Imago Comments

What an amazing closing couplet! I knew I was being prepared for a startling insight, but when you delivered it I was - WOW! The beauties you observe in this poem show an intensity of vision, the very thing needed to keep complacency from dulling ordinary life. Rilke refers to what you are doing observing natural things closely as MISSION, (The line is DAS ALLES WAR AUFTRAG from the First Elegy.) The Rilke passage begins YES, SPRING NEEDED YOU, and I get an almost custodial relationship between you and the bird. the damp air, the shadows, the dragonfly - there is a deep rapport expressed here without any self-serving language. What's more, I can right now leave my apartment and have precisely this experience where I am. This is a luminous poem.