What is the meaning behind this poem? "For The Sake Of A Single Poem"?

[For the Sake of a Single Poem]


by Rainer Maria Rilke


from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge


translated by Stephen Mitchell





...Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)- they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant

What is the meaning behind this poem? "For The Sake Of A Single Poem"?
It is about reflection. Poetry is often deep and can express multiple view points. The author just wants you to stop, smell the roses, reflect on the smell, and describe it as it pertains to life. Don't just write.





Roses are red


violets are blue


I wrote this poem


screw you.
Reply:What the poem is trying to say is that you need to wait till you grow. You have to grow up to have expreinces and you have to grow up to understand things that you didn't when you were younger. The point is to wait till your grown to do many things.
Reply:Sounds like someone who was very upset at not having their earlier poems published ..........poems can be written at anytime, even preschoolers can produce a poem about the ...here and now....(they don't have to wait until they are 50 to write it !...who would remember at 50 what happened in pre-school anyway)?.....I am a writer of songs and poems and I do not agree with the above writings..........


Thankx tho, for letting me see another side of someone else..sounds angry to me......
Reply:Rilke is describing how a single poem can -- and perhaps should -- encompass the gamut of human experience. So it's the day-to-day, the workaday world, the trivial, but also the sublime. What we can see, what we can't; past, present, future, etc.





But like Rilke writes, a poem is not merely facts and figures, emotions and memories. It is being immersed in human experience...you must live, and be sensitive to your living -- and others' --, to write a single word in a single poem.





Very, very, very simplistically a poem must be encyclopedic in its content, short in its form (usually), and empathetic to all that is the mundane and mysterious to people.





But in the end it also offers an insight on how difficult it is to write a poem, to write something generally short and yet have it speak volumes of everything.





You might want to read some of Rilke's -- what are often called -- "thing-poems" to get a sense of his, ahem, sensibilities. The Panther, The Archaic Torso of Apollo, and The Swan are three thing-poems you might want to read.