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Rainer Maria RilkeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The poem employs several similes. In a simile, usually recognizable by the introductory words “like” or “as,” poets compare one thing to a different thing in a way that brings out a similarity between them. A ghost, for example, “is like a place / your sight can knock on” (Lines 1-2), and the cat’s indifferent absorption of the human gaze gets compared to the effect on a troubled man as he pounds the walls of his cell: “just as a raving madman” (Line 5). This is an extended simile that takes up the entire stanza. The cat in Stanza 3 is “like an audience” (Line 10), a simile that suggests an audience witnessing a play, as she observes inside her all the accumulated looks of humans. The poem ends with a simile, in which the human being, as he observes the cat, sees himself in her eyes “like a prehistoric fly” (Line 16), suggesting a radical diminishment of how a man might normally see himself.
Mitchell’s translation of the poem consists of four four-line stanzas. Rilke’s original poem comprises two four-line stanzas, followed by one stanza of 10 lines. In that respect, then, Mitchell has made the form of the poem more traditional, while reducing the number of lines.
By Rainer Maria Rilke