Analysis of Encounter In The Chestnut Avenue

Rainer Maria Rilke 1875 (Prague) – 1926 (Montreux)



He felt the entrance's green darkness
wrapped cooly round him like a silken cloak
that he was still accepting and arranging;
when at the opposite transparent end, far off,

through green sunlight, as through green window panes,
whitely a solitary shape
flared up, long remaining distant
and then finally, the downdriving light
boiling over it at every step,

bearing on itself a bright pulsation,
which in the blond ran shyly to the back.
But suddenly the shade was deep,
and nearby eyes lay gazing

from a clear new unselfconscious face,
which, as in a portrait, lived intensely
in the instant things split off again:
first there forever, and then not at all.

Translated by Edward Snow


Scheme XXAX XXXXX BXXA XXBX B
Poetic Form
Metre 1101110 111110101 11110100010 110100010111 111111101 1001001 11101010 01100011 1010111001 10101011 1001110101 11000111 0111110 101111 1100101010 001011101 1101001111 0101101
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 674
Words 118
Sentences 3
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 4, 5, 4, 4, 1
Lines Amount 18
Letters per line (avg) 31
Words per line (avg) 6
Letters per stanza (avg) 110
Words per stanza (avg) 23
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

35 sec read
166

Rainer Maria Rilke

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke — better known as Rainer Maria Rilke — was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets", writing in both verse and highly lyrical prose. more…

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