Analysis of The Panther

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



His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.


Scheme XXXX AXAX BXBX
Poetic Form
Metre 11010100101 1111011101 101111111 01010010111 1110011010010 0101110011 110100101010 010101110 10110101010 1100110100 10110101010 100101011
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 504
Words 93
Sentences 6
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4
Lines Amount 12
Letters per line (avg) 33
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 133
Words per stanza (avg) 30
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on May 02, 2023

27 sec read
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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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