a walk

The poem A Walk by Rainer Maria Rilke is very good. The poet of the story is not from America, but from Bohemia/ Austria. That does not matter though because she uses the same techniques and literary devices that most poets use. She uses lots of imagery in her poem. All of the imagery in her poem has a purpose. The use of this imagery is to try to tie the reader in and make he or she feel as if she is experiencing the same thing she is. It also seems to use a little bit of third person in this poem. Her poem is talking about a situation in which most people know. This is not just familiar to her but to many others. There is always a meaning of every poem. I believe that the meaning of this poem is about life. She says," going far ahead of the road I have begun". I think that means that she is already on that road to what she is going to accomplish and be led to. She begins to describe the thing that has us grasped. When she says that, "so we are grasped by what we cannot grasp". I actually think that she is by an outside force like god. She gives hints like being grasped that we cannot grasp and it charges us, even if we do not reach it. This poem is saying that God is there to help us on our journey in life to get where we are meant to be. God does this unknowingly and even if we do not ask for god’s help, he is still there to "charge" at us and help us on our way. The author uses the personification of God being this wind. The literary text of this poem makes it really seem that it is really just wind that is blowing in the persons face as she is walking. But like every poem, it has more meaning than that. It is like a metaphor that God is the wind to our life. Rainer uses good use of literary devices like the personification and the imagery to show you that it is not just wind but really is God or an outside force. The line that gave this away to me was the very last line. "but what we feel is the wind in our faces". This is telling us that what we feel is the wind blowing at us, but what it really is is God. Rainer did an excellent job with this poem. At first I really had no idea what the author was talking about. I read it over a few times, because you can never just read a poem one time and know what it means, and I realized that this was not a literate poem. She made it seem very literal by the structure of the poem. The meaning behind the lines is what I looked for and I believe this is about how God is there to lead us on and carry us through life. He is there when we do not expect it and helps us when we do not need it.