17 pages • 34-minute read
Entrance
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Symbols & Motifs
Night and Darkness
Darkness and night always had a charged meaning for Rilke. Night is the realm in which a person can sense the deepest recesses and inner vastness of their being. This deep response to the infinity of night’s spaces is reflected in “Entrances.” It is not at all surprising that this poem about how a poem comes into being should be set outside, at night, far from the superficial comforts of the indoors. Night underlies the poem from the very first line, when the person being addressed is encouraged to step out of doors. Night symbolizes the potential for creative expression from the depths of life, which was the impulse that drove Rilke on throughout his poetic career. He wanted to experience the unbounded because then he could know the essential nature of existence—the abstract as well as the concrete world of objects and living things—and express them in poetry. Anything less than this would not be worthy of the poet’s calling in Rilke’s eyes. It is this that finds expression in the dark and the night of “Entrance.”
Tree
The tree, like the night, is another potent symbol. If the night represents the preconditions for creativity, the tree is the thing itself, emerging in all its suddenness and dark splendor. It is as if the poet, there in the darkness, has given birth, and the tree is his child. The black tree seems both to emerge from the darkness and to define it, to give it contours. The impression that this tree gives as it emerges, so to speak, fresh from the creator’s hands, is that it stands stark against the darkness of the night sky. It is huge and imposing and alone. However, a tree is not a sculpture that stands finished and fixed; it is a living organism capable of growth and change. That stark tree now alone in the heavens will grow branches and leaves and scatter seeds, and no one is to say who or what might nestle in its branches or enjoy shade under them, or be moved by the sight of the leaves as they fall in autumn. No one can know how far the seeds of the tree may spread. Thus, the symbol of the tree suggests so many things in potential; it is the necessary first step, a new world, from which so much more may come.
Initiation
The poem conveys the feeling of an initiation, and this serves as a motif, or recurring element. Initiation carries the sense of a rite, ceremony, or instruction in which a person is given a certain function or status. There is a kind of sacredness about the creative process described in the poem, a high seriousness that is worthy of the poet’s art and his calling. It is about the birth of a poet as well as a poem; a poet must go through the ritual described if he or she is to fulfill their destiny. It is not for nothing that one translator, C. F. MacIntyre, titled his version of the poem “Initiation.” Although that is not what the German title, “Eingang,” literally means, it does convey an important dimension of the poem.
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