Entrance

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.”

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.