Rilke's Panther and the smell of rain

   When I read Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "The Panther," I feel that someone understands what I struggle to express about incarceration. The poem mysteriously paints a living being in a cage. Read it now, and try to imagine how a prisoner might interpret it:  

The Panther 

 Rainer Maria Rilke  

(translated by Stephen Mitchell)  

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.

  I see the first verse describing the separation imposed by prison. This physical barrier creates a similar barrier in the mind. The world does begin to disappear. It exists only in the memory, save for an occasional glimpse.

  Within the confines of the cage a much smaller world is created, one that is tragically incomplete. All that I do as a prisoner is, at its core, equivalent to the panther's ritual dance around the center.      As I ponder the center of the cage, I arrive at an endless possibility of meaning. It is the most powerful thing in the panther's world, yet it is also nothing. It is vanishing point, a spot infinitely across the horizon. To have a "mighty will," or any will for that matter, is to have hope, and perhaps a dream. As I see the panther fruitlessly circle this point containing his fuel for hope, with strides somehow powerful yet soft, I see a prisoner sharing our condition.

  The image that enters the panther's tiny world must be disruptive. Because it penetrated the curtain of the pupils it is foreign, not planned or controlled like the ritual dance. I see these images from my cage as well. Once, it was an image of wet pavement and shimmering leaves on television. It reminded me of the smell of rain. Like the panther, I could not contain it once it plunged into my heart.