“Black Cat,” by Rainer Maria Rilke
In his terrific Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address, William Waters suggests there is a kind of “Rilkean ‘volta'” (94). It is the kind of volta one finds in “Black Cat.” He states,
Later in the poem, when the form you returns suddenly, we may mentally narrow the range of you to a single addressee, as the Rilkean “volta” isolates a punctual single event…That is, this poem, like so many of the New Poems, turns from an imperfective aspect–the first twelve lines describe not an event but generally valid conditions–to a perfective one; and a singular event–“she turns her face straight into your own”–implies a specific you unlike that of the opening stanza. (94)
…
What these poems [“Black Cat,” “Snake-Charming,” and “Archaic Torso of Apollo”] finally depict is not “someone’s” encounter but encounter itself: Rilke’s fascination is not with autobiographical events but with the possibilities of mind and world. The you-form, able to address each comer, permits this level of inclusiveness while yet retaining the insistence on the solitary, particular, one-time nature of meeting. The architecture of Rilke’s verse draws the reader in, eliciting the absorbed encounter that the poem describes and that its second-person grammar replicatingly calls forth. (98)
I love this idea: that some poets have a kind of turn all their own, or that seems primarily theirs. Can other poets be said to lay claim to a specific kind of turn? Shakespeare, of course, famously moved the location of the sonnet’s turn, but are their other poets we could argue have a kind of turn all, or primarily, their own?
Structure & Surprise 