The Seven Phallic Poems are exactly as overtly sexual as Mood had said they would be, describing the act of copulation just at the moment of the man's climax. He describes moments of pleasure as magical and intimate things, and uses natural imagery, like calling the inside of a woman a tree into which she draws his seed. He also compares her womb to the heavens, himself filling it with stars, and links the moment of orgasm with the cosmos, calling her womb a crystal ball.
In his third Phallic Poem, Rilke shifts his imagery to that of a god, a Herman pillar after which his body is named, and in whose lands, he and his lover are provinces. At the conclusion of his poem, he describes their consummation as the freeing of the god and his hounds from the ravaged column. He maintains the imagery of the column through the forth poem, in which he describes her womb as a secret room into which he is allowed entry, in which she coaxes him to the summit, and where he will fill her dark night with a dazzling rocket. In the fifth, his imagery changes to a tree ecstatically standing in a chamber before it declines. Death appears as a metaphor for sex in the sixth Phallic Poem, in which she is heaven resurrecting his stiff corpse. Also, in the seventh, his metaphor is of a child climbing a peak of pleasure.
Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties, Translations and Considerations of Rainer Maria Rilke
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