Rainer Maria Rilke's "Childhood" is included in his collection Das Buch der Bilder, first published in 1902. Various writers have translated the volume as "The Book of Images" or "The Book of Pictures." The poem can also be found in Robert Bly's collection of translations, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. The Book of Images was published just after The Book of Hours and just before New Poems and marks a shift in Rilke's poetic development toward more imagistic, slightly less sentimental verse.
Written in thirty-three lines of rhymed iambic pentameter verse and fit into four irregular stanzas, "Childhood" addresses loneliness and the passage of time, typical subjects for Rilke, who spent his life attempting to describe the effects of time's onslaught. Rilke wrote a number of poems about childhood, including "Duration of Childhood" and "The Child." All of these poems express feelings of wonder and bafflement and grapple with the puzzle of human existence. Childhood was a difficult time for Rilke. He was an effeminate and fragile child, and not at all cut out for the military schools to which his father sent him. Many of the images of childhood in his poems are dramatizations of his own memories.
This complete Introduction contains 200 words. This
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