The Panther/Rilke

My latest movie rental - Awakenings. I'd seen it before long ago but was reminded of it by that video with Oliver Sacks in a past post.

Most people know what the movie's about so I'll just leave a link to Roger Ebert's review - he gave it four stars.

One of the things I hadn't remembered from the first time seeing the film was the mention of one of Rilke's poems. The patient (Robert De Niro ) who had a catatonic form of post-encephalitis lethargica, used the poem to describe his imprisonment withing his own body ....

The Panther

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.