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The very first words of the poem, “A ghost” (Line 1), suggest that the reader is going to be taken out of the range of the normal, everyday world. The ghost may be invisible (although Rilke does not actually use the word “unsichtbar,” which is German for “invisible”) and yet an encounter with a ghost leaves an impact, a trace; something reciprocal occurs; the ghost in a sense is a tangible thing that the eyes can interrogate “like a place” (Line 1), and it produces an auditory phenomenon that reverberates, “echoing” (Line 2). An encounter with a ghost is a meeting of sorts between two entities; it is not a one-way thing (Lines 1-2).
Toward the end of Line 2, Rilke alerts the reader to an upcoming contrast with the word “but.” Now the cat appears, with its thick black fur (Line 3). The blackness of the cat is important, since black is the absence of light and therefore color. Color disintegrates in darkness; it cannot be perceived. Therefore the speaker can gaze at the cat for as long as he pleases, but his gaze will make no impact or impression on this particular creature. It is as if the gaze just dissolves, absorbed in the cat. The speaker depicts the cat as completely self-contained and self-absorbed, its inner being undisturbed, untouched by human gaze.
Stanza 2 creates a contrast to better illustrate the black cat’s properties. A person, in a terrible rage, will scream and bang on the “padded wall” (Line 7) of his room in the asylum. Somehow this eases his mind; he calms down. He has come up against something that he can have no effect on, like the human gaze that has no impact on the cat, so in a sense his inner turbulence burns itself out. This stanza also emphasizes the “dark night” (Line 6) of the institutionalized man, just as the previous stanza emphasized the blackness of the cat. The blackness absorbs things into itself while remaining unaltered in its essential nature.
In Stanza 3, Rilke comes back to the cat, which is now presented as a quasi-mystical being, existing in a capacious, all-containing realm beyond the human. It turns out that every look she has ever received from any living creature continues to exist inside her; nothing has been lost (Lines 9-10). (The female pronoun is used here for the cat for the first time.) The cat is conscious of all this, too. Those looks may be hidden to others, but she can see them and observe them, as they once observed her. She does this without affection or fondness; her nature is morose and disdainful (Line 11). It is as if these glances—and perhaps some of the qualities of the people who gave them—have invaded the privacy of her being, and they remain with her even in sleep, although she continues to detached from them with indifference (Line 12).
Beginning with another occurrence of the word “but,” in the last line of the third stanza, there is a turn in the thought that continues into the final stanza. Up to now, the cat has been the indifferent subject of the attention of others; now, she becomes active in perception; she looks into the human face that is regarding her (Line 13). Suddenly and unexpectedly the speaker sees himself in the amber of the cat’s eye—color appears for the first time in the poem—caught and preserved in amber like some ancient, long extinct fly. The amber color of the cat’s eyes is thus likened to the fossilized tree resin also called amber, a yellowish sticky substance in which organisms can be preserved for millions of years. While the inner recesses of the cat’s being are vast, the human image here is tiny and diminished so that it can be compared to an insect. It is also trapped, as if it cannot escape. The cat, therefore, seems to possess an eerie kind of power, at which the human can only guess.
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By Rainer Maria Rilke