Written for:  Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads
Literary Excursions with Kerry
Greetings to all friends and poets. This year I would like to give more focus to the skill of using literary devices , with particular interest in those developed during the modern and post-modern time-frame.

Rilke expressed ideas with “physical rather than intellectual symbols. While Shakespeare, for example, thought of the non-human world in terms of the human, Rilke thinks of the human in terms of the non-human, of what he calls Things (Dinge).” 

OUR CHALLENGE: Write a poem on a subject of your choice, not to emulate the writing style of Rilke, but to include diction and imagery which portrays humans in terms of the non-human within the style of your own work.

from I Am Much Too Alone In This World, Yet Not Alone~Rainer Maria Rilke

I want my conscience to be
true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everday jug,
like my mother’s face,
like a ship that carried me along
through the deadliest storm.

Here is my attempt:

She is a white butterfly
fluttering her wings,
flitting from man
to man flowers. She finds
it daunting to decide
with whom to settle down.
What if freedom is never
so free again? She does
not like being pinned
down or cataloged.

http://withrealtoads.blogspot.com/2017/01/literary-excursions-with-kerry.html