god
The Sirens
Sirens
also: Sirenen
The singing creatures whose song lured sailors to wreck; in Homer, Odysseus alone heard them and survived. Rilke's 'Die Insel der Sirenen' makes their menace a sudden silence, 'the song that no one withstands.'
Reading notes
- New Poems: The Other Part §5 the song that no one withstands
The Sirens, whose singing wrecked sailors; Rilke turns their lure inside out, so that the deadly thing is not their roar but the sudden, total stillness that is the song's 'other side.'