There is certainly at least one other famous poem about a Greek artefact which ends with a slightly abrupt transition from description to message - namely Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn", with its closing couplet
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
As with Rilke's poem, readers of Keats's ode may find themselves wondering, when they reach the end, not only why the urn should seem to have a message for us, but why the message should be that one in particular. And as with Rilke's poem, the feeling of surprize and puzzlement we experience is part of the poet's intention. It has to do with the fact that for both poets, the Greek artefacts they are describing represent a better era, a better way of life, which has been lost and replaced by our own dowdy present. It is appropriate that we should feel slightly nonplussed by the messages the statue and the urn bring to us, because those messages arise from a different way of looking at things, a different sensibility, which has become strange to us.
For Rilke, one of the things modern man has lost, which the torso of Apollo seems to possess, is unabashed sexual power -
...Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.
(...Else the curving breast
could not thus blind you, nor through the soft turn
of the loins could this smile easily have passed
into the bright groins where the genitals burned.)
Sexuality is an important theme in Keats's poem too. The figures depicted on his Grecian urn, in fact, seem to be involved in some kind of orgiastic rite:
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
But sex is only part of the story. What really interests Keats is intensity of feeling, whether this intensity comes from aesthetic experience, sexual desire or poetry - three things which are usually closely associated with one another in his work. All three of them, at their most intense, have the power to break us free of the bonds of intellectual thought and thus release us into a timeless, transcendent state -
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity...
- but in the modern era we have almost completely lost the ability to transcend the mundane considerations of everyday life in this way. The contrast between the time-ravaged present and the timeless mythical past represented by the urn is central to Keats's poem:
...Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe...
- but Rilke does not approach his subject from quite the same angle. Keats's urn is "still unravished", unharmed by the centuries through which it has passed, whereas the starting-point for Rilke's poem is the fact that his statue has been decapitated. What he has to say about his Apollo, therefore, is not that he is immune to time while we are not, but that despite his decapitated state he still seems to be outfacing us. The statue seems to be gazing at us although it doesn't have eyes; it seems to be smiling or grinning although it doesn't have a face; its power seems to be bursting out of it in the same way that starlight bursts from a star ("und brächte... aus allen seinen Rändern/aus wie ein Stern"); and the effect of all this, at the end of the poem, is to make us feel that our lives are somehow inadequate. The statue is somehow more alive than we are. We have lost something which it still seems to possess. This is why we need to change our lives.