Rilke in his poem, Before Summer Rain, cleverly embeds a narrative voice to express the “faded tapestries” of his past. The poem is four stanzas long, where the first two stanzas have four verses and the last two only have three verses. The poem begins, just as a story of a rainy day, and the author physically describes the surroundings, such as the cry of a “plover”. However, once the storm starts at the end of stanza two, “requests the downpour”, the narrator talks about the past, “ancient portraits”. The poem does not feel quite as immediate and fast as it did in the first two stanzas, it slows down, and the reader can almost sense this fading recollection of the past, and because of this, the last two stanzas have one less verse than the first two, and it has more relation to figurative things, showing this washed out memory the narrator is recalling. By doing so the author evokes emotion in the reader and suggests that it is a childhood memory similar to everyone, and yet tells the poet’s sorrowful memories.
In the poem, Childhood, Rilke through the use of narration creates a feeling of nostalgia. In the first stanza of the poem the narrator expresses a longing for the past, “those long childhood afternoons…that vanished so completely – and why?” The author’s use of the rhetoric question shows a yearning the narrator has for the past, and sets the mood for the rest of the poem. It gives the sense that the reader must have this collective feeling as the narrator to childhood years, thus unifying the narrator with the reader. At the end of the poem, the reader has this image of the narrator as a lost adult in the world, struggling as time moves forward, “where now having to go on bewilders us.” The narration of the poem, gives imagery itself. Because the reader looks beyond the text, but imagines, this person telling the story, and the reader can’t help but feel pity for the author.
Rilke’s narrative voice, give a very personal effect to his writing, and it allows the reader to unite the same emotions to his own.