Ranier Rilke - The Unfinished

He believed that we all share a common bond through the "life source," a primeval force that defined the world:.
             Smile O voluptuous coolbreathed Earth!.
             Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!.
             Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains misty-topt!.
             Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!.
             Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!.
             Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!.
             Far-swooping elbowed earth! Rich apple-blossomed Earth!.
             Smile, for your lover comes!.
             (Song of Myself, Dover Edition p. 18).
             He believed in a soul, and believed that all people have one. This was the connection we have to the life source. Of course, according to him, we aren't normally in commune with our soul, but all we need to gain this connection is demonstrated in the following:.
             Loafe with me [his soul] on the grass . . . . loose the stop from your throat, .
             Not words, not music or rhyme I want . . . . not custom or lecture, .
             not even the best, .
             Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
             (Song, p. 4).
             Note that this connection is simply made through lying in the grass and listening to ambient sounds, not through forcing song or voice to fill what isn't really empty in the first place. This is the first key connection between Whitman and Rilke's ideal of the self, as Rilke also believed that humans had to stop focusing on what we think the world is, and start noticing the truth:.
             Yes, the springtimes have needed you. There've been stars .
             To solicit your seeing. In the past, perhaps,.
             Waves rose to greet you, or out an open window,.
             As you passed, a violin was giving itself .
             To someone. This was a different commandment.
             But could you obey it? Weren't you always.
             Anxiously peering past them, as though.
             They announced a sweetheart's coming?.
             (Reading Rilke, The First Elegy, p.190).
             The difference, however, is that Whitman offers a way to achieve this "golden silence" of sorts.