In _New Poems_ (1907) and _New Poems, Second Part_ (1908) the historical figure, frequently taken from the Old Testament, has grown beyond the proportions of life; it is weightier with fate and invariably becomes the means of expressing symbolically an abstract thought or a great human destiny. _Abishag_ presents the contrast between the dawning and the fading life; _David Singing Before Saul_ shows the impatience of awakening ambition, and _Joshua_ is the man who forces even God to do his will. The antique Hellenic world rises with shining splendour in the poems _Eranna to Sappho_, _Lament for Antinous_, _Early Apollo_ and the _Archaic Torso of Apollo_. The spirit of the Middle Ages with its religious fervour and superstitious fanaticism is symbolized in several poems, the most important among which are _The Cathedral_, _God in the Middle Ages_, _Saint Sebastian_ personifying martyrdom, and _The Rose Window_, whose glowing magic is compared to the hypnotic power of the tiger's eye. Modern Paris is often the background of the _New Poems_, and the crass play of light and shadow upon the waxen masks of Life's disillusioned in the Morgue is caught with the same intense realistic vision as the flamingos and parrots spreading their vari-coloured soft plumage in the warmth of the sun in the Avenue of the Jardin des Plantes. Almost all of the poems in these two volumes are short and precise. The images are portrayed with the sensitive intensity of impressionistic technique. The majestic quietude of the long lines of _The Book of Pictures_ is broken, the colours are more vibrant, more scintillating and the pictures are painted in nervous, darting strokes as though to convey the manner in which they were perceived: in one single, all-absorbing glance. For this reason many of these _New Poems_ are not quite free from a certain element of virtuosity. On the other hand, Rilke achieves at times a perfect surety of rapid stroke as in the poem _The Spanish Dancer_, who rises luminously on the horizon of our inner vision like a circling element of fire, flaming and blinding in the momentum of her movements. Degas and Zuloaga seem to have combined their art on one canvas to give to this dancer the abundant elasticity of grace and the splendid fantasy of colour. * * * * * Many of the themes in the _New Poems_ bear testimony to the fact that Rilke travelled extensively, prior to the writing of these volumes, in Italy, Germany, France, and Scandinavia. His book on the five painters at the artists' colony at Worpswede, where he remained for a time, entirely given over to the observation of the atmosphere, the movement of the sky and the play of light upon the far heath of this northern landscape, is an introduction to every interpretation of the work of landscape painters and a tender poem to a land whose solitary and melancholy beauty entered into his own work.