The poem "The Panther" by Rilke gave me an emotional feeling of what the panther is experiencing in the cage. This emotional feeling is despair. Rilke's poem was consisted of many words and phrases containing ambiguity and connotations, which helped express this emotional feeling of despair.
             In the first stanza, because the panther had been so focused on the obstacle of bars, they were all it saw and since they were all it saw, it no longer sees them as an obstacle because it sees nothing beyond them. Therefore, since they are no longer an obstacle, it no longer sees them at all. So then "it" isn't just his sight that "no longer holds anything anymore" but the "bars" no longer hold the panther because they are accepted and no longer an obstacle. This stanza shows a lost of hope, faith, and confidence on the panther.
             In the second stanza where the panther "paces in cramped circles, over and over..." could represent a person, who is suffering from despair because many people who suffer from this emotion tend to do the same thing over and over to overcome their loss of hope, but their solutions never seem to work. For example, a person (male/female) who is trapped in a hole in the ground which is 20 feet deep keeps on trying to climb his way out, but as he keeps on doing it repeatedly, the person then becomes despaired of reaching the top because he/she has done it so many times and never made it to the top, which causes this loss of hope and confidence to deepen into the person. Now, that person's "mighty will stands paralyzed" because his hope and confidence has been degraded by his failures to reach the top out of the hole.
             Lastly in the last stanza of the poem, this "image" that "enters in", "only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly" is the rare opportunities that many despaired people take for granted during their lives. ...