"You must change your life."

It is an odd and powerful ending to Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo": "You must change your life." It is an odd and powerful feeling when a phrase of poetry just makes profound sense. I wonder if poetry speaks to us because it reflects our realities, or our realities speak to us because they reflect the poems we read. Certainly it is the reversability in a chemical process--the arrows go both ways. Achebe speaks of this: stories happening and creation coming out of them. Borges speaks of this, the living reality of text.