German Lyric Poetry

A Critical Analysis of Selected Poems from Klopstock to Rilke

Siegbert Prawer, S. S. Prawer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367856236
• eBook ISBN: 9781000768107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire allemande

Originally published in 1952, this book provides a detailed critical analysis of 40 German lyrics. All the poems analysed are reprinted in full, so that criticism may be checked by reference to the original text. The book therefore provides a unique introduction to German poetry from the Age of Enlightenment to that of Rilke, without burdening the reader with too much details about minor figures.

CHAPTER ONE

Approaching the German Lyric

‘No, it is impossible’, says Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; ‘it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning —its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live as we dream—alone.’ But it is just this ‘impossible’ which the lyric poet in our period at least sets out to accomplish. He does not seek to tell a story, or present conflict of character and opinion: he seeks, within short compass, to annihilate the distance between himself and his reader, to make the reader experience directly the poet’s ‘life-sensation at a given period of his existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning’.

‘The miracle of lyric poetry is this: that individuality, in its essence as individuality, has become experience generally accessible.’¹

The poet may express his ‘life-sensation’, his experience, directly, may speak in the first person of his thoughts and aspirations and fears, as does Novalis, for instance, in Sehnsucht nach dem Tode (see Chapter Seven, below); or he may express himself through symbols, through objective correlatives, as do—in different ways —Matthias Claudius in Der Tod und das Mädchen, Mörike in Um Mitternacht, and Platen in the Venedig sonnets.

But whether direct or metaphorical, the lyrical poem makes some of its most important effects through its rhythms: through the tension between metrical and syntactical stress. As we read a lyric, we become aware of a pattern, of the metre (however free) in which the work is written. Certain stresses recur at certain intervals; certain breaks (the end of lines, of stanzas) become noticeable at more or less equal distance from one another; certain sounds (especially end-rhymes) are heard more than once. All this imposes a pattern: and this pattern is significantly varied when natural speech-rhythms conflict or coincide with the hypothetical ‘regula’ metre. Through such tensions as these, through pauses and stresses, the poet is able to convert his experience into generally accessible physical sensation.

¹ Das Wunder lyrischei Dichtung besteht... darin, dass Individualität in ihrer Individualität allgemein erlebbar geworden ist. (Joh. Pfeiffer, Das lyrische Gedicht als ästhetisches Gebilde, Halle, 1931.)

A simple example—perhaps excessively simple, for the poem is certainly not a great one—of such tension, such significant variation, is furnished by one of the best known of Heine’s ‘Lieder’:

IM WUNDERSCHÖNEN MONAT MAI

Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,

Als alle Knospen sprangen,

Da ist in meinem Herzen

Die Liebe aufgegangen.

Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,

Als alle Vögel sangen,

Da hab’ ich ihr gestanden

Mein Sehnen und Verlangen.

Heine here confronts us with four statements. Buds open up—like them, love blossoms in the poet’s heart. Birds (begin to) sing —like them, the poet confesses his love. There is obviously progression in this poem (everything leads up to the last, crowning line, the actual confession of a love we have seen blossoming out) : but the four elements of comparison have one common factor. Each one denotes something which, hitherto hidden, now bursts forth.

And now we may set ourselves to notice how Heine, by playing natural speech-rhythms across the regular pattern of his stanza, makes his words do what they say.

At first the movement of the stanza (and the second repeats exactly the first) is comparatively slow and endstopped.

We notice at the same time that the grammatical construction does not allow us to let our voice sink at the end of the second line¹: and this combines with the hesitant movement to induce in the reader a feeling of expectancy. Something has yet to come before our voice may come to rest.

The pattern established by the first two lines of each stanza is broken in two significant respects in the last two. Line 3 begins in each case with a heavy stress; and lines 3 and 4 run on, enjambed:

At the word ‘Da’ we feel the expectancy to be over: what we have been waiting for has come, bringing with it a great sense of release. ‘Da’, there it is, the heavy stress at the beginning of the line seems to tell us. And with this release, all hesitancy of movement disappears. The last lines flow unimpeded one into the other.

First expectancy, then fulfilment. Something which has been hidden, bursts forth. The poem does, through its movements through significant variation of a regular pattern, what a prose-summary of it would only say.²

But metre, metrical variation, must not operate in a vacuum. As far as metre acts in and for itself, Coleridge tells us, it tends to ‘increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention’; it acts powerfully, though itself unnoticed, ‘as a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation’:

‘Where therefore correspondent food and appropriate matter are not provided for the attention and feelings thus aroused, there must needs be disappointment felt, like that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a staircase, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four.’

¹ To realize the force of this, we need only imagine Heine to have written:

Im wunderschönen Monat Mai

Alle Knospen sprangen.

² An analysis of this poem makes the desired point well enough: but it must be pointed out that the sudden ‘Da’, the onrush of the last two lines after the hesitancy of the first two, misrepresents the rhythm of the natural phenomenon invoked: the coming of spring. Heine is (as so often) forcing the rhythms of his own experience onto nature.

Metre, like any technical device in poetry, is only an empty shell if the artist has nothing to communicate. Poetic devices are only means to an end.

To see how a great poet uses his medium to communicate an experience, we need only glance at the lyric with which Eduard Mörike ends his Novelle Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag.

Ein Tännlein grünet wo,

Wer weiss, im Walde,

Ein Rosenstrauch, wer sagt,

In welchem Garten?

Sie sind erlesen schon,

Denk es, o Seele,

Auf deinem Grab zu wurzeln

Und zu wachsen.

Zwei schwarze Rösslein weiden

Auf der Wiese,

Sie kehren heim zur Stadt

In muntern Sprüngen.

Sie werden schrittweis gehn

Mit deiner Leiche;

Vielleicht, vielleicht noch eh

An ihren Hufen

Das Eisen los wird,

Das ich blitzen sehe.

The poem begins with slow, groping lines, made all the more portentous by t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. APPROACHING THE GERMAN LYRIC
• 2. THE LYRIC POETRY OF THE AUFKLÄRUNG
• 3. KLOPSTOCK AND THE ‘GÖTTINGER HAIN’
• 4. GOETHE
• 5. SCHILLER
• 6. HÖLDERLIN
• 7. THE ROMANTICS
• 8. HEINE AND PLATEN
• 9. POETIC REALISM
• 10. MUNICH INTERLUDE AND NATURALIST REACTION
• 11. CHAOS AND CONTROL
• 12. RILKE
• CONCLUSION
• BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• GENERAL INDEX
• INDEX FIRST LINES