Mozart's Journey to Prague and a Selection of Poems

by Eduard Morike

  Mörike’s renewed interest in classical poetry dates from the mid-1830s when, bored with his parish work at Cleversulzbach, he turned again to the Greek and Latin poets he had read at school and in his uncle’s house. Three of his own translations from Catullus (including the famous epigram ‘Odi et amo’ [‘I love and I hate’]) were included in his first collection, a strophe from Horace became the epigraph for ‘To an Aeolian Harp’, and the first Klassische Blumenlese (Classical Anthology) appeared in 1840, featuring Homer, Theocritus, Catullus, Horace, Tibullus and others. Mörike used existing translations, which he revised and annotated, in all cases preserving the original metres or, more strictly speaking, the usual modern German accentual adaptations of the ancient quantitative metres. The rhythmical and syntactical affinities between German and Latin or Greek have always meant that it could be used more readily than other modern European languages as an acceptable medium for translating and imitating the ancient classics, and since the mid-eighteenth century the German equivalents of hexameters and other ancient verse-forms continued to flourish. Their extensive use by Goethe, above all, must have influenced Mörike at least as much as his study of the Greek and Latin texts themselves. No doubt for a variety of reasons, this exploration of classical poetry marked a turning-point in Mörike’s own creative work, and from now on most (though not all) of his important poems are written in the classical rhymeless forms: dactylic hexameters as in the mock-Homeric ‘Tale of the Safe and Sound Man’ (‘Märchen vom sichern Mann’, 1837–8) and the Lake Constance Idyll (Idylle vom Bodensee, a short sentimental ‘epic’ of country life in seven cantos, inspired by a visit to Lake Constance [the Bodensee] in 1840 and indebted to Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea[1795]); elegiac distichs as in ‘The Beautiful Beech-Tree’ (‘Die schöne Buche’, 1842) or ‘A Domestic Scene’ (‘Häusliche Szene’, 1852); the iambic trimeter or senarius (the metre of ancient tragedy and comedy) as in ‘On a Lamp’ (‘Auf eine Lampe’, 1846), ‘Divine Remembrance’ (‘Göttliche Reminiszenz’, 1845), ‘An Edifying Meditation’ (‘Erbauliche Betrachtung’, 1846), ‘The Woodland Pest’ (‘Waldplage’, 1841), ‘A Visit to the Carthusians’ (‘Besuch in der Kartause’, 1861) and others. Like Goethe he also made good use of the traditional short form, the ever-flexible comic or serious classical epigram, originally a tombstone inscription and restricted in length for that reason but prized since later antiquity for its laconic antithetical wit and pointed ending. Typically it was in elegiac distichs and only one or two distichs long: Catullus’s ‘Odi et amo’ is an example; others in Mörike are ‘To Sleep’ (‘An den Schlaf’, 1838) (another translation), and ‘At Daybreak’ (‘Bei Tagesanbruch’, 1837, 1867). ‘Inscription on a Clock with the Three Hour-Goddesses’ (‘Inschrift auf eine Uhr mit den drei Horen’, 1846) and ‘On a Lamp’ (both in trimeters) are probably both short enough to be classified as epigrams, as are ‘Johann Kepler’ (1837) and ‘The Falls of the Rhine’ (‘Am Rheinfall’, 1846). Deservedly the best-known poem from the later Mörike’s whole ‘classical’ repertoire has always been the elegiac idyll ‘The Beautiful Beech-Tree’, but it is almost the only one to have been received into the canon, while others of comparable beauty and elegance have been largely neglected.

  The ‘Tale of the Safe and Sound Man’, for instance, a remarkable early exercise in Homeric hexameters standing more or less at the point of Mörike’s transition to his later manner and looking ironically both forward and back, is a Kunstmärchen of enormous comic verve. The opening line seems to indicate that it is addressed to an audience of children, though a personal allegory may also be intended. The grotesque giant Suckelborst (‘safe’ because he was hidden inside a womb-like mountain to survive the Flood) is a figure from the imaginary Orplid world which Mörike and Ludwig Bauer invented in their student days. A letter from Bauer to Hartlaub (9 October 1829) and the later reminiscences of the poem ‘An Edifying Meditation’ both suggest that Suckelborst had been a persona sometimes adopted by the poet himself in exuberant mimic improvisations. Mörike seems to have been gifted with a special kind of creative verbal sensuality, and the ‘safe and sound man’ perhaps came into being in his drunken, inarticulate bass-voice gurglings in the same way as the princess Rohtraut was born out of the sound of her name. In any case, it is easy enough to detect an ironic self-caricature of the poet in this clumsy, childlike dreamer, supposedly endowed with the special insights of genius into cosmic truths and called upon to commit them to writing, but usually too lazy to do so. To the rural community (comically and affectionately evoked as a Swabian village called Igelsloch, literally ‘hedgehog-hole’) he is an outsider, a mischievous hurlothrumbo, but not wholly isolated or rejected (the village barber secretly trims his beard for him with hedging-shears). Obeying, with a bad grace, the orders brought to him by a messenger of the gods, he writes his mysterious work on barn doors lashed together to form an exercise book, and sets off to the underworld, carrying a walking-stick and wearing a hat like a nineteenth-century professor, to read it to his proper audience, the timeless dead. Mörike whimsically mixes three different mythologies: the Orplid world of Weyla and Lolegrin, the Homeric gods whose unquenchable laughter ends the poem, and the Christian Devil who interrupts Suckelborst’s lecture in Hades. The giant punishes the Devil’s schoolboy antics by tearing out his tail, which he then uses as a bookmark, after prophesying that the Devil will at the end of days be finally put to scorn and the improbable hero received into the company of the gods; a Goethean note, for good measure. The story of Suckelborst is a substantial comic masterpiece by the later Mörike which has lacked due recognition.

  Another is ‘The Auld Steeplecock’, though like Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea it was published to popular acclaim. Exceptionally, Mörike reverted here to rhyming verse, the doggerel and archaizing style (Knittelvers) revived by the young Goethe in the 1770s. As a publisher’s note explained when the ‘Steeplecock’ first appeared in a periodical in 1852, the ‘cock’ is 113 years old and can therefore only talk in archaic German. The poem was conceived and the first twenty-two lines written in 1840, when Mörike was still at Cleversulzbach; by his own account the incident of the replacement of the church steeple-cock took place in reality, and Mörike kept the retired cock in his study. He then dropped the poem and did not finish it for another twelve years. Sending it to Storm in 1854, he explained that he had somewhat idealized his country parson, providing him for example with a wife and children (though in the text they appear only fleetingly). The cock, which by a bizarre deflection of roles does all the talking itself, describes in vivid language, and with a mixture of humour and resignation, its own situation and that of its ‘maister dear’ the minister. It has been rescued from the scrap-heap but moved from its proud position at the top of the church steeple to perch on the more modest ‘tower’ of the minister’s ornamental stove. The sublime panorama has been reduced to a limited and snug enclosure, well locked up and itself enclosed within a small village community. The minister’s study, a true Biedermeier nest of the kind seen in the paintings of Carl Spitzweg (1808–1885), is full of old leather-bound books, the smell of good tobacco, a walnut desk and other treasured objects. The minister evidently has a Biedermeier tendency to collect things, of which indeed the steeplecock itself is one and the Dutch stove with its elaborate picture-tiles another. Collecting is characteristic of this careful middle-class lifestyle. The Prior in ‘A Visit to the Carthusians’ has a ‘box of curiosities’; the schoolmaster Preceptor Ziborius in ‘A Domestic Scene’ collects varieties of home-brewed vinegar; Mörike himself (like the elderly Goethe) collected mineralogical specimens. Like the ‘Tale of the Safe and Sound Man’, ‘The Auld Steeplecock’ includes a detectable element of self-caricature: the slightly absurd snugness of the priest tucked away in the remote countryside with his pensioned-off cock, and the ‘safe and sound’ outsider with his neglected duty of preaching to the dead. Unlike it, however, it is also coloured by elegiac sadness, the resigned sadness of the solitary eccentric a
nd of the discarded cock itself. In common with other important works of Mörike’s later period, including Mozart’s Journey to Prague and ‘A Visit to the Carthusians’, it is both an idyll and a meditation on death.

  This is not paradoxical if we consider the rather complex sense of the concept ‘idyll’ as it developed in the literary theory and practice of the German classic-romantic era. Traditionally, the ‘idyll’ had since ancient times been simply the more or less sentimental evocation of pastoral life, but by the late eighteenth century, notably in Schiller’s classic theoretical account Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naive and Reflective Poetry, 1797), it came to mean the portrayal, in poetry or prose, of an ideal human condition, a past golden age or future utopia. Certain motifs remained characteristic: natural simplicity and innocence, harmony and contentment within accepted limitations, a state of things scarcely troubled by history and time. Schiller defined Idylle radically and widely as a mode of presentation (theoretically possible in any genre) depicting reality as the harmonious perfection it should be but empirically is not. Its opposite, defined even more widely, was ‘satire’, the representation of reality as the disharmonious imperfection it is but should not be. The poet writes from a vision of harmony and wholeness or from a vision of disharmony and conflict. The idyllic presentation can be humorous or serious or both, it can be tinged with irony, with a sense that the harmony is fragile, that the happiness is under threat, subject to mortality and change. Schiller argued that this should indeed always be so in idyll at its best: idyll and satire are in principle inseparable, since true satire should be a protest in the name of implied positive values, and true idyll should be coloured by awareness that potential tragedy is still there, next-door to the idyllic world because pushed back to just beyond its boundaries. Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea was essentially humorous, but nuanced with dramatic and tragic elements: it was an idealized portrayal of German middle-class society in a small country town, but this symbolically stable way of life was set against the threatening chaotic background of the French Revolution, war and refugees. The threatened idyllic condition is a social one. Most of the poems by Mörike that can reasonably be classified as idylls or near-idylls are humorous (though subtly expressing serious themes) and portray idyllic social states: the idyllic condition is one of social harmony, dependent not on mysterious higher powers but on civilized human behaviour and the recognition of human limitations.

  ‘The Auld Steeplecock’, expressly described as ‘an idyll’ in Mörike’s subtitle, presents a limited order of human life in which things are as they should be. It does not document Mörike’s existence as a simple country pastor in Cleversulzbach or anywhere else, but abstracts from this reality and transforms it into a model, a should-be, a place where ‘lichtsome sweet contentment dwalls’. In a sense it is the cock himself who transforms it, who so to speak creates the idyll. The cock sees it all as a peaceable and secure place, his contentment is heightened by the warm stove on winter nights, the good locks and bolts that keep out thieves, the stout wood of the henhouse that keeps out the fox, and even by his own final positive recognition that at the age of 113 it is time to accept mortality: to acknowledge, as in ‘A Visit to the Carthusians’, that ‘all things have their time’. This story of the Carthusian monastery, told in a late poem in trimeters (1861), is another variant of the social-domestic idyllic genre. The poet remembers his previous visit fourteen years ago, when things were as they should be: the idyllic state now in the past and half forgotten, the peaceful life of the monastic community in the old Prior’s day, the tables loaded with baked eel and succulent fresh artichokes and the 1834 house vintage. The house has become a brewery now, and little is left of its former happier state. The poet recognizes only the house doctor, who happens to be there on his return visit and now shares a glass with him, and an ornamental clock still standing on its shelf, its dial bearing the ominous motto Una ex illis ultima, to remind anyone who cares to look at it that one of these hours will be his last. Jocularly, the doctor tells him how the Prior bequeathed the clock to the Steward, who was so alarmed by its motto that he parcelled it up tight, sealed it ten times and hid it away behind the chimney in an out-of-the-way room. The clock had seemed to threaten the old order, or rather it had relativized it by spelling out its impermanence, but it was still an integrated part of that order. The Steward broke the convention required by the idyllic harmony, and became comically eccentric by hiding the clock; but the clock has come to light again, it has outlived the Steward and the Prior and the whole brotherhood, and to the poet it still ticks out its warning message.

  ‘A Visit to the Carthusians’ is a serious-comic social idyll. Idylls of solitude, of solitary encounter, on the other hand, are purely serious. One is ‘To a Christmas Rose’ (‘Auf eine Christblume’, 1841), in which Mörike reverts again to rhymed verse. The flower (a kind of winter-flowering hellebore) was a real one which Mörike found, suddenly and by chance, when walking in a churchyard, and which he describes in a letter to Hartlaub (29 October 1841) with botanical precision. Mörike, the poetic realist, was a dreamer with a strong sense of physical realities. This poem is the celebration of a harmonious and perfect physical phenomenon for its own sake. The flower is a thing, an object, a living entity, studied, described, contemplated, praised, held aloft as it were, but still a distinct Gegenstand, literally something standing ‘over against’ the poet. It is fully itself, though made fully ‘symbolic’ by a nexus of associations: the death of Christ, and at the other end of the cycle the annunciation of his birth, but also the world of innocent nature – the snow and the moonlight, the grazing deer, the inquisitive elf, the insect whose winter ghost circles the mysterious flower in eternal salutation. Very similar, and one of the most compelling of all Mörike’s poems, is another Dinggedicht (‘thing poem’), ‘The Beautiful Beech-Tree’ (written in elegiac distichs). This famous ‘thing poem’, or, as we might say, ‘object poem’ (or, as Brian Rowley prefers, ‘entity poem’), is another wholly serious idyll of solitude and numinous timelessness, an absolute synthesis between mature classical form and the romantic experience of ‘forest solitude’ (Waldeinsamkeit), the visionary and ecstatic contemplation of a mysterious yet wholly real Object within nature. Again, the poet has found the beech-tree – which later attempts have failed to identify – by chance, and yet, as it seems to him, not quite by chance. He feels that something has led him to the place, that it is being shown to him by ‘a sprite friendly to man’, one of the pagan tutelary spirits of the forest. As Romano Guardini pointed out, an accumulation of details gives the impression that the tree and its surroundings are more than beautiful or idyllic: they are sacred, numinous, almost uncanny. The forest is explicitly called a ‘grove’, and the space in which the tree stands, though no human hands have cleared it, is circular: the sun is at its zenith, and the tree’s foliage casts a circle of shade which almost fills the clearing but is bounded by a bright ring of sunlight. All this suggests the precinct, the τ′εμενος, of an ancient temple. The visitor is stricken with awe, the soft grass round the tree is like a precious carpet with magical powers, on which he ‘scarcely dares’ to walk; it receives him ceremoniously, and when he reaches the great tree in the centre it does not occur to him to sit down under it or loll against its trunk. Instead, with instinctive reverence, he stands upright. In this ‘high hour of noon’, the dangerous hour at which Pan sleeps, there is an air of nameless expectancy. Even the birds are silent, and the visitor remains motionless, he feels drawn into something that is not simply the absence of sound or motion but their other side, their positive countersphere. He listens to what Giacomo Leopardi, some twenty years earlier, in his famous poem ‘L’Infinito’ (‘Infinitude’, 1819) had called ‘sovrumani silenzi e profondissima quiete’. It is what Mörike calls ‘daemonic silence, fathomless stillness’. The phrase carries no suggestion (as the modern spelling ‘demonic’ might) of evil or malignity, only of a strong, indwelling, non-human power a
nd a profound harmony. Its representative, another listener, has been alert (‘auflauschend’) to the poet’s approach, and has drawn him to a place to which no path leads: it is ‘off the path’, there is no signpost, one finds it only when one is not looking for it. And again the moment, the encounter, as so often in Mörike, comes ‘suddenly’.

  Another symbolic Object is the Schaffhausen waterfall in ‘The Falls of the Rhine’. In this classical elegiac epigram a phenomenon, which Goethe had also found awe-inspiring, is perceived and imaginatively mythologized into an eternal gigantomachy, the gods with their silver-maned steeds eternally subduing the monstrous primal rage. The watching ‘wanderer’ feels a joy that almost shakes his heart out of his body. Similarly in ‘A Walk in the Country’ (‘Auf einer Wanderung’, 1845), which it is instructive to compare with the much earlier ‘A Journey on Foot’ (‘Fußreise’, 1828). Both are in free rhymed forms. ‘A Journey on Foot’ refers to the poet’s walking-stick, his mood of religious euphoria, and the woods, hills and birds in general terms. In ‘A Walk in the Country’, as a variant of Mörike’s characteristic theme, there is not so much an Object as a Moment, a momentary, personal, magical disclosure: the ‘little town’ entered just as the sun is setting, and from a window the clear voice suddenly singing (Auden’s phrase will do as well as any) just as he arrives, a specific moment in which he seems suffocated (lustbeklommen) with sudden, uncovenanted joy.

  These are poems that have a certain festive solemnity, they are at the serious end of the spectrum, the opposite end to the broad farce (somehow heightened by classical metres) of the ‘Tale of the Safe and Sound Man’. ‘The Woodland Pest’ on the other hand (in trimeters), written a year before ‘The Beautiful Beech-Tree’, could be read as a comic pendant to it. The daemonic presences here take the form of a plague of gnats, which drive him out of his poetic solitude and so enrage him that prudish dryads request him to moderate his language or quit their peaceful maidenly domain. The poet must recognize that the minor pains and disturbances of life are ‘almost unavoidable’. In ‘A Domestic Scene’ (in elegiac dialogue) the potential idyllic condition of contentment between the schoolmaster and his wife, with the husband pursuing his quaint but harmless hobbies of silkworm-breeding or brewing experimental varieties of vinegar, is disturbed and threatened when his activities grow into eccentric obsessions: the vinegar jars have spread all over the neat middle-class household, and the wife protests that he is a laughing-stock with the neighbours. Like the Carthusian Steward, Preceptor Ziborius becomes comical by his excess, his lack of irony. The balance must be restored, the pentameter must be spoken to close the distich, the measure must be respected: an ancient Horatian message, not far from the ‘Friede’ (‘sweet contentment’)of Mörike’s ‘Auld Steeplecock’ or the ‘holdes Bescheiden’ (‘contentment sweet and wise’) which ‘A Prayer’ (‘Gebet’) places neither at one extremity nor the other, but ‘in der Mitte’.