‘Seclusion’ was written in 1832.
‘To an Aeolian Harp’ (1837): The alcaic strophe of the epigraph is from a consolatory ode (II, 9) addressed by Horace to his friend Valgius Rufus, a contemporary poet whose favourite Greek slave-boy Mystes had recently died (or so at least Mörike reads it, though some Horace commentators suggest that Mystes deserted Valgius for another lover, or perhaps never even existed). Aeolian or wind harps were instruments known to Mörike; in Ludwigsburg, for instance, which he revisited from time to time, he ‘heard them murmuring as usual’ (letter to Luise Rau, 14 May 1831) at the Emichsburg, a baroque artificial ruin in the park of the royal palace. Ludwigsburg was where the poet’s beloved younger brother August had died in 1824 and was buried; Mörike’s grief for him is expressed, thirteen years after the event, in this complex of associations.
‘News from the Storks’ (1837): In German nursery lore it was necessary to explain not only the arrival of a new baby (a stork has brought it) but also its mother’s temporary indisposition (she can’t walk because the stork has been pecking her leg).
‘A Huntsman’s Song’(1837): The ‘huntsman’ was a traditional folklore figure who from Goethe’s ‘Jägers Abendlied’ (‘A huntsman’s evening song’, 1775) onwards frequently appears in German romantic poetry.
‘A Prayer’: The two quatrains of this poem did not originally belong together: the second was written in 1832 and appeared, without a title, in Maler Nolten, whereas the first was not written until 1845 or 1846. In the 1848 and 1856 collections the two appeared together as a poem in two parts, with the present title; the numbering was then dropped in 1867. The final result is nevertheless a perfect and touching expression of the ideal of ‘holdes Bescheiden’, a phrase hardly translatable but implying unembittered acceptance of a state of limited contentment ‘midway between’ too much woe and too much joy. The ‘prayer’ is ostensibly Christian, but embodies the ancient wisdom of the ‘golden mean’ (aurea mediocritas) with which Mörike was familiar from his study of Horace (Odes II, 10).
‘Johann Kepler’ (1837): Mörike’s fellow-countryman Kepler, a contemporary of Tycho Brahe and Galileo, was born in Württemberg in 1571 and died in 1630; he became court astronomer to the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague and was for a time employed by Wallenstein. He was a brilliant pioneer of mathematical and astronomical theories, famous above all for his discovery of the laws of planetary motion, to which he was led by his special study of the orbit of Mars.
‘To Sleep’ (1838): This Latin elegiac epigram, which Mörike has translated into trimeters, is attributed to Heinrich Meibom, a seventeenth-century German academic; Mörike found the lines quoted in a work on Hogarth’s engravings by the humorist and satirist Georg Christoff Lichtenberg (1742–99), who was one of his favourite authors.
‘At Daybreak’: A first version, with the title ‘A conversation before daybreak’ (‘Gespräch vor Tage’, 1837), was later much improved, and the revised text of the 1867 edition is a perfect example of the classical epigram in two elegiac distichs.
‘The Tale of the Safe and Sound Man’ was written in 1837–8.
‘The Woodland Pest’ (1841). ‘Classical six-footed line’: in Latin verse the trimeter was reckoned as a line of six iambic feet (senarius) rather than three double-iambic metra as in Greek verse. ‘A poet’: Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803) had a certain historical importance in German literature as a pioneer of classical verse forms. Mörike alludes with a trace of irony to the dedicatees and titles of some of his well-known odes (‘Fanny’, ‘Cidly’, The Lake of Zürich and The Early Graves, which is parodistically quoted in line 51).
‘To the Nightingale’ (1841): Mörike’s use of strophic forms is rare and usually parodistic, as here.
‘To a Christmas Rose’ (1841): ‘I’ and ‘II’ were first printed in a periodical as separate poems; from 1848 onwards Mörike numbered them as two parts of a single poem under one title.
‘The Beautiful Beech-Tree’ was written in 1842.
‘Divine Remembrance’ was written in 1845.
‘A Walk in the Country’ was written in 1845.
‘The Falls of the Rhine’ (1846): The falls here described are at Schaffhausen, on the German–Swiss border.
‘Inscription on a Clock with the Three Hour-Goddesses’ (1846): The ‘Hours’ (Latin Horae) were goddesses personifying the seasons or other fixed natural periods, and thus associated with the passage of time generally.
‘On a Lamp’ (1846): Since the verb scheinen can mean either ‘seem’ or ‘shine’, it has been suggested that the last line of this epigram could mean either that what is beautiful seems blessed in itself, or that it shines blessedly within itself. This ambiguity has stirred up a continuing but perhaps unnecessary academic controversy. The poem is often quoted as a celebration of the autonomy and self-sufficiency of beauty, but such a conception is not really characteristic of Mörike, especially not in his later period. The lamp by its nature is associated not with aesthetic isolation, but with human companionableness: it hangs in a room used for entertainment, and is decorated with a circle of dancing children. The same could be said of ‘Inscription on a Clock…’ (above), in which the dance of the goddesses of time symbolizes the orderly divisions of human life and social activity.
‘The Auld Steeplecock’ (1840, 1852): The regional and rather archaic folk-German of this Knittelvers poem has been translated by Gilbert McKay into the Buchan Scots still spoken in the Aberdeenshire and Banffshire area, which is perhaps a nearer equivalent than southern English to its down-to-earth style and subject-matter. ‘An Deil kens…’: since Dutch-tiled stoves are unknown in Scotland, these four lines are a discreet interpolation. ‘Hatto the Bishop’: according to legend, Archbishop Hatto of Mainz was eaten alive in his castle on the Rhine (still called the Mouse Tower) by a plague of rats and mice, as punishment for his cruel oppression of the starving people. ‘Belshazar’: Daniel 5. ‘Sarah’: Genesis 18, 9–15.
‘Oh soul, remember!’: The manuscript of an earlier text of this poem, with the title ‘Grabgedanken’ (‘Thoughts of Mortality’), is dated September 1851. Mörike then used it, slightly revised and dropping the title, as his epilogue to Mozart’s Journey to Prague. He also included it among his collected poems, adopting the new sixth line (‘Denk es, o Seele!’ as the title by which the poem has since become commonly known.
‘A Domestic Scene’ (1852): An example of the comic use of the elegiac metre.
‘A Visit to the Carthusians’ (1861): The ‘Kindelsteig’ and its village and monastery are fictitious, as Mörike indicates in a letter of 11 August 1863 to the Stuttgart bookseller Julius Krais, remarking ‘we therefore cannot here properly gratify the self-indulgent craving for actuality [realistische Verwöhnung] of certain readers’.
‘Erinna to Sappho’ (1863): Mörike’s epigraphic historical note is inaccurate, since Sappho was born in the late seventh century BC, whereas Erinna is thought to have lived in the fourth. She did, however, write a 300-line epic poem called The Distaff and died at the age of nineteen. ‘Struck me’: ‘betraf mich’, here scarcely translatable, suggests both ‘encountered me’ and ‘amazed me’ as well as ‘concerned me (referred to me)’. ‘Daughter of Demeter’: Persephone (Proserpina), the goddess of the dead in the underworld. ‘Cutting… a dark lock’: as a ritual token of mourning.
Title Index of Poems
A Domestic Scene 173
A Huntsman’s Song 101
A Journey on Foot 81
A Prayer 107
A Visit to the Carthusians 183
A Walk in the Country 147
Abschied 102
Am Rheinfall 148
An den Schlaf 108
An die Geliebte 92
An Edifying Meditation 151
An eine Äolsharfe 96
An einem Wintermorgen, vor Sonnenaufgang 66
An Philomele 138
At Daybreak 109
At Midnight 79
Auf eine Christblume 140<
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Auf eine Lampe 154
Auf einer Wanderung 146
Bei Tagesanbruch 108
Besuch in der Kartause 182
Besuch in Urach 84
Das verlassene Mägdlein 90
Denk es, a Seele! 172
Der alte Turmhahn 154
Die schöne Buche 142
Divine Remembrance 145
Erbauliche Betrachtung 150
Erinna an Sappho 190
Erinna to Sappho 191
Frühlingsgefühl 80
Fußreise 80
Gebet 106
Gesang Weylas 94
Gesang zu Zweien in der Nacht 76
Good Riddance 103
Göttliche Reminiszenz 144
Häusliche Szene 172
Im Frühling 82
In der Frühe 78
In the Early Morning 79
In the Spring 83
Inschrift auf eine Uhr mit den drei Horen 152
Inscription on a Clock with the Three Hour-Goddesses 153
Intimation of Spring 81
Jägerlied 100
Johann Kepler 106
Johann Kepler 107
Love Insatiable 91
Märchen vom sichern Mann 110
News from the Storks 99
Nimmersatte Liebe 90
Oh soul, remember! 173
On a Lamp 155
On a Winter Morning before Sunrise 67
Peregrina 68
Peregrina 69
Schön-Rohtraut 100
Seclusion 95
Storchenbotschaft 98
Sweet-Rohtraut 101
The Auld Steeplecock 155
The Beautiful Beech-Tree 143
The Falls of the Rhine 149
The Forsaken Girl 91
The Forsaken Lassie 91
The Song of Weyla 95
The Tale of the Safe and Sound Man 111
The Woodland Pest 137
To a Christmas Rose 141
To an Aeolian Harp 97
To My Beloved 93
To Sleep 109
To the Nightingale 139
Two Voices in the Night 77
Um Mitternacht 78
Urach Revisited 85
Verborgenheit 94
Waldplage 136
* This excursus on Wolf’s settings of Mörike’s poems has been written in collaboration with Gilbert McKay. We are indebted to the authoritative work by Eric Sams which catalogues the songs (E. Sams, The Songs of Hugo Wolf, Faber and Faber, 3 rd edn, 1992) and to the expert assistance of Richard Stokes.
* E. Sams, op. cit., p. 2.
* For Wolf’s discovery of Mö rike, see Prawer, Mörike und seine Leser, Ernst Klett, Stuttgart, 1960, pp. 35 ff.
* For Mörike and Wagner, see Prawer, op. cit., p. 36. A further historical irony (ibid., p. 32) is that, whatever affinities there may have been between Wolf and Nietzsche, they differed in their assessment of Mörike, whose poetry and its much-vaunted musicality the philosopher dismissed as ‘sickly-sweet swimsy-wimsy and tinkle-tinkle’ (süßlich weichliches Schwimm-Schwimm und Kling-Kling).
† For Wolf’s influence, see Prawer, op. cit., pp. 36ff.
Mozart's Journey to Prague and a Selection of Poems Page 26
