On a Christmas flower
On a Christmas flower is the title of a two-part poem by Eduard Mörike , which was published on January 26, 1842 in the Morgenblatt for educated readers . Inspired by a Christmas rose that he had found on a grave, Mörike wrote a work that, with its symbolic and religious references, can be understood as the glorification of a mysterious natural phenomenon. Like the earlier poem at Midnight , the verses were set to music by Hugo Wolf .
Content and form
The first stanza of the first part reads:
Daughter of the forest, you lily kinsman,
stranger whom
I have searched for so long,
In the strange churchyard, desolate and wintry,
For the first time, oh beautiful, I find you!
The first stanza of the sequel reads:
In
the winter ground sleeps, a flower sprout,
The butterfly that once around bush and hill
In spring nights cradles its velvet wing;
He should never taste your honeycomb.
For both parts of the double poem Mörike took up baroque hymn verses back and used quatrains with iambic pentameter . While the stanzas in the first part are rhymed in pairs and a male follows a female line , in the second part he chose embracing rhymes with female endings in the internal and male in the outer verse . Moerike loosened the metric structure by trochees and Dactyls on or above the iambics played in antikisierenden opening verse choriambisch .
Origin and background
On October 29, 1841, Mörike wrote to his friend Johann Wilhelm Hartlaub that some time ago he had found “something living, fresh and blooming” on a grave . After many years of unsuccessful search, he noticed a “completely new flower” “with five quite open, fairly broad leaves, whiteness and coarseness like that of the lily, with a hint of light green from the ends…” It reminded Mörike of a water rose , exuding a fine one Scent and looked at him strange and "longing-arousing". A short time later he found out that it was a Christmas rose belonging to the buttercup family and read in a garden book about the “mystical flower” which “endures the greatest cold” and would thrive in the moonlight while being warm and sunny places avoid.
On November 26, 1841, he sent Hartlaub the first part of the poem and wrote that he could perhaps add a stanza to it. The second part, which he sent him at the beginning of December, probably emerged from this consideration. While piece I was still titled Die Christblume in the first edition , the second already bore the later title Auf einer Christblume .
Epigraphic titles ( On a rose or On a painting of Europe ) can also be found among the anacreontic songs , which Mörike later translated from the Greek and which have a tradition of immortalizing certain things lyrically. Taking up this custom and developing it with new means, he wrote his own works such as To a Favorite Beech in My Garden and the thing poems To an Aeolian Harp or To a Lamp . While in some works he felt obliged to the concise brevity of ancient models, in others he went beyond the models and enriched them with his own experiences and interpretations. In his Christmas flower poem, he adopted the botanical details that matched his poetic ideas and could be translated into a specific space of meaning, while hiding features that did not want to conform to the intended symbolism.
The way Mörike celebrates the remote beauty of the Christmas flower and its inclination towards the pure, “virgin” moon brings to mind Stéphane Mallarmé and other symbolic poets , an absolute sphere of art that is distant from life and can already be found in the beginning with Conrad Ferdinand Meyer is. Mörike, on the other hand, still classifies what becomes aesthetically independent there and becomes art for art in a traditional-religious framework.
Symbolism and interpretation
Contrary to the wording of the first verse, the snow rose is not a "lily relative" in botanical terms. The relationship is of a different nature in that the lily , next to the moon and snow, is a symbol in the area of Marian veneration and is one of the motifs that were also used in fine arts and painting and point to the purity of Mary and the immaculate conception .
For Hanspeter Brode, the work transcends the biographical occasion and combines the Christmas reflection with a melancholy that goes back a long way. In the discreetly circumscribed encounter between man and woman, the lyrical self meets the "daughter of the forest"; his exclamation to finally find her after a long search is evidence of privation. Instead of painting the delicate details further, Mörike softens the tone, sublimates the erotic fascination emanating from youthful beauty with a series of Christian images, so that the “chaste body” and “the golden fullness of the bosom” can only be found under “the benevolent mother's brewing gown "And goes so far as to link the perfected youth with death metaphors like" Kirchhof "and" Grab ". With images from the sphere of fairy tales such as the “crystal pond” or the rhyming “magic realm”, the third stanza opens the door to a new region and eludes the world of Catholic piety . The elf who dances at midnight comes from another area, bringing the first part of the poem to a ghostly and Dionysian-pagan end.
In the second part of the poem, Mörike takes up a symbol with the butterfly that goes back to antiquity and alludes to Amor , the companion of the psyche . The fact that the butterfly "should never taste the honey" indicates for Brode the abyss between ancient vitality and Christian spirituality. The poem is a subtle complaint about the loss of sensuality in bourgeois society.
The fact that Mörike, who is familiar with Greek and Roman poetry, wanted to overcome the separation and combine ancient sensualism with Christian spiritualism can be read from his hexameter poem Im Weinberg , written three years earlier , in which the butterfly also belongs to the realm of elemental beings. What is shifted into the hypothetical as hope in the later poem has now already been fulfilled in this world: the butterfly unites with the flower, which here is actually a lily, and is “forever blessed”, while it is “spirit and heavenly Life “breathes.
Even Dieter Borchmeyer illuminates the Christian background and highlights the iconographic tradition of depictions of the Annunciation by the angel in which the lily is a sign of purity.
As God in a dark, secluded place appears and Christmas in the dark season falls, the flower blooms in the darkness of winter . Their pale color, their nocturnal beauty as the “child of the moon” point to a rapture from the plant-based connection to the earth into the otherworldly spheres. For Borchmeyer, the flower with its reference to the Immaculate Conception and the Annunciation can also be interpreted as a symbol of the Passion of Christ , which becomes clear in the sixth stanza: "A reminder of the sacred suffering / five purple drops would clothe you beautifully and uniquely ... "
Comparable with Brode, Borchmeyer refers to the resigned nature of the work. When the butterfly, as a "flower seed" sleeping in the cocoon , a symbol of metamorphosis , later wakes up and flutters around the flowers in search of nectar, the Christmas rose will have long withered, subject to the inexorable rhythm of the seasons.
In the last stanza, Mörike suggests the hope that the “tender spirit” of the butterfly will one day leave the body just as it once left the pupa to, drunk by the “scent”, circle the flower in an almost spiritualized metamorphosis . Against this background, a synthesis between the chastity and spiritual coldness of Christianity and the intoxicating state of the (still unredeemed) nature of ancient ideas can be imagined, a reconciliation of the Apollonian and Dionysian worlds.
literature
- Dieter Borchmeyer : Mörike's erotic mysticism , interpretations, poems by Eduard Mörike, ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, ISBN 3-15-017508-9 , pp. 144–153
- Simone Weckler: On a Christmas flower , Mörike manual, life - work - effect, eds. Inge and Reiner Wild, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-01812-1 , pp. 135-137
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Quotation from: Interpretations, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike , Ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, pp. 144–145
- ↑ Quotation from: Interpretations, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike , ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, p. 145
- ↑ Simone Weckler, in: Mörike manual, life - work - effect , eds. Inge and Reiner Wild, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2004, 136.
- ↑ Dieter Borchmeyer , Mörikes erotic mysticism , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike, ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, p. 147
- ↑ Quotation from: Dieter Borchmeyer, Mörikes erotic mystik , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike, Ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, p. 146
- ↑ Quotation from: Dieter Borchmeyer, Mörikes erotic Mystik , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike, Ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, p. 147
- ↑ Simone Weckler, in: Mörike manual, life - work - effect , eds. Inge and Reiner Wild, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2004, 136
- ↑ Dieter Borchmeyer, Mörikes erotic mysticism , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike, ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, pp. 145–146
- ↑ Dieter Borchmeyer, Mörikes erotic mysticism , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike, ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, p. 147
- ↑ Dieter Borchmeyer, Auf eine Christblume in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike, Ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, p. 148
- ↑ Hanspeter Brode, Flügelleichte Mourning . In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Hrsg.), 1000 German poems and their interpretations, From Heinrich Heine to Friedrich Nietzsche. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, pp. 173–174
- ↑ Hanspeter Brode, Flügelleichte Mourning . In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Hrsg.), 1000 German poems and their interpretations, From Heinrich Heine to Friedrich Nietzsche. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, p. 174
- ↑ Hanspeter Brode, Flügelleichte Mourning . In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Hrsg.), 1000 German poems and their interpretations, From Heinrich Heine to Friedrich Nietzsche. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, p. 175
- ↑ Dieter Borchmeyer, Mörikes erotic mysticism , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike, ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, p. 152
- ↑ Quoted from: Dieter Borchmeyer, Mörikes erotic Mystik , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike, Ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, p. 152
- ↑ Dieter Borchmeyer, Auf einer Christblume in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike, Ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, p. 149
- ↑ Quoted from: Dieter Borchmeyer, Auf eine Christblume in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike, Ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, p. 149
- ↑ Dieter Borchmeyer, Auf einer Christblume in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike, Ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, p. 150
- ↑ Dieter Borchmeyer, Mörikes erotic mysticism , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike, ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, pp. 150–151