At bedtime
Going to bed is a poem by the poet Hermann Hesse . Hesse wrote it in 1911 and published it in his poetry collection Musik des Einsamen in 1914 . It is best known to this day in the setting of the late Richard Strauss in Four Last Songs (1948).
Thematically, the poem is an evening song and describes in three stanzas, each with four trochaic and cross-rhymed verses, the coming to rest of doing, thinking and perceiving in the sleep phase as well as the expectation of a free and intensive life of the soul in sleep.
Text output
- Hermann Hesse: Music of the lonely . Heilbronn 1914.
- Hermann Hesse: The poems 1892–1962 . Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 978-3-518-40455-3 .
Web links
Text and recitation on deutschelyrik.de