You are like a flower
The song or the poem You are like a flower appeared in the Book of Songs in 1827 and is the 47th poem in the cycle Die Heimkehr . The work, probably composed in 1823 or 1824, is one of Heinrich Heine's most famous love poems .
text
You are like a flower
You are like a flower,
So lovely and beautiful and pure;
I look at you, and melancholy
creeps into my heart.
I feel as if I
should put my hands on your head,
Praying that God may keep you
so pure and beautiful and lovely.
Autobiographical background
The content should go back to a real love of the poet. In Berlin, Heine met the daughter of a rabbi, whom he soon placed under the care of his friend Rahel Varnhagen von Ense . Rahel sent the girl back to Gniezno (Gnesen) without forgetting her assignment. In her highly subjective memories of Heinrich Heine, Maria Embden-Heine describes Heine 's love for Mirjam as unrequited love. According to Maximilian Heine's communications, the poem's time of writing can be dated to the winter of 1823/24.
shape
The poem consists of two stanzas with four verses each, which are mainly held in the iambus . The so-called "half cross rhyme ", in which only the even-numbered verses rhyme, prevails in both stanzas. A female cadence is regularly followed by a male one.
interpretation
The catchy poem begins with a well-known comparison. The ascribed attributes of graceful , beautiful and pure do not deviate from the traditional gender role of a young woman. Consequently, in the second stanza the speaker does not dare to get any closer to the girl. The gesture of the laying on of hands goes hand in hand with the desire to preserve the properties mentioned. Hans H. Hiebel sees a threat to “untouchedness” by reality, “physical sexuality, perhaps also rudeness [...]”. As a result, the "state of purity - despite all threats - is aesthetically immortalized". The serious tone of the song is not ironicized - unless one assumes that the lyrical ego wants to understand the supposedly pious gesture of laying on of hands as a possibility of physical assault on the flower-like, untouchable young woman. The lyrical ego itself becomes a cause of the danger to sexual unaffectedness described by Hiebel. The social impossibility of this action and thus of the erotic rapprochement would then be the reason for the "melancholy" of the lyrical ego evoked in the first stanza.
reception
The love song is extremely popular. The poem was set to music 388 times alone, including classical composers such as Franz Schubert , Franz Liszt , Richard Wagner , Anton Bruckner , Johannes Brahms , Sergei Wassiljewitsch Rachmaninow and Jean Sibelius . The most famous setting comes from Robert Schumann .
literature
Text output
- Heinrich Heine: book of songs . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1827, p. 223.
