Loneliness (Gryphius)

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"Solitude" in an edition from 1658

Loneliness is a sonnet by Andreas Gryphius , famous, often interpreted, one of the vanitas sonnets. It was first published in Frankfurt am Main in 1650 as the sixth of the fifty sonnets from Gryphius' sonnet collection “Das Ander Buch” . During Gryphius' lifetime it was reprinted with the "Ander Buch" in 1657 in the first authorized complete edition and in 1663 in a last-hand edition with changes (only orthographical).

The 1650 version was reprinted in 1963 in Volume 1 of a complete edition of the German-language works for which Marian Szyrocki and Hugh Powell were responsible, the 1663 version in 2012 by Thomas Borgstedt.

text

The texts are taken from Szyrocki's and Borgstedt's reprints.

Lonliness. (1650)

In this loneliness / which is more than desolate /
Stretched out on wild herbs / to the large sea:
I look at that valley and these rocks above
On which owls and silent birds nest.
Here far from the palace; far from the man's lust
I consider: how the man perishes in vanity
How on no firm ground 'all our hope stand'
As those who scold before evening / who greeted vnß before the day.
The Höell / the rawe wald / the Todtenkopf / the stone /
The also the time limit / the emaciated legs.
Design with the courage to think twice.
The Moors old gray / this vngebaw'te land
Is beautiful and fruitful to me / who actually discover /
All of this / without a spirit / that God himself holds / must shake.

Lonliness. (1663)

In this loneliness / the more than barren deserts /
Stretched out on wild herbs / to the mossy sea:
I look at that valley and this rock heights
On which only owls and silent birds nest.
Far from the palace; far from the people's lust /
I consider: how the man perishes in vanity
How / on not solid ground 'all our hopes stand'
How those who scold before evening / who greeted us before the day.
The hell / the rough forest / the Todtenkopff / the stone /
The also the time / the emaciated leg.
Design in the Mutt impersonal thoughts.
The Moors old gray / this unbuilt land
Is beautiful and fruitful to me / who actually discover /
That everything / without a spirit / which God himself holds / must shake.

interpretation

The review quotes the version from 1650. A particularly detailed and “convincing” interpretation comes from Wolfram Mauser .

shape

Like most of Gryphius' sonnets, the poem is written in Alexandrians . The rhyme scheme is “abba abba” for the quartets and “ccd eed” for the trios . The verses with the “a” and “d” rhymes are thirteen syllables, the rhymes are feminine , the verses with the “b”, “c” and “e” rhymes are twelve syllable, therefore here according to the editions of Szyrocki and Borgstedt indented, the rhymes masculine .

First quartet

In the loneliness of a "more than desolate desert" is the lyrical self . This is not a locus amoenus . "Stretched out on wild herbs" the speaker camps instead of on a meadow of flowers, "by the large sea" instead of a rushing spring; instead of beating nightingales, “owls only vnd quiet birds” nest here - an “inverted locus amoenus ”, locus desertus or locus melancholicus ; Dietrich Walter Jöns speaks of an "anchor landscape" . The owl is a bird of solitude. So in the Psalms , based on the Luther Bible of 1545: "I am the same as a Rhordomel in the desert / I am the same as a Kützlin in the troubled cities." So with Shakespeare , in whose Titus Andronicus nothing flourishes in a locus desertus "unless the nightly owl or fatal raven ".

Second quartet

In addition to the loneliness in nature, to which the “here” anaphorically points, comes in verse 5 the distance from human community, “whose extreme positions are named in strict metrical and syntactic parallelism”: “Here, far from the palace; far from lust. ”The“ Pallast ”stands for the nobility, the“ Pövel ”- in the thinking of the time characterized by the inability to control passions - for the lowest strata of the population. What is meant is society as a whole. At this distance from everything distracting, the meditator is able to ponder the essence of man.

Mauser emphasizes the structure of the poem through the verbs and quotes from Grimm's dictionary . In the first quartet the speaker observes (verse 3), in the second he contemplates (verse 7). “To look at is more intimate than to look at, and to look at it more thoughtfully than to look at <...> the observer ponders, the observer thinks. you can not make beschauungen, they are made by itself, considerations but must be made "The deliberate consideration therefore teaches the ego, the overriding characteristic of the human condition:" vergeh as man in vanity ' "- the vanity. vanitas all earthly things.

First trio

The gaze turns back to nature.

The Höell / the rawe wald / the Todtenkopf / the stone /
The also the time limit / the emaciated legs

are further props of vanitas , metaphors of creature and transience. “For Gryphius, the nature of nature is ultimately always that it is an ens creatum. That is what all these things have in common ontologically. And just as everything that is created refers to the Creator, these things are also symbols of his reality. ”The distinguishing verb of the trio is“ design ”:

Design with the courage to think twice.

According to Grimm's dictionary, the word “courage” has “ the general meaning of the human inner being as the seat of feeling, thinking, desiring, striving in general, which is still partially preserved in our minds . “The things bearing the sign of decay take full advantage of the viewer, his feelings, thoughts, desires, striving. “'Design' things 'with the courage to think about', that means the language of creation heard in meditating contemplation."

Second trio

This language of creation becomes “beautiful and fruitful” for the speaker-ego in the second trio, reveals the ego - fourth of the verbs that make up the structure .

Is beautiful and fruitful to me / who actually discover /
All of this / without a spirit / that God himself holds / must shake.

In spite of all the vanitas , “vanity” (verse 6) of the earthly, looking at, looking at, “designing” “thought” leads to a conciliatory knowledge. Everything falls to dust when God hides his face. But if he sends out his spirit, it will be created anew and he will be the face of the earth again. According to the Luther Bible of 1545: “Hide your face / So they are frightened / You nimp away yren odem / So they pass away / and turn to dust. You read from your breath / so they are created / and the shape of the earth is lost. ”According to the letter to the Hebrews : God's Son “ is the gleam of God's glory / and the image of his being / and treats all things with his powerful word . "

“From this basis of baroque Bible Christianity, the invisible and the eternal in the visible and temporal, God as the creator and sustainer of all beings, and the emphasis on this perspective, which in its factual nature barren and the eye offers no beauty, the wasteland, beautiful and 'fruitful', it is important to Gryphius, as the conclusion of the sonnet worked out in dialectical antithetics shows. "

The whole

"Non-lyric poetry"

For Gerhard Fricke in 1933 “Solitude” “the coexistence of landscape character and soul mood , as it is possible for the baroque poet, emerges in a representative way.” The poem shows the poet in his landscape. However, "any poetic mood" is missing. Sea and mountains embodied, "still free of any aesthetically sublime, autonomous mood content, only the elements of sterility, desolation and destruction". The landscape lacks “not only all lyrical animation, all movement, yes, everything organic - in its completely unchanged, alien thinginess”, “it resembles a cemetery and rubble heap of nature”. This is precisely what lies “what is edifying to the poet's contemplative gaze”. The poet surrounds himself with caves, woods, stones, barren fields, skulls, skeletons and ruins, a world dissolved into fragments. “After we feel that it has been rendered useless for poetic use in this way, it just becomes 'beautiful and fertile' for G., welling up with suggestions and filled with meaning. But precisely with this, what is 'nature' in nature is completely leveled out. ”Literary artificiality and convention exclude“ any direct and original effect of nature ”.

Later interpreters confirmed many of Fricke's observations, but attributed his overall negative judgment to a concept of poetry that was inappropriate for the Renaissance and Baroque . Emil Staiger had written in 1946: "We read from romantic songs, from songs that Goethe wrote, and other songs that are similar to them, the essence of the lyric." Karl Otto Conrady replied in 1962 that Staiger's determination only affects the Goethic and post-ethical "experience poetry". The pre-ethical, in Staiger's sense “non-lyrical lyric poetry” gets out of sight. Erich Trunz explains in 1992 that baroque poetry “ saw only emblems of the order of salvation in everything natural and never wanted to represent the objective and individual, but only the legal and general”. Of course there was a personal, special experience, without this there would not have been poetry; but it was filtered until the general was left. In addition to the imagery, the second great stylistic device was accumulation. The poets would have strung together as many words as possible, in order to describe the matter correctly. The greatest artistic achievements, for example the sonnets by Andreas Gryphius, moved in clusters and images, and built correct Alexandrians. In these strict forms, even through the severity of this form, the poet's innermost concern was expressed, the overcoming of the chaos of the world through the Christian order of salvation.

According to Jöns, Fricke stands in his judgment that in "Loneliness" literary convention excludes "any direct and original effect of nature" (see above), "a concept of nature gained from the classic-romantic conception of nature in the way". If one looks at the sonnet from a baroque point of view and not under the critical sign of those possibilities of shaping nature that only began with the autonomy of subjectivity in Sturm und Drang , then it should be understood as the poetic shaping of a spiritual consideration of nature. “The relationship between man and nature, as it explicitly confronts us in these verses, is not determined by any feeling in the sense of subjectivist poetry, but it is also not non-binding reflection, <...> but what takes place here is one of the Bible as a spiritualizing contemplation of nature proceeding from an absolute truth. "

Visual arts

"Democritus in Meditation." Etching by Salvator Rosa.
“Meeting of Saints Paul and Anthony”. Painting by Matthias Grünewald.

Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly has found the landscape of the poem in depictions of melancholy in the visual arts . This includes Salvator Rosa's etching “Democritus in Meditation”. Democritus was considered a wise man who, separated from the world, recognized its folly. A man sits on the remains of a wall, his head in his hand, in a typical thoughtful, melancholy pose. In front of him lies a heap of bones, on the left an urn and a coffin with a corpse, around it rubble, a half withered tree with an owl in its branches in the upper left. About fifty years earlier, Matthias Grünewald's “Meeting of the Hermits Paulus von Thebes and Antonius Abbas ”, part of the Isenheim Altarpiece, was written . Watanabe-Kelly describes: “The scene is bare and stony, a stagnant stream drags in the background; tall, dry, leafless trees are covered with moss, and a raven flies down with bread for the hermits. Clumps of rock, also overgrown, demarcate the place. Wrecked walls lie around on the ground, and a few mountains tower up in the background. <...> This type of landscape is then only one step away from Gryph's statement in the 'Loneliness Sonnet': 'Die Höell / der rawe wald' <...> Design with the courage to think about it. ”With Grünewald, the scene is Setting that matches the state of mind of the two men. With Gryphius one could speak of a "meditation landscape, ie of a landscape that triggers a thought process with Christian content in the observer who is in the landscape". Just like the poem "Anachoreten landscape", Grünewald's picture has been called the "metaphysical exaggeration <of a natural scenery> to an ideal anachoretic landscape".

Interpretations since 1980

In 1988, Mauser puts his review of the three sonnets " To the crucified Jesus ", "Tears in serious illness" and "Loneliness" under the heading "Andreas Gryphius - philosopher and poet under the cross". “The poem is not a landscape poem.” Rather, it is about an intellectual examination of elements of nature, not for their own sake or for the sake of scenic beauty, but with a view to the eschatological determination of humans. Therefore the location is chosen and the items are put together. What they have in common is that they are carriers of analogous meaning. That is why the individual elements did not need to fit together, they could even be mutually exclusive, like the “desolate deserts” (verse 1) and the “rawe forest” (verse 9). “The objects of nature mentioned are images of meaning, images, signs. They are able to demonstrate the salvation-historical significance of the world. Who, like the ego of the sonnet, is able to take the step towards interpretation, for him the barren, deserted, sterile ('vngebaw'te') land is 'beautiful and fertile'. In an ingenious turn, Gryphius takes the step from the salvation-historical dimension of the sonnet to the aspect of the salvation of the individual. In several respects, the sonnet proves to be a high-level concentrate of meaning and form. "

The American Germanist Blake Lee Spahr is reminded of Caspar David Friedrich's winter landscapes . In contrast to Mauser, “Solitude” is not about the transience of human life. It is a poem about the artist and his visual visions, "icons of a world in extremis , which only the creative hand can turn to a positive purpose" - "icons of a world in extremis that only the creative hand <of the artist> is positive able to turn ”.

In 2009, Thomas Borgstedt referred to the relationship between "Loneliness" and Francesco Petrarca's sonnet

Solo et pensono i piu deserti campi
vo mesurando a passi tardi et lenti

Alone and thoughtful the most desolate lands
I traverse with slow and sluggish steps

pointed out. In the first verse, the reference to Petrarch is clearly marked with the rhyming phrase “desolate desert”. For Gryphius, Petrarkic melancholy is converted into the security of Christian contemplation.

The poem asks the rhetorical question “What is man?” Writes Andreas Blödorn. The first answer is: Man is nothing. The second is forgiving. Those who follow the meditative path of knowledge of the poem can “happily return to this now animated world. He is only lonely, but not alone. How could this knowledge be grasped more convincingly than with the beauty of the rule-based, artful form of the sonnet, the form which Gryphius first helped to achieve poetic independence in German. This poetic beauty of meditative knowledge speaks to us from afar, from the baroque period to today. <...> With an optimistic certainty of knowledge, the sonnet poetically binds the disintegration of the world and the newly found hold in faith in the embracing rhyme of the closing verses. Who, the poem appeals in its perfect form, would not like to follow this - just for the sake of the beauty of this knowledge? "

literature

References and comments

  1. ↑ This is a title edition of the edition from 1657.
  2. ↑ Drux 1993, p. 33; Borgstedt 2009, p. 347.
  3. ↑ Borgstedt 2016, p. 103.
  4. ↑ Szyrocki 1963.
  5. ^ Borgstedt 2012. Thomas Borgstedt is a Germanist and since 2002 President of the International Andreas Gryphius Society. Internet source.
  6. ↑ Szyrocki 1963, p. 68.
  7. ↑ Borgstedt 2012, p. 39.
  8. ↑ The edition of 1663 has "only" instead of "me", undoubtedly a printing error; Spahr 1993, p. 47.
  9. ↑ Drux 1993, p. 33.
  10. ↑ Mauser 1982/1988. Wolfram Mauser, * 1928 in Faistenau , Austria, was professor for modern German literary history at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg from 1964 until his retirement in 1993 . Internet source .
  11. ↑ Watanabe-O'Kelly 1978, pp. 67-73.
  12. ↑ Jöns 1966, p. 86. Jöns (1924–2011) was a professor of German studies at the University of Mannheim from 1966 to 1992 . Internet source.
  13. ↑ In the revision of 2017: Psalm 102,7  LUT .
  14. ↑ Watanabe-O'Kelly 1978, pp. 68-69.
  15. ↑ Drux 1993, p. 34.
  16. ↑ Mauser 1988, p. 232.
  17. ↑ a b Retro digitization with the option of full text search .
  18. ↑ Created being.
  19. ↑ Jöns 1966, p. 88.
  20. ↑ Jöns 1966, p. 89.
  21. ↑ In the revision of 2017: Psalm 104 : 29-30  LUT .
  22. ↑ In the revision of 2017: Heb 1,3  LUT .
  23. ↑ Jöns 1966, p. 90.
  24. ↑ Fricke's locking rate.
  25. ↑ Fricke 1933/1967, pp. 153–156.
  26. ↑ Quoted in Conrady 1962, p. 53.
  27. ↑ Conrady 1962, p. 53.
  28. ↑ Trunz 1992, pp. 12 and 32-35.
  29. ↑ Jöns 1966, p. 88.
  30. ↑ Jöns 1966, p. 86.
  31. ↑ Jöns 1966, pp. 90-91.
  32. ↑ Watanabe-O'Kelly 1978, pp. 24-25. The book is the dissertation of Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly, * 1948 in Cork , Ireland , ibid p. 3.
  33. ↑ Watanabe-O'Kelly 1978, p. 44.
  34. ↑ Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly 1978, p. 82.
  35. ↑ see above, Jöns 1966, p. 86.
  36. ↑ Klaus Starke : The meeting of Antonius and Paulus in eleven hundred years of fine art. . In: Antoniter Forum. 13, 2005, pp. 7-65, here p. 19.
  37. ↑ Mauser 1988, pp. 233-238.
  38. ↑ † 2006. Obituary from the University of California, Berkeley
  39. ↑ Spahr 1993, p. 47.
  40. ↑ Borgstedt 2009, pp. 347-348.
  41. ↑ Blödorn 2008. Andreas Blödorn has held the chair for modern German literature at the Westphalian Wilhelms University of Münster since 2011 . Short biography.