Melancholy (Gottfried Keller)
Melancholy is the title of a poem by the Swiss poet Gottfried Keller . It was written in 1848 while Keller was studying in Heidelberg and appeared in the collection of contemporary poems in 1851 . At that time it only comprised the first four stanzas. The fifth stanza, which explicitly refers to Albrecht Dürer's copperplate engraving Melencolia I , was first included in Keller's collected poems , published in 1883 .
text
Greetings to me, melancholy,
Who comes to
my
heart with the quiet fairy step In the garden of my imagination At the right time!
That
bends my
courage like a young willow
Deep to the edge of life,
But then in my bitter suffering
Full of loyalty lies at my side!
The mirror of truth, who is
unconquerable, holds up,
That tears of knowledge swell
And burst out of dark eyes;
How do you lift your head sternly and sternly,
When I forgot you more and more,
Whether the noisy noise and flicker, Which
sat by my cradle!
How my heart clings to vain lust
and the folly of this world!
Often more than a woman's breast
is surrounded
by outer work, and even the consolation that I recognized from my own striving,
what is empty and void,
you take and have raised my proudly
to the ground as soon as
you show me the book with a smile
Of the king, whom I often mocked,
From whom it, like a curse from bronze,
That all be vain! sounds.
And near and far I hear a sound like
fool's bells -
O goddess, let me embrace you,
only you, only you are true and beautiful! -
I still do not feel you so nobly
as Albrecht Dürer has looked at you:
A pensive woman, illuminated by the inner light
, the most beautiful bride of industriousness ,
surrounded by all the signs of all works,
with mild sorrow;
She muses - the demon must escape
Before the plan is ripe for the accomplishment.
About the work
To the form
Each of the five stanzas consists of eight lines of verse connected by cross rhymes . Stressed and unstressed syllables (raised and lowered ) alternate evenly. Each line starts with a reduction, the determining metrical foot is therefore the Jambus . Except for the fifth and seventh, all lines consist of exactly four iambi , which means that they end male . The fifth line of each stanza has five siblings and ends in feminine (with a lowering). The seventh, again in four parts, also ends feminine because of the rhyme. This loosening up makes the speech lively, dramatic and haunting, especially since the fifth lines represent iambic five-key words that resemble the blank verse customary in classical drama .
Go to content
The lyrical self welcomes a fantasy creature, fairy or goddess who has a melodious name, which of course also denotes a serious mental suffering: melancholy . This being comes close to him, very close, “creeps” up his heart with quiet steps, teasing like a secret lover, at the same time threatening like a demon. However, the attack or attack happens “at the right time” , that is, neither unexpected nor unwelcome, although melancholy deals with the self in a downright life-threatening manner, namely like a storm wind with a tree. But then she does not leave the bent I, pressed to the ground, alone in his distress, but lays at his side like a loyal lover.
The second stanza shows how this fits together: Melancholy relates to the self like a teacher or doctor. She holds the mirror up to him imperiously, relentlessly confronting him with painful truth. There appear traits and attributes of Athena , city goddess of the war and politician, art and science proud Athens, who was nicknamed "the unconquerable" and who possessed the mirror shield that petrified the terrible Medusa . However, when applied therapeutically, the Truth Mirror has the opposite effect, it softens the ego to tears, causes it to admit, "whether noisy noise or flicker" - because of insubstantial externalities - the goddess has forgotten what she accuses him of. For Athena, alias Melancholy, sat at his cradle, like fairies do when they bestow gifts on a newborn. This explains the situation: fairies jealously watch over the use that the recipients make of such gifts.
In the third stanza the ego continues its self-accusation: its heart is attached to "vain lust" and "folly of this world" . That sounds pretty general. But then: "More than a woman's breast is surrounded by external work ..." As a metaphor for the bias of the heart in the external, the poet chooses a woman's bosom, of all things, with the surrounding bodice that emphasizes its effect - a daring, almost improper in such a serious context Image. However, it tells us not a little about the nature of the needs in which the ego is. Obviously it is a male ego, erotically interested in spite of all contrition, which of course immediately resumes painful self-contemplation after the, as it were, furtively risked sideways glance. His complaint culminates in the fact that he is deprived of the consolation of having recognized “what is empty and void” on his own , if ...
(the sentence spans the line with the fourth stanza) ... when the strict teacher shows him the book with a "smile" that contains his supposedly original knowledge, the book of Kohelet , written by the legendary King Solomon , in which it says: " Everything is completely vain ” ( Koh 1,2 LUT ). Solomon regards even the pursuit of the truth as “chasing the wind” ( Koh 1,17 LUT ). But strange: with the mention of this highly contradictory man, the deepest melancholic, but at the same time also the most dissolute erotic in the Bible ( 1 Kings 11.3 LUT ), a proponent of cheerful enjoyment on top of that ( Koh 9.9 LUT ), the mood of the self strikes around. The dead center of self-humiliation has been passed, the deeply bowed spirits of life soar, despondency turns into willfulness, even arrogance: If everything just catches the wind, if the whole world is echoing with fool's bells, then why shouldn't the ego, even if it is foolishly, after that Take hold of the only remaining beauties and truths and embrace the goddess, fairy or some other fantasy as a lover?
A pointed, dialectical-humorous final turn, if not a downright noble one! The poet seems to have shared this opinion. He realized that the poem was still missing something: a fifth stanza - five is actually the magical number of Kellerscher compositions. So the last stanza begins with the quietly self-critical words: "I don't feel you so noble yet ..." . What follows is an interpretation of Dürer's paper, in which the poet, aged 30 years, puts the insights of an experienced artistic understanding into the mouth of the youthful ego. Like the lyrical self, the genre of the poem ( ode , homage to a beloved higher being) is preserved, only that the stormy declaration of love now leads to an art-philosophical consideration: In the vision of the artist Albrecht Dürer, melancholy appears as “the most beautiful bride of industriousness” . "Diligence" here means "diligence in art", study and artistic practice. A work of art is only created when the diligence of art is paired with inspiration . The source of inspiration, the artist's muse , is melancholy, depicted as a female being, “dressed with mild sadness” , serious, in a sunk posture, sitting deeply withdrawn, “surrounded by all works of signs” , in the midst of mysterious ones Structures that embody mathematical riddles and more familiar tools, as if left behind by indecisive builders. In this confusion, the “creative chaos ”, the plan for the work matures, suddenly the illumination of how it is to be accomplished occurs. The moment of inspiration is captured in the outwardly shadowed face of the female figure. It appears "illuminated by inner light" , the alert eyes gaze with the highest concentration, "she ponders - the demon has to escape" , the gloomy brooding and self-tormenting brooding comes to an end, stands out with that vampiric being who carries the caption "MELENCOLIA" , on bat wings away. Melancholy, equipped with angel wings, asserts its place on earth. (→ phases of the creative process ).
Keller's interpretation of Dürer's sheet is thus in the tradition of a revaluation of melancholy, which begins with the treatise De triplici vita by the Florentine Marsilio Ficino and in which Albrecht Dürer himself takes part: Against the condemnation of melancholy by the medieval theologians (as the main vice of indolence and cause of mortal sin ) the scholars and artists of the Renaissance set their new, high conception of the "melencolia generosa" as a painful state of mind that afflicts musically inspired, creative people, but also distinguishes them.
To the formation
There is much to suggest that the first version of the poem, written in Heidelberg in December 1848, was inspired by Dürer's Melencolia . During his studies in Heidelberg (October 1848 to April 1850), the poet frequently visited the painter Christian Philipp Koester , the restorer of the Boisserée painting collection and an excellent expert on old German painting and graphics. Koester published a series of booklets entitled Scattered Thoughts Sheets on Art , to which he and his friend, the Berlin antiquarian Gustav Parthey , contributed to a dialogue about Dürer's copperplate engravings. It was to this text and probably to the conversations with Koester that Keller owed the main features of his conception of the picture.
To the reception
Keller's Melancholie , printed in most editions (including selected editions) of his poem, more rarely in anthologies , was hardly ever commented on, interpreted, criticized or discussed in any other form as a single work. All the more important is the appreciation it received from Jonas Fränkel , the editor of the first text-critical complete edition of Keller's works, in a prominent place - in the foreword to the first volume:
- “This most Swiss poet is also the most German. […] If one wants to conjure up a similar appearance, Albrecht Dürer is forced to see how his image has lived in the consciousness of the century since the Romantic era. Both are rooted in a free city republic whose breath could still be felt in Gottfried Kellers' Zurich. Both art are nourished by a rich imagination that is tamed by viewing the real. In the art of both folk and educational elements - with Dürer the Renaissance, with Keller the Goethean humanism - have entered into an inseparable harmonic connection. Both are of the 'old master's' type that devotes the same love and devotion to the small as to the large, because they know that nothing is small and nothing large in itself and that the greatest can be reflected in the smallest.
- Among the works of the Nuremberg master, one sheet in particular had grown dear to Gottfried Keller: Melancholy. At a young age he called the serious woman in a poem as his guardian spirit, who had already sat at his cradle and always appeared with him whenever the vanity of the world wanted to gain power over him. In old age he picks up the poem again and adds a new stanza to it. Melancholy is no longer his goddess. He now praises the pensive winged woman with the wreath in her hair, surrounded by mild mourning, as 'the most beautiful bride of diligence', from whose stern eye the ghostly bat named 'Melencolia' takes refuge.
- As Gottfried Keller's rightful muse, 'the most beautiful bride of diligence' stands invisible in front of this series of volumes, interpreting the meaning of his life: 'the demon must escape / before the completion of the ripe plan.' "
Individual evidence
- ↑ Quoted from the text-critical edition by Jonas Fränkel (Ed.): Gottfried Keller. All works . Volume 2, I. Benteli Publishing House. Bern and Leipzig 1937, p. 157 f.
- ↑ The two volumes of Keller's novella cycle Die People von Seldwyla each contain five stories, as do the Zurich novellas and, if only the main novellas are counted, Das Sinngedicht .
- ↑ Taking into account the rainbow and radiant celestial bodies not mentioned in the poem, Wolfgang Florey describes this moment as follows: "The sudden blinding of consciousness through an almost catastrophic, overpowering thought, which often shows the creative person his way as a guiding star, - this overwhelming inner experience becomes visible here as a cosmic event. ” About Dürer's Melencolia I (PDF; 1.9 MB), p. 9.
- ↑ Jakob Baechtold : Gottfried Keller's life. His letters and diaries . 3 volumes. Wilhelm Hertz publishing house . Berlin 1894-1897, vol. 1, p. 336 f.
- ^ In volume 4 (1840), pp. 49–56.
- ↑ How deeply this suggestion impressed Keller can be seen in a letter he sent to his friend Paul Heyse at the time the fifth stanza was being written . Heyse had complained about his depressed mood. Keller replied that it seemed to him that this melancholy “looked as similar to Albrecht Dürer's women of the same name as one egg to another, in the sense that the blessed Doctor Parthey in Berlin interpreted it artificially and intelligently in a lost art book, namely as the mother of a ceaseless activity, surrounded by all the attributes of art and science. ” Letter of July 2, 1878. In: Gesammelte Letters . 4 volumes. Edited by Carl Helbling. Benteli, Bern 1950–1954, Vol. 3, I, p. 31.
- ↑ Vol. 1, pp. XXXI f.