Human misery

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Human misery is a sonnet by Andreas Gryphius . The poem appeared in 1637 in the poetry book "Lissa Sonnets". The then 21-year-old Gryphius captured the baroque vanitas motif in perfectly shaped verses .

text

Human misery.

What are we humans? a house grimmer Schmertzen.
A ball of false luck / a wisp of this time.
A scene of bitter fear / filled with sharp suffering /
A soon melted snow and burned off candles.

This life flies away like chatter and jokes.
Those who put before us the weak body garment
And have
long been inscribed in the dead book of great mortality / are out of our minds and hearts.

Just as a vain dream easily falls out of the eight /
And like a river sheds away / which no power stops:
So our acceptance / praise, honor and fame must also disappear /

what it and breath takes / must escape with the air /
what will come after us / will put us in the grave after zer
What do I say? we pass like smoke from strong winds.

shape

The poem “Menschliches Elende”, consisting of four stanzas, followed by two quartets by two trios, fulfills the classic structure of a sonnet. While the quartets consist of a total of two embracing rhymes (abba abba), the terzets are in the tail rhyme (ccd eed). The Alexandrian , as the predominant meter of baroque poetry, is also given here. The cadences are wmmw in the quartets and mmw in the terzets and thus adapt to the rhyme scheme.

interpretation

The poem is surrounded by two rhetorical questions: “What are we humans after all?” And “What am I saying?”, The haunting repetition in the last stanza closes the poem. When asked what a person is now, images of transience are found such as “melted snow” and “burned off candles”. Due to the antithetical structure of the poem, the image in the fourth verse is heightened again. The transience itself is designed as movement, similar to a "ball" or "will-o'-the-wisp" is the human being. But not only the time, but also the space shows our susceptibility, rigid structures such as “house” and “scene” are associated with negative feelings: “grim pain” and “bitter fear”. Powerful verbal concretizations and comparisons in the following two stanzas make the end of human existence tangible. The “body dress” mentioned in the sixth verse is the material covering, only the soul is immortal. In the seventh verse, man's powerlessness is shown again, because even the “ dead book ”, in which the deceased is remembered at least by name, does not remain unforgettable for those born after. It is precisely the victims of that "great mortality", the Thirty Years' War and its epidemics, that are subject to a second death. In the first trio there are several comparisons. Life is a "vain dream", which at the same time indicates hubris and transience. The flow as a motif for eternity experiences a negation, not life is infinite, but mortality. Even common compensations to escape death in the spirit are ineffective. After all, humans can no longer escape themselves in constructions. In the last three verses the previous message is repeated, the volatility of human existence, which applies even to posterity. The emerging subject in the fourteenth verse is a deliberately applied correction that equates to its own negation.

Web links

Wikisource: Human Misery  - Sources and Full Texts

Individual evidence

  1. See Volker Meid: Baroque Literature . In: Wolfgang Beutin, Klaus Ehlert (Ed.): A History of German Literature. From the beginnings to the present day . Routledge, New York 1993, p. 108.