Midnight (Gryphius)

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Midnight is a sonnet by Andreas Gryphius . It was first published in 1650 in Frankfurt am Main in Gryphius' sonnet collection "Das Ander Buch" . After the “ morning sonnet ”, after “noon” and “evening”, it is the last of the four sonnets of the time of day that opens the book. During Gryphius' lifetime it was reprinted with the “Ander Buch” in 1657 in the first authorized complete edition and in 1663 in a final edition with changes.

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 text comes from Szyrocki's reprint. The reprints during Gryphius' lifetime show not only orthographical deviations (e.g. verse 1 "SChrecken / vnd stille / vnd dark horror / dark cold covers the land" 1650, "SChrecken / and stille / and dark horror / dark cold covers the country" 1663) two changes to: verse 3 "animals and people" 1650, "people and thire" 1663, verse 8 "an honoring = desiring soul" 1650, "an honor-desiring mind" 1663.

Midnight.
Scratch / and still / and dark horror / dark cold covers the land /
now sleeps what work and aches and pains / these are the sad hours of loneliness.
Now / what moves through the air / now animals and men have disappeared.
Whether the ever-shimmering lights / the eternally shimmering stars arose!
Does a diligent mind still seek to watch? which through the effort of the artificial hand /
The souls arriving to us / him / who can now find themselves connected to him?
Does a bloody murderer sharpen the blade? does he want to wound innocent hearts?
Care for an honoring = desiring soul / how to attain a higher status?
Mortal! Mortal! let this poetry! Tomorrow! Oh! tomorrow ah! you have to get there!
Oh, we are about to disappear as the ghosts / the vmb appear and flihn.
When the dark pits are covered / what we want and seek to be nothing.
But as the shining morning opens / when neither moons nor torches shine:
So when the sudden day breaks / something is talked about / worried / meant.
Special cloaks open up before God's terrible courts.

interpretation

shape

The meter is almost the only one in Gryphius' poetry: a dactylic octonary , long verse with eight accents and a caesura after the fourth accentuation. Blake Lee Spahr wrote that Gryphius thought the dactylus was "spooky". In the sonnet from the “Ander Buch” “Die Hölle” he used it to conjure up spirits:

—◡◡ — ◡◡ — ◡◡—— ‖ —◡◡ — ◡◡ — ◡◡ — ◡

Terrible spirits of the tunckelen hells / You torture and endure the years

here he conjures up the horrors of midnight:

—◡◡ — ◡◡ — ◡◡—— ‖ —◡◡ — ◡◡ — ◡◡— (◡)

Scrapes / and quiet / and dark horror / dark cold covers the land /
Now what work sleeps and pain is tired / these are the sad hours of loneliness.

“Gryphius handles the shape with ease. His dactyls carry thoughts as if on wings. One may even feel a subtle change in rhythm when the exclamation marks of “Tomorrow! ach! ”to“ tomorrow ach! ”.” For another German scholar , Fritz Cohen, the rhythm intensifies “the central emotion of the sonnet: acute fear - does the intonation suggest the beating of the heart?” The rhyme scheme is “abba abba "For the quartets and" ccd eed "for the trio . The verses with the “b” and “d” rhymes are twenty-two syllabic, the rhymes feminine , the verses with the “a”, “c” and “e” rhymes are twenty-one syllabic, hence according to the Szyrocki edition indented, the rhymes masculine .

First quartet

Like the first three sonnets of the time-of-day cycle, “Midnight” begins with a landscape. In the first three sonnets it was evoked in a concrete and multifaceted way. The nouns mostly denoted realities . In the “Morning Sonnet” the stars wanted to “wear out the light of the year”, faded at dawn, and the birds were preparing to “greet the new day”; in “noon” the sun stopped at its zenith, “in the middle of the sky”, and the friends hurried “to the table”; in “Abend” the night “raised the stars”, the tired people left “feld vnd werck”. In “Midnight”, on the other hand, the landscape is “almost entranced into a dark alternative world”. The nouns mostly denote abstracts . Terror, silence, dark horror and gloomy cold show midnight as the time of the uncanny and threatening par excellence, “that dead and silent hour”. The loneliness that began in "Abend" has become even more depressing.

Now / what moves through the air / now animals and men have disappeared.
Whether the ever-shimmering lights / the eternally shimmering stars arose!

The last verse of the first quartet begins what follows the landscape in all four sonnets: the allegorical interpretation of the human being based on Gryphius' Christian- Lutheran faith. The "eternally shimmering stars" are a "warning emblem ." Light is the most important metaphor in Gryphius' religious poetry. According to the Bible, it stands for God and each of the three divine persons . Isaiah had prophesied (according to the Luther Bible of 1545 and its revision of 2017): "THE people walk in the dark / see a great light / and they shine brightly over those who live in the dark land / it shines brightly." 2017 ( Isa 9,1  LUT ): "The people who walk in the dark see a great light, and it shines brightly over those who live in the dark land." John had written about Jesus (based on the Luther Bible of 1545 and its revision of 2017): "That was the true light / which enlightens all people / who come into this world." 2017 ( Joh 1,9  LUT ): "That was the true light that enlightens all people who come into this world." Stars “jmmerdar”, “forever” shimmer, even at midnight, no creature looks up to them. The landscape of midnight reveals itself as a symbol of an existence that forgets God and does not look beyond itself.

Second quartet

The second quartet continues this interpretation. In three questions it names people who act: the scholar or artist who, with a diligent sense, “is connected to the souls arriving to us” - “the souls of future generations and contemporaries are connected Has"; the murderer; the ambitious who wants to promote his reputation. With their actions in the secular night they do not change their living conditions. You remain addicted to the world. “They stand side by side as examples of worldly sentiments without any moral judgment. Their doing and thinking in the night also means the spiritual darkness in which they find themselves, be it as the disorder of a thinking that is not directed towards the eternal, but towards temporal things, or as the corruption of the will to radically evil. "Spahr suspects, Gryphius, as a “hardworking mind”, wanted to place himself in the midnight with the “artificial hand”.

First trio

The first trio responds to such busyness, honorable as it is reprehensible, with the resolute appeal: “Mortals! Mortal! let this poetry! ". “Mortals!” Calls out the vanitas theme that dominates Gryphius . "Death and, possibly, damnation continue to be Man's lot" - "Death and possibly damnation remain the fate of man." The poet still refers to "poems" and the first personal pronoun of the first person "we" in verses 10 and 11 once in the crowd of his fellow men. “Even within Baroque poetry , which is not at a loss for drastic images and similes , the verses are of rare urgency. Life is not just a dream , here it is a gruesome ghost, and as its protagonists we step off the stage of life ourselves 'at the same time as the ghosts' who 'appear and flihn' around midnight; and with us all our earthly striving and desire in the dark pit will be nullified. ”Point of the verse: the poet spoke to the then, spatially distant reader and speaks to today's, centuries-distant reader really as a ghost, as he himself in one of his "Eugenia" sonnets: "You see me here / but only as a ghost floating."

Second trio

The first three sonnets of the time of day cycle ended with an eschatological perspective: the thought of one's own death or the last judgment . In the “Morning Sonnet” and in “Evening” the I, looking at the time of day, asked God for eternal life : “That I may shave my sun / my light forever” - “So tear me out of the valley of darkness to you”. In “noon” the ego gave itself a warning: one could escape the physical “glitz of the day”, but not the light of God, which sees and judges us, “Vns sees and directs / and bright and digs through” . “Midnight” also ends in a reminder, but strangely delayed and ambivalent.

But as the shining morning opens / when neither moons nor torches shine:
So when the sudden day breaks / something is talked about / worried / meant.
Special cloaks open up before God's terrible courts.

First of all, the gaze is directed to the future morning, which would put an end to the spook. But already in the following verse, the shining morning becomes a metaphor for the sudden day, the day of the Last Judgment, which is mentioned in Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians (based on the Luther Bible of 1545 and its revision of 2017): "SJhe / I tell you a secret. We will not all fall asleep / but we will all be changed / and the same suddenly in an instant. ”2017 ( 1 Cor 15 : 51-52  LUT ):“ See, I tell you a secret: we will not all fall asleep, we will but all are transformed; and all of a sudden, in an instant. ”On that day everything we talked, worked, meant will be open without any hiding place“ before God's terrible judgment ”. This final chord, the accentuation of the “ terrible God”, interprets Nikolaus Lohse, must surprise after a positive, redeeming effect had previously seemed to have been initiated with the metaphor of the shining morning. "Because the poem ends with this word, the human condition is not simply abolished, but even at the moment of 'redemption' the speaker (and with him the reader) sees himself thrown back on his creaturely nothingness." Confidence or pleading with the first two time-of-day sonnets, on the contrary, the speaker finds himself disillusioned before the face of God, before whom his deeds “become null” and his speech falls silent.

The whole

According to Dietrich Walter Jöns, who traced Gryphius' metaphors and emblems back into the Middle Ages and further back into the Bible, midnight becomes a symbol of the most extreme threat to human beings: namely, falling into the world, taking it as the highest value, but not its vanity and impermanence to see through, to forget that "all temporal human life is bound to the eternal and that, just as the night is followed by the morning, the present is followed by a future in which account is required". Cohen says the poet wanted to make “Midnight” the most dramatic poem in the cycle. Nikolaus Lohse calls the sonnet "one of the darkest and most desperate German languages". Comparing the four sonnets, de Capua writes, in the first and third hope of redemption inspires the ego's prayer; in the second, “noon”, and the fourth, “midnight,” the horror of damnation hovers as a threatening cloud over the risen Lord of the last day.

literature

  • Thomas Borgstedt (Ed.): Andreas Gryphius. Poems. Reclam-Verlag , Stuttgart 2012. ISBN 978-3-15-018561-2 .
  • Fritz G. Cohen: The "Times of the Day" Quartet of Andreas Gryphius: Convergence of Poetry and Meditation . In: Argenis . 2, No. 1-4, 1978, pp. 95-113.
  • AG de Capua: Two Quartets: Sonnet Cycles by Andreas Gryphius . In: monthly books for German teaching . 59, No. 4, 1967, pp. 325-328.
  • Gerhard Fricke The imagery in the poetry of Andreas Gryphius. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft , Darmstadt 1967. Unchanged reprint of the 1933 edition.
  • Dietrich Walter Jöns: The "sensory image". Studies on allegorical imagery with Andreas Gryphius. JB Metzler'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung , Stuttgart 1966.
  • Nikolaus Lohse: “Diss life seems like a race track to me”. Poetological remarks on a sonnet cycle by Andreas Gryphius . In: Journal for German Philology . 110, No. 2, 1991, pp. 161-180.
  • Blake Lee Spahr: Andreas Gryphius: A Modern Pespective. Camden House , Columbia, South Carolina, USA, 1993. ISBN 1-879751-65-8 .
  • Marian Szyrocki (Ed.): Andreas Gryphius. Sonnets. Max Niemeyer Verlag , Tübingen 1963.

References and comments

  1. ↑ Szyrocki 1963.
  2. ↑ Borgstedt 2012.
  3. ↑ Szyrocki 1963, p. 66.
  4. ↑ Borgstedt 2012, p. 37.
  5. ↑ American Germanist, † 2006. Obituary of the University of California, Berkeley
  6. ↑ Szyrocki 1963, p. 91.
  7. ↑ From the English; Spahr 1993, pp. 45-46.
  8. ↑ From Purdue University . Message from the university to Holocaust survivors .
  9. ↑ From the English; Cohen 1978, p: 110.
  10. ↑ Lohse 1991, p. 176.
  11. ↑ From Henry Vaughan's poem "The Night"; Cohen 1978, pp. 109-110.
  12. ↑ shimmering
  13. ↑ Jöns 1966, S: 153.
  14. ↑ Fricke 1966/1967, p. 35.
  15. ↑ “Him” could still be used reflexively in the 17th century .
  16. ↑ Jöns 1966, p. 183.
  17. ↑ Spahr 1993, p. 46.
  18. ↑ de Capua 1967, p. 326.
  19. ↑ Lohse 1991, p. 177.
  20. ↑ Szyrocki 1963, p. 69.
  21. ↑ Lohse 1991, pp. 177-178.
  22. ↑ Jöns 1966, p. 183.
  23. ^ Cohen 1978, p. 110.
  24. ↑ Lohse 1991, p. 175.
  25. ↑ de Capua 1967, p. 326.