Sea face
Seegesicht is a poem by Peter Hille . It was first published in Die Gesellschaft in 1889 .
Text and editions
Seegesicht has been published several times, including in Marcel Reich-Ranicki , 1000 German poems and their interpretations , Frankfurt am Main (Insel) ²1995, 5th volume, p. 17. The interpretation in this edition was written by Gertrud Fussenegger .
The individual printed versions of the poem are not entirely the same. As part of Rüdiger Bernhardt's study The Secret of the »Sea Face« by Peter Hille , it was published in the following form:
Sea face
The coast rests.
Wide tritons,
silver wounds of the flood,
raging eyes of anger.
Crowing chubby backs on soaring horses,
splashing play, purple fins,
teasing menacing with spikes and spikes,
powerfully touching bodies.
And see, a shell, flesh-
yellow and tender, preserved in a whisper by Cupids.
Infused resting lines of
greeting, rustling palms and pines.
Rose-flowered breasts.
Smiling sun-streaked coast.
Forder no threats with spikes and spikes,
tired clasping around the body.
Nodding chubby backs with shuffling horses. -
Green-whispering, sinister fins.
Extinct wounds of the flood,
Distant tritons,
Staring eyes of anger,
The coast rests.
The form of the poem in the 1916 edition, which can be read at zeno.org , differs not only in the punctuation from this version of the poem, but also in two places in the wording: The second verse of the second stanza there reads "Plätschernderspiele purple fins", the penultimate verse of the penultimate stanza “Nodding chubby-backs on shuffling horses. - “While the latter formulation sounds plausible, the former seems to be a printing or transcription error. At best, the genitive -r at the end of the word “purpurne” is conceivable . In the issue of Luminous Drops. The most beautiful poems by Peter Hille , which the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt published in 1924, can be found at the beginning of the last stanza with the deviation “Extinguishing wounds of the flood”.
The face of the sea , which was published in Detlev von Liliencron's work Der Maecen in 1890, shows significantly less resemblance to the previously mentioned printed versions of the poem by Peter Hille .
Form and content
Visually the face of the sea shows a kind of entasis , ie swelling and swelling again. Of the five stanzas, the first two and last four verses are long, while the middle stanza consists of six verses. In addition, the first and last stanzas are significantly shorter than the middle three stanzas. The poem begins and ends in a ring composition with the sentence “The coast rests.” But it is not the same calm that is described in this double verse, it is the calm before and later the calm “after the storm” or before and after a sexual surge, which is introduced with " Tritonengetut " and ends again like this. The "wounds of the flood" and the "eyes of anger", which are also mentioned in both the first and the last stanza, suggest rather violent actions.
But in the second stanza there appear actors who are more reminiscent of fountain figures, as they were popular at the time of Peter Hille. The playing, crowing, chubby fellows look quite childlike at first. However, they also act "teasingly" and embrace - whoever - "powerfully". So it seems to be a rather rustic approach to each other, although it is not yet clear who the chubby guys are actually targeting or whether they are just playing these teasing games with each other. Incidentally, from this second to the penultimate stanza the poem is executed in paired rhymes , while in the first and last stanza all the verses rhyme with each other.
In the central long stanza the motif of the shell appears, which here clearly has an erotic connotation. The infused resting lines of the third verse of this stanza, which one involuntarily relates to a female body, are connected with elements of the landscape - palms and pines - of the fourth verse through an enjambement . These, however, are in turn personified by the participle “greeting” , as is the smiling coast of the last verse of this stanza, which gives the rhyming word for the female breasts. The childish tritons from the beginning of the poem correspond to the Amorines , who preserve the flesh- yellow , tender shell. Overall, the feminine motif is clearly emphasized in this stanza. Involuntarily one feels reminded of the theme of the birth of Venus , which emerged from the sea foam mixed with sperm .
“Forder”, that is, from the moment the shell guarded by Amorines appeared, there is no longer any play with the prongs and spikes. In the penultimate verse, the chubby boys pull off tiredly on their horses, which are now slurping but previously rising. If the game of fins was associated with the attributes “rippling” and “purple” before this encounter, both the color and the mood have now changed. The fins are now whispering and dark, and instead of the warm purple, the cold green appears.
Likewise, in the last stanza the former silver color of the wounds of the flood has gone out, the distance has become the distance and the eyes of anger no longer rage, but they only stare, incidentally, like many of the actions of the poem, in participle form .
Interpretations
The title of the poem is ambiguous. If one reads the introductory verses, one can get the idea that the sea seen from the coast shows its face and the silver wounds of the tide are to be seen as sunlit foam heads or waves of the sea.
In old encyclopedias, however, the word “sea face” can be found in the sense of a paraphrase for the mirage . The title of the poem is certainly not meant quite so naturalistically, but in the course of the plot, i.e. after the first stanza, the second meaning of the word "face" comes to the fore. This does not seem to be a delusion in the manner of a Fata Morgana, but rather a kind of appearance , vision or conception of the lyrical subject , which in turn does not have a say in the entire text. Rüdiger Bernhardt also pointed out that related texts had corresponding titles. Bernhardt writes about the poem that it is “the description of an act of love in the world of ancient figures [...] The orgiastic act” takes place “between Amorines and Tritons.” It is “logically incomprehensible” and can therefore ultimately only be “imagined " occur. At another point, Bernhard points out that Hille is very familiar with the world of characters in homoerotic relationships, that he conjured up the hermaphrodite in an essay and that he had developed an idea of the universal excitation of the universe.
In Gerhard Peter Knapp compilation authors then and now it is emphasized that it was in the upsurge described here only to get an idea, not a real event. Because the flesh-bodied beings and the female-childish erotes who meet here could not unite with each other. In general, Hille may not have experienced sensual pleasure himself, but only performed it as a mental game. Perhaps he lived ascetic and thought platonically , influenced by his Catholic upbringing and the influence of his brother Philip. Hille was not capable of real partnership and that is why his lyrical subject also keeps away from the unification processes and only describes them.
context
Bernhardt explained in his essay on the face of the lake in which context the poem was created and should be seen. He names several sources from which Hille probably drew. The oldest is a poem by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff entitled Die Muschel , which was published in 1844 in the complete edition of the poet's works. The lyrical subject appears at the very end of this poem and comments: “That's how I got thunder, lightning and rain | Dreamy […] “Here too, the lyrical subject is not involved in the previously described plot, but only takes part in it dreamily. However, the union of the triton with the naiad is described, including several elements that also appear in Hilles' poem. These include the color silver, the hoot of the conch , the shell motif and also the harmless rippling before the unification takes place. Overall, the composition shows similarities, here, too, calm is first evoked, whereupon there is an intensification up to the love scene and then the figures and experiences described disappear and fade away up to waking up from the dream.
The works of some other authors whom Hille demonstrably knew well are closer in time than Droste-Hülshoff's poem. They are Detlev von Liliencron, Algernon Swinburne and Dranmor. Under this pseudonym wrote Ferdinand von Schmid His work which 1873 Collected Seals came out and were soon reprinted several times. In his demons Waltz portrayed Dranmor leg Bacchanal feast that but how the events in Hilles Seegesicht is observed only by the lyrical subject and described as delirium. This poem, too, shows an “ascent of the process to the orgiastic climax, only to then fall again and enter the previous situation”.
Hille had known Swinburne personally since his stay in London . He had bought his works in 1880 and then, with a letter of recommendation from Victor Hugo , sought the poet's acquaintance. “Swinburne's spirit”, wrote Bernhardt, “had no place for a church that had become sterile, but it had plenty of space for the gods, the pagan ones, and God, derived from antiquity . In this way he was able to do justice to an almost incomprehensible object, the dividing line between life and death, between fulfillment and transience, between constant movement and daily standstill, ultimately pressed into the metaphor of sea and land. "And:" Hilles' enthusiasm for the poet is clear Conscious of the peculiarity of recognizing in the poet a poet of taboo , taboo of same-sex love . Hille, it should be noted, also knew | around them. If, on the one hand, he understood the all-breaking sensuality between man and woman, read in Dranmor, then he also knew about the possibility of same-sex love. The encounter with Swinburne became for him the confirmation of his own ideas, probably not primarily for his own feelings, although such an assumption could easily explain some of the hard-to-understand things in Hille's life. ”In particular the poem An abandoned garden from Swinburne show similarities with Hilles sea face .
From 1885 Hille was in lively exchange with Detlev von Liliencron. It is not detectable, but very likely that he the in the 1880s Liliencron Borbyer Reprint received, which also Liliencron poem vision was to be found. It was created in 1880 and was very similar to the face of the lake . When Hille published Seegesicht , Liliencron changed the title of his poem to Face and published it in Pan magazine . Later, however, Liliencron's work was given the title Rapidly approaching, swelling and just as quickly dying electrical surge and was heavily modified, also given an ironic subtitle.
With Liliencron, the lyrical subject is on the “bank of the forest”, suddenly hears “horn tones” and then observes how his lover unites with a boar in the course of a hunt , whereupon the lyrical subject describes this lover as a “cursed bitch ”. For Bernhardt, Liliencron's act is “just as incomprehensible” as the events in Hille's face of the lake . In any case, according to Bernhardt, both poets had the disposition "to understand the world as an overwhelming process of movement in which a comprehensive love acts as the driving force, a comprehensive love in all its different possibilities."
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rüdiger Bernhardt, The Secret of the »Seegesichts« by Peter Hille , in: Peter-Hille-Blätter 1994, pp. 43-71, cited below as "Bernhardt 1994". The text is available for download as a PDF on the Peter Hille Society website . The poem was reprinted on page 47.
- ↑ Sea poem in the version of the edition of Peter Hille's collected works from 1916, p. 63, at www.zeno.org , accessed on November 8, 2015.
- ↑ Luminous drops. The most beautiful poems by Peter Hille , Deutsche Verlagsanstalt 1924, p. 36.
- ^ Detlev Freiherr von Liliencron: Der Maecen. tredition 2011, ISBN 978-3-8424-0893-7 , p. 142.
- ^ Carl Philipp Funke : Concise Dictionary of Nature. Volume 2, Leipzig 1805, p. 188.
- ↑ Bernhardt 1994, p. 63.
- ↑ Bernhardt 1994, p. 58.
- ^ Gerhard Peter Knapp (ed.): Authors then and now. Literature-historical examples of changed horizons. Amsterdam and Atlanta 1991 (= Amsterdam contributions to recent German studies ) Vol. 31–33, 1990/91, cited below as “Knapp 1991”.
- ↑ Knapp 1991, p. 411 f.
- ↑ Bernhardt 1994, p. 66 ff.
- ↑ Bernhardt 1994, p. 54.
- ↑ Bernhardt 1994, p. 57.
- ↑ Bernhardt 1994, p. 57 f.
- ↑ Bernhardt 1994, p. 64.
- ↑ Bernhardt 1994, p. 65.