Blessed longing

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Blessed Longing in the first edition of the West-Eastern Divan

Blessed Longing is the title of a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , which he wrote in Wiesbaden on July 31, 1814 and which is in the penultimate place in the singer's book from the West-Eastern Divan . The first printing took place in the paperback for women to the year 1817 under the heading completion .

Blessed Longing is one of Goethe's most widely interpreted poems and, with the motif of self-sacrifice, religious and literary references, unusual images and the famous sentence “Die and become!” Is one of his most difficult works.

Form and content

With the cross- rhymed Trochaic quatrain , Goethe chose a comparatively simple form for the profound content. He used the stanza form popular in German poetry most often for the west-eastern divan and entrusted it with some central statements in the book Suleika . In addition to the song-like and musicality of the quatrains, the mostly female cadences make it easier to tell an event fluently, even beyond the closings. In the last two stanzas Goethe changed the meter. In the fourth stanza he chose two male cadences, in the final one he shortened two lines of verse by an accent .

The poem reads:

Nobody says it, only the wise,
Because the crowd will be
mocked, I will praise the
living , That longs for death in flames .

In the nights of love cooling,
which begat you where you begat,
strangers touch you,
When the silent candle shines.

You no longer remain embraced
in the shadows of darkness,
And new desire tears you
up to higher copulation.

No distance makes you difficult, you
come flown and spellbound,
And finally, eager for light,
you are burned butterfly.

And as long as you don't have this,
this: Die and become!
Are you just a dull guest
on the dark earth.

Origin and background

Goethe got to know Hafis ' Dīwān in 1814 in the translation by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall , which his publisher Johann Friedrich Cotta had given him in May of that year. After this epoch-making encounter in the history of literature and intensive reading, he left Weimar on July 25th to visit his native Frankfurt am Main and Wiesbaden again after more than seventeen years .

If he had already written a few verses in Weimar, it was only with the start of the journey and the associated feeling of liberation that a powerful surge began, which led to various poems every day. When he arrived in Wiesbaden, a provisional and narrow divan had already been created with around 25 poems . In his daily and annual journals , Goethe described the deep impression that Hafiz's world made on him and that was so strong that he had to behave “productively” in order to survive “before the mighty apparition”.

Greco-Roman antiquity may have always been more important to Goethe than the Orient , but it was not alien to him. At a young age he had already sniffed the "patriarchal air " of the books of Moses and, as a young man, had been enlightened by Johann Gottfried Herder in Strasbourg about the cultural and historical significance of the Bible .

With the joie de vivre and sensuality, but also the longing for transcendence and eternity , Hafis' poetry met his attitude towards life. To Carl Friedrich Zelter he raved about the “Mohammedan religion” and mythology, which would give poetry a “space” “as befits my years. Unconditional surrender to the unfathomable will of God, serene overview of the moving, always circular and spiral-like recurring drifting on the earth, love, inclination, everything real purified, symbolically dissolving. "

Template and motifs

Goethe, portrait by Karl Josef Raabe, 1814

The poem has its origin in the parable of the butterfly, a didactic poem by Al-Halladsch , Sufi and poet. As is so often the case in Islamic mysticism, the symbolism transcends an “unspeakable” higher truth.

The Ghazel from which Goethe started does not come from Hafiz. It is an average work of Persian lyric poetry that contains common motifs , some of which Goethe picked out.

With their esoteric exclusivity and contempt the uninitiated the first line of the reflected Blessed longing the Horazsche "odi profanum vulgus et arceo" and can at the same time as an echo to the Christ words in the King James (( Mt 7,6  LUT )) of the "pearls" that one should not "throw before swine" should be understood.

According to Hans Heinrich Schaeder , the image of the flame in which a butterfly is burning is one of the most widespread motifs in Persian poetry and symbolizes a love that consumes the self and thus saves it. In the translation of Hammer-Purgstall it says u. a .: "The soul burns like a candle, / Bright on love flames / And with a pure sense I have / sacrificed my body. / Until you don't burn like butterflies / Out of desire / You can never find salvation / From the grief of love. ”The motif of the burning insect was not new to Goethe. When he thought of Charlotte von Stein in 1776 , the idea of ​​a mosquito dancing around the light came to mind, as he informed his friend in a letter.

Interpretative approaches

Ever since Konrad Burdach pointed out the apparent contradiction between the first four stanzas and the closing verses in his attempt at interpretation, the interpreters of the “most mysterious of Goethe's lyrical poems” have faced a number of difficulties.

According to Gert Ueding, the history of interpretation , which can hardly be overlooked, makes access difficult by first having to “pave a way through the erudition” that “was piled up in front of the work.”

The hermetic inaccessibility, as it were, is often explained with the line of thought and the sequence of images from procreation, the butterfly, whose death in flames up to the idea of ​​“Die and be”. According to Burdach, the “tragic-mystical-erotic thought” of self-sacrifice in the first part of the poem contradicts the idea of ​​metamorphosis that is echoed in the final sentence. The butterfly burnt in the light, forever past, no longer sounds "will!", After all, it is forever dead. In the case of these difficulties, Heinrich Schader believes that a mental analysis must lead to the "unity of the poem" being broken. Interpreters such as Eduard Spranger to Karl Viëtor explain the central idea of ​​change, which Goethe also circled in his poem The Metamorphosis of Plants , as the center of the work.

In the opinion of Michael Böhler and Gabriele Schwieder, the creation and placement of the poem at the end of the Singers' Book suggest a poetologically oriented reading that understands the work as “poetry about poetry”. The different titles of the poem - from completion to self-sacrifice to blessed longing - can be understood as an indication that Goethe viewed and depicted a central event from different perspectives. If the first title stands for self-confident creativity, the second indicates the abandonment of the ego, while “Blessed Sehnsucht” shows the willingness to get involved in this special moment. The central issue is the topos of inspiration , a sudden process of violent physical and mental intensity.

literature

  • Michael Böhler, Gabriele Schwieder: Blessed Longing. In: Bernd Witte (Ed.): Interpretations. Poems by Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-15-017504-6 , pp. 202-216.
  • Gert Ueding: Blessed longing. In: Bernd Witte u. a. (Ed.): Goethe manual. Volume 1: Poems. Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01443-6 , pp. 377-380.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ So Karl Otto Conrady : Goethe. Life and work. Dialogue with Hafez and a trip to the Rhine region, Patmos, Düsseldorf 2006, ISBN 3-491-69136-2 . P. 870
  2. ^ Karl Otto Conrady: Goethe. Life and work. Dialogue with Hafez and a trip to the Rhine region, Patmos, Düsseldorf 2006, p. 870
  3. ^ Gert Ueding: Blessed longing . In: Goethe-Handbuch, (Ed.) Bernd Witte ..., Volume 1, Gedichte, Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, p. 378
  4. ↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Blessed Sehnsucht . In: Goethe's works, poems and epics II, Hamburg edition, CH Beck, Munich 1998, pp. 18–19.
  5. ↑ Quoted from: Michael Böhler and Gabriele Schwieder: Schöpferischer Moment , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Reclam, Ed. Bernd Witte, Stuttgart 2005, p. 210
  6. ↑ Quoted from: Karl Otto Conrady, Goethe, Leben und Werk, Dialogue with Hafis and Journey to the Rhine Regions, Patmos, Düsseldorf 2006, p. 867
  7. ↑ Schimmel, Annemarie: Al-Halladsch, Martyrs of God's Love . Cologne 1969.
  8. ↑ Schimmel, Annemarie: Sufism. An introduction to Islamic mysticism . 5th edition. CH Beck, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-46028-9 , pp. 33 .
  9. ↑ Balmer, Hans Peter: It shows up - Hermeneutic perspectives speculative mysticism. Open Publishing LMU, 2018, accessed on May 20, 2020 .
  10. ^ Karl Otto Conrady: Goethe, Leben und Werk , Dialogue with Hafis and Journey to the Rhine Regions, Patmos, Düsseldorf 2006, p. 870
  11. ^ Gert Ueding: Blessed longing . In: Goethe-Handbuch, (Ed.) Bernd Witte ..., Volume 1, Gedichte, Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, p. 378
  12. ^ Karl Otto Conrady, Goethe, Leben und Werk, Dialogue with Hafis and Journey to the Rhine Regions, Patmos, Düsseldorf 2006, p. 870
  13. ^ Gert Ueding: Blessed longing . In: Goethe-Handbuch, (Ed.) Bernd Witte ..., Volume 1, Gedichte, Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, p. 378
  14. ↑ Quoted from: Michael Böhler and Gabriele Schwieder: Schöpferischer Moment , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Reclam, Ed. Bernd Witte, Stuttgart 2005, p. 206
  15. ^ Karl Otto Conrady, Goethe, Leben und Werk, Dialogue with Hafis and Journey to the Rhine Regions, Patmos, Düsseldorf 2006, p. 870
  16. ↑ Michael Böhler and Gabriele Schwieder: Schöpferischer Moment , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Reclam, Ed. Bernd Witte, Stuttgart 2005, p. 202
  17. ↑ Gert Ueding : Die and become! . In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (ed.), 1000 German poems and their interpretations, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, p. 338
  18. ↑ Michael Böhler and Gabriele Schwieder: Schöpferischer Moment , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Reclam, Ed. Bernd Witte, Stuttgart 2005, p. 205
  19. ^ Gert Ueding: Blessed longing . In: Goethe-Handbuch, (Ed.) Bernd Witte ..., Volume 1, Gedichte, Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, p. 378
  20. ↑ Michael Böhler and Gabriele Schwieder: Schöpferischer Moment , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Reclam, Ed. Bernd Witte, Stuttgart 2005, p. 211