Time of day cycle

The day time cycle is a cycle of four sonnets - " Morning Sonnet ", " lunch ", " evening " and " midnight , the" Andreas Gryphius at the head of his sonnet collection "The Ander book", the 1650 in Frankfurt am Main has been published . The term “time of day cycle” does not come from Gryphius, but from German research. It has been judged that the cycle represents an undisputed climax in Gryphius' lyrical output; There is no comprehensive baroque anthology and hardly a reader for household or school use that does not contain at least the famous third sonnet “Evening” - the core of German poetry.

• The time of day cycle in an edition from 1658
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"The Other Book"

In 1637 Gryphius published his first collection of German-language poems, the Lissa sonnets . At that time he was the private tutor of the two sons of his patron Georg Schönborner (1579–1637) on his estate near the Lower Silesian Freystadt . In 1638, in the middle of the Thirty Years War , he accompanied the sons to the University of Leiden . He enrolled as studiosus philosophiae , but attended lectures in many subjects. In 1644 he embarked on a major educational and study trip from Leiden, which took him to Italy and in 1646 to Strasbourg , from where he returned to his Silesian homeland in 1647. The Leiden years were extremely fruitful. Gryphius brought five collections of poetry to print, initially in 1639 “ANDREAE GRYPHII PHILOS. ET POET. Sundays and Feyrtags Sonnete ”, 65 Sunday sonnets and 35 holiday sonnets corresponding to the holidays of the church year , so a total of 100 Sunday and holiday sonnets. “ANDREAE GRYPHII SONNETE. The first book “with 50 sonnets, including revisions of 29 sonnets from Lissa. There were also collections of odes as well as German and Latin epigrams .

In Strasbourg, Gryphius prepared a first complete edition of his German-language works by the printer and publisher Caspar Dietzel. But Dietzel was prevented from completing the print “by all sorts of reusings and processes”, probably economic difficulties. The incomplete product appeared unauthorized in 1650 at Johann Hüttner in Frankfurt am Main. In addition to Gryphius' first tragedy “Leo Arminius” and revisions of earlier poems, it contained the new sonnet book “ANDREAE GRYPHII SONNETE. The Other Book ”.

During Gryphius' lifetime, “Das Ander Buch” was reprinted in the first authorized complete edition in 1657, in a title edition of the 1657s (from which the illustration) 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.

Poetry cycles from Gryphius

The tradition of structuring sonnet collections extends beyond Francesco Petrarca , be it autobiographical or salvation history. Gryphius had already ranked the 31 sonnets of Lissa according to overlapping numerical and salvation-historical aspects, with a solemn invocation, invocation of the Holy Spirit , beginning in the sonnet To God the Holy Spirit . In his collection from 1643 “ANDREAE GRYPHII SONNETE. In the first book “he had filled the number of sonnets to 50 without paying particular attention to the arrangement in detail. For the 100 Sunday and holiday sonsets, the structure was given by the pericope order .

In the “Ander Buch” the cycle of times of day is followed by dedication poems, occasional poems, the Petrarch-based sonnet “Loneliness”, love poems, satirical poems, memories of his educational journey such as “When he divorced Rome” and “On the underground tombs of the holy martyrs in Rome” . Towards the end of the book there is another short cycle about the last four things with the sonnets “Death”, “The Last Judgment”, “Hell” and “Eternal Joy of the Elected” (XLVI to XLIX). The following, fiftieth sonnet, "Elias.", Goes back to Thomas Borgstedt to the last, fiftieth of the 1643 "first book" about the death of Andreas Gryphius' brother Paul.

Victor Manheimer first drew attention to the cycle formation with Gryphius in 1904 : “Gryphius did not stuff into his verse books what he had just recently composed, but he actually composed them according to artistic criteria.” The “Ander Buch” compiled in Strasbourg was the most beautiful. The quartet of four poems of the times of the day forms, as it were, the overture. Before the last sonnet of the book, the only actually religious one, "Elias", Gryphius finally put a quartet of churchyard poems: "Death", "The Last Judgment", "Hell" and "Eternal Joy of the Chosen". Between these two parallel cycles, the previous one always seemed to echo in every sonnet, in that now its mood values, now larger associations, determine the individual's place.

composition

“Morning sonnet”, “noon”, “evening”, “midnight” - an allegorical-eschatological perspective on the earthly passage of time. Out of his Christian- Lutheran faith, Gryphius tried to shape the ambivalent nature of man poetically. De Capua calls the cycle a symphony in four movements , the main theme of which can be expressed by the simple equation "God is light, evil is darkness". Each “sentence” consists of two parts, “a statement of the theme in terms of real phenomena <...> and their transmutation into and variation as symbols of a transcendental permanence” - “the realistic description of a time of day and the interpretation of this image of nature as a symbol of a transcendent truth. "Exemplary verses of the four sonnets for nature image and interpretation:

Tomorrow Sonnet.
The eternally bright crowd will now wear out its light /
Diane is pale; the dawn laughs at
the grawen sky <...>

<...> O three times supreme power
Enlighten those who are now bowing at your feet.

Eve.
The fast day is over / the night swings its flag / and
leads the stars up. <...>

And when the last day will be evening with me /
So pull me out of the valley of darkness to you.

Noon
AVff friends! last vns to the table /
In which the sun holds in the middle of the sky. <...>

You can escape the glitz of the day!
But not to the light / that / where we always stand /
Vns sees and judges.

Midnight.
Scratch / and silent / and dark horror /
dark cold covers the land <...>

So when the sudden day comes
what is talked / worried / meant.
Special cloaks open up to find
before God's terrible judgment.

Other interpreters also see this structure of every sonnet, an "almost symmetrical two-part". In the morning sonnet, for example, the structure and content are clear: the tableau of the sunrise is followed by the request for enlightenment of the soul and the attainment of eternal salvation. The interpretation is different for sonnets I and III on the one hand and sonnets II and IV on the other. In the “Morning Sonnet” and “Evening” the hope for redemption flows into a prayer of the lyrical self . In “Noon” and “Midnight” the fear of the all-seeing world judge admonishes us to turn away from decay in the secular world.

The American German scholar Fritz Cohen, on the other hand, recognizes a three-part structure in each of the four sonnets, analogous to that recommended for meditation exercises in Gryphius' time . A meditation - and so each of the four sonnets - begins with the concrete, lively conception, imagination of a certain situation, with the sonnets of the phenomena of a time of day. The second step is the analysis of this imagination, by means of an energetic mental effort, with regard to its meaning. In the third step, the analysis results in a turning of will and emotion towards the supernatural, love of virtue and hatred of sin.

For Cohen, too, sonnets I and III differ on the one hand from sonnets II and IV on the other. “Sonnets I and III ask for the light of divine grace for the moment of death; Sonnets II and IV end with a dramatic warning to worldly minds about the inescapability of divine light at the Last Judgment. So the cycle is chiatic . Light is the central metaphor. It represents grace in sonnets I and III and justice in sonnets II and IV. <...> In terms of a formula, one could say that sonnet I relates to III as sonnet II to IV. Antithesis , the rhetorical figure of light -dark- Metaphor, thus also forms 'the interior drama', the inner drama of each of the four sonnets and their function in the cycle. "

literature

• Ralf Georg Bogner: Life. In: Nicola Kaminski, Robert Schütze (Ed.): Gryphius-Handbuch, pp. 1–18. Verlag Walter de Gruyter , Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-022943-1 .
• Thomas Borgstedt (Ed.): Andreas Gryphius. Poems. Reclam-Verlag , Stuttgart 2012. ISBN 978-3-15-018561-2 .
• Thomas Borgstedt: Sonnets. In: Nicola Kaminski, Robert Schütze (Ed.): Gryphius-Handbuch, pp. 90–112. Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-022943-1 .
• 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.
• Reinhold Grimm: Image and Imagery in the Baroque. To some recent work . In: Germanic-Romance monthly . 19, 1969, pp. 379-412.
• 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.
• Victor Manheimer: The poetry of Andreas Gryphius. Studies and materials. Weidman Verlag , Berlin 1904.
• Wolfram Mauser: Poetry, Religion and Society in the 17th Century. Wilhelm Fink Verlag , Munich 1976. ISBN 3-7705-1191-3 .
• Marian Szyrocki (Ed.): Andreas Gryphius. Sonnets. Max Niemeyer Verlag , Tübingen 1963.
• Marian Szyrocki: Andreas Gryphius. His life and work. Max Niemeyer Verlag , Tübingen 1964.

References and comments

1. ↑ Lohse 1991, p. 162.
2. ↑ Szyrocki 1964, p. 33; Bogner 2016, p. 14.
3. ^ Kaspar Dietzel in Consortium of European Research Libraries .
4. ↑ Szyrocki 1963, p. 244.
5. ↑ Borgstedt 2016, p. 93.
6. ↑ The anthology also contains Gryphius' play Absurda Comica or Mr. Peter Squenz . "In relocation Johann Lischken | vnd Veit Jacob Treschers Buchh. | MDCLVIII ".
7. ↑ Szyrocki 1963.
8. ↑ Borgstedt 2012.
9. ↑ 1650 "Loneliness."
10. ↑ 1650 "When he divorced from Rome."
11. ↑ 1650 "About the Vnter Jordanian Crypts of the Holy Martyrs in Rome."
12. ↑ 1650 "Der Todt.", "The Last Judgment.", "Hell.", "Eternal Joy of the Extraordinary."
13. ↑ "ELIAS."
14. ↑ “Above his brother's grave”; Borgstedt 2016, pp. 94-97.
15. ↑ Wolfram Mauser 1976, pp. 100-106 denies the isolated position of "Elias".
16. ↑ Manheimer 1904, p. 135.
17. ↑ Borgstedt 2016, p. 97.
18. ↑ de Capua 1967, p: 325.
19. ↑ Jöns 1966; Grimm 1969.
20. ↑ de Capua 1967, p. 526.
21. ↑ From Purdue University . Message from the university to Holocaust survivors .
22. ↑ Cohen 1978, pp. 99-101.
23. ↑ From the English; Cohen 1978, pp. 101-102.