At midnight (Mörike)
At midnight is the title of a poem by Eduard Mörike , which was published on May 23, 1828 in the morning paper for educated classes .
The work is one of his most famous poems, can be found in numerous poetry anthologies such as "Conrady" or the "Ewigen Brunnen" and was set to music by Hugo Wolf in his Mörike songs.
Mörike, who influenced Rainer Maria Rilke with his Dinglyrik ( To an Aeolian Harp , To a Lamp ) , here renounced any lyrical perspective on the viewing self. The verses were at the end of the first edition of the poem and thus, with the opening poem On a winter morning, before sunrise, put his lyrical work in the context of a daily routine .
Form and content
The metrical structure of the two- stanza poem is striking. The first part consists of two four- and two five-point verses with male iambic pair rhymes , while the second is made up of rhythmically moving dactyls ; first two four-part verse with male rhymes, then one shortened and finally one three-part verse with a female ending, which has an echo-like character due to the repetition of the word “days”.
The verses read:
The night rose calmly to the land,
Leaned dreaming against the mountain wall,
your eye now sees the golden scales
.
And the springs rush out cheekily,
They sing in the mother's ear, in the night
From the day
From the day before.
The very old slumber song,
she ignores it, she is tired of it;
The blue of the sky sounds sweeter,
The yoke swung like a fleeting hours.
But the sources always keep the word
The waters still sing in their sleep
From the day
From the day before.
The metric division corresponds to the contrast between day and night which structures the poem. While the night appears in the first two iambic halves, which at first rises serenely on the shore in mythical size, indulges in dreamy contemplation and listens to the music of the spheres, the second halves are dedicated to the sources , whose cheeky rustling moves up and down of the dactylic meter .
Background and special features
In Greek mythology , Nyx is the personification of the night, whereas in Norse mythology , Nótt
In Mörike's verses, she enters the country, powerful and serene, and surrenders to contemplation , revolving around the theme of temporality , which Mörike has long been concerned with.
The night wants to forget the eternal flow of time in a calm, meditative posture, but is interrupted again and again and led to another sensual level. First of all, she reverently sees the balanced golden scales of time, an image of eternity , the enjoyment of which is interrupted by the noise of the sources. These symbolize the passage of time, which also becomes clear in the alternation of the tenses from “rose” in the first to “leans” and “sees” in the second and third verses and can be heard acoustically. The night, at the beginning of the second stanza, does not want to pay attention to this "old slumber song" and enjoys the sound of the blue sky, a synaesthetic image in which different sensory areas mix, as is also known from Eichendorff's poetry .
Interpretations and references
Heinz Politzer refers to the same age poem Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1818, which in the since 1821 new collection of songs by Carl Friedrich Zelter was present, so Mörikes would read six years later written work in response. In Goethe, the three times repeated refrain “At midnight” is the title itself, while in Mörike's refrain “From the days of today” midnight is shown as the moment of the day that connects the present and the past. If Goethe's poem, which brought him “a miraculous state in sublime moonlight” and which he described as his “song of life”, was shaped by his father , Mörike offered a maternal perspective. The bold springs owe their existence to Mother Night, who rises from the floods like a mythical original woman. For Politzer, her serenity and the relationship with her children are to be understood as matriarchal gestures and are reminiscent of the mother who holds her children quietly in her arms. It seems as if Mörike had anticipated Johann Jakob Bachofen's teaching on mother law .
It is true that the poet's lyrical ego is missing , whose looks are not shown. The poem, devoid of people in this way, is not objective, but shows the world through the eyes of the night, which looks at the balanced scales of time. Their tiredness extends beyond the source song: the whole world sinks into sleep, while the night, in synaesthetic immersion, listens to the blue of the sky and thus unites the elements air, water and earth from which the sources come. As with Goethe, it is a song of life, but here it is a song of the life of the world.
For Ulrich Kittstein, the source singing refers exclusively to the past and must therefore not be equated with the dimension of time per se: The "old slumber song" of the sources, which constantly sings about the "days of today", rather wants to sing against the current of time . The sources coming from deep earth carry the memory with them and have the power to overcome transience. The poem does not revolve around the contrast between the eternal moment and the rustling of time, but opens two ways to cope with transience: immersion on the one hand, memory on the other. Mörike refrains from specifying the right path and a hierarchy of values, even if at first glance it looks as if he had preferred the night with its quiet dignity over the talkative sources.
literature
- Ulrich Kittstein, in: Mörike Handbook, Life - Work - Effect , Eds. Inge and Reiner Wild, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-01812-1 , pp. 111–112
- Renate von Heydebrand, Um Mitternacht , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Eduard Mörike, Ed. Mathias Mayer, Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, ISBN 3-15-017508-9 , pp. 43–56
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ulrich Kittstein, in: Mörike Handbook, Life - Work - Effect , Eds. Inge and Reiner Wild, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2004, p. 111
- ↑ Eduard Mörike, At midnight, in: Deutsche Naturlyrik, Vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart, Philipp Reclam jun. GmbH & Co., Stuttgart 1995, p. 234
- ↑ Ulrich Kittstein, in: Mörike Handbook, Life - Work - Effect , Eds. Inge and Reiner Wild, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2004, p. 112
- ^ Benno von Wiese : curriculum vitae in three stanzas . In: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (ed.), 1000 German poems and their interpretations, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, p. 399
- ↑ Heinz Politzer , Mother Night , in: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.), 1000 German poems and their interpretations. From Heinrich Heine to Friedrich Nietzsche, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, p. 209
- ↑ Heinz Politzer, Mother Night , in: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.), 1000 German poems and their interpretations. From Heinrich Heine to Friedrich Nietzsch, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, p. 210