Why are you still wondering, you rose of virgins?

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Print in the edition of 1657

Why are you still wondering, you Rose of the Virgins is a sonnet by Andreas Gryphius . The first version was printed in 1637 under the heading “To the same” in Gryphius' first collection of sonnets in Lissa , Poland , the twenty-first of the 31 sonnets from Lissa . The headline is taken from that of the previous, twentieth sonnet, "To a high state Jungfraw" .

Origin and tradition

Gryphius wrote the Lissa sonnets from 1634 in Gdansk while attending the academic high school there and then on the estate of his patron Georg Schönborner (1579–1637) near Freystadt in Lower Silesia . Later he kept fine-tuning them. So “What are you still wondering, you rose of the virgins” came to four further editions in Gryphius' lifetime, significantly changed in 1643, compared to 1643 little changed in 1650, 1657 and 1663. Since 1643 the heading has been “To Eugenien” - as well as the headline of "At a high place Jungfraw". Both belong to Gryphius' Eugenien poems , whose addressee, according to most researchers, was Elisabeth Schönborner, Georg Schönborner's fourteen-year-old daughter in 1637. Since 1643, “beautiful is a beautiful body that everyone's lips praise” has number 21, “What else are you wondering, you rose of the virgins” number 22 of the sonnet collections. The Lissa version was first reprinted by Victor Manheimer in 1904, then by Marian Szyrocki in 1963 in Volume 1 of a complete edition of the German-language works for which he and Hugh Powell were responsible, the last 1663 edition among others Thomas Borgstedt 2012. The following texts come from Szyrocki's and Borgstedt's editions .

text

To the same. (1637)

What else are you wondering / You rose of the Jungfrawen /
That this purple steed you hardly noticed
In your snow-white hand, so pissed off by mistake?
In this way your beautiful body will be swept away / from the
death of sharp seas in short be to swarm.
What you are now glistening so lovely on you /
The neck / the mouth / the chest / are so hateful /
That everyone / who sees them / will gawk furiously about it.
Your sigh is for nothing! nothing is in the world /
As beautiful as it is, there is always color /
We have come to ruin from mother = body.
May there be something similar in beauty to the Blum?
But / before it blooms properly, it wilts and
So the dead reaches for us / as soon as we are born.

To Eugenia. (1663)

What are you still wondering about / You rose of the virgins /
That this game of time / the rose / in your hand
Which defies all the roses / so unexpectedly disappeared?
Eugenie so it goes / so what we watch disappears.
As soon as death's sweetness will cut off this body:
You scratch your neck / forehead / eyes / this pledge
The love / this breast / in not too pure sand /
And the one who honors you with liberty / will dread for you!
The sigh is free! nothing is / that in the world /
How beautiful it always is / lasts and lasts color /
We have come from womb to doom.
May there be anything like roses in terms of beauty?
But before it blooms properly, it withers and folds!
We go no differently / as soon as we are born.

interpretation

The interpretation is based on the 1663 version. Fritz Cohen published a detailed interpretation by comparing the 1637 and 1663 versions.

shape

Like most of Gryphius' sonnets, both versions are written in Alexandrians . The rhyme scheme is “abba abba” for the quartets and “ccd eed” for the trios . The verses with the “a” and “d” rhymes are thirteen syllables, the rhymes are feminine , the verses with the “b”, “c” and “e” rhymes are twelve syllable, therefore here according to the editions of Szyrocki and Borgstedt indented, the rhymes masculine .

The image of the senses

The pivot of the poem is a symbol, an emblem without a picture, "sensory picture" in Gryphius' spelling: the rose. Their metaphorical use goes back to the High Song , according to the Luther Bible of 1545: “I am a flower in Saron / and a rose in the valley. Like a rose from under the Dörnen / So is my friend from under the daughters ", according to the revision of 2017 ( Hld 2,1–2  LUT ):" I am a flower in Sharon, a rose in the valley. Like a rose among the thorns, so is my friend among the girls. ”Here the rose is a metaphor“ for the inextricable interweaving of pleasure and pain ”.

Gerhard Fricke in 1933 and Dietrich Walter Jöns in 1966 thoroughly examined the imagery in Gryphius' work . According to them, Gryphius used the rose picture most extensively in his tragedy Catharina of Georgia , where the chambermaid Salome brings a bouquet of roses to the captured Catharina:

Salo. I almost found the new summer's signs.
Cath. O flowers which we can truly compare!
It barely opens the button / it is in full glory
Peppered with fresh taw. She throws the wilted costume
The pale leaves gone. The noble roses are alive
Such a short time and are given with thorns.
Immediately the sun arises / the garden tent adorns it;
And nothing will go wrong as soon as the sun is felt.
"Nascendo senescit."

Catharina names what she sees - a budding, blooming, dew-beaded rose, a withering rose: a precise description of impermanence that is convincing due to its accuracy in detail. That the rose only lived one day was a fixed motive. If the allegory ends here as a poetically exaggerated factual description, the second part of the parable, the interpretation, now follows:

So we kiss the day wet with our own tears.
And dwindle / when we really long to live.
See how the red is pale; so we drive away /
So the lust of the world flies / so breaks the golden throne.

Impermanence is the law to which everything is subject - including us. “Behind this parable stands a 'natura loquitur [nature speaks]' or 'natura monet [nature admonishes]'. The function of the symbol put by Gryphius here, to trace Catharina's self-understanding back to an essential truth of human life, is based on the quality of the thing to be a mirror of the truth. ”The thing that becomes the“ mirror ”for a meaning, such as a Rose, according to Fricke, becomes transparent and makes a context of meaning visible.

As a symbol of the frailty of life, the rose appears in the emblem literature in ever new variations. One in the Hamburger Kunsthalle kept Imprese of the engraver Giacomo Sarzina of 1623 is overwritten with the motto "nascendo senescit" - "in being born it ages" and explained "Hinc expressam cum vitae, tum venustatis Humanae ideam habeto" - "Here you like a Have a symbol of both human life and human beauty. "

First quartet

Three verses of a rhetorical question are followed by the answer in the fourth verse, addressing the addressee directly. What the rose and the fictional Eugenie have in common is initially beauty, whereby Eugenie's hand “defies all roses”, and roses even surpass their beauty; Gryphius Eugenie had named "the miracle of beauty" in the previous twenty-first sonnet of the 1643 collection. The rose then, like Queen Catharina of Georgia in the tragedy, so in the sonnet "Eugenie" alludes to transience. The transitoriness, the destructive action of time, is the second tertium comparationis between the rose and eugenie. The period between flowering and decay is compressed by the adverb “unexpectedly” (in the Lissa version also “hardly”); Past, present and future almost merge. The "Spil der Zeit / die Ros'" "disappeared" in verse 3, simple past , "so what we see disappears", verse 4, present tense .

Second quartet

Gryphius lines up body parts that carry sensual, time-subjugated beauty, "the neck / the forehead / the eyes / [...] this chest" - an asyndetic sequence as Gryphius loved. Joined in the series, preventing monotony, is the abstract "dises Pfand / Der Libe". Behind "sand" (verse 7) Manheimer suspects an omission, ellipse , of the infinitive "fall", which he finds "much too hard". For all these manifestations of beauty the quartet predicts death, decay, horror, culminating in the antithesis of verse 8: "And he who honors you with liberty / will horror for you!"

First trio

“The sigh is free” ends the consideration of Eugenie's individual fate and leads to a statement about the fate of the universe, the “ mundus fraudulentus - [the deceptive world]”: “nothing is / that appears in the world / how beautiful it always is sey / existence and color lasts. "

Second trio

It repeats, summarizes and exacerbates. Verse 12, although formulated as a question, repeats the equation rose = beauty, verse 13 the equation rose = impermanence. The latter equation, however, writes Cohen, is aggravated by “a radical manipulation of time”, a radical play with time. Verse 13

But before it blooms properly, it withers and folds

consciously reverse the natural sequence of flowering - decay. It is as paradoxical as "night is lighter than day" from the sonnet about the birth of Jesus . The antithesis achieves maximum effectiveness through language and rhythm. The two half-verses are lexically and rhythmically symmetrical to the climax, the opposition "blooms" / "wilts". In the first half verse, the tension rises up to this climax before and after the caesura , and then falls. Finally, the last verse transfers what has been said of beauty to our entire existence: “We go no differently / as soon as we are born” - again with the compression of the span between birth and death up to simultaneity that pervades the poem.

The whole

"Beautiful is a beautiful body that everyone's lips praise", sonnet 21 in the count since 1643, and "What else are you wondering, you rose of the virgins", sonnet 22, are obviously composed as a couple. They form the Lissa Sonnets' Beauty Praise group . The first praises the spiritual and moral, wisdom, faithfulness, piety, humility and kindness as the pinnacle of beauty. The second enumerates elements of physical beauty, but subjects them to the memento mori commandment. After Andreas Solbach, the second sonnet virtually discredits physical beauty. It means nothing in and of itself, is not desirable, but rather to be avoided or covered up in view of the abuse that is associated with it. As in his review of “Beautiful is a beautiful body that everyone's lips praise”, Solbach sees a message for the addressee and the nobility in general in “What else are you wondering, you rose of virgins”. As there, Gryphius self-confidently poses as a guide on the way to Kalokagathie .

literature

  • Thomas Borgstedt (Ed.): Andreas Gryphius. Poems (= Reclams Universal Library . No. 18561). Reclam-Verlag, Stuttgart 2012, ISBN 978-3-15-018561-2 .
  • Fritz Cohen: Two early sonnets of Andreas Gryphius: a study of their original and revised forms . In: German Life & Letters . tape 25 , no. 2 , 1972, ISSN  0016-8777 , p. 115-126 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1468-0483.1972.tb00788.x .
  • Gerhard Fricke : The imagery in the poetry of Andreas Gryphius. Materials and studies on the problem of form in German literary baroque (= New Research. Volume 17). Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft , Darmstadt 1967, DNB 456664645 (Unchanged reprint of the 1933 edition).
  • Dietrich Walter Jöns: The "sensory image". Studies on allegorical imagery with Andreas Gryphius (= Germanistic treatises. Volume 13). JB Metzler'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung , Stuttgart 1966, DNB 457100915 (Habil.-Schrift, Kiel).
  • Victor Manheimer: The poetry of Andreas Gryphius. Studies and materials . Weidmann, Berlin 1904, OCLC 457998751 ( archive.org ).
  • Hugh Powell (Ed.): Andreas Gryphius, Trauerspiele III (= Andreas Gryphius: Complete edition of the German-language works. Volume 6; Reprints of German literary works. N. F., Volume 15). Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1966, DNB 456834958 .
  • Andreas Solbach: Gryphius and love. The poeta as amator and dux in the Eugenia sonnets. In: Marie-Thérèse Mourey (ed.): La Poésie d'Andreas Gryphius (1616–1664). Actes de la journée tenue à la Maison Heine de Paris le 4 février 2012 (= Le texte et l'idée ). Center d'études germaniques interculturelles de Lorraine (CEGIL), Nancy 2012, OCLC 931023067 , pp. 35-46.
  • Marian Szyrocki (Ed.): Andreas Gryphius. Sonnets (= Andreas Gryphius: Complete Edition of the German Language Works. Volume 1; Reprints of German Literature Works . N. F., Volume 9). Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1963, DNB 456834893 ( scan; improved reprint of the 1643 edition in the Google book search).

References and comments

  1. ↑ The picture comes from a 1658 title edition of the 1657 edition.
  2. ↑ See the picture.
  3. ↑ Szyrocki 1963, pp. 16-17 ( scan; improved reprint of the 1643 edition in the Google book search).
  4. ↑ Borgstedt 2012, p. 20.
  5. ↑ Manheimer 1904, p. 284 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ), and Szyrocki 1963, p. 44 ( scan; improved reprint of the 1643 edition in the Google book search), have “look” in their variant lists.
  6. ↑ From Purdue University . Message from the university to Holocaust survivors .
  7. ^ Cohen 1972.
  8. ↑ Jöns 1966, p. 59.
  9. ↑ The rose of Sharon is botanically indeterminate. The Roman Catholic standard translation reads: “I am a flower in the meadows of Sharon, a lily of the valleys. A lily among thistles is my friend among the girls. ”( Hld 2,1–2  EU )
  10. ↑ Fricke 1933/1967, p. 69.
  11. ↑ Jöns (1924–2011) was professor of German studies at the University of Mannheim from 1966 to 1992 . Internet source.
  12. ↑ Powell 1966, p. 148.
  13. ↑ Jöns 1966, p. 110.
  14. ↑ Jöns 1966, pp. 107-108.
  15. ↑ Fricke 1933/1967, p. 226.
  16. ↑ Jöns 1966, p. 115.
  17. ↑ Manheimer 1904, p. 87 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  18. ↑ Manheimer 1904, p. 78 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ). The sentence would be something like: "As soon as the scythe of death has mowed down this body, one sees the neck, forehead, eyes and chest falling into not too pure sand."
  19. ↑ Cohen 1972, p. 124.
  20. ↑ Scil. "As the beauty."
  21. ↑ Cohen 1972, p. 124.
  22. ↑ Andreas Solbach has been Professor of Modern German Literature at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz since 1999 . Internet source .
  23. ↑ Solbach 2012, pp. 42–43.