Twilight (Eichendorff)

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Joseph von Eichendorff

Twilight is the title of a poem by Joseph von Eichendorff . It is one of his disturbing and dark works and can be found in the 17th chapter of his novel Awareness and Present , which was completed in 1812 and published in 1815. Eichendorff did not add the heading “Twilight” until 1837 in his first collection of poems.

The poem uses the uncanny ambiguity of dusk as a parable for the endangerment of love and the uncertainty of friendship. In the hour of transition from day to night , the fear of a threat that cannot be precisely described, which is reflected in nature, can lead to losses and requires vigilance, grows .

Structure and content

The poem consists of four stanzas with four verses each , which are trochaes in four parts .

It is built in three parts, with the first and fourth stanzas framing the two middle stanzas. The title and first stanza form the introduction and motto , while the internal stanzas describe situations, fears and experiences. The last, almost edifying stanza presents a quasi epigrammatic conclusion. The poem reads:

Dawn wants to spread the wings
, the trees stir eerily ,
clouds move like heavy dreams -
what does this gray mean?

If you love a deer in front of others,
don't let it graze alone,
hunters pull in the forest and blow,
voices wander back and forth.

If you have a friend down here,
don't trust him at this hour
,
kindly with eyes and mouth, he thinks of war in treacherous peace.

What goes under tired today, is
born again tomorrow.
Much remains lost in the night -
watch out, stay awake and alert!

Interpretations

Fears in the twilight

Forest during the twilight, painting by Julius von Klever

First Eichendorff paints the hour of the imminent sunset , which creates a twilight in which the world appears eerie and threatening. The nature appears in dark images that trees stir scary, the gambling in their branches Wind recalls the groans unredeemed spirits and the clouds , passing by like heavy dreams, images are nocturnal fears and Night albums . Two exemplary threats appear in the internal stanzas: The loved one, symbolized here by the tender deer , is extremely endangered, as “hunters” sneak around and voices “wander back and forth” like ghosts. So the world wobbles out of its joint, and in the pale light of the day that is drawing to a close, a friendship suddenly no longer appears reliable, as if the person you have believed to have known for a long time has suddenly changed and under the mask of friendliness could become Skip attack. In the night that follows dawn, some things can be lost forever and no longer show themselves alive on the next day.

Against the background of the more objectified and sober-looking conclusion of the last line, "to stay awake and alert", the work can also be interpreted differently, in that the images and fears appear as a delusion or even delusion and therefore there was no real danger from the outside world : In the twilight man believed himself to be surrounded by hostile powers, while he was the only victim of his own fear. He himself has lost himself in a dark world of thought and, as it were, disfigured. The words read as a warning or an invitation not to indulge in fearful fantasies and gloomy prophecies and to leave the dark behind even in the night .

Religious Assurance

Paul Gerhardt, oil on canvas (around 1700), Paul Gerhardt Church (Lübben)

In fact, the last stanza is based on the course of the sun and formulates a religiously based certainty, which is common topos especially in the spiritual song and is sung about in many ways. The evangelical hymn book states that the grace and great faithfulness of God is “fresh and new” every morning, that darkness and distance from God are limited in time and give way to light.

These comforting words can be found in many spiritual songs. In the first stanza of a hymn by Paul Gerhardt set to music by Johann Georg Ebeling , it says: "My head and limbs were lying down / But now I'm standing, am lively and happy / See the sky with my face." In the last stanza they read Verse: “Cross and misery, that comes to an end / After the roar of the sea and the gust of wind / The sun's desired face shines.” This makes it clear that the last verse has a religious background.

For the spiritual song, the sphere of the night, in which "unclean spirits" frolic, filled with evil , is a gloomy sphere, against which the poet Johann Rist used the words: "Become lively, my mind", which is in Eichendorff's lines remember another poem that can also be found in the novel Hunch and Present :

Out,
oh human, far into the world, fear your heart in sick courage!
Nothing is so gloomy in the night,
the morning easily makes it up.

background

Eichendorff's poetry has a small supply of motifs and, with its mixture of recurring lyrical formulas and symbolic elements of magical power, is characterized by an elusive yet specific tone. In terms of content, she has a conservative element, the melancholy wish to preserve, to recall from memory what lies in distant childhood and lost home. The eternally sung rushing forests, the beautiful trees that rhyme with dreams , the mountains and valleys, fields and meadows, rivers and streams, the picturesque landscapes over which the starry sky arches - this world shows itself in a manageable treasure Images that are complemented by original metaphorical phrases and ciphers .

memory

Much of his poetry, the images of which are already historically endangered and “questionable” after revolutionary upheavals, is essentially memory poetry. Homesickness and memory are the musical elements of his formula language, which accompany the motives of painful separation and happy rediscovery. Often the magic song sounds from the "old beautiful times", which is evoked in the poem, in order to remember love and the familiar surroundings in the comforting feeling of security. The attempt to aesthetically regain what was lost in reality is just as obvious as the perceived separation of man from nature. The family goods lost in reality are part of the biographical background from which this language comes.

The view goes back to childhood, the lost homeland and landscape, the earlier sociability that was lost in time. By not blinding the present, but by sharpening awareness of the past, he cannot avoid certain valuations. It is not a question of overcoming the past, but of singing about it. It is mostly the better, the life already lived is more intense than the current existence.

In this way, the poems capture the reflection of what has been lost forever, which becomes all the more powerful the deeper it is sunk into the sea of ​​time.

lonliness

The constant review not only sharpens the mind for what has been abandoned long ago, but also turns his verses into loneliness poetry. It is not several people who remember, but a lonely self that has fallen out of a better time like a young bird from its nest. So the memories do not come during the day, but at night. The night is for him no longer - as still in the early Romantics Novalis , which he estimated - the dream world that for the very life and a special, in-depth life is ( Hymns to the Night ), but the time melancholy knowledge of the loss, that makes you lonely.

Scoring and reception

Robert Schumann

Harmonious ambiguity in the twilight

The setting by Robert Schumann as the tenth piece ( E minor ) of his song circle from 1840 underlines the dark character of the verses and is considered an important romantic song.

Schumann presented the ambivalence of twilight, which goes hand in hand with the endangerment of love and the deceptive appearance of friendship, as a harmonic ambiguity in the first bar by circling the pitch axis G in both directions up to the C sharp at octave intervals. The recurring tritoni at the beginning of each stanza in the vocal part give the piece its characteristic threatening sound. The two also stand-out at Eichendorff verses "What does mean this Grau'n?" And "Beware, be awake and alert" raises Schumann recitative forth. In addition, the bitonality in the vocal part (E major) and piano accompaniment (C sharp minor) at the end of the third stanza sets the mentioned "tück'sche peace" to music. Thus the motif of the shady is emphasized in different ways in all stanzas. Another novelty of the dark composition is the dense polyphonic network of the movement, which only dissolves in the fourth stanza through the verticalization of the voices.

For many interpreters, the verses can no longer be separated from the setting by Robert Schumann . Eckart Kleßmann also confesses that it is impossible for him to read the verses without listening to Schumann's polyphonic music , which is reminiscent of Johann Sebastian Bach .

Thomas Mann and Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno (1964)

Even Thomas Mann made the connection. When asked about his favorite poem, he first stated that it was impossible to quote a single poem from the wide and rich world of German poetry, since too much depends on the respective living conditions and mood. After a few words about the beautiful song Mondnacht , he mentioned the twilight . Perhaps he would "not love it so much if Schumann had not set it to music so incredibly ingeniously."

For Theodor W. Adorno , twilight is one of Eichendorff's greatest poems, which for him is “not a poet from home, but from homesickness”. In his essay On Eichendorff's Memory , he points to the affirmative tone of voice that has escaped the dark and speaks of a “decision to be cheerful”, which manifests itself with strange paradoxical violence at the end of the work.

In his “Reading Against the Grain” he examines the elements in Eichendorff that run counter to the common notions of subjectivist romanticism . He speaks of the "suspension of the ego"; the well-known scheme of experience and poetry would actually not fit Eichendorff's works. His self-renunciation separates him from poets of objective intuition and "sensual dense experience" such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Eduard Mörike .

The devotion and romantic longing for death that can be recognized in Eichendorff's poetry indicate for Adorno the gift of being able to let go and turn against the "rule of the ego over the soul."

Thus the verses about the twilight reach an extreme limit for Adorno. In the novel Humming and Present , where they are intertwined with the plot in a moment of jealousy in which Friedrich will lose his bride Rosa to the prince, they maintain a certain “surface intelligibility”. The poem, considered in isolation, however, show up to the madness going "self-alienation of the ego." This tendency is evident for Adorno in the "schizoid warning" not to let the beloved deer graze alone and in the "phantasy of persecution of the departed, which bewitches his friend into the enemy."

literature

  • Alexander von Bormann: moonlit night, twilight. Pp. 25–31, in: interpretations, poems by Joseph von Eichendorff. Edited by Gert Sautermeister. Reclam UB 17528, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 978-3-15-017528-6

Web links

Wikisource: Twilight  - Sources and Full Texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ So Christiane Tewinkel, in: Der Liederkreis op. 39 after Eichendorff, Lieder, in: Schumann-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart, Weimar 2006, p. 428
  2. ↑ So Eckart Klessmann, hour of contestation, in: 1000 German poems and their interpretations, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, From Friedrich von Schiller to Joseph von Eichendorff, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1995, p. 318
  3. ↑ The presentation is based on: Alexander von Bormann: Mondnacht, Zwielicht , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Joseph von Eichendorff, Ed. Von Gert Sautermeister, Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, pp. 25–31
  4. ^ Joseph von Eichendorff, Poems 1811 - 1815, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig, p. 146
  5. ↑ So Eckart Klessmann, hour of contestation, in: 1000 German poems and their interpretations, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, From Friedrich von Schiller to Joseph von Eichendorff, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1995, p. 318
  6. ↑ Eckart Klessmann, hour of contestation, in: 1000 German poems and their interpretations, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, From Friedrich von Schiller to Joseph von Eichendorff, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1995, p. 318
  7. ↑ Quoted from: Alexander von Bormann: Mondnacht, Zwielicht , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Joseph von Eichendorff, Ed. Gert Sautermeister, Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, p. 29
  8. ↑ Alexander von Bormann: Mondnacht, Zwielicht , in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Joseph von Eichendorff, Ed. Gert Sautermeister, Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, p. 29
  9. ^ Joseph von Eichendorff, Poems 1811 - 1815, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig, p. 157
  10. ^ Wolfgang Frühwald: The lyric work of Joseph Freiherrn von Eichendorff. In: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Volume 5, Kindler Verlag, Munich 1989, p. 68
  11. ^ Wolfgang Frühwald: The lyric work of Joseph Freiherrn von Eichendorff. In: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Volume 5, Kindler Verlag, Munich 1989, p. 68
  12. ^ Helmut Koopmann, Ewige Fremde, eternal return, in: Interpretations, poems by Joseph von Eichendorff. Edited by Gert Sautermeister, Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, p. 48
  13. ^ Helmut Koopmann, Ewige Fremde, eternal return, in: Interpretations, poems by Joseph von Eichendorff. Edited by Gert Sautermeister, Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, p. 49
  14. ↑ Christiane Tewinkel, Der Liederkreis op. 39 after Eichendorff, Lieder, in: Schumann-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart, Weimar 2006, p. 428
  15. ↑ Eckart Klessmann, hour of contestation, in: 1000 German poems and their interpretations, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, From Friedrich von Schiller to Joseph von Eichendorff, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1995, p. 318
  16. ↑ Thomas Mann, The Favorite Poem, in: Reden and Essays II, Collected Works in Thirteen Volumes, Volume 10, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 1974, p. 922
  17. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, To the memory of Eichendorff, in: Collected writings Volume 11, p. 72
  18. ↑ Sven Kramer, in: Eichendorff, Lyrik und Gesellschaft, Adorno-Handbuch, Leben Werkffekt, Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, p. 203
  19. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, On Eichendorff's memory, in Collected Writings Volume 11, p. 72