I subscribe to the TLS, which does pretty good coverage of German literature and history, including Goethe. (I have even written a few reviews in the TLS on Goethe, which you can check out online.) But I also read literary coverage generally. Often reviews of other literary traditions lead me to consider Goethe, which was the case with a recent review: The Penguin Book of Elegy: Poems of Memory, Mourning and Consolation, edited by Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan. The reviewer, Alan Jenkins, gave a very tough review, tough in the sense of focusing on the shortcomings of the volume (a Penguin Classics), in particular its omissions.
The origin of the genre was an ancient Greek one: a song of mourning or lament and, in addition, composed in a specific meter, “the elegiac couplet or distich.” Jenkins made it clear that in the transmission of the genre over the centuries covers a wide territory of subject matter. For instance, the Anglo-Saxon “The Seafarer” does not lament the death of an individual but instead reflects “gravely on serious matters of life and death”; likewise Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which Jenkins considers the best example of this type:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
At first glance, one cannot say of Goethe’s Roman Elegies, written between 1788 and 1790, that they are laments. Composed in elegiac distichs, they portray Goethe’s experience of sensual love in the Eternal City. At the same time, that background, Rome with its ancient monuments, is no more. Goethe’s “love affair” with the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans was a life-long one, so it might be said that even the Roman Elegies are saturated with sadness at the passing of that world.
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| "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Jim Stovall |
But Goethe also penned an elegy back in 1767, when he was sixteen years old, which is indeed a poem about loss and is more in line with the elegies discussed in the TLS review. Indeed, I wonder if Goethe was aware of Thomas Gray's elegy, which was published in 1751, as his is entitled “Elegy on the Death of the Brother of My Friend" (Elegie auf den Tod des Bruders meines Freundes) and which was set in a churchyard. Herewith a link to the original; unfortunately I could find no English translation, which is an indication of the low esteem in which the poem is held in Goethe scholarship. The poem was never published, and was not discovered until 1895, decades after Goethe’s death, in a handwritten manuscript of nineteen poems, the so-called Buch Annette, prepared by the friend in the title of the poem, namely, Ernst Wolfgang Behrisch, Goethe’s confidant and mentor while he was a student in Leipzig. (You can find many posts on this blog in which Behrisch is discussed.) Apparently, Behrisch had a very nice handwriting, which can be seen in the image at the top, which is one of the poems in the collection of poems, most of which concern Goethe’s love interest while he was a student in Leipzig.
To do some research for this blog post, I went back and looked into the work of scholars I had not consulted since writing my dissertation on the “young Goethe,” in this case Heinz Kindermann and Eugen Wolff. The former’s work concerns the “Rococo Goethe,” the latter the “historical” development of Goethe’s poetry. Both scholars regard the poem as a “new direction” in Goethe’s poetic production, a move away from the subject of romantic dalliance that featured shepherds and shepherdesses toward a more sober tone.
The story the poem tells concerns a marriage abandoned, not as in Clavigo (see previous post), but because the prince whom Behrisch’s brother served required it of him. It is not specified what the demand was, but the bridegroom was honor-bound to observe it. There is a slight suggestion that he committed suicide, thus prefacing a theme found, as Kindermann and Wolff write, in The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Goethe does a nice job of telling the story, moving step by step, in the first verse setting the scene in a darkened courtyard featuring an an oak tree that has been felled by a storm. It is here that the brother’s body lies buried. A few verses on we read that his betrothed also lies buried, or as Goethe writes, her “heart” lies buried here: “Never did a heart suffer so.”
"O Gott, bestrafest du die Liebe
Du Wesen voller Lieb und Huld?
Denn nichts als eine heil’ge Liebe
War dieser Unglückseel’gen Schuld”
Her hope was to go with her beloved to the altar; instead the prince, in the fashion of tyrants, tore him from her side. Goethe doesn’t dwell on what the prince demanded, only that the lover’s heart was pierced. So that it did not appear that he abandoned his promise to marry her, his death serves as a sign of his fidelity.
“Leb’ wohl, es wein bey meinem Grabe
Jed’ zärtlich Herz gerührt von meiner Treue,
Dann eil’ die stolze Tyrannei,
Der ich schon längst vergeben habe,
Daß sie des Grabes Ursach sei,
Unwillig fühlend, schnell vorbey”
For my part, I don’t think one can attribute much in the way of personal experience on Goethe’s part: he never met Behrisch’s brother. Since the brother had a burial in a cemetery, he obviously was not a suicide. Moreover, research shows that the bride actually died a year before. The elegy seems to have been a “finger exercise” on Goethe’s part, and the “new direction” that scholars perceive in it is an indication of Goethe trying out every literary form he came across. It did not lead to further ventures in this genre until after his return from Italy in 1788, after which began an intensive immersion in the works of Greek and Latin poets and also in the metrical forms of the ancient literature. (Here is a great piece in the Goethe-Lexicon site.) Thus, the Römische Elegien and such works as Hermann und Dorothea (about which see my earlier post). The elegiac tradition, in the sense of lament and mourning, found a place in English literature. According to the TLS review, however, at least two German poets are featured in translation in the book under review: Rilke’s 9th “Duino Elegy” and Paul Celan’s “chilling ‘Deathfugue.’” Clearly there is more to say about the German tradition.
Image credits: Jim Stovall
