(1749-1832) is something of a giant in German literature. The foreign establishments meant to spread German culture abroad (equivalents of the British council or Alliance Française institutions) are named after him. ( Mehr Licht! )


Ten points if you guess what poem there will be on the menu tomorrow...

(1747-1794) was also the son of a pastor, and he too studied law but didn't get the degree. Instead he got a boring desk job, married a woman, promptly fell in love with her sister, was widowed, married the sister, and was widowed again. Then he remarried and divorced soon after that. That's not really relevant to this poem but I thought you'd like to know nonetheless. He was recognised as an important poet in his lifetime, but was never accepted as a serious one, so he didn't get much money for his literary work. He died dirt poor (though laden with honorific titles) aged 46.

Today's poem is probably his most famous, so famous in fact that it's been translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It's also very long so I won't copy-paste, here are the links instead: Lenore (original) and translated. (Francophones: Gérard de Nerval s'est également essayé à l'exercice).

First, it's a ballad - not in the medieval sense, in the romantic sense, ie it is a long poem, where the narrator doesn't use the first person, that tells a story, and that uses the kind of rhetoric tricks (rhymes, repeated phrases or even entire verses) that make it easier to learn it by heart. This is a genre that has never really been adopted in francophone poetry. I lack the expertise where anglophones are concerned, but I don't think it that common there either?

Anyway. There's a bit of a dispute concerning who was the first to come up with this form. General consensus seems to be on its being Hölty, not Bürger, but I didn't find a nice long translation for anything by Hölty so here goes.

On the poem:
- first strophe: the battle of Prague was part of the seven years' war (a conflict a bit like WW1 - all European countries were implicated in it one way or the other via alliances). The beginning of the second strophe is about as harsh a critic as could be allowed without being censored.
-Third, fourth strophes: we never know why Wilhelm doesn't come back. If he'd died on the battlefield (ie, covered in glory), surely someone would have told Lenore? My guess is that he deserted the army to come back to her earlier, got caught and executed for it. Now if you consider that desertion may be a form of suicide, and that people who kill themselves can only get buried after sunset... get my drift? It is a bit far-fetched though.
- strophes 5-11. Two voices at play here, Lenore and her mother. You can assign a whole range of meanings to both of them - the accepted interpretation is that Lenore represents modernity in that she's individualist. She's sad, so she ought to be allowed to kill herself, she says (see the suicide theme develop...). The mother could be reason (eigth strophe - were this not poetry this would most likely be what really happened to Wilhelm). She's also the voice of tradition / religion - no matter what individual troubles her daughter has, she's not allowed to break God's laws (ie, she shouldn't kill herself). They're both talking of love, but Lenore's for Wilhelm (another individual), the mother's is for, shall we say law and order?
- strophe 13: you just know anything happening in this strophe won't be good
- strophe 15: he only left at midnight, heh. After sunset! (cf. suicide theme). This is also the first time we're confronted directly to supranatural themes (there's no way anyone can ride from Bohemia to wherever in Prussia Lenore lives in only a few hours).
- 15 to 28: and this is a central theme to 19th century German poetry (Death and the maiden). The word death is masculine in German (der Tod) and the topic of young girls dying right before their wedding is one poets seem to love.

In a society that has a huge collective fetish for female virginity, the wedding night does indeed signify a major change for the girl (who looses blood, like in death, and her last name, like in death). But, more to the point since women don't make the rules, a woman looses most of her desirability after the marriage - she's not the unsullied potential mate any more, but a future mother. So attraction tends to concentrate on the very last moments before the wedding night - and the simili-death it includes. Having death put a final and romantic end to the girl's existence is more poetical than having her become someone else's property - or even your own. The attraction is so much stronger when it's irrealisable, and tainted by tragedy rather than by the sordid consummation of one's lust. This is an archetype - a theme that comes again and again. This isn't the first poem to use the theme, but it's one of the most famous - why do you think the little dead girl of the comic book is called Lenore.