POETRY
AND
RECITATION
(Vienna, 7 June
1922)
It is through declamation and recitation that
the art of poetry is accorded its true value. So I shall allow
myself – not, however, out of allegiance to any abstract
principle or any wish to claim that a world-view which springs from
the needs of our time must cast its reforming light in some way or
other over everything – I shall allow myself on quite other
grounds to say a little about recitation and declamation from the
vantage-point of the life- and world-conception represented at this
Congress. We shall only recapture an inner, a genuine
soul-understanding of poetry when we are in a position to find our
way to the real homeland of poetic art. And this real homeland of
poetic art is in fact the spiritual world – though it is not
that intellectual, that conceptual or ideational factor in the
spiritual world particularly cultivated in our own time. For this
more than anything else has a paralysing effect on
poetry.
We shall see most clearly what is meant by this
when we are reminded that one of the most significant products of
this art resounds to us out of the revolutions of time along with a
particular avowal on the part of its creator, or perhaps creators.
The Homeric epics invariably begin with the words “Sing, O
Muse...” Nowadays we are only too inclined to treat such a
phrase as more or less a cliché. But when it was first coined
it was no cliché – it was an inner experience of the
soul: whoever it was that conceived the poem out of the spirit,
whence this phrase was also drawn, knew how he was immersed through
his poetic faculty in a region of human existence and experience
different to that in which we stand in immediate
sense-perception, or when our power of intellect takes hold
conceptually of sense-impressions. The poet knew that his inner
being was seized by an objective spiritual force. That human
consciousness has indeed undergone a change in this respect in the
course of evolution has, I would say, been documented
historically.
When Klopstock, drawing upon the German
spiritual life, wished to sing of the great deed of the Messiah, as
Homer had sung the past events of Hellas, he did not say
“Sing, O Muse...”, but “Sing, immortal soul, of
sinful man’s redemption.” Here something of greater
intensity is indicated, something connected directly with the human
and its self-reliance. Here man
has come to himself in his individual
personality.
Yet we can add: if the mode of consciousness
which lives in our modern world of ideas and observations were the
sole criterion, we should lose poetry and art altogether. All the
same, it is necessary that here, too, what was suitable for mankind
at one time should now assume other forms. But these new forms can
only arise if the way into the spiritual world is rediscovered; for
such a path alone makes it possible for the
human “I” to be laid hold of again by the spiritual
world – not as in former times, in an unconscious, dreamy
fashion, but in accordance with the needs of the present day: in
full consciousness. That this need not be bound up with a
crippling of imaginative activity – this is not
generally recognized today. It will come to be understood, however,
as the world and life-conception put forward here gains more and
more ground. If we enter into the spiritual world with
circumspection – in full consciousness and with a developed
feeling of personality – it will exert no crippling effect on
our direct perception or on the vital participation in things and
beings so necessary to poetry and art in general. If, however, we
abstract ourselves from things in ideas, standing aside from them
in purely intellectual concepts, our knowledge will yield nothing
that can become a direct artistic creation. But
if we plunge down into what pervades the world as a vibrant
spiritual essence we will find again, along this spiritual path
what poetry and art as a whole were fundamentally seeking all
along.
From such a spiritual approach the
poet will have before his soul what recitation and declamation must
re-create for his audience. The poet must submerge himself in the
element of speech. This experience of submersion was still to be
found among the Greeks, and even in earlier forms of Central
European spiritual life, such as the Germanic. In primaeval ages of
humanity, if one wished to receive the divine-spiritual and bring
it to expression as it spoke in the soul, one dived down not only
into the element of speech, but also into what flowed within
speech, like the waves of the sea – into the breath. And in
earlier times, when the ancient spiritual life was still valued
above science, art or religion in isolation, in the period when
that spiritual life came into being, poetry, too, was not isolated.
It grew isolated at the stage when the felt vitality of the breath
(as manifestation of the efficacy of man’s innermost will)
was taken up into more exalted regions of organic life: into the
element of speech.
In due course today we have arrived
at the element of thought. And from the thought-element we can
experience only a sort of “upthrust” of the breath.
What held sway in ancient times in Central Europe
in the form of an unconscious
feeling whenever man felt the poetic urge was the pulsating of the
blood. Taking hold with the will, this formed the breathstream from
within, into tone; whereas when the man of Greek or
Graeco-Roman times waxed poetic he lived more in what
flowed
from the breathing-rhythm in the way of a picture or conception,
and in what musically formed the sound, tone and line through
metre, number and syllable.
Goethe’s whole being, his essential
soul-nature, was born from the spirit of Central Europe. The writings of
his youth derived their imaginative, pictorial form from an
experience, an instinctive feeling of how human breathing pushes
up, through the will-pulsating waves of
the blood, into the formation of tone and sound – and so into
the expressivity of the human soul. In this way he attained the
qualities we admire so much in his youth, even when he appears to
be speaking in prose. We have the prose-poems of Goethe’s
youth, like the marvellous Hymn to Nature, where the ruling
principle is that where we feel the language permeated by a kind of
breathing which pulsates on the waves of the blood. It was from
some such sense that the young Goethe initially composed his
Iphigeneia. In this composition we feel how something from
the Nibelungenlied, or the Gudrunlied, still lives
and weaves in the prose, welling up and working in its high and low
intonations. It calls attention to the upward thrust of the will
into what comes to be man’s head-experience. This rhythm,
thrown upward into configurations of thought, is what we can admire
in the poems of Goethe’s youth, including the first version
of his Iphigeneia.
But Goethe longed to get away to
Italy. A time came
when he could no longer come to terms with himself without
undertaking a journey to Italy, which he did in the
’eighties. What was it that he longed for in his innermost
being at that time? He longed to enter more deeply into human
individuality – to enter into the whole human being with what
lived in the high and low tones, creating in speech-formation an
effect like the forms of a Gothic cathedral. He wanted to blend
this with the even-measured flow he was seeking
and believed was accessible only in the south,
in Italy, in the wake of what had lived in
Greek culture. Out of this, stemming from his feeling for such art
as was still to be seen, came an understanding of Greek art He
understood that the Greeks created their art in accordance with the
same laws that govern the productions of nature; and of this he
believed himself to have uncovered the clue. He believed, too, that
he had traced these laws in speech-formation. He brought speech
into a deeper connection with the breath. Then, in
Rome, he refashioned his
Iphigeneia accordingly. We must distinguish sharply between
the northern Iphigeneia as first conceived and what came
about when he refashioned it in Rome – even though the difference
between the original and the Roman verse-Iphigeneia is
really quite slight. It turned it into a poem that no longer lives
simply in high and low tones; it became a work where in quite a
different way – and not in any trivial sense, but as regards
the whole of its speech-formation - the psychical experience of the
blood-rhythm, the circulation with its deeper rhythm, plays over
into the tranquil metre of the breathing-rhythm and the element of
thought. In this way, what represented a declamatory form in the
Nordic Iphigeneia is transformed in the Roman version into
recitation.
By juxtaposing the one Iphigeneia with
the other in this way, we can clearly discern the difference
between declamation and recitation. Recitation leads us more deeply
into human nature, and creates, too, more from its depths, seizing
upon the whole blood-circulation as well as the breathing. But
because in declamation the will (as it surges in the depths) is
caught up into the highest part of man’s spiritual and
soul-being, into the breath, it appears to us as the more forceful
– living as it does in high and low tones. It does not only
engage the flow of rhyme and verse,
but evokes something which goes
out into the world – perhaps even with a certain belligerence
– as alliteration. In this there is a beauty that is peculiar
to the north.
We do not wish
today to give theoretical explanations, but to make known what
should be present in an artistic sensibility. We will therefore
firstly present the declamatory, in Goethe’s Nordic
Iphigeneia; and then contrastingly the recitative, in the
Roman composition.
[Note 25]
[The magnificent language of the Authorized
Version puts it on a different level to any other translation
in English. There can be no doubt of its own high literary
qualities, and it furnishes us with fine examples of poetry for
declamation, as in this version of the ninetieth Psalm:
Lord, thou hast bene our dwelling place in all
generations.
Before the mountaines were brought
forth,
or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the
world:
even from everlasting to everlasting thou art
God.
Thou turnest man to destruction: and
sayest,
Returne yee children of men.
For a thousand yeeres in thy sight
are but as yesterday when it is past:
and as a watch in the night.
Thou carriest them away as with a flood, they
are as a sleepe:
in the morning they are like grasse which groweth
up.
In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth
up:
in the evening it is cut downe, and
withereth.
For we are consumed by thine anger:
and by thy wrath are we troubled.
Thou hast set our iniquities before
thee:
our secret sinnes in the light of thy
countenance.
For all our dayes are passed away in thy
wrath:
we spend our yeeres as a tale that is
told.
The dayes of our yeeres are
three-score yeeres and ten,
and if by reason of strength they be fourescore
yeeres,
yet is their strength labour and
sorrow:
for it is soone cut off, and we flie
away.
Who knoweth the power of thine anger?
even according to thy feare, so is thy
wrath.
So teach us to number our daies: that wee
may
apply our hearts unto wisedome.
Returne (O LORD) how long?
and let it repent thee concerning thy servants.
O
satisfie us early with thy mercie:
that we may rejoyce, and be glad all our dayes.
Make us glad according to the dayes wherein thou hast afflicted
us:
and the yeeres wherein we have seene evil.
Let thy worke appeare unto thy servants:
and thy glory unto their children.
And let the beautie of the LORD our God be upon
us,
and establish thou the worke of our hands upon
us:
yea, the work of our hands establish thou
it.
Metrical translations of the Psalms are
numerous; but many of them have no aims beyond fitting the verses
to a tune. The version begun by Sir Philip Sidney and completed by
his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, however, brought all the
literary resources of the classical tradition in Renaissance poetry
to bear on the problem of making an authentically poetic
translation. The result is that the ninetieth Psalm is here
drastically transformed into a recitative vein:
DOMINE
REFUGIUM
Thou’our refuge, thou our dwelling,
O Lord, hast byn from time to time:
Long er
Mountaines, proudly swelling,
Above the lowly dales did clime:
Long er
the Earth, embowl’d by thee,
Bare the forme it now doth beare:
Yea,
thou art God for ever, free
From all touch of age and yeare.
O, but
man by thee created,
As he at first of earth arose,
When
thy word his end hath dated,
In equall state to earth he goes.
Thou
saist, and saying makst it soe:
Be noe more, O Adams heyre;
From
whence ye came, dispatch to goe,
Dust
againe, as dust you were.
Graunt a thousand yeares be spared
To mortall men of life and light:
What is
that to thee compared?
One day, one quarter of a night.
When
death upon them storm-like falls,
Like unto a dreame they grow:
Which
goes and comes as fancy calls,
Nought in substance all in show.
As the
hearb that early groweth,
Which leaved greene and flowred faire
Ev’ning change with ruine moweth,
And laies to roast in withering aire:
Soe in
thy wrath we fade away,
With thy fury overthrowne
When
thou in sight our faultes dost lay,
Looking on our synns unknown.
Therefore in thy angry fuming,
Our life of daies his measure spends:
All our
yeares in death consuming,
Right like a sound that, sounded,
ends.
Our
daies of life make seaventy yeares,
Eighty, if one stronger be:
Whose
cropp is laboures, dollors, feares,
Then away in poast we flee.
Yet who
notes thy angry power
As he should feare, soe fearing thee?
Make us
count each vitall hower
Make thou us wise, we wise shall be.
Turne
Lord: shall these things thus goe still?
Lett thy servantes peace obtaine:
Us with thy joyfull bounty
fill,
Endlesse joyes in us shall raigne.
Glad us
now, as erst we greeved:
Send
yeares of good for yeares of ill:
When
thy hand hath us releeved,
Show us and ours thy glory still.
Both
them and us, not one exempt,
With thy beauty beautify:
Supply
with aid what we attempt,
Our attempts with aid supply.
Mary
Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621).]
Goethe followed up his incursion
into the new poetic sphere of his remodelled Iphigeneia with
works like his “Achilleis”, from which a passage will
now be recited. Here in Goethe we find something that shows us how
poetry springs from the whole man, how it should emerge from the
whole man and take shape as recitation and
declamation.
I might seem, at first glance, to
be propounding a mechanical interpretation of reciting and
declaiming, if I were to point to something in the nature of man as
the origin of recitation and declamation: this something is to be
found, however, precisely along the spiritual
path.
As an art, poetry has the task of
enlarging again what prose has atomized and contracted into the
single word. The harmony of sounds, the melodious flow of sound in
the picture-formation of speech, of mundane speech, is in this way
“canopied over,” as we might say, by a second,
spiritual speech. The prose-speaker clothes in words those thoughts
he wants to convey, along with whatever of individual experience he
can. The poet draws back from such rhetoric, to a much more
profoundly inward human experience.
[Note 26]
He reverts
to a level at which (as I have already indicated) the rhythms of
breathing and the circulatory system become perceptible, as they
vibrate through the language of poetry. We shall only get to the
bottom of rhyme, metre, the pictorial and the melodic in speech, by
comprehending human nature spiritually, even down to the physical.
We have, then, as one pole of the rhythmical in man, the breathing;
and as the other pole, circulation. In the interaction of breathing
and circulation is expressed something which is first given, in its
simplest ratio, when we attend to the resonance of breathing and
circulation in the flow of human speech. In breathing, we draw a
particular number of breaths every minute – between sixteen
and eighteen. And over the same period we have, an average, about
four times as many pulse‑beats. Circulation and breathing
interact, so that the circulation plays into the breath, and the
breath in turn weaves into the circulation its slower rhythm. It is
an apprehension of such an harmonious interchange between
pulse-beat and breathing that echoes on in speech. Formed and
transformed in various ways, it produces the after-effect of a
pictorial or a musical speech-formation, which is then brought to
expression by the poet.
I said – and the point has actually been
raised – that the fundamental law of poetry, the
interaction of breathing and circulation that I have elicited from
human morphology might be considered mechanical and materialistic.
But the spiritual life that holds sway and works in the world can
only be grasped if we trace that life right into its material
formations; only if the life of man’s spirit and soul is
pursued to those depths where it lives out its expression in
corporeal functions. These bodily workings will then act as a firm
wall to hurl back, like an echo, what derives from the laws of a
profounder spirituality – a spirituality of
direct experience pouring itself out into speech.
Goethe sensed how in earlier stages of human
culture man stood in a deeper relation, as it were, to his own
nature. He too sought to enter into an earlier epoch’s
feeling for poetic forms and revivify them. It is actually of deep
significance that at the highest point in the development of German
poetry, Goethe pointed away from the crude, prosaic stress
popularly taken for recitation and declamation, to a special kind
of what can be called – and deservingly – a real
speech-formation. To rehearse the iambics of his Iphigeneia,
Goethe stood in front of the actors with his baton. He knew that
what had to be revealed was, above all, the imagery he wanted to
incorporate, while the prose-content was there merely as a ladder
by which to scale the heights of the full, spiritual sense –
the sound and the picture-quality of speech that must evolve from
it. We must pierce through the given prose-content of a poem into
the truly poetic. Schiller’s
experience in his best creations, of an initially indefinable
melody, a musicality onto which he then threaded the prose-content,
was not a personal peculiarity. As regards the words, some of
Schiller’s poems could even have had a different content to
the one they currently possess. In a true poet there is everywhere,
in the background of the rhetorical speech, a quality that must
simply be felt. And only when it does justice to the musical in
speech-formation will true poetry stand
revealed.
If we turn to what is often taught today as
recitation and declamation, it is with a keen sense of something
having, in these uncultured times, gone amiss. The voice itself is
strengthened, and great value is attached to technical adjustment
of the organism: this is because no-one is any longer able to live
in a direct relationship with recitation and declamation (not to
mention singing), and we transfer to material tampering with the
body what should be experienced on a quite different plane. The
important thing in teaching recitation and declamation is that the
pupil should on no account be made to do anything but live with
speech-formation as such and the soul-resonance of living
with speech-formation, in such a way as to bring him to listen
properly. For anyone who is capable of listening correctly to what
may come over in poetry, the appropriate breathing, proper
disposition of the body, etc., will come about of their own accord
– as a response to proper listening. It is important to let
the pupil live in the actual element of declamation and recitation,
and leave all the rest to him. He must become absorbed in the
objective realities of tone, in “musical pictoriality”
and in authentically poetic formations. In this way alone,
paradoxical as it may sound, can we get the pupil to develop an ear
for what he hears declaimed to him and thereby sensitivity to what
moves spiritually over the waves of sound he hears. Only when he
experiences something in his surroundings, we might say, and not in
himself – and even though to begin with this experience is
illusory, it must be cultivated – only then will he be able
to refer back to himself what he feels vibrant in the world around
him. It is only through the recital of certain aesthetically
fashioned word-sequences, which have a special relation to human
morphology, that we ought to learn breath-control or anything else
connected with the adjusting of the voice. In this way we shall
best meet the requirements of Goethe’s artistic perception
and the sensitivity we value so greatly.
By way of illustration – not
of any theory, but of the foregoing remarks there will now be
recited a passage from Goethe’s “Achilleis”.
[Note 27]
[Since the hexameter in its true, classical form
can only occasionally be reproduced successfully in English, C. Day
Lewis performed the service of devising a metre which sounds
convincingly like it. He used it to evoke the heroic and epic
associations of classical poetry in relating, for example, an
episode from the Spanish Civil War in “The
Nabara”. This extract is from “Phase
One”:
Freedom is more than a word, more than the base
coinage
Of statesmen, the tyrant’s dishonoured
cheque, or the dreamer’s mad
Inflated currency. She is mortal,
we know, and made
In the image of simple men who have
no taste for carnage
But sooner kill and are killed than
see that image betrayed.
Mortal she is, yet rising always
refreshed from her ashes:
She is bound to earth, yet she
flies as high as a passage bird
To home wherever man’s heart
with seasonal warmth is stirred:
Innocent is her touch as the
dawn’s, but still it unleashes
The ravisher shades of envy.
Freedom is more than a word.
I see man’s heart two-edged,
keen both for death and creation.
As a sculptor rejoices, stabbing
and mutilating the stone
Into a shapelier life, and the two joys make one
–
So man is wrought in his hour of agony and
elation
To efface the flesh to reveal the crying need of
his bone.
Burning the issue was beyond their mild
forecasting
For those I tell of – men used to the
tolerable joy and hurt
Of simple lives: they coveted never an epic
part;
But history’s hand was upon them and hewed
an everlasting
Image of freedom out of their rude and stubborn
heart.
C. Day Lewis (1904-1972)
An earlier solution to the problem was a rather more
radical departure from the hexameter for a five-foot line, and the
blank-verse pentameter remains the natural epic metre in
English. Milton employed it in recreating many of the features of classical
epic in Paradise Lost, as may be illustrated from the
following passage (Book VI, 189-214):
So
saying, a noble stroke he lifted high,
Which
hung not, but so swift with tempest fell
On the
proud Crest of Satan, that no sight,
Nor
motion of swift thought, less could his Shield
Such
ruin intercept: ten paces huge
He back
recoild; the tenth on bended knee
His
massie Spear upstayd; as if on Earth
Winds
under ground or waters forcing way
Sidelong, had push’t a Mountain from his
seat
Half
sunk with all his Pines. Amazement seiz’d
The
Rebel Thrones, but greater rage to see
Thus
foil’d their mightiest, ours joy find, and shout,
Presage
of Victorie and fierce desire
Of
Battel: whereat Michaël bid sound
Th’ Arch-angel trumpet; through the vast of
Heav’n
It
sounded, and the faithful Armies rung
Hosanna to the Highest: nor
stood at gaze
The
adverse Legions, nor less hideous join’d
The
horrid shock: now storming furie rose,
And
clamor such as heard in Heav’n till now
Was
never, Arms on Armour clashing bray’d
Horrible discord, and the madding Wheeles
Of
brazen Chariots rag’d; dire was the noise
Of
conflict; over head the dismal hiss
Of
fiery Darts in flaming vollies flew,
And
flying vaulted either Host with fire.
John
Milton.]
And now, to illustrate declamation, Goethe’s
“Hymnus an die Natur” (abridged, as occasion demanded,
for a Eurythmy performance).
Natur! Wir sind von ihr umgeben und umschlungen
–
unvermögend aus ihr herauszutreten, und
unvermögend,
tiefer in sie hinein zu kommen. Ungebeten und
ungewarnt
nimmt sie uns in den Kreislauf ihres Tanzes auf
und treibt sich mit uns fort, bis wir ermüdet
sind
und ihrem Arm entfallen.
Sie schafft ewig neue Gestalten; alles ist neu,
und
doch immer das Alte. Sie baut immer und
zerstört
immer.
Sie lebt in lauter Kindern; und die Mutter, wo
ist
sie? – Sie ist die einzige Künstlerin; sie spielt
ein
Schauspiel; es ist ein ewiges Leben, Werden und
Bewegen in ihr. Sie verwandelt sich ewig, und ist
kein Moment Stillestehen in ihr.
Ihr Tritt ist gemessen, ihre Ausnahmen selten,
ihre
Gesetze unwandelbar. Gedacht hat sie und sinnt
beständig.
Die Menschen sind alle in ihr, und sie in
allen.
Auch das Unnatürlichste ist Natur, auch die
plumpste
Philisterei hat etwas von ihrem Genie.
Sie liebt sich selber; sie freut sich an der
Illusion.
Ihre Kinder sind ohne Zahl.
Sie spritzt ihre Geschöpfe aus dem Nichts
hervor.
Leben ist ihre schönste Erfindung, und der Tod
– ihr
Kunstgriff, viel Leben zu haben.
Sie hüllt den Menschen in Dumpfheit ein und
spornt
ihn ewig zum Lichte. Man gehorcht ihren
Gesetzen,
auch wenn man ihnen widerstrebt; man wirkt
mit ihr,
auch wenn man gegen sie wirken
will.
Sie macht alles, was sie gibt, zur
Wohltat.
Sie hat keine Sprache noch Rede,
aber sie schafft
Zungen und Herzen, durch die sie
fühlt und spricht.
Ihre Krone ist die
Liebe.
Sie macht Klüfte zwischen
allen Wesen, und alles will
sie verschlingen. Sie hat alles
isoliert, um alles
zusammenzuziehen.
Sie ist alles. Sie belohnt sich
selbst und bestraft
sich selbst, erfreut und quält
sich selbst. Vergangenheit
und Zukunft kennt sie nicht.
Gegenwart ist ihr Ewigkeit.
Sie ist gütig, sie ist weise und
still.
Sie ist ganz, und doch immer
unvollendet.
Jedem erscheint sie in einer eignen
Gestalt. Sie
verbirgt sich in tausend Namen und
ist immer dieselbe.
Sie hat mich hereingestellt, sie wird mich
auch
herausführen. Ich vertraue mich ihr. Alles
hat
sie gesprochen. Alles ist ihre Schuld, alles
ist
ihr Verdienst!
[Perhaps the nearest parallel in English
is the unrestricted and freely expansive rhythm of Blake. He
celebrates not Nature, but the spirits (the Sons of Los) in Nature
in these extracts from his Milton pl. 27,66 – 28,12;
pl. 31, 4 – 22:
Thou seest the Constellations in the deep &
wondrous Night:
They rise in order and continue their immortal
courses
Upon the mountains & in vales with harp
& heavenly song,
With flute & clarion, with cups &
measures fill’d with foaming wine.
Glitt’ring the streams reflect the Vision
of beatitude,
And the calm Ocean joys beneath & smooths
his awful waves:
These are the Sons of Los, & these the
Labourers of the Vintage.
Thou seest the
gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport
in
summer
Upon the sunny
brooks & meadows: every one the dance
Knows in its intricate mazes of delight artful
to weave:
Each one to sound his instruments of music in
the dance,
To touch each other & recede, to cross &
change & return:
These are the Children of Los; thou seest the
Trees on mountains,
The wind blows
heavy, loud they thunder thro’ the darksom
sky,
Uttering
prophecies & speaking instructive words to the
sons
Of men: These are
the Sons of Los: These are the Visions of
Eternity,
But we see only as
it were the hem of their garments
When with our
vegetable eyes we view these wondrous Visions.
The Sky is an immortal Tent built by the Sons of
Los:
And every Space that a Man views around his
dwelling-place
Standing on his own roof or in his garden on a
mount
Of twenty-five
cubits in height, such space is his Universe:
And on its
verge the Sun rises & sets, the Clouds bow
To meet the flat Earth &the Sea
in such an order’d Space:
The Starry heavens reach no
further, but here bend and set
On all sides, & the two Poles
turn on their valves of gold;
And if he move his dwelling-place,
his heavens also move
Where’er he goes, & all
his neighbourhood bewail his loss.
Such are the Spaces called Earth
& such its dimension.
As to that false appearance which appears to the
reasoner
As of a Globe rolling thro’ Voidness, it
is a delusion of Ulro.
The Microscope knows not of this
nor the Telescope: they alter
The ratio of the Spectator’s
Organs, but leave Objects untouch’d.
For every Space larger than a red Globule of
Man’s blood
Is visionary, and is created by the Hammer of
Los:
And every Space smaller than a
Globule of Man’s blood opens
Into Eternity of which this
vegetable Earth is but a shadow.
William
Blake.]
And now we will adduce some
examples of the lyric – to be precise, from two poets, both
Austrian: Robert Hamerling and Anastasius
Grün.
The lyric diverges from epic and
dramatic poetry in that, as far as speech-formation is concerned,
its aesthetic quality must be experienced directly. In a way, all
lyric strives to obliterate the immediate content of consciousness
– at any rate to some degree. It would restore to man’s
being a sense of universal participation. One might say that in
lyric there is always a damping down of conscious experience. With
a poet like Hamerling, a once widely influential poet who compared
with then is now largely forgotten, we can indeed observe how
personal experience passes over into a lyrical experience. Here we
have a personality whose soul wants to share inwardly with every
fibre of its being in the entire life of the world. He wants to
share in the life of colour that meets him from the world. And thus
the unconscious elements of human life come to play a part in him.
We can still see the after-effects of this colourful experience in
him when he tries to give it shape by casting it in antique forms.
Particularly in Hamerling’s lyric poetry we can feel the true
Austro-German lyricism. He is in a sense perhaps the most
representative of Austro-German poets. The German spoken
in Austria, deriving as it does from several
dialects to become the common parlance and also the so-called
“literary language” of Austrian poetry – this
language has something which marks it off from the other forms of
German language, fine discriminations which are of special interest
to poetry and speech-formation. Compared with other varieties of
German we might say that Austrian German has a subdued quality: yet
in this quality there lingers a delicate sense of humour; this
language became that of Austrian poetry. This soft humorous sound
and intimate soul-quality that comes across in Austrian speech is
not readily found in other forms of German
– except possibly dialects. And here we have something which
brings us, so to speak, close to antiquity.
It is at any rate remarkable that so outstanding
a poet as Joseph Misson should have resorted to Austrian dialect
for his “Da Naz, a
niederösterreichischer Bauerbui geht in d’Fremd”,
and that he arrived at a type of hexameter in which he felt
artistically at home. We might add that the idealism of thought
natural to someone who lives with Austrian German imparts an
idealistic tinge to all the German inner feeling in this little
piece of Central
Europe.
We encounter this even in the formation of
speech in Hamerling’s lyrics, which convey the feeling as if
on the wings of a bird, while continually catching the bird again
in powerfully moulded forms. This is really possible only with the
soft humour of Austrian German. If we recapture this in declamation
by taking what lives in Hamerling’s lyrical poetry
and allow it to be heard elsewhere,
it strikes a German from a different region as being cornpletely
German and yet he feels what is German in the language to have been
idealized. This is what gives Hamerling’s lyricism its
nobility and what makes his verve and colour genuinely artistic as
well as spontaneous.
How differently this appears in our other poet,
Anastasius Grün! In accordance with the unique character of
the Austrian disposition, he had a real feeling for what ought to
mediate between East and West – for the mutual understanding
of people all over the earth. The mood of 1848 finds expression
most nobly and beautifully in Anastasius Grün’s poem
Schutt – and in other of his poems too. It is this
prologue to Schutt that will be recited. So, on the one hand
we have, in Hamerling, a poet who really created more for
declamation, yet found for it a metrical form and in Anastasius
Grün a poet who takes over a recitative principle straight
from the language. We would now like to demonstrate this in a poem
by Anastasius Grün which, from its contents, might be entitled
“West und Ost”; and in two poems by Robert Hamerling:
“Nächtliche Regung” and “Vor einer
Genziane”.
WEST UND
OST
Prolog zu ‘Schutt’
Aug’ in Auge lächelnd
schlangen
Arm in Arm einst West und Ost;
Zwillingspaar, das liebumfangen
Noch in einer Wiege kost’!
Ahriman
ersah’s, der Schlimme,
Ihn erbaut der
Anblick nicht,
Schwingt den Zauberstab im Grimme,
Draus manch roter Blitzstrahl bricht.
Wirft als Riesenschlang’ ins
Bette,
Ringelnd, bäumend, zwischen sie
Jener Berg’ urew’ge Kette,
Die nie bricht und
endet nie.
Lässt der Lüfte Vorhang
rollend
Undurchdringlich niederziehn,
Spannt des Meers Sahara grollend
Endlos zwischen beiden hin.
Doch Ormuzd, der Milde,
Gute,
Lächlend ob dem schlechten Schwank,
Winkt mit seiner Zauberrute,
Sternefunkelnd, goldesblank.
Sieh, auf Taubenfitt’chen,
fächelnd,
Von der fernsten Luft geküsst,
Schifft die Liebe, kundig lächelnd;
Wie sich Ost and Westen grüsst!
Blütenduft und Tau und Segen
Saugt im Osten
Menschengeist,
Steigt als Wolke, die als Regen
Mild auf Westens Flur dann fleusst!
Und die
Brücke hat gezogen,
Die vom Ost zum West sich schwingt,
Phantasie als Regenbogen,
Der die Berge
überspringt.
Durch die weiten Meereswüsten,
Steuernd, wie ein Silberschwan,
Zwischen Osts und Westens Küsten
Wogt des Lieds melod’scher Kahn.
Anastasius Grün (1806-1876).
[The poem that follows demonstrates the English
sense of delicacy and restraint, and the subtle humour to which the
language was in its own way particularly suited – perhaps
especially around Marvell’s time:
ON A DROP
OF DEW
See how the Orient Dew,
Shed from the Bosom of the Morn
Into
the blowing Roses,
Yet
careless of its Mansion new;
For the clear Region where ’twas
born
Round in its self incloses:
And in
its little Globes Extent,
Frames
as it can its native Element.
How it the purple flow’r does
slight,
Scarce touching where it
lyes,
But
gazing back upon the Skies,
Shines with a mournful
Light;
Like
its own Tear,
Because so long divided from the
Sphear.
Restless it roules and unsecure,
Trembling lest it grow impure;
Till
the warm Sun pitty it’s Pain,
And to
the Skies exhales it back again.
So the Soul, that Drop, that Ray
Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day,
Could it within the humane flow’r be
seen,
Remembring still its former height,
Shuns the sweat leaves and blossoms green;
And, recollecting its own Light,
Does, in its pure and circling
thoughts, express
The greater Heaven in an Heaven less.
In how coy a
Figure wound,
Every way it turns
away;
So the World excluding round,
Yet receiving in the Day.
Dark beneath, but
bright above:
Here disdaining,
there in Love.
How loose and easie hence to go:
How girt and ready to ascend.
Moving but on a point below,
It all about does upwards bend.
Such did the Manna’s sacred Dew
destil;
White, and intire, though congeal’d and
chill.
Congeal’d on Earth: but does, dissolving,
run
Into the Glories of th’ Almighty
Sun.
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678).]
NÄCHTLICHE
REGUNG
Horch, der Tanne Wipfel
Schlummertrunken bebt,
Wie von Geisterschwingen
Rauschend
überschwebt.
Göttliches Orakel
In der Krone saust,
Doch die Tanne selber
Weiss
nicht, was sie braust.
Mir auch durch die Seele
Leise
Melodien,
Unbegriffne Schauer,
Allgewaltig ziehn:
Ist es Freudemahnung
Oder
Schmerzgebot?
Sich allein verständlich
Spricht in
uns der Gott.
VOR EINER
GENZIANE
Die schönste
der Genzianen fand ich
Einsam erblüht tief unten in kühler
Waldschlucht.
O wie sie durchs
Föhrengestrüpp
Heraufschimmerte mit den blauen, prächtigen
Glocken:
Gewohnten Waldespfad
Komm’ ich
nun Tag um Tag
Gewandelt und
steige hinab in die Schlucht
Und blicke der
schönen Blume tief ins Aug’...
Schöne Blume, was schwankst du doch
Vor mir in unbewegten Lüften so
scheu,
So ängstlich?
Ist denn ein Menschenaue nicht wert
Zu blicken in ein Blumenantlitz?
Trübt
Menschenmundes Hauch
Den heiligen
Gottesfrieden dir,
In dem du
atmest?
Ach, immer wohl drückt Schuld,
Drückt nagende Selbstanklage
Die
sterbliche Brust und du, Blume, du wiegst
In
himmlischer Lebensunschuld
Die wunderbaren
Kronen:
Doch
blicke nicht allzu vorwurfsvoll mich an!
Sieh,
hab’ ich doch Eines voraus vor dir:
Ich habe
gelebt:
Ich habe gestrebt,
ich habe gerungen,
Ich habe
geweint,
Ich habe
geliebt, ich habe gehasst,
Ich habe gehofft, ich habe
geschaudert;
Der Stachel der Qual, des
Entzückens hat
In meinem Fleische
gewühlt;
Alle Schauer des Lebens und des
Todes sind
Durch meine Sinne
geflutet,
Ich habe mit Engelchören
gespielt, ich habe
Gerungen mit
Dämonen.
Du ruhst, ein träumendes
Kind,
Am
Mantelsaum des Höchsten, ich aber;
Ich habe
mich emporgekämpft
Zu seinem Herzen,
Ich habe
gezernt an seinen Schleiern,
Ich habe
ihn beim Namen gerufen,
Emporgeklettert
Bin ich auf einer Leiter von
Seufzern,
Und hab’ ihm ins Ohr gerufen:
‘Erbarmung!’
O Blume, heilig bist
du,
Selig und rein;
Doch
heiligt, was er berührt, nicht auch
Der
zündende Schicksalsblitz?
O, blicke nicht allzu vorwurfsvoll
mich an,
Du stille
Träumerin;
Ich habe
gelebt, ich habe gelitten!
Robert Hamerling
(1830-1889).
[Something of the same fusion of lyric flight
and precision of form can be felt in the following poem:
THE
MORNING-WATCH
O
Joyes! Infinite sweetnes! with what flowres,
And
shoots of glory, my soul breakes, and buds!
All the long
houres
Of night, and
Rest
Through the still shrouds
Of Sleep, and Clouds,
This Dew fell on my Breast;
O how it Blouds,
And
Spirits all my Earth! heark! In what Rings,
And
Hymning Circulations the quick world
Awakes, and sings;
The rising winds,
‘And falling springs,
Birds, beasts, all things
Adore him in their kinds.
Thus all is hurl’d
In
sacred Hymnes, and Order, The great
Chime
And
Symphony of nature. Prayer is
The world in tune,
A
spirit-voyce,
And vocall
joyes
Whose
Eccho is heav’ns blisse.
O let me
climbe
When I lye down! The Pious
soul by night
Is like a clouded starre,
whose beames though said
To shed their
light
Under some
Cloud
Yet are
above,
And shine, and
move
Beyond that mistie
shrowd
So in my
Bed
That Curtain’d
grave, though sleep, like ashes, hide
My lamp, and life, both
shall in thee abide.
Henry
Vaughan (1621-1695).]
And to close, we shall introduce part of the Seventh Scene
from my Mystery Play, The Portal of
Initiation.
One is in a unique position when trying to give
poetic form to the life of the super-sensible. For, to begin with,
one seems to be withdrawing far
from the solid ground of external reality. One is thus exposed to
the additional danger, that anyone not readily familiar and quick
with spiritual matters takes our intention to be allegorical or
symbolic. Neither symbol nor allegory has any place in the
aesthetic viewpoint arising from the sort of perception we advocate
here. It is assuredly no more the abstractions of symbolism than it
is a straw-stuffed allegory that we attempt, but a living portrayal
of perceptions actually more distinct than our ordinary
sense-perceptions, because apprehended by the soul directly,
unmediated by bodily organs. Only for someone unable to rouse these
perceptions to life in himself do they seem abstract or hollow. I
hope to limit my remarks on this subject to a few words, for it
does not do to dwell over much on one’s own accomplishments.
These Mystery Plays concern the spiritual and soul development of
Johannes Thomasius, who is to be brought little by little to a
direct super-sensible experience of the spiritual world. This has to
a certain extent been achieved when once he has succeeded in
overcoming a range of inner obstacles, and made various advances.
There then comes a moment at which he finds, in what has hitherto
been known to him as the external world of the senses and the
intellect (which infiltrates the senses only as the thinnest and
most abstract spirituality), he comes upon a pervading activity of
concrete spiritual beings and concrete spiritual events. The
occurrences in a human soul who reaches this stage of
initiation are complex. Everything so far experienced in light or
sound, or in the other elements of the external world, figures for
the higher mode of experience in a different guise. It is actually
like a transformation in which the world is experienced as a
drawing together and struggling up of the soul-forces of thinking,
feeling and willing to another form of existence. As to how these
soul-forces share in such a transformation of man, and how this
participation stands in intimate relation to the entire cosmos
– that is what is presented in the scene from the Mystery
Drama.
One of the characters – Maria – who
has raised her life up into the spiritual, describes first how
those forces come together which are to inspire the soul’s
individual forces. Philia, Astrid and Luna are seen as the powers
of the soul which hold sway in real, living people, and play a part
in inspiring the man Johannes Thomasius. What the human soul may
come to be, out of the whole world, out of the totality of the
world what it can become in the moment that true understanding of
spiritual life arises there: that is the subject of this
representation. While one apparently withdraws in such a
representation more than ever from the ground of reality, yet (as
who should know better than their creator?) the characters formed
in this way actually stand before the soul no less concretely than
any external thing. Many people, of course, will not be drawn into
such matters: they call everything allegorical that leads beyond
sense-perception. In defence, Hamerling asked in his
Ahasver: Can anyone help me out of this predicament –
that Nero stands here and symbolizes cruelty? We introduce
symbolism only to the extent that reality itself is a kind of
symbol. It is exactly when we come to shape spiritual forms that we
feel how every detail, down to the minuter shades, has been
directly experienced. And we perceive a spiritual entity of this
kind not in concepts, but in words, in nuances of sound. No-one, I
believe, could create out of the energies of the spirit and attain
to that degree of life who cannot himself enter vitally into
language. He may then employ the spirit of language, with its wonderful inner
wisdom, its wonderful formation of feeling and its impulses of
will, to that end – so as to grasp things in their
particularity. If he cannot put to use those unconscious spiritual
pulsations which proceed from everyday life, he will not be able to
avail himself of the language to present the spiritual world. We
need not grow less poetic because our presentations take us into
the spiritual world. For there we enter the native country of
poetry and art.
All poetry has
originated from the soul and spirit. Since, therefore, man finds
himself confronted by the spiritual essences of things, the lyric
flight, the epic power and the dramatic form that live in him can
never be lost. These cannot be destroyed if the art of poetry
returns, as to its own proper home, to the realm of the
spirit.
From The Soul’s Probation, Scene
2:
[Note 28]
MARIA:
Ihr, meine Schwestern, die ich
In Wesenstiefen finde,
Wenn meine Seele sich erweitet,
Und in die Weltenfernen
Sich selbst geleitet,
Entbindet mir die Seherkräfte
Aus Aetherhöhen,
Und führet sie auf Erdenpfade;
Dass ich im Zeitensein
Mich selbst ergründe,
Und die Richtung mir geben kann
Aus alten Lebensweisen
Zu neuen Willenskreisen.
PHILIA:
Ich will erfüllen mich
Mit strebendem Seelenlicht
Aus Herzenstiefen;
Ich will eratmen mir
Belebende Willensmacht
Aus Geistestrieben;
Dass du, geliebte Schwester,
In alten Lebenskreisen
Das Licht erfühlen kannst.
ASTRID:
Ich will verweben
Sich fühlende Eigenheit
Mit ergebenem Liebewillen;
Ich will entbinden
Die keimenden Willensmächte
Aus Wunschesfesseln
Und dir das lähmende Sehnen
Verwandeln in findendes
Geistesfühlen;
Dass du, geliebte Schwester,
In fernen Erdenpfaden
Dich selbst ergriinden kannst.
LUNA:
Ich will berufen entsagende Herzensmächte,
Und will erfestigen tragende Seelenruhe;
Sie sollen sich vermählen
Und kraftendes Geistesleuchten
Aus Seelengründen heben;
Sie sollen sich durchdringen,
Und lauschendem Geistgehör
Die Erdenfernen zwingen;
Dass du, geliebte Schwester,
In weitem Zeitensein
Die Lebensspuren finden kannst.
MARIA (after a pause):
Wenn ich mich entreissen kann
Verwirrendem Selbstgefühl,
Und mich euch geben darf:
Dass ihr mein Seelensein
Mir spiegelt aus Weltenfernen:
Vermag ich zu lösen mich
Aus diesem Lebenskreise
Und kann ergründen mich
In andrer Daseinsweise.
(a
longer pause and then the following)
In euch, ihr Schwestern, schau’ ich
Geisteswesen,
Die Seelen aus dem Weltenall beleben.
Ihr könnt die Kräfte, die in Ewigkeiten
keimen
Im Menschen selbst zur Reife bringen.
Durch meiner Seele Tore dürft’ ich
oft
Den Weg in eure Reiche finden,
Und Erdendaseins Urgestalten
Mit Seelenaugen schauen.
Bedürftig bin ich eurer Hilfe
jetzt,
Da mir obliegt, den Weg zu finden
Von meiner gegenwärtigen Erdenfahrt
In langvergangne Menschheitstage.
Entbindet mir das Seelensein vom
Selbstgefühl
In seinem Zeitenleben.
Erschliesset mir den Pflichtenkreis
Aus meiner Vorzeit Lebensbahnen.
From
The Soul’s Probation, Scene 2:
MARIA:
You, my sisters,
I find
when in the depths of being
my soul,
expanding, guides itself
into the
reaches of the universe.
Release
for me the powers of seeing
out of
etheric heights
and lead
them down to earthly paths
so that
I may explore and find myself
in
course of time
and give
direction to myself
to
change old ways of life
into new
spheres of will.
PHILIA:
I will imbue myself
with
striving light of soul
out of
the heart’s own depths;
I will
breathe in
enlivening power of will
out of
the spirit’s urging;
that
you, beloved sister,
within
old spheres of life
may feel
and sense the light.
ASTRID:
I will weave into one
a
selfhood’s feeling of itself
with
love’s forebearing will;
I will
release
the
burgeoning powers of will
from
fetters of desire,
transform your languid yearning
to
certainty of spirit sensing;
that
you, beloved sister,
on paths
of earth far distant
explore
and find your Self.
LUNA:
I will call forth renouncing strength of heart
and will
confirm enduring soul-repose.
These
shall unite and raise
empowering spirit light
out of
the depths of soul;
they
shall pervade each other
and
shall subdue far distances of earth
to the
listening spirit ear;
that
you, beloved sister,
in
time’s wide ranges
may find
the traces of your life.
MARIA
(after a pause):
When I
can tear myself away
from the
bewildering sense of Self
and give
myself to you
so that
you reflect to me my soul
from
world-wide distances:
then I
can free myself
out of
this sphere of life
and can
explore and find myself
in other
states of being.
(a long
pause, then the following)
In you,
my sisters, I see spirit beings
that
quicken souls out of the cosmos’ life.
You
bring to full maturity in man himself
the forces germinating in eternities.
Through
portals of my soul I often
could
find my way into your realm
and
could behold with inner eyes
the
archetypes of earth existence.
I now
must ask your help:
it has
become my duty
to find
the way that leads
from
present life on earth
to long
past ages of mankind.
Release
my soul-life from its sense of self
in
time-enclosed existence.
Open for
me the sphere of duty, brought
from my
life journey in ancient days.
Trans. R.
and H. Pusch.
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