Dialog International

Poem for the New Year: Andreas Gryphuis Trawrklage des Autoris

The New Year is a time for new beginnings and resolutions, but also a time for reflection.  We think of past New Year celebrations and the passage of time, which seems to gain momentum with each passing year.  The transitory nature of life was the great theme of the Baroque poet and dramatist Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664) who witnessed enough death and destruction in his life.  I've become an admirer of his Sonnets, which, despite the often gruesome themes, somehow offer solace.  One of his most gruesome and self-pitying poems is Trawrklage des Autoris in which the author laments the decay of his own physical being.  Not happy reading, but many of us as we enter a new year can identify with his opening verse : Ich bin nicht/ der ich war/ Die kräffte sind verschwunden! ("I am not that which I was/ my strength is gone!") .  The poet's breathing has become so weak ("Der Athem wil nicht fort) that he no longer has a voice ("die Zung steht angebunden").  Yet we can take comfort that the poet's tongue was not bound and his poem bears witness.  Gryphius often not only imagined the end of life but also the end of the world ("O Erden gutte Nacht!") .  Let us hope that as we enter the new decade we have the resolve to save the planet.

Trawrklage des Autoris (1636)

Ich bin nicht/ der ich war/ Die kräffte sind verschwunden!

Die Glieder sind verdorrt wie ein verbrandter Grauß/

Hier schawt der schwartze Todt zu beyden Augen auß/

Nichts wird als Haut vñ Bein mehr an mir vbrig funden.

Der Athem wil nicht fort; die Zung steht angebunden.

Mein Hertz das vbersteht numehr den letzten Strauß/

Ein jeder/ der mich siht spürt daß das schwache Hauß

Der Leib wird brechen ein/ gar jnner wenig Stunden/

Gleich wie die Wiesenblum früh mit dem Liecht der Welt

Hervor kombt/ vnnd noch eh der Mittag weggeht/ fält;

So bin ich auch benetzt mit Thränentaw ankommen:

So sterb ich vor der Zeit: O Erden gutte Nacht!

Mein Stündlein laufft herbey! nun hab ich außgewacht/

Vnd werde von dem Schlaff des Todes eingenommen!

Mascha Kaléko Ich werde fortgehn im Herbst / I will go in Autumn

The poet Mascha Kaléko was "almost famous" in the early 1930s; her short, witty, whimsical poems perfectly captured the Zeitgeist of the late Weimar Republic.  But as a Jew, she was forced to flee Germany and found sanctuary in New York City, and then later Jerusalem.  Cut off from the air supply of Berlin dialect she struggled to find her lyric voice.  Her later poems are tinged with sadness and loss - loss of her beloved Berlin, loss of her family (she was predeceased by both her husband and her only child).  In the poem Ich werde fortgehn im Herbst she anticipates her death in obscurity - the promise of her youth vanished in the autumn mist.  The poem was published posthumously - she died in 1975 (in winter).

 

Ich werde fortgehn im Herbst

von Mascha Kaléko (aus Heute ist morgen schon gestern)

Ich werde fortgehn im Herbst
wenn die grauen Trauerwolken
meiner Jugend mich mahnen.
Keine Fahnen werden flattern
keine Böller knattern
Krähen werden aus dem Nebel schrein
Schweigen, Schweigen, Schweigen
hüllt mich ein.
Ich werde gehen wie ich kam
Allein.

(I will go in autumn

I will go in autumn

when the grieving grey clouds

remind me of my youth

No flags will fly

No salute will fire

Out of the fog crows will cry

Silence, silence, silence

Envelopes me.

I will go as I came

alone.)

German-American Poet Lisel Mueller Receives the Bundesverdienstkreuz

The TAZ reports that the poet Lisel Mueller, whose family emigrated to the US when she was a young girl, was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz - he Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany - by the Bundespresident Frank-Walter Steinmeier:

„Lisel Mueller wurde für ihre Verdienste als Lyrikerin und Übersetzerin ausgezeichnet“, so das Ordensreferat. Gewürdigt werde ihr Lebenswerk. Allen Bemühungen der taz zum Trotz ist das in Deutschland noch immer so gut wie unbekannt, obwohl es ihr international renommierte Auszeichnungen wie den National Book Award und den Pulitzer Prize eintrug.

Denn Mueller schrieb stets in der Sprache Amerikas. Des Landes, das sie gerettet hatte, wie es in einem ihrer Gedichte heißt: Als Schabernack der Geschichte und unverdientes Glück bestimmt sie darin die Tatsache, dank der Flucht ihrer politisch verfolgten Familie weder Täterin noch Opfer geworden, dem NS-Terror entronnen zu sein. Ein Überlebensschuldsyndrom?

Lisel Mueller was nominated for the prestigious award by Green Party representative Kirsten Kappert-Gonther, who expressed her joy at the news:

In den USA erhielt die wunderbare Dichterin u.a. den Pulitzer Preis. Bei uns müssen wir sie vor dem Vergessen bewahren! Herzlichen Glückwunsch, Lisel Mueller!

The poet, who suffers from Alzheimer, lives today in a nursing facility outside of Chicago.

Here is a poem from her collection Alive Together: New & Selected Poems (1996), which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Things

By Lisel Mueller

What happened is, we grew lonely

living among the things,

so we gave the clock a face,

the chair a back,

the table four stout legs

which will never suffer fatigue.

 

We fitted our shoes with tongues

as smooth as our own

and hung tongues inside bells

so we could listen

to their emotional language,

 

and because we loved graceful profiles

the pitcher received a lip,

the bottle a long, slender neck.

 

Even what was beyond us

was recast in our image;

we gave the country a heart,

the storm an eye,

the cave a mouth

so we could pass into safety.

 

#NationalPoetryMonth: The Sonnets of Andreas Gryphius

Somehow in my university studies we never studied the Baroque period in any depth, which is a pity, for there is much to be admired.  This was brought home to me recently when I read Ralph Rothmann's 2018 novel Der Gott jenes Sommers (See my review), in which he quotes a stanza of Grabschrift Marianae Gryphiae ("Epithaph of Marianna Gryphius") by the poet Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664). That very moving poem compelled me to look into other poems by Gryphius.  Some of his best poems, and best-known poems, can be found in his first collection - Sonnete - published in 1637, also probably the first sonnet cycle in German language.  In many of the poems Gryphius displays amazing poetic control - for a poet of only 20 years of age - as well as innovation within the confines of the Baroque conventions.

One of the most powerful - a well-known - poems in the cycle is Es ist alles Eitel ("All is Vanity"). The poem deals with the Baroque theme that life - and everything material - is ephemeral.  The sonnet is constructed with dichotomies: what's here today is gone tomorrow.  Cities become meadows where sheep graze, victorious armies strutting proudly become ash and bone, and so on.  The poem is neatly divided between two quatrains ending in two tercets. God ("Du") is addressed in the first half as He surveys the vanity of His creation. This shifts to "wir" (we), His pathetic creation ("Nichtigkeit") unable, or unwilling (ambiguity of "will" in the last line) to seek for what is eternal.  For a young man, Gryphius had certainly experienced his fair share of loss: he lost both parents at a young age, witnessed the horrors of war first hand, and fled from the horrible plague that killed those fortunate enough to escape the ravages of war.  No wonder Rothmann was inspired by the poems fo Gryphius when writing about the death and destruction at the end of WWII.  And today, Gryphius speaks to us as we watch the beautiful Notre Dame Cathedral engulfed in flames, or as cities flood due to man-made climate change.  

Es ist alles Eitel

DV sihst / wohin du sihst nur Eitelkeit auff Erden.
Was diser heute baut / reist jener morgen ein:
Wo itzund Städte stehn / wird eine Wisen seyn /
Auff der ein Schäfers-Kind wird spilen mit den Herden:
Was itzund prächtig blüht / sol bald zutretten werden
Was itzt so pocht und trotzt ist Morgen Asch und Bein /
Nichts ist / das ewig sey / kein Ertz / kein Marmorstein.
Itzt lacht das Glück uns an / bald donnern die Beschwerden.
Der hohen Thaten Ruhm muß wie ein Traum vergehn.
Soll denn das Spil der Zeit / der leichte Mensch bestehn?
Ach! was ist alles diß / was wir vor köstlich achten /
Als schlechte Nichtikeit / als Schatten/ Staub und Wind;
Als eine Wisen-Blum / die man nicht wider find't.
Noch will was Ewig ist kein einig Mensch betrachten!

(All is Vanity

Look where you will, you see only vanity on earth.
What some build today others tear down tomorrow:
Where now stand towns there will be a meadow
On which a shepherd’s child will play with the herds:
What now splendid flowers shall soon be trodden down
What now struts and preens will be ash and bone tomorrow,
There is nothing can be eternal, no metal, no marble stone.
Now Fortune smiles on us, but soon hardships will threaten
The fame of great deeds must be like a fleeting dream.
Why should the plaything of time, the frivolous human, endure?
Oh! What is all this that we regard as precious
But worthless nothingness, than shadows, dust and wind,
But a wild flower that cannot be found again.
That which is eternal yet no human wills to see!)

Scrap the Nobel Prize for Literature?

This year there was no Nobel Prize for Literature because of a #MeToo scandal involving a member of the committee in Stockholm.  It wasn't much missed, and it gave us a chance to reflect on the often absurd choices for this particular prize since it was first awarded in 1901.  Back then Leo Tolstoy was recognized as the greatest living novelist, yet the prize went to an obscure poet - Sully Proudhomme - completely forgotten today, but little known even then.  Throughout the years there have been more misses than hits with the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Among those writers passed over are some of the greatest writers - widely read and admired even today: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Ibsen, Strindberg, Zola, Proust, Kafka, Rilke, Brecht, Croce, Hardy, Henry James, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D. J. Lawrence, García Lorca  - just to name a few of the most obvious. 

When it comes to German language prize winners, Robert Messenger of the Weekly Standard has a special beef with Elfriede Jelinek: 

"In 2004, an Austrian mediocrity named Elfriede Jelinek got the prize, and the only possible explanation is the academy’s relishing her public role in opposing Austria’s anti-E.U. firebrand Jörg Haider—or maybe it was her opposition to the Iraq war. Reviewer Joel Agee in the New York Timesremarked of her tenth novel, Greed, “Nothing is farther from Jelinek’s mind than advancing a plot or even just telling a story. Her business is social dissection. Not vivisection, for none of her specimens are alive.” I am happy to take his word for it. In a typical Nobel oversight, Jelinek is the sole representative of a great Austro-Hungarian literary tradition to receive the Nobel. Not Rilke, not Kafka, not Altenberg, not Zweig, not Hofmannsthal, not Schnitzler, not Musil or Bernhard or Broch. Not Heimito von Doderer. Not Joseph Roth. Not Paul Celan."

"Not Paul Celan."  In 1966 Celan was rejected by the committee for the prize in favor of Nelly Sachs - a good but hardly comparable talent - mostly because Sachs was then living in Sweden. (See my post: Why Paul Celan was rejected for the Nobel Prize). And Messenger is on the mark by pointing to the political considerations of the committee in awarding the prize.  The conservative CSU politician Franz-Josef Strauß grumbled that awarding the prize to Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass  was nothing less than "politischen Werbung" as both writers were strong supporters of Willy Brandt.  Today, no one doubts that Blechtrommel is one of the seminal novels of the 20th century, while Heinrich Böll's star has faded.  Still, Böll was a distinctive voice for postwar Germany (see my review of Und sagte kein einziges Wort ) but Wolfgang Koeppen was a greater writer and was not even considered for the prize. 

Occasionally the Nobel committee makes interesting choices - propelling a relatively unknown writer out of obscurity into the public eye.  That was certainly the case with Herta Müller - winner of the 2009 prize.  I doubt I would have read her novels if she hadn't won the prize, but her unique voice deserves to be widely read (see my review of Atemschaukel). Examples such as Herta Müller  is why we should NOT scrap the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Every autumn brings the opportunity to quarrel about who is deserving or undeserving, allowing us to praise or ridicule the committee's choice.  At least we are talking about LITERATURE as well as writers and their books.  In the age of Twitter, Facebook, Fake News , etc.  -  that is indeed a blessing. 

German Leitkultur and Literature

For years I've been hearing German politicians talking about the national Leitkultur ("guiding culture"), but I never got a clear understanding about what exactly Leitkultur is.  Now, thanks to a comprehensive paper put forward by the right-wing AfD party in Thuringia (H/T nobody), I now know what Leitkultur is.  Basically, Leitkultur is a defensive posture in response to the influx of foreigners into the Fatherland:

Von Beginn an stand die Debatte um die Leitkultur im Zusammenhang mit der

Masseneinwanderung aus außereuropäischen, insbesondere muslimischen Kulturen.

Der Zustrom von Fremden, die mit der europäischen und deutschen Lebensweise

nicht vertraut sind und diese in Teilen sogar geringachten und zurückweisen, warf

die Frage auf, worauf für ein auskömmliches Zusammenleben in Freiheit nicht

verzichtet werden kann. Leitend war dabei die Überzeugung, dass Relativismus und Multik

ulturalismus keine angemessene Antwort auf diese Frage sein können.

Die Politik des  Relativismus und des Multikulturalismus  führe letztlich zu

einem unverbundenen Nebeneinander von Parallelgesellschaften, denen es

an gemeinsamen Bezugspunkten für das allgemeine Zusammenleben mangelt. Die

Fragmentierung der Gesellschaft führe zur Erosion des Rechts, zur Verschärfung sozialer

Konflikte und zum Anstieg von Gewalt. Um diesen negativen Entwicklungen zu begegnen

sei es notwendig, sich der Gehalte des verbindlichen Konsenses zu vergewissern, der die

Grundlage gesamtgesellschaftlichen Zusammenlebens darstellt.

Literature, of course, is a major component of the German Leitkultur.  The great German poets and novelists provide are a cohesive force - binding the Volk to it common German heritage.  The authors of the paper do not hesitate to list those authors that are essential to any concept of German Leitkultur:

Exemplarisch seien genannt: Das Bauhaus, Benedikt X („Wir sind Papst“), der Deutsche

Idealismus, unsere Dichter und Denker (wie z.B. Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Fontane),

Leaving aside for a moment the universalist Schiller ("alle Menschen werden Brüder") and the anglophile Fontane, Heine and Goethe may not be the ideal representatives of the ethno-nationalist identity politics promoted by the authors. Heine spent most of his creative life in self-imposed exile in France.  His native Germany was for him “the land of bigots,” where patriotism consisted of “hatred of the French, hatred of civilization, and hatred of liberalism,” and where “servility was in the German soul.” France, on the other hand, was “not only the wittiest of nations, but also the most compassionate."

As for Goethe, I have to ask whether the authors of the Leitkultur paper have actually read much of his work.  If they had, they would have known that Goethe had a life-long fascination with the Koran, which he knew as well as the Bible and considered it just as important. One of Goethe's most beautiful Sturm und Drang poems is Mohomets Gesang (1772)  ("Song for Mohammed") in which meaning of the prophet Mohammed  is put into the metaphor of the stream, starting from the smallest beginning and growing to be an immense spiritual power, expanding, unfolding, and gloriously ending in the ocean, the symbol for divinity. He especially describes the religious genius in carrying the other people with him like the stream does with small brooks and rivers.

Kommt ihr alle! –
Und nun schwillt er
Herrlicher; ein ganz Geschlechte
Trägt den Fürsten hoch empor!
Und im rollenden Triumphe
Gibt er Ländern Namen, Städte
Werden unter seinem Fuß.

Unaufhaltsam rauscht er weiter,
Läßt der Türme Flammengipfel,
Marmorhäuser, eine Schöpfung
Seiner Fülle, hinter sich.

And did the AfD authors ever read Goethe's late poem/prose cycle - West-östlicher Divan - , his homage to the great Persian poet Hafiz?  The work contains some of Goethe's most famous poems, such as Selige Sehnsucht.  His goal was a reconciliation - or even a fusion - of the Occident with the Orient, of Christianity with Islam:

              „Wer sich selbst und andere kennt /

                Wird auch hier erkennen /

                Orient und Okzident/

                Sind nicht mehr zu trennen.“ 

Sounds pretty Multi-Kulti to me!

 

Denise Levertov: "Thinking About Paul Celan"

   I've written about the (British) American poet Denise Levertov and her love of Rilke's poetry - which informed her work since she began writing poetry in the 1940s.  I don't know how many other German poets she was familiar with, but shortly before her death in 1997 she wrote this poem: Thinking about Paul Celan.  We know that Denise Levertov thought and wrote about the Holocaust, and was moved by the paintings of Anselm Kiefer.  Undoubtedly she knew Kiefer's painting Margarethe, which was inspired by Paul Celan's great poem Todesfuge.   In her Celan poem, Levertov alludes to the poet's suicide ("You at last could endure no more.") and contrasts that to the survivors who are able to go on - even flourish - amidst the pain and suffering - blithely "exceeding out allotted days."   Interestingly, Levertov "christianizes" Celan. Levertov was the daughter of a Hassidic Jewish scholar, but converted to Roman Catholicism late in life.

 

THINKING ABOUT PAUL CELAN

 

Saint Celan,

stretched on the cross

of survival,

pray for us. You

at last could endure

no more. But we

live and live,

      blithe in a world.

        where children kill children.

            We shake off

                   the weight of

                       our own exemption,

                  we flourish,

                   we exceed

                       our allotted days.

                       Saint Celan,

                      pray for us

                        that we receive

                         at least a bruise,

                             blue, blue, unfading,

                              we who accept survival.

 

Rilke as Lodestar: The Poetry of Denise Levertov

"Rilke was a jerk", the American poet John Berryman wrote in his third Dream Song.  But no other German poet has had such a profound influence on the course of modern American poetry - ironic, since Rilke despised everything American.  Rilke was greatly admired by Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams - polar opposites in poetic sensibilities.  Rilke is notoriously difficult to translate, but that didn't prevent poets such as Randall Jarrell and Robert Bly from attempting to do so.  Robert Lowell, whose command of German was shaky, at best, wrote one 0f his best poems - Pigeons (for Hannah Arendt) - as an Imitation of Rilke's Taube, die draußen blieb.

But no American poet was as "loyal" to Rilke as Denise Levertov (I categorize Levertov as an American poet, even though she was born in Wales.  Most of her important work was written in America).  Throughout her long career as a poet, Levertov was open to many influences - the poetry of T.S.Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, the art of Cezanne and Anselm Kiefer.  But Rilke - his poems, his letters, his novel Malte Laurids Brigge - was a source of constant inspiration to the very end of her life.

In her essay Rilke as Mentor (1981) Levertov writes about how reading Malte and Letters to a Young Poet at a young age gave her "permission" to be a poet - even though she never studied formally (Levertov was an autodidact):

"Rilke's works reinforced by assumption that I did not have to undertake special (academic) studies to develop my poetry, but need only continue to read and write, and to be open to whatever might befall me; the rest must depend on my native abilities and the degree of intensity and persistence that I was prepared to devote to the service of the art."

Levertov also was far from fluent in German, although she picked up some Kuchendeutsch as a child from her polyglot father and also knew Old English quite well.  In Rilke as Mentor she freely admits that her love of Rilke was based initially on translation of his prose works. But while teaching at Stanford in the 1980s she enlisted the help of a graduate student in German Studies to help her read Rilke's lyric poet in the original. The student (Barbara Hyams) wisely chose the early Stunden-Buch poem cycle as a place to start (see "Reading Rilke with Denise Levertov").  The tutoring sessions paid off handsomely when Levertov wrote two Variations on a Theme by Rilke based on two poems from Das Stunden-Buch which later served as bookends to her 1987 collection Breathing the Water. 

But it was not so much individual poems or poetic technique that drew Denise Levertov back to Rilke over and over again, but rather his example of how to live as a poet in the world:

"Rilke presents to any young poet an example of basic attitude that can remain relevant throughout a lifetime because it is reverent, passionate, and comprehensive. His reverence for "the savor of creation," as he calls it in a diary excerpt, leads him to concrete and sensuous images.  His passion for "inseeing" leads him to delight, terror, transformation, and the internalization (or absorption) of experience.  And his comprehensiveness, which makes no distinction between meeting art and meeting life, shows the poet a way to bridge the gap between the conduct of living and the conduct of art. Because he articulated a view of the poet's role that has not lost significance as I have read and reread Rilke's prose for almost four decades, he remains a mentor for me now as he was when I was a young girl."  (Denise Levertov, Rilke as Mentor) 

In his essay Über den Dichter, Rilke describes a dream which serves as a parable for the poet's mission.  He dreamed he was on a large boat that is moving upstream off the island of Philae. The oarsmen are struggling against the current, their attention focused entirely on the mechanics of rowing. A man is standing at the bow, singing, his focus is on the unseen destination.  His singing, not entirely coherent, seems to empower the the oarsmen to propel the vessel forward:

Das Schiff bewältigte den Wider stand; er aber, der Zauberer, verwandelte Das, was nicht zu bewältigen war, in eine Folge langer schwebender Töne, die weder hierhin noch dorthin gehörten, und die jeder für sich in Anspruch nahm. Während seine Umgebung sich immer wieder mit dem greifbaren Nächsten einließ und es überwand, unterhielt seine Stimme die Beziehung zum Weitesten, knüpfte uns daran an, bis es uns zog.

Levertov used this dream as the basis for a beautiful homage to her lifelong mentor:

                To Rilke

Once, in dream,

                                the boat

pushed off from shore.

You at the prow were the man—

all voice, though silent – who bound

rowers and voyagers to the needful journey,

the veiled distance, imperative mystery.

All the couched effort,

                creak of oarlocks, odor of sweat

                sound of waters

                running against us

was transcended: your gaze

held as we crossed. Its dragonfly blue

restored to us

                                a shimmering destination.

I had not read yet of your Nile journey,

the enabling voice

drawing that boat upstream in your parable,

Strange that I knew

your silence was just such a song.

(from Denise Levertov, A Door in the Hive (1989))

Denise Levertov: Variation on a Theme by Rilke

The American poet (born in England - 1923) Denise Levertov was influenced by many poets throughout her long career.  As a girl and young poet her greatest influence was T.S. Eliot, who encouraged her after Levertov - then just 12 years old - wrote to him.  After moving to the United States with her American husband in 1948 she struck up a friendship with William Carlos Williams, who had a profound influence - especially during her formative years when she came into her own as a poet.  But the one influence on Levertov that was a constant throughout her life - not just on her poetic style, but also on what it means to live as a poet in the world - was Rainer Maria Rilke.

Here she takes an early poem of Rilke's and transforms it into something new and powerful.  While in Rilke's poem the poetic inspiration describe comes from within the poet - ringing like bell, for Levertov it comes from a force without - a transcendent God.

 

Variation on a Theme by Rilke

A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me--a sky, air, light:
a being.  And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task,  The day's blow
rang out, metallic--or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.

Levertov, Denise, Breathing the Water (New York, NY: New Directions Publishing Corp., 1987)

 

Rainer Maria Rilke

---

Das Stunden-Buch . 2. Auflage 1907

Da neigt sich die Stunde und rührt mich an
mit klarem, metallenem Schlag:
mir zittern die Sinne. Ich fühle: ich kann -
und ich fasse den plastischen Tag.

Nichts war noch vollendet, eh ich es erschaut,
ein jedes Werden stand still.
Meine Blicke sind reif, und wie eine Braut
kommt jedem das Ding, das er will.

Nichts ist mir zu klein und ich lieb es trotzdem
und mal es auf Goldgrund und groß,
und halte es hoch, und ich weiß nicht wem
löst es die Seele los...

Poetry Month: Elisabeth Langgässer

Keeping with the theme of National Poetry Month, I offer a poem by Elisabeth Langgässer (1899-1951), a Catholic poet and novelist.  I am making my way through her masterpiece, Das unauslöschliche Siegel (The Indelible Seal) and have looked into her biography a bit. The poem Frühling 1946  (Spring 1946) was dedicated to her daughter Cordelia, who, as Langgässer learned in 1946, had miraculously survived Auschwitz. Langgässer herself had been deemed a Mischling - or half-Jew - in the Third Reich, and was therefore prohibited from publishing until after the war.  And so in 1946 Langgässer was reborn as a writer and a mother. In the poem the poet is literally brought back from the realm of death (Reich der Kröte) by the flower Anemone, who is identifed with Nausicaa, the rescuer of Ulysees.  In the final line, Nausicaa is recognized as her child.

Frühling 1946 (für Cordelia)

 

Holde Anemone,

bist du wieder da

und erscheinst mit heller Krone

mir Geschundenem zum Lohne

wie Nausikaa?

 

Windbewegtes Bücken,

Woge, Schaum und Licht!

Ach, welch sphärisches Entzücken

nahm dem staubgebeugten Rücken

endlich sein Gewicht?

 

Aus dem Reich der Kröte

steige ich empor,

unterm Lid noch Plutons Röte

und des Totenführers Flöte

gräßlich noch im Ohr.

 

Sah in Gorgos Auge

eisenharten Glanz,

ausgesprühte Lügenlauge

hört‘ ich flüstern, daß sie tauge

mich zu töten ganz.

 

Anemone! Küssen

laß mich dein Gesicht:

Ungespiegelt von den Flüssen

Styx und Lethe, ohne Wissen

um das Nein und Nicht.

 

Ohne zu verführen,

lebst und bist du da,

still mein Herz zu rühren,

ohne es zu schüren -

Kind Nausikaa!