14. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock
‘Der Zürchersee’1
p. 270-290
Texte intégral
Schön ist, Mutter Natur, deiner Erfindung Pracht
Auf die Fluren verstreut, schöner ein froh Gesicht,
Das den großen Gedanken
Deiner Schöpfung noch Einmal denkt.
Von des schimmernden Sees Traubengestaden her,
Oder, flohest du schon wieder zum Himmel auf,
Kom in röthendem Strale
Auf dem Flügel der Abendluft,
Kom, und lehre mein Lied jugendlich heiter seyn,
Süße Freude, wie du! gleich dem beseelteren
Schnellen Jauchzen des Jünglings,
Sanft, der fühlenden Fanny gleich.
Schon lag hinter uns weit Uto, an dessen Fuß
Zürch in ruhigem Tal freye Bewohner nährt;
Schon war manches Gebirge
Voll von Reben vorbeygeflohn.
Jetzt entwölkte sich fern silberner Alpen Höh,
Und der Jünglinge Herz schlug schon empfindender,
Schon verrieth es beredter
Sich der schönen Begleiterin.
“ Hallers Doris”, die sang, selber des Liedes werth,
Hirzels Daphne, den Kleist innig wie Gleimen liebt;
Und wir Jünglinge sangen,
Und empfanden, wie Hagedorn.
Jetzo nahm uns die Au in die beschattenden
Kühlen Arme des Walds, welcher die Insel krönt;
Da, da kamest du, Freude!
Volles Maßes auf uns herab!
Göttin Freude, du selbst! dich, wir empfanden dich!
Ja, du warest es selbst, Schwester der Menschlichkeit,
Deiner Unschuld Gespielin,
Die sich über uns ganz ergoß!
Süß ist, fröhlicher Lenz, deiner Begeistrung Hauch,
Wenn die Flur dich gebiert, wenn sich dein Odem sanft
In der Jünglinge Herzen,
Und die Herzen der Mädchen gießt.
Ach du machst das Gefühl siegend, es steigt durch dich
Jede blühende Brust schöner und bebender,
Lauter redet der Liebe
Nun entzauberter Mund durch dich!
Lieblich winket der Wein, wenn er Empfindungen,
Beßre sanftere Lust, wenn er Gedanken winkt,
Im sokratischen Becher
Von der thauenden Ros’ umkränzt;
Wenn er dringt bis ins Herz, und zu Entschließungen,
Die der Säufer verkennt, jeden Gedanken weckt,
Wenn er lehret verachten,
Was nicht würdig des Weisen ist.
Reizvoll klinget des Ruhms lockender Silberton
In das schlagende Herz, und die Unsterblichkeit
Ist ein großer Gedanke,
Ist des Schweisses der Edeln werth!
Durch der Lieder Gewalt, bey der Urenkelin
Sohn und Tochter noch seyn; mit der Entzückung Ton
Oft beym Namen genennet,
Oft gerufen vom Grabe her,
Dann ihr sanfteres Herz bilden, und, Liebe, dich,
Fromme Tugend, dich auch gießen, ins sanfte Herz,
Ist, beym Himmel! nicht wenig!
Ist des Schweisses der Edlen werth!
Aber süßer ist noch, schöner und reizender,
In dem Arme des Freunds wissen ein Freund zu seyn!
So das Leben genießen,
Nicht unwürdig der Ewigkeit!
Treuer Zärtlichkeit voll, in den Umschattungen,
In den Lüften des Walds, und mit gesenktem Blick
Auf die silberne Welle,
That ich schweigend den frommen Wunsch:
Wäret ihr auch bey uns, die ihr mich ferne liebt,
In des Vaterlands Schooß einsam von mir verstreut,
Die in seligen Stunden
Meine suchende Seele fand;
O so bauten wir hier Hütten der Freundschaft uns!
Ewig wohnten wir hier, ewig! Der Schattenwald
Wandelt‘ uns sich in Tempe,
Jenes Thal in Elysium !2
1The eighteenth century which produced Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock is two things. It is an age of contentment with its existing poetic achievements, with its mastery of rules and bienséances, its crafting of a language consonant with these aims. But it is also an age unruly in itself, filled with an inner unease and with the hope that the masters of German poetry might find better ways of exploring the deeper urges of the human soul and might be more adequate to the task of saying what the heart wishes to utter. One remedy might be to look at great outside models and their forms, Greek and Roman, for instance, and this poem bears some of that influence. Or one might look at one’s own native tradition of German poetry, the great formers and moulders of the German language. It comes as no surprise that Klopstock counts as one of the revivers of what we might call the Germanic inheritance, not in any strictly historical sense, but in his general awareness of standing in a line of descent which first peaks with Martin Luther and continues with Martin Opitz and Albrecht von Haller. When in 1750 he went to Zurich and this poem came about, it was at the invitation of Johann Jacob Bodmer. Bodmer counts as the first major renewer and editor of Middle High German poetry in the eighteenth century. We associate him, not always happily, with the movement towards a new expressiveness in the German language. In this, his true, if rather wayward, disciple is Klopstock. Klopstock dedicates an ode to him (‘An Bodmer’), written in the same year as ‘Der Zürchersee/Lake Zurich’. It has to do with moral and poetic models — and with friendship. Of all these factors, it is the sense of a new mastery of poetic language that is carried over into the poem with which we are concerned here.
2Nowhere else in Europe was poetry like this being written around 1750. But it is not enough to say that Klopstock is better than William Collins or Thomas Gray or Jean-Baptiste Rousseau or Albrecht von Haller. As a landmark the poem remains difficult and slightly intractable. It is ‘difficult’ in the sense that today so much of it requires explanation and explication. Its subject is friendship. This is not necessarily something alien to modern experience, at least it shouldn’t be. But modern poems tend to deal more with friends than with the notion or concept of friendship itself. Thus in 1977 the East German poet Volker Braun, actually quoting Klopstock’s poem, wrote
Aber am schönsten ist
Von des schimmernden Sees Traubengestaden her
in der Zeit Wirre
Die die Freunde verstreut roh
Vom Herzen mir, eins zu sein
Mit seinem Land, und
Gedacht
Mit Freunden voll das Schiff [...]2
3These are lines very different in tone from Klopstock’s, despite ranging poetry and friendship with national language and nation (‘eins zu sein / Mit seinem Land’). For Braun’s is a political poem about friends, ‘all in the same boat’, but some are now tipped out of it by the course which others steer. Klopstock’s poem provides for Braun the intertext and the contexture for reflexions on nation and state that Klopstock, at least in 1750, kept out of his poetic considerations: It might seem different when Friedrich Hölderlin, in 1789 and again in 1790, copied out stanzas thirteen and fourteen of Klopstock’s poem for his friends Johann Christoph Benjamin Rümelin and Clemens Christian Camerer:
Reizvoll klinget des Ruhms lockender Silberton
In das schlagende Herz, und die Unsterblichkeit
Ist ein großer Gedanke,
Ist des Schweisses der Edlen werth!
Durch der Lieder Gewalt, bey der Urenkelin
Sohn und Tochter noch seyn; mit der Entzückung Ton
Oft beym Namen genennet,
Oft gerufen vom Grabe her [… ]4
4Yet the young Hölderlin, despite the importance for him of the addressees of poems as a friendly and reassuring presence, extracts from Klopstock not the notion of friendship, but the sound of poetic fame. This is what he wants to share with his friends. And when in another early poem, ‘Mein Vorsaz/My Purpose’, he talks of striving after ‘Klopstoksgröße’,5 he is already aligning himself with the grand tradition of Pindar and Horace that he sees represented in German by the older man’s poetry. And yet, as I hope to demonstrate, Hölderlin, like Goethe before him, engraved ‘Der Zürchersee’ in his memory and retrieved from it something that Klopstock would have regarded as incidental: the extraordinary landscape description.
5For us today that landscape description has landmark quality. A line like ‘Von des schimmernden Sees Traubengestaden her’6 has rhythm and musicality, but also inner dynamism (‘Von […] her’) and inventiveness (‘Traubengestaden’): not just the lake shore covered with vineyards, but the much more concrete lake shore seemingly hanging with bunches of grapes. When Hölderlin later writes his most famous first stanza, for ‘Hälfte des Lebens’, we note how much he has learned from Klopstock with that merging of fruit and shore in one process (‘Mit gelben Birnen hänget […] Das Land in den See’).3 And it is fair to say that no poet in German before 1750 and few since, have managed such a good line as Klopstock’s here, certainly Goethe and Hölderlin, but there our short list ends. But as I said, for Klopstock the landscape is incidental, the background, at most the scene of other things much closer to his heart. How do we know? The opening of the poem will tell us:
Schön ist, Mutter Natur, deiner Erfindung Pracht
Auf die Fluren verstreut, schöner ein froh Gesicht,
Das den großen Gedanken
Deiner Schöpfung noch Einmal denkt.4
6We can see from this prelude to ‘Der Zürchersee’ how alien a landmark it is, certainly to post-Goethean or post-Wordsworthian sensitivities. But a poem written 250 years ago, especially one as complex as this, is unlikely to reveal its qualities without some understanding of the period in which it was written and of the poet who wrote it.5 We must be very careful not to misread this opening. Mother Nature, far from being the commonplace it is now (although the idea of all-provident maternal nature existed long since as a trope in religious and semi-religious discourse),6 was regarded by Klopstock’s conservative contemporaries as too bold and thus inappropriate. Far from suggesting with that verb ‘denkt’ (‘ponder’) that we should turn away from nature to rational activity, Klopstock is actually using it more or less in the same sense as ‘empfinden’ (‘feeling‘).7 Thus the first stanza recognizes nature in its fulness, but also claims for the human mind the faculty of recreating through the processes of inward contemplation and feeling what is ‘out there’. That still leaves us, however, with that irksome word ‘Gedanken’ (‘thought’). Time and again, Klopstock makes it clear that for him, the religious poet that he sees himself to be, it is the creator, not creation, that has prominence in the scheme of the universe. The opening of the ode ‘Dem Unendlichen/To the Eternal One’ (1764) is even more uncompromising that our poem’s:
Wie erhebt sich das Herz, wenn es dich,
Unendlicher, denkt! wie sinkt es,
Wenns auf sich herunterschaut! [...]8
7Klopstock is here formulating an idea which we associate with the word sublime (in German ‘das Erhabene’), the contemplation of the grand and elevated to produce an effect, as he says, ‘Wie erhebt sich das Herz’ (‘How the heart leaps’). With ‘Der Zürchersee’ we are just seven years before Edmund Burke separated the categories of the sublime and beautiful. We find them both prefigured in a letter of Klopstock’s closely connected in time and place with ‘Der Zürchersee’. On his way to Zurich in 1750 he is visiting that ‘must’ for all eighteenth-century travellers, the falls on the Rhine at Schaffhausen:
Dem Rheinfalle gegenüber
auf einem schattigen Hügel.
8Welch ein großer Gedanke der Schöpfung ist dieser Wasserfall! — Ich kann itzt davon weiter nichts sagen, ich muß diesen großen Gedanken sehen und hören. — Sei gegrüßt, Strom! der du zwischen Hügeln herunter stäubst und donnerst und du, der den Strom hoch dahin führt, sei dreimal, o Schöpfer! in deiner Herrlichkeit angebetet!
9Hier im Angesichte des großen Rheinfalls, in dem Getöse seines mächtigen Brausens, auf einer holdseligen Höhe im Grase gestreckt, hier grüß ich Euch, nahe und ferne Freunde, und vor allem dich, du werthes Land, das mein Fuß jetzt betreten soll! Seyd mir tausendmal gegrüßet! — O! daß ich Alle, die ich liebe, hieher versammlen könnte, mit ihnen eines solchen Werkes der Natur recht zu genießen! Hier möcht‘ ich mein Leben zubringen und an dieser Stelle sterben, so schön ist sie. — Weiter kann ich davon nichts ausdrücken. Hier kann man keinen andern Gedanken und keinen Wunsch hegen, als seine Freunde um sich zu haben und beständig hier zu bleiben.
Und ich sage im Namen aller dieser Freunde: Amen! Hallelujah! —— Klopstock.9
10This remarkable passage makes it clear that ‘Der Zürchersee’ is expressing notions of nature, creation and friendship that are close to Klopstock’s heart. We notice words like ‘schön’ and ‘holdselig’ (‘beautiful’, ‘beauteous’) but also ‘Getöse seines mächtigen Brausens’ (‘resounding noise of its uproar’, the sublime). We note how a nature depiction similar in its boldness to ‘Der Zürchersee’ (‘der du zwischen Hügeln herunter stäubst und donnerst’/‘that beween the hills sprays and thunders’) is placed in the wider context of the One who created it; how nature becomes the expression of the soul of God himself. Equally significant is the human relationship most appropriate for the enjoyment of the spectacle and its implications: friendship. In this religious context, where poetry seeks — however inadequately — to tell the wonders of creation, it is friends who form the only appropriate companionship. The theme of friendship as such comes as no surprise, perhaps only its intensity and exclusiveness. For Aristotle, Cicero, Montaigne, even Voltaire and so many others, friendship is the ideal human relation; it crosses the dividing lines of classical humanitas to embrace the virtues common to both ancient and Christian moral thinking. In the eighteenth century, where feeling, the practice of virtue, and social intercourse are perceived as one human activity, giving rise to the direct expression of emotions, the classical greatness of soul traditionally associated with friendship is ratified by the Christian experience of ‘where two or three are gathered together’.10 Klopstock need not have looked farther than the literary practice of his own time to remark the pervasiveness of friendship as a theme. Yet, when a slightly older contemporary, Samuel Gotthold Lange, begins a poem ‘Die Freunde’ (1745) with ‘lch will, ich will die Freunde besingen’,11 we feel that he is cranking up a piece of cumbersome mechanism. Klopstock, on the other hand, is prepared to invest friendship with the supreme attributes of the high style of poetry: his long ode in classical alcaic stanzas, ‘Auf meine Freunde/To My Friends’ (1747), invokes in its opening stanzas Apollo, Dionysus and Pindar before apostrophizing his friends collectively and singly. His friends become part of the poetic act that is unfolding in verses like:
Wie Hebe, kühn und jugendlich ungestüm,
Wie mit dem goldnen Köcher Latonens Sohn,
Unsterblich, sing ich meine Freunde
Feyrend in mächtigen Dithyramben.
Wilst du zu Strophen werden, o Lied oder
Ununterwürfig, Pindars Gesängen gleich,
Gleich Zeus erhabnem truncknem Sohne,
Frey aus der schaffenden Sel enttaumeln?12
11I have mentioned all of this extra-textual material to assist us on our way into the first stanza of the poem. Before looking more closely at the text stanza by stanza, we ought to consider the circumstances that led to its being written in the first place. In 1750, on a journey to Switzerland (as quoted above), Klopstock sojourned in Zurich. Zurich, the home of Johann Jacob Bodmer and Johann Jacob Breitinger, is the centre of the new poetry and the new aesthetics that are causing rifts and dissensions in the world of German letters. Zurich is on the side of imagination and feeling (‘hertzrührende Schreibart’). Breitinger’s Critische Dichtkunst/ Critical Poetics (1740) sums up ‘die bewegliche und hertzrührende Schreibart’13 as follows:
Die Eigenschaft dieser Sprache bestehet demnach darinnen, daß sie in der Anordnung ihres Vortrags, in der Verbindung und Zusammensetzung der Wörter und Redensarten, und in der Einrichtung der Rede-Sätze sich an kein grammatisches Gesetze, oder logicalische Ordnung, die ein gesezteres Gemüthe erfordern, bindet; sondern der Rede eine solche Art der Verbindung, der Zusammenordnung giebt, wie es die raschen Vorstellungen einer durch die Wuth der Leidenschaften auf einem gewissen Grad erhizten Phantasie erheischen […].14
12Breitinger is not advocating chaos and disorder in poetic discourse, but a form of order and combination not subject to mechanisms, able to free itself from the bonds of logical order at the behest of non-rational intimations. Klopstock, almost on cue, arrives in Zurich as the author of the opening cantos of a religious epic, Der Messias/The Messiah, which is a declaration in favour of the poetry of emotion, of expression, of imagination, of bold formal experiment. Klopstock is taken by friends on a boating excursion on the Lake of Zurich, done in his honour. He leaves a long factual account in a letter to his cousin; Johann Kaspar Hirzel, mentioned in the poem, wrote similarly to Ewald von Kleist, also immortalized.15 We learn who the company was and where they went. Klopstock flirted with the sister of one of the society. But the bare bones of Klopstock’s account do not prepare us in any way for the poem that arises from the occasion. I use that phrase in preference to ‘occasional poem’. For the poem that proceeds from a certain time and place transcends the occasion and arcs over into central concerns of the poet, not subject to the bonds and constraints of time or place.
13The incidentals of experience are transformed by the shaping hand of metrical form. The dignity of classical verse removes these events from the purely adventitious sphere and translates them into that of rhetoric, the high style. It is classical rhetoric in the service of ‘den großen Gedanken’, the great thought. It involves an ultimately religious contemplation of nature, but also the active will to extract from it a precept and an example for Christian ethics, what older religious language called ‘conversation’. That is why the poem will not permit ‘Mutter Natur’ more than a secondary place in its scheme of things. Klopstock chooses as his verse the fourth asclepiad ode stanza, known to generations of schoolchildren through Horace’s ‘O fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro’. He takes the metrical pattern of the classical original and makes its quantities correspond to the strong and weak beats of German poetry. That is, his language follows the normal accentuation of German, so that ‘Schön ist, Mutter Natur, deiner Erfindung Pracht’ can be read as a line of verse, but also as quite naturally cadenced German. These ode stanzas (alcaic, asclepiad, sapphic) appeal because they can express both the order and the imaginative enthusiasm that Breitinger spoke of. Their introduction into German by Klopstock is the major breakthrough in eighteenth-century German poetry before Goethe. The asclepiad stanza is largely dactylic (-xx), so that there is movement implicit in the verse form. This isn’t stately verse like the alcaic (‘Wie Hebe kühn und jugendlich ungestüm’, the opening of ‘Auf meine Freunde’); it is characterized by movement inside each line, with a marked masculine ending to verses one, two and four.16 Those strong beats are important, for they start and end each line. Klopstock puts his connecting words at the beginning of the stanza: ‘Komm’, ‘Schon’, ‘Jetzt’, ‘Jetzo’. He often ends his stanza with a dynamically stressed word: ‘Abendluft’, ‘vorbeigeflohn’, ‘auf uns herab’, ‘ganz ergoß’ etc. And so we hear those unusual words — new — his compounds (‘Traubengestaden’, ‘entwölkte’, ‘vorbeigeflohn’) or his intensifying comparatives (‘beseelteren’, ‘empfindender’, ‘beredter’, ‘bebender’, ‘sanfter’), which English cannot render, inside the structure of the verse. That is why the line ‘Von des schimmernden Sees Traubengestaden her’ is so remarkable, in terms of vocabulary, verbal experiment and poetic musicality. Klopstock isn’t all tortuous syntax or interruption, as some of the older standard wisdom on the subject would have it.17 It is true that his poetry exemplifies what he calls ‘Darstellung’: ‘Unvermutetes, scheinbare Unordnung, schnelles Abbrechen des Gedankens, erregte Erwartung, alles dieses setzt die Seele in eine Bewegung, die sie für die Eindrücke empfänglicher macht’.18 Stanza two, with its difficult inversions (‘Oder, flohest du schon wieder vom Himmel auf’) might illustrate the point, as might stanza six with its double objective ‘Hallers Doris, die sang […] Hirzels Daphne, den Kleist innig wie Gleimen liebt’. But anyone with a musical ear will, I hope, hear the harmony and grace of ‘Jetzt entwölkte sich fern silbener Alpen Höh’ or ‘Jetzo nahm uns die Au in die beschattenden/Kühlen Arme des Walds’. Through this kind of verse — this needs to be said — German poetry is liberated from the grip of those ‘vers communs’, rhymed iambic pentameter, that dominate the high style or the didactic mode before the 1740s, or from shapeless madrigal verses, such as Barthold Heinrich Brockes’s, with their varying line length. The releasing of poetic energy with Klopstock is unstoppable. He does not directly influence all subsequent developments in eighteenth-century German poetry. But he produces a willingness to respond to a whole variety of forms and influences that produce the extraordinary ‘mix’ of the next fifty years or so of German poetic expression. That is the essential link forward from ‘Der Zürchersee’ to Goethe, Schiller and Hölderlin.
14To return to our poem. Perhaps it is not by chance that Klopstock often ends his rhetorical sections by introducing more cadenced nature passages. Thus, stanza one with its double apostrophe to Mother Nature and to a human apperception of nature, breaks off and leads over to ‘Von des schimmernden Sees Traubengestaden her’. This in turn produces the unruly and inverted stanzas two and three that apostrophize joy. For the lake shore is only important as the place where joy, here personified, descends in the evening zephyr, to produce ‘Jauchzen’, her more ecstatic manifestation, but also gentler feelings (‘sanft’). It is as if joy were coming down in that very moment to assist the writing of the poem, suggesting that its artistry is really improvised on the spur of the moment. Klopstock does not want his poem to be impersonal, so he names the young woman who is susceptible to such tender feeling. In the first printing of the poem he wrote ‘Sch… inn‘, meaning his cousin Fanny Schmidt. As in that other poem ‘An Gott’ (‘To God’), so excoriated by Lessing, Klopstock is not above introducing the object of his personal hopes and devotion in the context of his poetic metier. It shows our poet to be very human after all. (Fanny Schmidt rejected him.)
15Klopstock then changes tense to the imperfect, to introduce five stanzas dealing with the boat excursion, his companions, and their feelings. The abruptness of this transition is at first bewildering: ‘Schon lag’. We are taken into the real event, in medias res, to be told, not what they saw, but what was already ‘hinter uns’, ‘vorbeigeflohn’. It leads over to that remarkable line ‘Jetzt entwölkte sich fern silberner Alpen Höh’, running slap against a sublime manifestation of nature, in a dramatic confrontation. Stanza after stanza of Albrecht von Haller’s ‘Die Alpen’, one of the century’s great didactic poems, never came up with a line like this. But it is not nature, it is human company that quickens the pulse (‘empfindender’) and gives more eloquent utterance (‘beredter’). Note that a technical and syntactical device, much favoured by Klopstock, the anastrophic genitive, enables him to stress — and link — ‘Höh’ and ‘Herz‘. Feeling and words now combine in that strangely tortuous next stanza six. Once we have teased out its syntax, we might be tempted to dismiss it as one of the poem’s weak spots. But look at its positioning in the very centre of those five stanzas that describe the journey on the lake. It is this invocation of names that leads over to the renewed apostrophizing of joy, ‘Freude’ or ‘Göttin Freude’ in stanzas seven and eight. Eighteenth-century poetry is not inhibited about naming names, and so many of Klopstock’s poems address real persons. Hölderlin, too, takes comfort in the presence of the friends to whom he dedicates his poems: ‘sagst du’, ‘Aber Freund’, to Heinse in ‘Brod und Wein’, ‘mein Sinklair’ to Isaak von Sinclair in ‘Der Rhein’.19 Klopstock’s stanza links friends (Hirzel and his wife) and friends who also are poets. Hirzel’s wife, here given the stylized Arcadian name of Daphne, sang Haller’s ode to Doris; Hirzel, of whom Kleist is as fond as he is of Gleim. Ewald von Kleist, Gleim and Hagedorn are poet-friends; the respected older Swiss poet Haller is a congenial spirit. For Klopstock, poetry and friendship belong together; the creative act is also a corporate act. Poetry gives the legitimation to the expression of such feeling.
16That stanza six, with its two-fold stressed ‘Und’ now urges over to stanzas seven and eight, ‘Jetzo’, ‘da’, ‘auf uns herab’, ‘Dich’. The communal experience in nature (‘in die beschattenden / Kühlen Arme des Walds’) brings the renewed presence of joy, descending in personified guise, the sister of its guileless companion, humanity. Eighteenth-century German poets, from Hagedorn to Schiller, have a weakness for addresses to joy, ‘An die Freude’, or to other allegorical virtues.20 But this poem, as we see, is not a mere ode to joy like Hagedorn’s. Its descent to Schiller’s poem is also not direct. Were it not for those verbs of action ‘kamest […] herab’ and ‘ergoß’ (stanza 8), we might nevertheless say that the poem has moved rapidly away from real persons in real places to abstractions. The next seven stanzas (9–15) in fact make no direct reference to the excursion, subsumed as they are under that general experience of joy. Instead, they mark a process of intensification, from the visual (‘fröhlicher Lenz’), to taste (‘winket der Wein’), to sound (‘klinget des Ruhms lockender Silberton’). That process is plotted by nature, but a very non-specific nature (‘Lenz’, ‘Flur’, ‘Odem’) couched in conventional language. And nature makes feeling triumphant; it removes the inhibitions between ‘der Jünglinge Herzen’ and ‘die Herzen der Mädchen’. Wine gladdens the heart of men, but the gladness it imparts is enhanced by moderation (the ‘sokratischer Becher’). It is the teacher who tells us what is worthy of ‘der Weise’. This is not an easy word to translate: it has associations with wisdom, but also with moderation and abstinence and the stoical satisfaction with one’s lot. It is also the subject of a poem by Friedrich von Hagedorn, whom Klopstock has already addressed. The scale has even higher stages. For fame, immortality that outlives its own generation, transferred through the act of poetry, nurturing the virtues of love and goodness (‘fromm’), is worthy of the highest effort of the noble soul. The young Hölderlin clearly found this sentiment appropriate for his friends’ commonplace books. These seven stanzas, with their invocation of nature, wine, and fame, are also related to the earlier address to the poet-friends. Kleist, Gleim and Hagedorn represent the strand of eighteenth-century poetry that celebrates the gentle virtues, the happy life without excess; Albrecht von Haller sings the high moral qualities of the human soul. All of them value friendship. Thus, the sections are thematically linked.
17Our poem could end here. It has catalogued joy, feeling, wise moderation, and fame, in an ascending scale. Part of that process of impulsion upwards has been sustained by the use of absolute comparatives: ‘schöner’, ‘bebender’, ‘Lauter’, ‘sanfter’. It cannot seemingly mount higher. It can. ‘Gedanken’, ‘Entschließungen’, ‘Ruhm and ‘Tugend’ cede the place of honour to ‘life’ and ‘eternity’ ‘in the arm of a friend’ (stanza 15). Klopstock has described a huge arc from the ‘froh Gesicht’ of stanza one, has taken in the virtues of human company and conviviality, in order to state in this fifteenth stanza what humankind’s highest aspiration is. But the stanza remains unspecific. Klopstock therefore appends three further stanzas to spell out the implications of friendship. He remembers the occasion that gave rise to the poem, and conflates the various earlier elements of nature description, ‘schimmernder See’, ‘silberner Alpen Höh’ and ‘beschattenden / Kühlen Arme des Walds’ to produce ‘Umschattungen’ and ‘silberne Welle’, a poetic shorthand for those earlier lines. Note that now the gaze is not directed upwards towards the snowclad peaks, but downwards (‘mit gesenktem Blick’), inwards, in silence. Like the letter I quoted earlier, the ending of the poem can imagine nothing better than the epiphany of friends. Perhaps theophany is the right word. For the final stanza does nothing less than equate the tabernacles of the Mount of Transfiguration in Matthew xvii (‘Lord, it is good to be here’, ‘one for Moses and one for Elias’), with the gathering of friends. But Klopstock, by another fine poetic reminiscence from earlier in the poem, takes us from the unspecific Mount of Tabor (the place of the biblical transfiguration) to the here and now. He remembers again the ‘beschattenden / Kühlen Arme des Walds’, and the ‘Umschattungen’ two stanzas up, and produces ‘Schattenwald’. The wooded place in which we are standing, with its nature evocation, would become the classical Vale of Tempe, the valley over there might be the Elysian fields. Klopstock has no qualms about merging Christian and classical mythology: it is an old Renaissance tradition. It goes hand in hand with the adapting of classical forms to the expressive needs of modern poetry. In this final stanza, Klopstock has fulfilled the promise of stanza one. The delights of Mother Nature are not forgotten, only they are translated on to a higher sphere, hypostasized into mythological association. The great embracing of friends would take place here, amid the ‘Schattenwald’ and ‘jenes Tal’. But thinking ‘den großen Gedanken deiner Schöpfung’ makes them into Tabor and Tempe, the highest places of inspiration in the classical and Christian traditions.
18Klopstock’s poem has dynamics that my stanza-by-stanza analysis has not brought out. It plots abstract and unqualified notions in ascending order: ‘Mutter Natur’, ‘froh Gesicht’, ‘süße Freude’, ‘Empfindungen’, ‘Entschließungen’, ‘Unsterblichkeit’, ‘Elysium’. But these would be unpoetic, at most didactic, were they not accompanied by a progression in verbal action: ‘denkt’, ‘lehre’, ‘sang’, ‘empfanden’, ‘ergoß’, ‘steigt’, ‘winkt’, ‘dringt’, ‘klinget’, ‘bilden’, ‘gießen’, ‘genießen’. They represent a movement away from learning or apprehending to feeling and fulfilling. Several of those verbs are compounds: ‘flohest […] auf’, ‘kamest herab’. We saw how, in the first part especially, the poem was impelled along by strongly stressed words like ‘Schon’, ‘Jetzto’, ‘Dann’, ‘Aber’. But the essential dynamics of the poem for the modern reader are surely ‘Von des schimmernden Sees Traubengestaden her’, ‘Jetzt entwölkte sich fern silberner Alpen Höh’, ‘Jetzo nahm uns die Au in die beschatteten / Kühlen Arme des Walds’ and ‘in den Umschattungen, / In den Lüften des Walds’. When the young Goethe in 1775 retraced Klopstock’s footsteps and embarked with friends on a boat on the same lake, there was not a shadow of doubt that all involved knew they were re-enacting ‘Der Zürchersee‘.21 It was perhaps inevitable that Goethe, taking out his notebook and jotting down three stanzas now known as ‘aufm Zürchersee’, was reminded of what I call the essential dynamics of the earlier poem. Klopstock, as Werther testifies, is one of the important influences on Goethe for a brief time. In an extraordinary homage to Klopstock later in 1775, Goethe quotes the phrase ‘Gedanken der Schöpfung’.22 Goethe’s is a poem very different from Klopstock’s. Goethe, ever feline and wayward in friendship, is not interested in ‘Hütten der Freundschaft’, even if his companions may be. He is not concerned with the catalogue of virtues in Klopstock’s poem, even though he will come to ponder some of them in his reflective poetry of the early 1780s. In his little poem on the lake, Mother Nature is a nourisher so exuberant that the poet gets his images mixed up (‘Ich saug’ an meiner Nabelschnur / Nun Nahrung aus der Welt‘).23 But he takes, not in Klopstock’s order, the things in nature that had helped to bear ‘Der Zürchersee’ along: ‘Und Berge Wolkenangetan / Entgegnen unserm Lauf’, ‘Auf der Welle blinken / Tausend schwebende Sterne’ and ‘Im See bespiegelt / Sich die reifende Frucht’.24 All of these images are bolder and more concrete than Klopstock’s, especially their evocation of the light dancing on the waves. They are part of a process in the poem where the young Goethe establishes the adequacy of his poetic powers to overcome a crisis in his creative and emotional life. But generations of commentators on this poem, agonizing over the meaning of ‘reifende Frucht‘, might have started (where they finish is another matter) with Klopstock’s ‘Traubengestade’ or ‘Gebirge, / Voll von Reben’. It is surely a tribute to Goethe’s powers of observation and his sense of artistic perspective that he first looks up (to the mountain peaks), looks down (to the light on the waves) and then around him (at the shores covered with vineyards, the ripening stage of the cycle of nature). Klopstock’s poem, perhaps against its stated intention, had helped him to see these processes. Hölderlin, over twenty-five years later, remembers just two of the landscape features of ‘Der Zürchersee’. Its message has long since been overtaken by mythological visions alien to Klopstock. But in ‘Der Rhein’ (1801), we read ‘Unter den silbernen Gipfeln’ and ‘Im Schatten des Walds’, in ‘Patmos’ (1803) ‘der schattige Wald’ and ‘der silberne Schnee’,25 proof of the dynamic power of Klopstock’s ode to penetrate poems about myth and history and the fulfilment of all things.
Appendix One
Translation of Klopstock, ‘Der Zürchersee/The Lake of Zurich’
Mother nature, how sweet when your gifts you unfold
On the meadows about, sweeter, a gladsome face
Pondering o’er the great thought
Of your handiwork yet again.
From the vineyard shores of the shimmering lake,
Or, if once again you to the heavens flew,
Come in the reddening ray
On the wings of the evening air,
Come and teach my song to be youthfully glad,
Sweet joy, like you, like the youth’s jubilation,
Quick, and filling the soul,
Gentle, as Fanny is, the tender.
Far beyond us lay mount Uto, at whose feet
Zurich lies in her vale, nurturing freemen in peace;
Now many a vine-clad slope
Had flashed past as we rowed our way.
The clouds now broke to reveal the heights of silvery alps.
The young men’s hearts beat in their feelings’ rush,
Words came easier
To their fair companion’s mouth.
‘Haller’s Doris”, sang she, worthy herself of the song,
Hirzel’s Daphne: Kleist loves him as he does Gleim,
And we young men sang
Full of feeling like Hagedorn.
Now the Au took us into the leafy shading
Arms of the wood, that the island surmounts;
Then, then, you descended,
Joy, and our cups ran over.
Joy divine, your very self, you, yes we felt you.
Yes, it was verily you, humanity’s sister,
Companion, pure in heart,
Who outpoured yourself on us.
Sweet is, springtide joy, your breath and inspiring
When the lea bears you forth, and your gentle breath
Pours into the hearts of youth
And into the maidens’ hearts as well.
O feeling triumphs through you, the breath rises,
Flourishes sweeter and beats,
Louder is the voice of love
When you loosen the magic spell.
Gently beckons wine when through it feelings,
Better desires and gentle beckon us in our thoughts,
In the Socratic beaker
Wreathed about with the dewy rose;
When it pierces the heart and resolutions are made,
To the drunkard unknown, awakens every thought,
So that we learn to abhor
What to the wise unworthy is.
Fame sounds silvery-voiced, charming, enticing
In the beating heart, and life without end is
Worthy to ponder,
Worth the sweat of the noble brow.
Passed down through song’s power to generations to come,
Its charms from daughter to son, son and daughter to be,
Often named by your name,
Often called from without the grave,
Then to shape their gentle heart and pour love
And good virtue, to pour into their gentle heart,
Is, by heaven, no trifle,
Worth the sweat of the noble brow!
But sweeter by far is yet, fairer and comelier,
In the arms of a friend, knowing that friend is yours,
Sharing life in this way,
Never-ending, and worthy too.
Tender affections full, in the shadowy glades,
In the breeze of the woods, with downward look of the eye
On the silvery wave,
Silent, I made the loving wish:
Were you but all here, you who love me abroad,
Scattered here and there in the land of our birth,
Whom in hours of bliss
My soul sought out and duly found:
O then here we would build tabernacles of friendship:
Ever live here, ever. The forest’s shade
To Tempe changed,
And that vale to Elysium!
Notes de bas de page
1 For a translation of this poem see Appendix One at the end of this chapter. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Landmarks in German Poetry, ed. by Peter Hutchinson, British and Irish Studies in German Language and Literature 20 (Berne, etc.: Peter Lang, 2000), 41–56.
2 ‘But sweeter by far
From the vineyard shores of the shimmering lake
In the tumult of times
That rudely scattered the friends
From my heart, to be one with one’s land and
Thought
Full with friends the ship’
Volker Braun, ‘Der Müggelsee’, first published in Die sanfte Revolution, ed. by Stefan Heym and Werner Heiduczek (Leipzig, Weimar: Kiepenheuer, 1990), 42.
3 ‘Half-Way Through Life
With yellow pears hangs,
And full of wild roses,
The land into the lake’.
4 ‘Mother Nature, how sweet when your works you unfold
On the meadows about, sweeter, a gladsome face
Pondering o’er the great thought
Of your handiwork yet again.’
5 Three studies can be recommended, two older and one more recent: Friedrich Beissner, Klopstocks Ode ‘Der Zürcherseee’: Ein Vortrag (Münster, Cologne: Böhlau, 1952); Emil Staiger, ‘Klopstock: “Der Zürchersee”’, in Die Kunst der Interpretation: Studien zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte (Zurich: Artemis, 1955), 50–74; Gerhard Sauder, ‘Die “Freude der Freundschaft”: Klopstocks Ode “Der Zürchersee”’, in Gedichte und Interpretationen, II, ed. by Karl Richter (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 228–39.
6 Cf. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Ausgewählte Werke, ed. by Karl August Schleiden (Munich: Hanser, 1962), 1228.
7 ‘Feeling’. See Gerhard Kaiser, Klopstock: Religion und Dichtung, Studien zur Religion, Geschichte und Geisteswissenschaft 1 (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1963), 94ff.
8 ‘To the Eternal One
How the heart leaps when you,
Eternal One, are its thought, and how
It sinks when it contemplates you!’. HKA, I, i, 224.
9 ‘Opposite the Rhine falls, on a shady hill. What a great thought of creation is this waterfall — I can say no more about it here, I have to see and hear this great thought — Greetings, stream! that between the hills sprays and thunders, and thou, who draws the stream through, be threefold adored, Creator, in thy glory.
Here, in front of the great Rhine falls, in the resounding noise of its uproar, lying on the grass on a beauteous height, here I greet you, friends, near and far, and above all you, worthy country, whose soil I am about to tread! A thousand greetings! O that I could gather here all those whom I Iove, to enjoy with them such a work of nature! Here I would gladly spend my life and die in this place of such beauty — Words cannot express further. Here one can have no other thought and can express no other wish: than to have one’s friends about one and remain here forever! And I say in the name of all of these friends
Amen! Halleluia
Klopstock’. HKA, Abt. Briefe, I, 125f.
10 Matthew, 18: 20.
11 ‘The Friends’; ‘The friends, the friends, I will sing’. Samuel Gotthold Lange, Horatzische Oden. Nebst Georg Friedrich Meiers Vorrede vom Werthe der Reime (Halle: Hemmerde, 1747) 142.
12 ‘To My Friends
Like Hebe, bold, youthful, impetuous,
As with his golden quiver Latona’s son,
Immortal, I sing of my friends,
In paeans of mighty dithyrambs.
Would you become verse, o song, or
Unyielding, like to Pindar’s strain,
Like Zeus’ great drunken son,
Come tumbling straight from the soul, creating?’ HKA, I, i, 6.
13 ‘Style that moves the heart’.
14 ‘Thus the quality of this language may be so defined: in the order of its diction, in the combination and ordering of words and styles, of the way the phrases are so arranged so as not to be bound by any grammatical law or logical order such as a more moderate soul requires, but gives speech such a way of combining and ordering as are demanded by the rage of passion and a certain degree of heated imagination’. Johann Jacob Breitinger, Critische Dichtkunst, ed. by Wolfgang Bender, Deutsche Neudrucke. Reihe Texte des 18. Jh., 2 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1966), II, 354.
15 The letter of Klopstock to his cousin Johann Christoph Schmidt, in HKA, Briefe I, 130f; the letter of Johann Kaspar Hirzel to Ewald von Kleist (both mentioned in the poem) in F. G. Klopstock, Oden. Eine Auswahl, ed. by Karl Ludwig Schneider, Reclams Universal-Bibliothek 13.91102 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966), 138–42.
16 It goes without saying that my English version cannot reproduce these features of the original.
17 Such as the highly influential Eric Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 347.
18 ‘Representation’. ‘Unexpected seeming disorder, thought abruptly breaking off, feverish expectancy, all this sets the soul in movement and this makes it more receptive to impressions’. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Ausgewählte Werke, ed. by Karl August Schleiden (Munich: Hanser, 1962), 1034.
19 ‘My Sinclair’, ‘you say’, ‘But, my friend’, ‘Bread and Wine’, ‘my Sinclair’, ‘The Rhine’.
20 See H. B. Nisbet, ‘Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”: A Reappraisal’, in On the Literature and Thought of the German Classical Era (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021), 215–40, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0180
21 See Roger Paulin, ’Von” Der Züchersee” zu “aufm Zürchersee”’, Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts 1987, 23–49.
22 ‘Thought of creation’. Ibid., 37.
23 ‘I suck on my navel cord
Nurture from the world’.
24 ‘And mountains decked with clouds
Rise up to meet our path.’
‘On the wave-tops sparkle
A thousand dancing stars’
‘In the lake is mirrored
The ripening fruit’.
25 ’Beneath the silvery peaks’, ‘in the forest shade’, ‘the shading forest’, ‘the silver snow’. Hölderlin, Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe, II, i, 142, 147, 165f.
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