The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Naturally, it will only be possible to lay down certain guidelines in our presentation of the real nature of the art of declamation, as an exhaustive discussion would require us to penetrate into a fair number of the intimacies and inner aspects of man's physical, psychic and spiritual life. Last time, we were able to see the remarkable way in which blood-circulation, pulse-beat and breathing-rhythm interpenetrate each other in the human organism something of which the poet in his act of creation already has some apprehension, and all of which sounds forth again in the poem, as indeed it should whenever this is realized through either declamation or recitation. Recitation stands midway between singing and mere speech. In speech, everything that in singing is still bound up with numerical relations is transformed into something of inner intensity: when we pronounce a word, it is as though the elements which live in song were compressed from spatiality into something two-dimensional yet through its intensive force, the two-dimensional plane still gives expression, albeit of a different kind, to what was present in the singing. And between these, between singing and spoken prose, lie recitation and declamation. It may be said that recitation and declamation are a kind of singing on the way to becoming mere words, but held back, and arrested midway along this path: it is this “midway” character which makes the essential nature of recitation so extraordinarily difficult to grasp. Here again, it is the task of an intimate psychosomatic observation to seize on those elements, through which the arts of declamation and of recitation are sharply distinguished. For it is deeply founded in the very nature of poetry that, in one case, a poem is recited, and in another declaimed.

Deeply founded in the nature of poetry is the way in which all those things that in music and singing, in pitch, harmony and so on, take on a kind of independent, external existence, are here turned inward – in poetry they are so far turned inward that nothing external remains except time, which finds expression in the metre, in the long and short syllables. Now, although we look in recitation mainly for the metrical element, where pitch, and even tone-colour, and that which produces harmony, etc., is laid aside, yet the element of differentiation still makes itself felt. We have not yet proceeded as far as the mere word, where the element of differentiation in the actual substance of the word is removed and is no longer apparent.

When it comes to reciting, the physical processes involved take the following course. [Note 6] Essentially, recitation depends upon what takes place when inhaled air penetrates into our body, and through the breathing-rhythm, into the movements of the cerebral fluid which also fills the spinal cord right into the nervous-sensory apparatus of the brain. [Note 7] The breathing-rhythm presses, so to speak, against the organs of mental representation, and along this path is brought to a kind of stasis: this path ultimately becomes the inhaling-process, which is then followed by that of exhalation, as in this case the rhythm is always twofold. When this process is carried to its farthest limit, prose-representations arise. If, however, it is consciously checked before its ultimate stage, and the metre deriving from the breathing-rhythm is not destroyed, there arises what lives in recitation. Hence we can say: it is a striving from world observation to mental representation that should manifest itself in recitation; and this is why recitation is in essence the representative art appropriate to epic and narrative verse.

At the other extreme stands declamation. This is bound up with the very opposite process, in which the soul-life is not linked with the representational element, but with that of volition. Now, when we will something, when we pass over into a will-impulse – what actually is it that is overcome? (This happens unconsciously, of course, for many people but consciously for those who exercise self-observation.) Here, in fact, one must always overcome a world of harmony, a world of inner consonances and dissonances. It is from harmony, from an inner experience closely resembling what hovers behind music, that the will-impulse is ultimately formed: when the breath-stream strikes up into the brain and flows back again, descends through the canal of the spinal cord, and strikes into the whole metabolic process – and this again strikes into the pulse-beat of the blood-circulation. With this passage from above downwards is thrust into our will-nature, mainly bound up as it is with exhalation, all that lives in man in the way of vanquished or allayed harmonies, inner discords, consonances, and so on. Thus the very opposite element is brought to expression and mediated through the word, when the word is made the bearer of an impulse of will.

And when, in a poem, we let sound forth what lives within us not merely as an external narrative, but sending forth what lives in us as we exhale our breath – then, indeed, we enter the sphere of the dramatic. But this can, or rather should be described only as the last step: for the dramatic also evolves out of the epic, when this has been developed through some folk-disposition, for instance. Those who, working in this way out of a folk-disposition, give poetic form to the epic, have a grasp of man’s inner nature to which they give outward expression in the external representations. Thus, where we find such a folk-disposition, a dramatic element sounds into the epic. Recitation becomes declamation.

Today we hope to make clear to you how this comes about, by the recitation of the beginning of Goethe’s “Achilleis”. Here Goethe transposed himself completely into the epic feeling, the epic metre of the Greeks, into the entirely metrical hexameter: so that inwardly, the conscious grasping of the in-breathing process which tends toward representation is predominant. Secondly, and by way of contrast, we shall take an epic of the Nordic world, from an earlier age – part of the magnificent Finnish Folk-epic, the Kalevala. Here you will see how the dramatic element arises in the epic itself, and consequently how recitation in epic metre quite naturally becomes declamation – how, therefore, epic recitation subtly results in dramatic declamation.

With this, then, we will begin our practical demonstration. Frau Dr. Steiner will give a reading from Goethe’s “Achilleis”.

Hoch zu Flammen entbrannte die mächtige Lohe noch einmal

Strebend gegen den Himmel, und Ilios’ Mauern erschienen

Rot durch die finstere Nacht; der aufgeschichteten Waldung

Ungeheures Gerüst, zusammenstürzend, erregte

Mächtige Glut zuletzt. Da senkten sich Hektors Gebeine

Nieder, und Asche lag der edelste Troer am Boden.

Nun erhob sich Achilleus vom Sitz vor seinem Gezelte,

Wo er die Stunden durchwachte, die nächtlichen, schaute der Flammen

Fernes, schreckliches Spiel und des wechselnden Feuers Bewegung,

Ohne die Augen zu wenden von Pergamos’ rötlicher Feste.

Tief im Herzen empfand er den Hass noch gegen den Toten,

Der ihm den Freund erschlug, und der nun bestattet dahinsank.

Aber als nun die Wut nachliess des fressenden Feuers

Allgemach, und zugleich mit Rosenfingern die Göttin

Schmückete Land und Meer, dass der Flammen Schrecknisse bleichten,

Wandte sich, tief bewegt und sanft, der grosse Pelide

Gegen Antilochos hin und sprach die gewichtigen Worte:

‘So wird kommen der Tag, da bald von Ilios’ Trümmern

Rauch und Qualm sich erhebt, von thrakischen Lüften getrieben,

Idas langes Gebirg und Gargaros’ Höhe verdunkelt:

Aber ich werd’ ihn nicht sehen. Die Völkerweckerin Eos

Fand mich, Patroklos’ Gebein zusammenlesend; sie findet

Hektors Brüder anjetzt in gleichem frommen Geschäfte:

Und dich mag sie auch bald, mein trauter Antilochos, finden,

Dass du den leichten Rest des Freundes jammernd bestattest.

Soll dies also nun sein, wie mir es die Götter entbieten,

Sei es! Gedenken wir nur des Nötigen, was noch zu tun ist.

Denn mich soll, vereint mit meinem Freunde Patroklos,

Ehren ein herrlicher Hügel, am hohen Gestade des Meeres

Aufgerichtet, den Völkern und künftigen Zeiten ein Denkmal.

Fleissig haben mir schon die rüstigen Myrmidonen

Rings umgraben den Raum, die Erde warfen sie einwärts,

Gleichsam schützenden Wall aufführend gegen des Feindes

Andrang. Also umgrenzten den weiten Raum sie geschäftig.

Aber wachsen soll mir das Werk! Ich eile, die Scharen

Aufzurufen, die mir noch Erde mit Erde zu häufen

Willig sind, und so vielleicht befördr’ ich die Hälfte.

Euer sei die Vollendung, wenn bald mich die Urne gefasst hat!’

Also sprach er und ging und schritt durch die Reihe der Zelte,

Winkend jenem und diesem und rufend andre zusammen.

Alle sogleich nun erregt, ergriffen das starke Geräte,

Schaufel und Hacke, mit Lust, dass der Klang des Erzes ertönte,

Auch den gewaltigen Pfahl, den steinbewegenden Hebel.

Und so zogen sie fort, gedrängt aus dem Lager ergossen,

Aufwärts den sanften Pfad, und schweigend eilte die Menge.

Wie wenn, zum Überfall gerüstet, nächtlich die Auswahl

Stille ziehet des Heers, mit leisen Tritten die Reihe

Wandelt und jeder die Schritte misst und jeder den Atem

Anhält, in feindliche Stadt, die schlechtbewachte, zu dringen:

Also zogen auch sie, und aller tätige Stille

Ehrte das ernste Geschäft und ihres Königes Schmerzen.

Als sie aber den Rücken des wellenbespületen Hügels

Bald erreichten und nun des Meeres Weite sich auftat,

Blickte freundlich Eos sie an aus der heiligen Frühe

Fernem Nebelgewölk und jedem erquickte das Herz sie.

Alle stürzten sogleich dem Graben zu, gierig der Arbeit,

Rissen in Schollen auf den lange betretenen Boden,

Warfen schaufelnd ihn fort; ihn trugen andre mit Körben

Aufwarts; in Helm und Schild einfüllen sah man die einen,

Und der Zipfel des Kleids war anderen statt des Gefässes.

Jetzt eröffneten heftig des Himmels Pforte die Horen,

Und das wilde Gespann des Helios, brausend erhub sich’s.

Rasch erleuchtet’ er gleich die frommen Äthiopen,

Welche die äussersten wohnen von allen Völkern der Erde.

Schüttelnd bald die glühenden Locken, entstieg er des Ida

Wäldern, um klagenden Troern, um rüst’gen Achaiern zu leuchten.

Aber die Horen indes, zum Äther strebend erreichten

Zeus Kronions heiliges Haus, das sie ewig begrüssen.

Und sie traten hinein; da begegnete ihnen Hephaistos,

Eilig hinkend, und sprach auffordernde Worte zu ihnen:

‘Trügliche, Glücklichen Schnelle, den Harrenden Langsame, hört mich!

Diesen Saal erbaut’ ich, dem Willen des Vaters gehorsam,

Nach dem göttlichen Mass des herrlichsten Musengesanges;

Sparte nicht Gold und Silber, noch Erz, und bleiches Metall nicht.

Und so wie ich’s vollendet, vollkommen stehet das Werk noch,

Ungekränkt von der Zeit; denn hier ergreift es der Rost nicht,

Noch erreicht es der Staub, des irdischen Wandrers Gefährte.

Alles hab’ ich getan, was irgend schaffende Kunst kann.

Unerschütterlich ruht die hohe Decke des Hauses,

Und zum Schritte ladet der glatte Boden den Fuss ein.

Jedem Herrscher folget sein Thron, wohin er gebietet,

Wie dem Jager der Hund, und goldene wandelnde Knaben

Schuf ich, welche Kronion, den Kommenden, unterstützen,

Wie ich mir eherne Mädchen erschuf. Doch alles ist leblos!

Euch allein ist gegeben, den Charitinnen und euch nur,

Über das tote Gebild des Lebens Reize zu streuen.

Auf denn! sparet mir nichts und giesst aus dem heiligen Salbhorn

Liebreiz herrlich umher, damit ich mich freue des Werkes,

Und die Götter entzückt so fort mich preisen wie anfangs.’

Und sie lächelten sanft, die beweglichen, nickten dem Alten

Freundlich und gossen umher verschwenderisch Leben und Licht aus,

Dass kein Mensch es ertrüg’ und dass es die Götter entzückte...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

[Sidney is one of the few English poets to transpose himself into the classical feeling for hexameter verse with even qualified success; in his case furthermore it is the pastoral, emblematic aspects of this representational, recitative mode which emerge, rather than its narrative possibilities. The following passage is an extract from the “First Eclogues” in Book I of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.

DORUS:

Then do I thinke in deed, that better it is to be private

In sorrows torments, then, tyed to the pompes of a pallace,

Nurse inwarde maladyes, which have not scope to be breath’d out,

But perforce disgest, all bitter juices of horror

In silence, from a man’s owne selfe with company robbed.

Better yet do I live, that though by my thoughts I be plunged

Into my live’s bondage, yet may disburden a passion

(Opprest with ruinouse conceites) by the helpe of an outcrye:

Not limited to a whispringe note, the Lament of a Courtier,

But sometimes to the woods, sometimes to the heavens do decyphire,

With bolde clamor unheard, unmarckt, what I seeke what I suffer:

And when I meete these trees, in the earth’s faire lyvery clothed,

Ease I do feele (such ease as falls to one wholy diseased)

For that I finde in them parte of my estate represented.

Lawrell shews what I seeke, by the Mirre is show’d how I seeke it,

Olive paintes me the peace that I must aspire to by conquest:

Mirtle makes my request, my request is crown’d with a willowe.

Cyprus promiseth helpe, but a helpe where comes no recomforte.

Sweete Juniper saith this, thoh I burne, yet I burne in a sweete fire.

Ewe doth make me be thinke what kind of bow the boy holdeth

Which shootes strongly with out any noyse and deadly without smarte.

Firr trees great and greene, fixt on a hye hill but a barrein,

Lyke to my noble thoughtes, still new, well plac’d, to me fruteles.

Figge that yeeldes most pleasante frute, his shaddow is hurtefull,

Thus be her giftes most sweet, thus more danger to be neere her,

But in a palme when I marke, how he doth rise under a burden,

And may I not (say I then) gett up though griefs be so weightie?

Pine is a maste to a shippe, to my shippe shall hope for a maste serve?

Pine is hye, hope is as hie, sharpe leav’d, sharpe yet be my hope’s budds.

Elme embraste by a vine, embracing fancy reviveth.

Popler changeth his hew from a rising sunne to a setting:

Thus to my sonne do I yeeld, such lookes her beames do aforde me.

Olde aged oke cutt downe, of newe works serves to the building:

So my desires by my feare, cutt downe, be the frames of her honour.

Ashe makes speares which shieldes do resist, her force no repulse takes:

Palmes do rejoyce to be joynd by the match of a male to a female,

And shall sensive things be so sencelesse as to resist sence?

Thus be my thoughts disperst, thus thinking nurseth a thinking,

Thus both trees and each thing ells, be the bookes of a fancy.

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586).] [Note 8]

Now a passage from the Kalevala: and we will try, despite the exigency of a translation, still to read this in such a way as to show all the things I have discussed.

From the Kalevala: Rune XIV (Conclusion)

Then the reckless Lemminkainen,

Handsome hero, Kaukomieli,

Braved the third test of the hero,

Started out to hunt the wild-swan,

Hunt the long-necked, graceful swimmer,

In Tuoni’s coal-black river,

In Manala’s lower regions.

Quick the daring hunter journeyed,

Hastened off with fearless footsteps,

To the river of Tuoni,

To the sacred stream and whirlpool,

With his bow upon his shoulder,

With his quiver and one arrow.

Nasshut, blind and crippled shepherd,

Wretched shepherd of Pohyola,

Stood beside the death-land river,

Near the sacred stream and whirlpool,

Guarding Tuonela’s waters,

Waiting there for Lemminkainen,

Listening there for Kaukomieli,

Waiting long the hero’s coming.

Finally he hears the footsteps

Of the hero on his journey,

Hears the tread of Lemminkainen,

As he journeys nearer, nearer,

To the river of Tuoni,

To the cataract of death-land,

To the sacred stream and whirlpool.

Quick the wretched shepherd, Nasshut,

From the death-stream sends a serpent,

Like an arrow from a cross-bow,

To the heart of Lemminkainen,

Through the vitals of the hero.

Lemminkainen, little conscious,

Hardly knew that he was injured,

Spake these measures as he perished:

‘Ah! unworthy is my conduct,

Ah! unwisely have I acted,

That I did not heed my mother,

Did not take her goodly counsel,

Did not learn her words of magic.

Oh! for three words with my mother,

How to live, and how to suffer,

In this time of dire misfortune,

How to bear the stings of serpents,

Tortures of the reed of waters,

From the stream of Tuonela!

‘Ancient mother who hast borne me,

Who hast trained me from my childhood,

Learn, I pray thee, where I linger,

Where, alas! thy son is lying

Where thy reckless hero suffers.

Come, I pray thee, faithful mother,

Come thou quickly, thou art needed,

Come deliver me from torture,

From the death-jaws of Tuoni,

From the sacred stream and whirlpool.’

Northland’s old and wretched Shepherd,

Nasshut, the despised protector

Of the flocks of Sariola,

Throws the dying Lemminkainen,

Throws the hero of the islands,

Into Tuonela’s river,

To the blackest stream of death-land,

To the worst of fatal whirlpools.

Lemminkainen, wild and daring,

Helpless falls upon the waters,

Floating down the coal-black current,

Through the cataracts and rapids

To the tombs of Tuonela.

There the blood-stained son of death-land,

There Tuoni’s son and hero,

Cuts in pieces Lemminkainen,

Chops him with his mighty hatchet,

Till the sharpened axe strikes flint-sparks

From the rocks within his chamber,

Chops the hero into fragments.

Into five unequal portions,

Throws each portion to Tuoni,

In Manala’s lowest kingdom,

Speaks these words when he has ended:

‘Swim thou there, wild Lemminkainen,

Flow thou onward in this river,

Hunt forever in these waters,

With thy cross-bow and thine arrow,

Shoot the swan within this empire,

Shoot our water-birds in welcome!

Thus the hero, Lemminkainen,

Thus the handsome Kaukomieli,

The untiring suitor, dieth

In the river of Tuoni,

In the death-realm of Manala.

Trans. J. M. Crawford.

I think that from these two examples, Goethe’s “Achilleis” and the Kalevala, you will be able to see how on the one hand in the “Achilleis” you have something experienced as a perception – as breathed-in, I might say, and on the way to being transformed into a placid mental representation. But one does not let it arrive there: it is held back so that what should terminate in representation does not quite become a purely conceptual representation; it is arrested on the way there, and becomes what we might call an ‘enjoyed’ representation. Thus, halted on the way from perception to a concept, it is not conceptually grasped, but enjoyed. This expresses itself best in metre, in a quiet verse-measure. When, however, the will-element wells up from the human being, bearing on its waves the will-impulse as a representation – then, the force which would become the will to an act, would become an external deed, is held back; and just there, where the will-impulse still lives within man and moves him to speak, it becomes vocal, and the voice is so formed that the will lives in the waves of vocal expression. Here the transition is the very reverse of the previous one: there, we had to do with a transition from the activity of perception to the repose of mental representation; now we have the opposite – from the repose of representation to volition. But the will element is held back where it would transform itself into external movement, into life in the outer world. Just this outward movement is held back and, instead of plunging into action, it lives on the stream of the words.

All that I have here indicated takes place in recitation and declamation respectively. And we can study psychosomatically, through observation of man himself, both these forms as I have just described them – something which was actually practised in former times in a more instinctive way. In earlier methods of declamation and recitation, it was possible to differentiate very clearly between the epic and the dramatic, and also to discern, within the epic, the dramatic element; and also their interweaving in the lyric, where again both interpenetrate in the rhythm. At the present time, we must raise what used to be present more spontaneously and instinctively in methods of recitation, although with the more prosaic modes of recitation it hasbeen for some time forgotten – this must now be raised into consciousness. It must not, of course, live in the reciting just as I have presented it, when I described the more corporeal processes: this connection with the artistic formation of the breath as I have presented it must rather become a feeling, an inner perception. It is along this path that an art of recitation will be found. One must be able to study the paths taken by human consciousness.

If once more we observe the path along which the predominant inbreathing-process tends toward mental representation, our consciousness then lays hold of what is en route to becoming representation. And here we can experience two paths: either we enter into abstract prose-representation, in which case we arrive at the formation of a concept; or we do not grasp these abstract prose-representations, but enter into a movement which, before the fact comes to be represented, places us in the inbreathed air and all that it does in our body – thus our consciousness floats, as it were, on the inbreathed air, and we arrive, because the psycho-spiritual frees itself from the bonds of the body, at a sort of unconscious condition. It is not allowed to reach this state, however. It is arrested: it is held up in the region of the vowels; instead of allowing it to issue in the formation of a concept or entering an unconscious state, we move in the region of the vowels – a movement of “enjoyment”. This is what is done by these poets who revel in assonance. In this experience of the breathing-process which has not quite arrived at representation, we have consciousness moving on the waves of assonance, the repetition of the vowels (which is in fact also present, in weaker form, in terminal rhyme). This is what takes place here. When, on the other hand, the will is active, what is within strives outward: and instead of checking consciousness before it leads to purely conceptual representations, we arrest it where the will streams outward, and hold the impulse back, keeping it under control, so to speak. We then bring into this life of volition something which has entered that poetry in which the element of will in particular streams out from man’s inner being – that part of man’s nature with which the Nordic races were especially endowed, and which they brought to expression when they gave themselves over to the creation of poetry. When they were unable to live themselves out in external deeds, these Nordic-Germanic peoples arrested the impulse, the urge and impetus to external deeds, and expressed the movement poetically on the waves of the out-flowing impulses of will. This lives in the incessantly repeated consonants of alliteration: in this the will, which streams through the breath and the whole body, has life. In the movement of alliteration it is just this will element that is active, just as in assonance, in the repetition of the vowels, there is laid into the innermost nature of the words that inhaled breath which fails to become representation, and expresses itself, wave-like, in the movement of assonance.

We would like to demonstrate assonance with a second example, the “Chor der Urtriebe” by Fercher von Steinwand. And then the element of alliteration, illustrated by a reading from Jordan’s Nibelunge. Now it was Jordan’s particular endeavour to bring out once more the real nature of alliteration. Of course it is natural that the modern German language did not quite achieve this: for this reason, a faint breath of coquetry hovers over Jordan’s poetry. This, however, is not important. It is better, for our purposes, to make use of a revival of alliteration, rather than trying to revive the old and far too difficult alliteration, which in fact no longer appeals to the modern soul.

From “Chor der Urtriebe”:

 Ist’s ein Schwellen, ist’s ein Wogen, 

 Was aus allen Gürteln bricht? 

 Wo wir liebend eingezogen, 

 Dort ist Richtung, dort Gewicht. 

 Hätt’ uns Will’ und Wunsch betrogen? 

 Sind wir Mächte, sind wir’s nicht? 

 Was es sei, wir heischen Licht – 

 Und es kommt in schönen Bogen! 

 Jeglichem Streite 

 Licht zum Geleite! 

 Schleunigen Schwingungen 

 Zarter Erregung, 

 Weiten Verschlingungen 

 Tiefer Bewegung 

 Muß es gelingen, 

 Bald durch die hangenden, 

 Schmerzlich befangenden 

 Nächte zu dringen. 

 Über den Gründen, 

 Über den milden 

 Schwebegebilden 

 Muß sich’s verkünden, 

 Geister entzünden, 

 Herzen entwilden. 

 Hat es getroffen, 

 Find’ es euch offen! 

 Seht ihr die erste 

 Welle der Helle? 

 Grüßt sie die hehrste, 

 Heiligste Quelle! 

 Schnelle, nur schnelle! 

 Hellen Gesichtes 

 Huldigt dem Scheine, 

 Hütet das makellos ewiglich-eine 

 Wesen des Lichtes! 

 Mag es, sein wechselndes Streben zu feiern, 

 Farben entschleiern! 

 Wecken wir lieblichen Krieg, daß sich trunken 

 Lösen die Funken! 

 Laßt uns die Tiefen, die schaffend erschäumen, 

 Laßt uns das Edle, was streitend gesunken, 

 Laßt und die Kreise, die Fruchtendes träumen, 

 Strahlend besäumen! 

 Fercher von Steinwand (1828-1902) 

[Two examples may help clarify the characteristic effects of assonance in English poetry. The first is a passage from Swinburne’s “Tristram of Lyonesse – Prelude: Tristram and Iseult”.

These are the signs wherethrough the year sees move,
Full of the sun, the sun-god which is love,
A fiery body blood-red from the heart
Outward, with fire-white wings made wide apart,
That close not and unclose not, but upright
Steered without wind by their own light and might
Sweep through the flameless fire of air that rings
From heaven to heaven with thunder of wheels and wings
And antiphones of motion-moulded rhyme
Through spaces out of space and timeless time.
So shine above dead chance and conquered change
The spherèd signs, and leave without their range
Doubt and desire, and hope with fear for wife,
Pale pains, and pleasures long worn out of life.
Yea, even the shadows of them spiritless,
Through the dim door of sleep that seem to press,
Forms without form, a piteous people and blind,
Men and no men, whose lamentable kind
The shadow of death and shadow of life compel
Through semblances of heaven and false-faced hell,
Through dreams of light and dreams of darkness tost
On waves innavigable, are these so lost?
Shapes that wax pale and shift in swift strange wise,
Void faces with unspeculative eyes,
Dim things that gaze and glare, dead mouths that move,
Featureless heads discrowned of hate and love,
Mockeries and masks of motion and mute breath,
Leavings of life, the superflux of death—
If these things and no more than these things be

Left when man ends or changes, who can see?

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)

And secondly:

THE WINDHOVER
To Christ our Lord

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

¤ ¤

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889).] [Note 9]

From Die Nibelunge: Sigfrid-Sage, Canto 20:

Als die sinkende Sonne den Strom der Sage,

Den smaragdenen Rhein, errötend im Scheiden,

Mit Geschmeiden umgoss von geschmolzenem Golde,

Da glitten bei Worms durch die glänzenden Wellen

Hinauf und hinabwärts zahlreiche Nachen

Und führten das Volk vom Festspiel heimwärts.

Dem geregelten Rauschen und Pochen der Ruder

Am Borde der Boote melodisch verbunden,

Erklangen im Takt auch die klaren Töne

Menschlicher Kehlen: in mehreren Kähnen,

Die nah aneinander hinunter schwammen,

Sangen die Leute das Lied von der Sehnsucht,

Die hinunter ins Nachtreich auch Nanna getrieben,

Als die Mistel gemordet ihren Gemahl.

Lauschend im Fenster des Fürstenpalastes

Lag Krimhilde und harrte des Gatten.

In banger Befürchtung bittersten Vorwurfs

Verlangte nun doch nach dem fernen Geliebten

Ihre sorgende Seele voll Sehnsucht und Schmerz.

Sie fühlte sich schuldig und ahnte des Schicksals

Nahenden Schritt. So vernahm sie, erschrocken

Und trüben Sinnes, den Trauergesang.

Während der Wohllaut der uralten Weise

Vom Rhein heraufklang, regten sich leise

Ihre Lippen und liessen die Worte des Liedes,

Welche sie kannte seit frühester Kindheit,

Also hören ihr eigenes Ohr:

‘O Balder, mein Buhle,

Wo bist du verborgen?

Vernimm doch, wie Nanna

Sich namenlos bangt.

Erscheine, du Schöner,

Und neige zu Nanna,

Liebkosend und küssend,

Den minnigen Mund.’

Da klingen von Klage

Die flammenden Fluren,

Von seufzenden Stimmen

Und Sterbegesang:

Die Blume verblühet,

Erblassend, enblättert;

Der Sommer entseelt sie

Mit sengendem Strahl.

Beim Leichenbegängnis

Des göttlichen Lenzes

Zerfallt sie und folgt ihm

In feurigen Tod.

‘O Balder, mein Buhle,

Verlangende Liebe,

Unsägliche Sehnsucht

Verbrennt mir die Brust.’

Da tönt aus der Tiefe

Der Laut des Geliebten:

‘Die Lichtwelt verliess ich,

Du suchst mich umsonst.’

‘O Balder, mein Buhle,

Wo bist du verborgen?

Gib Nachricht, wie Nanna

Dich liebend erlöst?’

‘Nicht rufst du zurück mich

Aus Tiefen des Todes.

Was du liebst, musst du lassen,

Und das Leid nur ist lang.’

‘O Balder, mein Buhle,

Dich deckt nun das Dunkel;

So nimm denn auch Nanna

Hinab in die Nacht.’

Wilhelm Jordan (1819-1904).

[A revival of alliteration seems never to have appealed to English poets in modern times. There are, however, a number of good translations of the Old English alliterative poem Beowulf; part of it is translated in this example:

Sorrowful sat in the Hall of the Hart, the Dane King Hrodgar

Mourning the brave one fallen, the dear friend dead.

Bowed was the hoary head and his heart was heavy,

Speechless a while, Then speedily sent he and bade them bring

Beowulf hither, the Grendel slayer, Agatheon’s son,

Straightway the Aethling answered his summons, strode thro’ the Hall,

First mid his followers all and the flooring strained at their feet,

Came to the King. With kindly custom he greeted him,

Questioning courteous if quiet the night.

Then answer made Hrodgar, strength of the skylding

Ask not of rest nor of night! renewed is the anguish

Doomed to the Danesmen. Aeskere is dead –

Aeskere, Irmenlow’s brother, of Aethlings the best.

Trusty in council was he and of comrades truest.

Foremost still at my side in the stress of the battle,

When man came breast against man and the boar tusks meet.

Here in the Hall of the Hart is he felly murdered

By a fiend most foul – which one I wot not.

Some there be of my fellows who warden the marshlands

Tell how twain there be such at times in the twilight

Ghostly figures haunting the homestead and vastly tall.

One was in woman’s shape and what stalked beside her

With menacing mien man’s form wore.

Yet huger them thinketh than human fashion.

Grendel they term him, the old ground tillers

Since times of yore – and his sire none guesseth

Nor knoweth none if brethren he boasteth

Nor kindred claimeth ’mongst grimly ghosts.

Bleak their abode and barren; holes where the wolf howls.

Trans. E. Bowen-Wedgwood.]

We see how in the first poem with its assonances, there lives the representational element, checked on the way to becoming a concept and held fast in enjoyment; and how in the second, which is built up on alliteration, on the repetition of consonants, there lives the element of will, checked on its way outwards and realizing itself in inner movement on the waves of the words, on the waves of a will-impulse that has been grasped conceptually.

You will see that in bringing the impulse of spiritual science to bear on aesthetic considerations there is no temptation to introduce those abstractions which so easily find their way into intellectually-derived studies of art. It will be evident from such studies as we have pursued here, even though we have only been able to indicate certain guidelines – how an understanding is brought to art, yet an understanding that is also a perceptive power, and which thus becomes a knowledge of things. Art and knowledge are gradually interwoven into a living spiritual perception, which makes itself felt and demands to be put to the test in that very sphere where man himself becomes an instrument of artistic expression. Knowledge such as this does not observe art from without, but is gained from an inner participation in art – and knowledge such as this can become the bridge that leads to the practice of art.

Especially when learning the art of recitation, you will find in such knowledge a support quite different from anything deriving from all those techniques of respiration based on external, materialistic and mechanistic observation of the human body, which result in voice-production that is purely external and mechanical. An inner awareness in the learning of an artform becomes possible. And now, in conclusion, I will just draw attention to a few instances of things which have to be learnt in recitation. What is at stake, for instance, is not how the voice or the tone can be sustained by some kind of external method of manipulating the breath, or placing the voice, in the way taught by some bad singing-teachers. The essential thing is that what should stay in the unconscious must still remain there when we are learning a subject such as this – a man should not just be wrenched out of everything unconscious through clumsy treatment of the body. Rather, through proper artistic formation and artistic treatment we can train our breathing so that the whole process remains in a certain sphere of the unconscious, and yet is drawn up into the soul-element which gives it artistic expression. We can then, for instance, develop a sustained tone by practising this where it is particularly preponderant: in the recitation of something of a sublime and exalted nature. If we try, when reciting such noble verse, to develop the sustained tone on a foundation of actual feeling, the poise of the voice and the breathing will develop of themselves, out of a true feeling for what is actually being recited.

We can develop correct intonation, and bring out the tone, by reciting examples of the ridiculous or comical; the required strengthening of the tone that we need in the rise and fall of speech for declamation or recitation we can achieve by practising the tragic; and we can learn to attenuate and mollify the tone by practising the joyful. We discover how it is really the soul-element which we grasp, and which must come to expression in recitation and declamation, and how, when we grasp it rightly, we draw the physical and corporeal after. We do not first adjust the physical with clumsy techniques that will rein our handling of these matters and lead, not to the development of a real art, but to mere routine. We enter upon a quite genuine, and yet straightforward practise and study of art. But this will only be obtained if there is in our knowledge so much of aesthetic sensibility, that with it we can approach art; and only if, on the other hand, our perception of man is so far evolved that in those arts which make use of man as an instrument, we can see man himself revealed – a revelation of art pierced through by the pulsating, pervading spirit of man.

Through these few guiding principles, scanty as they are, I hope to have shown you at least the direction in which an art-form as subtle and intimate as recitation and declamation leads: but this path can only be followed when the attempt is earnestly made to find the bridge between art and science. When I drew attention to this as one aspect, at the outset of the course, it was no mere empty phrase. The intention was to show you, taking the art of recitation and declamation as an example, that we do not merely set before ourselves the abstract ideal of unifying religion, art and science; but in pursuing true spiritual perception, leading to real spiritual knowledge, we do actually achieve something in the way of bringing knowledge to art and illumining artistic creation through knowledge. Thus will man be able to enter more and more consciously into art, and will be able to bring forth more and more consciously what he needs from art in the course of his evolution towards an absolutely free and truly human consciousness.

The art of recitation and declamation, of which we are going to say something this evening, is not at present accorded its full status as an art-form. In our approach to this art we often give too little consideration to exactly what is presented by the poet and to the medium in which the reciter or declaimer has to be artistically active. This moves us to consider the essentials of the art of recitation and declamation – when, as you have seen demonstrated many times, it presents itself as an accompanying art to eurythmy. We then become deeply aware that recitation and declamation must go beyond the prose content of a poem, which is actually the poem’s thought-component. For to stress the prose content turns the recitation and declamation of the poem into something inartistic. When in reciting, as happens at the present day, importance is attached to a prosaic stress on the meaning, this is an indication of our having abandoned the domain of the truly artistic. Let us be clear that a poet – if he is a true poet – will certainly have had in his imagination (in the full sense of the word) something which ultimately becomes apparent in the recitation and declamation. A poet who only had in his soul the thought-content, or the word-for-word content of feeling, and not the inwardly heard sound- and word-movement of the poem, would simply not be a poet at all. But it must also be made clear that what is put before the reciter is, in the end, only a kind of score or music-script – and that the art of recitation and declamation must go beyond the script in the same way as a pianist or other practising musician has to do. The re-creation is a new creating and the new creation is a re-creating. A musician who composes a piano work will, of course, also have in his imagination the whole pattern of sound: and whoever wishes to re-create his composition must make himself familiar above all with the instrument itself and with its characteristic sound-pattern and tone – of the piano in this instance. He must comprehend the art of handling both the instrument and its medium. And likewise the reciter must understand the art of handling speech. His instrument is bound up much more closely with his own being than are the external instruments of the musician, and in deploying his particular instrument he will also have to develop his own special characteristics. But he will have to start with the handling of speech, the material by means of which he can give expression to what reaches him from the poet only as a sort of score. As regards the handling of speech, it will be just as necessary to begin with the fundamentals as in the art of piano-playing, though the study must in many respects be pursued more intensively than in the case of learning the piano.

We must also take into consideration that we are now living in a time when much of what has hitherto lived instinctively within the soul of man must be raised into consciousness. There is still today in wide circles, and not least among artists, a certain fear of this consciousness when it is brought to bear on artistic, creative work. They think that by introducing this sort of consciousness they will injure instinctive, imaginative creation and cripple it; many believe, too, that by becoming conscious of what really goes on in the soul in artistic creation they will lose that spontaneity essential to the creation of art.

There is certainly some truth in all this. But, on the other hand, we must realise that what we are striving for in the sphere of anthroposophical perception is a matter of exceptional importance for our time and our civilisation. The slow struggle toward the experience of what in our spiritual stream is called Imagination weaves and lives in an element quite other than the intellectual, so that artistic feeling need in no way be lost when it is confronted with Imaginative experience. Indeed, if we are dealing with genuine Imaginations it cannot be lost. For what is disclosed in an Imagination with a view to knowledge is objectively (not subjectively but objectively) different from the Imagination manifested when the soul gives it an artistic form.

If I may refer for a moment to something personal: I would like to say that to me it was always extremely distasteful if someone or other came along and tried to interpret my Mystery Plays in a symbolic way and imported into them all sorts of intellectual notions. For what lives in these Mystery Plays is experienced Imaginatively – down to every single sound. The picture stands there as a picture and has always stood there as a picture. It would never have occurred to me to begin with an intellectual idea and then fashion it into a picture.

In that way I was able to discover by experience how, when one is attempting to impart artistic form, the Imaginative comes to be something objectively quite different to the form assumed by an Imagination that is directed toward cognition. Hence this prejudice, that spontaneity and instinctive imagining will be impaired if one raises artistic activity into consciousness, will have to be overcome. Our times require that this prejudice should be overcome. We may then perhaps be guided to the true foundations of declamation and recitation, as it is in this direction that they will have to be developed in the near future.

We cannot put recitation and declamation into practice unless we fathom the fundamental differences presented in poetry by, on the one side, lyric; on the second side, epic; and on the third, the dramatic. [Note 10] Today we shall only be able to present something of the lyric and the dramatic. We shall then continue with something that might be called a ‘prose-poem’. There were reasons for this choice. The epic will be considered separately later on – indeed the epic can perhaps best illustrate the art of recitation when once we have advanced beyond the elementary stages of the art.

In order to penetrate to a real declamatory and recitative art involving the lyric, dramatic and epic, the following must be observed. Whoever aims at this kind of vocal production must, for instance, develop a distinct feeling for the connection between lyric and the constituents of speech – and this he will achieve through a living experience of the vowels. A feeling for the vowels, for the intimacy of the vowels, must be sought if the lyrical is to be embodied and brought to expression. For it is in the vowel sounds that man’s essentially inward experience is expressed. In the single vowel-sounds – when penetrated by a sensitive understanding, a discerning sensibility – lies the whole spectrum of human inner experience. In vocalisation (the sounding of the vowels) lives everything which we might describe as coming from musical experience and which is projected into the lyric. Lyrical experience can definitely be traced back to musical experience. But in musical experience we find inwardness being unfolded in the movement of sound. In the lyric, we find inwardness absorbed into the very substance of the vowel itself. Yet whoever wishes to approach recitation from this point of view must avoid a certain error – and no greater error in the art of recitation is conceivable. For when we are learning how to handle the materials and elements of speech, we might be tempted to commence by introducing an element of feeling, to put subjective feeling into the vowel; and this is just what would actually make it prosaic. This is the opposite approach to that of recitation. Anyone who wishes to recite lyrical poetry must have a sensitivity to the vowel itself. He must begin by experiencing the vowel as such. Just as Goethe, for instance, recognises different shades of feeling in the various shades of colour, so we shall not only experience in the vowels different shades of feeling, but utterly different conditions of soul, different soul-contents. We shall feel every gradation, from sorrow and bitterness to joy and jubilation, in our sensing of the vowels and experience of what might be termed the vowel-scale.

It will be readily admitted that much of what I am saying is often felt instinctively by the reciter when he comes to apply his art in individual poems. But he will be able to enhance his art significantly if he brings such a feeling to conscious awareness. Through vocalisation something capable of further development will be disclosed to him: he will discover how a vowel sounding earlier on still sounds in the later vowels – or a later vowel-sound modifies the earlier ones, etc. However, these things must not be practised in the mechanical and materialistic way often adopted nowadays, when various postures are assumed, along with artificial breath-control. Everything the body has to learn in this domain must derive purely from what is learnt in working with speech itself. Just as a painter can learn most when, instructed by an accomplished artist, he paints directly onto the canvas and only touches his work up here and there, – so too will the reciter best learn to recite by acquiring his grasp of speech from speech itself: from actual speaking, from handling the speech-movement. Afterwards, his attention can be drawn to any particular detail relating to external, bodily control. It is a curious tendency of our materialistic times first to move away from the poem and adjust the instrument of speech and only then return to artistic speaking. This aberration might almost be called nonsense; it certainly does not derive from true artistic feeling.

Furthermore, if it is with the help of the vowel-sounds that we come to experience the lyric it is through the consonants that we shall begin to get a feeling for the epic. Truly to enter into the consonants is to experience over again, within ourselves, what is going on outside us. And if we feel in the consonantal element this peculiar imitation within us of the outside world, we shall be led artistically from these elementary constituents to an inner re-experiencing of what is also to be found in the images of a far-ranging epos. I can only touch upon this today; at another opportunity it can be referred to again.

In this way it will be possible to develop what ought to lie at the foundation of recitation and declamation into a true art-form, down to its handling of the constituents of speech. And it will necessarily become clear to us, if we see the essential feature of this art in the way it handles actual speech, that the nuances of the art will show up in its response to the different languages – each language having its own special recitative or declamatory requirements. A language which is essentially mimetic, one which takes its departure from the intellect and classification and has developed language in the sphere of the intellect, a language which has abstracted itself from what can be experienced in the outer world, – such a language will have to tackle recitation and declamation quite differently to one in which the sounds (vowels and consonants) themselves express their relationship to inwardness or to externality.

Now, in the first part of what Frau Dr. Steiner is going to declaim, you will hear to begin with something lyrical. From this you should actually be able to hear how lyrical poems come to expression with varying nuances, depending on the language in which they are presented. That will be the first part of our programme – a performance of essentially lyrical poems.

Three poems of Goethe’s youth.

BEHERZIGUNG

Ach, was soll der Mensch verlangen?

Ist es besser, ruhig bleiben?

Klammernd fest sich anzuhangen?

Ist es besser, sich zu treiben?

Soll er sich ein Häuschen bauen?

Soll er unter Zelten leben?

Soll er auf die Felsen trauen?

Selbst die festen Felsen beben.

Eines schickt sich nicht für alle!

Sehe jeder wie er’s treibe,

Sehe jeder wo er bleibe,

Und wer steht, dass er nicht falle!

MEERES STILLE

Tiefe Stille herrscht im Wasser,

Ohne Regung ruht das Meer,

Und bekümmert sieht der Schiffer

Glatte Fläche rings umher.

Keine Luft von keiner Seite!

Todesstille fürchterlich!

In der ungeheuern Weite

Reget keine Welle sich.

MIT EINEM GEMALTEN BAND

Kleine Blumen, kleine Blätter

Streuen mir mit leichter Hand

Gute junge Frühlingsgötter

Tändelnd auf ein luftig Band.

Zephyr, nimm’s auf deine Flügel,

Schling’s um meiner Liebsten Kleid!

Und so tritt sie vor den Spiegel

All in ihrer Munterkeit.

Sieht mit Rosen sich umgeben,

Selbst wie eine Rose jung:

Einen Blick, geliebtes Leben!

Und ich bin belohnt genung.

Fühle, was dies Herz empfindet,

Reiche frei mir deine Hand,

Und das Band, das uns verbindet,

Sei kein schwaches Rosenband!

A little English lyric:

SONG

April, April,

Laugh thy girlish laughter;

Then, the moment after,

Weep thy girlish tears!

April, that mine ears

Like a lover greetest,

If I tell thee, sweetest,

All my hopes and fears,

April, April,

Laugh thy golden laughter,

But, the moment after,

Weep thy golden tears!

William Watson (1858-1935).

THE BELLS OF ST. PETERSBURGH

Those evening bells! those evening bells!

How many a tale their music tells,

Of youth, and home, and that sweet time,

When last I heard their soothing chime!

Those joyous hours are past away!

And many a heart, that then was gay,

Within the tomb now darkly dwells,

And hears no more those evening bells!

And so ’twill be when I am gone;

That tuneful peal will still ring on,

While other bards shall walk these dells,

And sing your praise, sweet evening bells!

Thomas Moore (1799-1852).

An example of Russian lyric:

NILE DELTA

Lucid gold and emerald,

and black earth’s thick fecundity:

landscape aloof, your wealth witheld

from ease, in mute profundity…

Bosom laden with your fruit, –

how many slumberous shapes repose

secure in you, most lowly root,

or fertile corpses decompose?

Yet not for all slow dissipation:

not those that yearly upward flame,

like ghosts at magic conjuration,

and vernal life from death proclaim;

not Isis, crowned with flowers supernal,

lush companions of the spring –

the Touch-me-not, the Maid eternal,

the Rainbow’s incandescent ring!

Vladimir Soloviov (1853-1900).

Trans. Neil Thompson and A.J.W. [Note 11]

[Of considerable interest too is the beautiful German translation used in the original programme:

NILDELTA

Goldenglänzendes, smaragdenes,

Tief schwarzerdenes Gefild,

Deines Kraftens reicher Segen

Aus der Scholle quillt.

Dieser Schoss, der keimetragende,

Tote bergend in den Ton,

Er litt stumm, der allergebene,

Die jahrtausend lange Fron.

Doch nicht alles so Empfangene

Trugst empor du jedes Jahr.

Das vom alten Tod Gezeichnete

Sieht des Lenzes sich noch bar.

Isis nicht, die Kronen tragende,

Wird dir bringen jenen Kranz,

Doch die unberührte, ewige

Magd im Regenbogenglanz.

Trans. Marie Steiner.]

WANDRERS STURMLIED

Wen du nicht verlässest, Genius,

Nicht der Regen, nicht der Sturm

Haucht ihm Schauer übers Herz.

Wen du nicht verlässest, Genius,

Wird dem Regengewölk,

Wird dem Schlossensturm

Entgegen singen,

Wie die Lerche,

Du da droben.

Den du nicht verlässest, Genius,

Wirst ihn heben übern Schlammpfad

Mit den Feuerflügeln;

Wandeln wird er

Wie mit Blumenfüssen

Über Deukalions Flutschlamm,

Python tötend, leicht, gross,

Pythius Apollo.

Den du nicht verlässest, Genius,

Wirst die wollnen Flügel unterspreiten,

Wenn er auf dem Felsen schläft,

Wirst mit Hüterfittichen ihn decken

In des Haines Mitternacht.

Wen du nicht verlässest, Genius,

Wirst im Schneegestöber

Wärmumhüllen;

Nach der Wärme ziehn sich Musen,

Nach der Wärme Charitinnen.

Umschwebet mich ihr Musen,

Ihr Charitinnen:

Das ist Wasser, das ist Erde,

Und der Sohn des Wassers und der Erde,

Über den ich wandle

Göttergleich.

Ihr seid rein, wie das Herz der Wasser,

Ihr seid rein, wie das Mark der Erde,

Ihr umschwebt mich und ich schwebe

Über Wasser, über Erde,

Göttergleich.

Soll der zurückkehren,

Der kleine, schwarze, feurige Bauer?

Soll der zurückkehren, erwartend

Nur deine Gaben, Vater Bromius,

Und helleuchtend umwärmend Feuer?

Der kehren mutig?

Und ich, den ihr begleitet,

Musen und Charitinnen alle,

Den alles erwartet, was ihr,

Musen und Charitinnen,

Umkränzende Seligkeit

Rings ums Leben verherrlicht habt,

Soll mutlos kehren?

Vater Bromius!

Du bist Genius,

Jahrhunderts Genius,

Bist, was innre Glut

Pindarn war,

Was der Welt

Phöbus Apoll ist.

Weh! Weh! Innre Wärme,

Seelenwärme,

Mittelpunkt:

Glüh’ entgegen

Phöb’ Apollen;

Kalt wird sonst

Sein Fürstenblick

Über dich vorübergleiten,

Neidgetroffen

Auf der Ceder Kraft verweilen,

Die zu grünen

Sein nicht harrt.

Warum nennt mein Lied dich zuletzt?

Dich, von dem es begann,

Dich, in dem es endet,

Dich, aus dem es quillt,

Jupiter Pluvius!

Dich, dich strömt mein Lied,

Und kastalischer Quell

Rinnt ein Nebenbach,

Rinnet Müssigen,

Sterblich Glücklichen

Abseits von dir,

Der du mich fassend deckst,

Jupiter Pluvius!

Nicht am Ulmenbaum

Hast du ihn besucht,

Mit dem Taubenpaar

In dem zärtlichen Arm,

Mit der freundlichen Ros’ umkränzt,

Tändelnden ihn, blumenglücklichen

Anakreon,

Sturmatmende Gottheit!

Nicht im Pappelwald

An des Sybaris Strand,

An des Gebirges

Sonnebeglänzter Stirn nicht

Fasstest du ihn,

Den bienensingenden,

Honig-lallenden,

Freundlich winkenden

Theokrit.

Wenn die Räder rasselten,

Rad an Rad rasch ums Ziel weg,

Hoch flog

Siegdurchglühter

Jünglinge Peitschenknall,

Und sich Staub wälzt’,

Wie vom Gebirg herab

Kieselwetter ins Tal,—

Glühte deine Seel’ Gefahren, Pindar

Mut.—Glühte?—

Armes Herz!

Dort auf dem Hügel,

Himmlische Macht!

Nur so viel Glut,

Dort meine Hütte,

Dorthin zu waten!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

[For such lyrical intensity and power in English this famous ode remains unsurpassed:

ODE TO THE WEST WIND

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

II

Thou on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion,

Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine aery surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou

For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and spare

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life: I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).]

When studying poetry with a view to artistic declamation, it is of primary importance to lose nothing of what wells up in the words from the poet’s soul, or is contained in what is given to us by him. Recitation, as well as poetry itself, will only become artistic when everything that the soul expresses in the prose content is recast into form, into something formed. In the lyric it must go more into the musical. In the epic and particularly in the dramatic, more into imagery, into what has been given a definite form. The lyrical, as I said, inclines toward the vowel-sounds; but we must not forget that every consonant also has in it a vowel-element. In every consonant there lies a disposition toward a vowel and every vowel has a tendency toward a consonant. Consequently through art, just as in other spheres where something similar is effected, the opposition between subjective and objective will be completely overcome. The whole inner being of man will be able to live in the outer world and the outer world will be brought to expression in its full strength through the inner being of man.

Speaking about the art of reciting in our course last autumn, I drew your attention to the universal, cosmic rhythm which is expressed in the rhythmic system of man. Furthermore, I showed how this comes to find expression in poetry – and thence, of course, in recitation as the manifestation of poetic art. We may say that an element with a more spiritual tendency (since the spirit manifests itself in everything physical) unfolds in the tempo of the human pulse-beat; while something more psychic, we may also say, something that takes its course in the soul, unfolds in the rhythm of breathing. A greater part of what is expressed in poetic form depends on the interplay between the rhythms of the pulse and breathing and the ratio of one to the other. And it is in the hexameter that the primary and most self-evident ratio between pulse-rhythm and breathing-rhythm is displayed. Fundamentally the hexameter involves two breaths, with four pulse-beats to each breath and this, of course, is the natural ratio between human breathing and the pulse.

In this way, what wells up in poetry comes to actual corporeal utterance. And conversely, the poetic must come to expression through recitation and declamation out of the human being as a whole. It is as if the pulse-rhythm were playing upon the breathing-rhythm – rhythm on rhythm. And what lives in rhythm is expressed again in the musicality of speech, in lyrical poetry. All the prose content of a poem must be led back to this inner rhythmic treatment of metre and tempo. Everything that lies in the what of the content must also lie in the how of the performance, so that in discovering the one in the other there is really an experience of the whole. [Note 12] If, in poetry or reciting, we find ourselves having to exert our intellect to grasp the merely word-for-word content, then the artistic is at that point disrupted.

This should really be ever-present in our mind when in any field of art we have to struggle through from inartistic content to genuine artistic form or to what has been permeated by the element of music. The latter is especially evident in reciting or declaiming a poem that is lyrical in origin.

In the case of dramatic art, too, its own artistic forms must be represented when it is expressed in speech-formation. In fact we can say: Recitation as an independent art must take account of the way that it evolves the dramatic rather differently from how it is evolved in a fully staged production. Yet the essence of the stage-production must appear in the way the speech is handled – in the recitative-declamatory treatment of the drama.

What do we actually have before us when we consider poetic drama? It is essentially something that only comes into existence through the characters on stage – or, if we do not see the drama with our eyes and hear it with our ears, through what our imagination has picked up from the poetic language and set in its totality before our souls. Everything must flow in moving form. But although the drama is only complete when presented on stage, we must realise all the same that everything standing before us, the persons on the stage, everything we hear, is fundamentally the expression of a soul-quality. The soul-quality which evolves as drama, in the separate characters and in their interaction – this is really the essential content of the drama.

At this point it becomes necessary to take note of what actually goes on in the soul. What goes on there, especially in the re-creation of a drama, is something imaginative; and this is so even when it is only with the poetry that we are concerned. On the stage the presentation must be pictorial. But here, too, what is spoken is a pictorial representation of what lives in the poet’s soul. What is presented on the stage is effective, not through its reality, but through what derives from the ’fair seeming’: [Note 13] it is imaginative despite its reality. And when the dramatic forms come before our souls as images – that too is imaginative, albeit in a special sense. Imagination is not experienced in its true being, but as a projection into our souls in image-form. In the same way a shadow thrown onto the wall by a three-dimensional object is related to the object itself, though in no way containing what lives in the object; as a good two-dimensional portrayal contains everything its three-dimensional subject has: so what is represented in our imaginings contains the shadow thrown there by imagination. The stage presentation is fundamentally nothing but an external, corporeal representation of what lives in these images and for this reason we feel an aversion (if we have any healthy feeling for such things) whenever in the drama external reality is merely imitated naturalistically. Dramatic art can no more tolerate realistic imitation than can the other arts of speech – though these are less liable to such difficulties. And when, as in our times, the tendency toward realism has so often emerged in drama productions, and we have seen Schiller’s characters shown on stage with their hands in their pockets! When an attempt has been made to produce a realistic imitation of external, physical nature, this only shows that we have strayed from a genuinely aesthetic perception, and little by little in the general course of civilisation lost the truly artistic.

It is possible to adopt a materialistic world-conception, and in a certain sense this is appropriate for the external organic world. In outer life it is possible to be realistic, but it is not so in art. For what we then produce is no longer in the domain of art at all – and this can be seen both in the drama itself and in the way speech is handled in these dramatic productions.

It is really a matter of putting everything an artistic speech-formation can achieve into the treatment of the language. This comprises the most varied elements. I should only like to point out a few details – our limited time does not allow more. There may exist, for example, in what is presented through speech-formation, a sort of average tempo. We feel this and starting from this average tempo we can effect a transition to a quicker one, to a more rapid delivery of the words, or to a slower one. The first, the more rapid delivery, always expresses a kind of going-out of the human “I” – a going out from oneself and widely extending oneself. Naturally one can feel this in different ways: as a separation, for example, from some thing one longs to reach. A slowing-down of the words, notably in dramatic speech, will present a kind of being-within-oneself. Everything expressed in a self-collected contemplation, a resting within oneself, will be connected with a slowing-down of the tempo.

Another formative principle lies in the raising or lowering of the pitch. The first is connected with the spiritualisation of an inner experience, with an ascending of the “I” above itself. Going out of oneself in wide extension is connected with the tempo: and ascending above oneself is associated with a rising in pitch. Everything in the content which strives toward spiritualisation (even if only a spiritualisation in which the human intellect is overpowered by the will, by ardour, by enthusiasm) will bring itself to formative expression in raising the pitch. And when a human being sinks below the level of his ordinary life, whether in sorrow or in inwardness, this will be connected with a fall in pitch. All this will find particular expression in dramatic art and everything dramatic speech-formation demands will have to flow into the element of form – so that everything must be grasped, not by the sheer power of intellect, but as an expression of this formative treatment of speech – and of course, if it is a matter of stage production, through the gestures. It will all flow into this special way of speaking, so that in the very speech we can feel what the content is. It will not be very easy to bring certain things in dramatic art to perfection, because (as Aristotle already knew) drama has to do with causal connections in life; and for this reason what may be called the dramatic score, in the sense we spoke of earlier as that which has to be realised, is very largely based on an implicit understanding and discernment. It must be transformed into something that can be attained through the speech-formation itself: through tempo, metre, rhythm, the rise and fall of the pitch, etc. It is from the speech-formation that the images which arise before the soul must flow.

We must enter into such intimacies of human life if we wish to find the truly artistic. Dramatic art itself, because it is lifted out of physical experience through imagination (even if only a reflection, a shadowy image of true imagination) can only become effective if it shows itself in the style, in the handling of the speech.

Hence in dramatic art, even down to the treatment of speech, it is for dramatic style that one will have to cultivate a special sense. Style, not realism, must be all-important. Hence we can say that what has been developed in the way of dramatic style in the French theatre and has been imitated in other languages, what culminated in the classical French presentation of tragedy can stand before us like a model from which to learn the formation of a dramatic style. From the style in which the French classics were, until quite recently, presented on the French stage (and after them the non-classical drama too), we shall be able to obtain a good idea of how a uniquely dramatic mode stands out against naturalistic speech, such as depends on intellectual understanding rather than the element of form.

Two passages, taken from the German and the French, will exemplify what I have roughly tried to indicate as regards dramatic style and the dramatic treatment of speech.

Recitation by Marie Steiner.

From Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, Act IV, Scene 5:

TELL (enters with his crossbow):

Durch diese hohle Gasse muss er kommen;

Es führt kein andrer Weg nach Küssnacht – Hier

Vollend’ ich’s. – Die Gelegenheit ist günstig.

Dort der Holunderstrauch verbirgt mich ihm,

Von dort herab kann ihn mein Pfeil erlangen;

Des Weges Enge wehret den Verfolgern.

Mach deine Rechnung mit dem Himmel, Vogt,

Fort musst du, deine Uhr ist abgelaufen.

Ich lebte still und harmlos – Das Geschoss

War auf des Waldes Tiere nur gerichtet,

Meine Gedanken waren rein von Mord –

Du hast aus meinem Frieden mich heraus

Geschreckt, in gärend Drachengift hast du

Die Milch der frommen Denkart mir verwandelt,

Zum Ungeheuren hast du mich gewöhnt –

Wer sich des Kindes Haupt zum Ziele setzte,

Der kann auch treffen in das Herz des Feinds.

Die armen Kindlein, die unschuldigen,

Das treue Weib muss ich vor deiner Wut

Beschützen, Landvogt! – Da, als ich den Bogenstrang

Anzog – als mir die Hand erzitterte –

Als du mit grausam teufelischer Lust

Mich zwangst, aufs Haupt des Kindes anzulegen –

Als ich ohnmächtig flehend rang vor dir,

Damals gelobt’ ich mir in meinem Innern

Mit furchtbarm Eidschwur, den nur Gott gehört,

Dass meines nächsten Schusses erstes Ziel

Dein Herz sein sollte. – Was ich mir gelobt

In jenes Augenblickes Höllenqualen,

Ist eine heil’ge Schuld – ich will sie zahlen.

Du bist mein Herr und meines Kaisers Vogt;

Doch nicht der Kaiser hätte sich erlaubt,

Was du. – Er sandte dich in diese Lande,

Um Hecht zu sprechen – strenges, denn er zürnet –

Doch nicht um mit der mörderischen Lust

Dich jedes Greuels straflos zu erfrechen;

Es lebt ein Gott, zu strafen und zu rächen.

Komm du hervor, du Bringer bittrer Schmerzen,

Mein teures Kleinod jetzt, mein höchster Schatz –

Ein Ziel will ich dir geben, das bis jetzt

Der frommen Bitte undurchdringlich war –

Doch dir soll es nicht widerstehn. – Und du,

Vertraute Bogensehne, die so oft

Mir treu gedient hat in der Freude Spielen,

Verlass mich nicht im fürchterlichen Ernst:

Nur jetzt noch halte fest, du treuer Strang,

Der mir so oft den herben Pfeil beflügelt –

Entränn’ er jetzo kraftlos meinen Händen,

Ich habe keinen zweiten zu versenden.

(Wanderers pass over the stage.)

Auf dieser Bank von Stein will ich mich setzen,

Dem Wanderer zur kurzen Ruh bereitet –

Denn hier ist keine Heimat. – Jeder treibt

Sich an dem andern rasch und fremd vorüber

Und fraget nicht nach seinem Schmerz. – Hier geht

Der sorgenvolle Kaufmann und der leicht

Geschürzte Pilger – der andächtige Mönch,

Der düstre Räuber und der heitre Spielmann,

Der Säumer mit dem schwerbeladnen Ross,

Der ferne herkommt von der Menschen Ländern,

Denn jede Strasse führt ans End’ der Welt.

Sie alle ziehen ihres Weges fort

An ihr Geschäft – und meines ist der Mord’. (Sits down)

– Sonst, wenn der Vater auszog, liebe Kinder,

Da war ein Freuen, wenn er wiederkam;

Denn niemals kehrt’ er heim, er bracht’ euch etwas,

Warts eine schöne Alpenblume, war’s

Ein seltner Vogel oder Ammonshorn,

Wie es der Wandrer findet auf den Bergen –

Jetzt geht er einem andern Weidwerk nach,

Am wilden Weg sitzt er mit Mordgedanken;

Des Feindes Leben ist’s, worauf er lauert.

– Und doch an euch nur denkt er, liebe Kinder,

Auch jetzt – euch zu verteidigen, eure holde Unschuld

Zu schützen vor der Rache des Tyrannen,

Will er zum Morde jetzt den Bogen spannen. (Stands up).

Ich laure auf ein edles Wild. – Lässt sich’s

Der Jäger nicht verdriessen, tagelang

Umher zu streifen in des Winters Strenge,

Von Fels zu Fels den Wagesprung zu tun,

Hinan zu klimmen an den glatten Wänden,

Wo er sich anleimt mit dem eignen Blut,

– Um ein armselig Grattier zu erjagen. Hier

gilt es einen köstlicheren Preis, Das Herz des

Todfeinds, der mich will verderben.

(Gay music in the distance coming nearer.)

Mein ganzes Lebelang hab’ ich den Bogen

Gehandhabt, mich geübt nach Schützenregel;

Ich habe oft geschossen in das Schwarze

Und manchen schönen Preis mir heimgebracht

Vom Freudenschiessen. – Aber heute will ich

Den Meisterschuss tun und das beste mir

Im ganzen Umkreis des Gebirgs gewinnen.

Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805).

[A speech from Dryden’s All for Love: or, The World Well Lost (his “imitation” of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra) may stand here as a sample of the Neoclassical drama in England. It comprises Act I, Scene i, 237ff:

ANTONY (having thrown himself down) :

Lye there, thou shadow of an Emperor;

The place thou pressest on thy Mother-earth

Is all thy Empire now: now it contains thee;

Some few days hence, and then ’twill be too large,

When thou’rt contracted in thy narrow Urn,

Shrunk to a few cold Ashes; then Octavia,

(For Cleopatra will not live to see it)

Octavia then will have thee all her own,

And bear thee in her Widow’d hand to Caesar;

Caesar will weep, the Crocodile will weep,

To see his Rival of the Universe

Lie still and peaceful there. I’le think no more on’t.

Give me some Musick; look that it be sad:

I’le sooth my Melancholy till I swell,

And burst my self with sighing—Soft Musick

‘Tis somewhat to my humor. Stay, I fancy

I’m now turn’d wild, a Commoner of Nature;

Of all forsaken, and forsaking all;

Live in a shady Forest’s Sylvan Scene,

Stretch’d at my length beneath some blasted Oke;

I lean my head upon the Mossy Bark,

And look just of a piece, as I grew from it:

My uncomb’d Locks, matted like Misleto,

Hang o’re my hoary Face; a mirm’ring Brook

Runs at my foot…

The Herd come jumping by me,

And fearless, quench their thirst, while I look on,

And take me for their fellow-Citizen,

More of this Image, more; it lulls my thoughts.

(Soft Musick again)

John Dryden (1631-1700).]

From Le Cid, Act III, Scene 4:

CHIMÈNE: Ah! Rodrigue, il est vrai, quoique ton ennemie,

Je ne puis te blâmer d’avoir fui l’infamie;

Et, de quelque façon qu’éclatent mes douleurs,

Je ne t’accuse point, je pleure mes malheurs.

Je sais ce que l’honneur, aprés un tel outrage,

Demandait à 1’ardeur d’un généreux courage:

Tu n’as fait le devoir que d’un homme de bien;

Mais aussi, le faisant, tu m’as appris le mien.

Ta funeste valeur m’instruit par ta victoire;

Elle a vengé ton père et soutenu ta gloire:

Même soin me regarde, et j’ai, pour m’affliger,

Ma gloire à soutenir, et mon père à venger.

Hélas! ton intérêt ici me désespère:

Si quelque autre malheur m’avait ravi mon père,

Mon âme aurait trouvé dans le bien de te voir

L’unique allégement qu’elle eût pu recevoir;

Et contre ma douleur j’aurais senti des charmes

Quand une main si chére eût essuyé mes larmes.

Mais il me faut te perdre après l’avoir perdu;

Cet effort sur ma flamme a mon honneur est dû;

Et cet affreux devoir, dont l’ordre m’assassine,

Me force à travailler moi-même à ta ruine.

Car enfin n’attends pas de mon affection

De lâches sentiments pour ta punition.

De quoi qu’en ta faveur notre amour m’entretienne,

Ma générosité doit répondre à la tienne:

Tu t’es, en m’offensant, montré digne de moi;

Je me dois, par ta mort, montrer digne de toi.

RODRIGUE: Ne diffère donc plus ce que l’honneur t’ordonne:

demande ma tête, et je te l’abandonne;

Fais-en un sacrifice a ce noble intérêt;

Le coup m’en sera doux, aussi bien que l’arrêt.

Attendre après mon crime une lente justice,

C’est reculer ta gloire autant que mon supplice.

Je mourrai trop heureux, mourant d’un coup si beau.

CHIMÈNE: Va, je suis ta partie, et non pas ton bourreau.

Si tu m’offres ta tête, est-ce à moi de la prendre?

Je la dois attaquer, mais tu dois la défendre:

C’est d’un autre que toi qu’il me faut l’obtenir

Et je dois te poursuivre, et non pas te punir.

RODRIGUE: De quoi qu’en ma faveur notre amour t’entretienne.

Ta générosité doit répondre à la mienne;

Et, pour venger un père, emprunter d’autres bras

Ma Chimène, crois-moi, c’est n’y répondre pas.

Ma main seule du mien a su venger l’offense,

Ta main seule du tien doit prendre la vengeance.

CHIMÈNE: Cruel! à quel propos sur ce point t’obstiner?

Tu t’es vengé sans aide, et tu m’en veux donner!

Je suivrai ton exemple, et j’ai trop de courage

Pour souffrir qu’avec toi ma gloire se partage.

Mon père et mon honneur ne veulent rien devoir

Aux traits de ton amour ni de ton désespoir.

RODRIGUE: Rigoureux point d’honneur. Hélas! quoi que je fasse.

Ne pourrai-je à la fin obtenir cette grâce?

Au nom d’un père mort, ou de notre amitié

Punis-moi par vengeance, ou du moins par pitié.

Ton malheureux amant aura bien moins de peine

A mourir par ta main qu’à vivre avec ta haine.

CHIMÈNE: Va, je ne te hais point.

RODRIGUE: Tu le dois.

CHIMÈNE: Je ne puis.

Pierre Corneille (1606-1684).

We shall continue now with something about the prose-poem. Here it is a matter of something in the artist’s soul which he experiences as poetry, but which cannot be expressed in any of the art-forms generally employed. Although put into prose, it is nonetheless a genuinely poetic art that is brought to expression in this form. But anything cast in the form of a prose-poem will need special treatment when it is expressed in speech-formation. It is almost universally – though quite erroneously – assumed that the recitation or declamation of prose-poems is something easy to accomplish. In reality, the recitative-declamatory speaking of prose-poetry is the most difficult, as it represents the most intimate form of the art. Everything that comes to light in lyric, dramatic or epic speech-formation, whether of a more delicate or more profound nature, must form a synthesis whenever a prose-poem is to be presented in oral production. In recitation of this kind everything that is to be found in verse, or any form of poetic art, will sound forth – but with a more delicate shading.

In this way, merely touching upon what otherwise appears in the recitation and declamation with stronger emphasis, with more marked contours – by giving this only gentle emphasis – the recital will become essentially suffused with soul. Suffused with soul!

The artistic recital of prose-poetry must become much more soul-filled: it must occasion our going beyond the conceptual understanding of the words toward something imaginative. The energetic impetus that underlies logical inference, for example, leads toward an image-forming experience; [Note 14] and at the same time there sounds through softly, as something musical, the octave. The image-forming treatment of speech in a prose-poem, when presented in recitation or declamation, is like a continually flowing stream with its even waves. And, as if from the depths, other waves arise, bringing variation into its even flow – this is the delicate musical element which should become perceptible in this kind of recitation. In speaking a prose-poem with poetic sensibility, the more intimate features of a language will come to light and the raising of what looks like a prose production into a poetical work, into the realm of art and poetry, is something of a triumph which man can give to his language. What we may call the soul of a language finds a very adequate embodiment there.

We will now take an example – from The Apprentices of Sais by Novalis. In this novel, which remained unfinished, there is a wonderful little passage of prose in which all that I have tried to indicate about the recitation and declamation of prose-poems comes into prominence. The essential thing is that everything which otherwise comes to light in the reciting of poetry is transformed, through acquiring a more intimate character, into a particular mood or feeling. Everything, on the other hand, that serves to differentiate the mood will be taken up into the totality of the mood as a whole. Something like this can be attempted in an outstanding piece of prose like the fairy-tale in Novalis’ The Apprentices of Sais. In this wonderful fairy-tale, as in so much that has come to us from Novalis, is revealed the whole depth of his soul.

The handsome youth Hyacinth loves the maiden Rosepetal. It is a love cherished in secret – only the flowers and the animals of the forest know of the love of the handsome youth for the maiden Rosepetal. And then there appears a man with a long beard, who makes a wondrous impression and tells marvellous stories, in which the handsome youth Hyacinth becomes completely immersed. He is seized with a great longing for the veiled Virgin, for the veiled image of Truth. His soul trembles with longing, which also enlarges his vision so that he becomes estranged from his immediate surroundings, and his heart yearns for the image of the veiled Virgin. He forsakes Rosepetal, who remains behind weeping. He wanders through all sorts of unknown regions, and comes to know many things on his way; and at last he arrives at the Temple of Isis. Everything seems familiar to him, and yet different from what he had experienced before – it seems so much more splendid. And behold! he ventures to lift the veil! and Rosepetal falls into his arms.

It would be hard to represent with more intimate feeling the expansion of the soul out of her subjectivity into the wide universe; it would be hard to represent more intimately the longing of man for truth – hard to link more closely what man can experience when he rises to the highest spheres of truth with what he lives through in his most direct, intimate day-to-day experiences. All that is needed is sufficient intimacy of soul. What is expressed in this prose fairy-tale can only be brought to light by a soul such as that of Novalis, who really felt everyday life in such a way that it was for him a direct expression of the eternal. Novalis, after his first love had died, was able in inward truth of soul to live with her and to feel the direct presence of one who was in the other world as if she were in this world. Novalis’ soul was truly able to experience the super-sensible in the sensible and so raise what belongs to the sense-world to assume the character of the super-sensible. Everything flowed together in Novalis: striving after truth, striving after beauty and religious ardour. Only if we understand his comprehensiveness do we understand Novalis. Hence there could arise the remarkable feeling which resounds through The Apprentices of Sais, and wrests itself from Novalis’s soul: man has felt that in the image of Isis truth is veiled; “I am the past, the present and the future, no mortal as yet has lifted my veil” – that is the pronouncement of the veiled Isis and Novalis was sensible of it. Confronted with “No mortal as yet has lifted my veil”, Novalis responded with “Then we must become immortal”. Novalis never despaired of the soul’s ability to lift the veil of truth: but the soul must first become immediately aware of her own immortality. A man who experiences his immortality in himself may, in the sense of Novalis, lift the veil of truth. It is a powerful saying – “Then we must become immortal”.

What lives in this feeling in a far-reaching way meets us again in an intimate mood when the handsome youth Hyacinth comes to the Temple of Isisafter long dream-wanderings through unknown regions, which are nonetheless familiar to him, though now appearing more splendid than he had once known. He comes to the Temple of Isis, lifts the veil and what he knows and loves – Rosepetal – comes to meet him. Yet, as we can envisage and feel intimately in this prose fairy-tale, she has become through this experience of eternity much more splendid than she once was.

Truly it is a prose-poem conceived in a mood where the highest to which man can aspire takes the form of the most intimate – one of the fairest flowers of poetic prose, demonstrating that, in what is apparently prose, true poetry can be expressed.

From Die Lehrlinge zu Sais:

DAS MÄRCHEN VON HYAZINTH UND ROSENBLÜTE

Vor langen Zeiten lebte weit gegen Abend ein blutjunger Mensch. Er war sehr gut, aber auch über die Massen wunderlich. Er grämte sich unaufhorlich um nichts und wieder nichts, ging immer still für sich hin, setzte sich einsam, wenn die andern spielten und fröhlich waren, und hing seltsamen Dingen nach. Höhlen und Wälder waren sein liebster Aufenthalt, und dann sprach er immerfort mit Tieren und Vögeln, mit Bäumen und Felsen, natürlich kein vernünftiges Wort, lauter närrisches Zeug zum Totlachen.

Er blieb aber immer mürrisch und ernsthaft, ungeachtet sich das Eichhörnchen, die Meerkatze, der Papagei und der Gimpel alle Mühe gaben, ihn zu zerstreuen und ihn auf den richtigen Weg zu weisen. Die Gans erzählte Märchen, der Bach klimperte eine Ballade dazwischen, ein grosser dicker Stein machte lächerliche Bockssprünge, die Rose schlich sich freundlich hinter ihm herum, kroch durch seine Locken, und der Efeu streichelte ihm die sorgenvolle Stirn.—Allein der Missmut und Ernst waren hartnäckig. Seine Eltern waren sehr betrübt, sie wussten nicht, was sie anfangen sollten. Er war gesund und ass, nie hatten sie ihn beleidigt, er war auch bis vor wenig Jahren fröhlich und lustig gewesen, wie keiner; bei allen Spielen voran, von allen Mädchen gern gesehn. Er war recht bildschön, sah aus wie gemalt, tanzte wie ein Schatz.

Unter den Mädchen war eine, ein köstliches, bildschönes Kind, sah aus wie Wachs, Haare wie goldne Seide, kirschrote Lippen, wie ein Püppchen gewachsen, brandrabenschwarze Augen. Wer sie sah, hätte mögen vergehn, so lieblich war sie.

Damals war Rosenblüte, so hiess sie, dem bildschönen Hyazinth, so hiess er, von Herzen gut, und er hatte sie lieb zum Sterben. Die andern Kinder wussten’s nicht. Ein Veilchen hatte es ihnen zuerst gesagt, die Hauskätzchen hatten es wohl gemerkt, die Häuser ihrer Eltern lagen nahe beisammen. Wenn nun Hyazinth die Nacht an seinem Fenster stand und Rosenblüte an ihrem, und die Kätzchen auf den Mäusefang da vorbeiliefen, da sahen sie die beiden stehn und lachten und kicherten oft so laut, dass sie es hörten und böse wurden. Das Veilchen hatte es der Erdbeere im Vertrauen gesagt, die sagte es ihrer Freundin, der Stachelbeere, die liess nun das Sticheln nicht, wenn Hyazinth gegangen kam; so erfuhr’s denn bald der ganze Garten und der Wald, und wenn Hyazinth ausging, so rief’s von allen Seiten: Rosenblütchen ist mein Schätzchen! Nun ärgerte sich Hyazinth und musste doch auch wieder aus Herzensgrunde lachen, wenn das Eidechschen geschlüpft kam, sich auf einen warmen Stein setzte, mit dem Schwänzchen wedelte und sang:

Rosenblütchen, das gute Kind,

Ist geworden auf einmal blind,

Denkt, die Mutter sei Hyazinth,

Fällt ihm um den Hals geschwind;

Merkt sie aber das fremde Gesicht,

Denkt nur an, da erschrickt sie nicht,

Fährt, als merkte sie kein Wort,

Immer nur mit Küssen fort.

Ach! wie bald war die Herrlichkeit vorbei. Es kam ein Mann aus fremden Landen gegangen, der war erstaunlich weit gereist, hatte einen langen Bart, tiefe Augen, entsetzliche Augenbrauen, ein wunderliches Kleid mit vielen Falten und seltsamen Figuren hineingewebt. Er setzte sich vor das Haus, das Hyazinths Eltern gehörte. Nun war Hyazinth sehr neugierig und setzte sich zu ihm und holte ihm Brot und Wein. Da tat er seinen weissen Bart voneinander und erzählte bis tief in die Nacht, und Hyazinth wich und wankte nicht und wurde auch nicht müde zuzuhören. So viel man nachher vernahm, so hat er viel von fremden Ländern, unbekannten Gegenden, von erstaunlich wunderbaren Sachen erzählt und ist drei Tage dageblieben und mit Hyazinth in tiefe Schachten hinuntergekrochen. Rosenblütchen hat genug den alten Hexenmeister verwünscht, denn Hyazinth ist ganz versessen auf seine Gespräche gewesen und hat sich um nichts bekümmert; kaum dass er ein wenig Speise zu sich genommen. Endlich hat jener sich fortgemacht, doch dem Hyazinth ein Büchelchen dagelassen, das kein Mensch lesen konnte. Dieser hat ihm noch Früchte, Brot und Wein mitgegeben und ihn weit weg begleitet. Und dann ist er tiefsinnig zurückgekommen und hat einen ganz neuen Lebenswandel begonnen. Rosenblütchen hat recht zum Erbarmen um ihn getan, denn von der Zeit an hat er sich wenig aus ihr gemacht und ist immer für sich geblieben.

Nun begab sich’s, dass er einmal nach Hause kam und war wie neu geboren. Er fiel seinen Eltern um den Hals und weinte. ‘Ich muss fort in fremde Lande’, sagte er, ‘die alte wunderliche Frau im Walde hat mir erzählt, wie ich gesund werden müsste, das Buch hat sie ins Feuer geworfen und hat mich getrieben, zu euch zu gehn und euch um euren Segen zu bitten. Vielleicht komme ich bald, vielleicht nie wieder. Grüsst Rosenblütchen. Ich hätte sie gern gesprochen, ich weiss nicht, wie mir ist, es drängt mich fort; wenn ich an die alten Zeiten zurückdenken will, so kommen gleich mächtigere Gedanken dazwischen, die Ruhe ist fort, Herz und Liebe mit, ich muss sie suchen gehn. Ich wollt euch gern sagen, wohin, ich weiss selbst nicht, dahin wo die Mutter der Dinge wohnt, die verschleierte Jungfrau. Nach der ist mein Gemüt entzundet. Lebt wohl.’

Er riss sich los und ging fort. Seine Eltern wehklagten und vergossen Tränen, Rosenblütchen blieb in ihrer Kammer und weinte bitterlich. Hyazinth lief nun, was er konnte, durch Täler und Wildnisse, über Berge und Ströme, dem geheimnisvollen Lande zu. Er fragte überall nach der heiligen Göttin, Menschen und Tiere, Felsen und Bäume. Manche lachten, manche schwiegen, nirgends erhielt er Bescheid. Im Anfange kam er durch rauhes, wildes Land, Nebel und Wolken warfen sich ihm in den Weg, es stürmte immerfort; dann fand er unabsehliche Sandwüsten, glühenden Staub, und wie er wandelte, so veränderte sich auch sein Gemüt, die Zeit wurde ihm lang, und die innre Unruhe legte sich, er wurde sanfter und das gewaltige Treiben in ihm allgemach zu einem leisen, aber starken Zuge, in den sein ganzes Gemüt sich auflöste. Es lag wie viele Jahre hinter ihm. Nun wurde die Gegend auch wieder reicher und mannigfaltiger, die Luft lau und blau, der Weg ebener, grüne Büsche lockten ihn mit anmutigen Schatten, aber er verstand ihre Sprache nicht, sie schienen auch nicht zu sprechen, und doch erfüllten sie auch sein Herz mit grünen Farben und kühlem, stillem Wesen. Immer höher wuchs jene süsse Sehnsucht in ihm, und immer breiter und saftiger wurden die Blätter, immer lauter und lustiger die Vögel und Tiere, balsamischer die Früchte, dunkler der Himmel, wärmer die Luft, und heisser seine Liebe, die Zeit ging immer schneller, als sähe sie sich nahe am Ziele.

Eines Tages begegnete er einem kristallnen Quell und einer Menge Blumen, die kamen in ein Tal herunter zwischen schwarzen himmelhohen Säulen. Sie grüssten ihn freundlich mit bekannten Worten. ‘Liebe Landsleute’, sagte er, ‘wo find’ ich wohl den geheiligten Wohnsitz der Isis? Hier herum muss er sein, und ihr seid vielleicht hier bekannter als ich.’ ‘Wir gehn auch nur hier durch’, antworteten die Blumen; ‘eine Geisterfamilie ist auf der Reise, und wir bereiten ihr Weg und Quartier, indes sind wir vor kurzem durch eine Gegend gekommen, da hörten wir ihren Namen nennen. Gehe nur aufwärts, wo wir herkommen, so wirst du schon mehr erfahren.’ Die Blumen und die Quelle lächelten, wie sie das sagten, boten ihm einen frischen Trunk und gingen weiter. Hyazinth folgte ihrem Rat, frug und frug und kam endlich zu jener längst gesuchten Wohnung, die unter Palmen und andern köstlichen Gewächsen versteckt lag. Sein Herz klopfte in unendlicher Sehnsucht, und die süsseste Bangigkeit durchdrang ihn in dieser Behausung der ewigen Jahreszeiten. Unter himmlischen Wohlgedüften entschlummerte er, weil ihn nur der Traum in das Allerheiligste führen durfte.

Wunderlich führte ihn der Traum durch unendliche Gemächer voll seltsamer Sachen auf lauter reizenden Klängen und in abwechselnden Akkorden. Es dünkte ihm alles so bekannt und doch in niegesehener Herrlichkeit, da schwand auch der letzte irdische Anflug, wie in Luft verzehrt, und er stand vor der himmlischen Jungfrau. Da hob er den leichten, glänzenden Schleier, und Rosenblütchen sank in seine Arme. Eine ferne Musik umgab die Geheimnisse des liebenden Wiedersehns, die Ergiessungen der Sehnsucht, und schloss alles Fremde von diesem entzückenden Orte aus.

Hyazinth lebte nachher noch lange mit Rosenblütchen unter seinen frohen Eltern und Gespielen, und unzählige Enkel dankten der alten wunderlichen Frau für ihren Rat und ihr Feuer; denn damals bekamen die Menschen so viel Kinder, als sie wollten.—

Novalis (1772-1801).

[The prose-poem is a relatively rare beast in English literature; but one of its descendants is the lyrical novel, as practised by (among others) Joyce. [Note 15] This is one of the formal poetic “epiphanies” from his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ch. 4:

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life: A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on.

He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How far had he walked? What hour was it?

There was no human figure near him nor any sound borne to him over the air. But the tide was near the turn and already the day was on the wane. He turned landward and ran towards the shore and, running up the sloping beach, reckless of the sharp shingle, found a sandy nook amid a ring of tufted sandknolls and lay down there that the peace and silence of the evening might still the riot of his blood.

He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast.

He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watcher, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other.

Evening had fallen when he woke and the sand and arid grasses of his bed glowed no longer. He rose slowly and, recalling the rapture of his sleep, sighed at its joy.

He climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of skyline, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.

James Joyce (1882-1941).]

Today, seeing that from a living grasp of the anthroposophical world-conception there results something for the whole human being, for man in his totality, we would like to put forward something taken from the art of recitation. As I have mentioned already, there is a certain fear in artistic circles, especially among poets, reciters and so on, that everything approaching the conceptual, everything which takes a “scientific” form, is really foreign to art – and actually inimical to the original and vital in it, choking instinctive and intuitive art. And as regards that intellectuality which has arisen in the course of recent centuries of human development this is absolutely the case. Yet this very intellectuality is also connected with an inclination toward what is present in external, physical reality: our very languages have gradually adopted a certain form – what might be called a tendency towards materialism. In our words and their meaning lies something which points directly to the external sense-world. Hence this intellectuality, which possesses only picture-being and is all the more authentic the less it contains of life and reality from man’s inner nature – this intellectuality will indeed have little in common with the primordial vitality that must lie at the root of all art. But the reinvigoration of spiritual life to which Anthroposophy aspires means precisely the reimmersing of intellect in the primordial forces of man’s soul life. The artistic will not then appear in the so-much-dreaded gloom of intellectual pallor; imagination will not be drawn down through Anthroposophy into logic and materialism, but will on the contrary be made to bear fruit. From living together with the spiritual it will be nourished and bear fruit. An enhancement of art is to be hoped for just through its being pervaded by Anthroposophy and the anthroposophical way of thinking – the whole bearing and demeanour of Anthroposophy.

What applies to the arts as a whole we will show today with reference to recitation and declamation. Over the last decades recitation and declamation have been steered more and more into a predilection for endowing with form the meaning-content of the words. A stress on the word-for-word content has become increasingly conspicuous. Our times have little understanding for such a treatment of the spoken word as was characteristic of Goethe, who used to rehearse the actors in his plays with special regard for the formation of speech, standing in front of them like a musical conductor with his baton. The speech-formation, the element of form that underlies the word-for-word content – it is really this which inspires the true poet as an artist. The point must be emphasized: Schiller, when he felt drawn by inner necessity to compose a poem, to begin with had something in the way of an indeterminate melody, something of a melodic nature as the content of his soul; something musical floated through his soul and only afterwards came the word-for-word content, which had really only to receive what was for the poet, as an artist, the essential thing – the musical element of his soul. So we have on the one hand something musical, which as such would remain pure music; and on the other, the pictorial, painterly element to which in declamatory-recitative art we must return. To say something merely as an expression of the prose-content – it is not for this that true poetry exists. But to mould the prose-content, to re-cast it into measure and rhythm into unfolding melody – into what really lies behind the prose-content – for all this the art of poetry exists. We would surely not be favoured with such a mixed bag of poetry if we did not live in unartistic times when in neither painting nor sculpture, nor poetry nor its recitative-declamatory rendering, is true artistry to be found.

If we look at the means by which poetry is brought to expression, which in our case is recitation and declamation, then we must naturally refer to speech. Now speech bears within it a thought- and a will-element. The thought tends toward the prosaic. It comes to express a conviction; it comes to express what is demanded within the framework of conventions of a social community. And with the progress of civilization language comes to be permeated more and more with expressions of conviction, with conventional social expression and to that extent becomes less and less poetic and artistic. The poet will therefore first have to struggle with the language to give it an artistic form, to make it into sornething which is really speech-formation.

In my anthroposophical writings I have drawn attention to the character of the vowels in language. This character man experiences in the main through his inner being: what we live through inwardly from our experience in the outer world finds expression in the vowel-sounds. Occurrences that we portray objectively, the essential forms of the external world, come to expression in the consonants of a language. Naturally, the vocalic and consonantal nature of language varies from language to language. Indeed from the way in which a language deploys its consonants and vowels can be seen the extent to which it has developed into a more or less artistic language. Some modern languages, in the course of their development, have gradually acquired an inartistic character and are falling into decadence. When a poet sets out to give form to such a language, he is called upon to repeat at a higher level the original speech-creative process. [Note 17] In the construction his verses, in the treatment of rhyme and alliteration (we shall hear and discuss examples of these later) he touches upon something related to the speech-creative process. Where it is a matter of bringing inner being to expression, the poet will be drawn, by virtue of his intuitive and instinctive ability, to the vowels. The result will be an accumulation of vowels. And when the poet needs to give form to outward things or events, he will be drawn to the consonants. One or the other will be accumulated, depending an whether something inward or something external is being expressed. The reciter or declaimer must take this up, for he will then be able to re-establish the rhythm between inner being and the outer world. On this kind of speech-formation, on the bringing out of what lies within the artistic handling of speech, the formation of a new recitative and declamatory art-form will largely depend.

We will now introduce a few shorter poems to show how recitation and declamation must be guided by speech-formation.

MÄCHTIGES ÜBERRASCHEN

Ein Strom entrauscht umwölktem Felsensaale,
Dem Ozean sich eilig zu verbinden:
Was auch sich spiegeln mag von Grund zu Gründen,
Er wandelt unaufhaltsam fort zu Tale.

Dämonisch aber stürzt mit einem Male –
Ihr folgten Berg und Wald in Wirbelwinden –
Sich Oreas, Behagen dort zu finden,
Und hemmt den Lauf, begrenzt die weite Schale.

Die Welle sprüht und staunt zurück und weichet
Und schwillt bergan, sich immer selbst zu trinken:
Gehemmt ist nun zum Vater hin das Streben.

Sie schwankt und ruht, zum See zurückgedeichet;
Gestirne, spiegelnd sich, beschaun das Blinken
Des Wellenschlags am Fels, ein neues Leben.

—A Sonnet by Goethe.

[We encounter a similar movement and transition in style in the course of this English sonnet:

Devouring time blunt thou the Lyons pawes,
And make the earth devoure her owne sweet brood,
Plucke the keeneteeth from the fierce Tygers jawes,
And burne the long liv’d Phoenix in her blood,
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st,
And do what ere thou wilt swift-footed time
To the wide world and all her fading sweets:
But I forbid thee one most hainous crime,
O carve not with thy howers my loves faire brow,
Nor draw noe lines there with thine antique pen,
Him in thy course untainted doe allow,
For beauties patterne to succeding men.
Yet doe thy worst ould Time dispight thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

—William Shakespeare (1564-1616).]

Das Tier, die Pflanze, diese Wesen hatten
noch die un-menschliche Geduld der Erde;
da war ein Jahr, was heut nur noch Sekunde.

Jetzt geht ihr nichts mehr rasch genug von statten.
Der Mensch begann sein ungeduldig Werde.
Sie spürt: ‘Jetzt endlich kam die grosse Stunde:

auf die ich mich gezüchtet Jahrmillionen!
Jetzt brauch ich meinen Leib nicht mehr zu schonen,
jetzt häng ich bald als Geist an Gottes Munde.’

—A Ritornello by Christian Morgenstern.

[A series of three-line stanzas with recurring rhymes is a comparatively simple representative of a poetic form that is capable of being extended almost indefinitely. Our first poem is a relatively uncomplicated example; a second shows something of what can be achieved by a poet working within very strict limitations.

THE COVENANT

The covenant of god and animal,
The frieze of fabulous creatures winged and crowned,
And in the midst the woman and the man –

Lost long ago in fields beyond the Fall –
Keep faith in sleep-walled night and there are found
On our long journey back where we began.

Then the heraldic crest or nature lost
Shines out again until the weariless wave
Roofs with its sliding horror all that realm.

What jealousy, what rage could overwhelm
The golden lion and lamb and vault a grave
For innocence, innocence past defence or cost?

—Edwin Muir (1887-1959).

The highly-developed, courtly poetry of the late Middle Ages provides many examples of this type of elaborate and difficult structure. This Balade is a moderately ambitious and very beautiful instance:

TO ROSEMOUNDE

Madame, ye ben of al beaute shryne
As fer as bercled is the mappemounde;
For as the cristal glorious ye shyne,
And lyke ruby ben your chekes rounde.
Therwith ye ben so mery and so jocounde,
That at a revel whan that I see you daunce,
It is an oynement unto my wounde,
Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.

For thogh I wepe of teres ful a tyne,
Yet may that wo myn herte nat confounde;
Your seemly voys that ye so smal outtwyne
Maketh my thoght in joye and blis habounde.
So curteisly I go, with love bounde,
That to my-self I sey, in my penaunce,
Suffyseth me to love you, Rosemounde,
Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.

Nas never pyk walwed in galauntyne
As I in love am walwed and y-wounde;
For which ful ofte I of my-self divyne
That I am trewe Tristam the secounde.
My love may not refreyd be nor afounde;
I brenne ay in an amorous plesaunce.
Do what you list, I wil your thral be founde,
Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.

—Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400).]

WELTENSEELENGEISTER

Im Lichte wir schalten,
Im Schauen wir walten,
Im Sinnen wir weben.

Aus Herzen wir heben
Das Geistesringen
Durch Seelenschwingen.

Dem Menschen wir singen
Das Göttererleben
Im Weltengestalten.

—Poem in form of a Rondeau by Rudolf Steiner.

A scene will next be presented from my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation. What we have here is a representation of experiences connected with the spiritual world. One might be tempted to look upon something like this as contrived by the intellect, as though we were going after some sort of “symbolic” art – but that would not really be art at all. What will be spoken here, despite the psychic-spiritual nature of the events, was actually seen, in concrete form. Everything was there, down to the very sound of the words. Nothing had to be manufactured, or put together, or elaborated allegorically: it was simply there. We have attempted to give form to man’s manifold experiences in relation to the spiritual worlds; we have tried simply to give form to soul-forces, to what man can experience inwardly as differentiated soul-forces. Something results from this quite spontaneously, that is not shaped by any intellectual activity. As it is here a matter of purely spiritual contents, it is especially important to realize that it is not a matter of giving information or the prosaic word-for-word content, but of giving form to the actual spiritual contents. On the one hand a musical element will be perceptible – at the very point where one might suspect an intellectualising tendency – and on the other we will have a pictorial element, which must be particularly brought out whenever we are giving form to some kind of event. [Note 18]

From The Portal of Initiation, Scene 7.

MARIA: You, my sisters, at this hour
be once again my helpers,
as you have often been before, –
that I may make world-ether
resound within itself.
It shall ring out in harmony
and, ringing, permeate
a soul with knowledge.
I can behold the signs
that lead us to our task.
So shall your work
unite itself with mine.
Johannes, in his striving,
shall through creative deeds of ours
be raised to true existence.
The brothers in the temple
held council
how they could lead him
out of the depths to light-filled heights.
And they expect of us
that we arouse within his soul
the strength for soaring flight.
And so, my Philia, breathe in
clean essence of the light
from wide-flung spaces;
be filled with tones, enticing,
from souls’ creative power,
that you can hand to me
the gifts you gather
from spirit grounds.
Then I can weave them
into the stirring dances of the spheres.
And you, too, Astrid,
beloved mirror-image of my spirit,
create the power of darkness
in streaming light,
that colours may shine forth.
Bring harmony to tonal being
so that world-substance, weaving,
can live and sound.
I can entrust then spirit feeling
to seeking human senses.
And you, O sturdy Luna,
you are as firm within
as is the living heart
that grows within the tree;
join with your sisters’ gifts
the image of your own uniqueness,
that certainty of knowledge
be granted to the seeker.

PHILIA: I will imbue myself
with clearest essence of the light
from worldwide spaces.
I will breathe in sound-substance,
life-bestowing,
from far ethereal regions,
that you, beloved sister, with your work
may reach your goal.

ASTRID: And I will weave
into the radiant light
the clouding darkness.
I will condense
the life of sound,
that glistening it may ring
and ringing it may glisten,
that you, beloved sister,
may guide the rays of soul.

LUNA: I will enwarm soul-substance
and will make firm life-ether.
They shall condense themselves,
they shall perceive themselves,
and in themselves residing
guard their creative forces,
that you, beloved sister,
within the seeking soul
may quicken certainty of knowledge.

MARIA: From Philia’s horizons
shall stream forth joyfulness.
The undines’ power
of ever-changefulness shall rouse
a sensitivity of soul,
that the awakened one
can then experience
the world’s delight,
the world’s despair.
From Astrid’s weaving
shall spring forth love’s desire.
The airy life of sylphs
shall stir up in the soul
the urge for sacrifice,
that he, the consecrated one,
revive and quicken
those who are sorrow-laden,
those who are joy-entreating.
From Luna’s strength
shall stream forth firmness;
the power of fire-beings
can actively create
soul-certainty,
so that the knowing one
can find himself
in soul-life-weaving,
in world-life-breathing.

PHILIA: I will entreat the spirits of the worlds
that they, with light of being,
enchant soul feeling,
that they, with tone of words,
charm spirit hearing,
that he whom we must waken
may rise
upon soul paths
to heavenly heights.

ASTRID: I will guide streams of love,
that fill the world with warmth,
into the heart
of him, the consecrated one,
that he can bring
the grace of heaven
to earthly work
and mood of consecration
to sons of men.

LUNA: I will from primal powers
beseech both strength and courage,
and will imbed them deep
within the seeker’s heart,
that confidence
in his own self
may be with him
throughout his life.
He shall then feel himself
secure within himself.
And he shall pluck
each moment’s ripened fruit,
to draw from them their seeds
for all eternity.

MARIA: With you, my sisters,
united for this earnest work,
I shall succeed
in what I long to do.
There penetrates the cry
of him, who’s been so sorely tested,
into our world of light.
Trans. Ruth and Hans Pusch.

When we come to the sonnet it is, of course, to be taken for granted that a sonnet does not arise from the intention to compose a sonnet, but by necessity from the working out of inner experiences. It is evident that the sonnet tends toward something visual or pictorial that lives in the language – we have an experience which is in some way twofold. Such an experience presents itself, and we wish to give it a form, such as appears in the first two strophes. But we are then thrown into a contradiction of inner experience. The second strophe confronts the first wave, so to speak, like a counter-wave. And in the last two strophes we feel the contradictions that govern the universe. The human heart and the human mind strive for a unison, a harmonious association, so that they may resolve in harmony what found expression in discord and overcome the material dissonance through the spirituality of harmony. This is manifested even in the rhyme-scheme of the first two strophes and in the linked rhymes of the concluding strophes. In as far as there is not such a necessity of inner experience, a sonnet cannot arise; for it must manifest itself even down to the rhyme-scheme as a picture-form. And now, the musical element infiltrates this pictorial form: a musicality that depends principally on vowel sounds, and on what enters the vowel from the consonant – for every consonant has its vowel-element. This gives what one might call musical substance to the primarily pictorial form taken by the sonnet. What is present within the sonnet, shaping it, is metrical and, in the art of speaking, metre is brought to expression specifically through recitation: something the Greeks managed to bring to a certain eminence. The Greeks lived in the metre; that is to say, in the plastic element of the language. If, on the other hand, we look at what comes to us from the Nordic or Central European, Germanic tradition, we see how into the plasticity of speech there enters something musical from within. Here we have something which streams out more from the will, more from the personality whereas with the Greeks everything flows from metrical clarity of vision. With the Greeks it was primarily the art of recitation that attained a certain peak, whereas among the Germanic peoples it was declamatory art, drawing on the musical principle and flowing into themes and rhythms and cadences, which stirred into activity. And whereas in recitation we have to do with something in speech that in one sound broadens, in another makes ‘pointed’, forming it pictorially – in musicality we have what endows language with a melodic quality. It is in fact something like this that we can see in the sonnet and its treatment in the several regions of Europe. We can see how the declamatory united with the recitative, how the Germanic later united with the Greek feeling for measure. [Note 19] It is of some importance for us to realise the musical as well as the plastic quality inherent in speech-formation, for us to learn to introduce into declamation and recitation something which essentially leads us from what has significance for the senses to what is moved by the spirit. For this, it is once again necessary to have a feeling for poetic form as such – the form of a ritornello or a rondeau, for instance. This does not in truth make for a poetry wanting in thought; it simply expresses thought, not through abstractions, but through its productive creativity. If it is to adapt itself to forms created in this way, the art of speaking must be restored to a life in the actual waves of speech – the recitative with its pure formation; and the high or low intonations, the melodic forms of declamation. And if a dramatic touch has to be added, as in the scene you have just heard, which dealt with purely spiritual experiences, the intellectual significance or literal meaning must be completely overcome, completely transformed from a literal communication of prose fact into actual speech-formation. We thus have in immediate presentation the same experience as when in a prose piece we pass from prosaic understanding to a vision of what is represented in the prosaic. The pleasure of the prosaic is indirect: we must first understand, and through understanding we are then led to visualisation. This entails from the first something inartistic, for the aesthetic quality lies in immediacy. The art of speech-formation must have direct expression. What is actually presented (and not an intellectual imitation of it) must show itself and be given form. In our times we often see so-called poets working up intellectual imitations, rather than those immediate responses which make themselvesfelt in speech-formation. Goethe, who expresses so beautifully a living apprehension of tranquillity – a tranquillity preceding that of sleep – gives it utterance in these lines:

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh;
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

Compare Shelley, “Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa.”

The sun is set; the swallows are asleep;
The bats are flitting fast in the grey air;
The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep,
And evening’s breath, wandering here and there
Over the quivering surface of the stream,
Wakes not one ripple from its summer dream.

There is complete accord between the feeling for the summits and the tree-tops and what goes on in our own heart. A harmony lies in the sounds, in the very word-formation, so that what is mediated to us through the outer world sounds again – especially if we really listen to the poem – in the word- and speech-formation. All our experience of the outer world has passed over into the speech-formation itself. That would be the ideal of true poetry: to be able to present an experience received from outside in the very treatment of the language. The mere repetition of external experience, simply trying to express external experience in words – this is not poetry. The art of poetry only arises when something experienced in the outer world is reconstituted out of the life of the human soul in terms of pure speech-formation. [Note 20]

We can observe this in a truly artistic poet like Goethe, when he feels the need to recreate an identical prose-content out of a different mood and feeling. From living with the Gothic and the mood it transmitted to him, from the feeling let us say for the pointed arches striving upwards, which he felt most deeply in his appreciation of Strasbourg Cathedral, Goethe had gained at the beginning of his time in Weimar a sensibility which, when given poetic form, became something like inner declamation. Thought and feeling took such a form in him that we can experience directly in speech-formation something also to be found in contemplating a Gothic cathedral. We can see something striving upwards, something unfinished, in a Gothic cathedral; and this was Goethe’s mood in Weimar when he conceived his Iphigeneia. Driven by a deep longing for the fulfilment of his poetic disposition, Goethe set out, but in the course of his journey south he was gradually overcome by another mood – by a longing for measure. Faced with the Italian art that confronted him there, he felt a kind of echo of Greek art. He writes to his Weimar friends: “I suspect that the Greeks created their works of art in accordance with the very laws by which nature proceeds.” Looking at the Saint Cecilia, at Raphael’s works, the essence of metre became clear to him; and this became an inner recitation. He no longer felt the form of his first Iphigeneia to be a personal truth: he forged his play anew, so that we now have a Nordic and a southern Iphigeneia. Any consideration of the Nordic Iphigeneia must treat of it in terms of declamatory art, where it is preeminently the vowels that hold sway and that give form in the sounding of speech. In the Roman Iphigeneia recitation must predominate: what is relevant here is the plastically formed presentation of experience in a speech-formation comparable to the presentation in Raphael’s work. In two short passages we shall now compare the two versions of Iphigeneia and have before us what goes on in a poet when he really lives in aesthetic form and has to recreate his artistic forms out of inner necessity. Recitation and declamation must strive to follow poetry such as this.

In the first instance, therefore, we will present the Gothic-German Iphigeneia as Goethe originally conceived it – the Weimar Iphigeneia. [Note 21]

[Blake’s earlier poetry was strongly influenced by Romantic interest in northern “Bardic” verse, and something of its powerful declamatory nature can still be felt in this “Introduction” to Songs of Experience:

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future, sees;
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walk’d among the ancient trees,

Calling the lapsed Soul,
And weeping in the evening dew;
That might controll
The starry pole,
And fallen, fallen light renew!

‘O Earth, O Earth, return!
Arise from out the dewy grass;
Night is worn,
And the morn
Rises from the slumberous mass.

Turn away no more;
Why wilt thou turn away?
The starry floor,
The wat’ry shore,
Is giv’n thee till the break of day.’

—William Blake (1757-1827.]

And now Goethe wished to introduce into these verses something fundamentally alien to the north. These verses express what I have just claimed as emerging straight from the whole mood living in Goethe. It can be said, of course, that anyone who does not enter into the genuinely aesthetic will lack the deep sense of necessity that Goethe felt in Italyof forging his favourite subject, Iphigeneia, anew. Not only was he subject in Italyto impressions of what he regarded as Greek art, but the sun there has a different effect. A differently coloured heaven arches over us, and the plants struggle up from the earth in a different way. All this made its mark on Goethe, and we can trace how in every line he is again compelled to rewrite and adapt the substance of his Iphigeneia to a quite different mood. It was Hermann Grimm who first showed a really sensitive understanding for these matters. In his lectures on Goethe he stressed the radical difference between the German and the Roman Iphigeneia, demonstrating how Goethe transformed what at first lived in the dimension of depth, so to speak – where there is a tendency to make the tone too full, too bright, or too dull, in order to achieve a spiritual expression of the literal prose content; he showed how Goethe transformed this into something that lives in the plane of speech, as it were, in the metre, and how he tried to introduce into his Iphigeneia the symmetry he believed himself to have found in Greek art.

In order to characterise what Goethe experienced in artistic speech, therefore, it becomes necessary to work from the declamatory into the recitative when producing his Roman Iphigeneia – the recitative which, as we have said, the Greeks brought to perfection. [Note 22]

[To a much greater extent than Goethe, Blake consistently reworked his poetry into ever different forms as he matured and changed as a poet. By the time he came to write “Night the Ninth” of The Four Zoas he had extended his range to include a classically derived pastoral verse with a much more recitative quality. The visionary scene from the earlier “Introduction” appears again there – though after a more thorough metamorphosis than was the case with Goethe’s play. This is The Four Zoas ix, 386-409:

And thus their ancient golden age renew’d; for Luvah spoke
With voice mild from his golden Cloud upon the breath of morning:

‘Come forth, O Vala, from the grass & from the silent dew,
Rise from the dews of death, for the Eternal Man is Risen.’

She rises among flowers & looks toward the Eastern clearness,
She walks yea runs, her feet are wing’d, on the tops of the bending grass,
Her garments rejoice in the vocal wind & her hair glistens with dew.

She answer’d thus: ‘Whose voice is this, in the voice of the nourishing air,
In the spirit of the morning, awaking the Soul from its grassy bed?
Where dost thou dwell? for it is thee I seek, & but for thee
I must have slept Eternally, nor have felt the dew of thy morning.
Look how the opening dawn advances with vocal harmony!
Look how the beams foreshew the rising of some glorious power!

The sun is thine, he goeth forth in his majestic brightness.
O thou creating voice that callest! & who shall answer thee?’

‘Where dost thou flee, O fair one? where doth thou seek thy happy place?’

‘To yonder brightness, there I haste, for sure I came from thence
Or I must have slept eternally, nor have felt the dew of morning.’

‘Eternally thou must have slept, not have felt the morning dew,
But for yon nourishing sun; ’tis that by which thou art arisen.
The birds adore the sun: the beasts rise up & play in his beams
And every flower & every leaf rejoices in his light.
Then, O thou fair one, sit thee down, for thou art as the grass,
Thou risest in the dew of morning & at night art folded up.’

—William Blake.

It may be that in the case of an artist like Goethe, we shall find what it is that flows over into form only if we can understand with full intensity how, when he himself spoke his Iphigeneia, tears would roll down his cheeks. Goethe found his way from the Dionysian – to use the Nietzschean expression – into the Apollonian, into metrical form. Because the Greeks in their soul-life stirred the will to this metrical formation, they achieved something in this Apollonian realm, and of this Nietzsche felt that here art is exalted above outer sense-reality. He felt that art could elevate us above the pessimism of a humanity confronting the tragic in the immediate reality of physical perception. What holds sway here as the inner, the essentially human – though conforming to measure and the Apollonian principle – this was what particularly attracted Goethe once he had entered this element, and induced him to attempt the creation of something in Greek metre, in an inwardly recitative-declamatory style rather than his former purely declamatory one.

We will now give an example, from Goethe’s “Achilleis”, of the aesthetic form that Goethe conceived after he had sunk himself in the metrical, inwardly recitative style of the Greeks. [Note 23]

[In their attempts to recapture the feeling of the original Greek some translators have been driven to adopt a hexameter verse, as in this rendering of Odyssey VI, 85ff:

Now when at last they arrived at the beautiful stream of the river,
Here the perennial basins they found where waters abundant
Welled up brightly enough for the cleansing of dirtiest raiment.
So their mules they unloosened from under the yoke of the waggon,
Letting them wander at will on the bank of the eddying river,
Browsing on clover as sweet as the honey, and then from the carriage
Bearing within their arms to the deep dark water the garments
Cast them in trenches and trod them in rivalry one with another.
So, when the raiment was washed and was thoroughly cleansed of the dirt-stains,
All on the shore of the ocean in order they spread on the shingle
Where it is washed by the tides of the sea as they sweep to the dry land.
There did they bathe and anointing themselves with the oil of the olive
Set them adown to the midday meal on the bank of the river,
Leaving the garments to dry on the beach in the glare of the sunlight,
Now when in food they had fully delighted, both she and her maidensj
Casting aside their scarfs with a ball they betook them to playing,
White-armed Nausicaa with the choral melody leading.
E’en as descending a height moves Artemis, darter of arrows,
Either on Taygetus long-ridged or on huge Erymanthus,
Taking delight in the chase of the boar and of timorous roe-deer,
Whilst all around her the daughters of Zeus, who beareth the aegis,
Nymphs of the woodland, play – and Leto sees it rejoicing;
Even as over the rest uplifting her brows and her forehead
Easily known in her beauty she stands, though fair be the others,
Thus shone forth in her beauty the maiden amidst her attendants.
Now when at last it was come to the moment of homeward returning,
After the mules were yoked and folded the beautiful garments,
Other was then the device of the grey-eyed goddess Athene,
E’en that Odysseus awaking and seeing the fair-faced maiden
Her might follow as guide and reach Phaeacia’s city.
Seizing the Ball, at the maiden among her attendants the princess
Flung it, but missing the maiden it fell in a bottomless eddy.
Piercingly all of them shrieked; and godlike Odysseus, awakened,
Sat straight up and pondered thereon in his heart and his spirit:
‘Ah me! what is the folk whose country I now am arrived at?
Dwell here savages wanton and wild, despisers of justice?
Have they a love for the stranger and hearts that revere the immortals?
Lo, how piercing a cry as of maidens ringeth around me,
Nymphs peradventure that dwell on precipitous summits of mountains,
Or by the fountain springs of the rivers and leas of the lowlands;
Else, maybe, I am near to a folk of articulate language.
Nay, go to, I will test for myself this matter and view it.’

Trans. H.B. Cotterill.

With such poetry Goethe tried to find his way back to Hellenism. He believed himself, as he felt at a certain period of his life, nearer to the original source of poetry than he could ever have been had he not gone back to the Greeks. We have to look at Goethe’s instinctive artistic life, when he sought Greek metre and what the Greeks had formed plastically in inner recitation. As with the other art-forms, true poetry was to be sought where the fountain-head of art sprang more abundantly – in primitive humanity, in unaccommodated man and his inner experience, not yet shrouded by the thick veil of materialistic civilisation. In Greek, we can observe the measured flow of the hexameter; we observe how the dactyls are formed. What do we really have in this verse-measure? Now we must remember, speaking more theoretically, how something lives in man which strives inwardly toward a certain rhythm or harmony of rhythms.

Let us take, on the one hand, the breathing-rhythm: in a normal person of average age, about 18 breaths per minute; while in the same space of time we have 72 pulse-beats, four beats coinciding with each breath. This is an inner harmonising of rhythms in human nature. Let us picture the four pulse-beats taking place in each breath and consider their ratio, their harmony with the breath. Let us bring the first two pulse-beats together into one long syllable, and the remaining two pulsebeats into two short syllables. We then have the verse-measure underlying the hexameter. We can also produce the hexameter for ourselves by examining the harmony of the four and the one: the first three feet and, as the fourth, the caesura – all being related to the one breath. What is formed in this way we derive from man’s own being: we create out of man’s being, embodying in speech an expression of human rhythms. Now the fourfold rhythm of the blood can, of course, struggle with the unitary breathing-rhythm, separating and reuniting as they strive toward harmony. They separate in this or that direction, and then flow together again. In this way are revealed the several forms of verse and prosody. But each time it is an overflowing of what lives in man himself into speech. In the formation of Greek metres man unfolds his own being; something of man’s most intimate morphology comes to his lips and forms itself into speech. Here then lies the mystery: the Greeks strove for vocal expression of the most intimate, even organic life of man’s rhythmic system.

Goethe felt this. The Greeks by their very nature (and let us not misunderstand this) were striving after thought. Not for mere abstract thought, but something that led them away, through thought, into concrete speech-formation – the pictorial that is active in man. For what occurs in man through the confluence of the blood- and breathing-rhythms is transmitted to the brain and transformed into thought-content. The process is even vaguely recognisable in prose. This is really thought that has been stripped of everything that lay hidden in Greek recitative metre. The Greeks spoke of the music of Apollo’s lyre, meaning man himself as a work of art: a rhythmic being in the harmony of his breathing- and blood-rhythms. Here are uttered unfathomable cosmic mysteries which tell us more than any prose language can.

Into all this sounds the will. As we turn to the north we meet once more with the declamatory. The general inclination of Nordic language, Nordic speech-formation, is to make the will predominant. It is mainly breathing which lives in Greek rhythm (being closer to thought than the blood-circulation), but the experience of blood-circulation was rightly regarded by ancient spiritual researchers as the immediate expression of human personality, the human ego. And this is what lives in the Nordic treatment of speech. Here we see how the blood-rhythm strikes in and the breathing rhythm recedes. We see in addition how the blood-rhythm is connected with the mobility of the entire man. Looking back, we see how in the Nibelungenlied Nordic man could sense the wave-beat of his blood, instigated by a will-impulse and then subsiding into thought: in this way alliteration comes into being. We begin with a will-impulse, which then strikes up against the form, like a wave building up and then subsiding again into the repose of rhythm. This was felt as something constituting the whole man. Whereas the Greeks wanted to penetrate inwards into the breathing-system, Nordic man was inclined towards depth of personality and the life of the blood-rhythm. Nordic-Germanic poetry is spiritualised human blood. Here the will lives and gives itself form. We must imagine the will-working of Wotan, moving on waves of air or welling up in man as blood and forming the human personality. [Note 24]

The primal element of will, the human being as a whole, finds expression in Nordic-Germanic poetry. We can see this welling-up and surging in the epic Nibelungenlied. And even in more recent times, Wilhelm Jordan has tried to imitate the alliterative style, such as lived in Nordic declamation, and has tried in the speech-formation of his own epic to restore to life the things I have described. What lives in Jordan’s Nibelunge, therefore, we must not simply declaim by extracting and stressing the prose content. Rather, there must sound forth that wave-motion drawn from the inner nature of man. In Wilhelm Jordan’s alliteration, these Wotan-waves must sound forth as they did when he himself recited them. This he actually did; those who were still able to hear him will know how he tried, through a declamatory verse-technique, to draw out what is latent in alliteration.

We shall conclude by giving an example from the beginning of the Nibelungenlied, where the Nordic element (as opposed to Greek metre) is in evidence. This will strike a contrast to what Goethe, particularly in his later years, received from Greek culture. From there he derived the finest quality that lived in him, while yet wishing to unite it, together with the Nordic, into a single whole.

And finally, a short passage of alliterative verse from Wilhelm Jordan’s Nibelunge – his attempt at a re-creation of ancient German poetry.

From The Nibelungenlied.

I. Äventiurde

Uns ist in alten maeren wunders vil geseit
von heleden lobebaeren, von grôzer arebeit;
von freude und hôchgezîten, von weinen unde klagen,
von küener recken strîten möget ir nu wunder hoeren sagen

Ëz wuohs in Buregonden ein vil edel magedîn,
daz in allen Landen niht schoeners mohte sîn,
Kriemhilt geheizen, diu wart ein schoene wîp;
dar umbe muosen dëgene vil verliesen dën lîp

Der minneclîchen meide trüejen wol gezam:
ir moutten küene recken, niemen was ir gram.
âne mâzen schoene sô was ir edel lîp:
der juncfrouwen tugende zierten anderiu wîp.

Ir pflâgen drî künige edel unde rîch,
Gunther unde Gêrnôt die recken lobelîch,
unt Gîselher dër junge, ein waetlîcher dëgen;
diu frouwe was ir swëster, die helden hetens in ir pflëgen.

Ein rîchiu küneginne frou Uote ir muoter hiez;
ir vater dër hiez Dancrât, dër in diu erbe liez
sît nâch sîme lëbene, ein ellens rîcher man,
dër ouch in sîner jugende grôzer êren vil gewan.

Die hërren wâren milte, von arde hôhe erborn,
mit kraft unmâzen küene die recken ûzerkorn.
dâ zën Burgonden sô was ir lant genannt.
si frümten starkiu wunder sît in Etzelen lant.

Ze Wormze bî dëm Rîne si wonten mit ir kraft;
in dienten von ir landen vil stolziu ritterschaft
mit lobelîchen êren unz an ir endes zît.
si sturben jaemerlîche sît von zweier frouwen nît.

Die drî künige wâren, als ich gesaget hân,
von vil hôhem ellen; in wâren undertân
ouch die besten recken, von dën man hât gesaget,
starc unt viel küene, in scharpfen strîten unverzaget.

Daz was von Tronege Hagene, unt ouch dër bruoder sîn
Dancwart dër snëlle, von Metzen Ortwîn,
Die zwêne marcgrâven, Gêre unt Eckewart,
Volkêr von Alzeie, mit ganzem ellen wol bewart,

Rûmolt dër küchenmeister, ein ûzerwelter dëgen,
Sindolt unde Hûnolt; dise hërren muosen pflëgen
dës hoves unt dër êren, dër drîer künige man.
si heten noch manigen recken, dës ich genennen nienen kan.

Dancwart dër was marschalc; dô was dër nëve sîn
truhsetze dës küniniges von Metzen Ortwîn.
Sindolt dër was schenke, ein waetlîcher dëgen;
Hûnolt was kameraere: si kunden, hôher êren pflëgen

Von dës hoves êre unt von ir wîten kraft,
von ir vil hôhen wërdekeit unt von ir ritterschaft,
dër die hërren pflâgen mit freuden al ir lëben,
dësn künde iu ze wâre niemen gar ein ende gëben.

In disen hôhen êren troumte Kriemhilde,
wie si züge einen valken starc, schoene unt wilde,
dën ir zwên’ arn erkrummen; daz sie daz muoste sëhen,
irn kunde in dirre wërlde leider nimmer geschëhen.

Dën troum si dô sagete ir muoter Uoten.
sine kundes niht bescheiden baz dër guoten
‘dër valke, den du ziuhest, daz ist ein edel man;
in enwëlle got behüeten, du muost in schiere vloren hân.’

‘Waz saget ir mir von manne, vil liebiu muoter mîn?
âne recken minne sô wil ich immer sîn;
sus schoene ich wil belîben unz an mînen tôt,
daz ich von recken minn sol gewinnen nimmer nôt.’

‘Nune versprich ëz niht ze sêre,’ sprach ir muoter dô.
‘soltu immer hërzenlîche zër wërlde wërden vrô,
daz kümt von mannes minne; du wirst ein schoene wîp,
ob dir got gefüeget eins rëhte guoten ritters lîp.’

‘Die rede lât belîben, vil liebiu frouwe mîn;
ëz ist an manigen wîben vil dicke worden schîn,
wie liebe mit leide ze jungest lônen kan;
ich sol sie mîden beide, sone kan mir nimmer missegân.’

Kriemhilt in ir muote sich minne gar bewac.
sît lëbete diu vil guote vil manigen lieben tac,
daz sine wësse niemen, dën minnen wolde ir lîp
sît wart si mit êren eins vil wërden recken wîp.

Dër was dër sëlbe valke, dën si in ir troume sach,
dën ir beschiet ir muoter. wie sêre siu daz rach
An ir naehsten mâgen, die in sluogen, sint!
durch sîn eines stërben starp vil maniger muoter kint.

[Langland’s Piers Plowman is among the masterpieces of the English “Alliterative Revival” of the fourteenth century. This extract is from the C-text version, Passus IX, 152-191:

A Brytonere com braggynge a-bosted Peers al-so;
‘Wolle thow, ne wolle thow we wolleth habbe oure wil,
Bothe thy flour and thy flessh fecchen when ous lyketh,
And make ous myrye ther-myd maugre ho bygruccheth!’
Peers the plouhman tho pleynede to the knyght,
To kepe hym and hus catel as covenent was bytwyne hem:
‘Awreke me of these wastours that maken thys worlde dere;
Thei counte nat of cursing ne holy kirke dreden;
Ther worth no plente,’ quath Peers ‘and the plouh ligge.’
Curtesliche the knyght then as hus kynde wolde,
Warned Wastour and wissed hym betere,
‘Other ich shal bete thy by the lawe and brynge the in stockes.’
‘Ich was nat woned to wirche,’ quath Wastour and ich wolle nat now bygynne,’
And let lyght of the lawe and lasse of the knyght,
And sette Peers at a pese pleyne hym wher he wolde.
‘Now, by Crist,’ quath Peers ‘y shal apeyre yow alle!’
And hopede after Hunger that herde him at the ferste.
‘Ich praye the,’ quath Peers tho ‘pur charite, sire Honger,
Awreke me of these wastours for the knyght wol nat.’
Honger hente in haste Wastour by the mawe,
And wrang hum by the wombe that al waterede hus eyen.
He buffated the Brutener a-boute the chekes,
That he loked lyk a lanterne al hus lyf after.
He bet hem so bothe be barst neih hure guttes,
Ne hadde Peers with a peese-lof prayede hym by-leve.
Honger, have mercy of hem,’ quath Peers and let me yeve hem benes;
And that was bake for bayarde may be here bote.’
Tho were faitours a-fered and flowen to Peersses bernes,
And flapten on with flailes fro morwe til evene,
That Honger was nat hardy on hem for to loke,
For a potful of potage that Peersses wyf made.
An hep of eremites henten hem spades,
Spitten and spradde donge in despit of Hunger.
Thei corven here copes and courtepies hem made,
And wenten as workmen to weden and mowen;
Al for drede of here deth such dyntes yaf Hunger.
Blynd and brokeleggede he botnede a thousande,
And lame men he lechede with longen of bestes.
Preestes and other peple to Peers thei drowen,
And freres of alle fyve orders al for fere of Hunger.

William Langland (c.1331- ?).

From Die Nibelungen.
“Hildebrand’s Homecoming”, Canto 17:

Schon drängten sich draussen mit dröhnenden Tritten Zu jedem der Tore der Krieger tausend; Schon hob sein Hifthorn der Hunnenkönig, Um Sturm zu blasen. Doch stumm noch blieb es. Ob sein Herz auch zermalmt war, er musste horchen, Und gramvoll beseufzte die grosse Seele Verloren Grund begrabener Hoffnung In des stolzen Germanen Sterbegesang:

‘Erwacht! In den Wolken
Ist Waffengerassel.
Erwacht, es gewittert,
‘Als wieherten Rosse.
Walkürien kommen
Zum Kampf geflogen
In glänzenden Brünnen,
Von Brautlust glühend.
Sie lenken herunter
Die luftigen Renner,
Um Tapfer zu kiesen
Mit tötendem Kuss.

Erwachet! Es warten
Die Wodanswölfe,
Es rufen die Raben
Ihr Mahl zu rüsten.
Um der Seele die Pforte
Zum Sonnenpfade
Weit aufzuschliessen,

Ist Eisen geschliffen.
Das Leben ist Schlaf nur,
Erlösung der Schlachttod.
Erwachet zum Sterben,
Und Sterbend erwacht.

Erwachet! Es winken
Von Walhalls Schwelle
Die erkorenen Gäste
Des Götterkönigs.
Da lebt ihr in Leibern
Aus Licht gewoben;
Da ist Kampf nur Kurzweil
Und Wunde Wollust.
Da labt das Gedenken
Erduldeter Leiden,
Da schildert ihr scherzend
Der Niblunge Not.’

Wilhelm Jordan

[In the absence of any modern English attempt to restore alliteration in its full-blooded form, there may be a certain interest here in the following piece. The chiming effect of the alliterations serves in this instance rather to embellish and lend spice to the recitative flow of the verse, not aspiring to become the ordering principle of the poem:

EUROPA AND THE BULL

Naked they came, a niggling core of girls
Maggoting gaily in the curling wool
Of morning mist, and careless as the lark
That gargled overhead. They were the root
Of all that writhing air, the frothing rock
Of that grey sea in whose vacuity
Footless they stood, nor knew if it or they
Were moving now. Yet, even as they gazed,
Cave after cave of light calved out of gloom,
As on they glided through the muddling veils
Roof rose on roof, laugh laddered into laugh
Into the motionless meadow, clear as stone,
Interminably domed.
Nothing supernal here; only cow-parsley:
Any place was convenient velvet,
And everwhere was peace, pin-drizzled by
Bird-song; the bay bare lake a gong
Unbruised. Easy at the sea’s edge the rocks
Breathed up and down.
The Inland hills stood still
Like hoardings to be stared at. Happy place!
And happy happy day! How giddily then
They sleeked along the sand with smoking heels.
Some frayed off with fountain-fling of arms
To play and plunge, staccatoing the water
And some more slowly followed, picking the deep flowers
Out of the fume and underdrone of bees: green-kneed
They rose and fell in waves delightedly: new sights
Consumed them; new mites and motes of smell
Held and incensed them: crumbs of booty glowed
In every foot-dent, eiderdowntrodden.
And all among them moved the moon-like cows
Grazing light tracks across the long night-grass.

But look! the Bull! indubitably bull,
Elbowing slowly through the obeisant herd,
Blazing and bellowing. His massy head,
Laden like a dahlia, dallied and swung,
And his vast eye slid to and fro as sharp
And glaucous as sea-holly, salting all
Their thoughts with suddenness. They hardly knew
What most to admire; but most his hub of power
And circumambience of gentleness
Delighted them. Arms curved and craved to stroke
His milky sides, insidiously veined
With watery blues and bloody ivyings.
But how describe him? words can only add
To lightning the thunder’s redundancy.
He was most godlike and most temperate.

Slow, slow, slow, with bubble-pause and slide
He paced before Europa there, and she
As if with shivering drew her shoulders now
Shyly about her, yet she shivered still.
Never did shadow so shimmer with midges
As she with switherings. Should she go?
Or no? Body and soul see-sawed in her.
As slowly the swan comes forward, in advance
Bearing its bellying tray of effusive plumes,
Yet backward rears its head and huffs its glance
As if it fended off its offering that presumes:
Swollen with slowness and undertowed by longing
It grows on the water, close, thundery, and thronging,
Till suddenly beside us, without fuss,
Immense it blossoms like a cumulus –
So slowly rose Europa, slowly she
Opened her fan-like self and mounted him
And spread her valances.
O how his reticence reined and trounced him then,
Lifting his feet into flounces of flight
And ratchet-edges of agitation,
Chawing each gentle step. To have and to hold –
How he would love to have but feared to hold
Her who as srnooth as metal sat and smiled.
And how his silver slaverings flowed, and now
His chattering hooves danced under him like stones....

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 immediatesense-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.

I hope you will permit me to insert into today’s proceedings at this Pedagogical and Artistic Congress an example taken from the art of recitation and declamation, and to make some observations of an interpolated nature.

Art is always a particularly difficult theme on which to speak, in that art is conveyed through immediate sensation – through immediate perception. It must be received as a direct impression. We are thus in a quite special position in speaking about art at a Congress where our aim is a clarification that is reached both through knowledge and through a whole style of education and teaching-practice. Certainly all the lectures that have been held here have stressed the necessity, in the case of Waldorf education, of introducing an artistic quality into the art of education and teaching in general. But when confronting art itself, one would prefer, as I hinted in a former lecture, to preserve a chaste silence. Now every argument, every show of feeling, every human volition ultimately passes over to form the ongoing stream of human civilisation. They are contained in the three greatest impulses behind all human evolution and all historical events: the ideals of religion, art and knowledge. And in our day an attempt is quite justifiably made to make art the bearer of our ideal of knowledge, so that some possibility may once more be found of our rising upward with our understanding from the realm of substance, of matter, into the spiritual. I have tried to show how art is the way to gain a true knowledge of man, in that artistic creativity and sensitivity are the organs for a genuine knowledge of man. Nature herself becomes a true artist the moment she ascends from the multiplicity of facts and beings of the universe to bring about man. This is not said merely as a metaphor, but as a deeper knowledge of the universe and of man. And again, confronted with art, it may be said that it is an intrusion when we want to speak artistically about art. To speak about art is to lead what is spoken back to a sort of religious perception. Thereby religion is grasped in its widest sense, in which it does not only embrace what we today rightly regard as explicitly religious – the quality of reverence in man – but also includes humour, as understood in the highest sense. [Note 29] A sort of religious feeling must always prepare the mood for art. For when we speak about art we must speak out of the spirit. How can we find words for works of art of the sublimest kind, such as Dante's Commedia, if our language does not embody moments of religious insight?

This was indeed felt, and rightly felt, when art came into being. Art originated at a time when science still formed a unity, a common whole along with religion and art. At the beginning of certain great works of art we hear words which, I would say, seem like a confirmation of these comments from world-history. It is truly out of a cosmic awareness that Homer begins his poem with the words:

Sing, O Muse, of the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles.

Homer himself does not sing: Homer is conscious that he must raise his soul to the superhuman, the super-sensible; that he must place his words as a sacrificial gift before the higher powers he serves, if he is to become a truly artistic poet. (Of course, the question of Homer’s identity has nothing to do with this.) And if we survey a longer period, and come to one of the modern poets, we hear how Klopstock begins his Messiah with words that are indeed different, but formally sound quite similar:

Sing, immortal soul, of sinful man’s redemption,

Which the Messiah on earth in human form accomplished.

When we begin from the one poem and progress to the other, we pass through the period in which man traversed the great, immeasurable distance from complete surrender to the divine spiritual powers, whose earthly sheath he felt himself to be, to the point where man in his freedom started to feel himself a sheath only of his own soul. But there too, at the beginning of the great epoch of German poetry, Klopstock appealed to the invisible – as Goethe constantly did, even if he did not overtly say so. Thus among poets themselves we can observe the consciousness of a sort of translation into the super-sensible.

The super-sensible, however, does not speak in words. Words are in every instance prose. Words are in every instance components of a discourse, components of a psychic act which submits to the conditions of logic. Logic exists in order that we may become aware of external beings and occurrences in their external sense-reality; logic must not, therefore, intrude upon spiritual reality. The moment we arrive by means of logic at a prose sentence we must feel the solid earth under our feet. For the spiritual does not speak in human words. The spiritual world goes only as far as the syllable, not as far as the word. Thus we can say that the poet is in a curious position. The poet has to make use of words, since these are after all the instruments of human speech: but in making use of words he necessarily deserts his proper artistic domain. He can only achieve his aim if he leads the word back to syllable-formation. In the quantities, metres and weight of syllable-formation – this is the region where the word has not yet become word, but still submits to the musical, imaginative and plastic, to a speech-transcendent spirituality – there the poet holds sway. And when the poet has to make use of words, he feels inwardly how he has to lead word-formations back to the region that he left under the necessity of passing from syllable to word. He feels that through rhyme, through the entire configuration of the verse, he must again make good what is lost when the word abandons the concrete quantities and weight that belong to the syllable, and round it out artistically, imparting form and harmony.

Here we are vouchsafed a glimpse into the intimacies of the poet’s soul. This disposition is truly felt by a real poet. Platen is not alone in having left us some remarkable comments on what I have just attempted to describe:

Only to rambling dilettantes

Are formal strictures ‘senseless’. Necessity:

That is thy sacrificial gift, O Genius.

Platen invokes Genius, observing that it is inherent in Genius to fashion the syllables in accordance with quantity, metre and weight. Rambling off into prose is merely the foolishness of the half-talented. (Although, as I have mentioned, these make up ninety-nine per cent of our versifiers.) And not only Platen, but Schiller, too, puts it rather beautifully when he says:

It is the peculiar property of an untainted and purely quantitative verse that it serves as the sensible presentation of an inner necessity of thought; and conversely, any licence in the treatment of syllable quantities makes itself felt in a certain arbitrariness. From this perspective it is of particular importance, and touches upon the most intimate laws of art.

It is to the necessity inherent in syllable-quantities that Schiller refers in this pronouncement.

The declaimer or reciter, as the interpreter of the poet’s art, must give special attention to what I have just described. He has to conduct what comes before him as a poetical composition, which obviously communicates through words, back to quantity, metre and the weight of the syllables. What then flows out into the words has to be consciously rounded out so as to accord with the verse-structure and rhyme. In our own age, with its lack of artistic feeling, there has arisen a curious kind of declamatory-recitative art – a prosaic emphasis on the prose-sense, something quite unartistic. The real poet always goes back from the prosaic or literal to the musical or plastic. Before he committed the words of a poem to paper, Schiller always experienced a wordless, indeterminate melody, a soul-experience of melody. As yet without words, it flowed along melodically like a musical theme, onto which he then threaded the words. One might conjecture that Schiller could have conjured the most varied poems, as regards verbal content, out of the same musical theme. And to rehearse his iambic verse-dramas, Goethe stood in front of his actors with a baton, like a conductor, considering the formation of sound, the balance of the syllables, the musical rhythm and time-signature to be the essential, rather than the literal meaning. For this reason it has become necessary for our own spiritual stream to return to a true art of recitation and declamation, where what has been debased through the means of expression imposed upon the poet to the level of mere prose can once again be raised, so as to regain the level of a super-sensible formative and musical experience.

This work was taken in hand by Frau Dr. Steiner, who over the last decades has tried to develop an art of recitation and declamation in which something that transcends prose to become inwardly eurythmic, the imaginative and musical configuration of syllable-quantities, the imaginative quality of the sound, whether plastic or musical – in which all this is once more made apparent. This comes out differently in lyric, epic and drama – I shall deal with that presently. But we would first like to show how what is indicated here can in general be derived from poetry that is truly artistic.

As a first example you will hear “Ostern”, by Anastasius Grün, a poem particularly suited to such a passing-beyond-the-content and approach to the aesthetic form. It is a somewhat old-fashioned poem that is (in a rather narrow sense) topical, in being a poem dedicated to Easter. On the other hand it is not topical, in the sense that it dates back to the first half of the nineteenth century, an age when the poet still felt bound to acknowledge the necessity of plastic and rhythmical formative power. Let us accept the poem as it is – though it will nowadays be found tedious by those who attend to the prose content alone, as being rather antiquated in its imagery. Even allowing for its tediousness as prose, however, a genuine poet has here attempted to comply with the inner aesthetic necessity of the poem.

We shall then continue with a modern poet, with “An Eine Rose”, a sonnet by Albert Steffen. It is precisely in the sonnet that, with good will, we can discern how the verbal presentation is compensated by the strictly bounded form – this atones for the sin committed with regard to the words, and the whole is then rounded out and rendered euphonious. In the case of a poet like Albert Steffen, whose explorations extend into the hidden depths of his view of the world, it is interesting to observe how he simultaneously feels the necessity of transmuting what comes to light as a way of knowledge into the strictest aesthetic forms.

In the “Terzinen” of Christian Morgenstern we shall see how a peculiar poetic form – free terzetti – subsists on the basis of a feeling for continuity, for openness of form, in contrast to the sonnet which is based on a rounding-off of feeling. We shall see how the terzetti, albeit towards the end of the poem, have a quality of openness, while yet constituting a bounded whole from what flows into the words.

And then perhaps I may adduce three poems of my own: “Frühling”, “Herbst”, and “Weltenseelengeister”, in which I have tried to bring into strict forms the most inward experiences of the human soul – not the forms of conventional prosody or metrics, but forms which stem from the actual emotion, while at the same time they try to contain the amorphous, fluctuating, glittering life within the soul in internally strict forms.

Frau Dr. Steiner will now demonstrate these six, more lyrical poems. (“Ostern” is, of course, a long poem of which we will present only Part V.)

OSTERN

Und Ostern wird es einst, der Herr sieht nieder

Vom Ölberg in das Tal, das klingt und blüht;

Rings Glanz und Fühl’ und Wonn’ und Wonne wieder,

So weit sein Aug’ – ein Gottesauge – sieht!

Ein Ostern, wie’s der Dichtergeist sieht blühen,

Dem’s schon zu schaun, zu pflücken jetzt erlaubt

Die Blütenkränze, die als Kron’ einst glühen

Um der noch ungebornen Tage Haupt!

Ein Ostern, wie’s das Dichteraug’ sieht tagen,

Das überm Nebel, der das Jetzt umzieht,

Die morgenroten Gletscherhäupter ragen

Der werdenden Jahrtausende schon sieht!

Ein Ostern, Auferstehungsfest, das wieder

Des Frühlings Hauch auf Blumengräber sät;

Ein Ostern der Verjüngung, das hernieder

Ins Menschenherz der Gottheit Atem weht!

Sieh, welche Wandlung blüht auf Zions Bahnen!

Längst hält ja Lenz sein Siegeslager hier;

Auf Bergen wehn der Palmen grüne Fahnen,

Im Tale prangt sein Zelt in Blütenzier!

Längst wogt ja über all’ den alten Trümmern

Ein weites Saatenmeer in goldner Flut,

Wie fern im Nord, wo weisse Wellen schimmern,

Versunken tief im Meer Vineta ruht.

Längst über alten Schutt ist unermessen

Geworfen frischer Triften grünes Kleid,

Gleichwie ein stilles, freundliches Vergessen

Sich senkt auf dunkler Tag’ uraltes Leid.

Längst stehn die Höhn umfahn von Rebgewinden,

Längst blüht ein Rosenhag auf Golgatha.

Will jetzt ein Mund den Preis der Rose künden,

Nennt er gepaart Schiras und Golgatha.

Längst alles Land weitum ein sonn’ger Garten;

Es ragt kein Halbmond mehr, kein Kreuz mehr da!

Was sollten auch des blut’gen Kampfs Standarten?

Längst ist es Frieden, ew’ger Frieden ja!

Der Kedron blieb. Er quillt vor meinen Blicken

Ins Bett von gelben Ähren eingeengt,

Wohl noch als Träne, doch die dem Entzücken

Sich durch die blonden, goldnen Wimpern drängt!

Das ist ein Blühen rings, ein Duften, Klingen,

Das um die Wette spriesst und rauscht und keimt,

Als gält’ es jetzt, geschäftig einzubringen,

Was starr im Schlaf Jahrtausende versäumt,

Das ist ein Glänzen rings, ein Funkeln, Schimmern

Der Städt’ im Tal, der Häuser auf den Höhn;

Kein Ahnen, dass ihr Fundament auf Trümmern,

Kein leiser Traum des Grabs, auf dem sie stehn!

Die Flur durchjauchzt, des Segens freud’ger Deuter,

Ein Volk, vom Glück geküsst, an Tugend reich,

Gleich den Gestirnen ernst zugleich und heiter,

Wie Rosen schön, wie Cedern stark zugleich

Begraben längst in des Vergessens Meere,

Seeungetümen gleich in tiefer Flut,

Die alten Greu’l, die blut’ge Schergenehre,

Der Krieg und Knechtsinn und des Luges Brut.

Auf Golgatha, in eines Gärtchens Mitte,

Da wohnt ein Pärlein, Glück und Lieb’ im Blick;

Weit schaut ins Land, gleich ihrem Aug’ die Hütte,

Es labt ja Glück sich gern an fremdem Glück!

Einst, da begab sich’s, dass im Feld die Kinder

Ausgruben gar ein formlos, eisern Ding;

Als Sichel däuchtis zu grad und schwer die Finder,

Als Pflugschar fast zu schlank und zu gering.

Sie schleppen’s mühsam heim, gleich seltnem Funde,

Die Eltern sehn es, – doch sie kennen’s nicht,

Sie rufen rings die Nachbarn in der Runde,

Die Nachbarn sehn es, – doch sie kennen’s nicht.

Da ist ein Greis, der in der Jetztwelt Tage

Mit weissem Bart und fahlem Angesicht

Hereinragt, selbst wie eine alte Sage;

Sie zeigen’s ihm, – er aber kennt es nicht.

Wohl ihnen allen, dass sie’s nimmer kennen!

Der Ahnen Torheit, längst vom Grab verzehrt,

Müsst’ ihnen noch im Aug’ als Träne brennen.

Denn was sie nimmer kannten, war ein Schwert!

Als Pflugschar soll’s fortan durch Schollen ringen,

Dem Saatkorn nur noch weist’s den Weg zur Gruft;

Des Schwertes neue Heldentaten singen

Der Lerchen Epopeein in sonn’ger Luft!

Einst wieder sich’s begab, dass, als er pflügte,

Der Ackersmann wie an ein Felsstück stiess,

Und, als sein Spaten rings die Hüll’ entfügte,

Ein wundersam Gebild aus Stein sich wies.

Er ruft herbei die Nachbarn in der Runde,

Sie sehn sich’s an, – jedoch sie kennen’s nicht! –

Uralter, weiser Greis, du gibst wohl Kunde?

Der Greis besieht’s, jedoch er kennt es nicht.

Ob sie’s auch kennen nicht, doch steht’s voll

Segen Aufrecht in ihrer Brust, in ewigem Reiz,

Es blüht sein Same rings auf allen Wegen;

Denn was sie nimmer kannten, war ein Kreuz!

Sie sahn den Kampf nicht und sein blutig Zeichen,

Sie sehn den Sieg allein und seinen Kranz!

Sie sahn den Sturm nicht mit den Wetterstreichen,

Sie sehn nur seines Regenbogens Glanz!

Das Kreuz von Stein, sie stellen’s auf im Garten,

Ein rätselhaft, ehrwürdig Altertum,

Dran Rosen rings und Blumen aller

Arten Empor sich ranken, kletternd um und um.

So steht das Kreuz inmitten Glanz und Fülle

Auf Golgatha, glorreich, bedeutungsschwer:

Verdeckt ist’s ganz von seiner Rosen Hülle,

Längst sieht vor Rosen man das Kreuz nicht mehr.

Anastasius Grün.

[In a similar way, Vaughan here transmutes a religious meditation into haunting poetry:

THE NIGHT

(John, ii.)

Through that pure Virgin-shrine,

That sacred vail drawn o’r thy glorious noon

That men might look and live as Glo-worms shine,

And face the Moon:

Wise Nicodemus saw such light

As made him know his God by night.

Most blest believer he!

Who in that land of darkness and blinde eyes

Thy long expected healing wings could see,

When thou didst rise,

And what can never more be done,

Did at mid-night speak with the Sun:

O who will tell me, where

He found thee at that dead and silent hour:

What hallow’d solitary ground did bear

So rare a flower,

Within whose sacred leafs did lie

The fulness of the Deity.

No mercy-seat of gold,

No dead and dusty Cherub, nor carv’d stone,

But his own living works did my Lord hold

And Lodge alone;

Where trees and Kerbs did watch and peep

And wonder, while the Jews did sleep.

Dear night! this worlds defeat;

The stop to busie fools; cares check and curb;

The day of Spirits; my souls calm retreat

Which none disturb!

Christ’s progress, and his prayer time;

The hours to which high Heaven doth chime.

Gods silent, searching flight:

When my Lords head is fill’d with dew, and all

His locks are wet with the clear drops of night;

His still, soft call;

His knocking time; The souls dumb watch,

When Spirits their fair kindred catch.

Were all my loud, evil days

Calm and unhaunted as is thy dark Tent,

Whose peace but by some Angels wing or voice

Is seldom rent;

Then I in Heaven all the long year

Would keep, and never wander here.

But living where the Sun

Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tyre

Themselves and others, I consent and run

To ev’ry myre,

And by this worlds ill-guiding light,

Erre more than I can do by night.

There is in God (some say)

A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here

Say it is late and dusky, because they

See not all clear

O for that night! where I in him

Might live invisible and dim.

Henry Vaughan.]

Sonnet:

AN EINE ROSE

Ich schaue mich in dir und dich in mir:

Wo ich die Schlange bin, bist du die Blume,

wir assen beide von der irdischen Krume,

in dir ass Gott, in mir ass noch das Tier.

Die Erde ward für dich zum Heiligtume,

du wurzelst fest, du willst nicht fort von ihr.

Ich aber sehne mich, ich darbe hier,

ich such im All nach meinem Eigentume.

Du überwächst den Tod mit deinen Farben

und saugst dir ewiges Leben aus dem Boden.

Ich kehre immer wieder, um zu sterben.

Denn ach: Nur durch mein Suchen, Sehnen, Darben,

nur durch die Wiederkehr von vielen Toden,

darf ich um dich, O rote Rose, werben.

Albert Steffen (1884-1963).

TO A ROSE

I see myself in thee, and thee in me:

But where I am the serpent, thou’rt the flower –

In both consumes and grows by earthly power

A god in thee, alas! mere beast in me.

To thee the Earth was given for thy shrine,

Thou clungst to her, nor wouldst uprooted be.

But I, I yearn, I hanker to be free,

And seek in the great All to grow divine.

Thou with thy shooting hues outleapst corruption,

Drawing eternal life from out of the soil,

Whilst I fall back, fall even to death’s repose.

Yet still I seek and I yearn – and after disruption,

And only through manifold deaths’ laborious toll

Dare court your deathless beauty, rose, red rose!

Trans. A.J.W.

Terzetti:

Was ist das? Gibt es Krieg? Den Abendhimmel

verfinstern Raben gleich geschwungnen Brauen

des Unheils und mit gierigem Gekrächz.

Südöstlich rudern sie mit wilder Kraft,

und immer neue Paare, Gruppen, Völker...

Und drüber raucht’s im Blassen wie von Blut.

Wie Sankt Franciscus schweb ich in der Luft

mit beiden Füssen, fühle nicht den Grund

der Erde mehr, weiss nicht mehr, was das ist.

Seid still! Nein, – redet, singt, jedweder Mund!

Sonst wird die Ewigkeit ganz meine Gruft

und nimmt mich auf wie einst den tiefen Christ.

Dies ist das Wunderbarste, dieses feste,

so scheint es, ehern feste Vorwärtsschreiten –

und alles ist zuletzt nur tiefer Traum.

Von tausend Türmen strotzt die Burg der Zeiten

(so scheint’s) aus Erz und Marmor, doch am Saum

Der Ewigkeit ist all das nur noch Geste.

Dämmrig Blaun im Mondenschimmer

Berge...gleich Erinnerungen

ihrer selbst; selbst Berge nimmer.

Träume bloss noch, hinterlassen

von vergangnen Felsenmassen:

So wie Glocken, die verklungen,

noch die Luft als Zittern fassen.

Christian Morgenstern

What is that – is it war? The evening skies

are dark with ravens, like a congested brewing

of evil, and gasping horrible, envious croaks.

Southward and east they steer with reckless force,

shifting in constellations, pairs and groups...

and over all the smoke – so pale, like blood.

I, like St. Francis, rise upon airy wave,

and feel beneath my feet earth’s solid ground

no more, no longer knowing what that is...

Be still! – No, rather let each voice resound!

lest all Eternity, become my grave,

enclose me like the depth that in Christ is.

Most wonderful is this: the fast‑

as-iron (it seems to me) forward advance –

and yet, all is a dream in which we sink.

Time prides herself (apparently) on all

her forts of stone and iron – yet, from the brink

of Endlessness, mere gestures all at last!

Dusky, blue, in moonlight quiver

mountains...self-remembrances

themselves, as they were mountains never.

Mere dreams! the last, abandoned fragment

of some primeval, vast escarpment:

like stopped bells, whose resonances

in the vibrant air augment.

Trans. A.J.W. after V. Jacobs.

[Stevens has made extensive use of this form, as in his “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”. This example comes from the section “It Must Give Pleasure,” part VIII:

What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,

Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,

Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,

Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and

On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,

Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,

Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,

Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?

Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

Is it he or is it I that experience this?

Is it I then that keep saying there is an hour

Filled with expressible bliss, in which I have

No need, am happy, forget need’s golden hand,

Am satisfied without solacing majesty,

And if there is an hour there is a day,

There is a month, a year, there is a time

In which majesty is a mirror of the self:

I have not but I am and as I am, I am.

These external regions, what do we fill them with

Except reflections, the escapades of death,

Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof?

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955).]

Lyric poems by Rudolf Steiner.

FRÜHLING

Der Sonnenstrahl,

Der lichterfunkelnde,

Er schwebt heran.

Die Blütenbraut,

Die farberregende,

Sie grüsst ihn froh.

Vertrauensvoll

Der Erdentochter

Erzählt der Strahl,

Wie Sonnenkräfte,

Die geistentsprossenen,

Im Götterheim

Dem Weltentone lauschen;

Die Blütenbraut,

Die farberglitzernde,

Sie höret sinnend

Des Lichtes Feuerton.

HERBST

Der Erdenleib,

Der Geistersehnende,

Er lebt im Welken.

Die Samengeister,

Die Stoffgedrängten,

Erkraften sich.

Und Wärmefrüchte

Aus Raumesweiten

Durchkraften Erdensein.

Und Erdensinne,

Die Tiefenseher,

Sie schauen Künft’ges

Im Formenschaffen.

Die Raumesgeister,

Die ewig-atmenden,

Sie blicken ruhevoll

Ins Erdenweben.

SPRING

The Sun’s bright beam –

a gash of light,

he soars above.

His blossom-bride

showered with colour,

greets him with joy.

And trustfully

the beam instructs

the daughter of earth

how solar powers

(the spirit’s progeny!)

in the heavenly spheres

eavesdrop on their harmonies;

the blossom-bride –

sprinkled and bright with colour –

she hears the light’s

cadence of flame!

AUTUMN

The world’s body –

its life for spirit yearns

amidst the shrivelling.

The germinal sprites,

crushed with matter,

gather their power.

And fruits of warmth

from far expanses

saturate earthly being.

And worldly senses

(ah, deeply seeing!)

behold the future

in forming power.

The daemons of space –

eternal breathings! – they gaze

reposefully at the world’s

unceasing weft.

Trans. A.J.W.

WELTENSEELENGEISTER

Im Lichte wir schalten,

Im Schauen wir walten,

Im Sinnen wir weben.

Aus Herzen wir heben

Das Geistesringen

Durch Seelenschwingen.

Dem Menschen wir singen

Das Göttererleben

Im Weltengestalten.

SPIRITS OF THE ANIMA MUNDI

In light is our being,

and human seeing,

sensations weaving;

from deep hearts upheaving

through soul’s wide wending

the spirit’s contending;

our song to men sending

of gods’ true perceiving,

world-forms decreeing.

Trans. A.J.W.

Before we essay the second part of our programme, I shall permit myself to point briefly to the genesis of poetry – in man’s inner nature. For what ought to lie at the foundation of a knowledge of man is the following perception: in the first instance, the world, the universe, the cosmos is artistically active in man; but man then brings forth from himself again what the aesthetic activity of the cosmos has inlaid in him, as art.

Two elements must collaborate in a man, working through the powers of his spirit and soul, in order for poetry (in the general way of things) to be engendered and given form. It is not thought – even in the most intellectual poetry it is not thought as such – that is shaped by the artist. It is the collaboration, the wonderful interaction between breathing and blood-circulation. In breathing, the human being is entirely conjoined with the cosmos. The air which I have just breathed in was formerly an ingredient in the cosmos, and it will afterwards become an ingredient in the cosmos once more. In breathing I absorb into myself the substantiality of the cosmos, and then release to the cosmos once more what was briefly within me. Anyone who experiences this – anyone with a real feeling for this breathing-process – will find in it one of the most marvellous mysteries of the whole formation of the world. And this interchange between man and the world finds its inner formation in something closely bound up with the breathing-rhythm: the rhythm of blood-circulation. In a mature man the ratio expressed in the relation between respiration and pulse beat is an average one to four: eighteen breaths (or thereabouts) and seventy-two pulse-beats per minute. Between the two is generated that inner harmony which constitutes man’s entire inner life of plastic and musical creativity.

The following remarks are not advanced as exact knowledge, but by way of a picture. We see engendered before us a spirit of light who, on the waves of the air, plays into man through his breathing. The breath takes hold of the blood-circulation, as of the occult workings of the human organism. We see Apollo, the god of light, carried on the billows of air in the breathing-process, and in his lyre the actual functioning of the blood-circulation. Every poetic act, every forming act of poetry ultimately rests on this ratio between breathing, as inwardly experienced, and the inner experience of the circulation of the blood. Subconsciously our breath counts the pulse-beats; and subconsciously the pulse-beats count the breaths dividing and combining, combining and dividing to mark out the metre and the syllable-quantities. It is not that the manifestations of poetry in speech adapt themselves so as to conform either to respiration or to the circulation of the blood: but rather the ratio between the two. The configuration of syllables may be quite irregular, but in poetry they stand in a certain ratio to one another, essentially similar to that between breathing and circulation.

We can see this in the case where poetry first comes before us, in what is perhaps the most congenial and readily comprehensible form – the hexameter. Here we can see how the first three verse-feet and the caesura stand in a mutual ratio of four to one. The hexameter repeats this ratio of blood‑circulation to breathing a second time. Man receives the spiritual into his own inner processes and inner activities when he creates poetry out of what he is at every moment of his earthly life: a product of breathing and blood-circulation. He articulates this artistically through the syllables in quantity and metre. And we approach intensification and relaxation, tension and release, in a properly artistic way when we allow fewer or more syllables to the unit of breath. And these will then balance each other out in accordance with their inherent natural proportions. In other words, we must adjust the timing of the verse in the right way.

If we let the verse proceed according to the proportion ordained by the cosmos itself, which subsists between breathing and blood-circulation, we arrive at epic. If we ascend towards an assertion of our own inner nature; i.e., let the breathing recede, refrain from activating the life of the breath, do not allow it to count up the pulse-beats on the ‘lyre’ of the blood-circulation – when we recede with our breathing into ourselves and make the pulsation of the blood the essential thing, reckoning up the notches (so to speak) scored onto the blood-stream, we arrive at an alternative form of metrical verse. If we are concerned with the breathing, which calculates, as it were, the blood-circulation, we have recitation: recitation flows in conformity with the breathing-process. If the pulsation of the blood is our criterion, so that the blood engraves its strength, weakness, passion, emotion, tension and relaxation onto the flux of the breath – then declamation arises: declamation pays more attention to the force or lightness, strength or weakness of emphasis given to the syllables, with a high or low intonation. Recitation, in accordance with the quietly flowing breath-stream, reckons only the blood-circulation, and this is communication in poetry – whereas declamation is poetry as description. And in fact everyone who practises speech-formation must ask himself when confronted with a poem: Have I to recite here or declaim? They are two fundamentally different nuances of this art-form. We realise this when we see how the poet himself differentiates in a wonderful way between declamation and recitation.

Compare in this respect the Iphigeneia Goethe composed in Weimar, before he became acquainted in Italy with the Greek style. Observe the Iphigeneia he wrote at that time: it is entirely declamatory. Then he comes to Italy and grows absorbed in his own way in what he terms Greek art (it was not really still Greek art, but he does feel in it an after-effect of Greek art): he rewrites his Iphigeneia in the recitative mode. And while declamation, as stemming from the blood, passes over into recitation, which stems from the breathing, here that inwardly more Nordic, that Germanic disposition of feeling comes to adopt an outward artistic form that works through quantities and metre in this play which Hermann Grimm has aptly christened the “Roman Iphigeneia”. For someone with artistic sensibility there is the greatest conceivable difference between Goethe's German and his Roman Iphigeneia. We do not wish today to manifest a special sympathy or antipathy for one version or the other, but to indicate the tremendous difference, which should be apparent upon hearing a passage from the Iphigeneia either in recitation or declamation. Examples from both versions are now to be presented.

As for the hexameter, we shall encounter this in Schiller’s “Der Tanz”. A correct, regular metre – not necessarily the hexameter – we will come upon this in some poems by Mörike, a lyricist who inclines toward the ballad-form.

If we survey the aesthetic evolution of mankind, we may experience decisively how in ancient Greece everything became recitative and man lived altogether more in his natural surroundings. The life of recitation lies in the breathing-process, in quantitative metres. The declamatory emerges out of the northern sense of inwardness, the depths of feeling we find in the soul and spiritual life of Central Europe. It relies more upon weight and metre. And if, in his process of creation, the Divinity holds sway over the world through quantity, weight and proportion, then the poet is seeking through his declamatory and recitative art to hearken to the regency of the Divine – to do so in a poetic intimacy, through observing the laws of quantity and metre in recitation, and through an intimate feeling for metre and weight in the high and low tones of declamation.

In this context we will now present Schiller’s “Tanz” to exemplify the hexameter; then Mörike’s “Schön – Rohtraut” and “Geister am Mummelsee”, which are in a ballad-style; and lastly a short passage from Goethe’s German and Roman Iphigeneia. [Note 30]

DER TANZ

Siehe, wie schwebenden Schritts im Wellenschwung sich die Paare

Drehen! Den Boden berührt kaum der geflügelte Fuss.

Seh ich flüchtige Schatten, befreit von der Schwere des Leibes?

Schlingen im Mondlicht dort Elfen den luftigen Reihn?

Wie, vom Zephyr gewiegt, der leichte Rauch in die Luft fliesst,

Wie sich leise der Kahn schaukelt auf silberner Flut,

Hüpft der gelehrige Fuss auf des Takts melodischer Woge,

Säuselndes Saitengetön hebt den ätherischen Leib.

Jetzt als wollt es mit Macht durchreissen die Kette des Tanzes,

Schwingt sich ein mutiges Paar dort in den dichtesten Reihn.

Schnell vor ihm her entsteht ihm die Bahn, die hinter ihm schwindet,

Wie durch magische Hand öffnet und schliesst sich der Weg.

Sieh! jetzt schwand es dem Blick; in wildem Gewirr durcheinander

Stürzt der zierliche Bau dieser beweglichen Welt.

Nein, dort schwebt es frohlockend herauf; der Knoten entwirrt sich;

Nur mit verändertem Reiz stellet die Regel sich her.

Ewig zerstört, es erzeugt sich ewig die drehende Schöpfung,

Und ein stilles Gesetz lenkt der Verwandlungen Spiel.

Sprich, wie geschiehts, dass rastlos erneut die Bildungen schwanken,

Und die Ruhe besteht in der bewegten Gestalt?

Jeder ein Herrscher, frei, nur dem eigenen Herzen gehorchet

Und im eilenden Lauf findet die einzige Bahn?

Willst du es wissen? Es ist des Wohllauts mächtige Gottheit,

Die zum geselligen Tanz ordnet den tobenden Sprung,

Die, der Nemesis gleich, an des Rhythmus goldenem Zügel

Lenkt die brausende Lust und die verwilderte zähmt.

Und dir rauschen umsonst die Harmonien des Weltalls?

Dich ergreift nicht der Strom dieses erhabnen Gesangs?

Nicht der begeisternde Takt, den alle Wesen dir schlagen?

Nicht der wirbelnde Tanz, der durch den ewigen Raum

Leuchtende Sonnen schwingt in Kühn gewundenen Bahnen?

Das du im Spiele doch ehrst, fliehst du im Handeln, das Mass.

Friedrich Schiller.

[Though by different means, Sir John Davies also managed to devise a highly-polished, regular metre to reproduce in English the classical _.stateliness of a courtly dance. The following section treats of “The Antiquitte of Dancing,” and is taken from his “Orchestra, or A Poeme of Dauncing”:

Dauncing (bright Lady) then began to be,

When the first seedes whereof the world did spring,

The Fire, Ayre, Earth and Water did agree,

By Loves perswasion, Natures mighty King,

To leave their first disorder’d combating;

And in a daunce such measure to observe,

As all the world their motion should preserve.

Since when they still are carried in a round,

And changing come one in anothers place,

Yet doe they neyther mingle nor confound,

But every one doth keepe the bounded space

Wherein the daunce doth bid it turne or trace:

This wondrous myracle did Love devise,

For Dauncing is Loves proper exercise.

Like this, he fram’d the Gods eternall bower,

And of a shapelesse and confused masse

By his through-piercing and digesting power

The turning vault of heaven formed was:

Whose starrie wheeles he hath so made to passe,

As that their movings doe a musick frame,

And they themselves, still daunce unto the same.

Or if this (All) which round about we see

(As idle Morpheus some sicke braines hath taught)

Of undevided Motes compacted bee,

How was this goodly Architecture wrought?

Or by what meanes were they together brought?

They erre that say they did concur by chaunce,

Love made them meete in a well-ordered daunce.

As when Amphion with his charming Lire

Begot so sweet a Syren of the ayre,

That with her Rethorike made the stones conspire

The ruines of a Citty to repayre,

(A worke of wit and reasons wise affayre)

So Loves smooth tongue, the motes such measure taught

That they joyn’d hands, and so the world was wrought.

Sir John Davies (1569-1626).]

Two Ballads:

SCHÖN-ROHTRAUT

Wie heisst König Ringangs Töchterlein?

Rohtraut, Schön-Rohtraut.

Was tut sie denn den ganzen Tag,

Da sie wohl nicht spinnen und nähen mag?

Tut fischen und jagen.

O dass ich doch ihr Jäger wär’!

Fischen und Jagen freute mich sehr. –

– Schweig stille, mein Herze!

Und über eine kleine Weil’,

Rohtraut, Schön-Rohtraut,

So dient der Knab’ auf Ringangs Schloss

In Jägertracht und hat ein Ross,

Mit Rohtraut zu jagen.

O dass ich doch ein Königssohn wär’!

Rohtraut, Schön-Rohtraut lieb’ ich so sehr.

– Schweig stille, mein Herze!

Einstmals sie ruhten am Eichenbaum,

Da lacht Schön-Rohtraut:

‘Was siehst mich an so wunniglich?

Wenn du das Herz hast, küsse mich!’

Ach erschrak der Knabe!

Doch denket er: mir ist’s vergunnt,

Und küsset Schön-Rohtraut auf den Mund.

– Schweig stille, mein Herze!

Darauf sie ritten schweigend heim,

Rohtraut, Schön-Rohtraut;

Es jauchzt der Knab’ in seinem Sinn:

Und würdst du heute Kaiserin,

Mich sollt’s nicht kränken:

Ihr tausend Blätter im Walde wisst,

Ich hab’ Schön-Rohtrauts Mund geküsst!

– Schweig stille, mein Herze!

DIE GEISTER AM MUMMELSEE

Vom Berge was kommt dort um Mitternacht spät

Mit Fackeln so prächtig herunter?

Ob das wohl zum Tanze, zum Feste noch geht?

Mir klingen die Lieder so munter.

O nein!

So sage, was mag es wohl sein?

Das, was du da siehest, ist Totengeleit,

Und was du da hörest, sind Klagen.

Dem König, dem Zauberer, gilt es zuleid,

Sie bringen ihn wieder getragen.

O weh!

So sind es die Geister vom See!

Sie schweben herunter ins Mummelseetal,

Sie haben den See schon betreten,

Sie rühren und netzen den Fuss nicht einmal,

Sie schwirren in leisen Gebeten –

O schau!

Am Sarge die glänzende Frau!

Jetzt öffnet der See das grünspiegelnde Tor;

Gib acht, nun tauchen sie nieder!

Es schwankt eine lebende Treppe hervor,

Und – drunten schon summen die Lieder.

Hörst du?

Sie singen ihn unten zur Ruh.

Die Wasser, wie lieblich sie brennen und glühn!

Sie spielen in grünendem Feuer;

Es geisten die Nebel am Ufer dahin,

Zum Meere verzieht sich der Weiher. –

Nur still!

Ob dort sich nichts rühren will?

Es zuckt in der Mitten – O Himmel ach hilf!

Nun kommen sie wieder, sie kommen!

Es orgelt im Rohr und es klirret im Schilf;

Nur hurtig, die Flucht nur genommen!

Davon!

Sie wittern, sie haschen mich schon!

Eduard Mörike (1804-1875).

[For something similar in English we need look no further than the authors of the celebrated Lyrical Ballads:

LUCY GRAY;

OR, SOLITUDE

Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray:

And, when I crossed the wild,

I chanced to see at break of day

The solitary child.

No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;

She dwelt on a wide moor,

– The sweetest thing that ever grew

Beside a human door!

You yet may spy the fawn at play,

The bare upon the green;

But the sweet face of Lucy Gray

Will never more be seen.

‘To-night will be a stormy night –

You to the town must go;

And take a lantern, Child, to light

Your mother through the snow.’

‘That, Father! will I gladly do:

’Tis scarcely afternoon –

The minster-clock has just struck two,

And yonder is the moon!’

At this the Father raised his hook,

And snapped a faggot-band;

He plied his work; – and Lucy took

The lantern in her hand.

Not blither is the mountain roe:

With many a wanton stroke

Her feet disperse the powdery snow,

That rises up like smoke.

The storm came on before its time:

She wandered up and down;

And many a hill did Lucy climb:

But never reached the town.

The wretched parents all that night

Went shouting far and wide;

But there was neither sound nor sight

To serve them for a guide.

At day-break on a hill they stood

That overlooked the moor;

And thence they saw the bridge of wood,

A furlong from their door.

They wept – and, turning homeward, cried,

‘In heaven we all shall meet;’

– When in the snow the mother spied

The print of Lucy’s feet.

Then downwards from the steep hill’s edge

They tracked the footmarks small;

And through the broken hawthorn hedge,

And by the long stone-wall;

And then an open field they crossed:

The marks were still the same;

They tracked them on, nor ever lost;

And to the bridge they came.

They followed from the snowy bank

Those footmarks, one by one,

Into the middle of the plank;

And further there were none!

– Yet some maintain that to this day

She is a living child;

That you may see sweet Lucy Gray

Upon the lonesome wild.

O’er rough and smooth she traps along,

And never looks behind;