Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry | Page 6

father's sister, who was herself a widow and the faithful companion of the poet's mother. When the latter found herself again alone with her two little ones, whose care was weighing heavily upon her, she consented to become the wife of her late husband's friend, Kammerrat Gock, and accompanied him to his home in the little town of Nürtingen on the Neckar. But this re-established marital happiness was to be of brief duration, for in 1779 her second husband died, and the mother was now left with four little children to care and provide for.
The frequency with which death visited the family during his childhood and youth, familiarized him at an early age with scenes of sorrow and grief. No doubt he was too young when his father died to comprehend the calamity that had come upon the household, but it was not many months before he knew the meaning of his mother's tears, not only for his father, but also for his sister, who died in her infancy. Referring to his father's death, he writes in one of his early poems, "Einst und Jetzt":[16]
Einst schlugst du mir so ruhig, emp?rtes Herz!
* * * * *
Einst in des Vaters Schoosse, des liebenden Geliebten Vaters,--aber der Würger kam, Wir weinten, flehten, doch der Würger Schnellte den Pfeil, und es sank die Stütze.
At his tenderest and most impressionable age, the boy was thus made sadly aware of the fleetingness of human life and the pains of bereavement. We cannot wonder then at finding these impressions reflected in his most juvenile poetic attempts. His poem "Das menschliche Leben," written at the age of fifteen, begins:
Menschen, Menschen! was ist euer Leben, Eure Welt, die thr?nenvolle Welt! Dieser Schauplatz, kann er Freude geben Wo sich Trauern nicht dazu gesellt?[17]
But a time of still greater unhappiness was in store for him when he left his home at the age of fourteen to enter the convent school at Denkendorf, where he began his preparation for a theological course. A more direct antithesis to all that his body and soul yearned for and needed for their proper development could scarcely have been devised than that which existed in the chilling atmosphere and rigorous discipline of the monastery. He had not even an incentive to endure hardships for the sake of what lay beyond, for it was merely in passive submission to his mother's wish that he had decided to enter holy orders. And now, clad in a sombre monkish gown, deprived of all freedom of thought or movement and forced into companionship with twenty-five or thirty fellows of his own age, who nearly all misunderstood him, H?lderlin felt himself wretched indeed. "W?r' ich doch ewig ferne von diesen Mauern des Elends!" he writes in a poem at Maulbronn in 1787.[18] There was for him but one way of escape. It was to isolate himself as much as possible from the world of harsh reality about him, to be alone, and there in his solitude to construct for himself an ideal world of fancy, a poetic dreamland. This mental habit not only remained with him as he grew into manhood, it may be said to have been through life one of his most distinguishing characteristics. It would be impossible to make room here for all the passages in his poems and letters of this period, which reflect his love of solitude and his habit of retreating into a world of his own imagining. His letters to his friend Nast almost invariably contain some expression of his heart-ache. "Bilfinger ist wohl mein Freund, aber es geht ihm zu glücklich, als dass er sich nach mir umsehen m?chte. Du wirst mich schon verstehen--er ist immer lustig, ich h?nge immer den Kopf."[19] Another letter begins: "Wieder eine Stunde wegphantasiert!--dass es doch so schlechte Menschen giebt, unter meinen Cameraden so elende Kerls--wann mich die Freundschaft nicht zuweilen wieder gut machte, so h?tt' ich mich manchmal schon lieber an jeden andern Ort gewünscht, als unter Menschengesellschaft.--Wann ich nur auch einmal etwas recht Lustiges schreiben k?nnte! Nur Gedult! 's wird kommen--hoff' ich, oder--oder hab' ich dann nicht genug getragen? Erfuhr ich nicht schon als Bube, was den Mann seufzen machen würde? und als Jüngling, geht's da besser?--Du lieber Gott! bin ich's denn allein? jeder andre glücklicher als ich? Und was hab' ich dann gethan?"[20] There is a world of pathos in this helpless cry of pain, with its suggestion of retributive fate. A poem of 1788, "Die Stille," written at Maulbronn, epitomizes almost everything that we have thus far noted as to H?lderlin's nature. He goes back in fancy to the days of his childhood, describing his lonely rambles, from which he would return in the moonlight, unmindful of his lateness for the evening meal, at which he would hastily eat of that which the