The Orphic Voice, page 26
Jede Pflanze verkündet dir nun die ewgen Gesetze,
Jede Blume, sie spricht lauter und lauter mit dir.
Aber entzifferst du hier der Gottin heilige Lettern,
Überall siehst du sie dann, auch in verandertem Zug.
Once that language is deciphered, it will apply in wider and wider figures, and Goethe moves into the figures of the love between man and woman, tracing the growth and development of the relationship between Christiane and himself up to its fulfillment in sexual love and fertility. These figures are one with the processes of nature, a marriage of true minds their consummation, the shared method of contemplating nature which is to be the final bond between the lovers.83 This is one of the great themes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the reciprocal interpretation of the Ur-forms and metamorphoses of nature as sex, and nature as mind, the poet holding, by virtue of his power of language, the communication point between them.
After the brief Epirrhema, the Metamorphose der Tiere follows. Where the first of these two longer poems began with a du, a “thou,” this begins with an ihr, a “you”; but a loving friendliness prevails nonetheless in the opening: “If, thus far prepared, you will venture to climb the last step of this summit, then give me your hand, and turn your frank gaze toward the broad field of Nature.” So we are reminded that this is a continuation of the earlier poem, building its own unity. Nature is here seen as something unlimited which yet limits itself, according to flexible but firm laws, in each of its manifestations. An Urbild appears behind all the varied organization of the animal kingdom, hidden and secret but present even in the strangest forms, “Und die seltenste Form bewahrt im geheimen das Urbild.” Here is taxonomy again, yet with emphasis on plasticity and variability in the adaptation of the animal to its environment and the interdependence of form and living habits. In the middle of the poem Goethe develops this further under the concept of a balance held between novelty and heredity, where each new advantage an animal gains may have to be compensated for by a corresponding lack elsewhere in its organization. Then in the last twelve lines he sums up in terms of poetry, as possessing the characteristic note of “power and limits, caprice and law, freedom and control, order in movement, advantage and lack” which the opening of the poem pointed to. This balance or synthesis inherent in the sacred muse is applied far beyond the limits of zoology; it is the principle of the ethical philosopher, the man of action, the artist and poet, the ruler worthy the name. So the figures rising up out of the animal world permeate and interpret man and society up to the highest levels of art, ethics, and politics. And in Goethe the truth comes through poetry, “vom Munde der Muse,” as, in Ovid, Orpheus mediated the transition between the natural figures and those of human society.
Gradually with these poems we have been moving closer to the classical world, and to poetry as the language of nature. Now in 1817 we find Goethe writing to a correspondent84 that he has been reading works upon Greek mythology, and has been initiated into what he calls the Orphic darkness; he adds that it is an extraordinary world which there opens before the eyes, but one which is not much illuminated by the learned men who deal with it, since what one casts light on, the next obscures again. It is at this time, under this influence, that the Urworte: Orphisch are written. Goethe says of them, in the 1820 notes to these verses in Kunst und Altertum, that they originally appeared in his second Morphology volume but have a significance beyond this; also, that they present in concentrated form, “poetisch-kompendios, lakonisch,” what has been handed down “in older or more recent lore.” They do not merely do this; they synthesize also Goethe’s own Orphic approach to postlogic.
URWORTE. ORPHISCH
DAIMON, Dämon
Wie an dem Tag, der dich der Welt verliehen,
Die Sonne stand zum Grusse der Planeten,
Bist alsobald und fort und fort gediehen
Nach dem Gesetz, wonach du angêtreten.
So musst du sein, dir kannst du nicht entfliehen,
So sagten schon Sibyllen, so Propheten;
Und keine Zeit und keine Macht zerstückelt
Geprägte Form, die lebend sich entwickelt.
(The Daimon, individual Life-Force
Planets and sun in high conjunction o’er us,
The day that first advanced us to creation,
Sealed us ourselves at once, and all before us
Follows the law of that initiation.
Sibyls and Prophets uttered it in chorus:
Will we or nill we, we must hold our station.
No power on earth, no time-scale can disfeature
Impress of form that grows, a living creature.)
TYCHE, das Zufällige
Die strenge Grenze doch umgeht gefällig
Ein Wandelndes, das mit und um uns wandelt;
Nicht einsam bleibst du, bildest dich gesellig,
Und handelst wohl so, wie ein andrer handelt:
Im Leben ists bald hin-, bald widerfällig,
Es ist ein Tand und wird so durchgetändelt.
Schon hat sich still der Jahre Kreis geründet,
Die Lampe harrt der Flamme, die entzündet.
(Chance
Yet round these rigid limits seems to waver
A shifting force whose breath and play enfolds us.
Our actions come to have a social flavor:
Not loneliness, our fellows’ presence molds us.
Sometimes we’re in, sometimes we’re out of favor;
It’s all a game—as such, it scarcely holds us.
But silent seasons have fulfilled their turning;
The lamp awaits a light, to set it burning.)
EROS, Liebe
Die bleibt nicht aus!— Er stürzt vom Himmel nieder,
Wohin er sich aus alter Öde schwang,
Er schwebt heran auf luftigem Gefieder
Um Stirn und Brust den Frühlingstag entlang,
Scheint jetzt zu fliehn, vom Fliehen kehrt er wieder:
Da wird ein Wohl im Weh, so suss und bang.
Gar manches Herz verschwebt im Allgemeinen,
Doch widmet sich das edelste dem Einen.
(Love
And then it comes!— One comes, from Heaven darting,
Who rose from ancient void to that high seat,
Hovering, a springtime breeze of feathers startling
Forehead and breast that feel that airy beat;
Always upon the wing, but not departing—
O whence these pangs, so strangely bitter-sweet?
Most loves are held in common and commotion;
Great hearts alone pursue the one devotion.)
ANANKE, Nötigung
Da ists denn wieder, wie die Sterne wollten:
Bedingung und Gesetz; und aller Wille
Ist nur ein Wollen, weil wir eben sollten,
Und vor dem Willen schweigt die Willkür stille;
Das Liebste wird vom Herzen weggescholten,
Dem harten Muss bequemt sich Will und Grille,
So sind wir scheinfrei denn, nach manchen Jahren
Nur enger dran, als wir am Anfang waren.
(Necessity
Now, back to what the stars’ designs predicted,
We feel the law’s compulsion and constriction;
Wish is but will, duty-bound and restricted,
Whim’s will-o’-wisp exorcised by conviction;
Out of the heart the dearest is evicted;
“I want,” “I would,” are bent by Must’s infliction.
Thus, after years, to freedom’s semblance winning,
We’re but more straitened than at our beginning.)
ELPIS, Hoffnung
Doch solcher Grenze, solcher ehrnen Mauer
Höchst widerwartge Pforte wird entriegelt,
Sie stehe nur mit alter Felsendauer!
Ein Wesen regt sich leicht und ungezügelt:
Aus Wolkendecke, Nebel, Regenschauer,
Erhebt sie uns, mit ihr, durch sie beflügelt,
Ihr kennt sie wohl, sie schwarmt durch alle Zonen—
Ein Flügelschlag—und hinter uns Äonen!
(Hope
Yet these bronze walls, these boundaries unbending,
Though they stand rock-like, centuries together,
They and the soul’s despair at last have ending;
There’s one who rises free of any tether;
Lent wings by her, we’re airborne and ascending,
With her, through ceiling-fog and rainy weather.
Known everywhere, all tracts of the globe remind us.
One pinion-stroke—and aeons lie behind us!)
These five poems hold all the operating principles of Goethe’s method. In the first verse appears the Linnaean Ur-form within the individual’s own development, that taxonomic character which is fixed and yet capable of growth, seen here in its human form and taken as the type of all organic life. In the second is the theme of change, the Ovidian metamorphoses induced in this and the following verses, that union of obdurate selfhood and adaptability to surroundings, fixity and freedom, which is characteristic of living figures; here the figures of human life and thought and action take their partly conditioned shape, rising up out of inanimate nature and remaining at one with it. In the central place held by the third verse comes Eros, reminding us of the Metamorphoses and sex and love as interpretative instruments in mythology, this being the one stanza graced by the lovely touch of alternating masculine and feminine rhymes. In the fourth stanza the progression of the figures up to and including those of social and moral patterns in society—also an Ovidian touch—is shown; there is another feature of this stanza also, in that it circles back to the beginning in its first and last lines, as if it were closing the cycle of time opened by the individual’s birth. Yet the last stanza is not an end but a beginning, as if the five poems had not merely to narrate but to figure the kind of organic time-cycle Goethe described in the plant poem. The fifth verse relates us once again to the comparative timelessness of earth and nature (here seen as weather and rocks), endows us with a future to which the virtue or power of hope is necessarily directed, but also with an immemorial past.
(I believe there is implicit in these verses and in Goethe’s whole systematics a concept of the organism as its own independent time-universe, where time is not serial but a cumulative simultaneous present, individual and ancestral,85 operating not by “past” and “future” tenses but by living powers of memory and prophecy, and observable only within a living organism itself which is subject to change but changes always into itself, as Mallarmé says the poet does— “Tel qu’en Lui-même enfin l’Éternité le change,” as he says of Poe.)
But if the Urworte are a synthesis of subject matter, they are also a synthesis of method, or more properly both at once, reflexively. Here a mind passionately interested in the dynamics of life, in the individual organism, in nature at large, in human beings and in his own thinking and feeling and acting self, having tried to evolve a dynamic of nonmathematical thought as a means of interpreting life, brings this home, centrally and finally, to words, poetry and myth. The postlogic which has been visible throughout Goethe’s activity here receives its final seal, its ultimate connection with language. These are not just any words; they are Urworte, working taxonomic concepts as Urpflanze and Urtier were, from which to develop a morphology of metamorphoses, applicable to mind and nature alike.
Each of the Urworte, the primordial words, is a poem; and each is identified with a myth, Daimon and Eros and so on. These myths are five great powers which Goethe sees as operative in, and definitive of, organic life, including that of the thinking mind. The words are a working discipline of human metamorphosis according to powers presented as myths. Man is subject to these; by these he must interpret the universe and himself. Metamorphosis was for Goethe not just a phenomenon; it was a working discipline. It is Spengler who points this out, telling us to look for its principles in the Orphische Urworte; quoting Goethe as saying, “The methodology of forms (Gestalten) is the methodology of transformations. The working discipline of metamorphosis is the key to all the signs in nature”; and attempting himself to produce with it an organic and morphological world-history.86 It is here that Goethe stands, he and his Orpheus with him. What they offer is a method—a biology moving into language, or a poetry—highly generalized and potentially capable of adaptation to any field of thinking about organic life. This Goethe saw, embodying it in his own existence as well as in what he wrote. The European Orphic tradition moves on now from here.
PART IV
Wordsworth and Rilke: Toward a Biology of Thinking
1
and rapt Poesy,
And arts, though unimagined, yet to be,
The wandering voices and the shadows these
Of all that man becomes
IT IS Orpheus’ function to mark out the essential poetic tradition in any period by indicating those who are at work on the peculiar question and task of poetry in their time; also, to make plain the nature of that questioning endeavor. In this new period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we begin once more with indications. They come from various sources, for once again the Orphic line cuts across borderlines of nationality, discipline, or those restricted “movements” into which literary critics and historians tend to divide the Orphic unity.
At the beginning of the period there is a double manifestation of Orpheus, a great poet conceiving of his own task as Orphic, while his credentials are confirmed by another great poet, in Orphic terms again. This is the springboard of our own inquiry here. Wordsworth in Book I of the 1805 version of The Prelude (the later revised version was published in 1850) describes his vocation in Orphic terms:
Then, last wish,
My last and favourite aspiration! then
I yearn towards some philosophic Song
Of Truth that cherishes our daily life,
With meditations passionate from deep
Recesses in man’s heart, immortal verse
Thoughtfully fitted to the Orphean lyre.
This is the first great Orphic voice of our modern period. The last is Rilke and his fifty-five Sonette an Orpheus of 1923. Between these two the inquiry moves, with the help of other Orphic voices. What is its nature?
The voices themselves are clear and explicit about the unity of the task upon which they are engaged. Four of them, widely varied, speak it out:
episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world.
[Shelley, A Defence of Poetry]
Un génie finit l’autre. Mais pas dans la même région. L’astronome s’ajoute au philosophe; le législateur est l’exécuteur des volontes du poète . . . le poète corrobore l’homme d’état . . . L’oeuvre est mystérieux pour ceux mêmes qui la font. Les uns en ont conscience, les autres point.
[Hugo, Shakespeare]
J’irais plus loin, je dirais Le Livre, persuadé qu’au fond il n’y en a qu’un, tenté à son insu par quiconque a écrit, même les genies: l’explication orphique de la terre, qui est le seul devoir du poète et le jeu littéraire par excellence.
[Mallarmé, Autobiographie]
The poet, there’s where the great names . . . no longer matter,— it’s the same thing, it’s the poet; for, in the ultimate sense, there is only one, that infinite one who, here and there through the ages, asserts himself in some spirit that has been subjected to him.
[Rilke, letter of 1920]1
Rilke in the Orpheus sonnets puts it more specifically, “Ein für alle Male, ists Orpheus wenn es singt,”— once and for all, where singing is, Orpheus is. Of these Orphic voices, Shelley’s Orphic password, a very beautiful one, occurs in the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound:
Language is a perpetual Orphic song
Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng
Of thoughts and forms which else senseless and shapeless were.
The Hugo of the 1864–65 essay on Shakespeare we have met already. Orpheus enters first in Book IV in connection with a lost play of Aeschylus, then in a wider context in Book v, where Hugo broadens his theme to a consideration of the nature of genius in general; Orpheus figures twice in the roll call Hugo makes of genius from the beginnings of time and in every field of human endeavor. Mallarmé’s pronouncement is here patent, giving us, obscure and difficult poet as he is held to be, one of the clearest statements we possess of what the poet is engaged in. Rilke’s Orphic badge is clear. One more name remains to be added, again a familiar one: that of Renan, who in L’Avenir de la science, written 1848-49 and published only forty years later, sees Orpheus as one of the founders of civilization and as the very type of that union of scientific and poetic thinking to which this great essay of his is devoted. This, then, is the Orphic line with which we shall span the period from 1800 to the present day—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Hugo, Renan, Mallarmé, Rilke; English first, German last, French in between, to whom we shall turn first.
The French contingent is admirably varied, the supposed arch-Romantic who refused to use the terms “Romanticism” and “Romantic” at all, he found them so misleading;2 a philosophic historian and man of letters and science; and one of the purest of Pure Poets who ever had the label “Symbolist” pinned on to him.
Hugo’s and Renan’s respective Orphic essays are little known. Hugo’s is buried in the section “Philosophie” of his Oeuvres complètes and under the general prejudice which hides this great mind from us. Renan’s is simply neglected. I shall therefore give something of their contents.
