ON SONNETS ON SONNETS

BY W. E . YATES

‘Writing a good Petrarchan sonnet is difficult,’ observes a modern critic; ‘writing a superb one is all but impossible.’’ This difficulty is legendary, and has been both celebrated and lamented down the centuries. The most famous account of the problems is perhaps that in the second canto of Boileau’s L ‘Art pogtique, suggesting that the sonnet form with its ‘rigorous laws’ was invented by Apollo to drive poets to despair, and that its supreme perfection has never been attained:

Surtout de ce poeme il bannit la licence: L ui-mtme en mesura le nombre et la cadence; Dtfendit qu’un vers faible y pCt jamais entrer, Ni qu’un mot dCji mis osit s ’y remontrer. Du reste, il I’enrichit d’une beautt supreme: Un sonnet sans difauts vaut seul un long poeme Mais en vain mille auteurs y pensent arriver; E t cet heureux phtnix est encore i trouver.

One modern German poet who, interpreting the form as essentially dialectical, stresses the intensive discipline demanded by it is J ohannes R . Becher. In an essay of 1956 stimulated by Walter Monch’s monograph Das Sonett he argues that few sonneteers have succeeded in producing true (that is, substantially dialectical) sonnets. Becher regards the art of the sonnet in his sense as the highest species of creative writing, and the form as the one in which the most concentrated poetic power is achieved with the most restricted structural means. By contrast, the theoretical and critical material conveniently gathered together in Jorg-Ulrich Fechner’s historical anthology Das deutsche Sonett3 suggests that in the past in Germany it has often been critics hostile to the form who have stressed its difficulty, whether in a period such as the Auflrlarung, when it enjoyed little popularity, or in the midst of the Romantic ‘Sonettenwut’. Gottsched refers in his Versuch einer Critischen DichtRunst (1742), in the chapter ‘Von Sinn- und Scherzgedichten’, to ‘Das Sonnet, welches unter den Sinngedichten keinen geringen Platt verdienet, weil es so schwer zu machen ist’ (DS. 309). In 1807 the restrictions imposed by the technical difficulty led Friedrich Haug to describe it as a ‘wheel’ on which feeling is broken in fourteen blows (DS, 355).

Critics such as Gomched and Haug could speak with experience as occasional practitioners of the form; and its difficulty has furnished sonneteers with a recurrent poetic subject. There is, as Becher observes in his 1956 essay, no

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other form in which we meet so many poems written about the form itself; indeed, there is even an anthology of Sonnets on the Sonnet, edited by Matthew Russell, which was published in London in 1898 and includes 157 examples in five languages. In particular, there is an international tradition of light-hearted sonnets about the difficulty of composing a sonnet. This tradition was well known in Germany when interest in the sonnet revived after the Aufklarung period: i t was remarked on both by Burger in the preface to a collected edition of his poems published in 1789 (DS, 319) and by August Wilhelm Schlegel, the leading proponent of the sonnet among the German Romantics, in the important lecture on the Petrarchan sonnet that he gave in Berlin in 1803 (DS, 344). One of the best-known early examples of the tradition is a piece by Lope de Vega, ‘Un soneto me manda hacer Violante’, which is spoken by the graczoso in Act 111 of his play L a niira deplata. This was one of the sources of Voiture’s rondeau on the rondeau, whch in turn formed the basis for the earliest German imitation, a sonnet composed at the beginning of the eighteenth century bv Johann Burkhard Menke, which begins ‘Bey meiner Treu! es wird mir Angst gemacht; / Ich sol1 geschwind ein rein Sonnetgen sagen’ and ends triumphantly ‘Bey meiner Treu! das Werk ist schon gemacht’ (DS, 104).4 Later examples included in Fechner’s anthology include another early eighteenth-century version by Gottfried Benjamin Hancke, which ends with the line ‘Doch das Sonnet ist da: Es sind schon vierzehn Zeilen’ (DS, 113), a version in iambic dimeters by Daniel Schiebeler, dating from 1773 (DS, 123), and a nineteenth- century one (‘Doch ein Sonett, das hat nur vierzehn Zeilen . . .’) by the Viennese dramatist, anecdotist and memoirist Ignaz Franz Castelli (DS, 177). Echoes of the same tradition may also be detected in other sonnets, not least in the playful final tercet of Goethe’s ‘Kurz und gut’: ‘Du denkst es kaum, und sieh: das Lied istfertig . . . ’ .

The difficulty of the form is only one of the seven principal themes listed in Monch’s monograph (whch is now the standard work on the European sonnet) as being regularly treated by sonneteers in sonnets about the sonnet. Serious attempts to use the sonnet as a vehicle for expressing the essential qualities of the form have persisted in German from the Romantic period into the middle of the twentieth century. Fechner’s anthology contains some fifteen examples- serious and jocular, critical and laudatory-of German sonnets about the sonnet. The perennial fascination that the sonnet holds for poets derives, it is clear, from the elusive and complex effects characteristic of it and inherent in its form, and especially in that delicately weighted imbalance between octave and sestet that marks the structure of the Petrarchan sonnet (which is the dominant form in German literature).

Precisely this structural imbalance creates the effect that has variously been defined as its ‘hin- und herschwebende Fortbewegung’ (Burger), its ‘inne- wohnende Dynamik’ (Vietor), its ‘dialektisches Spiel’ (Month).' In interpreting the form as having an essentially tripartite structure-the sestet providing the

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synthesis to the thesis and antithesis of the two quatrains-Becher stands quite outside the traditional approach to the sonnet (an approach that he attacks as formalistic). The more traditional view, which conceives of the form as dualistic, is expressed by a critic such as Vietor, who likens the relation of the whole octave to the sestet to that of expectation to fulfilment, of pro- position to conclusion or solution. That after the obligatory volta the sestet characteristically has the effect of a response to the octave is why the sonnet form lends itself to the construction of dialogues as in such poems by Goethe as ‘Das Sonett’ of 1800, in which the sestet expresses the poet’s rejection of the argument advanced in the octave in favour of the form, or ‘Ich zweifle doch a m Ernst verschrankter Zeilen’, in which the octave is given to the girl’s doubts about the possibility of expressing personal feeling in complex poetic forms that need careful filing, and the sestet to the poet’s counter-argument, the example of the explosives expert blown to smithereens by elemental powers beyond his control. One of the effects inherent in the suucture of the Petrarchan sonnet is that by its relative brevity the sestet seems, as Fuller puts it, to ‘urge the sonnet to a decisive conclusion’.“ (Fuller’s other point here, however, that the sestet is also ‘more tightly organised’ than the octave, is more doubtful; that German sonneteers have not in fact found it to be so is one of the points that will emerge f rom a consideration of representative sonnets o n the sonnet.) The contrast in length between octave and sestet is strengthened by the ortho- dox rhyme-schemes. That the recurrence of rhymes creates its own tension and anticipation is the central point of a sonnet on the sonnet by Herbert Eulenberg, which records ‘Der Reime Ungeduld, die sich erwarten / Wie Liebende, die lang des Freundes harrten’ (DS, 232). The closed rhyme typical of the octave allows three pairs of successive rhyming lines (2-3, 4-5, 6-7), and that this repetition is generally avoided in the sestet produces a strikingly contrasting effect-a point emphasized by A . W. Schlegel in his 1803 lecture:

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In den Quartetts bleibt kein Reim ohne seinen entsprechenden, ja von der dritten Zeile an ist alles schon Antwort auf die Frage der ersten beyden Zeilen, und hochstens nur gelinder erneuerte Frage. Im ersten Terzett hingegen wird durch drey unmittelbar folgende verschiedene Reime eine ungeheure Spannung erregt, und diese dann im zweyten stufenweise und nur mit der lettten Zeile erst befriedigend gelost. (DS, 350 f.)

In Sengle’s view the frequent use of three rhymes in the sestet, strengthening this contrast with the octave, served in the Biedermeier period to underline the ‘dualistic structure’, which, he argues, underlay the extraordinary popu- larity of the sonnet a t that time, when the ‘sonnet mania’ reached such lengths that Heine was moved to propose a tax o n sonnets: ‘Die Sonettenwut grassiert so in Deutschland, daf3 man eine Sonettensteuer einrichten sollte.’7

The tendency to argument and riposte, which made the sonnet a natural

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vehicle for the antitheses characteristic of Petrarch and petrarchist poets, also invites an epigrammatic effect in the sestet. One eighteenth-century reference- book, John Barrow’s New and Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London, 1751), having observed in the article ‘Sonnet’ that the (Petrarchan) form ‘is held the most difficult and artful of all poetical compositions, as requiring the utmost accuracy and exactness’, notes as a specific requirement that ‘it is to end with some pretty, ingenious thought’, and adds the daunting rider: ‘The close must be particularly beautiful, or the Sonnet is naught.’ The sestet (while less ideally suited, perhaps, than the concluding couplet of the Shakespearian form) is short enough for an epigrammatic effect; but even though, as Welti remarks, the sonnet served in the Romantic period much the same function as the distich served for Goethe and S ~ h i l l e r , ~ as a whole poem it is too long to be based on the single pithy point or single antithesis character- istic of the true epigram. Equally, while it is long enough to invite personal self-expression, it is too short for lyrical effusion. This tantalizing quality about the length is summarized by Boileau:

Pour enfermer son sens dans la borne prescrite, La mesure est toujours trop longue ou trop petite.

Yet the very sense of restriction is one of the features of the sonnet form that have contributed to the enduring fascination it has held for poets. Goethe’s pejorative use of the term ‘Beschrankung’ in his sonnet on the sonnet (‘Sich in erneutem Kunstgebrauch zu uben’) is more than outweighed by the famous affirmation in ‘Natur und Kunst’, written about the same time: ‘In der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister’; and that the objections raised in ‘Das Sonett’ are not to be taken too seriously is made quite clear by Goethe himself in the letter to Zelter of 22 June 1808, where with explicit reference to this very piece he insists ‘daO man recht gut uber eine Sache spaflen und spotten kann, ohne sie deOwegen zu verachten und zu verwerfen’. The general aesthetic principle that ‘limitations’ of form are not incompatible with freedom of the intellect and imagination is reaffirmed in the early Biedermeier age, when the sonnet was approaching the summit of its popularity, in the sestet of the last sonnet of Ruckert’s early cycle ‘Aus dem romischen Tagebuch’ (1817). This is a little-known Christmas sonnet (it was not included by Ruckert in his own selection of his Gedichte), which treats religious ceremony and archtecture but, like Goethe’s ‘Natur und Kunst’, has clear relevance to the sonnet form itself:

Doch wie die Form auch starr gefroren sei, Es bleibt ihr Zweck auch so den Geist zu ehren, Der, zwar von ihr gebunden, doch ist frei.

Das Ganze fordert Schranken; doch es wehren Die Schranken nicht dem Einzelnen, dabei Sich selbst dem Schrankenlosen zuzukehren.9

ON SONNETS ON SONNETS 191

And a similar acceptance of rigid formal restrictions is expressed in the best- known of all German sonnets on the sonnet, that by August Wilhelm Schlegel, which Welti takes as the motto of his history of the German sonnet, and whose octave stands at the head of Monch’s preface:

Zwey Reime heil3’ ich viermal kehren wieder, Und stelle sie, getheilt, in gleiche Reihen, Dai3 hier und dort zwey eingefal3t von zweyen Im Doppelchore schweben auf und nieder.

Sich freyer wechselnd, jegliches von dreyen. In solcher Ordnung, solcher Zahl gedeihen Die zartesten und stolzesten der Lieder.

Den werd’ ich nie mit meinen Zeilen kranzen, Dem eitle Spielerey mein Wesen diinket Und Eigensinn die kunstlichen Gesetze.

Doch, wem in mir geheimer Zauber winket, Dem leih’ ich Hoheit, Full’ in engen Granzen Und reines E benmaa der Gegensatze.’O

Dann schlingt des Gleichlauts Kette durch zwey Glieder

Schlegel’s sonnet-the sonnet itself speaks, explaining itself as in a riddle- is both an exposition and a demonstration, analyzing the sonnet in appropri- ately precise language while also enacting the description, exemplifying the formal model Schlegel sought to establish. In the early eighteenth century the established practice-set out in the treatise by ‘Menantes’, Die Allemeueste Art, Zur Reinen und Galanten Poesie zu gelangen (DS, 307f.)-had been to alter- nate masculine and feminine rhymes, generally in iambic trimeters; by the end of the century Schlegel rejected masculine rhyme and insisted on the use of iambic pentameters. His sonnet on the sonnet adheres to this orthodox pattern, with closed rhyme in the octave, a marked volta, and an order of rhymes in the sestet conforming to one of the three most common schemes in Peuarch. I t has been widely observed that in explaining the form and the rhyme-scheme- the first quatrain treating the octave, the second the sestet-the octave gives a versified analysis of the structure of the form corresponding to the subsequent prose analysis in Schlegel’s 1803 lecture (DS, 343). The emphasis is on the balance of the form: the recurrence of the rhymes, the evenness of the order, the closed rhyme in both quatrains. The image of a ‘chain’ to convey the effect of the rhyme in the sestet is one of several images by which poets of sonnets on the sonnet try to suggest the effect of its rhyme-pattern: Morike too in his puzzle-sonnet ‘Heut lehr’ ich euch die Regel der Son[ette]’ (DS, 196) likens the effect throughout to a chain, with golden links; earlier images include a magic net (Loeben, DS, 154) and the rise and fall of waves (Strachwitz, DS, 187).

The enjambment between the last two verses of the octave lends a more spacious quality to Schlegel’s praise of ‘die zartesten und stolzesten der Lieder’;

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and it is this praise that the sestet moves on to develop. The final theme-‘das reine Ebenmd der Gegensatze’, not merely balance, but contrast within balance- has already been hinted at in the emphatic ‘getheilt’ of line 2 , and is now both explicated and exemplified in the antithetical structure of the tercets. The first tercet dismisses the idea that the formal order is mere ‘Spielerei’ (the ‘Silbespiele’ of the sceptical questioner in Goethe’s ‘Ich zweifle doch . . . I ) ; the second makes the obverse point, that for the true votary who can perceive the magic of the form (Loeben’s golden ‘net’ is similarly a ‘Zaubernetz’), the very strictness of the ‘enge Granzen’ will permit a peculiar nobility and richness and ‘pure balance of op- posites’.

While A. W. Schlegel does not in this poem attempt to prescribe the thematic content of the sonnet, his emphasis on antithesis seems to imply a stress on the potential of the form as a vehicle of ideas and thought. This is consistent with a recurrent strand in sonnet theory. One of the contrasts Friedrich Schlegel makes between the sonnet and the canzone is precisely that in the former the intellectual element is more to the fore: ‘Im Sonett herrscht mehr der Gedanie, in der Canzone mehr das GefchL‘ (03, 337). Among modern theorists Monch writes of ‘das Sonett, das schon seinem Wesen nach gedankenschwere Lyrik ist’ (p. 296). When Becher designates the sonnet ‘eine Grundform der Dichtung’, it is ‘weil in ihm der hochste menschliche Gedanke seinen prazisesten Ausdruck zu finden vermag’ (p. 330). In one of the late nineteenth-century sonnets on the sonnet, that pub- lished in 1872 by Ferdinand von Saar, the ‘thought’ is indeed the central figure in a kind of moral fable, in which the thought enters a maze, to be faced with distrac- tions of tempting abundance but at the moment of crisis to restrict itself to seizing a single fruit and so achieve its freedom:

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Ein Labyrinth mit holdverschlung’nen Gangen Hat dem Gedanken still sich aufgeschlossen; Er tritt hiliein-und wird sogleich umflossen

Von Glanz und Duft und zauberischen Klangen.

Hier leuchten Blumen, die auf Wiesenhangen Des Pfluckers harren, sehnsuchtsvoll entsprossen, Dort wollen Zweige, goldschwer ubergossen,

Den Wandelnden auf schmalem Pfad bedrangen.

Der aber, wird so mancher Wunsch ihm rege,

Doch manche Bluthe, die er trifft am Wege. Pfluckt eine Frucht nur mit zufried’ner Miene-

Und nun-ob er gefangen auch erschiene

Geleitet ihn in’s Freie die Terzine. ‘ I

Schon in des Vierreims wechselndem Gehege-:

ON SONNETS ON SONNETS 193

While once again the effect of formal balance is extolled, the intricacies of the formal rules are taken for granted, and the sonnet is presented essentially as the vehicle for the thought or theme, whose characteristic development Saar attempts to trace. The ‘maze’-like structure of the octave, treated by Saar in the octave of h own poem, is presented as offering an opportunity for rich effects by its recurring rhymes (‘zauberische Klange’). These effects-their appeal suggested by the play on all the senses in w. 3-4-are a temptation to digressive overdecoration. That this is a natural tendency in the form is perhaps suggested by the use in the second quatrain of images drawn from Nature, but in relation to the development of the central thought it is a retarding element. The pause in verse 3 after ‘hinein’ helps to highlight the entrance of the thought into the maze of the octave, and so to suggest that i t seems captured, an idea repeated in w. 12-13. That the ‘magic’ quality in the sonnet form seems at this stage to have an almost threateningly restrictive force provides the tension to be released in the sestet, with its much balder language and lighter tones following the rich colours and dense compounds of the octave. The very severity of the form demands concentration on a single poetic idea; this discipline established (v. lo), the sestet traces the progress of the theme along the direct path leading, away from decorative temptations, to the full expression of the thought and the completion of the sonnet.

The sense of liberation in the sestet is another motive wholly in accord with sonnet theory. Both Monch (p. 3 3 ) and Fussell (p. 120) write of a characteristic relaxation of tension or (intellectual or emotional) pressure in the sestet. Essentially the same point is made in a twentieth-century sonnet on the sonnet, when Weinheber writes in the final tercet of ‘reconciliation’:

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Fiinf Stufen jeweils gehts gemeher Steige viermal hinan, und viermal kehrt es wieder. Gestaltgewillt, damit das Chaos schweige, umschlingen sich die streitgeschienten Glieder.

Da lebt sich der Gedanke bald zuneige; ihn lahmt die Wand rings, soviel Ma13 halt nieder. Geschlossen ist das Zimmer . .Eke Geige will Antwort auf die streng gesungnen Lieder.

Und redefroh, schon spricht ihr frei die Ferne und h h r t die Zeit herein, die niemals steht. Dreifaltigkeit greift in den Gang der Sterne.

Die Zeit entscheidet viel. Der Streit vergeht. Versohnt mit sich, hat nun die Welt sich gerne und gibt sich hin: Mit Traum und mit Gebet.’*

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It is noteworthy that this poem again stresses the role of a leading thought in the octave; that the restrictions of the octave are again suggested by an image of an enclosed space (no longer a ‘maze’ but a room’ oppressively enclosed by walls); and that the sestet by contrast beckons ‘freely’-a sense of comparative liberty expressed also both by Schlegel (v. 6) and by Saar (v. 14).

In all these respects, then, Weinheber’s sonnet, which comes from the posthumous collection Hier ist das Wort (1947), seems to fit easily into the orthodox tradition of sonnets on the sonnet. Yet it is far from being a model sonnet, as Schlegel’s is. Vietor’s claim that classical perfection is not reached again in the German sonnet after Platen (p. 159) appears to be borne out by the technical vagaries to be found in h, the one sonnet on the sonnet composed by the modem poet most concerned with formal craftsmanship. The open rhyme used in the octave, though possible in early Italian sonnets, is more typical of the Shakespearean form and loses the characteristic contrast with the sestet when open rhyme is used there also. Moreover the sestet is marked-in a way that Saar’s, also constructed in open rhyme, is not-by what Fuller notes as a tendency in a great many writers of Petrarchan sonnets in English, ‘to organize the sestet in distichs rather than in tercets’ (p. 5). This is in fact a common feature in weak sonnets in German too, particularly perhaps in the late nineteenth century. To select a single example is invidious, but the sestet (in rhyming couplets) of Scheffel’s sonnet on the Rhein- fall near Schaffhausen will serve as a particularly clear illustration:

Im Mondenschein wirst du sein Bild betrachten Vom Hotel Weber und dort ubernachten . . . WO Wasser schaumt, will auch der Schaumwein knallen,

Und schrilles Pfeifen horst du jenseits schallen: Glutroten Augs zischt durch des Bergschachts Tiefe Der Neuzeit Drache, die Lokomotive. ‘J

Weinheber’s open rhyme in the sestet is of course orthodox, but the couplet effect created by the enjambment in w. 9-10 and 13-14 is made particularly pronounced by the use of heavy masculine rhymes in w. 10, 12 and 14.

It is interesting to note that Weinheber is similarly not entirely faithful to ancient forms whose metres he adopts: discussing two Sapphic odes in Spate Kmne (1936), ‘Kaisergruft’ and ‘An den antiken Vers’, Beii3ner shows how Weinheber’s use of enjambment (even between strophes) and his splitting of words between separate lines breaks the integrity of the verse that is intrinsic in his classical models. l4 That his imitation of classical forms was essentially external and did not extend to a recapturing of their spirit was something that Weinheber himself came to realize: ‘ “Klassisch” ist meine auflere Form: Ein Schutzmittel, eine Mimrkry. Wenn ein Aon zu Ende geht, hat niemand Zeit Klassiker zu sein, oder er ist-Literat . . . ‘.I5 But originally his interest in traditional forms was part of

ON SONNETS ON SONNETS 195

a healthy reaction against the cult of formlessness in the Expressionist period: ‘Wenn die Dilettanten dichten, miissen wohl die Dichter kiinsteln.’I6 He perceived that he was living ‘in einer Zeit der volligen Sprachverrottung’ (IV, 1 1 ) , and his ideal of traditional form-derived especially from Holderlin-was conceived as fashioning cohesive shape from the chaos of a disintegrating world. The task of the poet is ‘eine ordnend zusammenfassende [Aufgabe]’ (IV, loo), his function is ‘stolz zu wehren der Nacht, mit Wort / eines Ordnenden’ (11, 2 10).

The contrast between artistic order and a chaos beyond is also made in another sonnet on the sonnet published in 1947, that by Johannes R. Becher, who presents the order of form as the counterweight to the disorganization and threatening disintegration of the poet’s teeming vision:

. . . Alsdann erscheint in seiner schweren Strenge Und wie das Sinnbild einer Ordnungsmacht, Als Rettung vor dem Chaos: das Sonett. (DS, 251)

In his later essay Becher views the artistic discipline of the sonnet form explicitly as an expression of mordorder @. 339); and this seems to be closer to the suggestion in Weinheber’s sonnet that the artistic form acts as a counter to a force of chaos and disorder that is not explicitly limited to the world of the poem. It must be remembered that the celebrity and public honours enjoyed by Weinheber in the decade following the appearance of the volume Adel und Untergang in 1934 were tainted by his complaisant acceptance of the Nazi movement. Perhaps, as Walter Muschg has argued, l 7 it was partly his enthusiasm for Holderlin’s concep- tion of the poet as seer and bard to a national community that misled Weinheber into being dazzled by the role as national poet open to him in the Nazi period and into as it were glamourizing his position in this sense. It was leading on from a discussion of Holderlin that, at the ‘Grofldeutsches Dichtertreffen’ in Weimar in 1938, he described poets as the mouthpiece of the ‘Volk’: ‘So sind wir wohl das Sprachrohr unseres Volkes, aber durch unseren Mund reden die Gijtter!’ (IV, 103). Nonetheless his claim to serve and represent the people--’dd das, was ich m sagen und zu bilden versucht habe, [ . . . ] im Namen des Volkes gesagt und versucht wurde’ (IV, 90)-implies a responsibility, which he himself acknowledged: ‘die ungeheuere Verantwortung [. . , 1, welche dem Dichter [. . .] auferlegt ist. Er dient, indem er der Sprache dient, dem unverauflerlichen Wesen seines Volkes’ (IV, 229). His last years were fded with disillusioned self-criticism and self-doubts, with the p d l insight expressed in a letter of December 1943: ‘Das Problematische meines “Dichtertums” ist mir zutiefst b d t ’ (V, 598). In the 1930s, the ascend- ancy of Hitler had reduced even Karl Kraus-long admired by Weinheber-to silence; in October 1933 Kraus published in Die Fakef his poem ‘Man frage nicht, was all die Zeit ich machte’, which attests the dumbfounding of language itselfin the face of such enormity, ending with the line: ‘Das Wort entschlief, als jene Welt erwachte’.’* Weinheber’s last book of verse, which he prepared for publication

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in 1944 (11, 576) , was intended as a penitent answer to the last line of Kraus’s poem: Hiei 1st das Wort-a demonstration and affirmation of the survival of language and form in poetry through the blackest years of the human spirit. While i t is characteristic of Weinheber’s belief in poetic craftsmanship-his conviction ‘daR es keine Kunst ohne Handwerk gibt’ (IV, 108)-that a large proportion of the volume is devoted to technical demonstration of metre, rhyme and form, a distinctive quality of the poem ‘Das Sonett’ in particular, when seen in the context of the tradition of sonnets on the sonnet, is that the focus extends beyond the poem itself. This is especially clear in the generalized introduction of the ideas of ‘time’ and ‘conflict’ in the final tercet.

The first quatrain, as a description of the octave, again emphasizes the balance of the form and the contrast it allows; the second introduces the concomitant danger that control can lead to an inhibiting restrictiveness, which the clipped phrases of w. 5-7 help to evoke. The idea of measure introduced in the first line is pointedly restated in ‘soviel MaR halt nieder’-the objection equivalent to Goethe’s reluctance in ‘Das Sonett’ to rhyme ‘in sprachgewandter MaBe kuhnem Stolze’. That Weinheber conceived the violin of v. 7 as standing in active contrast- in response-to ‘die streng gesungnen Lieder’ is especially clear from the first of the two variants he published for the sestet, where, like the first violin in the earlier ‘Kammermusik’ variations (11, 371 f .) , the instrument is joyfully confident in its self-expression:

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Schon ist sie da, will von Figur nichts wissen und nichts von Raum und nichts von Schlusselstrenge, der Stirne abhold, Schmelz der suflen Kehle,

nur noch des Wohllauts ihrer selbst beflissen, im Dreiklang losend Wortes Angst und Enge, verstromt sie, Gegen-Wort, die gante Seele. (11, 493 f.)

The longing of the violin, then, as a symbol of lyrical expression, is togive answer, after the restrictiveness of the octave, in the ‘Dreifaltigkeit’ of the tercet structure- the sestet’s classic function of response. As the poem progresses (the advance of time) the sense of constriction gives way to a liberty of exploration, reaching for the universe itself; the sestet expresses an ideal, which the poem itself formally exemplifies but which is no longer merely artistic in its connotations. Form is a defence against a whole age of conflict and formlessness (the idea of chaos taken up and developed in v. 12); the poem significantly ends on a note of relaxation and reconciliation. In its range of suggestion, this sonnet goes far beyond the traditional pattern of sonnets on the sonnet; in it the recurrent experience of poets in exploring the form-the experience of restriction in the octave, followed by a sense of freedom in the sestet-becomes a symbol of the human condition itself, enchained by the limitations of physical nature but sustained by a glimpse

ON SONNETS ON SONNETS 197

of a higher spiritual freedom. With the religious overtones in the language of the tercets, the poem clearly points beyond the chaos of experience to a metaphysical order, which the order of the sonnet form symbolically anticipates. And by its final allusion to vision and devotion it also hints at the peculiar capacity of the sonnet for metaphysical profundity-a capacity that Friedrich Schlegel claimed as inherent in the essentially dualistic structure of the form: ‘Es liegt eine unendhche Duahat im Sonett-immer wieder von neuem. Eben darum eignet sich das Sonett t u m mystischen Gedanken, zum Gebet’ (DS, 3 3 7 ) .

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NOTES

’ Paul Fussell. Jr.. Poetic MeterandPoetic Form, New York. 1965. p . 124.

Johannes R. Becher. ‘Philosophie des Sonetts. oder Kleine Sonetrlehre. Ein Versuch’. Sinn und

’ Dm deutsche Sonett. Dichtungen, Gattungspoetik, Dokumente, ausgewahlt und hag. von Jorg- Ulrich Fechner. Munich, 1969. Wherever possible references are given to this anthology (henceforth abbreviated DS).

See Alfred Morel-Fatio. ‘Le sonnet du sonnet’, Revue d’Histoire litti+aire de la Frunce, I11 (1896), 435-9; L. E. Kastner, ‘Concerning the sonnet of the sonnet’, MLR, XI (1916), 205-11; Marcel Francon, ‘Sur Ie sonnet du sonnet’, MLN, LXVII (1952), 46f.; Walter Monch, Das Sonett. Gestaft undGescbicbte. Heidelberg. 1955. pp. 43f.

Sonetteau.ruirJ&hn&en, Bcrh. 1926. ‘Nachwonda Herausgebers’. p. 154; Monch. op. ni., p. 39.

Form, Vlll (1956). 329-51.

Burger, ’Vorwort zur zweiten Ausgabe der Gedichte’ (1789). DS, 320; Karl Vietor, Deutsche

John Fuller, The Sonnet, London, 1972, p. 3.

’ Heine. Samtliche Werke, hng. von Ernst Elster, kipzig, 1887-90, VII, p. 416. Cf. Friedrich Sengle, Bierkpnneieneit: Deutsche Literatur in Spannungrfedzwischen Restauration und Revolution 1811-1848, Stuttgart, 1971- , 11, pp. 557f.

* Heinrich Welri, Geschichte des Sonettes in derdeutschen Dichtung, Leipzig, 1884, p. 167.

’ Ruckert. Gesammelte Poetische Werke in zwolfBanden, Frankfurt a.M., 1868-9, V, p. 20. The representative significance of this passage is pointed out by Sengle, op. cit., 11, pp. 551, 5 5 5 . Editions from which the poem is omitted include Ruckert, Gedichte, Neue Auflage, Frankfurt a.M., 1843, a printing published with the authentication ‘Auswahl des Verfassen’ on the half-title but not recorded in Goedeke, GmndnJ. . . (2. Aufl.), VIII, p. 169.

lo August Wilhelm Schlegel, Gedichte, Tubingen, 1800, p. 198.

’ I Ferdinand von Saar. Gedichte, 2. Aufl.. Heidelberg. 1888, p. 77.

I2 Josef Weinheber. Santliche Werke. hrsg. von Josef Nadler und Hedwig Weinheber. Salzburg, 1953-6. 11. p. 493.

Joseph Viktor von Scheffel, Gedichte aus dem Nacbfd, 3. Aufl., Stuttgan, 1889, p. 40. Interesting twentieth-century examples include nos. 4, 14, 18 and 23 ofA. Wildgms’sSonette an Ead(1913).

198 DOROTHEA SCHLEGEL’S FLORENnN AND THE PRECARIOUS IDYU

l4 Friedrich Beiflner, ‘Holderlin und die neuere deutschc Dichtung: George, Rilke, Weinheber’,

’’ To Gerda Stadlcr, March 1945; quoted by Josef Nadler. Josef Weinheber. Gerchichte seines

l6 Weinheber. Siimtlicbe Wer&e, IV. p. 101. Subsequent references in the text of the last three

Gcish’gc Arbcit, IV. No. 23 (5 December 1937). pp. 9f.

Lbcns andseinerDichtang, Salzburg, 1952. p. 402.

paragraphs of the essay are to volume and page of this edition.

Walter Muschg, Die Zerstonrng derdeutschen Literacur. 3. Aufl., Bern, 1358. p. 170 17

’* Die Fadel, 888. p. 4. The link between this poem and Weinhcbcr’s collection is pointed out by Ernst Alker, Erasrnvs, V (1952). 513.

DOROTHEA SCHLEGEL’S FLORENZ7N AND THE PRECARIOUS IDYLL

BY J. HIEBERD

Dorothea Schlegel’s novel Fforentin was, it appears, written for all the wrong reasons. The most compelling was the need to ease the financial situation of Friedrich Schlegel, who was almost penniless when Dorothea joined him in Jena in October 1799. Another probable motive was her ambition (incited by Friedrich) to compete with other women writers of her circle and of the age, with her friend Henriette Hen, with Caroline Schlegel, Tieck’s sister Sophie Bernhardi, and Schiller’s sister-in-law Karoline von Woltogen; for women were now making their mark on the literary scene throughout Europe, and Dorothea, too, might show that men did not have a monopoly of creative talent. Her literary activities were, however, undertaken in the service of her beloved Friedrich, and only as a letter- writer did she freely follow her own creative urge. Not surprisingly, therefore, the first, and only, volume of Fforentin, completed despite interruptions within nine months, is not comparable in quality with Wdbefm Meisters Lebrjahre or with Franz Sternbalds Wandencngen, though its indebtedness to these novels (among others) is so striking that such comparisons are inevitable. Nevertheless it is an interesting work. It reflects the ideas of Friedrich Schlegel on love, marriage and friendship, but in an easily digestible, straightforward narrative quite unlike the oversophisticated form of his Lucznde. Furthermore, for all its lack of preten-