Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin
The Cheerful Life
When I come to the meadow,
When I’m out in the field,
I’m gentle
and sincere,
Unharmed by thorns.
My clothes blow in the breeze,
As my spirit gaily asks
What’s going on inside,
Until dispersed in
twilight.
As before a tavern sign
I can hardly pass by
This
gentle picture
Where the green trees stand,
For the stillness of
quiet days
Seems to me altogether splendid,
You mustn’t ask about
this,
If you'd wish me to answer.
But I look for a pleasant path
To the beautiful brook,
Which, as if in a chamber,
Creeps over the
wild sunken bank,
Where the bridge crosses over
Leading up to the
beautiful forest,
Where the wind blows over the bridge
And the eye
looks cheerfully up.
I sit many an afternoon
Up there on the
peak of the hill,
Where the winds blows the tree-tops
To the
beating from the bell-tower,
And watching it gives peace
To the
heart, just like a picture,
And pacifies pains that come
From
joining reason with cunning.
Lovely landscape! Where the road runs
Straight through the middle,
Where the pale moon rises,
When
evening winds appear,
Where Nature becomes twilight,
Where the
mountains stand in majesty,
Then I'll head home to domesticity,
To
look upon the golden wine.
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Notes
Another late poem in which each of Nature's moments is
apprehended like a picture (second and fourth verses). The original parodies
the rhyme scheme and some of the imagery in Schiller's
Ode to Joy (1785), which remains embalmed forever in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Perhaps Hölderlin, always experimenting, had heard Beethoven's famous
melody and wrote his own words to go with it. In the second stanza the
original German meter sounds something like this:
O before this gentle picture
Where green trees are standing high:
As before a tavern sign,
I can hardly pass it by.
These four lines are perhaps also notable
because an attempt at humor is rarely found in Hölderlin's poems.
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