On a Winter Morning before Sunrise

In his poem 'On a Winter Morning before Sunrise', the twenty-one year old Eduard Mörike (1804-75) wrote of his emotions on seeing the first light-as-down light of dawn: 'my soul is like crystal'. He felt his mind still as still water, opened to wonder by a ring of clear blue sky. A perfect way to start the day, certainly better than listening, as I do, to the latest grim news on the radio. The editor/translators of this poem, David Luke and Gilbert McKay, link it to 'Urach Revisited’ (1827), another 'major expression of the poet's youthful sensibility.' Bad Urach is a spa town at the foot of the Swabian Alb where Mörike studied at the evangelical seminary. His nostalgic return as a young man is reminiscent of Wordsworth’s poem on Tintern Abbey. A stream flows heedlessly past without any sorrow at the flux of time and the poet questions the landscape surrounding him:   

Here you all are, ancient and new,
Bare sunlit hills uprearing, summits made
For cloud-thrones, woods where scarcely noon breaks through,
Where balmy warmth mingles with deepest shade:
Do you still know me, who once fled to you,
Whose heavy head sweet-slumbrously was laid
Here in cool moss to hear the insects humming –
Do you know me, and shrink not at my coming?

Eduard Mörike wrote one of the stories most special to me, 'Mozart's Journey to Prague' - one I have re-read before in bleak times and found myself reaching for again recently. Although tinged with sadness, because we and the narrator know what will happen eventually to Mozart, it is a story of a brief, idyllic encounter, a moment (in the words of the translators) of 'festivity and conviviality, badinage and Lebenslust, memories of an earlier golden age of culture.' This sparkling novelle is not really about landscape although it begins with Mozart and Constanze journeying through the Moravian mountains. They then descend into a valley and stop at a village and Mozart decides to take a short walk. He enters the park of a local Count, sits down by some orange trees and, with his mind on his music, inadvertently picks one, an action which sets in train the events of the story.     

I will end this brief post on Mörike by mentioning a couple more poems on the subject of spring. In 'Frühlingsgefühle', translated as 'Intimation of Spring', violets wake and dream their time is near. It puts me in mind of the crocuses I saw on my lockdown exercise walk yesterday. 'In the Spring' find the poet lying on a hill: clouds drift, rivers flow and sunlight enter his veins. And yet he still feels a yearning, 'for what I cannot say'. It makes him wonder what memories are woven into 'this twilight of the gold-green leaves? / - The nameless days of long ago!'