Die drei heiligen Könige auf ihrer Reise (Foto: lukbar – stock.adobe.com)
Lyrik in der Vorweihnachtszeit
Die Heiligen Drei Könige, einmal anders
ESV-Redaktion Philologie
06.12.2021
„Es begab sich aber zu der Zeit, dass ein Gebot von dem Kaiser Augustus ausging, dass alle Welt geschätzt würde...“ Wer sich bei diesen Worten direkt in eine Kirche an Heiligabend zurückversetzt fühlt, der weiß vielleicht auch, wie der Text weiter geht und um welche Geschichte es sich handelt.
Im Folgenden stellen wir Ihnen aber nicht die typische Weihnachtsgeschichte vor, die vielen sicher bekannt ist. Stattdessen wollen wir mit einem Gedicht von T. S. Eliot und einem anschließenden Close-Reading ein bisschen zum Nachdenken und selber Interpretieren anregen: Ralf Hertel und Peter Hühn laden in unserer Neuerscheinung English Poetry in Context: From the 16th to the 21st Century dazu ein. Lehnen Sie sich zurück und lassen Sie das Gedicht auf sich wirken:
‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
5 The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
10 And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
15 And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
20 That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky
25 And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
30 And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
35 This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
40 We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
“Journey of the Magi” juxtaposes two perspectives by telling two separate stories. The main story is explicitly presented by the voice of the speaker. However, at the same time, another underlying story is implicitly and surreptitiously conveyed by the text of the poem as a whole, behind the speaker’s back, as it were – a story which he inadvertently plays a part in, without being fully aware of the fact and without understanding
its significance.
The speaker is identified by the title as one of the wise men, or magi, who travelled – as we are told in the New Testament (Matthew 2: 1-16) – from the east to Bethlehem, guided by a star, to worship the newborn Christ. However, the poem presents his individual perspective as radically limited to the superficial and factual dimension of the journey. He shows no awareness of the religious context and the transcendent relevance of their quest. The speech situation partly resembles that of a dramatic monologue, featuring a personalised speaker clearly dissociated from the author and speaking in an interpersonal constellation. The magus, speaking in old age and presumably addressing some unspecified listener (“you may say”, 31; “set down ...”, 33-35), first recollects and narrates the group’s journey up to the point where they reached their destination. Then he recounts their subsequent reflections on their past experience and its impact on their lives after they returned to their kingdoms. Throughout, the experience of this journey is marked by profound incomprehension, incoherence and doubt.
[...]
Interestingly, a number of more or less hidden signs in the text also convey a second story, another script superimposed on the narrative of the undiscerning speaker. This is a story the Christian reader can be expected to be familiar with: the legend of the three magi coming from the east to worship the newborn Christ. This story is evoked in three ways, first by the title, which explicitly refers to the Bible; second, by the quotation (indicated by the quotation marks around ll. 1-5) from a Christmas sermon held by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes in 1622, stressing the realistic implications of the legend, a text Eliot had recently studied but is of course bound to remain a cryptic allusion for the general reader; and third, by the speaker’s enigmatic observations just before arriving at the “place”. They all allude to different passages in the New Testament adumbrating Jesus’s later “career” and his ultimate fate: the “running stream” (23) alludes to his baptism in the river Jordan (Mark 1: 9); “the three trees” (24) to his crucifixion (Luke 23: 32-33); “the old white horse” (25) to the Book with Seven Seals (Revelation 6: 2); “the vine-leaves” (26) to the new wine in one of Jesus parables (Mark 2: 22-28); “dicing for pieces of silver” (27) to Judas’s betrayal (Matthew 26: 15-16) and the soldiers casting lots for Jesus’s garments (John 19: 23-24); and “the empty wine-skins” to the parable about old and new wine (Mark 2: 22).
The poem thus contrasts two narratives: on the one hand, a traditional (biblical) one, namely the emergence of Christian religion, promising stability, meaning and salvation for mankind; on the other, the emergence of modern man, the loss of unquestioning religious belief and of the reassurance of a traditional world-view. Paradoxically, the advent of a new religion is here experienced as the destruction of an old one and offers nothing to replace it, foregrounding the disillusionment and uncertainty of modern life against the background of traditional religion.
The form of the poem is modernist, too, reflecting the collapse of the traditional order in its prosodic and stylistic dimensions, using free verse without conventional metrical structures. There are no regular line-lengths, no rhymes, no traditional stanzas, nor is there a regular rhythm. At the same time, repetitions structure the sequence of the utterance. The opening line with its slightly archaic wording (“A cold coming we had of it”) is repeated with a slight variation (“A hard time we had of it”, 16) shortly before the end of the account, briefly summarising the frustrating experience of the journey. The progress in the temperate valley is similarly structured by the anaphora “Then ... we came” (21, 26). The introduction to the crucial reflection on the aim of their quest is also emphasised by repetitions: “set down / This set down / This” (33-35). The style is deliberately unpoetic; matter-of-fact descriptions of the circumstances of the journey, its banal and sordid details prevail. We are not presented with carefully formulated complete sentences but frequently with a mere series of clauses without finite
verbs (esp. in the first and second parts); religious verbiage is also conspicuous by its absence.
Hier bieten uns die Autoren eine Analyse der eher kritischen statt besinnlichen Geschichte der Heiligen Drei Könige. Neben einigen Kenntnissen über den historischen Kontext des Gedichts und den Dichter T. S. Eliot bietet das detaillierte Close-Reading viele Ansätze zum Weiterdenken und Weiterinterpretieren.
Zur Einstimmung auf die Feiertage hier nun noch unsere persönliche Empfehlung eines anderen Weihnachtsgedichts.
Before the ice is in the pools—
Before the skaters go,
Or any cheek at nightfall
Is tarnished by the snow—
Before the fields have finished,
Before the Christmas tree,
Wonder upon wonder
Will arrive to me!
Emily Dickinson
Wir wünschen Ihnen Merry Chistmas and a Happy new Year with “wonder upon wonder”!
Journey of the Magi
‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
5 The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
10 And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
15 And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
20 That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky
25 And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
30 And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
35 This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
40 We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
“Journey of the Magi” juxtaposes two perspectives by telling two separate stories. The main story is explicitly presented by the voice of the speaker. However, at the same time, another underlying story is implicitly and surreptitiously conveyed by the text of the poem as a whole, behind the speaker’s back, as it were – a story which he inadvertently plays a part in, without being fully aware of the fact and without understanding
its significance.
The speaker is identified by the title as one of the wise men, or magi, who travelled – as we are told in the New Testament (Matthew 2: 1-16) – from the east to Bethlehem, guided by a star, to worship the newborn Christ. However, the poem presents his individual perspective as radically limited to the superficial and factual dimension of the journey. He shows no awareness of the religious context and the transcendent relevance of their quest. The speech situation partly resembles that of a dramatic monologue, featuring a personalised speaker clearly dissociated from the author and speaking in an interpersonal constellation. The magus, speaking in old age and presumably addressing some unspecified listener (“you may say”, 31; “set down ...”, 33-35), first recollects and narrates the group’s journey up to the point where they reached their destination. Then he recounts their subsequent reflections on their past experience and its impact on their lives after they returned to their kingdoms. Throughout, the experience of this journey is marked by profound incomprehension, incoherence and doubt.
[...]
| Nachgefragt bei: Prof. Dr. Hertel und Prof. Dr. Hühn | 23.11.2021 |
| Lyrik lebt | |
 |
Im Erich Schmidt Verlag erscheint nun ein Band, in dem Gedichte vom 16. bis ins 21. Jahrhundert vorgestellt und in ihrem jeweiligen historischen Kontext analysiert werden. Wir haben mit den Autoren Prof. Dr. Ralf Hertel und Prof. Dr. Peter Hühn gesprochen. mehr … |
The poem thus contrasts two narratives: on the one hand, a traditional (biblical) one, namely the emergence of Christian religion, promising stability, meaning and salvation for mankind; on the other, the emergence of modern man, the loss of unquestioning religious belief and of the reassurance of a traditional world-view. Paradoxically, the advent of a new religion is here experienced as the destruction of an old one and offers nothing to replace it, foregrounding the disillusionment and uncertainty of modern life against the background of traditional religion.
The form of the poem is modernist, too, reflecting the collapse of the traditional order in its prosodic and stylistic dimensions, using free verse without conventional metrical structures. There are no regular line-lengths, no rhymes, no traditional stanzas, nor is there a regular rhythm. At the same time, repetitions structure the sequence of the utterance. The opening line with its slightly archaic wording (“A cold coming we had of it”) is repeated with a slight variation (“A hard time we had of it”, 16) shortly before the end of the account, briefly summarising the frustrating experience of the journey. The progress in the temperate valley is similarly structured by the anaphora “Then ... we came” (21, 26). The introduction to the crucial reflection on the aim of their quest is also emphasised by repetitions: “set down / This set down / This” (33-35). The style is deliberately unpoetic; matter-of-fact descriptions of the circumstances of the journey, its banal and sordid details prevail. We are not presented with carefully formulated complete sentences but frequently with a mere series of clauses without finite
verbs (esp. in the first and second parts); religious verbiage is also conspicuous by its absence.
Hier bieten uns die Autoren eine Analyse der eher kritischen statt besinnlichen Geschichte der Heiligen Drei Könige. Neben einigen Kenntnissen über den historischen Kontext des Gedichts und den Dichter T. S. Eliot bietet das detaillierte Close-Reading viele Ansätze zum Weiterdenken und Weiterinterpretieren.
Zur Einstimmung auf die Feiertage hier nun noch unsere persönliche Empfehlung eines anderen Weihnachtsgedichts.
Before the ice is in the pools
Before the ice is in the pools—
Before the skaters go,
Or any cheek at nightfall
Is tarnished by the snow—
Before the fields have finished,
Before the Christmas tree,
Wonder upon wonder
Will arrive to me!
Emily Dickinson
Wir wünschen Ihnen Merry Chistmas and a Happy new Year with “wonder upon wonder”!
| Die Autoren |
| Ralf Hertel is professor of English Literature at the University of Trier. He has published widely on poetry, for instance a study on dance and modernist poetry („Tanztexte und Texttänze: Der Tanz im Gedicht der europäischen Moderne“, 2002) and essays on W. H. Auden and John Agard. Peter Hühn is professor (retired since 2005) of English Literature at the University of Hamburg. He has published widely on poetry, especially „Geschichte der englischen Lyrik“, 2 vols. (1995), „The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry: Studies in English Poetry from the 16th to the 20th Century“ (with J. Kiefer, 2005), „Europäische Lyrik seit der Antike“ (with H. Hillmann, 2005), „Facing Loss and Death: Narrative and Eventfulness in Lyrik Poetry“ (with B. Goerke, H. du Plooy, S. Schenk-Haupt, 2016). |
 |
English Poetry in Context: From the 16th to the 21st Century Von Ralf Hertel, Peter Hühn “English Poetry in Context” offers an accessible, comprehensive survey of the genre from the early modern period to the present day. Situating close readings of selected poems within their larger literary and historical contexts, it is an ideal starting point for students, teachers and other readers looking for a book that maps out the field of English poetry. Whether you are interested in a comprehensive overview or in in-depth case studies of your favourite poems, “English Poetry in Context” will cater for your demands. |
Programmbereich: Anglistik und Amerikanistik