From Scott Horton today. I highly recommend a visit to see the painting that accompanies this poem.
Um Mitternacht
Hab’ ich gewacht
Und aufgeblickt zum Himmel;
Kein Stern vom Sterngewimmel
Hat mir gelacht
Um Mitternacht.
Um Mitternacht
Hab’ ich gedacht
Hinaus in dunkle Schranken;
Es hat kein Lichtgedanken
Mir Trost gebracht
Um Mitternacht.
Um Mitternacht
Nahm ich in Acht
Die Schläge meines Herzens;
Ein einz’ger Puls des Schmerzens
War angefacht
Um Mitternacht.
Um Mitternacht
Kämpft’ ich die Schlacht
O Menschheit deiner Leiden;
Nicht konnt’ ich sie entscheiden
Mit meiner Macht
Um Mitternacht.
Um Mitternacht
Hab’ ich die Macht
In deine Hand gegeben:
Herr über Tod und Leben,
Du hältst die Wacht
Um Mitternacht.
At midnight
I was roused
and looked up to heavens;
No star in the entire sky
smiled down upon me
at midnight.
At midnight
I cast my thoughts
out beyond the dark limits.
No vision of light
Brought me solace
at midnight.
At midnight
I was rapt
to the beats of my heart;
One single pulse of pain
welled up
at midnight.
At midnight
I fought the battle,
of your passion, o humankind;
I could not resolve it
with my strength
at midnight.
At midnight
I commended my strength
into your hands!
Lord, over death and life
You keep watch
at midnight!
SCOTT HORTON, writing in his No Comment blog on Harpers.org: In Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks repeatedly discusses the emotive force of certain kinds of music and attempts a scientific understanding of the phenomenon. Drawing on personal experience at one point, he describes songs that his dream-mind was playing incessantly–they were “songs full of melancholy and a sort of horror.” They were also songs in a language he did not understand. Sacks is talking about Gustav Mahler’s collection of songs composed to poems by Friedrich Rückert–he was focused on the dark Kindertotenlieder, but another equally powerful song is Um Mitternacht. I will have more on this in an interview with Oliver Sacks in the next few weeks.
Like many of Rückert’s works, this one has strong lyrical qualities–if it is not indeed overtly a hymn. The work stands clearly in the tradition of the early Romanticists, and particularly of Novalis and his Hymnen an die Nacht. “Abwärts wend ich mich zu der heiligen, unaussprechlichen, geheimnisvollen Nacht. Fernab liegt die Welt—in eine tiefe Gruft versenkt—wüst und einsam ist ihre Stelle,” Novalis writes—“I turn aside to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious night. The world lies far away, sunk in a deep crypt—desolate and lonely her fate.”
The poem scintillates with emotion, but it suggests a viewpoint that is only half-awake, perhaps in a trance-like or dream-like state. ...
This poem belongs to the works of a German poet who is usually, despite his lyrical success, only placed on the second rung in the German literary canon–probably unfairly. Nevertheless, this particular work had great impact around the world–winning its earliest acclaim outside of Germany. Its first broad impact was in fact felt in the United States. The New England Transcendentalists, filled with a zeal for the German Romanticists, picked it up almost immediately from its first publication in Germany–it was translated by the Reverend N.L. Frothingham of Boston and widely published in Transcendentalist journals during the period. A letter from Rev. Frothingham to Rückert from 1837 discussing the translation can still be found in the Rückert Archives. The themes of the Rückert poem in fact resonate in several essays and poems by Emerson from the same period. American anthologies of the period regularly speak of the three great contemporary German poets–Goethe, Schiller and Rückert–a distinction that Rückert failed to achieve at home, but perhaps one that was merited.
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Transcendentalists
Transcendentalism in New England "Caroline H. Dall was a second-generation Transcendentalist, reformer, and historian of the movement who wrote Transcendentalism in New England in 1897. Her observations are noteworthy in that they remind us that the Transcendentalists were among the first feminists in America." http://www.alcott.net/alcott/home/remarks/Dall.html
http://www.transcendentalists.com/1emerson.html
http://www.transcendentalists.com/1thorea.html
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