READING HEINRICH HEINE

From the private life of Everyman: Buch der Lieder 57
the nightingale’s song within the larger logic of the unfolding narrative is
uncertain. Now, it is clear that in one sense it does not matter at all whether
we regard this nightingale as inhabiting the world of the awakened dream,
or as being (or being identical with) the nightingale of the ‘framework’
who intervenes from beyond the visionary world in such a way as to propel
the dream action into its most painful phase. A similar uncertainty occurs
in the last two stanzas. Here the nightingale’s song seems to offer a commentary
on the dream action which has reached a rhetorical conclusion
in the ironic rhyme of ‘unermeßlich’ with ‘gräßlich’. As a result the reader
may be initially inclined to see this song as part of the dream sequence like
the one which apparently causes the lyric subject to embrace the sphinx
in stanza 8. Onthe other hand, the substance of the song ‘O Liebe! was
soll es bedeuten’ clearly parallels the ‘Lieb und Liebeswehe’ of the second
stanza. But even if this connection is possible, the framing devices of the
poem seem to lack final conviction. The level of the opening narrative –
on any reading – does not achieve closure; and to see the final stanzas as
decisively within the dream frame is only the most radical reading of this
open-endedness.
There is another way in which this uncertainty is subtly sustained in the
course of the poem. The pattern of tenses hints at a present-tense action-ofnarrative
framing the past-tense story of the awakened dream. Confronted
by and entering ‘der alte Märchenwald’, the narrator hears the song of the
nightingale. With the exception of the first lines of stanza 2, the tenses here
are all present indicatives. In the dream sequence from stanza 4 to stanza
10 the main verbs are all simple past, and the past tense is sustained in the
opening phrase of stanza 12 and hence to the end of the text, given that the
words of the nightingale’s song are reported in stanzas 12 and 13. Within
this sequence (4–13), however, there is a further exception.
The first deviation from the pattern of present-tense frame and pasttense
dream-narrative appears in the second stanza. The first appearance
of the formula ‘Ich ging fürbaß’ establishes a simple past which, like its
reappearance in stanza 4, introduces a sequence of past tenses. ‘Ich ging
fürbaß, und wie ich ging,/ Erklang es in der Höhe.’ The tense of this second
line is therefore parallel to that of the second line of stanza 4: ‘Dasah ich
vor mir liegen’. This confirms a sense that the repeated formula needs to
operate in parallel ways: the opening of the dream narrative would thus
be located at the start of the second stanza, an effect of the spell cast on
the poet’s sensibilities by the miraculous moonlight. In formal terms the
demarcations between one movement of the poem and another seem to
have become blurred. The present tenses describing the nightingale’s song