READING HEINRICH HEINE

60 Reading Heinrich Heine
are about to read. Nor are we the only readers: after Heine’s disingenuous
claim, in the text following the poem, that he could have conveyed the
poem’s meaning quite adequately in decent prose, he suggests that his own
rereading of the poems in Buch der Lieder has delivered him once again into
the power of poetry, just as in the poem the lyric self is delivered by the song
of the nightingale to the painful experience of the sphinx – whose mystery
has endured for thousands of years: a literary experience (rereading his
earliest poems – ‘erste Gedichte’) becomes the occasion of revived memories
(‘Vergessene Träume erwachen’) which are felt, now, as utterly immediate
personal experience. The equivocation of the manuscript, as between ‘Das
ist’ and ‘Das war’ (which would more precisely refer to a volume of poetry
recently reread in preparation for a new edition) raises just this question
of autobiographical relevance very sharply. If the DHA editor is correct,
the tense of the final version makes its reference more immediate and less
generally Romantic in tone:
In 1839 Heine looked back on the poems of his youth as on to a now remote
past. As he reviewed them and reread them critically the opening topos of the fairy
tale spontaneously came to mind: ‘once upon a time’ [‘Es war einmal’]. (DHA 1/2,
1239)
I see no reason to think anything much in this poem is the result of spontaneous
inspiration. The substitution of the present tense indicates that the
poetry of the volume, with its typical Romantic features, can still be a living
issue for the poet even though it consists of fairy-tales. The first version,
‘Das war der alte Märchenwald’, would leave us in no doubt that the Buch
der Lieder was a matter of no more than historical interest for its author,
twelve years after its original appearance.
The continued relevance of the book and its Romantic impulses anticipates
what Heine had to say later in the Geständnisse about his own recidivist
Romanticism:
After I had dealt the feeling for Romantic poetry the most mortal blows, an infinite
longing for the blue flower in the dream-land of Romanticism crept up on me once
again. (B 6/1, 447)
The opening of the poem then becomes a response to and even a description
of Heine’s own reading of Buch der Lieder.Nightingales and linden blossom
are the attributes of his own writing and the dream a pastiche of characteristic
themes from the collection. It is in the course of such a self-reading
that the alarming immediacy of the present tenses of stanza 11 has its place.
What seemed to be retrospect or dream – what seemed to be ‘Romantic