READING HEINRICH HEINE

80 Reading Heinrich Heine
that emerges later serve to emphasize the pastoral effects created by the
children playing in the straw – and, of course, their relationship with
the archetype of the child in the manger. But, secondly, this order of
archetype and instantiation can be reversed: the Christmas world of the ox
and the infant Jesus becomes contextualized as one moment in an extended
recollection of childhood. Hide-and-seek, playing house in packing cases
out in the yard, and inviting the neighbours’ cat to tea are all parts of this
reminiscence; and it is a world already made old by the games of children
who ‘klagten, wie alles besser/ Gewesen zu unserer Zeit’.
This familiarity with the way of the world gives Heimkehr XXXVII the
quality of citation noted elsewhere. The poem quotes, and illustrates, the
possibilities of Empsonian pastoral, of multum in parvo. 37 The simple story
speaks a vast and complex truth – not primarily a truth about religion,
but about the realm of faith to which childhood gives a name. The Wise
Men are Christmas and Twelfth Night seen in a remote retrospect which,
in the poem’s opening line, reduces them to a mere title ‘Die heilgen
drei Könige aus Morgenland’. It is the context offered by the following
poem which reveals this reminiscence as itself a reading, a citation of itself,
musing on its possibilities and limitations. What is bafflingly unfocussed
and open, in Heimkehr XXXVII, acquires from the vantage point of the
following poem the double focus of its self-presentation. It is a text already
being performed or read; in fact a reading would be a performance, and the
major reader is Heine himself. His hand rests against his cheek, as Kraus had
realized.
In Lyrisches Intermezzo LIX (‘Es fällt ein Stern herunter’) Heine foregrounds
the problematic status of imagery, conceived as the fixed emblematics
of personal experience, by organizing the text in a series of mutually
exclusive formal patterns. In the Magi poem from Heimkehr a similar issue
is dealt with, but with different rhetorical means. Here the text works
through a triple structure in style and register. Pastoral contrasts of the
great and the little are played out in contrasts of language: ‘aus Morgenland’
/ ‘in jedem Städtchen’; ‘Die heilgen drei Könige’ / ‘Ihr lieben Buben
und Mädchen’. The force of this pattern is constantly close to satire and
anti-pastoral, working to uncover a false pietism. The second stanza then
concentrates on disconnection and continued passage: ‘wußten es nicht’,
‘zogen weiter’; but these effects serve to make the star shine out all the
more brightly until it ‘stund oben über, da das Kindlein war’, as Luther’s
Bible says. ‘Da sie den Stern sahen, wurden sie hoch erfreut. Und gingen
in das Haus und fanden das Kindlein mit Maria . . .’ (Matthew 2, 10–11a).
By minute shifts of emphasis and tone, the final stanza gives way to the