READING HEINRICH HEINE

86 Reading Heinrich Heine
The protagonist of the Nordsee cycles is full of moody gestures as he meditates
on lost love, the callousness of society, the indifference of nature, and
the ineffectiveness of literature. His most typical condition is solitude: in the
first cycle he sits ‘engulfed in bleak thought and lonely’ ‘On the pale strand of
ocean’ (‘Am blassen Meeresstrande, / Saß ich gedankenbekümmert und einsam’,
‘Abenddämmerung’ (‘Twilight’)); or: ‘And I sat on the shore and gazed
at / The white dance of the billows’ (‘Und ich saß am Strand und schaute zu/
Dem weißen Tanz der Wellen’, ‘Erklärung’ (‘Declaration’)); this solitary
figure is repeatedly presented in terms of a consciousness challenging the
power of nature – ‘But I’ or ‘Yet I’, raised, in ‘Sonnenuntergang’, to a universal
condition of humanity (‘But I, a human’ (‘Ich aber, der Mensch’)). In
the second cycle his posture becomes more supine: shipwrecked ‘I lie on the
seashore, / The bleak and barren seashore’ (‘. . . Lieg ich am Strande/ Am
öden, kahlen Strande’, from ‘Der Schiffbrüchige’ (‘Shipwrecked’)); the barrenness
of the shore perfectly corresponds to the protagonist’s own sterility,
and the arrival of darkness perfects the pathos: ‘The night yawned wide, /
And long I sat in the darkness and wept’ (‘Und ich saß noch lange im
Dunkeln und weinte’, ‘Gesang der Okeaniden’ (‘The Song of the Daughters
of the Ocean’)). If Kortländer is right and the seaside contemplatives
of the Homecoming poem ‘Wir saßen am Fischerhause’ (Heimkehr VII: ‘We
sat by the fisherman’s cabin’) recall the foreground figures staring out to sea
in so many paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, then Heine’s solitaries in
the Nordsee poems seem to be versions of the ‘Monk by the Sea’ facing the
Sublime. 50
The postures of this ‘ich’ figure in the poems are every bit as derivative
as the worn-out poetic diction of earlier parts of Buch der Lieder: alongside
the Homeric and hellenizing register that Heine has borrowed from
Voß’s Odyssey, healso returns to Byron’s ‘estranged heroes’, particularly
Childe Harold, for this mood of melancholy. 51 Perraudin suggests that the
Hebridean ‘blue-eyed northern child . . ./ The tempest-born in body and
in mind’ of Byron’s The Island is also in play in the diction and imagery of
‘Abenddämmerung’. 52 But elsewhere we also hear from a more familiar representative
of Northern culture in the German literary repertoire. ‘Ancient
legends from Norway’ together with ‘Conjure-songs from the Edda, / And
runic incantations’ (‘Uralte Sagen aus Norweg’, ‘Beschwörungslieder der
Edda,/ Auch Runensprüche’) appear in ‘Night on the Beach’ ‘Die Nacht
am Strande’ (‘Night on the Beach’)); 53 in the ‘Storm’ (‘Storm’) of Nordsee
I, 8, amid the notes of a bardic harp, a pale woman staring from her castle
window over Scottish cliffs evokes an Ossianic world which returns with the
‘woman of the Northland’ (‘ein Weib im Norden’) in ‘Der Schiffbrüchige’