READING HEINRICH HEINE

116 Reading Heinrich Heine
work – not least in the hands of the angel from the Prelude to George’s
collection Der Teppich des Lebens (The Tapestry of Life); in its new context
in George’s pantheon, the poem itself comes to celebrate poetry as a record
of loss: ‘Long since they’ve flown and faded . . .’ ‘But you remain poor
song’ (‘Verblichen und verweht sind längst die Träume ...’‘Dubliebst,
verwaistes Lied’). That is to say, Heine’s act of memory, as an induction to
the Buch der Lieder as a whole, is given a new task as the transcription of
a poetic sense of absence, not unlike the pervasive sense of absence in the
poetry of George’s symbolist mentor Mallarmé: only the poem is left as an
evocation of a dream of love. In this way the possibility of reference to the
real world has become doubly remote. This is entirely congenial to George’s
own poetics of aesthetic autonomy, even if we recognize that he departs
from the pure symbolist project himself, in a reversion to Parnassian ideals. 3
The first of Heine’s ‘Dream Pictures’ is a ghostly poem and in some ways
a learned one. Because the poem survives its original generative impulse, it
too is orphaned here (‘verwaist’) in relation to its context in Buch der Lieder,
and therefore like a revenant; it is also curiously representative of George’s
and Wolfskehl’s procedure in constructing their own sequence from Heine’s
poems. Because it retains its character as a prelude, even in George’s anthology,
‘Mir träumte einst . . .’ still has a programmatic function. In Heine’s
own construction of his poetic persona, the title of the opening group
of poems, ‘Junge Leiden’ (‘Young Sorrows’), suggests, as we have seen, a
poetry derived from a fantasy identification with Goethe’s Werther; this
self-stylization is followed by images of a more Gothic kind associated with
figures such as Bürger, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and even Werner. 4 Isolated from
Heine’s strategies in his own collection, however, ‘Mir träumte einst . . .’
becomes a reflexive text:
Mir träumte einst von wildem Liebesglühn,
Von hübschen Locken, Myrten und Resede,
Von süßen Lippen und von bittrer Rede,
Von düstrer Lieder düstern Melodien.
Verblichen und verweht sind längst die Träume,
Verweht ist gar mein liebstes Traumgebild!
Geblieben ist mir nur, was glutenwild
Ich einst gegossen hab in weiche Reime.
Du bliebst, verwaistes Lied! Verweh jetzt auch,
Und such das Traumbild, das mir längst entschwunden,
Und grüß es mir, wenn du es aufgefunden –
Dem luftgen Schatten send ich luftgen Hauch.
(B 1, 20)