READING HEINRICH HEINE

222 Reading Heinrich Heine
line of the narrative is, in one sense, unrelieved. Ferdausi’s epic emerges in a
moment when the history of Persia’s ancient kings has run aground on the
reign of a Shah who has substituted meanness and trickery for generosity.
When the poet takes up his ‘Wanderstab’ and sets off into exile, it is poetry
itself which has departed. The ancient unity of poet and king cannot be
recovered, no matter how generous any subsequent act of restitution may
be – and there is every reason to think that the Shah would like to restore
the poet to his old standing:
Firdusi? – rief der Fürst betreten –
Wo ist er? Wie geht es dem großen Poeten?
(B 6/1, 52)
‘Firdausi?’ Upset, the king was staring:
‘How is our noble poet faring?’
(D 596)
But the Shah’s reawakened generosity fails to reach the poet before his death.
The tale unfolds in a relentless linearity: as the caravan of unimaginable
wealth reaches Ferdausi’s place of exile, the poet’s body is carried out for
burial.
In another sense, however, the unrelenting declension of the poem is
played off against its variety. Each of its three parts is cast in a different
form: the opening section deals with the composition of Ferdausi’s most
famous work, the Schach Nameh (Book of the Kings)inunrhymed trochaic
four-line stanzas, which adopt an appropriate range of images for the Persian
subject. Against this grand orientalizing manner, the second part of the
poem sets a conversational tone in which the poet Ferdausi speaks in his own
interest (‘Hätt er menschlich ordinär/ Nicht gehalten was versprochen . . .’
(‘“If he had, like other men / failed to keep a promise, merely”’)) and in
abba-rhymed four-liners. Finally, the third part completes the narrative in
iambic couplets, demonstrating, from time to time, Heine’s notorious wit
as a rhymster: ‘Zins’ (interest) rhymes with ‘Provinz’ (province), ‘Kamele’
(camel) variously with ‘erwähle’, ‘Befehle’, and ‘Kehle’ (choose; commands;
throat); and ‘Karawane’ (caravan) with ‘Führerfahne’ (leader’s flag). Only
the four-beat rhythm remains consistent amid this burgeoning variety, but
it has moved from the oriental mimicry of the first section to a Verserzählung
(narrative poem) form close to Knittelvers in the third, which both looks
back to Wieland in the eighteenth century and forward to Wilhelm Busch
later in the nineteenth. Such formal variations demonstrate a virtuoso control
of form and tone, and measure Heine’s credentials as a poet. His retelling
of an old tale, presented as oriental pastiche, as travesty, and in the demotic