READING HEINRICH HEINE

232 Reading Heinrich Heine
leading to the rhyme. The ‘Doch’ of stanza 2, introducing the unceremonious
celebration of the anniversaries of Heine’s death, therefore, also
introduces a tripping counter-rhythm which echoes the good spirits of his
wife and her friend Pauline Rogue as they set out for Montmartre on a fine
day. The third stanza distances itself from the emotion of the occasion by
including a French phrase, so that the less than silent final /e/ of ‘homme’
becomes comically over-stressed by its position in the German metrical
scheme. The emergence of the poem into French at this point has been
prepared by the earlier appearance of Montmartre and of the ‘immortelles’
of Mathilde’s wreath. French is also the language of the everyday, set in
contrast to the ritual Hebrew of the kaddish and the implied Latin of the
Requiem Mass. The stanza wryly acknowledges the limits of Mathilde’s –
perhaps sentimental – ‘Feuchte Wehmut’ (‘damp sorrow’), but it does not
undermine its sincerity; and the final stanzas continue to hold this hint of
irony in check. The notorious rhyme and assonance on ‘meiner Süßen’ /
‘mit müden Füßen’ (for my sweet / with weary feet) does not step beyond
the bounds of realism. Mathilde, overweight, must take a cab; and with a
final French word the poem comes to rest, apparently as reconciled to its
urban setting as T. S. Eliot’s ‘lonely cab-horse’ in the ‘Preludes’.
Yet this recognition of the day-to-day plainness of city life, formally
echoing the rejection of ceremony announced at the start, excludes any
satisfactory tone of closure just as much as it does any emotional afflatus.
Such an uneasy balance is characteristic. 32 Heroic gestures, for instance,
are demonstrably inappropriate. In ‘Zwei Ritter’ (‘Two Knights’) they
are unmasked as evidence of the bad faith of self-deluded Polish patriots.
Crapülinski and Waschlapski are down-at heel survivors who, like
Herwegh in ‘Der Ex-Lebendige’ (‘The Ex-Living Man’) and Dingelstedt
in ‘Der Ex-Nachtwächter’ (‘The Ex-Night Watchman’) among Heine’s
‘Lamentations’, must come to an accommodation with the slackening of
energy and resolve which is also the everyday. Conversely, in Heine’s domestic
poems about his concern for his wife, such as ‘An die Engel’ in the
Romanzero ‘Lazarus’ cycle or ‘Ich war, o Lamm, als Hirt bestellt’ (‘I was,
my lamb, your shepherd here’) from the uncollected poems, the high style
and high feeling of religious rhetoric is ironically undone by the particularity
of the case: in ‘An die Engel’ the mythological grandeur of ‘dread
Thanatos’, with its associated language of ‘Schattenreich’ (‘the realm of the
shades’) and the classicizing syntax of the line ‘Wird Witwe sie und Waise
sein’ is challenged by the rhymes on Mathilde (‘eurem Ebenbilde’, ‘Huld
und Milde’) which conclude the last two stanzas. It would be inappropriate
to describe this effect as bathos. There is real sentiment in the way the poem