READING HEINRICH HEINE

Mathilde’s interruption: Heine’s later poetry 235
Its thanks to the poet for the play.
But now the house is silence-wrapped,
Laughter and lights have dimmed away.
But hark, a sound rings dull and thin
From somewhere near the empty stage:
Perhaps a string has snapped within
A violin decayed with age.
Some rats are scurrying here and there
Rustling around the dim parterre,
A rancid reek from every hole.
The last lamp sputters low in doubt,
It groans despair, and it goes out.
That last poor light was my own soul.
(D 648)
The image of the final curtain was sufficiently powerful for Heine to repeat
the opening line of this poem within the different poetic development of
‘Der Scheidende’ (B 6/1, 349–50). 34 There, the departing audience provides
aprospect of domestic pleasures preferable even to an heroic death. In ‘Sie
erlischt’ what dominates is the emptiness of the theatre. The sensitivity
to sound which was apparent in the squeaking of Dame Care’s snuff-box
produces the positively Chekhovian effect of the snapping violin string;
but that noise, both uncanny and vulgar (‘schnöd’), is succeeded by the
‘groaning’ and ‘hissing’ oil-lamp of the soul. 35 These noises suggest a later
archetype: the irritated solitude of the domestic interior in Baudelaire’s
Spleen poem ‘Pluviôse irrité contre la ville entière’ in Les Fleurs du Mal.
L’âme d’un vieux poète erre dans la gouttière
Avec la triste voix d’un fantôme frileux.
Le bourdon se lamente, et la bûche enfumée
Accompagne en fausset la pendule enrhumée, ...
Some poet’s phantom roams the gutter-spouts
Moaning and whimpering like a freezing soul.
Agreat bell wails – within the smoking log
Pipes in falsetto to a wheezing clock... 36
Baudelaire’s interior is dominated by the sight of his mangy cat and the
reminiscences of malicious gossip and old love-affairs. Heine, on the other
hand, is constantly accompanied by his anxieties about Mathilde’s future
and by his own inescapable illness. In the empty auditorium the extinction
of the soul leaves an uncanny and anxious space, populated by scurrying
rats. Survival, in this group of poems, can only be unheroic, and the shade
of Achilles is right. Yet vestiges of a moralizing interpretation of the fact of