West-Eastern Divan. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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else the merchandise which Goethe sought to purchase in the East was wisdom and piety and peace. These the Persian Hafiz had somehow found. Hafiz – gay but also wise – possessed of inward piety, did not pursue with zeal the outward practices of religion. The special quality, as Goethe perceived, of the Persian poet was his spontaneity; he was a true poetic fount: " wave welling after wave", like Goethe's own lyrical impulses in his earlier days, when song seemed to possess him rather than to be held in possession. There was another circumstance in common with them. Hafiz – a contemporary of our own Chaucer – had seen Timur, that scourge of God, sweep over Persia with his hordes and spread his conquests from Delhi to Damascus. Another Timur had arisen in Europe in the nineteenth century whose name was Napoleon.
Hafiz could not stay the conqueror's career; but at least he could give the world the joy of his Ghazels – so likewise Goethe.
With a strange and happy return upon him of the creative impulse of youth, urging him to swift and spontaneous jets of song, Goethe, in the early morning of 25th July 1814, started in his carriage from Weimar for the Rhine, Frankfurt and Wiesbaden. It was seventeen years since he had visited the scenes of his childhood and youth. Something of enchantment was added by this revival of the past to the Indian summer of Goethe's sixty-fifth year. (With an arrangement of certain pieces of the West-Eastern Divan, as indicated by Burdach, we can make out a kind of diary of the days of travel.)
The central motive of the poems is, in truth, love. First there is benignant charity extended to man as man; secondly, there is the charming relation of the old sage, poet and toper of wine to the boy-cupbearer, blooming in beauty, eager, as a boy may be, for wisdom, a relation which is lightly touched with humour; and last, there is the passionate love of man and woman exhibited in that ideal pair, Hatem and Zuleika.
During his visit to Frankfurt in the autumn of 1814 Goethe had the pleasure of personal intercourse with his friend, the Banker Willemer – a man of generous heart and cultured intelligence. Marianne, his third wife – a woman of thirty – had bright social gifts and graceful cultivation, besides good humour and good sense. She became model for the Zuleika of the West-Eastern Divan, accepted her part as Zuleika with pride and pleasure, and played up to it with spirit, not without a sense of humour. The poems are poems of passionate love, but in the relation of Goethe and the good Marianne – a relation absolutely honest – the passion was born for the imagination merely, from a friendship which was of the happiest kind and which endured without interruption up to Goethe's last days, though after 1815 they never met again.
A few beautiful poems in the collection are Marianne's, e.g., the song to the East Wind and the lovelier song to the West Wind (which every German singer knows in a beautiful musical setting).
The secret of Marianne's contribution to the Divan was well kept. She disclosed the facts not long before her tranquil death at the age of seventy-six.
Loeper, in his very elucidating Foreword to the Divan, notes that we find in it only the expression of the active, living side of the Orient; it shows forth the submission to God, but not the Fatalism of the East. The urge in it is all towards joy, towards life, towards love, out of the depths of a serene and composed spirit.
From out the narrow room and narrow local surroundings of his home the poet takes his Hegira into the open world, into the freedom of Nature, as well as also into the freedom of human intercourse, in foreign towns, in the market-places, the taverns.
When the book came to light in 1819, in the epoch of the Byron Welt-Schmerz, it must have seemed as though it were a protest against all enmity towards the world and humanity – inasmuch as it is wholly free from all trace of self-torturings or of immersion in subjectivity. Goethe's world herein knows no such melancholy, for the pain and sorrow and the longing that it may contain have tangible objects and are never otherwise than sound and sane.
The calm Indian-summer radiance illumines it all.
E. D. D.
December 1913.
I. MOGANNI NAMEH. BOOK OF THE SINGER
Twenty years I let go past,
Joying in what life provides;
A train, each lovely as the last,
Years' fair as 'neath the Barmecides.
I. HEJIRA
NORTH and West and South up-breaking!
Thrones are shattering, Empires quaking;
Fly thou to the untroubled East,
There the patriarchs' air to taste!
What with love and wine and song
Chiser's fount will make thee young.
There, 'mid things pure and just and true,
The race of man I would pursue
Back to the well-head primitive,
Where still from God did they receive
Heavenly lore in earthly speech,
Nor beat the brain to pass their reach.
Where ancestors were held in awe,
Each alien worship banned by law;
In nonage-bounds I am gladly caught –
Broad faith be mine and narrow thought;
As when the word held sway, and stirred
Because it was a spoken word.
Where shepherds haunt would I be seen,
And rest me in oases green;
When with the caravan I fare,
Shawl, coffee, musk, my chapman's ware,
No pathway would I leave untraced
To the city from the waste.
And up and down the rough rock ways
My comfort, Hafiz, be thy lays,
When the guide enchantingly,
From his mule-back seat on high,
Sings, to rouse the stars, or scare
The lurking robber in his lair.
In bath or inn my thought would be,
Holy Hafiz, still of thee;
Or when the veil a sweetheart lifts
From amber locks in odorous drifts;
Ay, whispered loves of poet fire
Even the Houris to desire!
Would you envy him for this,
Or bring despite upon his bliss,
Know that words of poets rise
To the gate of Paradise,
Hover round, knock light, implore
Heavenly life for evermore.
II. PLEDGES OF BLESSING
FROM a cornelian Talisman
Glad prosperous days the faithful gain;
If on an onyx ground it rest
To lips devout let it be pressed!
All that is ill away 'twill chase,
It shields you and it shields the place;
If the engraven word proclaim
With