Monthly Archives: March 2025

Week 648: Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen, by Heinrich Heine

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This poem, from the 1827 collection ‘Buch der Lieder’, has its genesis in the young Heine’s slightly complicated love life. He was in love with his cousin Amalie, but she had no interest in the poet and anyway had feelings for another. But this other man in his turn did not reciprocate her feelings and married someone else, at which, at least according to Heine’s jaundiced and perhaps rather ungallant view of the matter, Amalie settled for ‘den ersten besten Mann’, the first man to come along, and married him, leaving poor Heine out in the cold.

If this poem with its line in neat ruefulness gives you the impression of reading a German version of A.E.Housman, that is not surprising: Housman once named Heine as one of the three principal influences on his own verse, along with the English ballads and the songs of Shakespeare.

The translation that follows is my own.

XXXIX

Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen,
Die hat einen andern erwählt;
Der andre liebt eine andre,
Und hat sich mit dieser vermählt.

Das Mädchen heiratet aus Ärger
Den ersten besten Mann,
Der ihr in den Weg gelaufen;
Der Jüngling ist übel dran.

Es ist eine alte Geschichte,
Doch bleibt sie immer neu;
Und wem sie just passieret,
Dem bricht das Herz entzwei.

Heinrich Heine

A young man loves a maiden,
Who would another wed;
This other loves another
And marries her instead.

The maiden out of chagrin
To have a husband still
Weds the first to come along;
The young man takes it ill.

The story is an old one,
Yet stays forever new,
And those to whom it happens,
It breaks their heart in two.

Week 647: Teens, by Molly Holden

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For me this poem captures beautifully that feeling of alienation mingled with relief that arises at a certain age, typically around thirteen, when you realise that human beings are interesting and some may even be lovable but that you have very little in common with most of them and you might as well stop trying to belong and instead do your own thing, contentedly brooding, like the poet here, at the shadowy edge of things. And of course, she is by no means the first poet to find delight in the dissolution of the self into the natural world: think of Keats with his sparrow pecking in the gravel, or Hopkins with his inscapes.

Teens

That was always my place, preferably
at dusk, in a slight rain
– below the drenched allotment bank,
by the bridge not often shaken by a train.

The neat hedge ended there, the fields began,
sloping to shrouded hills,
and the lane grew pot-holed, led only
to flowery pastures and abandoned mills.

There I would stand in the mizzle, watching
thirty martins or so
hawking silently above the meadows
high on black lines of flight, eerily low

as the heads of the grasse, swerving
only at solid hedge
and me, a contentedly brooding phantom,
at the lane’s, at the night’s edge.

Molly Holden

Week 646: Mountain Lion, by D.H.Lawrence

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I have never much taken to D.H.Lawrence as a novelist. The problem I have is with his characters, a rather intense lot who are like nobody I have ever known or would wish to know. Of course, from one point of view it is absurd to judge works of literature by how sympathetic you find the protagonists. ‘Yes, William, it’s very good, but this couple of yours, the Macbeths was it?, well, they’re not very nice, are they?’ And yet, for those of us who read for pleasure with no academic axe to grind, is it so unreasonable to prefer to spend our leisure time in the company of Elizabeth Bennet rather than Heathcliff, of Dorothea Brooke rather than Becky Sharp, of Anna Karenina rather than Raskolnikov?

But while D.H.Lawrence as novelist may not be my cup of tea, I find him as poet sometimes excellent, as travel writer and observer of nature sometimes superb. This week’s poem is from the collection ‘Birds, Beast and Flowers’, and is surely prescient in its sorrow for the diminishing otherness of the world.

Mountain Lion

Climbing through the January snow, into the Lobo canyon
Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water sounds still unfrozen, and the trail is still evident.

Men!
Two men!
Men! The only animal in the world to fear!

They hesitate.
We hesitate.
They have a gun.
We have no gun.

Then we all advance, to meet.

Two Mexicans, strangers, emerging out of the dark and snow and inwardness of the Lobo valley.
What are they doing here on this vanishing trail?

What is he carrying?
Something yellow.
A deer?

Qué tiene, amigo?
León—

He smiles, foolishly, as if he were caught doing wrong.
And we smile, foolishly, as if we didn’t know.
He is quite gentle and dark-faced.

It is a mountain lion,
A long, long slim cat, yellow like a lioness.
Dead.

He trapped her this morning, he says, smiling foolishly.

Lift up her face,
Her round, bright face, bright as frost.
Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears;
And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays,
Dark, keen, fine rays in the brilliant frost of her face.
Beautiful dead eyes.

Hermoso es

They go out towards the open;
We go on into the gloom of Lobo.
And above the trees I found her lair,
A hole in the blood-orange brilliant rocks that stick up, a little cave.
And bones, and twigs, and a perilous ascent.

So, she will never leap up that way again, with the yellow flash of a mountain lion’s long shoot!
And her bright striped frost face will never watch any more, out of the shadow of the cave in the blood-orange rock,
Above the trees of the Lobo dark valley-mouth!

Instead, I look out.
And out to the dim of the desert, like a dream, never real;
To the snow of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the ice of the mountains of Picoris,
And near across at the opposite steep of snow, green trees motionless standing in snow, like a Christmas toy.

And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion
And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two of humans
And never miss them.
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost face of that slim yellow mountain lion!

D.H.Lawrence

Week 645: The New House, by Edward Thomas

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I find this a very sad poem, while recognising that for the most part sad writes deeper than happy. One’s home should be a place of sanctuary,  and moving into a new house, at least when one is young, should be a time of excitement and new beginnings, not of bleak forebodings as here. But of course for Edward Thomas, who spent most of his adult life as a poorly rewarded reviewer and hack writer, his home was also his place of work, and thus bound up with his feelings of dissatisfaction, of spending his spirit on uncongenial tasks he knew to be unworthy of him – a common enough situation for most of us but one especially lacerating for the sensitive man who came so late to the discovery of his true gift and had so little time to enjoy it.

The sentiment of the last two lines seems ambiguous. Is Thomas finding some dour consolation in the thought that his troubles are transient and will end with nothing having changed, while the timeless elementals of the earth continue on their uncaring way? Or does the thought of this future wind merely intensify his desolation, his sense of time lost or ill-spent, but either way never to be recaptured?

The New House

Now first, as I shut the door,
    I was alone
In the new house; and the wind
    Began to moan.

Old at once was the house,
    And I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
    Of what was foretold,

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
    Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain: old griefs and griefs
    Not yet begun.

All was foretold me; naught
    Could I foresee;
But I learned how the wind would sound
    After these things should be.

Edward Thomas