"Die Veilchen kichern und kosen
Und schau'n nach den Sternen empor."[5]
[5] The violets titter, caressing,
Peeping up as the planets appear.
(C. G. LELAND.)
It is quite audacious enough to represent violets as caressing each other; we are reminded of Hans Andersen's enchanted gardens; to make them titter is certainly too much of a good thing. Émile Zola affects this same style in his description of the Paradou garden.
The next song, which is conceived in the same spirit, the song of the lotus flower that fears the splendour of the sun, is a charming poem, despite its flower-innocence, marvellously, meltingly sensuous. Sensual-spiritual desire is here intensified till it reaches the verge of hysteria; for the poet, not content with making the lotus flower blossom and glow and shine and exhale fragrance and tremble, when her lover, the moon, awakes her with his rays, actually makes her weep.[6]
[6] Cf W. Kirchbach: Heine's Dichterwerkstatt, in Magazin für die Litteratur, Jahrgang 57, Nr. 18, 19, 20.
Next in real feeling to the poems of desire come those that express the relinquishment, the cessation of the passion. The finest example is poem No. 59 in the Intermezzo, which in its first verse describes the falling of a star, the star of love, from heaven; in its second, the falling of the apple-blossoms from the tree; in its third, the sinking of a swan to its watery grave; then sums all up in the concluding verse:
"Es ist so still und dunkel!
Verweht ist Blatt und Blüth',
Der Stern ist knisternd zerstoben,
Verklungen das Schwanenlied."[7]
[7] The silence and the night fall,
The blossoms all have fled,
In sparks the star has vanished,
The swan and his song are dead.
(H. F.)
It is very characteristic of Heine that, as the poem stands, it does not produce the impression that he has really witnessed any one of the three natural scenes depicted; they are simply symbols, arbitrarily selected and combined.
Amongst this passionate verse he has interspersed poems of a totally different description, treating of far more trivial amours. Some of the most exceptionable of these he did not include in the Buch der Lieder, not even, for example, the very harmless:—