Preamble of a study on the "Wanderer"

(and all other uses of words based on the verbs "wandern" and "to "wander" ) as a privileged word in the poetic works of Goethe and his Romantic contemporaries writing in German and English .This introduces a series of articles that may be accessed by the usual clicking operation Why do literary critics find it so hard to get a handle on Wandering as a pervasive phenomenon in German and English poetry?

Video clips treating wandering in poems by Goethe, Wordsworth and Blake

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From about 1770 until 1832 the word Wanderer (Wandrer) enjoyed pride of place in German literature. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe instigated and propagated its use as a term to denote a the modern self-conscious poet. This development first emerged in his Rede zu Shakespears Tag (1771), and was progressively enhanced by his poetic works, particularly "Der Wandrer" (a fragmentary dramatic dialogue in verse), "Wandrers Sturmlied" and that exquisite pair of poems entitled "Wandrers Nachtlied." The word also resounds in his novel Die Leiden des Jungen Werther when the despairing hero exclaims, "Ich bin nur ein Wanderer auf dieser Erde." ("I am but a wandering pilgrim upon this earth"). The word remained deeply significant in Goethe's last works for Faust is renamed the `"Wanderer" in the final scene of Faust Part II and Goethe's last major work in prose is entitled Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre.

Goethe's preoccupation with the confusing questions aroused by the word Wanderer stemmed from the need to reconcile poetic tradition with secular modernity, literary convention with a new spirit liberty that was rising throughout Europe. The inroads of secular rationalism left little room for an unquestioning faith in the Muse, but poetry, as Goethe as a poet himself knew, lived on and could not be quenched. Liberty in the literary realm, as elsewhere in the socio-political sphere, was a mixed blessing, bringing both euphoria and anguish, both an expansion of consciousness and a fear of being unable to define the limit between self and non-self in the exterior world. In the Rede zu Shakespears Tag (Speech on Shakespeare`s Day) we discern the chief concerns that weighed on the young Goethe's mind in 1771. He had recently made the acquaintance of Johann Gottfried Herder, who had enthused him with an appreciation of Shakespeare's poetic and dramatic greatness and had acquainted him with the legacy of folkloric traditions to be discovered in every culture and in every age. In 1771 Goethe resided in Frankfurt and habitually covered the distance between Frankfurt and Darmstadt on foot in order to take part in the discussions of literary themes at Herder's home. His strenuous walking bouts through the woodlands between Frankurt and Darmstadt in wind and weather earned him the nickname of the Wanderer among his friends in Darmstadt. The experience of encountering a storm during one of his walks leaves a trace in Walderers Sturmlied. On the physical level the wanderer fights his way through a raging storm in search of a hut's protection only to find himself wading through a muddy sludge. On the imaginary level he inhabits the world of Greek mythology as he with his escort of the Charities and Graces wafts through the air aspiring to emulate the charioteers honoured in a Pindaric ode before crash-landing into mud. The poem is a study in bitter-sweet self-irony.

For many years Goethe regarded the poem with a certain embarrassment, dismissing it as mere babbling, and delayed its publication for that reason despite the great merits it possessed. The true reason for Goethe's initial disparagement of the poem lay in the sensitive nature of its subject matter and the perceived threat of self-exposure it incurred, for Goethe did not yet feel able to understand the relationship between himself, the living and breathing individual known to his friends as the Wanderer, and the informing genius resident in his poetic self, which was also a Wanderer, as we can tell from a reading of his Speech on Shakespeare's Day. In this Shakespeare, or rather his universally ranging powers of imagination, receives the title of the Wanderer. The Wanderer depicted in the essay begins life as a figure of speech, itself conventional enough, for the wanderer, to use a phrase in common language, makes great strides. The increasingly condensed image of the Wanderer soon exceeds the bounds of a common figure of speech,

however, and comes alive in its own right, absorbing, as in a dream, the images of the Titan Prometheus, the legendary creator of mankind, and the giant in seven-league boots derived from native Germanic folklore. Thus it poses a condensation of Goethe's newly found interest in Shakespearean drama and folklore as well as a wish to integrate these elements into his previous world view based on Greek classicism. Shakespeare meant freedom from the limitations imposed by neo-Aristotelean rules, while Prometheus stood for a rebellion against the aristocratic order of the day in accord with the spirit of the age of Storm and Stress. Later in life Goethe received an aristocratic title himself. He wrote Iphigenia and other dramas in accordance with the Aristotelean unities He drove his rebellious and anarchic impulses out of his system by allowing Werther to die in his stead.

Der Wandrer, another poem dating from the early 1770s, points ahead to the successful strategy Goethe would later adopt in his quest for intellectual and emotional equilibrium.Der Wandrer was initially inspired by Oliver Goldsmith's The Traveller, a poem in the tradition of accounts of travels penned by those who recorded impressions gained during a "grand tour" of Continental Europe . The poem contained an idyllic passage referring to the return of an agricultural labourer to his cottage and family after his daily exertions. In a similar vein in Der Wandrer, the explorer wandering among the ancient Greek ruins in the vicinity of Cuma in southern Italy hails a young woman and her infant child whom he finds beside their rough dwelling eeked out of the stones on an ancient temple. The bantering dialogue that ensues between the tourist and the young woman constrasts the lofty and detached mentality of the tourist cum artist with the down-to-earth concerns of the young woman. The tourist somewhat wistfully moves on his way without finding his resting place, yet he departs in goods spirits, perhaps with the assurance that one day he will reach it. Der Wandrer has a strangely prophetic aspect, for in later years Goethe would indeed explore the archeological riches of southern Italy during his travels in Italy between 1786 and 1789.

Until 1780 Goethe had yet to achieve in poetry that harmonious blend of subjectivity and objectivity for which he searched, and if any poetic utterance marked his achievement of that harmony it is surely found in Wandrers Nachtlied and Ein Gleiches, two poems so inseparably connected as to pose one work. The first poem of the two recalls the disquieting restlessness Goethe had experienced during the troubled years leading up to his taking up residence in Weimar in 1776. The first of these poems takes the form of a prayer to a higher power capable of soothing his troubled breast. The second

poem Ein Gleiches (or Wandrers Nachtlied II, if read as a separate poem) comprises a short and simple statement referring to the tree-tops and hill peaks that an observer apostrophized by the speaker as du perceives during the night. Not even the source of light by which the observer traces the perceived objects in this night vista is mentioned, but this can only be the moon. The extreme economy of the poem reveals what Professor Elizabeth Wilkinson once termed the basic and pure structure of language.1 The birds in the trees are silent, a fact that might be taken as a pointer to the reticence of the poetic speaker himself, as birds traditionally symbolize the poetic spirit. Thus the poems unites the Wanderer's subjective quest for inner peace and objectivity of a cool observer, whether artist or scientist, By 1780 Goethe had become both.The closing lines assure the wanderer that he will soon find rest whether that sought by a traveller or that yearned for by a pilgrim on life's journey. For Goethe and the Romantics the creative act of composing poetry was itself a journey and pilgrimage through the medium of language, though for Keats it was one with an uncertain path.

The Romantic poets adopted the word Wanderer with relish. Hlderlin composed a poem entitled Der Wanderer. Wilhelm Mller's cycle of poems Die Schne Mllerin begins with the poem, and later song, "Das Wandern ist des Mllers Lust," which has gone down in German culture as a much celebrated "folk song." Many forget that this song portends the wandering millers tragic death. As Friedrich Schlegel once pointed out,much of the jauntiness of the Romantic wanderer is superficial, hiding a grave sense of loneliness and isolation.

Though, at Goethe's instigation, the Romantics accepted the linkage beween the word "Wanderer" and their concern to clarify the relationships between the modern self-conscious poet, the world of society and the nature of the poet's role within that world, they had great difficulty in moving on from that stage in Goethe's development marked by the figure of the Wanderer as manifested by Werther. As Professor Willoughby demonstrates in his article "The Image of the `'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry," 2 references in Goethe's poetry and prose to a "Wanderer" are coupled by those to a "hut," a place of refuge, a home to reach or return to, a family hearth and a loving woman's care, a place in an established social order and, at a deep subconscious level, the anima, das ewig Weibliche, to whom or to which the dying Faust, as the "Wanderer" returns and through whose mediation he is redeemed.

The prevalence of the word 'Wanderer` like other forms of the verb "wandern" finds an echo in English Romantic poetry in the figure of the Wanderer in Wordsworth's The Excursion and, even more hauntingly, in that most celebrated of poems in the English language which begins with the line "I wandered lonely as a cloud." The word wandereracquires a deep meaning in the poetry of all the great Romantic poets. In one case Goethe's direct influence is undisputed. As Jonathan Wordsworth demonstrates in his monograph The Music of Humanity 3, Coleridge mediated a knowledge of Goethe's works to Wordsworth resulting in the figure of the Pedlar and the cognate figure of the Wanderer in The Excursion.. Goethe'san dramatic poem Der Wanderer was translated into English by Wordsworth's contemporary William Taylor of Norwich and this translation instilled in Wordsworth a sense of what the word Wanderer meant to Goethe . It is interesting to note that here the German "Wanderer" passes into English as "wanderer." Later Longfellow translated Goethe's "Wandrers Nachtlied" as "Wanderer's Night-Songs." Perhaps in the case of a prose translation to wander and wandern could be considered faux amis, words the outward similarity of which commonly leads to a misunderstanding. In poetry they are not. Let us consider why this should be so.

The German and English verbs have a common origin in the root that gave rise to the formwander, which conveys a range of senses whose common feature lies in the idea of turning and changes. In German the word "Wanderer" conveys, according to its context, the generally positive senses of wayfarer, a long-distance walker, a rover walking for pleasure, a pilgrim on life`s journey whether joyful or distraught, and a minstrel such as a troubadour. The words also has religious and astronomical associations in Wandersmann and Wanderstern. (planet). In both English and German poetry the word "wanderer" may be a reference to the moon cf. Shelley`s "Lines written in the Bay of Lerici. beginning with an apostrophe to the moon: Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven.

In English the word wanderer tends to convey the negative sense of a person whose winding path betrays signs of disorientation and detachment from the hard realities of life. In this sense Byron's anti-hero Don Juan represents the wanderer encountered in Wordsworth's poetry. However the verb "to wander" plays no less an important range of significance in Byron's poetry than in Wordsworth's. The verb "to wander" reveals much the same evocative power as its German counterpart if used adjectivally in the form of the present participle form of "wandering" when preceding the words 'pilgrim," "minstrel," "star" and "eyes" with its libidinal implication. To go a-wandering has a

positive ring conveyed by the source verb "wandern"

The verb "wander" and the verb "wandern" evidently share a vast field of denoted and connoted meanings and evocations, whether positive or negative. Do these words share a common source in the sense of being of grounded in some unitifying principle? The Russian linguist and literary critic Jurij Tynjanov 4 (see article below) posited such a unity in the aggregated occurrences of a single word and his theory will provide a handle on this otherwise so diffuse and elusive word "wanderer." To understand why the word has such a deep signifance we can also consider it in the light of Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. C. G. Jung and scholars such as L. A. Willoughby and Harold Bloom have ascertained a connection between "wandering" /"Wandern" and the archetypal solar heros of ancient literature such as Gilgamesh. and Ulysses, who according to this analysis represent the quest of the male libido to achieve union with the female anima.

Jung often considers the etymology of words in order to demonstrate the power of unconscious and pervasive psychological influences. Could recourse to etymology illuminate the wide range of apparently opposite meaning shared by the verbs "to wander" and "wandern"? The scope of a words power of association results from the cumulative effects of a words evolution over long periods of time. This we can judge from words sharing this root such as "Wandel" ("change") and " verwandeln" (to change).In ealier times all changes in nature were attributed to unseen forces often deemed a divine or spiritual in character. Thus Odin received the name of the Wanderer, and magical powers attributed to a magicians stick became a "wand. In the Christian era wandering designated those who turned from a certain course, either as repentant pilgrims or moral deviators like Cain, Ahasureus. Wandering was also deemed an attribute of a guiding sprit, hence references to a "wandering Muse found in Miltons works and elsewhere, and to Odin the Wanderer, the German deity of poetry. This implication of a source of inspiration was readily transferred to guiding forces belonging to the Christian concepts of truth. On a negative level wandering became associated with error, madness and death (cf. Shakespeares 18th Sonnet).

In English "to wander can mean to deviate from a logical argument or discourse as when Byron mockingly declares in Don Juan that he will not deviate from his purpose of providing a chronologically ordered narrative of events. The regularity of my design forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning (Don Juan, Canto 1, VII.) Here Byron makes two associations of the

word collide, one implying deviation from a logical narrative and another deviation from a moral code. Wandering is therefore not necessary concerned with a long journey, voyage or excursion but more with the act of turning, this being often set within the context of a phyical or mental journey. In Wordsworths I wandered lonely as a Cloud," we do not learn much about a walk per se. We have to go to Dorothy`s diary for that! Rather, the poem presents a turning point, a moment of transition, a flash of insight followed by a period of ingesting this experience.

In poetry, as indeed in ordinary discourse, a word conveys a certain sense to the exclusion of other meanings residing in the same word. Otherwise we have a pun or even a jarring lapse of style. Outside poetry this is all to the good, as otherwise the mind would be confused and overloaded by a possible plethora of wider considerations. To ascertain the appropriate sense of a word capable of signally many meanings (cross, bow, air, etc.) we consider the context that is generated in the linear progress of the text as that which conveys a narrative or coherent message. Words have more that just this context. They have many. They also have a chemical or perhaps alchemical power of association as shown most palpably by Dylan Thomass Altarwise by Owllight, for this yields no intellible surface of meaning amounting to a narrative or message . (See the article I wrote that appears in Welshpedia with the title The Rude Red Tree). The chemical aspect of words takes over completely. Most poems, however, exhibit a coherent and readily comprehensible narrative line , while still exploiting the alchemy of word clusters, whether the poet realizes this or not.. If we regarded poems only as source of meanings to be gleaned from the surface providing a texts logical coherence, we would only need to read poems once or twice, as in the case of a newspaper article. To do justice to a poem we cannot read and then discard it, for with each new reading a poem gives up more of ist secrets in a process of progressive revelation. Thus we can understand to wander and wandern as a unity even though in common use the meanings of wandern as foregrounded in prose does not necessarily find ist equivalence in to wander. In the case of poetry words may combines all association that inhere within it even though only one of its meanings is immediately evident.

Why then did the Wanderer become so privileged a word in the poetic vocabulary of Goethe and his Romantic contemporaries? In both German and English literature the word was highly significant in its association with the powers of inspiration and the imagination. Puck we know as that merry wanderer of the night, and even that distraught poet Cassius in Julius Caesar wandered forth under the influence of some strange impulse. Goethe wrote

in an age when it had become impossible to assume acceptance of a belief in a divine muse, though poets of a religious persuasion may have continued to do so. The modern self-conscious poet had to search for a new foundation. His wanderings accordingly took the shape of rambles and walks, but these represented a downscaled version of the great migrations of nations and peoples in line with Homeric, or biblical traditions and with Germanic or Celtic folklore. Explicitly or implicitly, if only by the allusive force of verbal clues. poems such as Hlderlin's "Der Wanderer", Wordsworth's The Prelude rest on the foundation of the archetypal journeys of antiquity. Hlderlin predicates his eulogy of his Swabian homeland on the notion that an ancient Greek tribe once migrated to Swabia. In the introductory lines of The Prelude the poet expresses a desire to be freed from a "house of bondage," an unmistakeable allusion to the biblical Egypt.

The Lakers` preference for descriptions of country walks and evocations of historical migrations earned them the somewhat disparaging appelation of cold-earth wanderers in "The Mental Traveller" by William Blake. Yet even in such an oniric vision such as that conveyed by Blakes London the poetic wanderer must encounter whatever sight, whatever symbol exciting joy or horror, might lie or lurk in thespeaker's path, whether the objects encountered originate in external nature, like Wordsworths daffodils, or in the creations of the subconscious as they enter the poets field of vision. In Wordsworth's famous poem telling of the experience of his visual encounter with daffodils the first two words form the past tense, the preferred tense of historians and reporters. The first two words in London are I wander in the present tense, one might say the ever-present transcending time altogether. However, both poets use the same verb, which suggests some affinity. Wandering concerns the reciprocity of the mind subject to external impulses and the mind creating images that are no less palpable and concrete than their external counterparts. Blakes London speaks of a the real world and pronounces judgement on its social injustices no less severely and tellingly that any poem by Shelley or Byron.

As Milton's self-appointed heir, Blake recognized what wandering meant to Milton, the journey through the world of experience, through post-Edenic history, as the final lines of Milton's Paradise Lost so resoundingly declare. The last two lines of Book XII tell of Adam and Eve leaving Paradise: "They hand in hand with wand'ring feet and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way. London, let us remember, falls under the general heading of the Songs of Experience .Experience here entails exposure to the power of sin, Satanic bondage and the ravages of adversity that inhere in the phyical world but also

mankind's passage through this world is an essential part of its ultimate recovery and redemption. Experience can therefore be understood as progress, a striving for a future New Jerusalem. Of this Northrop Frye5 takes little account in his evaluation of the literary archetype he perceives in the wanderings of the Israelites from Egypt towards the primal state of Eden, and if to the Promised Land, then only to some original state owing nothing to the experience of wandering, which he sees only negatively as the labyrinth of the Law. Perhaps too much misapplied Pauline theology has spilt into his thinking. Goethe, on the other hand, saw the wandering journey of the Israelites more positively, and the combined images of the Wanderer and the Hut has a biblical foundation in the Feast of the Tabernacles. Like Northrop Frye, most modern critics cannot get a grip on the phenomenon posed by the word Wanderer in English and German poetry, This they ignore, even though the word to wander slips into their writings. To appreciate the significance of this phenomenon would mean for them an abandonment of the prevalent view that literature is divorced from the common needs of mankind, and devoid of any bearing on eternal truth only to become some elusive, emasculated corpus without relevance to history and biography -in other words to LIFE. ***********************************************************************

The following articles investigate the issues raised in the Preamble at greater length. As the arguments in the Preamble involve conderations based on a study of linguistic theories the following article investiates a logocentric approach to "the word in poetry."

I: THE WORD IN POETRY

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II: THE "WANDERER" IN GOETHE'S "SPEECH ON SHAKEPEARE'S DAY," HIS EARLY POEMS AND THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER; WILHELM MLLER'S ROMANTIC WANDERER

Between the Muse and the Unconscious

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"Der Wandrer," "Wandrers Sturmlied" and the Roman Elegies

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"Wandrers Nachtlied" in the light of Longfellow's translation

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Werther, the socially alienated "Wanderer"

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The Romantic Wanderer "Das Wandern ist des Mllers Lust"

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III: ENGLISH POETRY AND OCCURRENCES OF WORDS DERIVED FROM THE VERB "TO WANDER"

1) In Shakespeare's works.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar, Sonnet 18

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2) Romantic poetry:

Blake's "London"

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Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud"

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Romantic poetry and Miltonic influences

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Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," A wanderer in all but name http://www.julian-scutts.de/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=35&Itemid=37

Wandering in Literary Criticism concerned with Romantic poetry http://www.julian-scutts.de/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=42&Itemid=37

IV:APPENDIX: TANGENTIAL ASPECTS

1) LOGOCENTRICITY AND LINGUISTICS

To be or not to be

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A logocentric approach to unravelling Dylan Thomas's "Altarwise by Owl-light"

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Rabelais and the Grotesque (In Honor of Frantisek Galan)

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2) ALLEGORIC JOURNEYS

Robert Browning: "By the Fire-Side, " "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" http ://www.julian-scutts.de/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=37

3) VERBAL CLUES IN LITERARY TEXTS

An article on literary treatments of the Pied piper in European poetry (Wascana Review)

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Videos on the Pied Piper: Place Julianselfkant in YOUTUBE searchbox

Did Godot turn up after all?

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1 Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, "Goethe's poetry." In: German Life and Letters. N. S. 2 1949. P. 316-329 2 L. A. Willoughby, "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry," (Etudes Germaniques,3, Autumn. 1951). 3 Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity (New York, 1969). 4 Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse," Readings in Russian Poetics (Ann Arbor, 1978). 5 Northrop Frye, The Mythos of Summer Romance, Anatomy of Criticism ( Princeton, 1957).