This is perhaps the week that the German poet and theologian Paul Gerhardt had in mind in
Geh' Aus Mein Herz, his remarkable 1656 religious poem about spring, nowadays sung to a pretty air by August Harder.
All the nature imagery in the poem, such as the mention of the tulips and daffodils, the nest-building by the storks and the rising wheat, is connected with this point of the German spring, which is around the 17th week of the year in Zone 8. Some of this imagery reappears in later Christian poetry, such as Sydney Carter's
Lord of the Dance: "Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain."
Gerhardt's mention of summertime in at least two places in the poem (I have not quoted all 33 stanzas here) is misleading. Germans consider
Geh' Aus Mein Herz a
Sommergesang, but it would be more accurate to call it a "spring song". Perhaps Gerhardt simply regarded spring as a phase within his wider concept of summer. At the time he wrote, the division of the climatic year into the four perfectly equal seasons, just like the celestial year, may not have been as strict as it is today. Or perhaps, since he was a very great writer, he simply took a little of the poetic licence due to him. His literary purpose is plain: the poem is not about rebirth as such (an Easter or spring theme) but about greening, so that the entire flowering season becomes a metaphor for the Christian's growth: "Laß mich bis zur letzten Reis an Leib und Seele grünen."
Geh’ aus mein Herz und suche Freud
In dieser schönen Sommerzeit
An deines Gottes Gaben
Schau an der schönen Gärtenzier
Und siehe wie sie mir und dir
Sich ausgeschmücket haben.
Die Bäume stehen voller Laub
Das Erdreich decket seinen Staub
Mit einem grünen Kleide
Narzissen und die Tulipan
Die ziehen sich viel schöner an
Als Salomonis Seide.
Die Lerche schwingt sich in die Luft
Das Täublein fliegt auf seiner Kluft
Und macht sich in die Wälder
Die hochbegabte Nachtigall
Ergötzt und füllt mit ihrem Schall
Berg Hügel Tal und Felder.
Die Glucke führt ihr Völklein aus
Der Storch baut und bewohnt sein Haus
Das Schwälblein speist die Jungen
Der schnelle Hirsch das leichte Reh
Ist froh und kommt aus seine Höh
In’s tiefe Gras gesprungen.
Die Bächlein rauschen in dem Sand
Und malen sich an ihrem Rand
Mit schattenreichen Myrten
Die Wiesen liegen hart dabei
Und klingen ganz vom Lustgeschrei
Der Schaf’ und ihrer Hirten.
Die unverdroßne Bienenschar
Fliegt hin und her, sucht hier und da
Ihr edle Honigspeise
Des süßen Weinstocks starker Saft
Bringt täglich neue Stärk’ und Kraft
In seinem schwachen Reise.
Der Weizen wächset mit Gewalt
Darüber jauchzet jung und alt
Und rühmt die große Güte
Des, der so überflüssig labt
Und mit so manchem Gut begabt
Das menschliche Gemüte.
Ich selber kann und mag nicht ruhn
Des großen Gottes großes Tun
Erweckt mir alle Sinnen
Ich singe mit, wenn alles singt
Und lasse was dem Höchsten klingt
Aus meinem Herzen rinnen.
The plants mentioned include:
- Narzissen: genus Narcissus. Daffodils are clearly spring flowers: a daffodil is brown and withers by summertime.
- Tulipan: genus Tulipa. The tulip flowers briefly at the start of spring. The bulbs can be dug up and relocated from about June, when the stalks dry up and begin to rot. Tulips were a modern novelty in Gerhardt's time, having just been popularized in western Europe. About 30 years before Gerhard wrote, the Tulip Mania had occurred during a lull in the Thirty Years War. Nowadays Germans call the genus Tulpen. Gerhardt's form of the name matches older English forms like tulipa and tulipant.
- Myrten: Possibly Myrica gale, which mainly grows in acidic bogs in the milder parts of Germany. Adelung (1793) and Grimm indicate this plant was formerly called Deutsche Myrte: Wegen einiger Ähnlichkeit in der Gestalt der Blätter, wird auch der Porst, Myrica communis L. von einigen Myrte, Deutsche Myrte, Engl. Dutch Myrtle genannt (Adelung: Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart) (The specific name communis does not come from Linnaeus, who considered this the type species, but was evidently added by later botanists. Ultimately however the botanical name M. gale prevailed.) The plant's old English name was gagel, from which one modern name, sweet gale, derives. Bog myrtle is today known in German as Gagelstrauch or Porst. Michael Fischer offers an objection to this identification however. The choice of Myrte as a motif to describe a stream in springtime is largely prompted by a European artistic tradition where a different plant, Myrtus communis, figures as a feature of paradise-like landscapes. Myrtus is a frost-sensitive evergreen tree which does not grow alongside German streams, so we are left wondering whether Gerhard was guided here by his observations or by his literary upbringing. Those who favour sweet gale must concede that Myrica gale is usually too small (2 metres tall) to cast much of a shadow on a stream, so the adjective "schattenreich" indeed gives rise to a certain amount of doubt as to what Gerhardt meant.
- Weinstock: genus Vinus, which Gerhard mentions here as greening (in spring), not fruiting (in the late summer).
- Weizen: presumably Triticum aestivum, though I cannot say what other wheat species were grown in mid 17th century Germany. Gerhardt mentions the green shoots rising in the fields, not the summer stage of the plant's growth.
I did not see an exhibition about Gerhardt in March 2007 at the Nikolaikirche in Berlin, but saw a notice about it by
Arno Widmann (no longer online, unfortunately). I would also like to thank Dr. Michael Fischer for his highly informed advice about Gerhardt's allusions to a
locus amoenus. Fischer does not believe that the poem is descriptive of Germany at all.
