Nacht und Träume, D 827

Night and dreams

(Poet's title: Nacht und Träume)

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One of Collin’s titles for this poem was ‘Nachtfeier’ / ‘Ceremony of Night’ or ‘Night Celebration’ (see notes on the text below). In the previous generation the idea of holding a solemn celebration of darkness rather than light would have appeared perverse. In the so-called age of Enlightenment most European intellectuals wanted to bring clarity to a world that they saw as befogged by superstition and arbitrary authority. Poems about night (there were many such, often set in graveyards) tended to signal the hope of a new day dawning, offering a new start or a new life (for those who have entered the night of death). Although there were strands of ‘enlightenment’ thought that were critical of religion (equating it with superstition and obfuscation), the central metaphor of ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ was inherited from Christianity:

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen

The Collect for Aid against all Perils in 'An Order for Evensong', probably written by Thomas Cranmer, The Book of Common Prayer 1549

By the 1820s the mood (amongst both writers and readers) had changed. Novalis published his ‘Hymns to Night’ (Hymnen an die Nacht) in 1800, and in the years following it became almost conventional for poets to hail night as the domain of perfection and truth, somewhere we could escape to after all the confusion and delusion of ordinary ‘daily’ living. In the following years the ‘romantic movement’ encouraged this veneration of night since it seemed to offer so much more profundity than what was presented as the superficial coldness and objectivity of ‘the age of reason’.

Above all, night came to be seen as offering a chance to dream. If the Enlightenment had valued ‘daydreams’ – projects of practical improvement – Romanticism encouraged the view that nocturnal dreams might allow us to perceive a level of reality or significance that previous generations had ignored or lacked the sensitivity to take seriously. Collin therefore writes about dreams descending along with night itself. Like moonlight they permeate the expanses of dark space and enter the silent breasts of humans, where sensitive souls eavesdrop and attempt to learn from them. Dreams are therefore presented as something external and objective, they are a necessary corrective to our day-to-day experience of the world. Later writers (Freud most notably, but also other traditions in psychology) would read dreams as internal, subjective phenomena: they well up from the depths of a soul that is far from quiet or calm and they usually reveal a world of torment rather than solace.

For Collin and his readers, it is waking up that brings about disturbance and psychic discomfort. This is a common enough experience as we emerge from a dream into awareness that what had seemed so real and valuable was not what it had seemed. The conventional view of this moment of realisation was to treat it as a way of understanding human perception in general: we have a tendency to be deluded, in particular by our inner turmoil and inclinations, so we should use all the powers at our disposal to ‘wake up’ and accept things as they are, not as we would like them to be. Nacht und Träume encourages us to indulge in the opposing inclination, though. As day dawns and we awake with the light, we come to value the world of night all the more. We beg it to return as soon as possible so that we can re-enter the world of dreams. It is this longing to return that structures the poem’s rhyme scheme (abbccdda). We need that reality to come down (nieder) again (wieder).

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Original Spelling and Notes on the text

Nacht und Träume

Heil'ge Nacht, du sinkest nieder;
Nieder wallen auch die Träume,
Wie dein Mondlicht durch die Räume,
Durch der Menschen stille Brust;
Die belauschen sie mit Lust,
Rufen, wenn der Tag erwacht:
Kehre wieder heil'ge1 Nacht,
Holde Träume,2 kehret wieder.


1  Schubert appears to have changed 'heil'ge' (holy) to 'holde' (beauteous), probably by mistake under the influence of the following line.
2  In Schubert´s manuscript of the song this comma is omitted, which would change the meaning (from an invocation to a description - beauteous dreams are returning). As Peter Rastl points out, we cannot know if he simply omitted the comma because he was writing quickly or if he intended to change the meaning.

Schubert must have made his setting of these lines from Collin’s manuscript, since the text was not published until after the poet’s death in 1824. In his posthumous collected works (Matthäus Edler von Collin´s nachgelassene Gedichte, ausgewählt und mit einem biographischen Vorwort begleitet von Joseph von Hammer, Wien 1827) the poem which Schubert called Nacht und Träume appears in three slightly different versions:

Volume 1, page 134

Volume 2, page 149

Volume 2, page 65

In the play ‘Fortunats Abfahrt von Cypern‘ at the beginning of a scene set on board a ship, the Count of Flanders is given these lines:

Confirmed by Peter Rastl with Matthäus Edlen von Collin’s nachgelassene Gedichte, ausgewählt und mit einem biographischen Vorworte begleitet von Joseph von Hammer. Zweytes Bändchen. Wien. Gedruckt und im Verlage bey Carl Gerold. 1827, page 149.