An den Mond (Füllest wieder Busch und Tal), D 259, D 296

To the moon

(Poet's title: An den Mond)

Part of  Goethe: The second collection intended for Goethe 

All translations into English that appear on this website, unless otherwise stated, are by Malcolm Wren. You are free to use them on condition that you acknowledge Malcolm Wren as the translator and schubertsong.uk as the source. Unless otherwise stated, the comments and essays that appear after the texts and translations are by Malcolm Wren and are © Copyright.

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The Context

In Weimar, on the morning of 17th January, 1778, a body was recovered from the River Ilm and brought to the nearby house of Charlotte von Stein, a lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Duchess Anna Amelia. Christiane von Lassberg was only 18 years old when she had jumped from a bridge over the Ilm the night before. As with so many young suicides over the previous two or three years, a copy of Goethe’s ‘Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers’ (The Sufferings of Young Werther) was found in her pocket. The town council of Leipzig had recently banned the book precisely on the grounds that it was an open invitation to suicide.

Goethe had already experienced a personal crisis in response to the extraordinary and seemingly inexplicable reception of his small epistolary novel. He wanted to avoid bourgeois literary circles and the attention he was attracting as the most famous (and infamous) author of the day, so he moved to Weimar, specifically to serve in an aristocratic court, where formal structures and relationships would protect him from the passions unleashed in his Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) phase. He even avoided romantic attachments with women (he broke an engagement in order to escape to Weimar) and instead formed a platonic but fully devoted connection to an unattainable (married) woman, a courtier who would insist that he leave behind youthful sentimentality and build a mature, collected persona based on good manners and inner restraint. She, of course, was Charlotte von Stein, whose home looked onto the bank of the Ilm where poor Christel von Lassberg was washed up that awful January morning.

Goethe was distraught at the news. He could not escape, and his book was continuing to have its terrifying effects, do what he may. His letters and notes to Charlotte von Stein show that they both considered the situation to be extremely serious. Initially, there were emotional outbursts and grand gestures on Goethe’s part (such as him digging out a grotto in Lassberg’s memory with his own bare hands), but under Charlotte von Stein’s influence he began to channel the churning impressions and sensations. Within a short time the major figure of the Sturm und Drang movement would turn into the titan of Weimar Classicism. Out of it all would come ‘An den Mond’, one of the greatest lyrics of Weimar Classicism (and perhaps of all European literature).

One of Goethe’s letters to Charlotte von Stein in 1778 referred to Christiane von Lassberg’s suicide, and attached to it was the first version of ‘An den Mond’, in the form of a song. Goethe’s composer friend Philipp Christoph Kayser had written a setting of a poem by Heinrich Leopold Wagner (1747 – 1779) also called ‘An den Mond’. Goethe had taken the verse form of Wagner’s text so that his own version of ‘An den Mond’ could be sung to Kayser’s music (which was also included with the letter). Goethe’s text (which was never published in his lifetime) had 6 strophes and explicitly compares the moonlight over the Ilm valley to the soothing glances watching over his fate (Charlotte von Stein’s concern for the author). Charlotte, like the moon, seems to know him intimately. He then considers the river, both a blockage, an impediment, and at the same time an image of the fluency of his own work. It can be furious and flood in winter (as when Christel Lassberg drowned) or it can be transformed and transforming in spring. Can his own work, which has produced such fury and death (in the Werther craze), spring into a new splendour despite all that has happened? The text ends with a beatitude: blessed are those who cut themselves off from the world without hatred. Blessed is she who holds a man to her bosom and enjoys with him that which paces around in the labyrinth of the breast. Blessed are Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Charlotte von Stein.

In the years that followed Goethe did indeed (under Charlotte von Stein’s soothing but sometimes intense gaze) blossom. He reinvented himself as a courtier and diplomat, but also as a scientist and administrator, while continuing to write. However, the drive and integrity that had led him to Weimar to escape the perils of fame and ‘settling-down’ remained. By the mid 1780’s Goethe needed to escape again. He planned to go on an extended tour of Italy, but this would be interpreted by Charlotte von Stein as a rebuff. He simply left (in 1786) without telling her what he was doing. She never forgave him and their relationship on his return to Weimar two years later was frosty. She chose to explain her reaction by re-writing ‘An den Mond’. A sort of love poem has turned into a recrimination [1].

In this version of the poem the moonlight is asked to offer oblivion rather than enlightenment, the river is linked with the shedding of private tears rather than the flow of creativity. Charlotte von Stein’s eyes, which in Goethe’s original poem had looked into his soul with a deep understanding and kept watch over his fate, are now not looking but crying. Her attention has turned inwards, and instead of looking she is listening; she is sensitive to echoes of past pain and happiness. Her acute perception of hints and intimations now no longer links her to someone held to her breast but increases her isolation.

However, the solitude that she appears to accept as inevitable and principled in the text is to some extent undermined by the very fact of her writing it and sharing it with Goethe. This is an act of communication, not just self-expression. She is far from ‘unconscious’ of the world around, least of all of Goethe’s inner life. She must have known that her text would have an effect on him; she knew enough of the world and of his character to realise that his journey to Italy would be transformative. As Boyle puts it in his biography of the poet, Goethe became a devotee of the sun rather than the moon during his two years in the south. The fact that she chose to re-write his own ‘An den Mond’ to emphasise their changing relationship shows that she was trying to reach out to that aspect in him that valued continuity as well as the poetical, nocturnal part of him that was always in tension with the blazing light of science and history that he indulged in so fully in Italy.

Her intuition was spot on. He responded as a mature human being and as a poet. He showed that he had read her text with the same intensity that had inspired it and proceeded to reply by rewriting ‘An den Mond’, thereby producing the version that was later published. Her accusations are left to stand on their own terms and many of her images and phrases are taken over directly to create an amazing balance of confession, regret, gratitude and celebration.

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[1] There is a full discussion of Charlotte von Stein’s role in the writing of ‘An den Mond’ in Markus Wallenborn, Frauen. Dichten. Goethe. Die produktive Goethe-Rezeption bei Charlotte von Stein, Marianne von Willemer und Bettina von Arnim  Tübingen 2006

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The three versions of the text

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The text

The ‘du’, the ‘you’ being addressed by the speaker here, appears to be rather fluid. It is a poem ‘to the moon’ but in the second half of the text it is the river that is being spoken to directly. The shift from moon to river comes about through seeing the full moon as an eye, which both ‘spreads its glance’ and produces tears which mix in with the flowing stream. The moonlight that fills the woods and valley is a ‘Nebelglanz’, a watery or misty act of looking. The friend that is looking out has eyes wet from tears, just as the light that fills the valley is distorted by mist.

Other senses are at work in addition to eye-sight. There is sound, but we are never very sure how loud it is. The river is told to ‘roar on’, but the verb ‘rauschen’ can cover a wide range of flowing sonic effects, from the gentle rustling or babbling of a spring (perhaps hinted at in the ‘whispering’ that helps the poet sing his song) to the majestic roar of a waterfall or a flood (as when this river overflows on a winter night). There are echoes, but we do not exactly ‘hear’ these: ‘My heart feels each echo’ insists the speaker. This is about being open to inner rather than outer sensations. It is the heart that feels the reverberations of what has happened, and it is similarly in this enclosed and hidden space that something unnamed or inexpressible moves about at night ‘through the labyrinth of the breast’.

This ‘feeling’ (Jeden Nachklang fühlt mein Herz) itself echoes the ‘filling’ of the valley with the moonlight (Füllest wieder Busch und Tal still mit Nebelglanz). Other slight distortions in the sound of words add to the effect of echoes and transformations. The poet dithers or hovers between joy and pain (Wandle zwischen Freud und Schmerz), and is aware of something pacing about, restless, in the labyrinth within (Durch das Labyrinth der Brust wandelt in der Nacht). Unstated, but heard in the reverberations, is the verb ‘wandern’, wandering or travelling.

Does the agitated spirit want to move off with the river, to wander around in the open world, or to rest in safety, enclosed and secure? In what sense has the moon both ‘finally’ and ‘once again’ set the speaker’s soul free? How does this relate to people locking themselves off from the world without hatred (stanza 8)? In a world where the river is never still and the poet knows that he will never be cheerful again, the memory of what he once possessed and has now lost causes relentless agony. The cluster of images about enclosure and liberation serves to highlight the speaker’s lack of certainty about his status; he is hovering between freedom and imprisonment, between pleasure and pain. Despite the assurance in the first stanza that the speaker’s soul has finally been released we are left at the end of the poem wondering if the wandering and hovering will ever end.

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Original Spelling

An den Mond

Füllest wieder Busch und Tal
Still mit Nebelglanz,
Lösest endlich auch einmal
Meine Seele ganz;

Breitest über mein Gefild
Lindernd deinen Blick,
Wie des Freundes Auge mild
Über mein Geschick.

Jeden Nachklang fühlt mein Herz
Froh- und trüber Zeit,
Wandle zwischen Freud´ und Schmerz
In der Einsamkeit.

Fließe, fließe, lieber Fluß!
Nimmer werd´ ich froh;
So verrauschte Scherz und Kuß,
Und die Treue so.

Ich besaß es doch einmal,
Was so köstlich ist!
Daß man doch zu seiner Qual
Nimmer es vergißt!

Rausche, Fluß, das Tal entlang,
Ohne Rast und Ruh,
Rausche, flüstre meinem Sang
Melodien zu,

Wenn du in der Winternacht
Wüthend überschwillst,
Oder um die Frühlingspracht
Junger Knospen quillst.

Selig, wer sich vor der Welt
Ohne Haß verschließt,
Einen Freund am Busen hält
Und mit dem genießt,

Was, von Menschen nicht gewußt
Oder nicht bedacht,
Durch das Labyrinth der Brust
Wandelt in der Nacht.

Confirmed by Peter Rastl with Schubert’s source, Goethe’s sämmtliche Schriften. Siebenter Band. / Gedichte von Goethe. Erster Theil. Lyrische Gedichte. Wien, 1810. Verlegt bey Anton Strauß. In Commission bey Geistinger, pages 89-90; with Goethe’s Werke, Vollständige Ausgabe letzter Hand, Erster Band, Stuttgart und Tübingen, in der J.G.Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1827, pages 111-112; and with Goethe’s Schriften, Achter Band, Leipzig, bey Georg Joachim Göschen, 1789, pages 153-154.

To see an early edition of the text, go to page 89 [103 von 418] here: http://digital.onb.ac.at/OnbViewer/viewer.faces?doc=ABO_%2BZ163965701