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.Centripetal force draws humans away from themselves and toward God as the true center; like the sun, which provides energy for physical life, the divine love of God reaches out to humans and promotes spiritual growth.Humans are free to accept that love and prosper or succumb to centrifugal forces and perish in the abyss of their own earthliness.The movement, then, that is always present in his work can usually be recognized as either of these choices and thus a descent into the darkness of the base individual self and spiritual death or an ascent upward toward the heavenly source of love and eternal salvation.When Eichendorff speaks of love, however, it need not be of divine love; its uplifting power may also be that of human love, which by itself has none of the redeeming features of divine love and which leads to an ever-diminishing world of the self if it is not touched by the light and love of God.Such ill-starred love is treated in poems such as “Verlorene Liebe” (“Lost Love”) and particularly in the novella The Marble Statue.“MOONLIT NIGHT”One of Eichendorff’s most famous and beautiful lyrics, “Mondnacht” (“Moonlit Night”), might at first glance appear to be solely a nature poem, even though it is listed among the religious poems in his collected works.Viewed within the framework of the poet’s philosophy, the poem clearly appears to be an illustration of God’s loving gesture toward his earthly creations.Somewhat in the Homeric manner of not directly describing physical traits of objects but rather depicting subjective reactions to them, Eichendorff here shows the effect of Heaven’s kiss upon Earth and nature’s response to it.If one takes the sky or Heaven (the German word Himmel means both) as a representation of God, then one sees the spirit of God moving across the landscape; the rustling of the forests and the gently waving grain are manifestations of that movement.God’s creation, Earth, is visited by him and derives its beauty and holiness from that contact.The poem ends with the human reaction to such an association: The soul of the narrator moves through the quiet countryside in the presence of God’s spirit as though it were already flying home.That homeward journey is in ordinary Christian terms a return to heavenly origins.Eichendorff gives here an exceptionally effective poetic picture of heavenly love, the centripetal pull it exerts on God’s creation, the beauty it produces in the physical world, and the spiritual reply to that love in the soul of humans.It is likewise noteworthy that this occurs on a moonlit night; especially with Eichendorff, one must assume that the title of a poem is as important as the text itself and that the moonlight is a significant addition to the poem.Here the light of the moon serves the purpose of illuminating God’s moving spirit; were the night not moon-bright, the shimmer of blossoms and the billowing of the grain would not be visible to any human observer.What initially appears to be a magnificently executed nature description is thus demonstrated as being a poetic statement of God’s love, symbolized by the kiss of Heaven, reaching, like the moonlight, down to his creation, which in turn renders physical as well as spiritual evidence of the efficacy of that love.RECURRING MESSAGES AND IMAGERYEichendorff is sometimes criticized for his repetitiousness and lack of originality, but such objections lose their force with the realization that the poet, in service to his well-defined worldview, is constantly and deliberately reiterating, rephrasing, rearranging, and recombining his relatively few basic concepts in the manner of any dedicated teacher following the tradition of repetitio est mater studiorum.Eichendorff is not the aesthete who expresses himself in random variety, casting up beautiful images in a kind of verbal “light show” but rather the pedagogue who is “preaching with other means” the established religious convictions to which his ego and his poetic talents are subordinated and with which they are harmonized.He is a kind of religious philosopher who has achieved an exercise in the sublimation or apotheosis of his philosophy in and through his poetry as well as vice versa [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]