Novalis First Hymn to the Night

Friedrich von Hardenberg, who adopted the name Novalis, was one of the chief figures of German Romanticism. When he was twenty-two, he fell in love with the twelve-year-old Sophie von Kühn. After she died at the age of fifteen, he made his passion the basis of a love religion in which the beloved, like Jesus, mediates between the worshipper and the divine. His Hymns to the Night were composed, partly in prose, partly in a rhapsodic sort of free verse, shortly thereafter and published in the Schlegel brothers’ journal Athenaeum. His incomplete novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen uses the image of the “blue flower,” a symbol that became an emblem for von Chamisso and von Eichendorf among others. By the spring of 1968, what had been radical to the Romantics had become academic in the eyes of young leftists who used the slogan “Schlagt die Germanistik tot, färbt die blaue Blume rot!” (“Kill German studies, color the blue flower red!”). Novalis died, like his dear Sophie, of tuberculosis, at the age of twenty-eight shortly after publishing the Hymns to the Night. Typically, he uses the image of descent and praises the dark while chasing after the sublime. As Wagner had it in Tristan und Isolde: “to drown,/ to founder -/ unconscious -/ utmost joy!” [“ertrinken,/ versinken, -/ unbewusst, -/ höchste Lust!”] Liebestod/ yang and yin inseparable. What living thing, gifted with senses, does not love more than all the manifested marvels of the world spread before him, the all-joyful light, with its beams and waves, its colors, its mild ubiquity in daytime? As the most secret soul of life it is inhaled by the great world of restless constellations that swim in their blue sea, by the glittering stone, the peaceful plant, and by the evermoving polymorphous multiform energy of animals. It is breathed too by varicolored clouds and winds and most of all by the splendid alien with thoughtful eyes, a swinging gait, and speaking mouth. Like a king of earthly nature it calls all energy to countless eternal metamorphosis, and its presence alone opens the wondrous miracle of this earthly realm. Downwards I make my way to the holy ineffable night full of secrets -- the world is far away as though sunk in a deep grave -- a barren and a lonely place! Deep depression plucks my heartstrings, distant memory traces arise, desires of youth, dreams of childhood – brief joys and vain hopes from an entire long life approach in grey gowns like evening fog after the sun goes down. The world is then far off with its bright delights. In other realms the light still pitches its breezy camp. And – if it never returned to its loving children, its gardens, its marvelous house? Yet what gushes, so cool and refreshing, liquid vengeance to our hearts and swallows the soft air of sadness? Have you, too, a human heart, dark night? What do you hold under your coat, unseen but strong, that touches my soul? Your seem to be afraid – priceless balm trickles from your hand, from a bouquet of poppies. In sweet intoxication you unfold the mind’s heavy wings and give us joy, dark and inexpressible, joy as secret as you yourself, a presentiment of heaven. How poor and childish seems light then to me with its colorful things. How delightful and blessed the departure of day. It must only be because night comes between you and your minions that you sow the vastness of space with shining spheres to broadcast your omnipotence and promise your return even in the time of your absence. More celestial than those twinkling stars in the vastness are the eyes of eternity opened in us only by the night. They see farther than the palest of that countless host. Needing no light they see through the depths of a loving heart that fills a space more sublime with unspeakable ecstasy. All praise to the world’s queen, the high herald of the divine world, the one who tends to blessed love – you’re coming, my lover – the night is here, my soul is rapt, the earthly way is done and you are mine again. I look into your deep dark eyes, see only love and blessedness – we sink on night’s altar, on a soft bed – the veil falls, and, kindled by your warm embrace, there gleams the pure glow of sweetest sacrifice.