Roman Elegies

The cycle has a spine, and the frame passes the subtractive test. The first elegy finds Rome mute until love opens it; the elegy of study by day and love by night joins the two halves of the argument; the elegy of the north sets the grey day against Roman light; the private bond deepens into something like a marriage under the gods; and the last poem admits that the secret will out. Remove the first elegy or the elegy of study and love and the book loses its argument. But a cycle of elegies is additive by nature, and the test bites in the middle: the allegorical pieces, Fama and Amor as rivals, Amor as the quarrelsome house guest, could go with little loss, and several middle elegies could change places without the book knowing anything different. Goethe’s own withholding of four poems shows that the set could shed members. Necessity sits in the frame and in perhaps half the poems, not in all twenty.

Score: 8.0 / 10

What the cycle brings into the open can be stated: that antiquity is not learned from stones and books alone but understood through a living body and a present love, and that sensual life is a mode of knowledge, not its enemy. The elegy of study and love says it outright and makes it hold, in a line that turns on itself: to see with a feeling eye and to feel with a seeing hand. More quietly the book discloses a man of forty coming into happiness late, and the cost of the northern, Protestant, courtly habit of mind that had kept it from him. These are meanings, not moods. Held at 8.0 because the disclosure is a single one, turned in many lights, and because the social condition the cycle presses against, the beloved’s position, money, rank and scandal, is glimpsed and declined rather than opened.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The register is warm elevation, frequent and steady, rarely high. The first elegy’s address to the stones and the high palaces rises, and the turn that closes it, that without love Rome would not be Rome, carries it. The elegy of the north reaches a quiet, smiling grandeur: the lover in Jupiter’s hall, begging to stay among the gods until Hermes leads him down past the tomb of Cestius. It is the nearest the book comes to the sublime. The night of love and verse is radiant rather than lofty. There is no terror here and little grief; the book chose happiness, and the elevation of contentment is real but lower than the summits. Height moderate and frequency good: that is what holds the axis at 7.8, below every figure but The Encompassed.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The gods are present throughout: Amor as guest, instructor and nuisance; the gods’ own quick and secret loves offered as precedent; Jupiter’s hall in the elegy of the north; the story of Midas at the close. Much of this is evoked, the learned furniture of Roman elegy, and allusion is not credited here. What is built is one thing: Rome itself made an erotic body, and the lover’s private union made the key to the classical world, so that the reading of ruins and the act of love become one rite. Faustine, the beloved, is a woman and a figure of the ancient city at once. That conjunction is load-bearing, but it is a single construction, and the archetype of the northern pilgrim made whole by the south is stated more than enacted. It bears in the frame and in a few elegies, not in every poem.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The inheritance is the Roman love elegy, Propertius above all, with Tibullus and Ovid; and in German, the hexameter and the distich as Klopstock and Voss had naturalised them, largely for sacred epic and for translation. The swerve: a modern poet writes his own love, in the first person, in the ancient couplet, frankly and happily. The genre’s suffering lover, Propertius bound to Cynthia, becomes a fulfilled one, and the measure itself becomes a matter of the body. The stake was real. Goethe’s open bond with Christiane Vulpius was a scandal the poems half confess, and four poems were held back from print as too frank, which marks the risk he judged. Held below 8.5 because the turn was made within a classicism the age was already reaching for, and because Goethe’s own greater departures lie elsewhere.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The distich is the instrument: the long hexameter that reaches out and the shorter pentameter that falls back give the cycle its rhythm of desire and rest, of looking and touching, and the book’s claim that antiquity is known through the body is made in the ancient body of verse. Its best-known image is the form knowing itself: the poet counting the measure of the hexameter with his fingers on his beloved’s back. In rhymed stanzas these poems would be a modern lover’s songs; in the couplet they are a citizen’s return to Rome. Held below the top because, once taken, the elegy form is a container across the middle pieces, where the allegories would sit as easily in another measure.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The yield is demonstrated. For two centuries the cycle has been read as the founding document of Goethe’s classicism, of his Italian turn, and of a German erotic poetry in the open. It has been reread through the biography, through the history of German metrics, through the reception of antiquity, and lately through the question of the beloved’s silence and her position. The four withheld elegies have kept a scholarly argument alive about what the cycle is. But the yield is concentrated in a few elegies and a few questions, and the poems do not open on return as the greatest lyric bodies do: their surface is their meaning, gracefully held. That concentration holds the axis at 8.0.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The field is German poetry of the late eighteenth century, with the classical revival in European letters behind it. Intrinsic force is high: the cycle shows that the classical couplet can carry living experience in German, and it sets the lyric programme of Weimar classicism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Schiller’s elegies, Der Spaziergang among them, Hölderlin’s Brod und Wein and Mörike’s classical measures stand in its line, and the erotic Rome of the northern pilgrim recurs through the next century. The reach is real but largely German. Outside German it is the reach of a famous work by a famous author, read in translation without redirecting a foreign field, and its delayed influence is little. The force runs ahead of the reach, and the two are scored together at 8.2.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The text survives whole, as Goethe published it in 1795 and kept it in his collected works, its metre revised by his own hand. It has stood for 231 years. The four poems withheld from the cycle were not lost but delayed, printed long after Goethe’s death: a change to what survives that adds rather than takes. In German its presence is continuous and general, in schools, anthologies and the collected works, and it has been widely translated, into English by David Luke among others. Outside German it is read mainly among readers of Goethe and in the academy, a narrower presence than that of Faust or Werther. The figure stands between the band for a text of centuries in general reading and the band for one read mainly by scholars: unbroken in its own language, academic abroad.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Command of the German distich at a level no German poet before Goethe had shown in this measure. The line moves easily; the syntax runs through the couplet and stops where the sense stops; the diction holds the colloquial, the tavern, the bed, the lamp, and the elevated, the Capitol and the gods, in one key. The first elegy’s double turn on Rome and love, and the movement from day to night and from book to body within a few couplets in the elegy of study, are making at a high level. The charge: German stress imitating classical quantity forces some lines; Goethe’s hexameters were faulted in his own time for laxness, and he revised the metre for the collected editions; and some of the allegorical pieces are merely deft. The faults are local. The command of movement and of mixed register is the substance of the axis, and it is high.

Score: 8.8 / 10

One law governs the whole: love makes Rome legible, and the classical world is entered through the present one. Take the two farthest elements, Jupiter’s radiant hall in the elegy of the north and the dry, sour joke about the one plague the lover fears, said obliquely: both obey the law, since both are the lover’s Rome seen from the bed and the street. The ironic pieces about Amor keep the same law in a comic key. The withheld Priapic frame would have widened the range; the published cycle is narrower, and the more consistent for it. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range here is moderate: no grief, and little of the world beyond the lovers and the ruins. That moderation holds the axis at 8.5.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged on what a cycle of twenty elegies holds. Consciousness, in the speaker’s joy and his northern past. Eros and the body, fully. History, as Rome’s ruins and the ancient poets read through them. Art, as study, sculpture and the making of verse. The city, its taverns, streets and seasons. The sacred, as the old gods made present in play. These orders are held together by one love, not listed. What holds the axis at 7.0, the lowest of the twelve, is what the cycle declines: the family and labour enter only at the edge, and the state is absent, as is the revolution that Goethe’s Venetian Epigrams would meet. The figure describes a lyric book that holds several orders and declines the rest; it is not a charge against its length.

Score: 7.0 / 10