Idyll and Elegy: Mörike's 'Besuch in der Carthause'

Abstract

Mörike's late poem 'Besuch in der Carthause' (1861), an elegant and witty narrative poem in iambic hexameters, has suffered remarkable neglect, perhaps due to its having been mistaken for a piece of biography, or to uncertainty about its generic status, or a feeling that it is too long for its witty pointe. While it combines the idyllic and the elegiac modes, it also carries the subtitle 'Epistel', and can be seen to have an important relationship to Horace's satires and epistles. What has always been taken to be the pointe of the poem — a jocular warning that to try ignoring the fact of our mortality is fruitless — can be shown, once the poem is no longer seen as simply endorsing its narrator's view, and once the significance of the central character, the Carthusian procurator, and the central symbol, the clock, have been understood, as having a very different message about the loss of balance in the modern world and the need to regard changes and apparent advancements as themselves subject to the undermining power of time.