Meter and Time in Mörike's "Um Mitternacht"

Abstract

Meter and Time in Mörike's "Um Mitternacht" Márton Dornbach (bio) Gelassen stieg die Nacht ans Land,Lehnt träumend an der Berge Wand,Ihr Auge sieht die goldne Waage nunDer Zeit in gleichen Schalen stille ruhn; Und kecker rauschen die Quellen hervor, Sie singen der Mutter, der Nacht, ins Ohr Vom Tage, Vom heute gewesenen Tage. Das uralt alte Schlummerlied,Sie achtets nicht, sie ist es müd;Ihr klingt des Himmels Bläue süsser noch,Der flüchtgen Stunden gleichgeschwungnes Joch. Doch immer behalten die Quellen das Wort, Es singen die Wasser im Schlafe noch fort Vom Tage, Vom heute gewesenen Tage. (Mörike 55) Eduard Mörike's poem from 1827 belongs to a distinct class of lyric poetry whose defining characteristic is intricate formal order achieved within a restricted textual space. The intense formal organization of the poem is immediately evident in the musical effects produced by its metrical and phonological patterns. Yet Mörike's poem does not only realize formal order through its aesthetic qualities. It also foregrounds the problematic of order through the concept of mid-point implicit in the title, the allegorization of symmetry in the parallel images of the scale and the yoke, and the precise parallelism between the two [End Page 639] stanzas. Even in an initial approach to the poem, moreover, one is liable to make a third observation as well, which concerns the thematic focus of the poem: cryptic though it may be, "Um Mitternacht" is clearly a meditation on time. In what follows, I take my point of departure from these readily apparent features. If the resultant interpretation turns on observations about various patterns, this is not because formal analysis offers a universal methodological key but because a work that so saliently articulates and thematizes order calls for such an approach. Following an initial exposition of the order types superimposed in the poem, I give a fine-grained, and inevitably somewhat technical, analysis of its locally deployed metrical and phonological patterns. This account will seek to do justice to the phenomenology of reading and re-reading; and it may in the end, if it succeeds, even enrich that phenomenology. Guided by the formal-phenomenological account developed in the first half of this essay, the second half will develop a philosophical reflection on time invited by Mörike's poem. Order Types as Models of Time The ambiguous temporal determination of the title—at or around midnight—leaves the poem suspended between a discrete temporal marking and an extended temporal continuum. The poem situates the pivotal moment of midnight in a process that begins with the recollected arrival of the night and ends with the indefinitely continuing singing of the springs. Superimposed upon this narrative progression is a formal parallelism between the two stanzas, which is made immediately conspicuous by the typographic presentation. Both stanzas begin with two couplets in iambic tetrameter, continue with a couplet composed in a less metrically regular pentameter, and conclude with a refrain that is clearly set off from the rest of the text. This formal parallelism can be schematically represented as follows: [4, 2, 2 / 4, 2, 2]. At first glance, the thematic structure of the poem would seem to follow the same parallelism, since the image of the night in the first half of each strophe is contrapuntally answered (Hötzer 201) by the voice of the springs in the second. On closer examination, however, the thematic structure of the poem turns out to be ambiguous. Notice, first of all, that the first four lines portray the mythological figure of the night without any relation to the springs, whereas the last four lines evoke the springs without any relation to the night. In a perceptive psychoanalytic interpretation, Jutta Matzner-Eicke proposes [End Page 640] that the poem is concerned with two types of dreaminess: the night's oblivious, objectless dreaming and the "healing" dreaming of the springs, which symbolically processes inner and outer realities and thereby allows for a future (Matzner-Eicke 90). However, the poem does not merely describe the self-absorption of these two poles. Rather, it also performs self-absorption through the hermetic opacity...