Writing Birds, Butterflies, and Other Insects: Metaphors of Mortality and Metamorphosis in Eighteenth-Century Religious Literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT The mortality of man and the possibility of life after death are recurring themes in eighteenth-century German and Swiss literature. Animal imagery serves as an idiosyncratic poetic device for illustrating the inevitability and finality of death or the metamorphosis of the body in preparation for eternity. This article explores the functions of animal metaphors of mortality and metamorphosis in three eighteenth-century works of religious literature. Gessner’s epic poem Der Tod Abels (1758) describes how the discovery of a dead bird prompts Eve to reflect on her responsibility for human mortality. Klopstock’s hymnic poem ‘Die Frühlingsfeyer’ (1759) questions the impermanence of life by example of a little insect, the ‘Frühlingswürmchen’. In Lavater’s play Abraham und Isaak (1776), the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly proves that death is the threshold to eternity. The article offers a new perspective on the German-language tradition of Christian poetry and Bibeldichtung across literary genres and the role of animal imagery in it.