Hymns to the Night
George MacDonald's English version of the six Hymns to the Night, Novalis's prose and verse poems on love, death and the dark.
What this poem is
Hymns to the Night (Hymnen an die Nacht) is a set of six prose poems written by the German Romantic poet Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg) and published in 1800. The poems were written in response to the death of Novalis' fiance, Sophie von Kuehn, in 1797.
The poems are written in the first person and the main focus is Novalis' grief over the death of his fiance. The third poem contains phrases directly lifted from Novalis' 1797 diary entries.
Like some of his other works, the Hymns contain elements of Christian thought; Novalis inserts several metaphors to Christian divinity and the fifth poem directly concerns Christianity's central figure, Jesus Christ. German Romanticism was influenced by Christian mysticism.
Hymns to the Night concerns itself with the threshold between life and death, which Novalis describes using the metaphor of the night. The poem contains passages about light, night as a maternal figure, and sleep and dreams.
Adapted from the Wikipedia article “Hymns to the Night” (revision 1360689906), used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Laurel's own notes and measurements are not from Wikipedia.
Measured across the book
Across its 60 lines, 92% of stressed syllables fall on the beat (95% interval 88% to 96%). Alliteration runs at 0.94 times what shuffling the words would give (0.22 observed against 0.23 expected). 33% of the lines have a feminine ending.
Baselines and intervals are described in the methods.
Contents
About this text
Public domain. Text from Rampolli: Growths from a Long-Planted Root (Hymns to the Night only), Project Gutenberg ebook #8949. Free to read, print, copy and reuse.