After tiring of the television I picked up a violin again with the most moderate imaginable success, and eventually went to sleep. Now I'm awake again.

Then, because it is Easter and bells are a symbol of the feast, I wanted to write about Schiller's poem "Das Lied von der Glocke" for the "Lighthouse." Since it isn't turning out the way I want, I will post it in Hermitologies as an unfinished fragment with no literary pretensions. I didn't consult a dictionary, either, so the translations are totally unreliable. Sorry for the lousiness.

***

"The Song of the Bell"

First published: 1798

WHEN I was twelve years old or so my grandfather taught my sister and me a little German grammar and literature. Among other things Opapa read Schiller's "Lied von der Glocke" with us, and I liked it very much. Now it feels didactic and a little consciously quaint, but it has a purity of language that is quite classical as well as an informality of subject and diction that already feel romantic.

It traces the casting of a church bell, and describes in poetic terms the manufacture and its purpose once it is finished and hung in the tower (and I think it is very suited to Easter because of the association of the feast with bells in Italy and France).

After a Latin epigraph whose emphases echo the ringing of the bells — toll . . . toll . . . — it begins,

Fest gemauert in der Erden
Steht die Form, aus Lehm gebrannt.
Heute muß die Glocke werden.

"Firmly walled within the earths there stands the mold of fired clay; on this day the bell must be."

The bronze is formed from liquid tin and copper, ash salts are added and the foam removed so that the bell will have a clear tone as the dry fir wood heats the whole, and the workers are sweating like pigs.

Schiller reminds us of the higher purpose of these proceedings:

Soll das Werk den Meister loben,
Doch der Segen kommt von oben.

In other words, the work should sound its master's praises, and yet the blessing comes from heaven.

If I understand the lines he idealizes manual labour in general, arguing that it invariably has a purpose and that any man who does not work meditatively is degraded. Schiller doesn't do much for the repute of poets as pragmatic individuals who understand the realities of the labour here.

A church bell is admittedly lofty in more than the physical sense. It will persist (if providence permits) for centuries, and

rühren vieler Menschen Ohr
Und wird mit dem Betrübten klagen
Und stimmen zu der Andacht Chor.
Was unten tief dem Erdensohne
Das wechselnde Verhängnis bringt,
Das schlägt an die metallne Krone,
Die es erbaulich weiterklingt.

"touch the ear of many men and lament with those who live in grief and sound with the choir to the prayer. What to the sons of earth below the varying fates and destiny brings, that beats against the metal crown which it most usefully further rings." ("Erbaulich" is much like the modern word "constructive" — though I put it as "usefully" — and similarly pedantic.)

Then the narrator follows the fate of an ideal baby whose arrival and every subsequent epochal moment of life is celebrated by the bell. Schiller is drippingly sappy when the baby grows into the age of romance:

herrlich, in der Jugend Prangen,
Wie ein Gebild aus Himmelshöhn,
Mit züchtigen, verschämten Wangen
Sieht er die Jungfrau vor sich stehn.

"Glorious in the pomp of youth, like a presentment from heavenly heights, with decorously shameful cheeks he sees the maiden before him stand."

Bleaugh.

After the nuptials we revisit the bell. You poke in a stick of wood; if it comes out of the liquid bronze with a glassy coat it is time to pour the bronze into the mold.

Then the metonymous baby marries, as Schiller declares that an alliance of feeble (femininity?) and strong (masculinity?) is the ideal. The family flourishes and is from the sounds of it painfully bourgeois, though as Schiller points out fortune is fickle and they may yet be poor.

As the bronze is poured into the mold, at last and amid anxieties about its propensities to break, Schiller philosophizes about fire. Fire is good for humanity if we tame it and bad if we do not, etc. Any retelling of the Prometheus myth, however simplified, already has this truism covered, I think.

In Schiller's case it appears to be a metaphor for human passions, and he admonishes the reader to keep a tight rein on it, be decorous all the time, and keep the will of heaven always in mind. Otherwise God will unleash destruction upon him:

Leergebrannt
Ist die Stätte,
Wilder Stürme rauhes Bette,
In den öden Fensterhöhlen
Wohnt das Grauen,
Und des Himmels Wolken schauen
Hoch hinein.

. . .

Needless to say, Schiller's conception of religion pretty much does nothing for me, and it seems consciously folksy and naïve.

. . .

A major charm of the poem — as the relevant article at a certain online encyclopaedia states — is that it has a clear narrative, so that even a grade-schooler like I was can like it; besides it is feels like an atmospheric vignette of German society in terms of the late 18th-century ideal as well as of the historical setting, which is particularly useful as a kind of verbal illustration if one lives as I did in relatively ahistorical und un-Teutonic places where churches with bell towers are rare birds. It is left to adults to speculate on the full and finer significance of the poet's thought.