Winterreise
Today we pause to hear the solar rage
Of wind above the spars,
To watch the planet’s massive gauge
Align itself with stars,
The way that music clocks the winter
Down an icicle’s long limb,
And cloaks the graupel feathers
On our cabin’s metal trim
With musical rosettas
That let the world in
To merely human dramas,
To the season’s frozen weirs
That wind the stream together
With our flapping adult gears,
So our bloody flag of time and age
Hangs the clothesline in its page.
Redone January 11th, 2022
Kaiholu
Explanation
The poem is based on Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, a winter ride. Schubert’s cycle was based on the poems of Wilhelm Müller, which narrate a journey through the winter of the soul by a rejected lover. The music Schubert wrote to this evokes that psychological winter: a frozen river, frost on a windowpane, a melting icicle, despair.
The poem “Winterreise” describes how music, blizzards, and the human clockwork of Schubert’s grief work together to illuminate the weather. It describes the opposite of a pathetic fallacy (where we derive substance from a storm, and the rain outside empathises with our tears).
In “Winterreise,” the storm derives substance from us, from our ability to integrate the clockwork of cosmic gears with the frequencies of a violin. We can extract metaphors from blizzards, and it is this observation principle, the presence of the genome, that creates the direction in which atoms flow, or the whiteness of the blizzard. It is our ability to describe the world, whether in the mechanics of music or in quantum mechanics, which creates it.
Caspar David Friedrich painted Romantic landscapes of despair, in which human figures are small, abandoned. Ruins and mountains are swirled round with winter and aridity.
It is Caspar Friedrich’s Wanderer who creates his own view, as the Victorian concept of the Lorrain glass turned panoramas into a mirror which we held up to nature. To see the mirror view, we had to turn or back on nature, and manipulate the frame to get just the landscape we had imagined. As Oscar Wilde said, “Wordsworth found in stones precisely the sermons he has already hidden there.”