George’s Waller im Schnee starts with “Die steine die in meiner strasse staken”, which like all poems in the season collections of Das Jahr der Seele has no title. The poem describes a landscape in winter and a speaker who wanders alone in the cold. It addresses the speaker’s death wish and his will to find shelter once again as hope might be closer than expected.
Its rhyme scheme and content divide the poem into three parts. In George’s literary magazine Blätter für die Kunst, it was printed with three stanzas, the second of which contained two additional verses. The manuscript, on which the private edition of 1897 was based, divided the poem into four quatrains, probably to create a visual match to the surrounding poems. Both the private and the public editions adopted this layout with four stanzas. I base my analysis on the form with three stanzas that can be found in the collected edition of George’s work. Therefore, I do not agree with Simon (2011), who claims that the rhyme scheme translates terza rima into quatrains and that the resulting asymmetry generates an internal resistance. In my view, two sextains with the regular rhyme scheme abc abc (or fgh fgh) frame a quatrain of alternate
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However, the winds hit the speaker only gently (“gelinde”, v. 12). Thus, he has the possibility to reconsider. There might still be hope as described in the three last verses. The poem is written in regular iambic pentameter with the thirteenth verse as the only exception. Here, the reader perceives the start to be dactylic with an upbeat as “einmal” is stressed on the first syllable. It seems as if the speaker is shaken awake from his death wish at that moment. Instead of giving himself up to the elements, he once again tries to find