Sommermüd Poem Analysis

Not much is known about the German author Jakob (born: Johann Franz Albert) Haringer (1898-1948). He was unconventional, obstinate and outspoken, and enjoyed duping his contemporaries with fictional details regarding his life and his works. Since the 1920s he lived the life of a vagrant, because he was wanted by the police for a customs offence and later for several other offences, among others blasphemy. He was committed to several mental institutions . His work consists mainly of poetry and is very uneven in style and level. He wrote how he felt, and thus his work fluctuates between deep melancholy, lamenting his destiny and savage rants against God and the bourgeois institutions he hated. Some of his poetry is reminiscent of old folk songs;

Although it is written in one piece, syntactically and semantically, it can be divided into three stanzas of four verses. This corresponds with the rhyme scheme xaxa xbxb xcxc. The first two verses of each stanza are end-stopped, whereas the third and fourth verse are enjambed. The whole poem is structured as a logical argument with the two first stanzas presenting the premises in one sentence each and the third stanza deriving a conclusion. The conjunction “Wenn” is ambiguous in German, as it can introduce temporal, conditional or concessive clauses. The connection with “schon” (already, yet; possibly also even) in the first verse and “dann” (then) in the fifth verse implies a temporal relation, but it is not impossible to interpret it as concessive (Even though you believe…) or conditional (If you believe…). The anaphoras “Wenn Du” (v. 1, 5) and “Es ist” (v. 2, 6) lend emphasis to the main statement of the two first stanzas that even when all seems lost, suddenly something good happens. The parallelism of the two first sentences smoothens the metre, thus making the statement more emphatic and persuasive. Each verse of the poem contains two to three primarily trisyllabic feet. The first and second stanza begin with a dactyl, whereas anapaests predominate in the second part of the two stanzas. The contrast between falling and rising metre underlines the contrast between

Not everyone is as lucky as you are. The ninth and tenth verse contain only monosyllabic words, almost as if the speaker attempts to carve in the message in the addressee’s brain. “Und sei still” (v. 9) separates the sentence “Drum dank Gott, daß Du noch lebst…“. This hyperbaton and the repetition of “noch” (v. 10) emphasise the conclusion further. Haringer managed to reuse the images of the first stanza very artistically. Life, death, kisses and stars appear again to support the conclusion. The metrical change at “ohne” (v. 11) and the alliteration “Stern/Sterben” (v. 11-12) lend emphasis to the speaker’s message of how lucky the addressee should feel. Like other poems by Haringer, “Sommermüd” ends without punctuation mark