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Eight Poem From Stefan George's Das Buch Der Safrangenden Gärten

Decent Essays

“Meine weissen ara haben safrangelbe kronen” is the eighth poem from Stefan George’s Das Buch der hängenden Gärten. It is followed by two of the collection’s four poems with individual titles, “Vorbereitungen” (Preparations) and “Friedensabend” (Peaceful Evening), and the fifteen poems in the central section of the Buch that George’s friend and muse Ida Coblenz called Semiramis-Lieder and that were set to music by Arnold Schönberg.
In the poem, the speaker tells about his macaws that sleep in their cage. They never sing or fly, but according to the speaker, they dream of the date trees that are far away. Waters (2005) calls this “another image of royal and exotic birds that varies this recurring picture of a painful and insuperable divide between art and life. […] Rare, isolated from the world, crowned, and arranged “in schlanken ringen,” the parrots epitomize a realm of formal aesthetics […] [D]ozing, they nod, as if assenting to their confinement for beauty’s sake.” …show more content…

This shape points at the two middle verses, which emphasise the macaws’ passivity. Enjambments connect the second to fourth and the seventh and eighth verses. Hence, the flow stops in the middle of the poem, especially in the fourth verse which is interrupted by a caesura. Both the fourth and fifth verse are not only end-stopped but also stressed on the last syllable and thus further highlighted. The rhyme scheme of two rhyming couplets enclosing an enclosed rhyme (aabccbdd) points again towards the middle of the poem in addition to mirroring the birds’

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