A blossom speaks to the tree on which it hangs.
In the ups and downs of the iambus, sometimes three, sometimes five, she describes the well-being of her airy existence.
It is based on a balance between freedom and closeness;
mild winds move the branch, and yet the blossom feels safe in the green bed.
As at the mother's breast, one might say in view of the erotic associations that pervade the first part of the poem: there is talk of "waves of love" and the "desire" to "snuggle up" to the "body" of the person addressed.
Somewhat unusual, such a view of the relationship between blossom and tree as a love affair!
The poem takes a more familiar turn when the second half evokes the changing of the seasons.
The flowering period is limited;
it will become fruit and fall off.
The tree should not be sad about this, it says with a surprising twist: Instead of fearing "bitter weaning", it can console itself with the prospect of a return of the lost blossom: namely as a partner tree (comrade) at its side.
In the printed version of his originally untitled poem, which appeared five years later in Kerner, Fouqué and Uhland’s “Deutscher Dichterwald” (1813) under the heading “The blossom on the tree”, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense (1785 to 1858) published the Oddities of its design mitigated.
The eroticism is toned down and the line "snuggle up to your body" is replaced (with: "Then fly back up into the blue air").
Now it is no longer the tree, but the autumnal fruit that could give way to anxious thoughts of the imminent “separation”.
She consoles herself, so to speak, with the prospect of a future community of green growth.
The poem has certainly gained in coherence as a result, but at the same time it has lost its psychological significance and dynamics.
Safe in the green bed
Because at the original place, under the date of October 15, 1808 in Varnhagen's travel diary of his journey of several weeks from Berlin via Dresden and Nuremberg to the (never completed) completion of his medical studies in Tübingen, it had a very precise function: it presented the direct answer a letter from Rahel Levin, with whom he had met shortly before in Leipzig.
His later wife, who was fourteen years his senior and with whom he had been in a close relationship since the spring, had every reason to fear that Varnhagen, with this study trip, which was to merge fairly seamlessly into his voluntary participation in Austria's war against Napoleon, was worryingly far from her would remove.
Encouraged by the last get-together, she nonetheless pointed out in her first letter after returning to Berlin on August 8.
October 1808 every “sickly clinging” far from himself: “I have the courage to lose you too, and to live on.
Only because of you can I lose you.
And then it's right.
Then you fall away from me like a blossom falls from a tree: that's bad, but you can't stop it.
stay you airy flower;
the most natural weather makes me happy or not;
I, the tree, also want to endure the winter.
Stay flower and free: that's how I accepted you!
No cramp, no more forced!”
Stay flower and free: that's how I accepted you!
No cramp, no more forced!”
Stay flower and free: that's how I accepted you!
No cramp, no more forced!”
Varnhagen takes up this parable gratefully in his poem.
He thanks the “tree” Rahel, who appears in his verses half as mother and half as lover, for last summer's erotic closeness.
As the autumn leaves for the Tübingen winter semester, the twenty-three-year-old responds directly to the fears that Rahel's letter so resolutely suppresses.
This blossom will not flutter away indefinitely, but after an unavoidable growth process settle in close proximity: less as an offspring than as a life partner - as a table and "green" bed "companion" at eye level.
He just has to grow up to her first.
That a man writes something like this to a woman or writes poetry for her is not only something special in 1808.
But the woman's name was also Rachel.