Erika Burkart's "Vita", which first appeared in the poetry collection "Das Spätekennen derzeichen", enters into a dialogue with Eduard Mörike's "The Abandoned Girl" from 1829. Mörike's poem about a disappointed love describes a morning scene.
A maid lights the fire in the hearth “early in the morning, when the roosters crow” and, looking at the flying sparks, remembers the nightly dream of a “faithless boy” who left her, about which she wept bitterly: “Tear after tear then / fall down;
/ So the day is coming – / O he went again!“.
In "Vita" too, a new day begins with the "early morning twilight".
But the affix "zwie", which describes the light exactly on the vertex between night and day, evokes an ambivalence that was prepared for by the first verses: the speaking I perceives its body as foreign.
The inversion: "I have become a foreign body / I remember" syntactically reproduces this, as does the word order of the verses: "There I was once / one with my seeing and hearing, speaking and walking" a past, contrastive state of agreement realized syntactically harmoniously between body and mind.
The combination of the “early morning twilight” with the self-description “mood and hair dusty”, with the dying sparks, the ash “rattled and scraped through the grate”, reflects the inner feeling of the speaker’s ego on the outside.
The robinia in the window, only remembered, "Prince into old age, ossified and bald, perch of the crows", suggests that the voice that speaks here belongs to a much older woman than that of Mörike's maid.
It is the voice of a woman whose life is drawing to a close, an impression reinforced by images of ash, of crows landing on 'winter meadows' and 'fog steaming floes'.
Until the arrow of love follows the arrow of death
One could imagine the person speaking here corresponding to pictorial representations of the third age of a woman, as she encounters “The Three Ages and Death” from Hans Baldung Grien around 1509/10 or Gustav Klimt’s “The Three Ages of a Woman” from 1905 : as a woman, ossified and bald, resembling the felled black locust in the poem, but as the "home of the crows" still a haven of life.
The first verse of the last stanza "Hahne, Mörike!
Don't crow anymore" finally refers explicitly to "The abandoned girl" as the pretext of "Vita".
With this reference, the difference between the young lover and the elderly woman speaking here becomes even more pressing.
But despite the current foreignness of the aged self and although the poem plays with the colloquial expression "no cock crows for her" in a mildly ironic way, the speaker feels her vitality as one that exceeds her own will.
"The yellow, the white ashes" may remind us of the irretrievably past, of the liturgical burial formula "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust", but the speaker applies - or even more so - the command to "light the fire". to receive light and warmth until the arrow of love is followed by the arrow of death of the "head forester",
"Vita" is a memento mori, characterized by no longer romantic, but sober tenderness in tone and look and quiet tenacity in clinging to everyday actions. Burkart's lyrical exercise chooses life in the sense of a résumé, including the course of a holy life, as the title .
It becomes the aging poet's commitment to her writing existence in dialogue with nature and literary precursors.
The poem rebels, as gently as it is insightful, against mortality, which the author had clearly become aware of from an early age: After Burkart had suffered a heart attack in 1953, which forced her to give up her day job as a teacher, she lived from then on in the free in in the Aargau countryside, which her father bought in the 1920s after an unsettled time as a big game hunter in Latin America.
Erika Burkart died on April 14, 2010, after decades of immense literary productivity.
Her husband Ernst Halter has been looking after the estate ever since.
The volume "Spiegelschrift", published in 2022, brings together a selection from Burkart's lyrical work, in which "Vita" was also included.