Johannes Schlaf's Poem 'Waldsonne'

“Waldsonne” is taken from Johannes Schlaf’s volume of poetry helldunkel from 1899. It is the first poem of the two-poem cycle “Eine Liebe” (One Love). The other one, “Abendgang” (Walk in the Evening), describes how the speaker and a young girl stroll into the evening where golden violins play softly in the sky. It is followed by another cycle with the title “Eine andere Liebe” (Another Love), in which a different relationship is explored in three poems that describe how love has turned into hatred but is perhaps not entirely lost. Like “Erwartung”, “Waldsonne” conveys the impression of a moment. The poem captures the atmosphere of a sunlit forest and elaborates on how it affects the speaker and evokes memories of a former love. It consists …show more content…
The first stanza introduces the predominant brown, green and golden tones as it describes the special light that occurs when the sun shines through the trees in a forest. The speaker’s surroundings are characterised as “brown, rustling nights” (v. 1). Although the sun is only mentioned in the title of the poem, the green-golden light (v. 3) implies that it is not actually night. The image might convey the darkness and loneliness of the forest. The colour brown is a symbol of ageing, maturity and transience and might indicate that it is autumn. The adjective “rauschend” could refer to the rustling of leaves in the wind. Throughout the poem, vowel sounds are more significant than metre in conveying the atmosphere. The assonance “braunen, rauschenden” (v.1) hints at the speaker’s excitement or emotional turmoil. The darker diphthongs contrast with the light [aɪ̯]- and [ɪ]-sounds of the second verse, which emphasise how small the rays of light are that barely manage to shimmer through the trees. The vowels of the third verse convey the warmth of the …show more content…
Alliterations in the fourth (Blumen blinken) and fifth verse (Waldwässerlein) highlight the beauty of the scene. The accumulation of conjunctions increases the tension and underlines the speaker’s awe. The internal rhyme “singenden, springenden”, which is composed of two buoyant dactyls, mirrors the light and playful movements of the water. While the speaker glances over the sunlit details, memories are triggered that cause him or her to get lost in thought. Due to dashes in the sixth verse and the length of the noun “Erinnerungen”, the only pentasyllabic word of the poem, the tension decreases