NEGATIVE SPRING: THE CRISIS OF BELIEF AND THE CONTINUITY OF A POETIC IMAGE

When Schiller's "sentimentalische Dichter" do not respond to spring in the traditionally positive mood, we frequently find the "negative spring" image (examples: Clemens Brentano's "Fruhlingsschrei eines Knechtes aus der Tiefe"; T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land). It begins to appear regularly in seventeenth-century northern European literature in response to earlier religious discord and the era's scientific discoveries. Pascal and Gryphius are prototypes; in both their lives a personal crisis may function as a catalyst. Certain modern poets' work repeats this basic schema; they normally also display a sympathetic interest in seventeenth-century literature. In Brentano the image introduces an extended pattern, a quest for security leading from despair (negative spring) through purgatorial deserts to a springtime garden entered across a significant Schwelle. Nikolaus Lenau offers a similar pattern with only slightly different individual elements; for both poets a great love is instrumental in transforming spring's negation into joyous affirmation. Giacomo Leopardi shares Lenau's existential despair; his case shows that negative spring makes the same statement under similar emotional and intellectual conditions despite rigid Roman Catholic tradition. Rilke's "Worpswede" essay analyzes the poet's break with nature and spring as a process that began in the seventeenth century. Life-bringing spring rains become a central poetic image in Rilke's personal mythology created to restore meaning to spring. Eliot's pattern is remarkably similar to Brentano's, from negative spring to an eternal rose-garden. Both also wrote a poem ("Marina") that enunciates their vision of the garden and spring redeemed. Despite sometimes uncanny similarities linking all these cases, it is impossible to establish conscious influences. The image is an unconscious tradition extending back to the seventeenth century. Then as now it emerges as a reliable symbolic formulation of despair or a crisis of belief.