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“Selige Sehnsucht” and Goethean Enlightenment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Robert Ellis Dye
Robert Ellis Dye*
Affiliation:
Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota
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Abstract

Goethe's poem “Selige Sehnsucht” has been variously interpreted in the light of different readers' notions of what is characteristically “Goethean.” This essay examines syntactic, semantic, and rhetorical ambiguities in the poem and adds to the variety of interpretations by suggesting that the opening lines' elitist restriction of the message to “none but the wise” is, ironically, democratic and that the familiar closing maxim discriminates not between “us” and “them” but between “before” and “after”—between blessed, half-blind (“trübe”) desire and a brilliant fulfillment potentially in store for everyone. Goethean enlightenment, like irony, is indirect. Temporarily obfuscating, it promises—beyond time and selfhood—a consummate unitary illumination.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 104 , Issue 2 , March 1989 , pp. 190 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1989

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