Published in her volume My Miracles, Leise Sagen (“Say It Softly—”) embodies Lasker-Schüler’s greatest expressionist achievements. She combines extraordinary, unconventional imagery with simplicity of form to render love as both spirited frisson and melancholic surrender. The title, along with its distinguishable poetic subject and addressee, posits a conception of the poem as intimate space, casting the reader at once as welcomed listener and awkward interloper.

“You took for yourself all the stars / Above my heart.” In the first couplet of this love poem, Lasker-Schüler already makes use of stars and hearts—symbols that recur throughout her lyrical work. These symbols, far from giving shape to an intimate setting of union, however, signal an act of violation, while at the same time evoking an intense visual shift from light to darkness.

This image prefigures Lasker-Schüler’s perception of the twin dimensions of love—at once joyful, impulsive, and frenetic, while also demanding and depleting. The following couplet, with its astonishingly evocative verse “My thoughts are curling,” conveys playful glee, only to be followed by verses that reveal a countervailing force that renders desire exhausting and almost unmanageable.

The expressiveness of the usual noun-verb pairings is exemplified once more with the image of the archangel’s eyes that, once stolen, serve not as something with which to see, nor to be looked into, but as objects for consumption: “I nibble on the honey / Of their blueness.” More precisely, their blueness is enjoyed with the sense of taste.

The relationship established in the poem’s beginning couplets sustains a sense of the lover as both frenetic and submissive; that is, the first five verses sit as if temporally or causally independent of one another, unconnected by conjunctions, adverbs, or punctuation, almost as if interchangeable. Love appears at first to be less of a process and more a group of events unbounded by causality.

Just as the poem effects a subtle loosening of the chronology of erotic unfolding, it also appears to set into question the integrity of the poetic subject. Distinguished as the central couplet in the poem’s economy, the often-quoted verse “No more do I find my image / In the mirror of the streams” invites the reader to understand that along with this process of surrender in eroticism belongs the loss of self or, more accurately, the subject’s own failure to perceive self.

In a provocative twist, the poem’s two final couplets both reinforce and undermine the poetic subject’s sense of disintegrated self in love by attributing “substance” to the subject, while at the same time bearing witness to the subject’s deconstruction at the very moment of contact.

Leise sagen— became the center of a legal controversy when the newspaper Hamburger Blatt accompanied a printing of the poem with the disparaging characterization of Lasker-Schüler’s lyrical style: “a complete softening of the brain.” In defense of his wife, Herwarth Walden brought legal action against the newspaper and published a scathing piece in the July 1912 issue of his magazine Sturm (Storm), culminating with the declaration: “After all, art requires love” (“Deutsche Dichter und Deutsche Richter.” Der Sturm 3 (July 1912): 102–104).

Bibliography
Lasker-Schüler, Else. Your Diamond Dreams Cut Open My Arteries: Poems by Else Lasker-Schüler. Translated by Robert P. Newton. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982, 135.

Categories: German Literature, Literature, World Literature

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