The Art Of Recitation And Declamation
GA 281 — 3 October 1915, Dornach
Lienhard Celebration
Recitation by Marie Steiner from “Poems” by Friedrich Lienhard
WHERE FROM? I don't know and can't find words,
Where my home is.
They stand tall and shine like candles
The birches down into May.
But I see out, as if lost,
Far away, somewhere else I am at home,
Far!... That homesickness that I cannot explain,
Those whispering questions in the firs
of a strange forest:Was I in ancient times
A knight on the rough sea?
Do I hear the great surf
Rushing in sorrowfully and heavily?
Did I fall in battle
For a granite possession?
Was my heroic galley
Smashed by wild lightning?Perhaps years ago I was
A fresh and vigorous lad;
A brooklet murmuring ran
Through a mill-bottom.
I have sat by it
In many a youthful carol,
While another, laughing, lay
In a different arm.
I know not and find no words
Where my home is.People hurt me,
I ask the wind: why?
Wherever I listen, wherever I look,
Their behavior remains strange and silent to me.
Their city is full of unmelodiousness!
They never see the realms of the universe,
Do not see that they are trapped –
I wish I were a child again!I would speak so sweetly,
So strangely, as I am moved!
Break the abundance of images
That hang luminously on my trees!
With “you”, with “brother” and “sister”
Wandering through a kind world,
Loving, saying love
To anyone I like.
Light as a ghost, only bound in God, free!I don't know and can't find words
Where my home is...MORNING WIND
You lovely morning bells, when stalk strikes against stalk!
When the ringing meadow moves to the swinging bells!
I listen to all the grasses, to all the bells
Come, wild morning wind, come in, come in, come in!It is a delicate plucking, just a stirring of strings:
after all, the winds are little fingers that tremble as they glide over them!
Then a stronger whistling comes from the overblown meadow:
the dew shaken by the wind springs and sings in drops!And what the delicate harp swings,
The wind song, the sound of the blades of grass,
And what sings in strong tones
On the whole noisy meadow slope:I pick until I have shreds and scraps
to please myself and amuse you, sounds caught in fiddle and song!So I know many melodies in all the meadows:
We wait for the morning wind and become a chime!SUMMER FOREST
How shyly the summer wind walks in the fir forest!
It calls by as if from a distant child,
Who is standing in the forest, searching;
But only the mosquitoes hum in the summer breeze
... and their song blows away...
Dear forest!...Of seven dwarfs, of Snow White dreams
Der Wandter, who in the sun-dazzled flicker
At his fir many hours lingers:
A Hans in Luck, who all the gold's glimmer
In a source threw, which foams in the valley...
Dear forest, oh dear forest!Red Riding Hood wanders gracefully through the greenery,
the weight of the basket sways on the arm of the little one;
she reaches into the flowers that bloom along the path;
She has to marvel at every umbel, every strange ear
and chat as she makes her way...
Dear forest... oh, dear forest!...WALDGRUSS
Waldhornschall
Hör' ich dahinten im Wasgenwalde!
O sieh, der Fingerhut
Leuchtet von sonniger Halde!
Eidechsen huschen übern Stein,
The thyme-scented rain smells lush,
Bumblebees hang on hot clover -Oh forest, my forest,
I ache for your delights!WANDERING SOUL
I have always been nurtured by the forest
As a hawk or a stream or an elf of the night;
As ivy, I clung to the ruins,
I stirred as a mist in the ground.
And when the forest wind's tinkling sound
Came through the colored clearing's radiance:
It was I who rang together all the slopes and heights
For a Sunday dance.
And when a beetle with a greenish glow
Flew over the late stick figure:
It was me, I burned a little light for the night, the damp one,
A little light in the grass and dew.So I was enchanted and have been alive for a long time!
Now I sing it all in human sound...SUNDAY AFTERNOON
In the village on Sunday afternoons
The songs and humming of one's own heart beat.In the village on Sunday afternoons
The fields and hedgerows bloom in delicate tones.Even to the neighbor in the shade there
God's word speaks from the silent Bible.And the old man, who surveys his land,
Hears melodiously growing clover and cabbage.For on all the melodies of growth
The echo of holy bells trembles...FAITH
Like a flower on a mild night,
Fed by the moon, watered by dew,
I grow up from your soil
To that which has sunk me here.Thy storms are past, thy rain is gone,
Thy vernal air doth woo, thy moonlit night doth dew
Do with me as thou wilt:
Thou art my gardener, I thy herb!THE CREATING LIGHT
1.
You unfathomable radiance!
You unfathomable sea!
Oh spring, cast waves of bliss
Over the wanderer!The light of the east and the steaming
The hawthorn in the dewy hedge,
The breaking and the roaring of the brooks
How do I sing such a sparkling day?Listen, in the heavens hang
Enough singing larks!
I will make you drink,
O spring day, little by little.2.
All the round pink blossoms
That burst from peach trees;
All the invisible larks
That sing on white clouds;All the flowers that light like little flames
on the meadow ignite;
Those children who at the edge of the forest
laugh on Sunday morningsOh, and the beating of the heart:
Everything stretches upwards towards the day!
Everything that has breath becomes a poem:
A hymn of praise to the creative light!3.
Have you also experienced it?
Often trembles from blossoms and herbs
A homesick, sweet saying,
As if it were a ghostly sound.And sometimes, after thunderstorms,
There stands, in the evening glow, On the crystal clouds, An unknown land.And if your hill is high enough, The wind's whispering train Bears a ghostly, delicate singing, As if the late red were sounding.
Do you know the sound so homesick and soft?
It is a greeting from the realm of the soul!
From there God has sent us,
That we may reveal words of light to the dark edge of the earth!Have you also experienced it?
In the future, when an overview of the development of spiritual life is made, Friedrich Lienhard will always be counted among those poets who know how to bring into the world of outer, physical reality the sounds of spiritual life, the sounds of yet another world.
Friedrich Lienhard is a poet of whom we must say, especially in our present time, when so much that is untrue, inauthentic, and fantastic is mixed in art and poetry, that he is genuine and true as an artist, as a poet, and as a human being to the very bottom of his soul. And when all the tendencies that, in the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, one might say tended towards all possible “isms” as a kind of accompaniment to materialistic tendencies in the artistic and aesthetic fields, have disappeared, only then will it be felt that the spiritual life in poets like Friedrich Lienhard shows the ideal goals in the world. One will feel that his poetry does not see art in the fact that one will see in it external images that have been viewed with the senses and simply placed in some poetic guise or other or expressed in some artistically formed words or forms, but that one will see the artistic, the poetic in it, that the invisible, mysterious world that physical world is truly enchanted everywhere, that this invisible, mysterious world, which man weaves out of the interaction of all world harmonies for the human gaze, and which is like a breath cast over the sensual reality, may be evoked from its enchantment, and that one may try to penetrate the message of poetic creation and poetry.
Thus, Friedrich Lienhard faces the world, humanity, and the entire universe not only as an artist, not only as a poet, but, more than that, as a seeker, as someone who interwoven with the riddles of human existence, of world existence, and who is able to tune his poetic power by feeling these riddles of the world, these riddles of humanity.
When we listen to the older of his poems, we feel how this human mind lives with all that lives and moves in nature itself, how the joys, the elemental joys of this human heart are released from the processes of nature, as if the spirits of nature itself in this human heart, and we hear the strange weaving of the elemental beings of nature in Friedrich Lienhard's poetic work, and that, in turn, is what in his poetry goes beyond the often dull and narrow of his contemporaneity, and out of which he had to grow.
On the other hand, the intimate, sincere, deep feeling for nature and the interweaving with all the intricacies of human life and what is produced in the individual human mind, on the one hand, longing, joyful elation, and on the other, brings pain and deep suffering, all this is caused by Friedrich Lienhard's poems, so that we cannot understand them if we grasp them individually as human beings, but grasp them as developing out of a people and a spirit of our newer development.
It is very peculiar when you have an ability to really feel your way into Friedrich Lienhard's poetry, especially at the point where the poem begins to take on its deeper traits and characteristics, but where people's souls often do not want to go. If you have the ability to empathize with and follow such things, you will find that the unique nature of Friedrich Lienhard's work truly poetically lives and weaves its own language, removed from the world, which demands its own answer, I would say, in the great existence of the world, which satisfies it in order to allow the living weaving and essence of all nature to live on in its own. Then we find, as in swinging waves, how with wings of being and of higher life, what creates and works in nature lives on, and makes us feel how elemental spirits of magic obtain being through what Friedrich Lienhard says, through what lives in the universe and wants to enter into poetic creation because it cannot fully live in creating nature. Thus we see how in Lienhard's language there is something like a higher natural tone, and how the weaving of alliteration lives quite naturally into Friedrich Lienhard's linguistic work. If we try to listen and fathom that which can truly show us how the heart finds expression in the tones of the words, we will see how nature still weaves into the shining light, into the air that produces sound, how forces and beings turn to the existence of nature that cannot be seen except by the artist's eye, cannot be felt except by the artist's heart and mind. Souls like Friedrich Lienhard's often appear to us as if the divine All-Mother of existence had saved up what was left of her surplus of creative power and what she could not use up to create the natural kingdoms, in order to express in a very special way in individual human individuals what she cannot say herself from within her own creatures.
And then we feel very deeply what Goethe wanted to say when he spoke of human creativity as a nature above nature, as a nature in which spiritual devotion and spiritual elevation are summarized in that which is otherwise spread out in the wide realms of natural existence.
Friedrich Lienhard became a seeker in this sense, carried by the mysterious forces that create and invigorate him, and so he surrendered to those moods of nature in which what what works and what is in nature, in order to feel what plays from human heart to human heart and what leads to the great universe and to what the poet is called to depict in a picture.
Thus we see how Friedrich Lienhard, as a seeker, is always growing and developing, how he is not like someone who simply presents himself to the world to say what is currently moving his heart, his individual human soul, but how grown with human becoming and weaving, which does not merely want to live as a single egoity, but wants to be like an exponent, like an effect of what lives in the vastness of the human soul, in the soul of a people, in the soul of an age.
After Friedrich Lienhard had reached a certain level of maturity, he immersed himself in what the more recent spiritual development has brought in so many different ways, and expressed in his own way how he began to study Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Jean Paul, Novalis in order to understand the other newer spiritual greats more closely, to understand them more deeply, to live with them more intimately. He described the paths he had taken in his very remarkable hermit journal, which nevertheless, as a hermit journal, was able to speak to the outside world about his “paths to Weimar”.
He had wandered the paths to Weimar, those paths to Weimar that are the present paths of humanity's newer nature wanderings, the paths of humanity today that can be found in our state of development, those paths on which Goethe sought the connection with the worlds of heaven and of the soul, those paths that Herder fathomed in order to find how human becoming is connected with cosmic evolution and with historical evolution. Those paths to Weimar through which humanity can sympathize with those from whom joy has receded, those paths to Weimar of which Goethe speaks, that they expand into a cosmic, into a world-feeling, those paths through which the human soul in all its intimacy can feel so connected with the nature of the universe, where the soul is able to feel with joy, feel with suffering, feel with the divine on the other side, that human nature is able to feel the divine in the harmonies of heaven, that it is able to bring a weeping eye on the one hand, a cheerful eye on the other. It was along these paths that Friedrich Lienhard sought to follow in Noyalis' footsteps. He wanted to find a way into the supersensible worlds with a groping human sense, the way that one must go if one still wants to find the human souls that have left their earthly bodies. It was along these paths that Friedrich Lienhard followed Goethe, who had preceded him, in loyal allegiance, on which the human soul is healed of all spiritual egoism, of all spiritual individualism, because it can allow itself to be absorbed by humanity's striving toward the All, those paths on which it is healed of egoism, of obstinacy. And so he found the way, alongside those who have striven for the healing and maturing of humanity, to empathize with Goethe, Schiller, to empathize with Novalis and the others.
That is what Friedrich Lienhard strove for on his journeys to Weimar, and then he added what he had found in the way of intellectual and spiritual development and feeling, and he brought into his art what he himself had striven for as the highest. Thus Friedrich Lienhard did not develop in isolation but in relationship to others, and now we have the great joy, at the time when Friedrich Lienhard's rich striving culminates in his fifty-first year, to see in our midst someone who strives for the spiritual heights of humanity, and we can have a great joy that he is in our midst, a joy that can be great because we not only want to develop a selfish spiritual life for each individual soul, but because, if we want to develop a healthy spiritual life, we have to draw threads to all that lives and strives in the world in a spiritual way.
Friedrich Lienhard has found a way to walk with the elemental spirits that rush through the leaves with the wind, that trickle with the water, that flicker in the light. He has found a way to walk with these elemental spirits of nature so that his words become boats that carry these elemental magical spirits human activity and human creativity – Friedrich Lienhard also found the way to build even larger boats that are able to take on and guide the other spirits, through which those who have gone to Weimar have sought the way from the individual soul to the collective soul of humanity.
Just as Friedrich Lienhard wandered on these two paths, he now also wanders the long spiritual path that we ourselves seek with our weak powers. With strong longings, he tried to penetrate not only the individual soul of this strange, hermit-like, spiritually gifted pastor from Alsace with his novel 'Oberlin', but with this novel he also tried to penetrate the entire cultural-historical fabric of time, within which Oberlin, the seer, the lonely seer from Alsace, stands.
Thus Friedrich Lienhard also came to be a poet like those who, like Hamerling and other similar poets, try to depict the secrets of humanity itself from the historical life and development of humanity, to find the riddles of life. It is highly appealing to see how the human life and essence of the entire age grows out of the portrayal in Friedrich Lienhard's beautiful novel Oberlin. In his later historical works, Friedrich Lienhard tried to go further, depicting how man today combines spirit and nature, how he can try to travel the pilgrimage of life with his soul. Friedrich Lienhard has truly grown into the spirit-filled work and activity, and how close he is to our striving will be shown to you in the recitation of the poems, which, I would say, are truly the substance of our soul and which we will hear.
In poems such as “Christ on Tabor” or “Temple of Fulfilment”, Friedrich Lienhard has found the most intimate connection with the spiritual feeling that we are seeking. When one can see that more and more the time is approaching in which a spiritual creator will show whether he is grasped by the spiritual calls that will sound in the future by the fact that he shows himself to be equal to a real real respect for the world's only, humanity's only form of Christ, if one may say this, then one may also say: Friedrich Lienhard has found his way to such forms of his poetry, thinking and creating that can stand understandingly in relation to humanity's only, the world's only form of Christ Jesus. Thus he belongs not only to the present, but, as one of the beginnings, to the future that we long for, that man must long for, who understands his time in the present.
In the poem “Temple of Fulfilment”, which we will hear later, Friedrich Lienhard shows us how what is in the symbol before him is also in our mind's eye in the symbol, in that symbol that is to express to us how the hearts, minds and spirits of humanity can grow into that future which must overcome materialism for the reason that Ahriman must be bound again for the salvation of the world, for the salvation of the world. We want to remember this above all at the time when our dear friend Friedrich Lienhard turns fifty, that he has known how to connect those who can follow the calls for the future of humanity, who have recognized, as one must recognize, that everything must be abandoned from the structure of human development and that only that which strives for the fruits of the spirit, the spiritual seeds that are sown today for the future, can remain.
So let us be among those for whom the fiftieth birthday of Friedrich Lienhard is a beautiful celebration, a celebration that they want to celebrate lovingly in their hearts, in their minds, a celebration at which we want to indulge in the thought that Friedrich Lienhard not only belongs to us for our joy, but belongs to those who want to work on the great 'building of the temple of spiritual human development'. We want to strengthen and invigorate our love for our friend, we want to strengthen and invigorate our understanding of his very unique way of thinking and being. Many of you, my dear friends, know him; he has been here and in other places among us. You know him, the remarkable man who walks among other people as if his eyes were looking into a world from which a piece of what the eyes usually look at with interest and attention disappears, as if he does not see many things, but instead sees other things that those around him do not see. And so, I would say, he seems pure in his outward walk like a dreamer of a world that others around him only become aware of when they sense it in his soul, in his mind, when they stand opposite his pensive head. He appears as a personality who feels much that others cannot feel, who is unworldly in many respects because he seeks kinship with a world that can only be known by becoming estranged from much of what is so familiar to many other people.
Indeed, when one feels, I would say discreetly, the peculiar characteristic of this personality, then the most intimate love for his whole being mixes with the veneration of his beautiful, his highness-filled work, and then we also learn to relate to him in the right way. Today, as we look forward to the fiftieth year of his life, we want to harbor and cultivate these thoughts within us, so that they can become beautiful wishes, strong wishes that Friedrich Lienhard may be granted to create much, much more in the rising, further epoch of life, in the higher, mature epoch from the deep source of his spirit-filled, nature-loving, humanity-loving, humanity-friendly creativity and work. And let us say it with the deepest satisfaction, a word in reference to him fills us with joy, fills us with satisfaction, but also fills us with a certain trust in our own cause, a word spoken in reference to him: Let us rejoice, for he is ours!
Recitation by Marie Steiner from “Lichtland” by Friedrich Lienhard
TEMPLE OF FULFILLMENT The blue dome arches up to the red wall;
And in the blue are stars wrought in gold.
Twelve masters stand in the round columned hall
And turn their gaze of power from afar
thirteenth, who stands before the altar gray
In the silver robe of the leader
And collects twelve-fold strength in prayer. So the sun runs through the signs of the zodiac
And receives twelve special powers,
Then sends them out into the world;
So power exchanges with power at all ends
Of the cosmos and the small human life;
And no least one shines and works in vain
The sun's goal can be reached by every star. Everyone for everyone - and everyone for everyone!
This wonderful hall is rhythmic:
Because each of these gently curved arches
Is drawn over every master's head,
The marble remains beneath it;
The room is filled with a fine, breathing wave
Of clarified soul forces, strong and delicate. Whoever enters this solar temple
Is marked by the double seven
of the symbolic columns that surround the hall
with symmetry all around;
Like a dove, he senses above him the white dome window's round shape floating:
And the holy ray falls on the altar. Only what is sensed may be formed here,
fulfillment dwells in this building's curve;
the yearning for the distance calms down in peace,
and the earthly wound heals.
Escaped from base, nocturnal forces,
the consecrated one sees the place as destined
for his heavenly recovery. And he beholds the archetypal form of all things,
The world's confused play becomes harmony;
The blood of the cross presents itself as roses,
On which the crystal-clear light from above
Falls as a sound, the sound of the melody of the spheres,
Which fills this high space with beauty
And every hard edge softly envelops... You have been drawn to this temple for a long time,
You long to look inside and pray.
But you still turn to the rose beds
Along the yew wall of the outer world
And are not freed from what sounds outside
And that temple's existence booms –
When you have matured, you will enter it. CHRIST ON TABOR Beyond the tribulation,
Sparkling with the power of grace,
You stand, solar figure,
And the transitory suffering there is transformed
Into a golden light. So you are beyond And yet attainable:
Because we,
As often as we rise from the waters of affliction
As you would rise—
Surrounded by the sun, we stand with you,
Clad in gold, transformed into light. Behold, you once stood like this,
When you walked in the garments of the earth,
Casting forth the radiance of future glory,
Great upon Tabor.
In dialogue with you were
The exalted masters of primeval times:
Elijah and Moses.
But beneath you, in shadow and darkness, The sparkling God-man!
Stepped out of the covers and stood,
Stood like a pillar of sacrificial flame
Tall on the nocturnal Tabor! Then those approached, sparkling like you,
The great ones of the past,
Stepped out of the veiling light clouds,
took shape and stood in splendor
on the summit of Tabor.
And they exchanged radiant speech with you,
greeted you from the blessed ones,
filled the rapt disciples with flaming power
and withdrew again
into the mysterious moonlit night. But you, Master, and your disciples
Silent, radiant; knowing smiles
On faces glowing in the light,
You walked back down to the dark people.