The Lorelei Song and Siren Song Essay Example
The Lorelei Song and Siren Song Essay Example

The Lorelei Song and Siren Song Essay Example

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  • Pages: 3 (769 words)
  • Published: May 1, 2017
  • Type: Article
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Have you ever thought of a time when a beautiful sound or sight made you lose track of what was going on around you? What do you think about dangerously beautiful music? Is Lorelei only a legend or something more? Close your eyes and imagine this beauty. ‘The Lorelei’, on the bank of the Rhine River, is a large rock that produces an echo. It became associated with a legend about a spirit of a woman who would lure boatmen to their deaths with her beautiful singing, The woman had drowned herself in the river because of an unfaithful lover. Heine’s poem, based on this legend, first appeared in his most famous volume, the ‘Book of Songs’.

Like much of his early verse, it was influenced by the Romantic writers’ fascination with folk songs. The poem deals with the theme of unrequited love. While reading it w

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e are lulled into a false sense of security. The outstanding feature of this poem is the turn, i. e. ironic twist, which concludes it. ‘The Lorelei’ has been set to music by more than twenty-five composers. It became so popular that anti-Semitic Nazis, who controlled Germany during 1930s and early 1940s, did not remove it from schoolbooks after they banned Heine’s works because he was Jewish.

Also read this reflection Murfin Song

Instead, editors described it as ‘a popular folk song, author unknown’. The author is best known for his lyrical poems, which brought a new tone of irony and skepticism to German literature. In his time, however, this earned him as much condemnation as praise. As he grew older financial and health problems increasingly burdened him. Sometimes the view is voiced

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that Heine, unlike his romantic predecessors, restored the original legend. In the poem it is said that there was a beautiful woman, who used to sit and sing from the top of a cliff, which is located on the right bank of the Rhine River.

Her singing and her beauty were so seductive thaSt the sailors, who were passing the dangerous cliff, could not take there eyes off of her. Then they and their ships were smashed against the rocks of the Lorelei. In her poems, Atwood uses photographs to explore identity, particularly the facades women adopt to conform (at least superficially) to society. “This is a photograph of me,” the first poem in her first collection, plays with the conventional equation of appearance and reality.

The photograph obscures, rather than reveals, the speaker’s mysterious identity and history. Similarly, the speaker of “In the Tourist Centre in Boston” reflects on the perceived discrepancy between photographic images of Canada and her own memories of the place. The speaker’s “private mirage” takes precedence over the glossy colorized certainties depicted in the photographs. In the poem “Girl and Horse, 1928,” from Procedures for Underground, the speaker contemplates an old photograph of a girl, “someone I never knew,” and tries to imagine what the girl was thinking.

In the end of the poem, the speaker turns over the photograph, whereupon the girl waves and rides “out of sight. ” Thus photographs are no longer static recorders of a fixed history in which “nothing can change, grow older. ” Instead, photographs represent the truths a viewer chooses to invent. More than a decade later, in “Postcards,” Atwood describes a photograph only to comment

on its inability to capture the realities of a place. The theme Inevitability of Death, Atwood demonstrates a remarkable determination to confront death in her poetry.

In “Another Elegy,” she asks: “Fine words, but why do I want / to tart up death? ” No aspect of life occurs without some reminder of death. She is most interested in the decay of the body—or, as she cautions in “Circe/Mud Poems,” “this body is not reversible. ” The historical poem “Marrying the Hangman” includes a related observation: “There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. ” The body is enslaved to time and somehow disconnected from the person inside of it. “Time is what we’re doing,” Atwood writes in “Time. In “Bedside,” she curses “the murderous body, the body / itself stalled in a field of ice. ” Atwood confronts the inevitability of death most explicitly in the last section of another collection, Morning in the Burned House. “Man in a Glacier” echoes the themes of “Bedside,” as it literally represents a human body suspended in ice. “A Visit” mourns the passage of her father’s days of activity and lucidity. In “Flowers,” the speaker observes a dying father and realizes that she will undergo the same experience. Nothing can stop the relentless march of death.

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