Flora Unveiled

450 i Flora Unveiled

of all, Schiller in 1805. The Dowager Duchess Amalia, of whom he was very fond, died in
1807, followed by his mother in 1809. Such losses inevitably led him to reflect on his own
mortality, and, in 1809, he began work on his autobiography.
Seeking escape from the Napoleonic turmoil around him, Goethe turned for com-
fort to the work of the fourteenth- century Persian poet Hafez, a new German trans-
lation of which had appeared in 1814. In his poem “Hegira,” published in the book
West- East Divan (1819), Goethe ref lects on the military and political upheavals raging
around him:

North and West and South are breaking,

Thrones are bursting, kingdom’s shaking:

Flee, then, to the essential East,

Where on patriarch’s air you’ll feast!^60

In reality, Goethe fled west, to his native Rhineland, stopping off at various universities
along the way to chat with renowned scholars about arcane topics. In this whirlwind tour of
academia, he found the intellectual stimulation he needed to revive his creative energy, and,
in the poetry of Hafez, he found the model he was seeking for the synthesis of the sensual
and the spiritual. In his celebrated poem “Blessed Longing,” written in 1814, Goethe writes
as an old man driven like a moth by a “new desire/ to a higher union,” a union he associates
with a transcendent “death by fire”:

Tell it only to the wise,

For the crowd at once will jeer:

That which is alive I praise,

That which longs for death by fire.

Cooled by passionate love at night,

Procreated, procreating,

You have known the alien feeling

In the calm of candlelight;

Gloom- embraced will lie no more,

By the flickering shades obscured,

But are seized by new desire,

To a higher union lured,

Then no distance holds you fast;

Winged, enchanted, on you fly;

Light your longing, and at last,

Moth, you meet the flame and die.

Never prompted to that quest:

Die and dare rebirth!

You remain a dreary guest

On our gloomy earth.^61