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Goethe’s wife, Christiane, who had begun to suffer from a kidney disorder around this
time, died after a long and painful illness. His writings immediately afterward suggest
heartfelt distress, bereavement, and loneliness, but in fact, at the age of sixty- five, Goethe
was experiencing a creative renewal reminiscent of his Italian journey.
Even prior to Christiane’s death Goethe continued to seek inspiration from the com-
pany of women. His intense, although chaste, relationship with the former actress and
singer Marianne Jung, who was married to a wealthy Frankfurt banker, lasted from
1814 to 1816. According to John R. Williams, in the poems of West- East Divan, the
two “played out the roles of the legendary lovers. ... Hatem and Suleika, exchanging
mutual gifts of oriental knick- knacks, playing exotic charades, corresponding in a pri-
vate code.”^62
In 1821, at the age of seventy- two, he indulged himself in one last futile attempt to
rekindle his love life. While vacationing at Marienbad, Goethe became besotted with a
seventeen- year- old girl, Ulrike von Levetow. It ended badly, but his disappointment in love
once again bore him poetic fruit in the form of “The Marienbad Elegy,” written in 1823 and
the second of three poems in his Trilogy of Passion, which ends on a note of despair worthy
of Werther:Leave me here now, my life’s companions true!
Leave me alone on rock, in moor and heath;
But courage! open lies the world to you,
The glorious heavens above, the earth beneath;
Observe, investigate, with searching eyes,
And nature will disclose her mysteries.
To me is all, I to myself am lost ...
[The immortals] urged me to those lips, with rapture crowned,
Deserted me, and hurled me to the ground.In “The Marienbad Elegy,” Goethe reprised the theme of hopeless love that he had
mined so successfully in his earlier lyric poetry. Yet, Goethe’s state of mind had actually
undergone a radical change since his youth, having embraced eastern mysticism with its
detachment, serenity, and resignation. In a letter to his friend Zelter, written a few years
earlier in 1820, Goethe sees death in terms of two alternative worlds, the real versus the
ideal or symbolic:Unconditional submission to the unscrutable will of God, viewing with serenity the
ever- circling and spiral recurrence of the earth’s restless bustle, love, affection, sus-
pended between two worlds, all that is real refined, dissolving into symbol.^63One of Goethe’s signal achievements during his last decade was the completion of Part
II of Faust in 1831, the year before his death at age eighty- two. In contrast to Part I, with its
lusty account of Faust’s carnal obsessions, Part II is highly abstract, metaphysical, and in
the end, mystical. Whereas Part I is focused on the seduction and abandonment of the girl,
Gretchen, Part II presents Faust as a medieval knight who falls in love with Helen of Troy,