Corpus · The Gay Science · Full-text route

Jest, Ruse, and a Reader Who Will Not Follow

Optional full-text route · Station 1 of 35

Read: The verse prelude, Jest, Ruse and Revenge, poems 1–63, in full, from the original 1882 edition. Begin at the prelude’s title page and stop at the title of Book I.
Allow: About 45–60 minutes, including the poems, this guide, rereading, and a short written response. This is an editorial estimate, not a measured reading time. The poems total about 2,100 words in the free edition; read several aloud.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative (The Joyful Wisdom; poetry rendered by Paul V. Cohn and Maude D. Petre): open the prelude.

Quotations on this page follow the free edition’s verse translation. That edition credits Petre by footnote for poems 19, 48, and 63; it does not credit the other poems individually, so they are attributed here to Cohn and Petre jointly. Kaufmann’s verse translations differ, often considerably, and none of his wording is quoted here. The poems are numbered 1–63 separately from the prose sections, so “poem 7” and “§7” are different texts. The editor’s introductory note in the free edition says the title Jest, Ruse and Revenge is borrowed from Goethe; that note is Oscar Levy’s, not Nietzsche’s.

Before you read

The 1882 book does not open with an argument. It opens with sixty-three short poems: jingles, epigrams, riddles, two dialogues, and verses put into the mouths of named speakers. Many are only two or four lines long. Some are good jokes; some are weak; a few are harsh. The later preface of 1886, which the free edition prints first, belongs to the book’s 1887 expansion; this route reads it last (station 35). If you prefer your edition’s printed order, read the motto and preface at station 35 first, then return here to begin the route. Save that station’s comparisons and final writing task until after station 34; return to station 35 for them. The preface itself is assigned only once.

Why begin a book of inquiry this way? The question is not rhetorical. A reader who has just laughed at a poem mocking its own author will hear the prose differently. A reader who has noticed a poem spoken by “The Man of Power” will be slower to assume that every confident sentence in the book is Nietzsche’s settled view.

The main question: How do jest, ruse, and self-mockery prepare a reader for inquiry—and where do the poems stop joking?

One question for every poem

On this first station, ask only one question of each poem: who speaks, and to whom? Many poems name a speaker in the title (“The Proverb Speaks,” “The Pious One Speaks,” “The Sceptic Speaks”). Two are dialogues between A and B. Others address “thou,” “you,” a reader, or a type of person. Station 2 builds this into a fuller marking habit for the prose.

What to notice

Following. Several poems tell the reader not to follow the author. Find them.
Eating and digestion. The first poem offers “fare”; later poems prescribe toads and ice; poem 54 wishes the reader good teeth. What does the book expect its reader to swallow?
Height. Count the poems about climbing, heights, stars, and the “crowd” or “rabble” below. Where does the joking about height turn into a claim about rank?

Close reading

An invitation to eat

Poem 1, “Invitation,” asks “comrades” to venture on the fare the poet sets before them: “You will like it more to-morrow, / Better still the following day.” The book presents itself as food that improves with digestion. Poem 1, “Invitation”

The image returns. Poem 24, “A Cure for Pessimism,” tells a fussy friend to swallow a fat toad “whole, nor pause to think!” Poem 35, “Ice,” offers ice that “may help you to digest.” Poem 54, “To my Reader,” wishes the reader good teeth and good digestion. The jokes set a condition for reading: some of what follows will be hard to swallow, and a reader should not expect it to be pleasant at once. They also make fun of the author who sets such conditions. Poem 54, “To my Reader”

Do not follow me

Poem 7 has a Latin title that turns on itself: “Vademecum—Vadetecum,” roughly go with me—go with yourself. A reader drawn by the author’s style wants to follow in his footsteps. The poem answers: “Follow yourself unswervingly, / So—careful!—shall you follow me.” Poem 7, “Vademecum—Vadetecum”

The same paradox recurs. In poem 23, “Interpretation,” the poet cannot “expound” himself; the one who pursues “his own unaided course” casts more light on the poet’s image. In poem 25, “A Request,” the speaker cannot see himself at all—“my eye’s too near”—and asks for a place between friend and enemy from which to look. Poem 33, “The Lone One,” begins: “I hate to follow and I hate to lead.” Poem 25, “A Request”

Take the paradox seriously. A book that tells its reader to follow herself is still a book asking to be read. The poems do not escape that tension; they make a joke of it. You will meet the prose version in Book III (§255, “Imitators,” at station 19), where one speaker wants others “to do something before himself (as a pattern to himself).”

The author laughs at himself

A good share of the prelude mocks its own poet and his work. Poem 36, “Youthful Writings,” hears his earlier wisdom’s “A and final O” turn into the “eternal Ah! and Oh!” of youth. Poem 44, “Thorough,” asks: “I an Inquirer?” No—he is just heavy, and keeps sinking until he hits the ocean floor. Poem 53 addresses his own earlier book, Human, All-too-Human, and cannot decide whether it is an eagle or Minerva’s owl. Poem 59 ends: “What then? Who reads the stuff I write?” Poem 44, “Thorough”

This is the practice §1 will call for: laughing at oneself. Keep one limit in view. Self-mockery is a way of holding one’s claims, not a withdrawal of them. The poet who calls himself a lump in poem 44 still sinks to “the ocean’s deepest bed.”

Who speaks?

Several poems give their lines to a named figure. Poem 11, “The Proverb Speaks,” claims to be everything at once: “Dove and serpent and swine.” Poem 17, “The Man of Power Speaks,” says: “Take without asking, take alway!” Poem 38, “The Pious One Speaks,” turns the subtle ones’ reply (“Man hath made God!”) back on them, and ends by hearing “the devil’s halting hoof.” Poem 61, “The Sceptic Speaks,” tells a life half over that it has sought and found nothing, and hears in reply: “That’s what I’m seeking—reasons why I’m here!” Poem 17, “The Man of Power Speaks”

A title like “The Man of Power Speaks” does not tell you whether Nietzsche endorses the speaker. It tells you to hear a type. That is the first reading skill the book asks for. The sceptic of poem 61 is also worth keeping: “reasons why I’m here” is the very question that §1 says human beings periodically need answered. Poem 61, “The Sceptic Speaks”

Where the joking stops

Not every poem is light. Three groups deserve plain statement.

Rank and the crowd. Poem 26, “My Cruelty,” has the speaker climb a hundred stairs while “the herd declares / I’m cruel.” Poem 49, “The Sage Speaks,” is useful to the crowd but will “always pass above the crowd!” Poems 45 and 40 speak of the “rabble” and of a man who “sees you not.” The height is partly comic, but the contempt for the many is not a joke about the speaker alone.
War. Poem 41, “Heraclitism,” begins: “Brethren, war’s the origin / Of happiness on earth,” and makes friendship a bond of battle. The title points to Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher who called war the father of all things; the poem turns that into praise.
Women. Two poems turn on stock generalizations about women. Poem 22, “Man and Woman,” sets a man’s motto of seizing a woman against the verdict that “woman seizes not, but steals.” Poem 50, “He lost his Head,” has a woman gain her wit because a man lost his reason, his head gone “to woman.” They are jokes; they are also generalizations. Book II returns to the theme at length, especially at station 8.
A different case: poem 19. “Accidentally a Seducer” (Petre’s translation) should not be grouped with them. Its accidental seducer is a man: “He shot an empty word / Into the empty blue,” and on the way it met “A woman whom it slew.” The woman is the one struck by his careless word. The poem does not portray women as seducers. Its joke is about the unintended force of an idle word.

The prelude ends with poem 63, “Star Morality” (Petre’s translation). A star rolls on through “spaces vast and far”: “Let sorrows pass thee—nations die! / Compassion would but dim the light.” Its one law is “be pure and bright!” The last word of the prelude is a refusal of pity, spoken to a star. Poem 63, “Star Morality”

Read it next to poem 62, “Ecce Homo,” where the speaker is a flame that consumes itself and turns what it touches to light. That title, Behold the man, is Pilate’s phrase in John’s Gospel. Nietzsche would reuse it in 1888 for the book that became Ecce Homo; do not read that later book back into this poem. Poem 62, “Ecce Homo”

A difficulty

Is a hard line softened by being a joke?

The prelude’s title promises jest, ruse, and revenge. A reader may be tempted to excuse every harsh poem as jest, or to treat every jest as a disguised doctrine. Neither shortcut works. “Star Morality” can be read as a picture of an ideal the book will test, or as the book’s own first statement against pity, which returns at §271 (“In pity”) and in Book IV. The poems about women can be read as self-mocking male jokes or as the generalizations they state.

Two tests help. First, ask who speaks: a named type, a “thou,” or an “I” who also mocks himself? Second, ask whether the prose later argues for the same claim. If it does, the joke was a preview; if it does not, the joke may be doing different work. Decide one case now, and revisit it when the prose reaches the same theme.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

What does poem 7, “Vademecum—Vadetecum,” ask of a reader who wants to follow the author?

To follow herself instead: “Follow yourself unswervingly, / So—careful!—shall you follow me.” Following the author correctly means not imitating him. The poem jokes about the paradox that a book still asks to be followed in order to say so.

Does a poem titled “The Man of Power Speaks” state Nietzsche’s own view?

Not by its title alone. The title assigns the lines to a type. Whether the book endorses that type has to be judged from the rest of the work, which is why this station asks of every poem who speaks.

What is the last poem of the prelude, and what does it refuse?

Poem 63, “Star Morality.” It tells a star to roll on though “nations die,” since “Compassion would but dim the light.” It refuses pity, in the voice of an address to a star.

Why read the prelude before the prose?

Because it trains attention to voice, joke, and self-mockery before the book makes its arguments, and because in the 1882 edition it stands first. The route reads the later preface of 1886 last, as a retrospect.

Writing prompt

Write 150–200 words answering:

Choose two poems: one where the joke is on the author, and one where the joke is on someone else. What does each do to the claim it contains?

Say who speaks in each poem and to whom.
Quote no more than two lines from each.
Say whether you expect the prose to argue for either claim, and why.

A successful response distinguishes a named speaker from the author, treats a joke neither as a doctrine nor as nothing, and states any harsh claim plainly.

Continue

Continue to station 2: The Comedy of Existence and Its Serious Teachers →

Read next: Book I, §§1–3. The first prose section begins with the most serious people in history, the teachers of the purpose of life, and asks why they never want us to laugh.

Return to the route list in the book guide

A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised September 27, 2026.