Reading Nietzsche

Corpus · The Gay Science · Full-text route

Songs of Prince Free-as-a-Bird

Optional full-text route · Station 34 of 35

Read: the appendix, “Songs of Prince Free-as-a-Bird,” added in 1887: all fourteen songs, in order. Begin at “To Goethe” and stop at the end of “A Dancing Song to the Mistral Wind,” before the translators’ footnotes. Read at least some of them aloud.
Allow: About 45–65 minutes, including the songs, this guide, rereading, and a short written response. This is an editorial estimate, not a measured reading time. The songs total about 2,100 words in the free edition; the Mistral song is by far the longest. If you need two sittings, stop after the ninth song, “The Fool’s Dilemma.”

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative (The Joyful Wisdom; poetry rendered by Paul V. Cohn and Maude D. Petre): begin at “To Goethe”.

Quotations on this page follow the free edition’s verse translation. That edition credits Maude D. Petre by footnote for two songs, “In the South” and “A Dancing Song to the Mistral Wind,” and says that both first appeared in the Nation (April 17 and May 15, 1909). It does not credit the other twelve songs individually, so they are attributed here to Cohn and Petre jointly; this page does not assign any of them to Cohn. Kaufmann’s verse translations differ, often considerably, and none of his wording is quoted here. The verse translations are free, so this page notes the German, from the Projekt Gutenberg-DE text, where a difference matters.

Before you read

§383 ended with the author reaching for his bagpipe. The songs are what he plays. The appendix belongs to the expanded edition of 1887, and the preface dated autumn 1886 (station 35) describes it as “the handful of songs which are given along with the book on this occasion,—songs in which a poet makes merry over all poets.”

Added in 1887 does not mean written in 1887. Six of the songs revise poems that Nietzsche first published in May 1882 as Idyllen aus Messina (Idylls from Messina), in the Internationale Monatsschrift. This guide checked the six by comparing opening lines in the Projekt Gutenberg-DE texts of both works: “The Poet’s Call” (from Vogel-Urtheil), “In the South” (from Prinz Vogelfrei), “Beppa the Pious” (from Die kleine Hexe), “The Boat of Mystery” (from Das nächtliche Geheimniss), “An Avowal of Love” (from Vogel Albatross), and “Song of a Theocritean Goatherd” (from Lied des Ziegenhirten). The composition dates of the other eight have not been checked here.

The German title is Lieder des Prinzen Vogelfrei. Vogelfrei means free as a bird, but it was also the legal word for an outlaw, someone outside the law’s protection. “Free-as-a-Bird” keeps only the first sense.

The main question: What does poetry do to the book’s closing voice?

Keep using the marks: P, H, V, and ? for Nietzsche’s own hedge only. Add a fourth question for each song: who is speaking? Several songs are put in other mouths.

The fourteen songs

In the free edition’s order, with the German titles. In that edition’s web page, the ninth title is marked up at a higher heading level than the others; it is still the ninth song, not a new section.

  1. “To Goethe” (An Goethe)
  2. “The Poet’s Call” (Dichters Berufung)
  3. “In the South” (Im Süden; Petre)
  4. “Beppa the Pious” (Die fromme Beppa)
  5. “The Boat of Mystery” (Der geheimnissvolle Nachen)
  6. “An Avowal of Love” (Liebeserklärung)
  7. “Song of a Theocritean Goatherd” (Lied eines theokritischen Ziegenhirten)
  8. “Souls That Lack Determination” (Diesen ungewissen Seelen)
  9. “The Fool’s Dilemma” (Narr in Verzweiflung)
  10. “Rimus Remedium” (Rimus remedium)
  11. “My Bliss” (Mein Glück!)
  12. “Columbus Redivivus” (Nach neuen Meeren)
  13. “Sils-Maria” (Sils-Maria)
  14. “A Dancing Song to the Mistral Wind” (An den Mistral. Ein Tanzlied; Petre)

What to notice

  1. Parody. The preface’s phrase, a poet making merry over all poets, fits at least four songs: “To Goethe,” “The Poet’s Call,” “The Fool’s Dilemma,” and “Rimus Remedium.” Ask who is being mocked, and whether the singer is spared.
  2. Birds, sea, and wind. A woodpecker, a bird’s nest in the south, an albatross, a Genoese ship, the Mistral. Compare Book V’s “emigrants” and “Argonauts” (§§377, 382; station 33).
  3. Translation. Verse translation changes more than prose translation does. At least four songs change something that matters in the German; they are noted below.

Close reading

One way to group the songs

Read the songs in order. These groups, for thinking about them afterwards, are this guide’s, not Nietzsche’s.

Poets mocked

“To Goethe” opens: “‘The Undecaying’ / Is but thy label, / God the betraying / Is poets’ fable.” The free edition’s note calls it “a parody of the ‘Chorus Mysticus’ which concludes the second part of Goethe’s ‘Faust.’” This guide checked the German of both. Goethe’s lines begin Alles Vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis (all that passes is only a likeness) and end Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan (the eternal feminine draws us upward). Nietzsche’s song turns them round: Das Unvergängliche / Ist nur dein Gleichniss (the imperishable is only your likeness), and Das Ewig-Närrische / Mischt uns – hinein: the eternal foolishness mixes us in. In the English: “The Eternally Fooling / Makes us play, too!” Mark it V. “To Goethe”

“The Poet’s Call” puts the poet under a tree, rhyming to a woodpecker’s tapping, until the bird answers each stanza: “‘Yes, yes, good sir, you are a poet,’ / Chirped out the pecker, mocking me.” In the German the woodpecker shrugs (Achselzuckt der Vogel Specht). The poet’s rhymes are arrows that pierce “the reptile’s nobler parts”; is his heart cruel? The refrain answers every question the same way. In 1882 this poem was Vogel-Urtheil, the bird’s verdict.

“The Fool’s Dilemma” (Narr in Verzweiflung, the fool in despair) has a fool scrawling “on board and wall”; the wise demand the wall be cleaned, and he takes up sponge and broom “As critic and as waterman.” His last wish is to see “each learned owl / With ‘wisdom’ board and wall defoul.” The German breaks off after besch…, leaving the reader to supply a coarse verb; the English completes it politely. Compare §379’s fool (station 33). “Rimus Remedium (or a Consolation to Sick Poets)” is a fever poem: time is a “witch, beslavering me,” pain writes “upon my bone,” and the cure is rhyme: “He that hath not an hundred rhymes, / I’ll wager, in these dolorous times / We’d see him shattered!” Keep it for the preface’s account of sickness and convalescence (station 35). “Rimus Remedium”

Other voices

Five songs are spoken, or mostly spoken, by someone other than a philosopher. “Beppa the Pious” is a pretty girl’s song: “While beauty in my face is, / Be piety my care, / For God, you know, loves lasses,” and a young monk will be forgiven; “The Church has ken of living.” It ends: “When age has killed my graces, / Let Satan claim my hand!” The satire aims at the Church and at the girl’s bargain alike; state both plainly. Mark it V.

“The Boat of Mystery” is a night journey: a sleepless speaker without “a conscience pure” (German ein gut Gewissen) drifts out to sea, sinks into “a vast Indifference,” and wakes to shouts: “was there—Blood?” “Naught had happened! On the swell / We had slumbered, oh, so well!”

“An Avowal of Love” carries a subtitle, “(during which, however, the poet fell into a pit),” and praises an albatross in flight. Its English ending, “I thought of her, was stirred / To tears unending—yea, I love her true!,” brings in a woman who is not in the German. There the declaration is addressed to the bird: Oh Vogel Albatross! … Ich dachte dein: da floss / Mir Thrän’ um Thräne, – ja, ich liebe dich! (I thought of you … yes, I love you). Read the German as a love declaration to the albatross, undercut by the subtitle’s fall. “An Avowal of Love”

“Song of a Theocritean Goatherd” speaks as a sick, jealous goatherd (Theocritus was the ancient Greek pastoral poet) waiting for a girl who does not come: “Or runs she after all that woo, / Like the goats I follow?” State plainly that he compares her to his goats. It ends at dawn: “Let Death come! I care not!” In the German he would gladly die, Ich stürbe gerne. “Souls That Lack Determination” (German Diesen ungewissen Seelen, these uncertain souls) is spoken in anger against those whose praise is “self-contempt and shame” and whose envy follows the singer. Mark it P.

South, sea, and summit

“In the South” (Petre’s translation) swings in a bird’s nest and flies south from “slow German way”: “No reasons for me, if you please; / Their end is too dull and too plain.” The English adds the refrain “In the South!” to each stanza; the German has no such refrain. The last stanza, set off in the English by asterisks and quotation marks, tells the birds: “I worshipped a woman, hideous and gray, / Her name was Truth.” The German says that in the north he loved a little woman, old enough to make one shudder, and that this old woman was called Truth (Die Wahrheit, set in quotation marks in the German). Set this beside §377’s old woman “unless perhaps it were ‘the Truth’” (station 33) and Preface §4’s truth as a woman (station 35). Mark it V. “In the South”

“My Bliss” is set in St Mark’s Square in Venice: “Once more, St Mark, thy pigeons meet my gaze,” with the refrain “My bliss! My bliss!” (German mein Glück!, also “my luck” or “my happiness”). “Columbus Redivivus” is the free edition’s title for Nach neuen Meeren, toward new seas. Its speaker sails “my Genoa ship” and ends facing “Awful Infinity!” (German ungeheuer, monstrous, and Unendlichkeit). Compare §124’s infinite (station 14) and §374’s (station 32). “Columbus Redivivus”

“Sils-Maria” is six lines: “Here sat I waiting, waiting, but for naught! / Beyond all good and evil.” The phrase is also the title of the 1886 book. The English ending, “Then one, dear friend, was swiftly changed to twain, / And Zarathustra left my teeming brain,” changes two things. In the German the friend is a woman (Freundin), and Zarathustra does not come out of the speaker’s brain: he passed by me (gieng an mir vorbei), an encounter rather than a birth. Sils-Maria is the Swiss village where Nietzsche spent his summers; that note is this guide’s. “Sils-Maria”

The last dance

“A Dancing Song to the Mistral Wind” (Petre’s translation) ends the book. The singer greets the wind as a twin, “Surely ’twas one womb did bear us,” and dances with it. Three things need the German.

The song, and the book, ends with a wreath thrown upward: “Whirl it on before thee ever, / Till it reach the farthest star.” “A Dancing Song to the Mistral Wind”

A difficulty

Is the singer exempt from his own mockery?

The preface says these songs make merry “over all poets.” “The Poet’s Call” and “The Fool’s Dilemma” mock the singer himself. Yet the last song excludes the sick and crippled from its dance, as §377 excluded the “humane” age and §382 withheld its ideal from others.

Three readings are possible.

Decide which the songs best support. Name one song and one section of Book V.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

How many songs are there, and which comes first and last?

Fourteen. The first is “To Goethe”; the last is “A Dancing Song to the Mistral Wind.” “The Fool’s Dilemma” is the ninth.

Were all the songs written in 1887?

No, or at least not all. Six revise poems first published in May 1882 as Idylls from Messina. The appendix itself was added in 1887.

What does “To Goethe” parody?

The “Chorus Mysticus” that ends Faust Part Two. It turns the eternal feminine into the eternal foolishness that makes us play.

What does the English lose at the end of “Sils-Maria”?

That the friend is a woman, and that Zarathustra passed by the speaker rather than leaving his brain.

Where does the book’s title appear in the German of the last song?

In Fröhlich – unsre Wissenschaft!: let our science be called joyful. The free English translation does not keep it.

Writing prompt

Write 200–250 words answering:

Choose one song and one section of Book V. Does the song answer the section, mock it, or repeat its claim in another voice?

A successful response identifies the speaker, compares a specific line with a specific sentence, and says what the change to verse does.

Continue

Continue to station 35: The Later Preface →

Read next: the title-page motto and the four-section Preface to the second edition, dated autumn 1886. The free edition prints them first; this route reads them last. Its question: what can the later convalescent’s portrait explain or recast?

Previous station: station 33, §§377–383. Return to the route list in the book guide.

A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised .

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