Virgilian Retrospection in Goethe’s Alexis und Dora

German poetry," says Friedrich Kittler, "begins with a sigh." Ach, the signifier of ineffability at the center of the German word for language (Sprache), launches, in this case, the spate of elegiac production most closely associated with Goethe's classical lyric.

Ach! unaufhaltsam strebet das Schiff mit jedem Momente   Durch die schäumende Flut weiter und weiter hinaus! Langhin furcht sich die Gleise des Kiels, worin die Delphine   Springend folgen, als flöh' ihnen die Beute davon. Alles deutet auf glückliche Fahrt: der ruhige Bootsmann   Ruckt am Segel gelind, das sich für alle bemüht; Vorwärts dringt der Schiffenden Geist, wie Flaggen und Wimpel;   Einer nur steht rückwärts traurig gewendet am Mast, Sieht die Berge schon blau, die scheidenden, sieht in das Meer sie   Niedersinken, es sinkt jegliche Freude vor ihm.

Written from 12 to 14 May 1796 and published that October in the Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1797, Alexis und Dora would prove to be the first in a series of elegiac poems occupying Goethe's interest for the next two years: Herrmann und Dorothea (the elegy, not the epic), from the end of 1796; Der neue Pausias und sein Blumenmädchen, from May 1797; Amyntas, from September 1797; Euphrosyne, finished in June 1798; and Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen, also from June 1798. If the grouping of these poems into a more or less coherent "classical phase" is a fiction of Goethe scholarship, it is a fiction that was begun by the poet himself. Already in the Neue Schriften of 1800, organized into rubrics chosen by Goethe, these poems (minus the Metamorphose der Pflanzen) were grouped together as Elegien II, to distinguish them from their only real generic precursor in Goethe's oeuvre, the much earlier Roman Elegies. In the arrangement of poems Goethe is no slave of chronology; the order is as follows: Alexis und Dora, Der neue Pausias, Euphrosyne, Das Wiedersehen, Amyntas, and Herrmann und Dorothea. Most striking here is the inclusion, fourth in the group, of Das Wiedersehen from 1793. Alexis und Dora therefore opens the journal in which it was first published and continues in subsequent printings to introduce its own group of poems, even in strong defiance of chronological order. From this clear editorial choice we may well expect that Alexis und Dora's relationship to the other texts in Elegien II will prove programmatic. More precisely, as a beginning, first of its own issue of the Musen-Almanach and then of the rest of Goethe's classical lyric, the most obvious aspect of Alexis und Dora to claim our attention will be its own beginning. In this paper I will focus on the intertextual affiliations of this self-conscious "beginning of a beginning," specifically its model in Virgil and later Virgilian poetry, and the multi-layered figure of retrospection.

The search for classical exemplars for such a typical product of this phase in Goethe's career needs no elaborate justification, but the influence of Latin literature on Goethe, as opposed to Greek literature, has been widely underappreciated. This is due, ironically, to the vastly greater familiarity of Goethe's age with Latin than Greek. In 1912 Ernst Maass could devote a mere 40 pages of his 655 page Goethe und die Antike to the Roman authors, and claim, "die Griechen sind phantasiebegabt, die Römer gar nicht. Dies der Grund, weshalb von den Dichtern der augusteischen Zeit abgesehen die römische Literatur verhältnismässig bei ihm so spärlich erscheint."¹ Such a judgment reflects a Romantic dichotomization of the ancient world that would have been somewhat familiar to an older Goethe, but certainly distorts the educational experience of any German in the eighteenth century.² Goethe describes his own acquaintance with the ancient languages at age sixteen in Dichtung und Wahrheit:

Das Hebräische sowie die biblischen Studien waren in den Hintergrund getreten, das Griechische gleichfalls, da meine Kenntnisse desselben sich nicht über das Neue Testament hinaus erstreckten. Desto ernstlicher hielt ich mich ans Lateinische, dessen Musterwerke uns näher liegen und das uns, nebst so herrlichen Originalproduktionen, auch den übrigen...