THE ABSOLUTE NIGHT INVOKED BY THE GERMAN ROMANTIC FRIEDRICH von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis, might well have been more influential at the turn of the nineteenth century than previously acknowledged. This image saturating his dithyrambic cycle Hymnen an die Nacht [Hymns to the Night], published in 1800, continues to be read by some in terms of obscure private experiences despite the twentieth-century work of Kate Hamburger, Martin Dyck, and others that show scientific connections. (1) This construal is especially popular in the Enghsh-speaking world and has followed a long tradition of interpreting Novalis that began with the reviews of essayist Thomas Carlyle. In the late 1820s, Carlyle had tied this poet not just to the medieval German mystic Jakob Bohme but also to what he regarded as the "tenebrific constellation" of Immanuel Kant and the "Kantists." (2) Common readers today tend to merge Novalis's night more with a state of spiritual loneliness the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross had called "the dark night of the soul" ["la noche oscura del alma"]. This inclination is not merely the result of a religious metaphor's familiarity; it derives its understanding from an incident linked to the poem's inspiration, an epiphany Novalis experienced at the grave of his first fiancre, Sophie von Kuhn, on 13 May 1797. (3) The subsequent view that Novahs's spiritual insight was inextricable from his emotional vulnerability has led several critics to identify a wide range of literary influences. Suggestions include August Wilhelm Schlegel's essay on Romeo and Juliet of 1797, Johann Gottfried Herder's mythic poems, the religious writings of Karl von Eckartshausen and Johann Patti Friedrich Richter, or Jean Paul, and Edward Young's Night Thoughts of 1742-45. (4) Young's poem, which had numerous European translations by the end of the eighteenth century, is often cited in view of its thematic resemblance to Novahs's poem and its reputation among German writers such as Herder, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Christoph Martin Wieland, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. (5) Novalis might have turned to this reflection on mortality weeks before his graveside experience, but it seems rather excessive to proclaim Young's direct and deep impact. The British surrealist David Gascoyne expresses the same doubt in his introduction to an English edition of Hymnen an die Nacht translated by the American poet Jeremy Reed and published in 1989: Gascoyne notes that Young's poem exudes disgruntlement--its other tide being, after all, The Complaint--while Novalis's achieves "a serene transcendence of bereavement and mourning through the resolution of grief into rapture rather than resignation." (6)
