Frankfurter Anthologie: Robert Walser: The World (I)

The title of the poem sounds on the high side, and the first verses would seem, in fact, a little pathetic, if not the Laugh would be at the beginning. The laughter, however, is not the Individual, is braced against the world, but the world itself, even many lower worlds arise and pass away. The old transience topos of the Underground will be expanded to the universal. Although there is the possibility of parallel worlds in philosophy since ancient times, but Robert Walser was able to verses, at the time of the creation of the poem have anything to do with the Expansion of the universe, and certainly nothing of the theory of the Multi. Nevertheless, the verses from solve today, such associations.

The different worlds, whether cosmic or social, of which Walser speaks of here, are fixed and immutable, they are “Hiking”. May your truth lies precisely in the change, the change, the promises of freedom. From Kafka, the sentence is handed down: “The idea of the Vastness and richness of the cosmos is the result of the Extreme-driven mixture of laborious creation and free self-contemplation.” It is only in the evolutionary movement, the following sentences of the poem, seem to the worlds as “more beautiful” compared to those that you have left behind. The “Escape” is their paradoxical Foundation. “It is a Go in all and in all”, – stated in the novel “Geschwister Tanner” and “The whole world is rushing, the whole life! So it’s nice. Only in this way!“

With the three final verses of the poem it is personal; under the universal model, while fleeing and Shrinkage of the lyrical I itself may be volatile and of a good courage, without fear and without anxiety. This gives him a clear view of the world as such, it can take “unzertrümmert” the world as it is, and walk through it, you can even “strut”. But the mischief is seated in the meter: Dreihebige Jamben are from children’s and folk songs known, but not infrequently the meter is being used to joke and ridicule. Equally instructive is the rhyme scheme of the exchange of two-line pair-rhyme (aa), and a four-line, so called, embracing, or tail rhyme (bc, cb). Reflected here – even if the question far-fetched, the motif of the wandering schweifens, of the Fickle and love to the world, may be alike?

The whole world is rushing

As a poet Walser has become less known, and not infrequently, he was criticized by hart, but his literary career began with poems, which, of course, in their unspectacular diction against the sensitive snapshots of impressionism and the ecstatic had expressionism. The poem was published with other poems Walser’s in January 1900 in the journal “The island” under the Heading of “happiness” and without verse outline; the author was just twenty-one years old. It was later calculated to be in the “I” after Walser had written another poem with the same title. As the verses were recorded in 1909 in the first volume of poetry, Walser’s great novels already.