If there is such a thing as the lyrical tone of Romanticism, it is nowhere as distinct and familiar as in Eichendorff’s most well-known poems. Certain simple phrases recur in his verses again and again: dawn breaks, quiet the land, only forest and fountain rustle, the clouds drift by, night falls, the nightingale sings, the stars dance. Aimless wandering by day, the fields and roads glistening in the sunlight, the post horn awakening a yearning for distant parts. Many verses tell of departure and romantic roving, others of melancholy and farewells. It is a world seemingly devoid of modern lifestyles and technologies — and of the exploitation of nature that, in the decades around 1800, had left much of Europe deforested. The far-reaching changes that also shaped Eichendorff’s own lifeworld are only indirectly perceptible — in the longing that echoes in his songs.

Eichendorff’s drafts shed light on his technique of linking motifs deeply rooted in literary tradition. They also reveal that the flow of the lines, however effortless it may sound, was only attained by carefully marking, pondering, reordering, and reassessing the individual elements. A poem entitled Wünschelrute (Wishing-Wand) bears striking testimony to this process. The draft in the display case shows that it was based on a sonnet by a different author, Friedrich August von Staegemann; the source is cited. Eichendorff began by timidly drawing on that text, also in sonnet form, and then underlined the rhyming words primarily responsible for the verses’ overall tone. In the third verse, something entirely new and unprecedented suddenly emerges: Eichendorff comments: “In all things slumbers, enchanted, a song (or a wonderful melody) / Many a century long”. In the margin, he writes, as if to exhort himself: “The poet must break the spell — Make sure to strike the right tone!” This twist would eventually become the core of the evolving poem: just four lines that are meanwhile among the most well-known in all of German Romanticism:

A song sleeps in all things around
Which dream on and on unheard,
And the world begins to resound,
If you hit the magic word.