This slim volume, first published in 1963, collects 37 poems Hesse wrote between 1944, when he was sixty-seven, and 1962. The final poem is dated August 8, the day before Hesse died at eighty-five. They are, for the most part, firmly in the tradition of Romantic landscape poems. They convey the melancholy of the change of seasons as objective correlatives of an observer who sees his own transience reflected. It surprises me that Hesse, whose prose works include the phantasmagoria of Steppenwolf and whose life was shaken by spiritual and psychological crises, should write such seemingly simple lyrics.
The best to me is one in which the object to which the observer feels kinship is not natural but a weathered Buddha statue. Thirteen of its fourteen lines are perfect, but then Hesse ruins the effect by restating the obvious in the last line: “Bild allen Wandels in der ewigen Einheit.” He’d made that point effectively and did not need to spell it out.
Then something happens in the final poems: the form loosens while the diction tightens. Two of these appear in more than one version, and a comparison of the first draft and the revision of one of them, “Einst vor tausend Jahren,” demonstrates what Hesse was capable of.
Overall, these poems remind me more of Hesse’s watercolors than the best of his prose. They seem the fruit of hours of relaxation, contemplating the beauty surrounding him in his refuge above Lake Lugano. I don’t begrudge him those hours. ( )