ISSN: 1391 - 0531
Sunday March 30, 2008
Vol. 42 - No 44
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The little known lyricist within the socialist

Tribute to Karl Marx on his 125th death anniversary

By Prof. Desmond Mallikarachchi

Karl Marx has been respected by his friends and foes alike as a great thinker and enthusiastic and indefatigable explorer into the covert and overt oppressive mechanisms of the rising capitalism of the 19th century.

If one reads Karl Marx’s personal and academic life closely leaving prejudices aside, one would realize that right inside him there had always been a kind-hearted father, beloved husband, joyful friend, penetrative critic, uncompromising debater, humorous and lampoon drama producer, and a lyrical poet.

Jenny and Karl Marx

A very few, most notably his fiancée Jenny and his father knew Marx’s potential for writing lyrical poetry, though it remained as a family affair of little interest to the wider world.

Marx, as a university student at Bonn and Berlin, not only studied history, philosophy, and law but also literature and western classics and never lost his admiration for Greek mythology or Shakespeare. Disclosing his fervent and unceasing thirst for knowledge, he wrote to his father as far back as 1837, that he had attended lectures of Schlegel (on Homer), Welcker (on Greek and Latin mythology), Bruno Bauer (on Isaiah) and translated extracts from Tacitus and Ovid, in addition to receiving inspiration from German poets such as Schilller and Heinrich Heine. Due to the physical exhaustion Marx encountered as a result of his attempts to comprehend these abstruse disciplines, and the mental state he had been in due particularly to the fact of living away from home for the first time, he sought some solace in writing lyrical poetry.

It is true that his early poetry had been contaminated, understandably of course, with German romanticism but his originality was that he had been sharp enough to perceive the (natural) affinity between the moments of change and the lyric mood, as Prof. S.S. Prawer observes in his work Karl Marx and the World Literature (1976). As young Marx disclosed his inner poetic self to his father in the letter he wrote in 1837 ; “at such (painful) moments ...an individual becomes lyrical, for every metamorphosis is partly a swan song, partly the overture of a great new poem that is trying to find its right proportions amid brilliant colours that are not yet distinct”. Marx has compressed here the three significant art-fields, i.e. literature, music and the visual arts employing sensibly the words ‘lyrical’ ‘overture’ and ‘brilliant colours’ respectively to yield metaphors that help him to convey his feelings. Karl Marx’s artistic inspirations were reflected in the dedicatory poems he wrote to his father entitled Dichtung (German), meaning poetry. The most inspirational verses of the poem run as;

Creator-like, flames streamed,
Purling, from your breast to mine,
High, wide they tongued together
And I nourished them in my breast.
Your image stood bright, like Aeolian sound;
Gently it covered the glow with pinions of love.
I heard murmuring sounds, I saw a gleam,
Faraway skies drifted along,
Emerged to sight, sank down again,
Sank only to rise higher still.
When the inner struggle came to rest
I saw pain and joy concentrated in song. (Marx-Engles Works)
Young Marx, the Romeo, wrote a number of poems expressing his platonic love to his fiancée Jenny, who subsequently became his life partner.

Jenny if I may boldly say
That we have lovingly exchanged hearts,
That our glowing hearts beat as one,
That one and the same stream agitates their waves, (Marx –Engles Works 1. (20 48-50)
Young Marx’s later poems revealed his desire to combine poetry with the concept of action/praxis as attested by the following two poems among many.
Therefore let us dare all,
Never pause, never rest,
Let us never sink into dull silence,
Into willing nothing and doing nothing.
Let us not walk, in brooding anxiety,
Under the yoke that weighs us down:
For longing and desire

And action- these remain to us in spite of all. (Marx-Engles Collected Works. 1)

Young Marx demonstrated his talents not only in lyrical poetry but also in prose. He had almost completed a humorous novel entitled The Scorpion and Felix of which only a fragment now survives, but as Professor Prawer rightly observes, it was an attempt to speak of political matters in a literary form. This is also evident from the poems he composed immediately before he switched over from composing lyrical love- poetry to formulating a political programme based on materialist philosophy.

One of his philosophical poems entitled Human Pride demonstrates his premonition of the concept of alienation, which played a central role in his later philosophical works. He lyrically exposes how the buildings of a city vitiate humanness of city-dwellers while ruthlessly destroying the human pride and ingenuity of their very (human) architects.

Young Marx wrote a good deal of poetry among which the poems entitled , The Minstrel, Night Love, Song of the Sirens, Song of a Boatman on the Sea, The Despairing Man’s Prayer, and On Hegel and a few others stand out and survive to this date. While writing poems he developed a critical approach to the retrogressive and repressive ideologies and realized, in the process, that the time had come to put an end to composing lyrical poems and hence he devoted the rest of his life until his death in 1883 to formulate a political programme with a view to redeem mankind from exploitation and oppression, the project, in my belief, is Karl Marx’s monumental epic.

(The writer is attached to the Department of Philosophy & Psychology, University of Peradeniya)

 
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