Open Access

Johannes Schade

• The article engages in a close reading of Goethe's sonnet "Mächtiges Überraschen", published in the sonnet cycle of 1807. In it the poetic voice evokes a mountain river whose course is suddenly interrupted by the limiting force of a dam. Paradoxically, however, the effect of this is not stagnation, but the emergence and celebration of a "new life". This paradox will be illuminated by a discussion of Goethe's "Morphologie" as a universal scientific method. Morphology studies the infinite variety of (natural) forms while also insisting on their individual limitation. Goethe's understanding of life lingers on the co-presence of "coined form" and "living development" as he formulates it in "Urworte. Orphisch". "Mächtiges Überraschen" is read as a poem that embodies this fundamental polarity. The sonnet refers time and again to the borders and limitations of both the natural image it evokes and its own poetic properties. Simultaneously, it suggests the transgression of these limitations on both a formal (or structural) and a metaphorical level. As a poetological sonnet, "Mächtiges Überraschen" unifies the representation (of a natural event) with a reflection on representation as such. The announcement of a "new life" in the last stanza of the poem is thus read as an announcement of its own coming-into-being.