Choruses of the Midnight

Author: Nelly Sachs

• Choruses, lacking first-person speakers
• Giving voice to groups
• Drawn from Greek tragedy
  • Comment on stage, off stage
  • Guiding in interpretation

Chorus of the Survivors

Sachs_Poems.pdf – p. 5

• Closeness to death
• Metaphor of music
• Sound is key
• Death changes body parts into instruments
  • Lament
• Suffering longing for life, light, music, stars
• Haunting
• Death may break through efforts to live again
  • 🔗 In Memoriam
  • No hope for a complete return to life
    • Death remains a presence
      • Farewell in the dust

Chorus of the Orphans

Sachs_Poems.pdf – p. 9

• Using natural images to invert the natural
  • Parents → inanimate objects
• Sorrow
• Anger
• No forgiveness
• Contrast with angels and childish images
• Gives voice to those who have perished

Chorus of the Stones

Sachs_Poems.pdf – p. 15

• Bearing witness to the beginning of humanity’s suffering
• ^25f794
• 🔗 Paramita, The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion, prajñaparamita

The voice of the Holy Land

Sachs_Poems.pdf – p. 25

• Suffering
• Hope for rebirth
• Contributed to her image as spokesperson of Jewish people
  • 🔗 People see what they wish to see
• Land’s dialogue with death
• Revenge and anger 🔗 ^63087d → Israel-Hamas War
• Does not want rising nationalism
  • Metaphorical
  • Coming of the Messiah

references

• Sachs_Poems.pdf