SOURCE: Heinrich Heine Poetry in Context: A Study of 'Buch der Lieder,' Berg Publishers Ltd., 1989, 292 p.

In the following excerpt, Perraudin discusses imagery, theme, and style in two chronologically distinct poems of Buch der Lieder.

Two of the most complex, important and, given their importance, also most neglected poems of Heine's Buch der Lieder period are the principal objects of attention of this chapter. It is evident that in a simply chronological sense 'Die Weihe' of 1816 and 'Im Hafen' of 1826 represent the 'Anfang und Ende meines lyrischen Jugendlebens'—the phrase is Heine's own epistolary characterisation of the Buch der Lieder collection¹—for the one is his first published work, and the other is one of his last compositions for "Die Nordsee" II, the final cycle of his anthology. But they are so in a more momentous sense too, and it is this which is my concern here...