Die Lorelei is a poem by German poet Heinrich Heine. The poem describes an enchanting female, a sort of siren, who, sitting on the cliff above the the Rhine River and combing her golden hair, unwittingly distracted shipmen with her beauty and song, causing them to crash on the rocks. In 1880, Mark Twain translated the poem, which begins with the first line, “I cannot divine what it meaneth.” Despite the almost morbid tone of the poem, this line can be applied to the events in our lives. We do not know what everything means or why it happens, but we make the best of the cards we are dealt and remember to find beauty in even the most ordinary of days. We hope this blog will be a way to share the various ways we do this, through our daily adventures, recipes we try, crafts we attempt, places we go and opinions we have about it all.
Die Lorelei
I cannot divine what it meaneth,
This haunting nameless pain:
A tale of the bygone ages
Keeps brooding through my brain:
The faint air cools in the gloaming,
And peaceful flows the Rhine,
The thirsty summits are drinking
The sunset's flooding wine;
The loveliest maiden is sitting
High-throned in yon blue air,
Her golden jewels are shining,
She combs her golden hair;.
She combs with comb that is golden,
And sings a weird refrain
That steeps in a deadly enchantment
The listener's ravished brain:
The doomed in his drifting shallop,
Is tranced with the sad sweet tone,
He sees not the yawing breakers,
He sees but the maid alone:
The pitiless billwos engulf him!-
So perish sailor and bark;
And this, with her baleful singing,
Is the Lorelei's gruesome work.
This haunting nameless pain:
A tale of the bygone ages
Keeps brooding through my brain:
The faint air cools in the gloaming,
And peaceful flows the Rhine,
The thirsty summits are drinking
The sunset's flooding wine;
The loveliest maiden is sitting
High-throned in yon blue air,
Her golden jewels are shining,
She combs her golden hair;.
She combs with comb that is golden,
And sings a weird refrain
That steeps in a deadly enchantment
The listener's ravished brain:
The doomed in his drifting shallop,
Is tranced with the sad sweet tone,
He sees not the yawing breakers,
He sees but the maid alone:
The pitiless billwos engulf him!-
So perish sailor and bark;
And this, with her baleful singing,
Is the Lorelei's gruesome work.