The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Poetry - 84. ...to cherish truths and yet conceal...

I can connect with this one. Platen has studied this character well. I wonder who his subject was?

15 minutes ago, Parker Owens said:

I can connect with this one. Platen has studied this character well. I wonder who his subject was?

That's a very astute observation, Parker. Because Platen was Gay, there's a willful streak to see him as the unhappy poster-child for the supposed misery of "choosing" to be such. Lots of hets moralizing on Platen in 20th century books, warning young readers not to be like him . . . 

But actually, Platen left us a detail accounting of his life and loves. His journals were published, so scholars can mostly find out who he was sleeping with and in love with and writing poems to right down to the day. Therefore, the other myth that his "hands were porcelain" and unsullied with actual man-on-man sex is total BS. The man was happy; the man was sad; the man was lonely; the man had abundant company. All it went into his poetry, which is universally reckoned as some of the finest that exists in the German tongue.

So why is so little of it in English? Because it's much too open and honest    

21 minutes ago, AC Benus said:

That's a very astute observation, Parker. Because Platen was Gay, there's a willful streak to see him as the unhappy poster-child for the supposed misery of "choosing" to be such. Lots of hets moralizing on Platen in 20th century books, warning young readers not to be like him . . . 

But actually, Platen left us a detail accounting of his life and loves. His journals were published, so scholars can mostly find out who he was sleeping with and in love with and writing poems to right down to the day. Therefore, the other myth that his "hands were porcelain" and unsullied with actual man-on-man sex is total BS. The man was happy; the man was sad; the man was lonely; the man had abundant company. All it went into his poetry, which is universally reckoned as some of the finest that exists in the German tongue.

So why is so little of it in English? Because it's much too open and honest    

Thanks very much for this background.  I'd read the poem several times and, though the imagery painted a somewhat dark and vivid picture, I wasn't grasping the meaning well.  One stumbling block was function of one specific word in this line: 

"He stands alone, in conflict with his age". 

Once I grasped that age was the time in which the subject lived and not his calendar years, it made a lot more sense.  These postings make me think.  Sometimes that takes a while   

25 minutes ago, Backwoods Boy said:

Thanks very much for this background.  I'd read the poem several times and, though the imagery painted a somewhat dark and vivid picture, I wasn't grasping the meaning well.  One stumbling block was function of one specific word in this line: 

"He stands alone, in conflict with his age". 

Once I grasped that age was the time in which the subject lived and not his calendar years, it made a lot more sense.  These postings make me think.  Sometimes that takes a while   

Thanks for reading and commenting, Backwoods Boy. I've been working my way though Platen's Sonnets, doing translations, and the themes in the poem above are very familiar ones. Many of them are expressed in the man's Sonnets as well, including the idea that Platen belonged in an age where same-sex love was given the honor it deserves, perhaps like in the days of Classical Greece and Rome; or perhaps he imagined a future time when things for us would be better.

Joseph Gotswick, the translator of the work above, praises Platen's poise and sense of philosophic observation, saying he was the modern equivalent of Horace. And that's high praise indeed!