Schiller: “Hope”

Excerpt, “A Book of Ballads from the German.”  Translated by Percy Boyd, Esq.  1848.

Schiller: “The Maiden From A Far Country”

Schiller: “The Conflict”

Schiller at the Court of Weimar

Friedrich Schiller: “The Might of Poesy”

Excerpt, “German Ballads, Songs, etc., comprising translations from Schiller, Uhland, Burger, Goethe, Korner, Becker,  Fouque, Chamisso, etc., etc.” London:  Edward Lumley. 1845.

Schiller:  “Trooper’s Song”

“The Book of German Songs from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century.” Translated and Edited by H. W. Dulcken. 1856.

Schiller:  “The Translator’s Apology to the Reader”

“The Poems of Schiller.”  Translated by Edgar A. Bowring, C.B.M.F. Second Edition. 1872.

Schiller: “The Commencement of the Nineteenth Century”

Excerpt, “German Poetry with The English Versions of The Best Translations.” Edited by H.E. Goldschmidt.  1869. Translated by C. Hermann Merivale.

 

Schiller: “The Glove”

THE GLOVE (1797)

A Tale

,

Before his lion-court,

To see the gruesome sport,

Sate the king;

Beside him group’d his princely peers;

And dames aloft, in circling tiers,

Wreath’d round their blooming ring.

.

King Francis, where he sate,

Raised a finger–yawn’d the gate,

And, slow from his repose,

A LION goes!

.

Dumbly he gazed around

The foe-encircled ground;

And, with a lazy gape,

He stretch’d his lordly shape,

And shook his careless mane,

And–laid him down again!

.

A finger raised the king–

And nimbly have the guard

A second gate unbarr’d;

Forth, with a rushing spring,

A TIGER sprung!

.

Wildly the wild one yell’d

When the lion he beheld;

And, bristling at the look,

With his tail his sides he strook,

And roll’d his rabid tongue;

,

In many a wary ring

He swept round the forest king,

With a fell and rattling sound;–

And laid him on the ground,

Grommelling!

.

The king raised his finger; then

Leap’d two LEOPARDS from the den

With a bound;

And boldly bounded they

Where the crouching tiger lay

Terrible!

.

And he gripped the beasts in his deadly hold;

In the grim embrace they grappled and roll’d;

Rose the lion with a roar!

And stood the strife before;

And the wild-cats on the spot,

From the blood-thirst, wroth and hot,

Halted still!

.

Now from the balcony above,

A snowy hand let fall a glove:–

Midway between the beasts of prey,

Lion and tiger; there it lay,

The winsome lady’s glove!

.

Fair Cunigonde said, with a lip of scorn,

To the knight DELORGES–“If the love you have sworn

Were as gallant and leal as you boast it to be,

I might ask you to bring back that glove to me!”

,

The knight left the place where the lady sate;

The knight he has pass’d thro’ the fearful gate;

The lion and tiger he stoop’d above,

And his fingers have closed on the lady’s glove!

. .

All shuddering and stunn’d, they beheld him there–

The noble knights and the ladies fair;

But loud was the joy and the praise, the while

He bore back the glove with his tranquil smile!

.

With a tender look in her softening eyes,

That promised reward to his warmest sighs,

Fair Cunigonde rose her knight to grace;

He toss’d the glove in the lady’s face!

.

“Nay, spare me the guerdon, at least,” quoth he;

And he left forever that fair ladye!

The Knight scorns Cunigonde