ABSTRACT
The Hohelied was a source of unique importance to the imaginative conception of the Gretchen episode in the Uifaust, an importance not to be measured in terms of verbal echoes, a 'colouring' to the language of the love scenes, or even those motifs, lyrical, narrative and dramatic, which Goethe saw as the origin of poetry's power to move. The first issue that must be addressed is whether the later play is a wilful falsification, a desperate measure designed to set limits to the 'golden dream' of gratified desire, or whether Goethe had in fact simply brought out into the light of consciousness a flaw in the idyll which had been there from the very beginning. This chapter shows that there is nothing factitious about the analysis undertaken in Iphigenie auf Tauris and that, as far as the idyll is concerned, there had indeed always been an invisible worm in the bud.
