ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Goethe's 'Urworte. Orphisch' and Morike's 'Besuch in Urach'. While the two poems are very different, they are also strikingly connected by themes of loss, transformation and — finally — hope. 'Urworte. Orphisch' draws on a mythic background and on grandly framed concepts but, implicitly, meditates on personal desolation; 'Besuch in Urach' evokes the personal experience of an experience of landscape in order to reflect on subjective alienation and the possibility of regained unity. In poetry Goethe can take the decisive further step that is missing in his essay 'Geistesepochen nach Hermanns neuesten Mitteilungen', written shortly after the composition of 'Urworte. Orphisch'. Morike, like Goethe, deploys a complex pattern of intersection and division, which stages a self's fraught and unstable quest to find resonance in the encounter with another.
