ABSTRACT
A note of disenchantment was present in the baroque from the beginning. Its obsessive fondness for play-acting and for the metaphor of the stage reveals a deep-seated awareness that appearances are illusion, while its philosophical basis in Christian stoicism was a constant reminder, like war, plague and fever, that life is precarious indeed in comparison to the certainty of death. Life seemed indeed to be a martyrdom, and contemplation of the grave the fittest subject for the poet’s art. One of those who responded to the Jesuit’s achievement was Andreas Gryphius, the German Lutheran poet whose temperament and linguistic gifts were most suited to this particular aspect of the age in which he lived. Life’s anguish, man’s mortality and the fragility of beauty were his usual themes; but the sombre splendour of his poetry is much more than a sum total of them.
