Chiasm of Love

Chiasm of Love April 14, 2015

Marion Gibbs and Sidney Johnson present a sensitive analysis of the poetry of Gottfried of Strassburg’s Tristan in their introduction to Medieval German Literature.

In the Prologue to the poem, Gottfried captures the contradictory qualities of love with a rich series of antitheses: 

ir süeze sur, ir liebez leit, 

ir herzeliep, ir senede not, 

ir liebez leben, ir leiden tot, 

ir lieben tot, ir leidez leben (ll. 60-63).

(Translation: Loves “sweet bitterness, its dear sorrow, its heart’s joy, its yearning pain, its dear life, its sorrowful death, its dear death, its sorrowful life.”)

The last couplet in the quatrain forms a complex chiasm: leben and tot switch places to become tot . . . leben. The adjectives that modify the two words stay in place on the page, though changing case endings: liebez/leiden lieben/leidez. But with the shifting of the nouns, the adjectives take on shocking new force. “Dear life” and “sorrowful death” are trite; but love is also the contrary of “dear death” and “sorrowful life.”

Later in the prologue, at what the authors describe as “the first peak” (161), Gottfried makes “effective use of chiasmus:

ein senedaer unde ein senedaerin, 

ein man ein wip, ein wip ein man, 

Tristan Isolt, Isolt Tristan (ll. 128-30).

(Translation: “A lover and a loveress; a man, a woman, a woman, a man; Tristan, Isolt; Isolt, Tristan.”)

The repetitions give the lines the feel of an incantation, and the second and third lines are internally chiastic. They match each other: In the second line, the man is at the edges, the wip in the center, and in the third Tristan’s name frames the repetition of Isolt’s. In the double chiasm, we have a depiction in words of the intertwining of the lovers themselves; the arrangement places Isolt in the interior, as she is taken to the grotto of love, where Tristan guards her from her husband. The whole triad comes to an aural closure with the rhyme of “man” and “Tristan,” the rhyme moving from the generic to the specific, and suggesting that Tristan is man, his love exemplary of the sweet sadness of all human loves.

Gibbs and Johnson notes the “Eucharistic overtones” (162) of the closing lines of the Prologue:

Ir leben, ir tot sint unser brot. 

sus lebet ir leben, sus lebet ir tot. 

sus lebent si noch und sint doch tot 

und ist ir tot der lebenden brot.

(Translation: “Their life, their death are our bread. Thus lives their life, thus lives their death. Thus they live still and yet are dead, and their death is bread to the living.”)

Here it is not the paradoxical sweet-sadness of love that is highlighted but the mutual penetration of life and death. The lovers’ death is bread of life to the reader. Tristan and Isolt’s death lives on because their death lives on. The final couplet presses the paradox to a climax: They live though dead; their death is bread to living. They live on in us who eat the bread of the poem. As Isolt is “inside” Tristan in the earlier chiastic couplet, so death is enclosed within life/living in this couplet. Death is the interior secret to life, to the eternal life that great lovers enjoy, for without their death for love they would not continue to live.


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