AMD2 Poetry

For my AMD I decided to look up German poetry. There were many lyrics and poems written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, so I decided to read and try to comprehend a few of his poems for an hour. One of my favorite was called Nähe des Geliebten. The title did not make sense to me until I began dissecting the words, and in Geliebten I found the prefix lieb-; after reading the entire poem this made sense because the overall theme seemed to revolve around another person the author loved.

Comprehend the poem turned out to be easier than I had initially thought because I could guess what the smaller words or adjectives meant. Each stanza began with the author doing an action. The first stanza says Ich denke dein which translates into "I am thinking of you" or "I think of you." The second stanza begins with Ich sehe dich, meaning "I see you." When I read this line I was very excited because I understood it, and knew why it said dich instead of du. The third stanza started with Ich höre dich, which translates to "I hear you." The final stanza began with Ich bin bei dir. I wasn't sure what this exactly translated to because I was unsure of the word bei, but it did resemble and sound like the English word "by." I guess that it could translate into a phrase similar to "I am by you." 

The lines wenn mir der Sonne schimmer and wenn sich des Mondes Flimmer  each sounded like "when the sun shimmers" and "when the moon glimmer." Many of the other words and phrases were hard to understand, but I could pick out which were verbs and which were nouns (obviously because of capitalization). Some verbs I found were hebt, bebt, steigt, schweigt, leuchten, and wärst.

I found this poem very interesting, and after trying to decipher the meaning looked up the English translation and was surprised to see that the guesses I made were correct. It was cool to see that where I guessed Ich bin bei dir meant "I am by you" was translated to "I am with you." After reading the translation this poem may make it into my top 10 favorite poems. It was very beautifully written.