«[…] Und achtzehn Jahre streichen / Aus meinem Lebensbuch». Das alternde Ich in den Gedichten der Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

The topic of time and transience occupies a key position in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s poetry with regard to the poetological discourse that her poems always negotiate. This paper focuses on a selected series of poems in which Droste explicitly reflects on her old age or aging. Characteristic of this type of poems is the choice of an autodiegetically-staged speaker, whereby Droste frequently plays with autobiographical references. In particular, the paper emphasises the close or complementary relationship between the age motif and the poet motif, which is often metaphorically dressed, and with which the lyrical discourse repeatedly shifts to a meta-level. Even on the diachronic level of the selected corpus, which encompasses Droste’s central creative phase, a continuous pattern of thought structure becomes recognisable, and this pattern ties poetic creativity to the experience of aging. Only this experience provides the lyrical I with the possibility of a retrospective or, more exactly, of a memory irrevocably separated from the experience itself and aware of its transience – a memory that takes on a fixed form in the (written) poem. On the one hand, this seems to confirm the poet’s ‘Biedermeier’ attitude (in comparison to the politically engaged ‘Vormärz’). At the same time, however, the profound divergence between subjective (interior) and objective (exterior) experience of time also marks an almost modern, identity-shattering moment in her writing.