Annotations of Benn's Two Poems

Beautiful Youth

         BY GOTTFRIED BENN

The mouth of the girl who had lain long in the rushes

looked so nibbled.  | casual diction a tone of astonishment

When they opened her chest, her esophagus was so holey.

Finally in a bower under the diaphragm  | an attractive place retreat, a lady’s private apartment in medieval times, a shelter

they found a nest of young rats.

One little thing lay dead.   | not human

The others were living off kidneys and liver

drinking the cold blood and had

had themselves a beautiful youth.

And just as beautiful and quick was their death:

the lot of them were thrown into the water. | idiomatic phrase for “bad people”

Ah, will you hearken at the little muzzles’ oinks!

The use of “so” as emphasis for?

Diction and the contrasts in how the rats and the girl are named. Rats=”things” and “the lot of them” and are seen as creatures “muzzles’ oinks”

Little Aster  |an enchanted flower, star-shaped, thought to carry magical powers, “Asters were laid on the graves of French soldiers to symbolize afterthought and the wish that things had turned out differently.”

         BY GOTTFRIED BENN

A drowned drayman was hoisted on to the slab.

Someone had jammed a lavender aster  | Aegeus myth allusion? Cursed by Medea

between his teeth.

As I made the incision up from the chest

with a long knife

under the skin

to cut out tongue and gums,

I must have nudged it because it slipped

into the brain lying adjacent.

I packed it into the thoracic cavity

with the excelsior  (wood shavings for packing)

when he was sewn up.

Drink your fill in your vase! |Coroner talking to the aster!

Rest easy,

little aster!