The Promise of Eternity: Love and Poetic Form in Hadewijch'sLiederenorStanzaic Poems

Abstract

The thirteenth-century Brabantine Beguine Hadewijch uses what Barbara Newman has termed “la mystique curtoise” to construct a devotional system of oscillating genders for both God and narrator; this complicated web of relations between the speaker of the poem and Minne (Love, most often allegorically personified as a courtly woman) produces a series of variations on the Brautmystik first developed in monastic commentaries on the Song of Songs. The poetic form of the Stanzaic Poems forces the reader or hearer to consider the coexistence of alternative temporalities in the moment of ecstatic fruition: the past moment of revelation or union Hadewijch describes, the present temporal moment of readerly experience, and the promise of an eternal heavenly future of constant fruition. This fusion of temporalities is closely linked to the use of erotic imagery in religious discourse; Jean-Luc Marion's recent phenomenological analysis of erotics offers a new theoretical approach to the intersection of time and love in the Brautmystik tradition. Hadewijch writes of the renewal of time in the circular procession of seasonal change even as she considers the need for a divine lover that is eternally new. The act of processing her metaphor-laden, intricately formed poetry provides the reader with a cognitive experience that mimics the representational and linguistic paradoxes of mystical writing itself.

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