A Sigh After Sleep: Poiesis and the Sacramentality of Nature in Annette von Droste-Hüshoff’s Late Lyric

Abstract

Critics of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff have long pursued the dominant themes of natural depiction and religiosity in her poetry, and a more recent strain of scholarship has been drawing out the ecological implications of the former, though less so of the latter. The article brings these different lines of interpretation together by exploring how Droste’s late work presents the connection between nature and poiesis as an effect of the Fall, and thus as integral to the human condition. The article shows how these themes are gathered around the figure of Eve and the leitmotif of sleep and argues that tracing these topoi allows us to see that Droste depicts the encounter with nature to be an inherently sacramental event, one which ultimately lays bare a postlapsarian—and ecologically relevant—kinship between poiesis, nature, and human Being.