The Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern, translated from the German by Max Knight, introduction by Samuel Titan, New York Review Books, 2025
Christian Morgenstern’s name itself opens a door. The significance of his first name is clear enough, but it is his last—German for “morning star”—that bears the promise of light before knowledge, of awareness before the world hardens into habit. In The Gallows Songs, newly reissued by NYRB Poets in Max Knight’s classic 1963 translation, Morgenstern uses that dawn brightness to keep language—and thus perception—from calcifying, with a celebrated nonsense that is less escapist whimsy than a disciplined refusal of routine. At the heart of The Gallows Songs lies a paradox: it is the crimson thread holding the hanged man to the gallows pole, at once constraining and liberating, that gave Morgenstern permission to see the world as a new thing, with the freshness of something that will not be seen again. Laughing on the edge of death, Morgenstern turns the gallows itself into a perch to witness the world anew.
Born in Munich in 1871, months after the establishment of the German Empire, Morgenstern lived in a liminal moment between centuries and sensibilities. Tuberculosis claimed his mother when he was nine and would eventually come for him in 1914, but it was this illness which drove him into the mountains, where his verse changed. With an inheritance that was visual as much as verbal (art ran in Morgenstern’s blood through generations of landscape painters), Morgenstern upheld his familial tradition differently, with panoramas made of words and their bulk—although always with also an awareness of how this material could lose its ballast. Tubercular exile sharpened, rather than dimmed, that painterly gaze, and as Samuel Titan notes in his new introduction, Morgenstern’s “nomadic life in the mountains” nourished verses “at once lighter than air and weighted by metaphysical strangeness.” This paradox is everywhere in The Gallows Songs: levity with gravity, the childlike with the cosmic, the playful with the precise.
“Nothing is more bourgeois than language,” Morgenstern jotted in a note later gathered in Stufen, a collection of aphorisms and notes. His calling, then, was to entbürgerlichen—to de-bourgeoisify speech. In practice, that meant puncturing words until they deflated into play, music, silence—and within a world accelerating toward mechanized slaughter, this irreverence was moral as well as aesthetic. Nonsense became resistance to the deathly drag of cliché, a kick against entropy in language itself.
That resistance appears nowhere more clearly than in “Fish’s Night Song,” a poem made entirely of diacritical swoops and dashes. Read it aloud and you supply your own vowels; glance at it and you see a minimalist score; flip past and it flickers like a buoy on dark water. Its semantic vacuum forces the reader into active perception—precisely the “seeing before knowing” that Morgenstern prized. Knight’s translation wisely keeps the page bare, refusing to over-explain the joke or the hush it conceals.
But this nonsense is not literary doodling. Like Zen koans or Blake’s gnomic proverbs, these poems discipline attention through contradiction. “The Aesthetic Weasel” perches on a pebble beside a brook and “dreams the world away,” equal parts comic mascot and ascetic sage. Palmström and Korf, the collection’s recurring fools, drift through illogical bureaucracies that prefigure Kafka’s corridors and Beckett’s stilled landscapes. Their very names—one solid, the other airy—map the tension between embodied absurdity and metaphysical joke.
Consider also “Moonsheep,” that creature which “has never been,” yet grazes serenely in lunar pastures. The line collapses being and non-being into playful coexistence: we laugh, then feel the floorboards of ontology give way. It is a small rehearsal for the vertigo Europe would soon know in earnest.
Because poetry lives on the page and in the ear, Morgenstern exploits both channels. His painterly ancestry surfaces in poems such as “The Funnels,” where typography itself becomes a riddle; the poem begins as a diagram of utilitarian equipment, then dissolves into a question mark—what is a funnel if not a throat, a channel, a gallows pole for liquids? By turning concrete object into conceptual hinge, Morgenstern links the physical world to the metaphysical violence of naming. This visual acuity places him within a lineage stretching backward to George Herbert and Thomas Traherne, whose devotional shape poems made the page an arena for seeing, and forward to the Brazilian concretists who explicitly cited him as inspiration. And Morgenstern is not simply a curiosity in German letters; he is a node in a network of poets for whom visual form is integral to textuality, where seeing and reading are not separable acts but a single commitment to attention. In these poems, the rainbow is not a spectrum analyzed but an apparition revered. To diagram it would be to kill it. The task, as Morgenstern sees it, is to keep the shimmer alive.
Max Knight, who fled Nazi Europe and remade his life in America, understood the stakes of language; his translation doubles as high-wire act, preserving Morgenstern’s off-kilter rhymes, bending English syntax to match German acrobatics, and—critically—leaving the blank spaces blank. Where literalness might smother the joke, Knight opts for fidelity to spirit over letter, capturing “Fish’s Night Song” as near-silence and letting the reader’s eye complete the music. This salvage feels urgent today, when speech is flattened into slogans or drained by the inertia of overuse; Knight’s choices remind us that translation can itself be a gallows, but also a crimson thread—fragile, saving, absurd. To read The Gallows Songs now is to reclaim vision from algorithmic sameness, to practice freedom not as a posture but as an event within language.
If Morgenstern’s absurdity found readers in the trenches of the First World War, it was not despite catastrophe but because of it, for his nonsense is not a retreat from disaster but a stubborn survival both within and beyond it. Laughter here is not a mask but a method, a way of keeping language limber enough to pivot rather than march, to bear witness without succumbing to the violence it records. The poems resonate with the “thousand darknesses of murderous speech” that Celan would later describe, offering instead a syntax of joyful refusal. We speak of “nonsense” lightly, but in Morgenstern it is a discipline. It asks the reader to risk confusion, to risk bewilderment. In “Fish’s Night Song” and “The Aesthetic Weasel,” in “Moonsheep” and “The Funnels,” there is a demand beneath the whimsy: to remain unsettled, to refuse the world becoming something you no longer see. This demand aligns him with poets for whom play is not ornamental but structural—Blake’s playful contraries, Traherne’s radiant perplexities, the Brazilian concretists’ typographic experiments, the fragmented radicalisms of Dada. In Morgenstern’s nonsense, there is a kick against entropy that is neither noisy protest nor quietism but something rarer: a fidelity to perception’s fragile, flickering attention, even under pressure.
The collection’s dedication “to the child in the man” is sometimes mistaken as sentimentality—but it should instead be read as a call to recover astonishment, to guard the world from the deadening habits of adulthood. The child marvels at the rainbow; the adult maps it. The child hears language as invention; the adult cites precedent. Morgenstern’s poems bring the reader back into apprenticeship, asking us to sound out the unsayable, to follow the visual squiggles, to let meaning slip and come back as something newly made. His creations, Palmström and Korf, become guides in this practice; they never escape the world’s disorder, but reveal its strange, enduring vibrancy. Their foolishness is rigorous, their humor precise—like children, they are perhaps relieved from certainty.
For in Morgenstern, the rainbow remains an apparition, never reduced to its refractions. The gallows remains a gallows, but it is also a place where laughter rings clear, just as how the poet and his friends had once staged mock executions on Gallows Hill. The crimson thread remains thin, absurd, breakable—but it is enough to hold us above despair. This is the paradox of The Gallows Songs: that in refusing to be useful, to be straightforward, to be explanatory, these poems remain alive. They preserve wonder without sentimentality, nonsense without triviality, and laughter without cruelty. For Anglophone readers today, Morgenstern offers not nostalgia but equipment. They are reminders that seeing is a moral act, that attention is a practice, that bewilderment is not failure but fidelity.
At the end, Morgenstern’s crimson thread still swings between the gallows and the morning star. It is not an assurance of rescue, but a promise that you can remain awake. You can laugh, even here. You can let the rainbow shimmer and not insist on naming every color. You can let language breathe. In his own vivid refusal, Morgenstern shows us how to keep words—and ourselves—alive to chance and grace. That, perhaps, is the morning star: the dawn of seeing, again, for the first time.
Jordan Silversmith is the author of Redshift, Blueshift, winner of the 2020 Gival Press Novel Prize, and his poem, “Praxis,” has received the 2020 Slippery Elm Prize in Poetry. He regularly writes on literature in translation.
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