Where roots take hold of rock

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), the German poet and naturalist, opens the final scene of the second part of Faust with a landscape. No individual speaker yet claims our attention. A chorus and an echo give voice to a place of forest and rock. Reading the lines aloud, one can hear how a handful of short movements begins to suggest a whole mountainside.

Two lines and two forces

Lean them the cliffs thereon,
Grapple the roots thereon,

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part Two, 1908, p. 333.^[1]

The rock has weight. The root has the power to hold on. Goethe puts each noun first in its line and then gives it the little pronoun “sie,” or “they.” Twice the sentence gathers itself for a fresh start. The first movement presses down, and the second answers with a grip. A painter could draw a root stretching across a boulder and show each of the smaller strands. On stage one verb suffices. The act of clinging lets us feel the resistance of the surface to which the root holds.

A setting that can be heard

Other brief perceptions surround these lines. A forest sways, trunks crowd together and water makes its way noisily through the landscape. Among these movements the rocks give weight somewhere to rest and roots somewhere to fasten. The echo gives the words a direction in space. For a moment a second voice seems to come from higher on the mountain, although the eye has yet to pick out a speaker. Only afterwards do individual figures in the final scene speak in their own voices. Rock and plant have already furnished the audience with a first experience of the place.