Gottfried Keller holds a cut stone to the light.

The invisible bonds of Keller’s diamond

Gottfried Keller (1819–1890), the Swiss poet and novelist, opens a political sonnet with a question addressed to a gemstone. The title, Das Eidgenossen-Volk, has already announced a human community. The first stanza holds that community out of sight. For four lines the diamond has the stage to itself. What holds it so firmly together when its transparent form offers the observer no visible bond at all?

A stone without a visible seam

How, then, did the diamond come to be:
a unity pervaded throughout, enduring,
a purity unclouded, rich in rays,
made firm by bonds invisible to us?

– Gottfried Keller, Das Eidgenossen-Volk, 1846, p. 88.[1]

Keller’s question slows down the act of looking. At first one notices the brilliance. Then comes the thought of the material’s strength. Finally the word “bonds” asks about the relation between its parts. A bundle shows the cord that keeps it together. A diamond offers the eye no comparable clue. Its cohesion appears in the fact that light can pass through a continuous whole. The stanza moves from a visible result to an invisible relationship.

From a gemstone to a commonwealth

The second stanza speaks of people finding a home and of their love of freedom. The question of cohesion now has a human setting. Keller leaves room for the reader to work out why a community might be more than the sum of the people who belong to it. At the end he returns to the stone. Small dark bodies can be enclosed within a gem. Its initial purity now faces a detail easily lost at first sight. The dark inclusion belongs to the very specimen the reader first saw as a single radiant whole.