It
has the strong, full-blooded, passionate love of life characteristic
of its author, "the many-souled" Brentano, whose Romantic irony
resulted from his being ashamed of his sentimentality, and whose
hatred of philistinism was caused by his fear of his own latent
tendency toward that point of view. The plot of _Godwi_ runs wild, but
the satire and the interspersed lyrics make it interesting reading.
Romantic irony can go no farther than in this book, in which the
author's own death-bed scene is portrayed and in which the preceding
parts of the work are referred to by page and line--"This is the pond
into which I fall on page so and so."
If Brentano's _Rosary_ cycle (1809) is somewhat unpleasantly
superhuman, and if, at times, he mixes sex and religion like a mystic
of the Middle Ages or a Spaniard of the Counter Reformation, he rises
to wonderful lyric heights when he touches his own experiences, or
when he expresses the note of the people. His use of the supernatural,
of the subconscious mood, gives rise to such poems as _The Lore-Lay_,
the legend of which was actually invented by Brentano. Like all
Romanticists, Brentano was a poet of incomplete works, of moods
which abandoned him before the artistic perfection of his effort was
reached; but his suggestive touches, and, above all, his constant use
of the refrain in all phases and _genres_, especially to emphasize
and summarize his musical consciousness, are a striking proof of the
French adage, "Quand le coeur chante, c'est toujours un refrain.
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