Burning Tears, Floods, and Seething Torrents: Metaphors of the Natural Sublime in Winterreise

In Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, the wanderer-protagonist roams through a frozen landscape that externalizes his emotions: He sings that his burning tears will pierce through ice and snow (song Nos. 3 & 6) and likens his inner turmoil to the seething torrent of a river (No. 7). This characterization of the wanderer’s relationship to nature portrays his environment as a static tableau of feelings; however, a closer reading of the poetry and music reveals that the wayfarer takes recourse to metaphor in these comparisons of his body to nature. Extending scholarship on rhetoric in Winterreise (Hallmark, 2011), this paper examines the role of metaphor in Part I of Winterreise. I demonstrate that these dynamic figurative moments elide the boundaries between the wayfarer’s internal and external worlds and allow him to reconfigure the natural world as he assumes the sublime power of natural phenomena to express his grief.

After contextualizing invocations of ice, water, and fire in the first part of Winterreise with contemporary natural disasters (such as the eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1815) and competing geotheories (including glacier theory, Neptunism, and Vulcanism), I show how the associations of the elements with the sublime are transferred to the wanderer’s emotions via metaphor. Using Paul Ricœur’s theory of metaphor (1975) to reinterpret Immanuel Kant’s notion of the “dynamic” sublime, I understand the sublime in Part I of Winterreise as an act of metaphor. I propose an expanded theory of metaphor that functions textually and musically as a substitutive process that reinscribes the natural world through affect. Reinterpreting Winterreise via metaphor and the sublime helps us understand how linguistic and musical devices create affinities of resemblance between the power of nature and human affect, ultimately reshaping the natural environment and aesthetic experience through subjectivity.