Some thoughts about Sibylla Schwarz´ sonnet "Is love a fire?"

This is the poem: 

Is love a fire? Can love melt iron? 
Am I like fire and full of the pain of love? 
Out of what is the heart of my lover? 
If it were made of iron then I could melt it with my fire. 

 If it were made of gold I could bend  it 
with my glow, should it made of flesh 
so I see : it is a stone made of flesh. 
However, a stone cannot betray me like she does. 

 But if her heart were like frost , as cold as snow and ice 
Then how can she make me hot with love? 
I think: her heart is like laurel leaves 

 Which are not touched by any thunderstorm 
She laughs about you, Cupid,  and your arrow 
She is immune to your thunderstorm 

Sibylla Schwarz was the daughter of the mayor of Greifswald and was born in 1621. She died at the age of 17 already. This is what makes her poetry so interesting for us to read because neither in her days nor in ours there are people who wrote or rather would have written like her. Sibylla Schwarz seems to have been a unique and highly intelligent young woman. In the 17th century, it surely must have been something like a revolution to be writing  like she did because then to get an education and to write poetry were almost exclusively male privileges. 

The young poetess was a clever technician. Typical of this period of time is that the poem is written in the form of  a sonnet the elements of which she used in a perfect way. 

The poem can be divided into two parts, i.e. 2 stanzas with 4 lines and 2 stanzas with 3 lines. The change from the first half to the second is marked by a change of ideas. In the last two lines and sometimes in the very last one, the quintessence of the poem is revealed. 

We liked Sibylla Schwarz´s sonnet because she writes from a man´s point of view  who has fallen  in love with a girl. But, unfortunately, she shows him the cold shoulder and not a single sign of interest. 

The whole poem speaks of the girl´s  heart only. No other object  is mentioned -  in contrast to most other baroque poems in which poets often write up a whole list of items to show the beauty of the women. 

In the role of the man, the speaker of the poem is in search of the material the woman´s heart may be made of. For this, he uses some strange, mostly antithetical similes, metaphora and oxymora, which, however, she contradicts after having used them. 

In order to find out what his sweetheart´s heart is made of, the speaker thinks of various materials,  fire, iron or gold, for example. The more he tries to find a fitting comparison, the more he has to realize that her heart cannot be compared to anything at all:  this heart is neither made of  iron nor gold because if it were he would be able to melt or to bend it. 
 

Peter Paul Rubens  "Amor schnitzt den Bogen"

At last, only one simile, i.e. the one between the laurel leaves and the girl´s heart remains – a simile that for today´s readers may sound a bit strange. Like his love´s heart, the laurel tree with its leaves can`t be hurt at all, neither by thunderstorm nor by Cupid`s arrows. 

In order to understand the text, you have to be as educated as Sybilla Schwarz was. The simile of the cold heart and the laurel tree has a symbolic meaning which we can find in the literature on emblematics of the 16th and 17th centuries. In a book by Joachim Camerarius , we find an emblem which carries the headline "untouchable virtue" and shows a laurel tree in a thunderstorm which can`t be hit by the terrible thunder and flashes. Underneath the picture, there is a Latin inscription which says "As beautiful virtue remains unhurt by evil, so the laurel tree remains unhurt." 

Hence, it is quite clear that Cupid´s arrows cannot do anything against the virtue of the woman in question here.  Whatever the lover may do, his love will remain untouched. His efforts have been in vain – she will always be as cold as ice. 

We liked the language of the poem, too. Of course it is not the same German as the one in our days but the one of the 17th century. It is a good example how language can change and develop over the centuries (cf. our recent spelling reform in Germany which nobody likes). 

We believe that Sybilla Schwarz tries to hide her own feelings by writing from a man´s point of view. Maybe it is her wish is be the woman who addresses her beloved in this way. 

But, on the other hand, she may want us to think about what love really is: You have to do something for your love and you have to fight for it, in order to win the love which is so strong that it melts everything. She definitely makes fun of the artificial male rhetoric. So, you can say the whole poem is an appeal to do everything for your love, tell him or her about your love and fight for it, And this is as important today as it always was! 

Zeynep Akel and Deniz Abar