Romanzero

Romanzero, a volume of poems by H. Heine, published in 1851. It is divided into three books, Historien, Lamentationen, and Hebräische Melodien. The poems in this volume were written during Heine's long illness and represent both a renewal and an intensification of his poetic power. For inspiration he turns in part to the Jewish traditions into which he was born, and at the same time he grapples, with the aid of a courageous irony, with the realities of his slow death. Among the best-known poems of the Historien are ‘Der Dichter Firdusi’ and ‘Vitzliputzli’, and of the Hebräische Melodien, ‘Jehuda ben Halevy’. The more personal poems of the second section of the Lamentationen, headed Lazarus, include the powerful and moving ‘Der Abgekühlte’, ‘Gedächtnisfeier’, ‘Frau Sorge’, ‘An die Engel’, and the final trio ‘Sie erlischt’, ‘Vermächtnis’, and ‘Enfant perdu’.