Poem 1 – Joachim Ringelnatz (1883–1934): The Ants
In Hamburg there lived two ants / who wanted to travel to Australia. / At Altona on the highway / their legs began to hurt, / and so they wisely renounced / the last part of the journey.
Poem 2 – Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914): The Aesthetic Weasel
A weasel / sat on a pebble / amid the babbling of a brook. // Do you know / why? // The moon-calf / told me / in confidence: // The refined / animal / did it for the sake of the rhyme.
Commentary: The comedy of disproportion
Both poems are short, both are about small animals, and both are funny – but not in the same way. In Ringelnatz the comedy arises from a disproportion in the subject matter: two ants set out on the longest journey imaginable, from Hamburg to Australia, and give up after a few kilometres, at Altona, then still an independent town right on the Hamburg border. The poem needs two lines for the plan, two for the failure and two for reinterpreting it. Two inconspicuous words are decisive. "Wisely" ennobles a defeat into a clever decision; the word is ironic, because you can really only renounce something you could still reach. And "the last part of the journey" is an understatement of grotesque size: the last part is practically the whole distance. The form reinforces the effect. Six lines, a single stanza, plain rhyming couplets (Ameisen – reisen, Chaussee – weh, weise – Reise): it sounds like a nursery rhyme, and precisely this harmlessness makes the punchline all the drier. You don’t have to read the ants as people, but you can: who doesn’t know grand resolutions that end at the first inconvenience and are passed off afterwards as insight?
Morgenstern moves the disproportion from the subject matter into language itself. His weasel does nothing, it just sits – on a pebble amid the babbling of a brook, evidently because these words rhyme with "Wiesel". The first stanza piles up the same rhyme three times in a row; the question "Do you know / why?" pretends there is a riddle, and the moon-calf, a fantasy creature, reveals the solution "in confidence", as if it were a secret. The resolution is the punchline: the animal did it "for the sake of the rhyme". To make this sentence rhyme too, Morgenstern breaks the word "raffinierte" (refined) in two, so that "raffinier-" chimes with "Tier". The poem thus demonstrates what it claims: here sound determines content, not the other way round.
What both texts have in common is the drop between great ambition and small result – in Ringelnatz between a journey round the world and the next town, in Morgenstern between a solemn riddle and a banal answer.
