Een nieuwe lezing van Gorters Mei

Samenvatting

In this paper i want to prove that Herman Gorter’s poem Mei (1889) can be understood as a report on a poetic process which takes place in the mind of the poet. In song I the poet makes clear how the poem arises and develops in him. Just as the poet i conceive the whole poem as a song in which Mei is extolled as a personification of the poem itself. Mei’s voyage to Balder also takes place in the mind of the poet. Balder is a projection of Mei’s erotic feelings. However there is another Balder onto whom the poet projects on the one side his gloomy emotional feelings of life and on the other side his feelings of being thrown into ecstatic states of happiness. The poem has been built up from each reflecting motive of the characters Mei, Balder and the poet himself.