EN 
DE 
FR 
ES 
“Die Sonne spricht zum Menschensinn . . . ”
Rudolf Steiner, Oster Stimmung
Dear Friends,
Section member Daniel Polikoff has shared this essay, which is a lecture that he gave at The 52 Colors of the Soul festival, sponsored by EANA [Eurythmy Association of North America], which occurred on August 12-16, 2026, at Threefold Educational Foundation in Spring Valley, NY. Roughly 150 persons attended the gathering, which featured keynotes talks, workshops, an evening devoted to recitation, and—the centerpiece—the premier performance by diverse eurythmy groups of all 52 verses of Rudolf Steiner’s The Calendar of the Soul in English. Thirteen verses were performed on Thursday night, twenty-six on Friday, and thirteen again on Saturday night. All fifty-two were then presented consecutively during an epic Sunday morning performance. Daniel Polikoff’s pre-conference talk, “The Romantic Genius of Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul” is posted here, unedited and shared directly from Daniel.
The Romantic Genius of Steiner’s “Calendar of the Soul” [i]
by Daniel Polikoff
Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul offers a path of soul development, a means by which the human being may gain knowledge of her innermost nature by way of contemplative engagement with the course of the year and its seasonal changes.
For Steiner, Nature is no mere outward show or sequence of objective events, but a dynamically rhythmized Life and vast cosmic intelligence. Steiner himself states the essential premises of the Calendar in his 1918 Preface:
The course of the year has its own life. With this life the human soul can unfold a feeling-unison. If the soul opens itself to the influences that speak so variously to it week by week, it will find the right perception of itself. Thereby the soul will feel forces growing within that will strengthen it.[ii]
I’d add here that—as is implicit in Steiner’s own words—it is not only a matter of “strengthening” the soul, but of what amounts to a kind of initiatory process by which the soul is empowered to receive and assimilate spiritual forces into its own being, and so—achieving an integral unity of body, soul, and spirit—realize the origin and ground of its own authentic existence, its participation in the divine I AM.
Those acquainted with the Soul Calendar may take the validity and intelligibility of this approach for granted, but it is worth recognizing that the frame of mind — the conceptualization of Self and Nature inherent in the Soul Calendar—is peculiarly modern, or (to be more exact) Romantic. A passage from contemporary depth psychologist James Hollis’ book, The Archetypal Imagination, may help fill in relevant historical background. Hollis writes:
The core condition of our time has been manifest as a collective spiritual wound, one perhaps as traumatic as an amputation. Jung noted that psychology was the last of the so-called social sciences to be invented because the insights which it seeks were previously in the domain of tribal mythologies and institutionalized religions. When moderns fell offthe roof of the medieval cathedral, Jung wrote, they fell into the abyss of the Self. Affective linkage to the cosmos, nature, and the community was once available via tribal creation stories, heroic legends, and transformative rituals. Wth the loss of those connective rites and mythic images, the problem of identity and the task of cosmic location, or spiritual grounding, becomes an individual dilemma.[iii]
Hollis cites both “tribal mythologies” and “institutionalized religions” as forms of pre-modern culture that address “the problem of identity and task of cosmic location”—that is, the sense of Self, and its rightful place in the cosmic scheme of things. By virtue of physical necessity, tribal cultures maintained a close connection with nature. Such cultures were (and may still be) intimately involved in drawing sustenance from their natural surroundings, and so attuned to daily and seasonal rhythms, including the seeding and growth of plants and the migration of animals.
As far as “institutionalized religion” is concerned, we may well think of medieval Christianity (the principle reference here) as focused more on the human soul and its relation to God than on the cycles of Nature, and this would, of course, be correct. At the same time, it’s no secret that the festival life of the Christian Middle Ages borrowed a good deal from nature-based pagan beliefs and practices. The life of the People, in this pre-industrial time, consequently remained more closely tied to agricultural and seasonal rhythms than is ours, so that a real bond between the religious life of the soul and the cycle of the year persisted as part of the fabric of human culture. One only need recall the many medieval depictions of the zodiacal signs as these are associated with activities characteristic of distinct phases of the year to be reminded of this truth.
Yet, as Hollis indicates, this culture, at once soul and nature-based, largely disintegrated in the course of modernity. What are some of the key reasons for that unraveling?
The Reformation—ignited when Martin Luther nailed 99 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517—fractured the unity of religious culture in Europe. Despite the very real spiritual imperative that motivated the Reformation, the upheaval Luther set in motion not only provoked endless religious conflict that drained the spiritual as well as physical blood of Europe, it transformed the theological landscape after a fashion decidedly detrimental to the cooperation of God, Man and Nature still in effect (even if only residually) in medieval culture.
Leading strands of Protestantism, grounded in the dictum sola scriptura (“solely scripture”) were peculiarly indifferent to Nature.[iv]
Whereas there existed a long tradition of the “Two Books”—recognition of two sacred texts, the Book of Nature, or the Creation; and that of the Bible, strict adherents of sola scriptura effectively tossed the Book of Nature clear off the shelf of Christian religion. True religion consisted of the adherent of Christian liberty’s own personal relation to a transcendent God and the moral imperatives inherent in his social existence. Nature had little, if anything, to contribute.
In a related development, the (then incipient) Scientific Revolution catalyzed a decisive split between God and Nature, Religion and Science. In the medieval period and, too, in the early Renaissance, the Catholic Church had looked upon Natural Philosophy, the study of the Creation, as a natural accompaniment and crucial support for Christian theology. But Copernicus’ heliocentric theory—first introduced around the same time that Luther ignited the Reformation, and later attracting trail-blazing natural philosophers such as Kepler and Galileo—was seen as contradicting the Aristotelian cosmology that had long been of a piece with Christian dogmatics that viewed the Earth as the center of the universe. Feeling it had to match or outdo the burgeoning Protestant movement’s commitment to traditional scriptural authority, the Catholic Church—proceeding along battle lines drawn in the Counter-Reformation—denounced Galileo in 1633. In so doing, it drove a sharp wedge between Religion and Science that persists, in ever more absolute and dangerously polarized forms, to this day.
The persistence of that split may be traced back—not only to Galileo and Church politics—but to accompanying developments in philosophy as well. Descartes wrote his famous Discourse on Method [v] even as Galileo suffered trial and condemnation by the Church. In fact, as a consequence of Galileo’s sentencing, Descartes suppressed publication of his manuscript for several years. He did, however, publish it in 1637, and his Discourse contained some of the most influential words ever scribed: Ego cogito, ergo sum. The thought-form distilled in that phrase functions as the foundation stone of modern scientific method.
The problem with the Cartesian cogito, however, is that it constructs the human subject or Self, the Ego, as essentially separate from both Nature—which, as a consequence of its objectification—is quantified, mechanized, and deadened—and God or divinity, which, in the deistic conception, takes on the character of an ultimately dispensable source of purely natural laws. In his lifetime, Descartes always played the role of the good Catholic, but there’s good reason why he was repeatedly suspected of heresy, and why his books were once banned by the Church.
All of this eventually leads to the situation that James Hollis describes: the predicament of a modern Self cut off from Nature and God, and so suffering a state of debilitating existential isolation. That condition was greatly exacerbated by the industrialization and urbanization that followed in the wake of the Scientific Revolution. It is a condition that remains very much in force today, and indeed has been yet further intensified by the 3rd and 4th Industrial (Computer and Digital/AI) Revolutions, which break the bonds linking the human soul to nature and divinity ever more decisively.
Anthroposophy is dedicated to the project of restoring, or—better—renewing those bonds; re-imagining the human soul in intimate relation to Nature and the Divine Being, Life, and Wisdom that underlies both the cosmos and our own humanity. Yet it is important to remember that, for Steiner, the state of existential isolation associated with modernity and the rise of Science—for all its downsides—counts as a necessary development; one intrinsic to the emergence of “consciousness soul” and the Idea of individual freedom so basic to anthroposophical vision. If, as Hollis states, “the problem of identity and the task of cosmic location” posed questions only the individual human being— no tribe, no religious community, and no social group—might answer, that difficult challenge doubles as the condition and promise of a new degree of spiritual maturity, even the dawn of a new Michaelic[vi] humanity.
Even so, the transition from the isolated, spiritually orphaned Cartesian ego to the divine I AM (or, in the language of the Christian Community, “the Christ in you”) entails a terribly fraught and dangerous crossing of an abyss—almost as if one were asked to leap, unaided, across the Grand Canyon. Nor can the modern self go it alone. Rather, to progress towards its destined end, that Self desperately needs an image, an exemplar, of the fuller, more authentic and expanded being that comprises is innermost character.
This is where Nature—the macrocosm—enters the picture in a new/old guise, re-introduced by the Romantic Imagination. In the wake of the Enlightenment and the concomitant rise of a materialistic modern Science and decline of religion (not to mention the soul-crushing failure of the political ideals that kindled the French Revolution), it was Romantic poets and philosophers who squarely faced that “abyss of Self,” and sought, with courage, passion, and imaginative genius, new means of bridging the yawning gap between the subjective Ego and the objective Cosmos, the mortal Self and the divine ground of universal being. From the start, that effort hinged upon discovery of new soul horizons opened by way of contemplation of Nature: the human soul’s romance with the Universe, and the wild beauty that even the equations of an increasingly cold, hard science could not extinguish.
At once artistic, philosophic, aesthetic and religious, Romanticism and its correlatives (such as German Philosophical Idealism) unfolded with astonishing potency and brilliance in both England and Germany, and indeed (speaking of the first great Romantic wave) at exactly the same time. It speaks to a world destiny inscribed in the stars that the seminal works of English Romanticism—Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads [vii], and the first draft of Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic The Prelude [viii]—appeared in 1798 and 1799. The heart and soul of English Romanticism consequently coincides precisely with the brief but astonishingly brilliant career of Novalis,[ix] That, of course, is the name assumed by the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg after his initiation, in 1798, at the grave of his beloved Sophie von Kühn—a death/rebirth poetically expressed in the remarkable Hymns to Night.[x] Novalis produced a lifetime’s worth of work in the three short years at turn of the century before his own early death in 1801 at the age of 28.
It is of course true that there is a significant run-up to Romanticism’s halcyon years at the spectacular close of the 18th century. In England, Wordsworth and Coleridge were preceded by Willliam Blake; and Goethe and Schiller prepared the way for Novalis, who was in fact a student and acolyte of Schiller’s in Jena in the early 1790s. It was Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humankind [xi]—published in 1795— that inspired Goethe to write the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily [xii] published in that same year. Consequently, we are speaking here, by Rudolf Steiner’s own admission,[xiii] of the seedbed of anthroposophy, the womb of Rudolf Steiner’s vision. Indeed, dialogue with these Romantic figures bookends Steiner’s own career. His so-called First Address, delivered in 1888, treats of Goethe as the Founder of a New Science of Aesthetics.[xiv] His famous last one singles out Novalis as the herald of anthroposophy and special bearer of the mantle of Michael.[xv]
What does this have to do with The Calendar of the Soul? In light of all of the above, I think it fair to say that Rudolf Steiner’s feeling for Nature; his innate sense of how the Wisdom of the Universe might educate the human soul as to its own divine lineaments, and the rhythmic measures through which that soul-nature might be unfolded, was born around the turn of the 18th century; birthed in the Imaginations of Wordworth and Coleridge in England, and of Goethe and Schiller, Novalis and Schelling in Germany.
It is true, of course, that the Calendar works with a dynamic polarity of the self or soul, on the one hand, and nature, on the other. Even so, the Calendar does award a certain, provisional priority to the cosmic intelligence inherent in the course of the year. That is its very raison d’etre. The Calendar begins in the spring or Easter season, and portrays the soul learning a wholeness, an alive-ness, a vastness, a sun-illumined nature which it can, in the course of time, internalize, and recognize as the center of the microcosm that is its own real being. But the source of spiritual rejuvenation—the response to the dilemma so acutely described by Hollis—is found first, not in the alienated modern ego, or in any revival of traditional religion, but in the life, light and rhythms of the Cosmos at large. If, in following the path traced by the Calendar, the soul ultimately finds and affirms a solar cosmos as the heart and soul of its own being, it is because it has first encounted the image and mold for that in the macrocosm, in the life and rhythms of Nature herself.
That said, it need be frankly acknowledged that, in a certain poetic sense, the portrayal of Nature in the Soul Calendar leaves much—indeed almost everything—to be desired. Steiner’s Calendar does characterize Nature, but does so—perhaps deliberately—in broad brushstrokes. There are no concrete images—no trees or flowers, rivers or mountainsf—in the Soul Calendar. Nor is it only earth-based imagery that is lacking. You will search the verses in vain for a single mention of a star, the moon, or the earth. Stern, Mond, Erde: none of these words appear even once. What you do find is repeated invocation of what could be considered relatively abstract generic or universal concepts: Light, Life, Time, Space, Being, Power, and the like. Perhaps most characteristically, you find innumerable references to “the world” (“die Welt”) compounded with a whole host of generic terms.
Despite, or perhaps in part on account of, the relative dearth of specific, concrete images, what is conveyed in the Soul Calendar is the sense of Nature as a universal Life unfolding in measured rhythms of Light and Darkness. If the earth, moon and stars do not appear, the sun is omnipresent. Conditions of darkness and cold are defined by its absence. One could well say that Steiner’s Calendar is all about (not the earth or moon) but the Sun Sphere, and the way the etheric forces associated with its light and warmth bear Spirit, or (to cite a word Steiner uses more than once) “Das Weltenwort, ” the World-Word. Both Space and (perhaps especially) Time are also of the essence, as is the alternating expanding and contracting motions of breath characteristic of Life itself.
What I would like to emphasize here, is that it is a like sense of Nature as an ensouled Being, a cosmic Life that unfolds in and through Time in a dynamic characterized by the interplay of polarities, that is first found—and extensively developed—in Romantic philosophy and poetry.
The recognition of this Romantic heritage does not diminish the value or originality of Steiner’s own remarkable rendition of the “52 Colors of the Soul”— on the contrary. What Steiner does in his Soul Calendar is neither elaborate a systematic philosophy of Nature, as, for instance, Friedrich Schelling does in his Naturphilosophie, [xvi]nor provide verses that—like the genuine poetry found in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads—express an artist’s unique meditative feelings occasioned by richly imagined experience of a particular time and place. Instead, Steiner offers something that is neither Philosophy nor Poetry proper, but something in-between.
It is true that the Soul Calendar is nothing if not systematic or methodical in its own way. Moreover, like a true lyric poem, each verse does give expression to the quality of a particular moment in the sequence of changes comprising the Cycle of the Year. Traversing a middle-ground between Philosophy and Poetry, the Calendar verses serve as mantras that, if faithfully practiced, can attune human consciousness to the archetypal rhythms that unfold, in time, the seed of Being, relating transient experiences of this or that season to the abiding Unity that underlies the course of the Whole—the whole Soul as well as the Cosmos entire.
That said, acquaintance with exemplary works of Romantic Poetry and Philosophy can amplify both theoretical and practical understanding of what one is actually doing, or trying to do, in working with the Soul Calendar.Consequently, in the last section of this presentation, I want to offer a few instances of Romantic Philosophy and Poetry that I hope will illuminate and deepen the sense of the Nature, of Soul, and their interplay that constitutes the heart of the Soul Calendar.
I do not have time here, to delve into Romantic Philosophy in any consequential way, but will have be a satisfied with a few glancing allusions.
It is a rather interesting fact that, as I’ve mentioned, the word “Welt” or “world” is ubiquitous in the Calendar, appearing in (by my count) twenty-five distinct compound nouns (such as Weltenlicht, Weltenwinternacht, Weltengeist; world-light, world-winternight, world-spirit). That means that Steiner introduces a new compound of the word in just about every other verse. That said, there is one notable compound noun that Steiner does not use: namely, Weltenseele, or World-Soul.
This is somewhat suprising, because this word (which in Latin would be translated as anima mundi), perhaps more than any other, expresses the gist of the sense of Nature at work in the Calendar.[xvii] It’s also the title of an important book by Friedrich Schelling, the complete title of which is Von der Weltseele, or On the World Soul.[xviii] That book was published in 1798, and so, once again, during those same crucial few years at the end of the 18th century.
I cannot rehearse Schelling’s philosophy here but can mention a few of its salient features. According to Schelling, Nature, understood as the World Soul, is nothing like the dead mechanism described by the likes of Descartes, Bacon, and Newton. Instead, Nature is (1) a unified, living, dynamic organism; that (2) occupies a central, intermediary position between material existence, on the one hand, and Divine Reason, on the other. Correlatively, (3) Schelling does not understand the human Mind and Nature as two fundamentally distinct substances, but as manifestations of the one underlying reality, which (4) unfolds or expresses itself in accord with the kind of circular motion characteristic of a constant relation of opposites, or the law of polarity.
These ideas are not so much unique to Schelling, as they are a kind of staple of the Philosophy of Nature prevalent in Romanticism. They are reflected, for instance, in much of Goethe’s work. That is no accident, because Goethe himself was, in his later years, deeply influenced by Schelling. Unsurprisingly, too, these ideas find resonant echo in Steiner’s Soul Calendar, and are fundamental to the Idea of Nature that informs it from beginning to end.
Whereas the Idea of Nature as the World Soul finds systematic formulation in German philosophy, it receives consummate artistic expression in English in the lyric poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth. In his early, pathbreaking conversation poem, “The Eolian Harp,” Coleridge provides a classic formulation:
O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where—
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so fill’d;
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is music slumbering on her instrument.[xix]
Coleridge originated the genre of the “conversation poem,” or “greater Romantic lyric,” but Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey[xx] represents the most complex and accomplished instance of the form. “Tintern Abbey” also contains Wordsworth’s own iconic articulation of Romantic nature philosophy. As the relevant lines are spread throughout the long poem, I’ll recite a a rather long excerpt of this profoundly influential piece, beginning at the beginning.
LINES
Written a few miles above TINTERN ABBEY on revisiting
the banks of the WYE during a Tour. July 13, 1798
Five years have passed, five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage ground, these orchard tufts,
Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
Among the woods and copses, nor disturb
The wild green landscape. Once again I see
These hedgerows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees,
With some uncertain notice, as might seem,
Of vagrant Dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
Though absent long,
These forms of beauty have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As may have had no trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
. . . For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.[xxi]
These passages of Coleridge and of Wordsworth deliver the brand of nature experience that underwrites Romanticism generally, and, too, informs the (admittedly more rarefied and more exclusively solar) Spirit of Steiner’s Calendar. I would like to add two of my own “Romantic” poems that, while likewise expressing the doctrine of the one Life, the invisible link between the human soul and anima mundi, play more explicitly upon the motif of the great archetypal rhythm of the seasons. The two poems I’ve selected echo the polarity inherent in the Fall and Spring equinoxes.
First, the autumnal poem titled Seelensein—or “soul-being,” the title and epigraph for which is drawn directly from Week 24—mid-September—of Steiner’s Soul Calendar. The epigraph may be translated as: “Perpetually creating itself, the soul becomes aware of its own being.”
SEELENSEIN
Sich selbst erschaffend stets,
Wird Seelensein sich selbst gewahr
—Rudolf Steiner, Calendar of the Soul, Week of September 15-21
How German welds one word to another effortlessly, as if it were naturalfor “soul” and “being” to stick togetherthis time of year, when leaf fall begins to strip the robed trees, etching oakand maple in dark silhouette against the autumn evening. So in this stark season, we too are laid bare against the ground of what we are or think we’re not: cold earth, sun-drained sky, leaving us peculiarly alone, unwed to anything except ourselves. Whereas this poem speaks to the sense of death, detachment, and existential alone-ness associated with fall, my second piece, titled simply “Spring,” expresses the opposite mood, harping on the great Romantic theme of the one Life. It’s an ekphrastic poem based on the painting by the Jugendstil artist Heinrich Vogeler, a close friend of Rainer Maria Rilke’s at the Worpswede Art Colony in North Germany, where Vogeler painted this picture.
SPRING
After Heinrich Vogeler
Never mind the light blue dress that covers her
in a second sky—the girl’s gaze
is riveted upon the small red-breasted bird
perched among twig-slender boughs
of budding birches. The bird’s tiny beak
is open—open just enough to allow
the remarkable volume of song inside
to spill out, to pour forth over
the once more awakening world like color
from an artist’s brush, or new warmth
from the breath of heaven. Rapt
in that silent music, the girl herself
is filled with it, filled with the ineffable
mystery of the One Life. The bird
is no angel but sings like one, and she
is no angel either but a new
more natural Mary, like every girl
who bears witness to the coming spring,
and yes the soul of each and every
miraculously conceived human being.
Speaking of Rilke, this consummate lyric poet counts as another heir of Romantic tradition, as evidenced by these lines from his great, late work Sonnets to Orpheus.
Atmen, du unsichtbares Gedicht!
Immerfort um das eigne
Sein rein eingetauschter Weltraum. Gegenwicht,
n dem ich mich rhythmisch ereigne.
These lines are almost impossible to translate, but can be roughly rendered:
Breathing, you invisible poem!
World-space continually in pure
interchange with my own being. Counter-tone
in which I rhythmically occur.[xxii]
The compounding of “Welt”—here, as “world-space”—is not the only feature Rilke’s poem shares with Steiner’s Calendar. The gist of these lines, the rhythmic interchange between human consciousness and the world, expresses the dynamic at the heart of Steiner’s verses.
I’d like to conclude by noting that, in Rilke’s universe—and especially the universe of the Sonnets—one cannot begin to conceive of Orpheus, or the rhythmic poetry of soul, without Eurydice, the beloved feminine other that inspires, contains, reflects, and embodies logos, or World-Word. Rilke’s Sonnets were, in point of fact, inspired and shaped by the life and early death of a young dancer, Vera Ouckama Knoop, a childhood playmate of Rilke’s own daughter, Ruth. So we are truly blessed, as this Festival unfolds, to enjoy the privilege of experiencing all 52 Colors of the Soul embodied or manifested—“danced,” if you will—in eurythmy, as we are thus offered a uniquely powerful—a truly magical—portal through which to experience the deep wisdom inscribed in the Romantic genius of Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul.
===============================
Dear Friends,
Daniel also shared this poem, reminiscent of the poem by Wordsworth that he cited in his lecture. He asked that it be appended to the the text of his talk, and here it is!
Lines
composed on a morning walk from Threefold to Drury Farm, Chestnut Ridge, NY, August 12, 2026
Morning light: swallows dip and flit
around the barn at the end of the road.
Sounds, smells and sights are different here
than in California; even the warm
August air exudes a distinct aura.
It’s the humidity, to be sure, but more
than that as well: here, we are not so far
from Paterson, the Bronx, Frost’s New Hampshire,
the woods that enchanted Emerson. All these
may seem a far cry from the European
universe of Rudolf Steiner, and the German
grammar of the Calendar of the Soul,
but appearances can be deceptive: affinity
runs deep as a vein of ore in the heart
of the mountain. The blood of the Word
flows out, and returns, again and again, to source
and my steps here are measured by the meters
of prior poems and verses, even as these
swerving swallows remind me of those I once saw
at Tintern, and the lines composed there
so many years ago. So does the Old World
live again in the New, and the view
of this pastoral farm feed imagination,
the hidden life of the Soul of the World.
Morning light: swallows dip and flit
around the barn at the end of the road.
The sounds and smells are different here
than in California; even the air
exudes a distinct aura. It’s the humidity,
to be sure, but, seasoned by oak and apple,
more than that. Here, we are not so far
from Paterson, the Bronx, Frost’s New Hampshire,
the woods that enchanted Emerson. All these
may seem a distant cry from the peculiarly
European universe of Rudolf Steiner
but appearances can be deceptive: affinity
========
Footnotes
[i] For an introduction to Rudolf Steiner’s life and work, see Part I of “Anthroposophy Today . . . And Tomorrow?” in the second section of this book. Steiner composed the 52 verses comprising The Calendar of the Soul in 1912. Each (unrhymed) mantric “verse” is between five and eight lines long. As the cycle revolves around the polarities intrinsic to the course of the year, each verse can be paired with another that expresses the complementary, opposite sense (cf. the Pusch edition cited below). “Eurythmy” is a movement art developed by Steiner, which has therapeutic and pedagogical as well as artistic applications. The EANA (Eurythmy Association of North America) 52 Colors of the Soul Festival ran from 8/12 through 8/16, 2026, and represented the first time all 52 verses were performed in English translation.
[ii] Rudolf Steiner, The Calendar of the Soul, tr. by Ruth and Hans Pusch (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1982), iii.
[iii] James Hollis, The Archetypal Imagination (College Station, TX: Texas A&M UP, 2000), 14.
[iv] This is not true of all strands of Protestant belief. “Natural theology” emerged as a potent force in certain Protestant circles as early as the late 17th century (Newton is a crucial figure here) and its influence persisted well into the 19th. Even so, the relation between “God” and “Nature” recognized in “natural theology” reflected the high degree of intellectualized abstraction inherent in modern science. For further discussion of these matters, see Daniel Joseph Polikoff, Apocalypse of the Modern Mind (Asheville, NC: Chiron Publications, 2025), especially Part II.
[v] René Descartes, Discourse on Method (IN: The Liberal Arts Inc., 1950).
[vi] Rudolf Steiner understood the Archangel Michael to be a guiding spirit for our age, one who (among other signal attributes) endows human beings with spiritual courage. Michael (as well as his many surrogates in popular lore, such as St. George) is often depicted in combat with the Dragon, a being intent upon the destruction of the light in man. For more on Steiner and the Michaelic spirit see “Anthroposophy Today . . . AndTomorrow?” in this volume.
[vii] Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1802 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013)
[viii] William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850 (NY: W.W. Norton, 1979).
[ix] For background relevant to Friedrich von Hardenberger’s taking of the pen name “Novalis,” see Bruce Donehower, The Birth of Novalis: Friedrich von Hardenberg’s Journal of 1797 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007).
[x] Novalis, “Hymns to Night” in Novalis, Philosophical, Literary, and Poetic Writings, ed. and tr. by James D. Reid ( Oxford: Oxford UP, 2024), 485-499.
[xi] Friedrich Schiller, Über die äesthetische Erziehung des Menschen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1965), or, in English: Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man tr. by Wilkinson and Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
[xii] Goethe, Das Märchen (Rastatt, Germany: Verlag Freies Geistleben, 1961/82). For an English edition, see Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (Hudson, NY: Steiner Books, 1991).
[xiii] Steiner lectured multiple times on the Goethe’s fairy tale, and accorded it a privileged place in his thinking. See
Rudolf Steiner, Goethe’s geheime Offenbarung in seinem “Marchen von der Grüne Schlange und der Schönen Lilie” (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1982).
[xiv] Rudolf Steiner, “Goethe as the Founder of a New Science of Aesthetics,” November 9, 1888, Vienna, Austria.
GA 230 in the Rudolf Steiner Archive, https://rsarchive.org/Articles/GA030/English/Singles/GoeAes_index.html
[xv] Rudolf Steiner, “The Individuality of Elias, John, Raphael, and Novalis,” Sepember 28, 1924, Dornach, Switzerland. GA 238 in the Rudolf Steiner Archive,
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA238/English/Singles/19240928p01.html
[xvi] For an English translation, see Friedrich Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, tr. by Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1988).
[xvii] One could hypothesize that Weltenseele, or World Soul, does not appear in the Soul Calendar because the gist of Steiner’s vision does have a subtle esoteric Christian ground not entirely consistent with some of the rather more pantheistic resonances of the term “World Soul.” As already mentioned, Steiner does use the term Weltengeist, or World-Spirit, as well as the compound Weltenwort (World-Word). This is congruent with a sense of Nature as a vessel of the Holy Spirit, or Spirit of the risen Christ, that—while not necessarily at odds with (e.g.) the sense of Nature at work in a poet such as Wordsworth—does not register in the same way in that writer’s much earthier, more concrete imaginations of Nature.
[xviii] For an English version, see Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, On the World Soul in Timothy W. Wright, ed, Studies in Illuminism (Khem Publishing, 2025).
[xix] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp” (l. 26-29) in The Portable Coleridge, ed. I.A. Richards, (NY: Viking Penguin, 1950), 65-67.
[xx] William Wordsworth, “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” in Wordsworth and Coleridge Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1802(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 193-198.
[xxi] Ibid;, ll. 1-58 and 89-103.
[xxii] SO, II, 1.
8.29.26