"Boring is the pine forest?" My friend, you will revoke that soon!
Then I think you never saw him When reddish dreams in the treetops So quiet the last ray of sunshine And everything is lined with gold. When gentle nausea like a fragrance Lies in the soft evening air And the forest in its last rays Reflected in the smooth sea Meanwhile to the meadow ground in the valley Carefully pulls the slender deer, And by the thrush's last song The peace of the evening descends.
But also in the quiet sunshine And in the midday heat, Where everything swims in resinous scents, I like to wander there alone. At your head only a gentle singing, And down in the sunny herb A wheeze, a whirr and a ring. The hoverflies stand on the sandy slope, And the fritillaries weigh On the thyme itself. – Otherwise hardly a sound, As sometimes from the high air, Where the Milan swings the circles, A distant cry. – The bunting sings Oversleep her short lines At the edge of the forest. Also flutes well An oriole hides in the top. Here a jay calls, harsh and peculiar, There a woodpecker knocks. – Then silence again.
But when the red swarm of tribes, Blue in the corner of the treetops Many jagged pieces of the summer sky, The tired look looked enough, There you may lower him to the ground, And you will see new wonders: You see a graceful grove standing, Much nicer than you might think Of heather and blueberries. The little trees stand so gracefully So finely branched and so mannered, As if the real forest were them. Many little animals live in it: The deer is the brown mouse, lizards scurry there at the bottom, And beetles crawl through the foliage. The shrew sniffs there for prey, And in the sunny noon hour, There flies around its low peaks Many a butterfly with a colorful tip And flaunts its splendor: Yellow, tan, fire color and blue.
Are you tired of this sight too? Your gaze may go even deeper: A third grove will appear In which it eagerly lives and flourishes.
And certainly none of the bad ones: It builds up of moss and lichen, And see how lovely it shows: Here delicate fir tree branches, There finely ramified like corals, And here begotten and buttoned, There little club dripped with sealing wax, And here trumpets that don't sound. And in the wondrous forest how it swarms with a thousand little animals, How it lives and weaves and creeps and crawls And from the finest little voices resound! And the people still seem so insignificant You drive it just as important Like all the big ones around And enjoy your life very much!
Well, dear friend, I ask again: Don't you lower your eyes And you say, ashamed: "One soon makes a mistake! I am defeated and utterly defeated And never want to say it again: The pine forest is boring!
In the middle of the forest there is a plaque with a long poem by Heinrich Seidel about the forest. Seidel was a Berlin engineer and poet in the second half of the 19th century. His book "Leberecht Hühnchen" was particularly well-known. His writing style is not my first choice; I find his detailed descriptions of Berlin and its surroundings interesting, as are those of other local poets (e.g. Georg Hermann).