Essays on literary works - 2024

Man and Nature (Based on Goethe’s ballad “The Erlking”)

Let’s be real: “The Erlking” slaps way harder than it has any right to. I mean, it’s a poem from 1782 about a forest spirit whispering sweet nothings to a dying kid on horseback—and it still hits like a late-night doomscroll through a haunted TikTok feed. Forget dusty ballads and moral allegories. This is raw emotional violence. Nature isn’t just a backdrop here. It’s a character. A manipulative, seductive, murderous character.

And the human characters? Total chaos. One’s in denial, one’s hallucinating, and one’s... dead.

So yeah. Goethe wasn’t just writing about folklore—he was dragging us into an unhinged, high-stakes face-off between man, child, and the big, leafy unknown. Let's unpack this—unhinged Tumblr-thread-style—with a little help from German Romanticism, daddy issues, and maybe the occasional Stranger Things reference.

The Forest Isn’t Neutral. It’s Horny and Hostile.

Goethe’s forest isn’t some peaceful Disney glen with twinkly music and rabbits braiding each other’s hair. It’s giving cosmic horror lite. Fog, shadows, movement where there shouldn’t be movement. It’s where language unravels and rules stop applying. And who lives in this forest?

Enter the Erlkönig. Or as we could call him today: a nature-coded predator with main-character energy. He’s got that softboi-rizz danger vibe—“come play with me, I’ve got pretty flowers and invisible daughters.” Sir. This is a child. No thanks.

The forest is the perfect setting for this because it does what nature does best in literature: erode structure. Dismantle sanity. Eat your GPS signal and spit you out barefoot and afraid. It’s chaos incarnate, and in Goethe’s hands, it’s not the background—it’s the engine.

This isn’t nature as muse or resource. It’s nature as a shapeshifting, gaslighting death machine. (Nature is healing, they said. Not in this poem, babes.)

The Father: Peak Rationalist Dad Energy (aka Mr. “It’s Just the Wind”)

Let’s talk about this guy.

The father’s riding through this demonic woodland with a clearly distressed son clutched to his chest—and he’s doing the 18th-century version of “it’s probably just the neighbors” while the kid literally hears voices from the trees.

The kid: “He’s calling me.”
The dad: “It’s the leaves, sweetheart.”

The kid: “He’s got daughters.”
The dad: “Those are just… willows waving.”

The kid: “HE’S TOUCHING ME.”
The dad: “You’re imagining things.”

I mean… gaslight, gatekeep, horseback ride?

This father is the human mind trying to rationalize the irrational, trying to tame nature with language. Classic Enlightenment move. It’s also a tragic flex. Because in the end, all the logic in the world doesn’t stop the boy from dying. Science can’t save you when the forest decides you’re prey.

Goethe’s basically telling us: hey, maybe you can’t negotiate with death. Or trees.

The Boy: Baby Empath Who Sees the Truth, and It’s Killing Him

This child? Literal psychic sponge. Hyper-attuned. Fragile. Bleeding with perception. He hears what the adults refuse to acknowledge—which is pretty on-brand for Gen Z if you ask me. He feels everything. And that’s the whole horror.

The boy isn’t wrong. He’s just too right, and it’s killing him.

Goethe puts all the supernatural weight on the kid’s POV because he knows childhood is where truth slips through—before society sandblasts it down with reason and rationality. It’s also where vulnerability is weaponized by the unknown. The Erlking doesn’t try to fight the kid. He seduces him. That’s the horror.

And there’s this brutal elegance to how Goethe structures the poem—call and response, plea and dismissal, escalation and silence. It reads like an anxiety spiral in verse form. The kid sees. The dad denies. Nature closes in. Boom.

So... Is the Erlking “Nature”? Or Like, Something Worse?

Okay, let’s get a little messy.

The Erlking isn’t just a tree ghost. He’s nature with a human mask. Or maybe he’s death with a green aesthetic. Or maybe he’s the embodiment of everything humans repress when they pretend the world is safe and knowable.

In a way, the Erlking is the Real (yes, Lacan moment incoming). He’s the untouchable terror that exists outside language, beyond control. He’s that quiet moment when you’re standing in the woods alone and everything feels off. He’s the beauty that turns to menace when no one’s looking.

So yeah. Nature here isn’t just nature. It’s climate dread. It’s entropy. It’s queer-coded seduction. It’s the thing in the dark that doesn’t care if you believe in it. And maybe the scariest part is: it wants you to come willingly.

Consent culture? The Erlking does not know her.

The Ending: No Crescendo, Just Collapse

And then—the ending. If you can call it that. It’s like the poem suddenly slams a door in your face.

“In his arms, the child was dead.”

No buildup. No scream. No lesson. Just an emotional brick to the chest. It’s brutal in a way that modern horror writers should study with flashlights and cigarettes. It’s so abrupt it becomes mythic.

There’s no catharsis. No closure. Just the reminder that you can gallop as fast as you want—but death always rides faster. Or quieter. Or with better lighting.

Real Talk: Why This Still Slaps in the Age of iPhones and Existential Cringe

Here’s the thing. We’re not out in the woods much these days. We’ve traded branches for browser tabs. But The Erlking still hums underneath our media, our fears, our favorite cursed vibes. It’s in The Babadook. It’s in that weird Black Mirror episode where the forest digitizes your trauma. It’s Annihilation. It’s Inside Out, but if Joy were a child-killing fae.

Nature still unsettles us because it won’t stay still. It shifts. It mocks. It consumes. And no matter how smart your phone is, the dark still feels like it’s watching you back.

Goethe was tapping into a timeless horror: that something old is out there, and it doesn’t need you to believe in it to kill you. It just needs you to hear it.

And maybe say yes.

Final Thought-Drop: Whose Voice Do You Believe?

That’s the real question Goethe leaves us with. Do you trust the voice of the child, who feels everything and dies for it? Or the voice of the father, who explains everything and is still somehow wrong?

Or maybe—terrifyingly—you hear the Erlking’s voice most clearly. Maybe you want to follow it. Maybe you already have.

And maybe… that’s the point.