Ah, yes. I knew you would. Land means land and Band means band - and not landing and banding. And it rhymes no matter what you do. So why not do away with a mere suffix?
Well, yes. Be my guest. But you might be missing something.
What? That's difficult to explain. So let's start with something obvious.
Busch rhymes on the diminutive. For that, the most common noun suffix in "German" German is "chen" ("erl" in Austrian and "le" in Swabian and "li" in Swiss German, e.g. Ländli is a small and cherished land). English analogs such as "kin" or "let" (as in lambkin or ringlet) are out of commission and, besides, would hurt the poem.
In the Germanic tongues, however, and particularly in the Swiss variety, this is everyday language. Swiss love to use such terms of euphemistic endearment. Nestlé (the international conglomerate portraying itself as a warm nest for the poor, paying chicks) may be a case in point. Sells better, you know...
And, of course, society needs that. Diminutives can flow like oil, covering the points of friction and making the world spin around smoothly. Like the money that consequently flows the other way and completes the lubrication circuit...
Of course friendly diminutives are mental make-believes. Just like the litte drummer-boy. But everyone winks at that. Wilhelm Busch, the painter, writer, and grandfather of the comic strip was, needless to add, an unsurpassed master of teutonic psychology. Just have a look at the twinkling eyes of his 1894 self-portrait (left)...
But what does that have to do with the poem, you ask? Perhaps more than meets the eye.
What does meet our eye are figurines of Meissen porcelain, the shepherd and the shepherdess playing with symbolic bands aloft. (If this is too German for you, think of Sèvres porcelain, or of Watteau's aristocrats enganged in shepherd games. Or, if you like your world deconstructed, let the figurines turn on top of an old-fashioned music-box playing the Marseillaise...)
Well, enough. The language of Busch is beautiful and finely chiseled; a filigree that asks to be enjoyed for its own sake. Still, it is a spider's net glistening in the sun...
Yes, of course Busch was a confirmed bachelor and, in his later days, a famous recluse. (Sometimes I wonder what a conversation between Wilhelm Busch and that other famous spinster recluse, Emily Dickinson, would have been like. But that is neither here nor there...)
What is here, though - I mean in my little website collection - are three spider poems by Emily Dickinson and one spider poem by Walt Whitman. Same spider, so to speak, but three very different worlds...
So, as always, enjoy the poem(s). I shall not spoil your pleasure. My comment, as usual, will be of the pictorial variety (see the hatchery).
Later, unfortunately much later:
Seems my word hatchery still had a few imperfections in it. But thanks to my linguistic mentor, Master Bertram, I was able to mend yet another one of my memory's fabulous sound-shifts. Although, for whatever it's worth, I still think a "shephard" waxes more poetic than a "shepherd".
(And when MY water runs, it "rins" - though only in a translation that my mind still prefers but that a stern dressing-down by Friedl Fuerst has long since deep-sixed. And recently I distilled "deprivation" from "depravation" - while having a sip on the Winterreise - and had to be rescued by Lau Kanen.) But enough of the trials of mine and the triumphs of my samaritans. I don't want to spoil the spelling of your young in case they read this before leaving your nest...
Which brings me to another one of those irrefutable points of Bertram Kottmann. The Nestles were really an old Swabian family, traceable over many centuries. One Heinrich Nestle then emigrated in 1839 to the French part of Switzerland and changed his name to Henri Nestlé, thus keeping, sort of, the Swabian diminutiv while adding an accent assimilative. There, that's the way the stomach turns...
