Luise Hensel

German poet

Luise Hensel (30 March 1798 to 18 December 1876) was a German teacher and religious poet, who influenced the romantic style of her friend and fellow poet, Clemens Brentano.

Luise Hensel was the sister of Wilhelm Hensel and the sister in law of the composer Fanny Mendelssohn. She was born on March 30, 1798. Her father, Johann, was a Lutheran minister at Linum, a small town in the Margravate of Brandenburg, Kingdom of Prussia. After the death of her father, in 1809, Luise's mother with her son and three daughters returned to her hometown, Berlin. Luise attended the high school (Realschule), now the Elisabethschule, where she showed extraordinary talent. Around 1816, she met the poet Clemens Brentano, who called her "the angel in the wilderness". Hensel influenced the romantic style of Brentano quite significantly; Brentano wrote the following to his brother in 1817: "These songs (referring to twenty songs sent to him by Hensel) at first broke my heart, causing me to burst into tears, their truth and simplicity striking me as the holiest that man could produce." In 1833 Luise returned to Berlin to care for her aged mother. Her religious convictions were once again tested by love, this time in the form of a marriage proposal from a doctor, Clemens August Alertz, who would later become the personal physician to Pope Pius IX. She continued to teach, and writing religious poems, moving several times. She spent her last years in Paderborn with her former pupil Pauline Mallinckrodt, at the convent of the Sisters of Christian Charity, where she died on December 18, 1876, at the age of 78.

Her "Gedichte" (English: Poems), which include some work by her sister, Wilhelmine, were published in 1858, and show a wistful piety on the part of Hensel, a prime example of German religious poetry. Two more books, compilations of her songs and poems, were published: "Lieder" (English: Songs) in 1869, and her last work, "Briefe der Dichterin Luise H." (English: Letters of the poet Luise H.), posthumously in 1878. Catherine Winkworth translated Immer muss ich wieder lesem as Ever Would I fain be Reading. One of her most well known poems, "Müde bin ich" (English: I am tired), appears below in its original German, and an English translation. A looser English translation of this by Frances Ridley Havergal is entitled Now the Light Has Gone Away.