Mörike, writes one scholar, is situated historically in a state of Zwischenheit, or “betweenhood”; …

Translate: I was caught in such a traffic jam that I needed a microcentury for a picoparsec and that my car’s fuel consumption was two tenths of a square millimetre.

The result is not an image of the natural world in a tapestry but a depiction of nature as a tapestry: a splendid, impenetrable, depthless screen of shivering pixels.

The murder-hole above the outer end of the passage survives, but only the descending grooves mark the position of the outer portcullis within it, beneath the recess to receive it in the outer E. wall