August Graf von Platen’s Poem on The Grave of Alaric

August-von-Platen

The launch of one of my videos on YouTube is always accompanied by a flurry of PR activity.  Well actually, I just tweet it a couple of times in the hope that somebody somewhere will notice.   From time to time I even get some responses.  My most recent one on the death of Alaric elicited a gem of a response from @sciamannata who drew my attention to a poem on the subject by the German romantic poet August Graf von Platen.  I don’t know anything about this guy apart from his dates – early nineteenth century.  But reading the poem you can get a big sense of what Alaric meant to pre-unification Germans.