The gulf of contemplation, the magic of love, the soul stirred up by nature - the lines Mörikes uses, to clothe romantic ciphers in the strict form of a sonnet speak with a passionately glowing fire.

Spiritual devotion to an idea - be it the idea of a woman worshipped ("An die Geliebte"), the image of a god meditated upon ("Auf ein altes Bild"); be it merely the vision of the tender spirit of a butterfly, the notion of a flower's scent ("An die Christblume"), one encounters in Mörike's poems a world of thought which shows great similarity to the idea of exalted love in the middle ages.
The language he uses is in a subtle way, the vehicle of aesthetics which are deep in sensitivity, exaggerating in introspectiveness and enriching through use of fantastic images.

The fantastic, the self immersion into the "gulf of contemplation" finds its counterpart and an exaggeration bordering on mania.
Wolf's Möriker Lieder represent solitude, oversensitive and tense existence, loneliness and remoteness, but also the erotic spiritualisation, so to speak, of a romantic minnesinger.