Two verses Rudolf Steiner gave in September 1919 to open the Waldorf school day, one for the four lower classes, one for the upper classes.
The Waldorf Morning Verse in Anthroposophy is the spoken saying with which a Waldorf class opens its school day, given by Rudolf Steiner in September 1919 for the first Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart and printed in GA 40, Truth-Wrought Words. There are two of them, not one. The Morgenspruch für die vier unteren Klassen, said by children in the four lower classes, begins with the sun's light brightening the day and asks God for the strength planted in the child's own soul. The Morgenspruch für die oberen Klassen, said from roughly the fifth class upward, begins “I look into the world” and walks down through stones, plants, animals, and the human being before turning inward to the soul. Both are spoken aloud, in chorus, by the whole class standing. Waldorf schools have kept the practice since the school opened on 7 September 1919.
The Waldorf Morning Verse is less a prayer than a daily act of orientation. Before lessons begin, the class stands and speaks it together, aloud, from memory. The younger children thank the sun and ask for diligence. The older ones survey the four kingdoms of nature, then look inward and find the same weaving spirit in the soul that they have just found in the world.
In Steiner's Own Words
Morning verse for the four lower classes
Dear light of the sun,
It brightens my day;
The power of the soul,
It gives strength to the limbs;
In the radiance of the sun's light
I worship, O God
The human power that you
Have so kindly planted
In my soul,
So that I can be industrious
And eager to learn.
From you comes light and strength,
To you flow love and thanks.
Morning verse for the upper classes
I look into the world,
In which the sun shines,
In which the stars sparkle;
In which the stones lie,
The plants grow alive,
The animals live with feeling,
In which man is animated,
Gives dwelling to the spirit;
I look into the soul,
Which lives within me.
What it Means Today
The first Free Waldorf School opened in Stuttgart on 7 September 1919, and the two verses have been spoken at the start of the main lesson ever since, in schools from Järna to Nairobi to Sacramento. What that daily chorus does to a body is not a matter of belief. In August 2004 the American Journal of Physiology: Heart and Circulatory Physiology published “Oscillations of heart rate and respiration synchronize during poetry recitation” by Dirk Cysarz, Dietrich von Bonin, Helmut Lackner, Peter Heusser, Maximilian Moser, and Henrik Bettermann, working out of the Department of Clinical Research at the Gemeinschaftskrankenhaus Herdecke. Twenty volunteers recited hexameter verse from ancient Greek literature. The recitation produced a stronger synchronization of heart period and breathing than paced breathing at the same rate did. The verse they studied was hexameter, not Steiner's Morgenspruch, and the researchers claimed nothing about school children. Still, the mechanism they measured is the one a Waldorf class enacts each morning: metered speech spoken in common pulls breath and heartbeat toward a shared rhythm before any arithmetic is attempted.
Thalira synthesis: the Morning Verse is not a devotional preface to the lesson but the lesson's first instrument, tuning a class's breathing to one measure so that thinking has something steady to sit on.
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