Schubert's first four of five settings of the poetry of Novalis come from the year 1819, the most experimental period of the young composer's life. This was a very good thing, because the poetry of Novalis (the nom de plume of Friedrich von Hardenburg) was far and away the most experimental poetry that the German language had ever experienced. In its conflation of religious and sexual imagery, its onrushing torrent of words, and its juxtaposition of recherché metaphors and similes, Novalis' poetry was the most extraordinarily Romantic poetry being written in Germany at the time—indeed, the most extraordinarily Romantic poetry in Germany until Wagner unleashed the text for his Tristan und Isolde 60 years after Novalis.

Schubert's first setting of one of Novalis' Hymne an die Nacht (Hymns on the Night), the Hymne I (D. 659), of May 1819, is one of the wildest songs the composer ever wrote. Novalis' poem itself is wild: it consists of 53 unrhymed lines that join the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion with lovers' sexual desire in images of astounding vividness: "The holy pair shall swim in heavenly blood." Schubert broke Novalis' unstoppable lines into four sections. In the first section, a nearly recitative-like opening marked Mit Andacht (With Devotion), Schubert seems to be leaning in the direction of interpreting the text as Pietistic poetry. But Schubert transforms the music of the second section into a series of awe-inspiring vocal declamations that go beyond anything one might hear from a church's pulpit. The third section comes close to an almost Italianate aria, but the tremolo accompaniment in the piano undermines the aria effect. The final section pushes and thrusts against the fabric of the music and attempts to embody Novalis' lines "Thus the pleasure of love endures throughout eternity" in music that seems as if it could indeed go on forever.

But perhaps not in a good way: Schubert's Hymne I is one of his least focused songs, a song whose relentless attempts to manifest the eternal and the infinite become, in the end, almost a parody of both the religious and the sexual experiences.

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