Many of his poems were set to music and became established folk songs, while others were used by composers Hugo Wolf and Ignaz Lachner in their symphonic works.

After the death of his father, in 1817, he went to live with his uncle Eberhard Friedrich Georgii in Stuttgart, who intended his nephew to become a clergyman.

Therefore, after one year at the Stuttgart Gymnasium illustre, Mörike joined the Evangelical Seminary Urach, a humanist grammar school, in 1818 and from 1822 to 1826 attended the Tübinger Stift.

In the Autumn of 1843 he stayed for over half a year with his friend Pastor Wilhelm Hartlaub (1804–1885) in the village of Wermutshausen [de], situated in the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany.

This drawing is speculated, due to the perspective, to be from a top-floor room of a local brewery, distillery, and guesthouse at the edge of town, which remains in operation today as Gasthaus und Manufaktur Krone Wermutshausen.

[1][5] He also wrote a somewhat fantastic Idylle vom Bodensee, oder Fischer Martin und die Glockendiebe (1846), the fairy tale Das Stuttgarter Hutzelmännlein (1855), and published a collection of hymns, odes, elegies, and idylls of the Greeks and Romans, entitled Klassische Blumenlese (1840).

[7]Many of his lyrics were set to music by Hugo Wolf,[8] Ludwig Hetsch, Didia Saint Georges, Elise Schmezer, Julie Waldburg-Wurzach, Pauline Volkstein, and Fritz Kauffmann.

While staying in the town of Wermutshausen in the Autumn of 1843, Mörike produced a drawing of the Petruskirche, a small church built in the early 1800s.