Poem of the Week – Grodek by Georg Trakl
The Austrian expressionist-poet Georg Trakl, lived a trying and tragic life. Plagued by drug addiction and periods of intense depression, Trakl popularised the efforts of Germanic poets who attempted to import expressionist methods and devices from the visual arts to literature.
During the First World War, he served as a medical officer on the Eastern Front and witnessed numerous scenes of mass slaughter. Supported in his last years by a secret benefactor, Trakl took his own life at the age of 27, two days before his unknown patron arrived at the hospital where he was convalescing to assist the beleaguered poet. It was none other than the millionaire philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Had Trakl lived another forty-eight hours, Wittgenstein’s passion for pioneering artists like Trakl might have corrected the young poet’s dire circumstances. This week’s poem is considered Trakl’s last composition and displays many of the curious qualities that distinguished his earlier work. Trakl’s typical motifs of autumn, evening and death pervade the vivid imagery in the poem. The theme of silence also features, which Trakl often used to symbolise the awful absence of god.
We hope you enjoy this week’s poem as much as we did.
Grodek by Georg Trakl (1913)
At evening the autumnal forests resound
With deadly weapons, the golden plains
And blue lakes, above them the sun
Rolls more darkly by; night enfolds
The dying warriors, the wild lament
Of their broken mouths.
But in the grassy vale the spilled blood,
Red clouds in which an angry god lives,
Gathers softly, lunar coldness;
All roads lead to black decay.
Beneath the golden boughs of night and stars
The sister’s shadow reels through the silent grove
To greet the ghosts of heroes, their bleeding heads;
And the dark flutes of autumn sound softly in the reeds.
O prouder sorrow! you brazen altars
Today an immense anguish feeds the mind’s hot flame,
The unborn descendants.