Quaint Spring by Georg Trakl - Poetry: The Best Words In The Best Order - #BlogchatterA2ZChallenge2021
QUAINT SPRING
GEORG TRAKL
Probably around the deep midday,
I lay on an old stone,
Before me in quaint dress
Three angels stood in the sunshine.
O ominous spring year!
In the acre the last snow melted,
And the birch's hair hung quivering
In the cold, clear lake.
From the sky a blue ribbon blew,
And beautifully a cloud flowed within,
Facing it, I lay dreaming -
The angels kneeled in sunshine.
Loudly a bird sang marvelous stories,
And at once I could understand it:
Still before your first desire is satisfied,
You must go die, must go die.
The Poet: Georg Trakl (1887 - 1914)
The Austrian poet, Georg Trakl, was one of the important proponents of the Expressionist movement in poetry, who wrote poems that were philosophical in content. Many of his poems were set in the evening or had evening as their theme. They were often dark and introspective, with dreamlike imagery. It is said that his poems had a magnificent silence in them, the German word for this being 'schweigen'. His earlier poems dealt with personal angst and a sense of disintegration, but as he matured as a poet, his writing turned more impersonal and objective. In his later years, he had bouts of schizophrenia and mental imbalance, and his addiction to narcotic drugs reflected on his writing, making it disjointed and fragmentary. 'Grodek' was his best known poem, but shortly after he wrote it, he died of a drug overdose at the young age of 27.
'Quaint Spring' begins around deep midday as the poet lies on an old stone. Before him stand three angels in quaint dress, a word carried over from the title of the poem. The imagery is beautiful - the last snow having melted, as the birch's hair quivers in the cold, clear lake. A blue ribbon of the sky blows as a cloud flows through. The poet lies still, in a dream-like state, (is it drug induced) seeing angels kneeling in the sunshine. All at once, he hears a bird sing marvelous stories, stories which speak to him, as he fathoms that before his first desire can be fulfilled, he must die.
As I read this poem, echoes of many other poems linger in my mind - the vision of the Abyssinian maid with a dulcimer in 'Kubla Khan', the singing of the bird who "singest of summer in full-throated ease" in 'Ode to a Nightingale' and the appearance of the angels in sunshine similar to the angel writing in the moonlight in 'Abou Ben Adhem'.
This post is a part of #BlogchatterA2ZChallenge2021
Wow! I loved your analysis and the way you compared this poem to Kubla Khan, Ode to the Nightingle and Abou Ben Adhem.
ReplyDeletePurba, thank you so much. This is not a poem I am very familiar with, and yet, when I read it, it evoked these memories within me. That, I guess, is the magic of poetry!
ReplyDeleteI wonder how one writes silence into a poem. Also the last lines in their way speak about the dying of 1 season and the start of another.
ReplyDeleteIsn't it wonderful, Suchita? The very idea of writing silence into a poem? Death is also a kind of silence. The last two lines encapsulate this idea further.
DeleteWow ! This is profound and I loved the narration so much. How intense can one get to write about silence.
ReplyDeleteChinmayee, thank you so much. Imagine silence being intense! That is a kind of oxymoron, isn't yet? And yet, it works.
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