Georg Trakl Quotes

In an old family album
Ever again you return, Melancholy,
O meekness of the solitary soul.
A golden day glows and expires.
Humbly the patient man surrenders to pain
Ringing with melodious sound and soft madness.
Look! There's the twilight.
Night returns once more and a mortal thing laments
And another suffers in sympathy.
Shuddering under autumn stars
Yearly the head is bowed deeper.
-Georg Trakl (1887-1914)

The dark eagles, sleep and death,
Rustle all night around my head:
The golden statue of man
Is swallowed by the icy comber
Of eternity. On the frightening reef
The purple remains go to pieces,
And the dark voice mourns
Over the sea.
Sister in my wild despair
Look, a precarious skiff is sinking
Under the stars,
The face of night whose voice is fading.

It is a stubble field, where a black rain is falling.
It is a brown tree, that stands alone.
It is a hissing wind, that encircles empty houses.
How melancholy the evening is.
A while later,
The soft orphan garners the sparse ears of corn.
Her eyes graze, round and golden, in the twilight
And her womb awaits the heavenly bridegroom.
On the way home
The shepherd found the sweet body
Decayed in a bush of thorns.
I am a shadow far from darkening villages.
I drank the silence of God
Out of the stream in the trees.
Cold metal walks on my forehead.
Spiders search for my heart.
It is a light that goes out in my mouth.
At night, I found myself on a pasture,
Covered with rubbish and the dust of stars.
In a hazel thicket
Angels of crystal rang out once more.

Shuddering under the autumn stars, each year, the head sinks lower and lower.

The near stillness recalls what is forgotten, extinct angels.

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.

Cold metal walks across my forehead,
spiders search for my heart.
It is a light that goes out in my mouth ...

The blue of my eyes is extinguished in this night, the red gold of my heart.

MARCELLUS: But look, Agathon, what strange dark light is glowing amongst the clouds. You would think a sea of flame is blazing behind the clouds. A divine fire! And the sky is like a blue bell. It's as if one can hear it tolling in deep, solemn tones. You might even suspect that up there above us, in unattainable heights, something is taking place of which we shall never know. But at times we can sense it, when that vast silence has settled over the earth. And yet! All this is very confusing. The gods have to pose insoluble riddles for us humans. And the earth does not rescue us from the cunning of the gods; for it too is full of things that confound the senses. Both things and humans confuse me. True enough! Things are very taciturn! And the human soul won't yield up its riddles. You ask and it keeps silent.

AGATHON: Let's live and not ask questions. Life is full of beauty.

Under the trimmed willows, where brown children
are playing
And leaves tumbling, the trumpets blow. A quaking
of cemeteries.
Banners of scarlet rattle through a sadness of maple
trees,
Riders along rye-fields, empty mills.
Or shepherds sing during the night, and stags step
delicately
Into the circle of their fire, the grove's sorrow
immensely old,
Dancing, they loom up from one black wall;
Banners of scarlet, laughter, insanity, trumpets

Not your dark poisons again,
White sleep!
This fantastically strange garden
Of trees in deepening twilight
Fills up with serpents, nightmoths,
Spiders, bats.
Approaching stranger!
Your abandoned shadow
In the red of evening
Is a dark pirate ship
Of the salty oceans of confusion.
White birds from the outskirts of the night
Flutter out over the shuddering cities
Of steel.

The guilt of newborns is immense.

I do not have easy days at home now and I drift between fear and helplessness in sunny rooms where it is unspeakably cold. Strange shudders of transformation, bodily experienced to the point of vulnerability, visions of mysteries until the certainty of having died, ecstasies to the point of stony petrifaction, and a continuation of dreaming sad dreams.

Our silence is a black cavern.

At the Moor
Wanderer in the black wind; quietly the dry reeds whisper
In the stillness of the moor. In the gray sky
A flock of wild birds follows;
Slanting over gloomy waters.
Turmoil. In decayed hut
The spirit of putrescence flutters with black wings.
Crippled birches in the autumn wind.
Evening in deserted tavern. The way home is scented all around
By the soft gloom of grazing herds;
Apparition of the night; toads plunge from brown waters.

A world without fairy tales and myths would be as drab as life without music

Silently, God opens his golden eyes over the place of skulls.

The thrush called strangeness into the sunset.

Shepherds buried the sun in the naked forest.
With a net of hair
A fisherman hauled the moon from the icy pond.

The pale man dwells
In a blue crystal, his cheek at rest against his stars,
Or he bows his head in crimson sleep.

But the black flight of birds always touches
The watcher, the holiness of blue flowers;
The nearby silence thinks forgotten things, extinguished angels.

Again the brow turns night in moonlit stone;
A radiant youth,
The sister appears in autumn and black putrefaction.

I drank the silence of God from a spring in the woods.

Your body is a hyacinth,
Into which a monk dips his waxy fingers.
Our silence is a black cavern,
From which a soft animal steps at times
And slowly lowers heavy eyelids.
On your temples black dew drips,
The last gold of expired stars