Trakl saw the world — or saw its essence, its future, its fate — as something which is passing away. Sometimes it is passing away slowly, in a process of decay. Sometimes it is passing away quickly, in a violent destruction. Sometimes Trakl’s lyric imagery pictures the world after its demise, the viewpoint of one walking among the ruins.
But this destruction is not meaningless. It takes places within a conceptual framework, as Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis writes:
The experience of the shattering of the world, however, exhibits in Trakl two aspects that qualify its destructiveness by providing it with a religious context. The speechless and unutterable pain (sprachloser Schmerz) experienced is described in terms of an event (ereignet) that has irrupted from outside the sphere of its occurrence (hereingebrochen), and that Trakl names a judgment or sentence (Gericht).
There is a moral and spiritual logic in Trakl’s vision of the world’s decline. The routine chain of cause and effect operates within the sensible physical world. Trakl opens the door to the possibility of metaphysical causes producing tangible events.
Trakl is not a philosopher: certainly not one in the tradition of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, or Schopenhauer. Yet he is indirectly encountering some of the metaphysical topics which are known to philosophers.
It is not mere abstract principles of metaphysics which interest Trakl. The events he describes or envisions are loaded with value, whether good or evil:
It is a feature of the figural imagination to think of the world, not as an encapsulated realm in which cause and effect succeed each other with relentless horizontality, but rather to conceive of existence in time as an open-ended situation that may at any moment (and does, indeed, at all moments, although not always perceptibly) undergo a sudden incursion of God’s free action.
Trakl sees destruction coming to his society — slowly or quickly — and anticipates wreckage which will be left afterwards. Yet his tone is not one of fear or panic. Nor does he condemn: he is not a prophet of wrath, he takes no joy in the world’s downfall.
Is the coming collapse a punishment? If so, is it just? Is it God’s vengeance? Trakl doesn’t answer directly. His focus is on finding some way to retain meaning in the midst of the disintegration, and in so doing, offer some hint of renewal after the unraveling of civilization.
He views the apocalypse not sensationalistically in the manner of a tabloid newspaper — die Boulevardzeitungen were already well-known in Trakl’s day — but rather seeks for himself, and hopes to explain to others, a cosmic context which shattering of culture makes sense, even if it is a painful sense.
Trakl’s description of his painful experience is, then, in keeping with his figural view of the world as embodied in his poems. The devastating event, furthermore, leads the poet to formulate a desire for persevering in the “doing of the truth,” an expression pregnant with scriptural associations concerning those who are doers and not mere hearers of the Word.
The power of Trakl’s lyric style is that it universally evokes within the reader a sense of darkness — dunkel, finster, düster — in a literal optical sense of those words, words which occur frequently in his texts. Even in passages which don’t use those words, the sensation of darkness is inevitably and involuntarily called forth in the mind of the reader.
There is an internal tension within Trakl’s texts between, on the one hand the attempt to explain a framework within which the world’s destruction has some meaning, and on the other hand, the pain and darkness of that destruction. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis explains:
We must conclude that, in some manner, Trakl regards his frightful experience as occurring within a context that determines, but is not to be equated with, the immediate phenomena of namelessness, painfulness, and unremitting darkness (steinernes Dunkel).
There are dozens of occurrences of words like Schatten, dunkel, finster, and düster in Trakl’s poems. Yet references to Wahrheit are also significant.
In a poem titled Heiterer Frühling Trakl makes this melancholy observation:
Wie scheint doch alles Werdende so krank!
Yet only a few lines later use some form of wahr twice, followed immediately by a reference to Matthew 28:20, the last sentence of the last chapter of Matthew’s text: an ending, but an ending with a forward-looking promise.
So schmerzlich gut und wahrhaft ist, was lebt;
Und leise rührt dich an ein alter Stein:
Wahrlich! Ich werde immer bei euch sein.
O Mund! der durch die Silberweide bebt.
In a poem titled Romanze zur Nacht Trakl describes a way of seeing which is truthful. This could even be a programmatic statement for his lyricism.
Sehr friedlich schaut zur Nacht das Kind
Mit Augen, die ganz wahrhaft sind.
The truth of Trakl’s texts is his gift to the dying world: a gift which will give meaning to this death, and which lays the foundation, however ambiguous, for a life after this death. Trakl predicts a cataclysmic downfall, but does so with sympathy, empathy, and compassion. His prediction is true, and because it is, it can point the way to rebirth after the disintegration.
