German Literature Archives - Page 9 of 13

Alfred Döblin’s The Murder of a Buttercup and Other Stories – a Review

Alfred Döblin’s The Murder of a Buttercup is a collection of short stories written by the German writer during his early career, from 1904-11, and published in English in the book Bright Magic. I read them largely because they all fall within the time period of the German paper I’m taking next year – is there any other reason to read anything? – and because unlike, say, Robert Musil’s stories of this period, the stories collected in The Murder of a Buttercup are rather more straightforward and approachable. They are, that is, stories as well as experiments, however full they are of modernist flourishes. Döblin himself is one of the better-known German modernists, albeit one whose lifetime’s work has been reduced down to a single book – Berlin Alexanderplatz – just as Ivan Goncharov in Russia or William Makepeace Thackery in Britain have been reduced to Oblomov and Vanity Fair for the casual reader.

A photo of Alfred Döblin, the author of The Murder of a Buttercup — Alfred Döblin, a German writer whose work has more or less been reduced down to his novel *Berlin Alexanderplatz*, was born in 1878 and worked as a doctor before becoming a full-time writer. *The Murder of a Buttercup* was his first collection of stories.

Whether or not that seems fair in Döblin’s case I hope to venture an early answer to at the end of this review. Before then I’ll go over a few of the stories themselves, alongside their general themes. For, whether good or not, they are certainly interesting for their modernist impulses. All translations are by Damion Searls.

The Rejection of the World – “The Sailboat Ride”

The first story in The Murder of a Buttercup is the plainly titled “The Sailboat Ride” and it is itself one of the most straightforward tales here. It details a relationship between a Brazilian man, Copetta, and a woman he meets at the beach at Ostend in Belgium. Copetta is, at forty-eight, already conscious of his age. In Paris, before the story begins, he’s spent weeks in hospital, expecting to die only to ultimately recover. Far away from home, he hopes to sample European culture. But his attention is taken by a woman he meets. After seeing her three times in one day he begins to question the assumptions underlying his life. He sends her a note before destroying both his wedding ring and his pictures of his children.

When they meet, they go for a ride into the sea on a sailboat. They are wild and restless in their passion, but in time Copetta’s mood worsens. She tries to comfort him, but without success. At last a wave comes that bears him away. She is found by the authorities, drifting on the sea – Copetta’s suicide was premeditated, and he had already sent them a telegram to warn them. But the story does not end here. Now we follow the woman as she heads to Paris and tries to stave off her grief through sexual liberation. “She denied herself to no one”. But this does not bring her the deep pleasure she is after. A year later she sends a message to Ostend: “To Mr Copetta Ostend Hotel Estrada expect me tomorrow noon. Wire reply requested.”

She returns. Her mother has died in the interim, but the news has no effect on the woman. She is filled with bliss – her madness is complete. She pretends that Copetta is alive and writes him a message, then one morning she steals a rowboat and heads into the sea. There she meets “Copetta” again. From out of the waves “a dark shape” appears. He joins her on the boat, but his body is crusted with shells and ruined. He tries to ward her off with an ambiguous wave of his arm, but she does not retreat. As they are united in intoxication and pleasure, they turn young once more, and in that moment they are both at last swept under the waves.

Meanings and Themes in “The Sailboat Ride”

“The Sailboat Ride” is a good introduction to many of the general themes of The Murder of a Buttercup. First among these is a turning away from the world. In the Modernist period many artists rejected the stodgy social conditions of the environment in which they worked. Emotions and characters that otherwise would not grace the printed page now rose to prominence and without condemnation on the part of their creators. In “The Sailboat Ride” we have Copetta’s infidelity and also the open female sexuality of the woman. Döblin’s narration in The Murder of a Buttercup is at timeshighly sensual, and this story is filled with hip-on-hip contact, mussels, and other overt and covert sexually charged emotions and symbols.

A painting of Nietzsche by Edvard Munch. — Friedrich Nietzsche, destroyer of past values and builder of new ones, is a big influence on modernism in general, and Döblin in particular. It was he who first challenged the foundations of our culture and society, revealing how flimsy these foundations really were. Painting by Munch.

Of course, within the story both man and women are punished for their desires – Copetta’s inability to deal with socially-conditioned guilt no doubt leads to his suicide, while the woman faces condemnation for forgetting her mother and dancing with so many men. But what matters is that that at the story’s conclusion they turn their backs on society and find bliss. The sea, intoxication (a motif that directly speaks to Nietzsche’s Dionysian world in The Birth of Tragedy), allows them to come together at last, at the cost of their demise. And it’s hard to read the final moments as anything other than triumphant.

“Astralia”: Another Retreat from the World

A rejection of the world can come in many forms, and though death and suicide are common in The Murder of a Buttercup there are other retreats here. In Astralia we find a scholar, Adolf Götting, whose escape comes in the form of mysticism. As the fin-de-siècle mood in Europe worsened towards the outbreak of the First World War, and with organised religion dying, many turned to cults and mysticism to try to find a suitable faith.

The scholar of Astralia has his own mystic group, convinced that the Redeemer will soon return. They meet and drink, and drink a lot. When Götting leaves the tavern one evening he has no boots, nor hat nor coat. He thinks he is transformed into some kind of prophet, and the mockery he receives on the street only confirms his delusions. When he returns home, he treats his wife badly for not being part of his group, but when she continues to fuss about his dress and state of dishevelment he eventually breaks down: “Oh, don’t laugh…. Please, please don’t laugh. Oh, I beg you, I’m begging, beg-ging….”. The retreat fails, Götting is left a fool. Society has been too strong for him to escape.

“The Murder of a Buttercup” – Religion and Rationality

There is a tension in The Murder of a Buttercup not only between society and the self, but also between an extreme rationality and irrationality. Both Nietzsche (e.g. Beyond Good and Evil) and Max Weber (in his lecture “Science as Vocation”) warn against adopting a hyper rationalist viewpoint of the sort that was at the time coming into vogue. While on the surface science offers a lot of explanations, Nietzsche saw a wholehearted belief in science as just a continuation of the Christian world view, and as such one ultimately tending towards nihilism and a devaluation of all things. Meanwhile, Weber added that although science answers a lot of questions, nonetheless its answers are very often based on presuppositions (even today), meaning that most “facts” are nonetheless ultimately contingent. Once we start questioning what underpins them we can devalue the world that way too.

What matters, then, is to leave a little bit of irrationality in yourself instead of veering between hyper-rationalism and irrationalism. There are many characters in The Murder of a Buttercup who seem unable to do this. The most memorable on is Michael Fischer, the hero of “The Murder of a Buttercup” itself. This is an extraordinarily strange tale. On a walk in the mountains Fischer, the head of a firm in the city, attacks and dismembers a buttercup that had managed to slow him down. Fischer is a rational man, if cruel. But the murder of a buttercup is all that is necessary to lead him down the road to madness. A few moments after killing the flower he sees himself, committing the act again. A dislocation has taken place between the old Fischer and the new.

As he continues walking, guilt for the “murder” begins to eat away at him, including a fear of social repercussions – “What if someone saw him, one of his business colleagues or a lady?”. Fischer tries to control himself the same way he controls his firm. In his mind he even seems to refer to himself as a “firm”. But he is unable to win out, and images of death and decay, of the “plant corpse”, continue to eat at him. Alongside another emotion – pleasure. A kind of sexual enjoyment was to be had in murdering the plant, a “gentle lasciviousness”.

Once Fischer gets over his guilt he feels “liberated”. But back in the city this guilt returns. He finds himself crediting the buttercup money to try to buy back his peace, he makes offerings to it. He is unable to win out – he ends up crying at all the beauty in the world, beauty that his guilt is ruining. He only moves on when he takes a new buttercup home from the mountains. He lavishes attention on this one out of spite for the old one. “Never had his life passed so cheerfully” we are told. Eventually, he disappears into the forest, “laughing and snorting loudly”. His madness is complete.

Modern Anxieties in The Murder of a Buttercup

Döblin’s Berlin grew extremely rapidly in the final years of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The city and business underpin Fischer’s power and confidence. But the foundations are flimsy. There is a moment in the story where he thinks “Nobody would make a fool out of him, nobody”. Though he tries to live rationally, he gains more enjoyment from an imaginary war with a buttercup than from his entire business career. His final retreat into the forest, like Copetta and the woman’s in “The Sailboat Ride”, is a firm rejection of society and social constraints. And like theirs, it is marked by a feeling that illicit, sexual pleasures and desires and more valuable than socially constrained ones, even as those same desires have fatal consequences. Fischer’s story is also similar to “Astralia” by means of its preoccupation with religious concerns.

In “Astralia” there was an attempt to replace organised religion with a kind of mystical cult; in “The Murder of a Buttercup”, however, it is the absence of religion that is the focus. Without a god to turn to, the question of how to expiate his guilt torments Fischer incessantly and seems to be a great contributor to his eventual madness. Looking at the story through Nietzsche seems like a good approach. Guilt, of course, is a Christian emotion in Nietzsche’s view. It makes us uncomfortable acting in a way that benefits ourselves by encouraging us to think about others and external, heavenly, judgement. It is thus the hallmark of a slave-morality. Fischer lives in a godless world, but he is still hamstrung by a Christian moral system, leaving him in the double bind of feeling a bad emotion but being unable to deal with it.

He doesn’t know he is free, and that ignorance comes to destroy him.

Conclusions

There are a few other interesting stories here, including “The Wrong Door”, with its amusing play on our ideas of fate, and the coldly rational and brutally misogynistic “Memoirs of a Jaded Man”. But space and attention are at a premium and I had better wrap things up. I liked a lot of the ideas and concerns that Döblin voices in The Murder of a Buttercup. In some sense his stories, with their mix of the supernatural and irrational alongside the rational and concrete, reminded me of Borges’ work. But Borges manages in three or four pages what Döblin needs several more to do, and I’m not sure the latter’s work is better for the extra space.

A painting of Döblin in a jagged, modernist style. — Modern anxieties alone are not enough for good fiction, at least in my book. The stories in *The Murder of a Buttercup* are intellectually interesting, but not always gripping. Portrait of Döblin by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

It doesn’t help that his stories are rarely gripping, and there were a few times when I was left confused about what was actually happening. These aren’t instances of modernist flourishes – when Döblin’s language gets weird, it can be fantastic and beautiful – instead, these are times when he could probably simply have done with an editor. In the end, I’m left with mixed feelings. These tales are the work not of a talented author, but of someone who has everything they need to become one given time and the right circumstances. As with Isaac Babel’s Red Army Cavalry, and Platonov’s Soul and Other Stories, I can’t help but feel that the intellectual side of Döblin’s stories overpower their weaker and less gripping plots. And unfortunately, while it makes him easy to write essays about, it doesn’t really make him enjoyable to read.

But I hope his mature work, when I get around to it, will change my mind.

Have you read any Döblin? Does he get better? Leave a comment and let me know.

Fate and Control in Stefan Zweig’s The Fowler Snared (Sommernovellette)

The Fowler Snared is a short story by the German-language writer Stefan Zweig. Though it is short, it nonetheless reflects a lot of the key preoccupations of the German “Novelle” form while putting its own spin on them. There is a tension in this short tale between our desire for power and control, and our ability to achieve that same control. As in a work of tragic drama the characters of The Fowler Snared discover that there are forces – luck, fate, whatever – that act upon them even as they try to give order to their own world.

A photo showing Stefan Zweig, a handsome young man with glasses dressed formally. — Stefan Zweig, Austrian and Jewish German writer. The photo shows him at about the age he was when he wrote *The Fowler Snared*.

Zweig’s story, taking place on the banks of Lake Como in Northern Italy and detailing something akin to a failed romance, is typical of the highly cosmopolitan writer that Zweig was. Indeed, its setting and language reminded me somewhat of the opening of Henry James’s Daisy Miller, another work from a transnational talent. Born in Vienna 1881 to a family of wealthy but nonreligious Jews, Zweig was a pacifist and internationalist. Following Hitler’s rise to power in Germany Zweig fled first to the UK, then the United States, and finally Brazil. There, overwhelmed by Hitler’s early successes in the Second World War, he and his wife jointly committed suicide in 1942.

The Fowler Snared is from 1906 and contains none of that fear or anxiety about the world that Zweig’s later works, such as The Royal Game/Chess Story/Schachnovelle do, even though the story does acknowledge some of the darker sides of human character. But anyway, to the story.

Introduction: Plot and Form in The Fowler Snared

What’s in a story? I’ve spoken about the Novelle form in my piece on Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”, and also in my thoughts on Theodor Storm’s “Aquis Submersus”. Generally we have a frame narrative, a small cast of characters, leitmotifs or recurring symbols, and a moment of crisis around the middle or else a twist. The Fowler Snared has all of these. The story begins in Cadenabbia, a place of “white villas” and “dark trees” on the banks of Lake Como. A place that is full of potential romance. But already something is slightly off, because it is August, and the narrator finds his hotel almost empty – those people looking for crowds, for adventure, would have been better off coming in the spring.

But still there are guests. The narrator singles one out, an elderly gentleman, and approaches him in search of a story. “Why, I wondered, did he not go away to some seaside resort?” the narrator asks himself. In approaching him the narrator makes us aware of the artificiality of stories, the way that they often need to be constructed out of forced experience that may often prove unrewarding. The man, however, rewards the narrator’s curiosity with a story just as he had hoped.

The Old Man’s Story: Experience and Memory

The old man, who had “never had either a fixed occupation or a fixed place of abode”, is always described in pairs of adjectives to indicate his lack of stable existence. The narrator remarks that with the end of his life his accumulated experiences would be scattered and lost. “I have no interest in memories. Experience is experienced once for all; then it is over and done with” is the man’s reply, but he agrees to tell his story all the same. And here, as we enter the second narrative layer, we first encounter the tension that will be the man’s undoing – the tension between what he says and what, ultimately, he does.

The Old Man’s Story: The Girl

A year ago the old man was staying at the same hotel, and there he came to be aware of certain guests – a family of Germans. He is intrigued by the youngest of them, a plain girl of about sixteen or seventeen. He sits watching her, unable to work out why he finds her interesting. He admits to himself that she is nothing more than a teenager, “gazing dreamily across the lake”. And already there comes a natural impulse for control – he begins to imagine her personality, where he can only see her outward appearance. “She must be dreaming”, he thinks, of romantic tales.

A photo of Lake Como, where A Fowler Snared is set. — A photo of Lake Como, looking lovely. Resorts are always useful in the literature of this period. They let characters relax and forget a little the social rules that would bind them otherwise, thanks to the fact that all acquaintances here are by default fleeting and temporary. Chekhov’s “Lady With a Little Dog” is another classic resort-town romance. Photo by Stan Shebs CC BY-SA

And so he decides to create such a tale for her and be the author of her own story – “I made up my mind to find her a lover”. He writes her a love letter without signing it, leaves it for her to find the next morning. He does not consider the risk – he has a low opinion of women and thinks the girl is much too meek and quiet to tell anybody about the letter. There is certainly a sense that the man is living out a masculine power fantasy by controlling her.

His first letter is a success and he writes another, and another. The “sport” and “game” of his “imaginary passion” brings him an immense pleasure. But it also brings the girl pleasure. She “seemed to dance as she walked”, and her previous plainness disappears now that she pays attention to her appearance. For the moment all is well, “the marionette danced, and I pulled the strings skilfully”. But our control over the world is not so permanent as the old man might have hoped.

The Old Man’s Story: Control’s Failure

There are two mistakes, two things that the old man doesn’t anticipate. In his letters, to avoid the possibility that the girl might realise it is him who is writing them, he now suggests that he comes from another resort each morning to look at her. The girl begins to sit watching the steamer. And one morning, a “handsome young fellow arrives”. Their eyes meet, and although they do not know each other they both succumb to the illusion that they were destined to meet. For the old man, this comes as a shock. “He had almost caught up with her, and I was feeling in my alarm that the edifice I had been building was about to be shattered”. At the final moment, however, the girl’s mother arrives and the two are unable to meet. But this has already revealed the fragility of the man’s overall control.

The next morning the second instance of the man’s inability to control fate is revealed. He comes across the girl in “disorder”. “The charming restlessness had been replaced by an incomprehensible misery”. He only understands when he sees that the family’s table is not laid – they have left the resort. She has been unable to meet her imagined lover. Not only that, but the man’s manipulation, which at first had brought her pleasure, is now the cause of her despair. The moral aspect of the story grows harder to avoid.

Two Moments of Conflict

The old man’s story ends. But as the narrator points out, this is not a good story. The novella form itself demands neatness, a tying up that is absent here. “A story needs an ending”, he says. And so he himself takes a more active role again, asking questions and leading the conversation. He says how he imagines the story ends: the old man was incapable of feigning passion like that forever. In the end, the passion became real. He came back to the same place a year later, hoping to find the girl and declare his love.

And here the man interrupts him with a denial that is as good as a confession. A novella often has a moment of crisis as its high point. This crisis, where the old man’s secret is revealed, is two-parted. There is of course the revelation of his secret, but more importantly there is also his failure. The girl is not here. He returned, “wooing fortune’s favour only to find fortune pitiless”. In a sense, the crisis has already taken place before the story begins. And that makes its impact, the sense of the old man’s powerlessness before fate, all the greater. He tried to control the girl, only to find another force, a more powerful force, controlling him. It is a pleasant irony and gives a nice symmetry to the story.

Stories and the Language of Control

I read The Fowler Snared in an English translation by Eden and Cedar Paul, and the translation seems to be a fine one. It didn’t get in the way of the story, and most importantly it was clear, letting the uncertainties of Zweig’s own dialogues and descriptions come to the forefront. For after all, alongside the controlling impulse of the man himself towards the girl, the act of speaking and telling a story is also one that involves giving order and control to something that is essentially boundless and untransferable – personal experience.

First, we have story itself. It is created when the narrator approaches the old man at the beginning of The Fowler Snared, then is given an ending when the narrator pressures the old man to explain his return to the resort. Even the old man himself is aware of the ways that stories are constructed. “The old fellows… would rather talk of their successes than of their failures”. He makes us aware of the inevitable gap between what we hear and what could be said. He was comfortable ending the story without acknowledging that although he had successfully manipulated the girl, he had failed to meet her this time. In the same way, it’s hard to avoid considering that the girl herself never gets a chance to speak in The Fowler Snared. Language and form control her throughout. Even the letter itself is language, weaponised as a tool for power.

Stories are a way of controlling the past. The old man, so long as he himself is speaking, is calm. But when the narrator guesses his secret, he is forced to shout over him and deny the truth. Once he has taken control again, to finish the story, he once again tries to control what we as readers learn. He quotes Balzac to describe his predicament, distancing himself by means of literature from his reality. But ultimately we are left with the knowledge that language is a double-edged sword. The very language he uses to avoid his fate is the language that got him into it. The passionate letters lead to his own ruin just as much as they lead to the girl’s.

Conclusion

I really liked The Fowler Snared. Though it is short, I felt that the way it combined its form and content was interesting. As with many novellas it presents the conflict between order and disorder, but here it shows how we humans are responsible for creating both sides of that coin, first building up systems of control, and then watching as they collapse. Really though, I liked it because it was clearly written, short enough to get through in an evening, and will be good for answering essays on. What more could I possibly want?

For more writers of this period, there’s Hofmannsthal, Trakl, and Sandor Marai to consider.

Georg Trakl and the Poetry of Spiritual Twilight (Translations)

I came to the Austrian German poet Trakl depressed and didn’t leave any happier. His short oeuvre, written in the final years before the first world war, is not for the faint of heart. There is very little joy to be found here, and what beauty there is in his poems is tainted by an overwhelming sense of decay. But what Trakl does offer, above and beyond his despair and endless talk of decline, is a unique view of the world, and a unique language of symbols for appreciating it. Each of his poems is a mysterious mood-piece, filled with images whose interpretations are never definite. Rilke’s view, that reading Trakl is like being “an outsider pressed against panes of glass”, looking into a space of experience which “like the space in a mirror, cannot be entered”, hits the mark.

Georg Trakl. Intensely sad, his poems reflect a sensibility that felt deeply the spiritual turbulence of his age. A turbulence that continues into our own and leaves his poetry mysterious and fresh even now.

Trakl is a strange poet, but he is also one whose work is tragically beautiful, and I hope to show that in these few translations below. His concerns seem perfect for our own age. The empty spiritual gulf left by religion’s decline, the feeling of foreboding as the world enters a new era without any ballast or sense that we are prepared for its challenges, and even the loss of a deep understanding of and connection to the natural world – all these are just as relevant now as they were as the First World War erupted. To face Trakl’s dark world is to be given a way of visualising the darkness of our own. So let’s begin.

The Poems

Trakl’s poems are made up of short and simple sentences, that are nonetheless often hard to understand. There’s a lot of ambiguity due to the syntax and punctuation, and whenever I’ve met something unclear, I’ve aimed to convey that same uncertainty in the English. After all, I’m trying to translate a mood and an atmosphere, not a technical document. If I have managed that, then I can be happy with how these have turned out. Following the poems is a bit about Trakl’s life and a conclusion.

Song of a Captive Blackbird (DE)
 
Dark breath in green twigs.
Blue blossoms float around the face
Of the lonely one, his golden step
Dying under the olive tree.
The night is filled with the fluttering of drunk wings.
So quietly bleeds out humility,
Dew, which slowly drips from the blossoming thorn.
The mercy of shining arms
Embraces a breaking heart.

A painting showing a night time landscape. Munch's early and middle work reflects a similar sensibility to that of Trakl. — This painting (Starry Night), by Edvard Munch, strikes me as a good representation of my feeling as I read the final two stanzas of “Spiritual Twilight.” Munch was working at about the same time as Trakl and I feel like both of them are often similar in tone and image.

 Spiritual Twilight (DE)

 Silence encounters at the forest’s hem
 Its dark quarry.
 On the hill the evening wind ends quietly,
  
 The blackbird’s cries are stilled,
 And the soft flutes of autumn
 Go silent in their pipes.
  
 On a black cloud
 You sail, drunk on the poppy,
 The ponds of the night,
  
 The stars in the heavens.
 The sister’s lunar voice is always calling
 Through the spirit’s night.

The Sun (DE)

Daily comes the yellow sun across the hill.
The forest, the dark beast, man – hunter or shepherd – 
All are beautiful.
  
Reddish rises the fish in the green pond.
Under the round heavens
The fisherman quietly rows in his blue boat.
  
Slowly ripens the grape, the grain.
When the day silently ends,
A good and an evil is prepared.
  
When the world becomes night,
The wanderer quietly lifts his heavy eyes;
The sun breaks out of a gloomy chasm.

The Sun, also by Munch, shows a sun. — The Sun, also by Munch. I wonder if, had Trakl lived to grow older, he too would have found way of looking at and representing the world that moved beyond fear and anxiety.

In Spring (DE)
Softly sank from dark steps the snow;
In the shadow of the tree
The lovers raise their rosy lids.
  
Star and night always follow
The dark calls of the mariners;
And the oars beat softly in time.
  
Soon on the ruined wall blooms
The violet;
The temples of the lonely one silently grow green.

Autumn Homecoming (DE)

Remembrance, a buried hope,
Preserves this brown wood frame,
Where dahlias hang above -
An ever stiller homecoming;
The ruined garden, the dark reflection
Of childhood years,
So that from blue lids the tears plunge
Unstoppably.
Now swim the glassy minutes
Of gloom
Over and into the night.

Who was Trakl? Biography and its Absence

Georg Trakl was born in 1887 and died towards the end of 1914, likely by his own hand. He was born in Salzburg to a family of not great financial means, but all the same this is where he was most happy. His relations with his sister Grete, herself a musical prodigy, may well have been incestuous. In his poems Trakl often writes about the “sister”, but it’s difficult to know what to make of that. What is more clear is that Trakl developed a drug addiction that he supported through becoming a pharmacist. Once war broke out Trakl joined the Austro-Hungarian army as a medical officer on the Eastern Front. By this point his mood was extremely unstable and the experience of the battle of Grodek, though it led to perhaps is most famous poem, also led to Trakl’s final breakdown and probable suicide of a cocaine overdose.

Yet all of this is almost irrelevant in the poems. As is clear above, Trakl hides himself from view. The experience of reading his work is rather like floating through a deep fog. There is nothing so solid as an “I”, even a lyrical “I”, to hold on to. The places of his life certainly make their appearances, including Grodek itself, but always more as symbols and maps of an internal world than as real settings, at least it seems that way to me.

The lovely German edition of Trakl’s work from Reclam which I’ve been reading also includes many of his letters. But these, too, are not of much use for understanding his poems. We can hear Trakl’s own voice, always in pain, and always suffering. It only caused me to feel a terrible and futile desire to help the poor man, but the poems remained – perhaps thankfully – impenetrable. “I was terribly sick for a few days, I think from a mourning that cannot be put into words”. Shortly before he dies he writes “I feel like I’ve already almost passed over into the beyond”. What I like about him so much is that his sensibility really does seem to belong to another world, no matter how much suffering seems to be involved.

Conclusion – Religion and the Poppy

Probably my favourite pieces here are the first two. The image of the blackbird, of the innocent forced to suffer its way through the world, lies at the heart of Trakl’s whole project, and the bird’s short and brutal poem strikes me as being particularly beautiful. But it also contains within it a rare hint at redemption. Trakl’s religious inclinations are, as with so much else about him, not entirely clear. But for me at least, this poem has a spiritual angle to it: the suggestion that for all our suffering there may lurk at the end of the tunnel a kind of salvation. It’s not unlike Dostoevsky, in its way.

As for “Spiritual Twilight”, I love its tone and sense of mystery. For me it really conveys that world of abstract rumination we fall into somewhere in the depths of our despair. It is a weightless poem, just as we, in our thoughts, are weightless too. But one day we must open our eyes. And that is where the challenge lies.

The last word on all this should go to Trakl himself. This is how he describes himself, towards the end of his life: “Too little love, too little justice and mercy, and always too little love; too much hardness, pride, and all sorts of transgressions – this is me. I am certain that I only refrain from evil out of cowardice and weakness and in doing so shame even that part of me.”

I hope, having read a few of his poems, you have a sense that for all the mercy and love he did not receive himself, he was more than willing to give plenty of it out to those who needed it in his work. The strange thing is, for all his despair, I find myself feeling less alone for reading in his company. And that’s why I think he’s a fantastic poet.

What did you think?