[Julie Steiner]

What am I missing? What is it that you admire about "To the Boy, Elis," John? I see nothing particularly swoon-worthy about it, but maybe I'm just swoon-immune.

I think that first quatrain is supposed to be a tercet, BTW.

[John Isbell]

Hi Julie,

Fair questions.
Yes, it's a tercet. I may have inadvertently reformated it in copying and pasting.
I tried to put some of what I like about Trakl in my little Trakl poem, under D & A. Let's see if I can put some things in words. First, here are some details that strike me in this poem:

Elis, when the blackbird calls in the dark forest,
this is your downfall.

A thornbush chimes
where your mooning eyes are.
O, how long Elis, are you dead?

The last gold of fallen stars.

It's a kaleidoscopic poem, surreal avant la lettre and to my mind more interesting than almost any surrealist work I've read. Trakl has a habit of naming birds and trees precisely, as here (not so common in surrealist writers). I love "this is your downfall." The translation isn't great; "are you dead?" is an ugly version of "bist du gestorben?", a question I like a good deal. I can imagine better English throughout. As Rilke writes, the angels cannot tell the living from the dead, and that seems to be the N's case here. The last line I find mythic, in a sort of end of the world-y way.
There's stuff I like less well here, and there's definitely a mental furniture to Trakl that one comes to recognize, but then that's true of Rilke or Baudelaire as well. I'm not claiming that Trakl is another Rilke, but I think he is intermittently splendid, and that's worth knowing in the history of German C20th poetry, which is not broadly known in the US. Trakl died young after six good years of writing and might have produced more; what he did paved the way for, say, Breton and Eluard, and maybe Neruda. Surrealism per se, which he preceded.
Here's a twenty-page pamphlet on Trakl by James Wright and Robert Bly: https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Trakl.pdf COming out of his complete poems, I think they're right about his silence.

Cheers,
John

[Julie Steiner]

I dunno, John. I respect your opinion, and I appreciate your efforts to help me connect to Trakl's work. And I tried, I really did. But I seem to be a hopeless case.

Maybe I'm just not patient enough to hear all this silence speaking.

I do like the color palette of this poem...

     (black[bird], dark, blue, dark, night, purple, blue, hyacinth, black, black, and the fading gold from a fallen star)

...somewhat better than the color palette of the twenty poems in the other document that you linked to...

     (black*, dark**, blue***, purple*4, red*5, gold*6, silver*7, white*8, pale*8b, and grey*9).

To be brutally honest, reading through those (yes, I know, way too fast) and being smacked in the face with color word after color word, I was reminded of the palette of Chapter 4 (Twilight Town, Forest, and Creepy Steeple) of the Paper Mario 2: The Thousand Year Door video game. The scenery's contrasting gloom and luridness is all drama, drama, drama and despair, despair, despair.

Everything's autumnal and decaying and sickly, and the same elements seem to pop up in every poem. Oh, goody, more thorns*10. That gloomy mood becomes almost a caricature of itself after a while, in my opinion. Read through the lists of color words below. Wow.

In the OP poem, "Your body is a hyacinth / a monk dips his wax finger into" is certainly untrodden territory, but I can't quite make it mean anything much. The mythological Hyacinth died of a head wound, as Elis seems to have also, but I don't recall any monks (with or without a wax finger--is that meant to be phallic? a candle? an actual finger?) in Ovid's version of the story, if that is one of the "ancient legends" referred to in S2L2.

But great poetry is often great poetry without my understanding or endorsement.

Thanks, John.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

* black wall (p. 7)
black waters (p. 9)
black horses (p. 10)
black fir branches (p. 10)
black wind (p. 12)
black wings (p. 12)
blackness (p. 15)
black firs (p. 15)
black wings (p. 15)
black rain (p. 16)
black fir trees (p. 18)
black swarms of flies (p. 19)
black voyages (p. 19)
black horses (p. 20)
black frost (p. 23)
Sleep is black. (p. 23)
black mold (p. 27)

** Darkening thunder (p. 6)
In the dark room (p. 6)
dark animals (p. 8)
forests that were growing dark (p. 9)
darkening woods (p. 10)
Icy winds quarrel in the darkness (p. 11)
over dark waters (p. 12)
I am a shadow far from darkening villages (p. 16)
Dark anxiety (p. 18)
The dark cry of trumpets (p. 18)
Out of the dark entrance hall (p. 18)
Black swarms of flies / Darken the stony space. (p. 19)
The motionless sea grows dark. (p. 19)
You dark mouth inside me (p. 20)
A mountain stream turns dark in the green light. (p. 20)
A dark future prepared / For the pale grandchild. (p. 21)
Oh the darkness of night. (p. 23)
a dark machine-gun nest (p. 23)
out of the darkness of my shadow (p. 23)
the dark eagles, sleep and death, (p. 25)
And the dark voice mourns (p. 25)
Not your dark poisons again (p. 26)
A dark pirate ship (p. 26)
the darkening sun (p. 27)
the dark flutes of autumn (p. 27)

*** blue skiff (p. 8)
blue grief of the evening (p. 13)
blue spring (p. 13)
blue water (p. 15)
The blue dove of the evening (p. 18)
The moon shines with blue light (p. 21)
blue ice (p. 23)
blue lakes (p. 27)

*4 purple fruits (p. 9)
purple grapes (p. 9)
purple clouds (p. 15)
purpled foreheads (p. 29)
purple wine (p. 23)
purple linen (p. 23)
purple surge (p. 24)
purple remains (p.25)

*5 red poppy (p. 6)
The fish rises with a red body in a green pond (p. 8)
red deer (p. 9)
red maple (p. 10)
red hunter (p. 15)
red evening (p. 18)
red fire (p 23)
A red wolf that an angel is strangling (p. 23)
Out of the door in the east the rose-colored day (p. 23)
red of evening (p. 26)
red cloud (p. 27)

*6 gold sun (p. 8)
golden harvests (p. 9)
golden clouds (p. 13)
Her eyes graze, round and golden, in the twilight (p. 16)
Dark anxiety / Of death, as when the gold / Died in the grey cloud (p. 18)
golden branches (p. 18)
The golden shape / Of the young girl (p. 18)
the agony / Of the golden day (p. 19)
golden evening stillness (p. 20)
The golden statue of man / is swallowed by the icy comber / of eternity. (p. 25)
full of the sound / Of the weapons of death, golden fields (p. 27)
gold branches of the night (p. 27)

*7 A silver hand / Puts the light out (p. 6)
silver eyelids (p. 9)
toads plunge from silver waters (p. 12)
silver skiff (p. 17)
silver light (p. 19)
silver snow (p. 20)
silver light (p. 23)
silver soles (p. 23)
silver arms (p. 24)

*8 the white moon of autumn shines (p. 11)
Over the white fishpond (p. 17)
The white walls of the city are always giving off sound. (p. 17)
The wild heart grew white in the forest (p. 18)
With her white habit glittering like the stars / Over the broken human bodies / The convent nurse is silent. (p. 20)
and your forehead is white before the ripe desire of the frost; (p. 23)
A white shirt of stars burns on your clothed shoulders (p. 23)
a white-washed room (p. 23)
Not your dark poisons again, / White sleep! (p. 26)
White birds from the outskirts of the night (p. 26)

*8b Something pale wakes up in a suffocating room (p. 15)
Surrounded by the pale moon (p. 18)
A dark future prepared / For the pale grandchild (p. 21)

*9 a grey malodorous mist from the latrine (p. 11)
the grey skies (p. 12)
the gray cloud (p. 18)

*10 the sweet body decayed in a bush of thorns (p. 16)
under arching thorns (p. 17)
thorny stairs (p. 23)
a thorny desert surrounds the city (p. 24)

[John Isbell]

Hi Julie,

You make a compelling case, and I did like your comparison to the video game. Frankly, I didn't read the pamphlet's poems - I've just finished 500-odd pages of Trakl - I only scanned through the prefatory materials by James Wright, whom I like, and Bly, whom I don't much but others do. I didn't find the complete poems as monotonous as this pamphlet evidently is. The early poems are quite Catholic, opening up later into something more ecumenical. Death is a constant; he was pretty clearly depressive if not bipolar, and likely committed suicide (cocaine OD) after his early experience of WW I. But yes, he has a mental furniture, and in this pamphlet it seems relentless, not to say caricatural, as you establish.
In case you'd like (!) to see one more short Trakl poem, here's "Sebastian im Traum" translated by the gifted Michael Hamburger: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...ontentId=28696 It has some of the color palette you indicate, but used perhaps more effectively - dark stair, for instance.

Cheers,
John