Poem ‘Helian’ by Georg Trakl, Essay Example

The poem “Helian” was written by Georg Trakl in December of 1912 and January of 1913. The poem was created at the height of the winter, the gloomiest season of the year. The author himself eventually mentioned the poem as both the most valuable and the most distressing thing he had ever written. The poem is believed to be greatly autobiographical, as well as the most of Trakl’s works.

The “Helian” has ninety-three lines and is considered to be Trakl’s longest poem. The stanzas are short and of unequal length, varying from two to seven lines, and are assembled into five major sections. No need to say, the present poem is instantaneously identifiable as being Trakl’s. It has typical for the poet’s works trance-like tempo and terrifying philosophy of soul’s eternal loneliness. “Helian” is endowed with some sort of casual loveliness that seem to provide richly deserved moments of comfort, gratification and peace:

In the lonely hours of the mind

It is lovely to walk in the sun

Along the yellow walls of summer.

However, the whole of the text has an extremely melancholic tone. The author seem to rush between the life and the world of the dead, he observes the world never forgetting about the dead ones buried beneath the soil he walks at. In my opinion, the whole idea of the poem is expressed in the last lines:

When the grandson in the solitude
Of his tender madness muses over a darker ending,
The blue eyelids of the silent god sink upon him.

Trakl uses frequent allusion to death and decay. There is death, cold and radiating, practically in each line of the poem. Even if not being mentioned directly, death is implied everywhere. The poem generates an image of an internal world of misery, yet the author makes it look somehow delicately romantic. The whole of the text is saturated with author’s yearning for deliverance, which is not to happen, and the author’s feverish sense of doom concerning the matter.

Trakl’s poetry is joyful and depressing at the same time. The reader faces up to a random collection of colors and sensations. Once we observe “the red peach” that “glows under the foliage” and “the grove” which “is a sight of sober clarity”, and then we suddenly ran into “a dead soldier” that “calls for a prayer… among black walls in the public place”. The poem is strongly expressionistic. Its beauty is dark and powerful. It seems like Trakl wrote the poem as if he were making up a melody, a piece of music more than a piece of text. He is painting own emotions into various colors. His each line is full of emotional content rather than tones and accords.

The reader of “Helian” is presented with the amazing images of somber sad world endowed with the surreal beauty and the grandeur of dying. The author makes the reader observe a separate universe, which is far from being welcoming to human beings. It is the world full of death, desolation, and decay, where rather weird living things exist in a splendid harmony being guarded by mysterious gods. This world is sad yet beautiful, and it is doomed to stay in your thoughts for a long time. The poem is some kind of reflection of the deepest place from the author’s inner world. This place is undeniably beyond human understanding, it is a place of disillusionment, of loss and fright. If having enough courage and patience to attempt to understand the meaning of Trakl’s meditations, the reader might be able to recognize his own emotions in the poem, to recognize himself in the author symbolic depiction of surrounding reality, to finally understand the author, yet in a way that goes beyond the power of words.

I have to say, I cannot propose any specific interpretation for each image used in the poem. I believe it is full of symbols and oblique allusions that could be fully understood only by the author himself. I feel truly sorry for someone who could go through the emotions described in the poem. The mere reading of those makes me feel depressed. I imagine author’s soul to be a dark deep abyss, empty and dangerous, something he himself is afraid of and something he was trying vigorously to express in the chaotic sequence of both terrible and beautiful illusions. Facing the death so readily, giving himself to the power of the dark and mysterious fantasies, Trakl should have been truly miserable. However, he is not afraid to look at the face of the terrifying visions produced by his own imagination.

The poem is full of pre-Christian and Christian symbolism, yet it is far from being religious. It has frequent allusions to the Bible and to God. When we read about “dying away a man‘s head droops in the dark of the olive tree” biblical olive garden is the first to come into one’s mind. And then goes:

At the bank of Kidron a great mind is lost in musing,
Under a tree, the tender cedar,
Stretched out under the father’s blue eyebrows,
Where a shepherd drives his flock to pastures at night.

It is well-known that there is a Kidron Valley on the eastern side of The Old City of Jerusalem. The one valley is included as an important part of the Bible. The Kidron Valley is situated along the eastern wall of The Old City of Jerusalem, keeping the Temple Mount apart from the Mount of Olives.  There is also some Kedar settlement named after the valley and located on a ridge above the one. The traditional scientific view of the Kidron Valley is that it is presented in the Bible as Valley of Jehoshaphat which is to be translated as “The valley where God will judge.”Thus I believe this stanza to be a direct reference to Biblical text.

Are the author’s allusions to the Bible being provoked by his search of God? Being “stretched out under the father’s blue eyebrows” as he believes himself to be, does he sincerely believe in God’s watching him? Or does he regards himself to be someone like god himself, watching the life and yet being able to hear the mourning of those who passed away, observing how “souls of the resurrected gather on rocky paths”? Trakl’s visions are so chaotic and so inconsistent, that somehow they seem to be a mix of real life recollections, dark dreams and mad fantasies of the author. Some of the dark images we observe might be fragments of his memories of war. Some of those are obviously unreal and fantasized by someone mentally unhealthy.

Just as the poem starts the reader is deluded by the smoothness of each line describing the plain beauties of nature. But as the poem goes, one starts to be carried along by the atmosphere of gloomy solitude and frightening dark fancies. It is weird how the poem seems to be written by two different people. The part of it is written by someone who loves to live and enjoys the observation of wonders of living, whose “round eyes follow the flight of birds” and who hears “tender sonata, joyous laughter” rather than “screams which escape the sleep”. Yet the part of the poem is written by someone observing death in each manifestation of life, by someone in fact already partially dead through the acceptance and readiness to die, someone who strives to lose “himself in November’s black destitution”. This striking contrast, this amazing paradox endows the poem with an absolutely exceptional nature. It actually made me startle when I read it for the first time.

“Helian” by Georg Trakl is something definitely worth reading. The rereading of the poem is provoked by the desire to understand its hidden meanings and to be able to read between the sometimes shocking lines, rather than by enjoying the poem itself. Trakl’s poem is a melody of the author’s soul, it is the music where personal emotions substitute the notes. It seems like if the author guides us somewhere he doesn’t know himself. Not a single image in the poem is certain; they all are lures solely, inviting the reader to go after. Trakl’s poem presents the reader with an enormous amount of visions to be interpreted and comprehended, complicating the task by the range of ambiguities and possible meanings the text provides. Most of the lines are truly bewildering. Yet the challenge thrown down by the author, Trakl’s emotional instability and unwillingness to perceive the life as it is, makes his poem somewhat an intriguing and tempting thing to read.

Works Cited

Trakl, Georg, and Alexander Stillmark. Poems and Prose: A Bilingual Edition. European Poetry Classics. Northwestern University Press. 2005.