Yvan Goll’s Dream Grass (Traumkraut) celebrates the poet’s love for his wife, Claire. The emotional pitch of the collection, published a year after his death, reflects the trauma of the poet’s struggle with leukemia, which took his life in 1950. Images combine a surreal exuberance with expressionistic urgency.

“Dreamgrass grew / Nightshade lovepale” (“Das Traumkraut wuchs / Nachtfarben liebesfahl”) reads the title poem, with a hint of the mysticism sometimes found in Goll’s imagery. Goll was bilingual, writing in French and German but choosing French throughout most of his career; he returned to the German of his childhood as he approached death.

The poems of Dream Grass employ figures associated with the earliest Germanic poetry, for instance, the kenning “bonehouse” in the lines:
“Home to my ancestors / This tottering bonehouse / Built on sand” (“Behausung meiner Ahnen / Dies schwanke Knochenhaus / Auf Sand gebaut”).

To Goll, the world of his dying, in “The Sacred Body” (“Der heilige Leib”), is nonetheless a Godless universe, the universe of expressionistic anguish over modern alienation from sacred sources of meaning. Restless to live therefore in the celebration of his love, the poet finds catharsis in the passionate expression of his feelings.

His lover is both seductress and death mother in a plummeting of the mythic subconscious typical of Goll’s strongest imagery:
“In your eyes trout speed / And lightning bolts drown” (“In deinen Augen schnellen Forellen / Und erlöschen die Blitze”) (“To Liane, Strassburg, October 29, 1948”) (“An Liane, Strasbourg, 29 Oktober 1948”).

Even close to death, happiness lies in devotion to the one with whom one is most deeply connected. Perfection of soul lies in acts of love—for instance, in the building of a Rain Palace (“Der Regenpalast”) or a House of Embers (“Die Hütte aus Asche”), two of the most notable poems from the last pages of the collection.

The latter poem closes with an image of the beloved’s body, phoenixlike, transformed,
“Your golden body gleaming like the nightly sun” (“Dein goldener Leib erstrahlte als nächtliche Sonne”).

Dream Grass and Neila, a posthumous companion volume of lyrics, are well represented in the English Selected Poems. “Neila” is an anagram for “Liane,” the term by which Claire is most frequently identified in Goll’s poetry. The poems of Dream Grass resolve many of the tensions that inflect the dialogue in poems between Yvan and Claire Goll in Ten Thousand Dawns, a collaborative volume that hauntingly traces their first love, separation, and reconciliation.

Bibliography
Goll, Yvan. Die Lyric in Vier Bänden. Berlin: Argon, 1996.
———. Ten Thousand Dawns: Love Poems of Yvan and Claire Goll. Translated by Thomas Rain Crowe and Nan Watkins. Buffalo: White Pine, 2004.
———. Yvan Goll: Selected Poems. Translated by Robert Bly, George Hitchcock, Galway Kinnell, and Paul Zweig. San Francisco: Kayak, 1968.

Categories: British Literature, French Literature, Literature

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