A Romance to Night (Romanze zur Nacht) is a perfect example of Trakl’s preoccupation with the horrors of modernity in rural settings and its effects on the individual’s physical and unconscious existence. It showcases Trakl’s most characteristic poetic technique of creating impressionistic collages of images and moods to mimic the fragmentation of the self in relation to external reality, with all its different facets and remnants of underlying truths.
In a disconnected series of simple images, the poem’s five stanzas describe several inhabitants of a town who seem disconnected from life, faith, and other individuals—for example, their own children, their neighbors, even their own lives—and how such disengagement leads inevitably to death and the collapse of meaning.
The first image is of a man walking through a deserted town at midnight and a young boy, perhaps his son, who wakes from a nightmare only to disappear slowly within the moon, for his father has left his side and cannot comfort him. We also receive images of a mad woman crying in front of barred windows, a murderer, the afflicted facing imminent death, a naked injured nun who seeks to recapture her faith, and finally “The dead,” who “paint silence on the walls / With their white hands” while “The one sleeping continues to whisper.”
The speaker has led us from the basic rupture between a son and his father to the ultimate rupture between a sleeping God and his creation. The reader, however, is never completely certain whether these impressions are based on a nightmare or represent waking reality, whether these visions are caused by the unconscious or by actual phenomena. But in modernity the boundaries have been blurred, and the poem can be seen as a metaphor for modern/industrialized society and the dreamlike existence some people seem to endure, witnessing life via fragmentary impressions.
Yet throughout the poem we still encounter beauty—lovers floating on a pond, a mother singing, and laughter—which lend hope that reality could only be a nightmare and we are merely waiting to wake up, or for God to awaken.
As with most of Trakl’s poems, it is extremely difficult to extract unambiguous meaning. But that is precisely what Trakl attempts to achieve: to portray the confrontation of an individual with a reality that has lost all apparent meaning and, as a result, has broken into mere impressions. Discovery of underlying truths, if these exist, depends solely on the reader’s sensibility or perception.
Bibliography
Trakl, Georg. “A Romance to Night.” In Autumn Sonata: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl, translated by Daniel Simko, 16–17. Mt. Kisco, N.Y.: Moyer Bell, 1989.
Categories: German Literature, Literature, World Literature
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