Psalm by Georg Trakl

First published: 1912, as “Psalm”; collected in Die Dichtungen, 1919; English translation collected in Poems, 1973

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Psalm” ushered in what is known as Georg Trakl’s middle period, in which his poems were longer and his imagery more complex than had been the case in his previous work. The influence of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud is well documented. “Psalm” is written in long, flowing lines of free verse. In the original German, it contains the mellifluous language that ensured that Trakl would continue to be read, even if he was not entirely understood.

“Psalm” has four stanzas of nine lines each, and a single, isolated line at the end. Semantic associations between adjacent lines are not always readily apparent.

Although everything is described in the third person, the poem is highly autobiographical, as is all of Trakl’s work. The title seems to indicate a devotional poem, but “Psalm” is devotional only in that for Trakl, the act of writing was a means of atoning, at least in part, for his sins.

The first stanza is a good illustration of the extreme contrasts that characterize Trakl’s poetry. Four consecutive subjects are operated on by negative forces. They are extinguished, abandoned, burned, and misused. A madman dies and is replaced, exactly halfway through the stanza, by the sun god in an idyllic South Sea island paradise, an image qualified only by the closing observation that it is a paradise lost.

At first, the second stanza seems to consist of nine unrelated images. The sense of danger, though, is omnipresent, and it is clear that something horrible is happening in the last line. It is the female figures who are at risk. The nymphs have left their safe place, perhaps out of a false sense of security, for no sooner is the strange man buried than he is replaced by the son of Pan, whose strong body soaks up the heat of the midday sun. The following central line of the stanza portrays some very vulnerable little girls who, one suspects, are also of central significance.

The sister who is mentioned in the middle of the poem dominates the beginning of the third stanza. While she remains the constant focal point, there is now a fragmentation of the male personality. He appears in rapid succession as the someone of “someone’s evil dreams”; the “student, perhaps a double”; his “dead brother” (in two places); and the “young novice.” What happened at the end of the second stanza seems to have overwhelmed and destroyed the integrity of his personality.

Indeed, the remainder of the poem is anticlimactic, with images of ending, departure, decay, and desolation. The Church remains silent, as does the God portrayed in the last line, a deus absconditus (hidden god). Only the opening of his eyes indicates acknowledgment of the poet’s penance.

Forms and Devices

The most conspicuous structural device in “Psalm” is Trakl’s prominent use of anaphora. He employed this rhetorical device of repetition in only one other poem, “De Profundis.” By setting apart consecutive subjects with the formula “It is a . . .” Trakl has heightened the evocative power of each image and has lent the poem the air of an incantation. Images that might be questioned in a more relaxed format tend to be accepted when stated so absolutely. Trakl has applied the technique to both negative and positive images. It is a compelling way of presenting the realities of his mind, and it is because his inner world is portrayed so convincingly that he is considered the foremost poet of German expressionism.

Trakl’s poems are extraordinarily closely knit. He wrote them slowly, and his manuscripts show many revisions and alternative wordings. In the final version, everything is significant. Adjacent lines are associated, no matter how disparate their content may seem, and the more structurally important their position in the poem, the more interpretive weight may be placed on them. For example, the climax and turning point in “Psalm” occurs halfway through the poem, the key lines being the last line of stanza 2 and the first line of stanza 3: “A white steamer carries bloody scourges up the canal./ The strange sister appears again in someone’s bad dreams.” The first line suggests sadistic sex; the second line identifies the victim. Thus the peak of the poem “Psalm” captures the essence of Trakl’s confession, the driving force behind all his poetry: He had an incestuous relationship with his younger sister Grete. The central significance of the sister is formally attested by her exactly central position in the poem. By adding the single extra line at the end, Trakl made her line the median, with eighteen lines before it and after it.

Numerous cross-references extend throughout the poem like long threads holding it together. The white steamer that carries “bloody scourges” at noon has its counterpart in an empty boat that moves down the black canal in the evening. There is an aural accompaniment to this event. The rooms in stanza 2 are filled with chords and sonatas, but the music stops in stanza 3 with the final chords of a quartet. Likewise, the shadows who, in the third last line of stanza 2, embrace before a blind mirror reappear in the antepenultimate line of the poem as the shadows of the damned, descending to the sighing waters.

The self-judgment implicit in the imagery indicates that this psalm was written by a poet who entertained no hope of redemption.