https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Trakl
http://www.outriderspoetryproject.com/uploads/4/6/1/4/4614234/trakls_collected_poems.pdf
https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Trakl.pdf
A WINTER EVENING
To begin to approach the essence of language, Heidegger considers poetry, which he regards as the purest form of speaking. The poem he chooses to discuss is “A Winter Evening,” by the lurid Austrian genius Georg Trakl (1887–1914), a master of morbid imagery who died of an overdose of cocaine. It might be translated as follows:
A Winter Evening
When the snow falls at the pane,
evening bells will long resound—
the table set for many guests
in a well-provided house. Some, along their wandering,
follow dark roads to the gate.
Cooling juices from the earth
will feed the golden tree of grace.
Silent drifter steps inside,
a painful threshold turned to stone.
There, in purest brightness shine,
on the table, bread and wine.
Trakl’s poem speaks of numerous alluring things: snow, bell, window, pain, threshold, falling, and resounding. By naming these entities, the poem is not just giving titles to things that are already found present-at-hand. Instead, it calls these things before us for the first time. This calling summons the objects into a true nearness, which (we already know) is also a kind of distance.
The presence of these things in the poem is something much deeper than the presence of physical bells or snowflakes lying before us. If I were to see a snow-covered bell in my front yard, I might simply represent it as a set of visible qualities. But if a bell is named in the poem, it is summoned before me in a presence that is simultaneously an absence. In the poem, the thing things:
the bell bells, to use a phrase that Heidegger himself never uses. In this way, the bell is gathered into the mirror-play of the fourfold of earth and sky, gods and mortals. The bell unites the fourfold even though the four poles remain distinct. This united fourfold is the world.
Harman, Graham. Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing (Ideas Explained) (pp. 144-145). Open Court. 2007, Kindle edition.
