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.