Sebastian in Dream
Georg Trakl


Mother bore this infant in the white moon,
In the nut-tree"s shade, in the ancient elder's,
Drunk with the poppy's juice, the thrush's lament;
And mute
With compassion a bearded face bowed down to that woman,

Quiet in the window's darkness; and ancestral heirlooms,
Old household goods,
Lay rotting there; love and autumnal reverie.

So dark was the day of the year, desolate childhood,
When softly the boy to cool waters, to silver fishes walked down,
Calm and countenance;
When stony he cast himself down where black horses raced,
In the grey of the night his star possessed him;

Or holding his mother's icy hand
He walked at nightfall across St. Peter's autumnal churchyard,
While a delicate corpse lay still in the bedroom's gloom
And he raised cold eyelids towards it.

But he was a little bird in leafless boughs,
All the churchbells long in dusking November,
His father's illness, when asleep he descended the dark of the
     turning stair.

                              *     *     *

Peace of the soul. A lonely winter evening.
The dark shapes of shepherds by the ancient pond;
Little child in the hut of straw; o how softly
Into black fever his face sank down.
Holy night.

Or holding his father's horny hand
In silence he walked up Calvary Hill
And in dusky rock recesses
The man's blue shape would pass through his legend,
Blood run purple from the wound beneath his heart.
O how softly the Cross rose up in the dark of his soul.

Love; when in black corners the snow was melting,
Gaily a little breeze was caught in the ancient elder,
In the walnut-tree's vault of shade;
And in silence his rosy angel appeared to that boy;

Gladness; when in cool rooms a sonata sounded at nightfall,
In the beams' dark brown
A blue butterfly crept from its silver chrysalis.

O the nearness of death. From the stony wall
A yellow head bowed down, silent that child,
Since in that month the moon decayed.

                              *     *     *

Rose-coloured Easter bells in the burial vault of the night,
And the silver voices of stars,
So that madness, dark and shuddering, ebbed from the sleeper's
     brow.

O how quiet to ramble along the blue river's bank,
To ponder forgotten things when in leafy boughs
The thrush's call brought strangeness into a word's decline.

Or holding an old man's bony hand
In the evening he walked to the crumbling city walls,
And that man in his black greatcoat carried a rosy child,
In the nut-tree's shade the spirit of evil appeared.

Groping his way over the green steps of summer. O how softly
In autumn's brown stillness the garden decayed,
Scent and sadness of the ancient elder,
When in Sebastian's shadow the angel's silver voice subsided.

Translated by Michael Hamburger