Poem of the Week – Umbra Vitae by Georg Heym
On a sunny afternoon in January 1912, two young men were seen skating on the frozen river Havel, a few miles from Berlin. One of the men had recently been hailed a serious talent in the Berlin-based expressionist movement; his name was Georg Heym. At only 24 years old, he had already received acclaim for his unsettling and original poems.
As Heym glided across the river, his friend suddenly fell through an acre of thin ice, and the panic-stricken poet leapt to his rescue. The accident was to prove fatal for both of them.
A nearby farmer watched the scene unfold and reached the riverbank in time to see Heym plunge in after his friend. This abrupt and tragic end to a brief but bountiful career deprived the expressionist movement of one of its most promising voices.
This week’s poem is entitled Umbra Vitae and is one of Georg Heym’s most popular pieces. It articulates a disquieting sense of impending doom and is actuated by a chilling pitch of angst and foreboding. Despite the darkness of the subject, the vivid and inventive imagery and phrases make it a thoroughly exhilarating read.
Umbra Vitae by Georg Heym (1912)
The people on the streets draw up and stare,
While overhead huge portents cross the sky;
Round fanglike towers threating comets flare,
Death-bearing, fiery-snouted where they fly.
On every roof astrologers abound,
Enormous tubes thrust heavenward; there are
Magicians springing up from underground,
Aslant in darkness, conjuring to a star.
Through night great hordes of suicides are hurled,
Men seeking on their way the selves they’ve lost;
Crook-backed they haunt all corners of the world,
And with their arms for brooms they sweep the dust.
They are as dust, keep but a little while;
And as they move their hair drops out. They run,
To hasten their slow dying. Then they fall,
And in the open fields lie prone,
But twitch a little still. Beasts of the field
Stand blindly round them, prod with horns
Their sprawling bodies till at last they yield,
Lie buried by the sagebrush, by the thorns.
But all the seas are stopped. Among the waves
The ships hang rotting, scattered, beyond hope.
No current through the water moves,
And all the courts of heaven are locked up.
Trees do not change, the seasons do not change.
Enclosed in dead finality each stands,
And over broken roads lets frigid range
Its palmless thousand-fingered hands.
The dying man sits up as if to stand,
Just one more word a moment since he cries,
All at once he’s gone. Can life so end?
And crushed to fragments are his glassy eyes.
The secret shadows thicken, darkness breaks;
Behind the speechless doors dreams watch and creep.
Burdened by light of dawn the man that wakes
Must rub from grayish eyelids leaden sleep.
Translated by Christopher Middleto