Age 26. After years of false starts — pharmacy training in Salzburg, restless army postings, a wrecked stint as a clerk in Vienna — Trakl finds his footing through Ludwig von Ficker, who prints him steadily in the Innsbruck journal Der Brenner and becomes his patron and friend. Kurt Wolff in Leipzig publishes Gedichte, the only collection to appear in Trakl's lifetime: the mature voice is now set — autumnal, color-saturated, liturgical, the decay of an inner Austria turned to image. He is drinking and using drugs heavily, and his bond with his sister Margarethe shadows the work.

poem Poems 1913

Age 27. The year breaks his world. In the spring his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein anonymously settles a large sum on him and other artists; Trakl, summoned to collect it, cannot bring himself to take the money. In August the assassination at Sarajevo has become a general war, and Trakl — a trained dispenser — goes to the front in Galicia as a medical lieutenant. After the slaughter at Grodek he is left to tend some ninety severely wounded men almost alone, with no means to help them; he breaks down, attempts to shoot himself, and is sent for psychiatric observation to the garrison hospital at Kraków. There, in the last weeks of his life, he writes Grodek — the war poem that names its own battlefield and answers it with 'the unborn grandchildren.'

poem Grodek 1914

The year Trakl does not live to see. On the night of 3–4 November 1914 he dies in the Kraków hospital of a cocaine overdose, aged twenty-seven, the cause never settled between accident and suicide. The second collection, Sebastian im Traum, had been readied for Kurt Wolff before his death; it appears in 1915, posthumous — the dream-cycle of Sebastian, the boy-saint and double, his fullest gathering of the late style. His sister Margarethe, the 'sister' of so many poems, shoots herself in 1917. The war that took him grinds on; Ficker and the Brenner circle keep the work alive.

poem Sebastian in Dream 1915