The dimension of the night in Novalis and Trakl

Abstract

and Trakl’s poems “Decline”, “Canticle to the night XII”, and “Melancholy”, we seek to explore the different treatments that each of these authors give to the motif of the night. Our fundamental view is that whereas Novalis considers the night as a spiritual dimension which favors to man a suffering
but positive path towards a mystical union with the universe and discloses death as a crossing way into a superior life, Trakl’s verse would, otherwise, express the lament over the loss of that superior spiritual dimension, which will then give way to negative forces: an encompassing negativity that signals either emptiness or malevolence, as in a kind of triumph of evil.