Life & Wisdom Quote by Georg Trakl

A single image turns bodily color into a weather report from the soul. Trakl’s line stages a slow eclipse: the “blue of my eyes” isn’t just dimmed, it’s “extinguished,” as if sight itself were a flame snuffed out by night. Blue carries the usual freight of clarity, distance, even innocence, but here it reads as the last fragile proof of aliveness. When night arrives, it doesn’t merely surround the speaker; it enters him, erasing the outward-facing organ first. The gaze goes dark.

Then comes the twist of “red gold of my heart,” a compound that refuses purity. Red suggests blood, fever, violence; gold suggests value, radiance, something hoarded or sacred. Pressed together, they feel alchemical: the heart as both wound and treasure, a warmth that might be saving or terminal. The subtext is less romantic confession than a diagnosis of inner combustion. What remains when the eyes go out is not calm feeling but a metallic heat, an ember that gleams because everything else has blackened.

Trakl’s context makes the imagery land with extra force. Writing at the edge of World War I, steeped in Expressionist intensity and personal collapse, he treats color as moral atmosphere. Night in Trakl is rarely restful; it’s a pressure system of guilt, despair, and historical dread. The line’s intent is to compress that dread into anatomy: a world going dark, a self still burning, and no promise that the fire is survivable.