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Franz Werfel poems, quotations and biography on Franz Werfel poet page. Read all poems of Franz Werfel and infos about Franz Werfel.
Franz Viktor Werfel was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet whose career spanned World War I, the Interwar period, and World War II. He is primarily known as the author of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933, English tr. 1934, 2012), a novel based on events that took place during the Armenian Genocide of 1915, and The Song of Bernadette (1941), a novel about the life and visions of the French Catholic saint Bernadette Soubirous, which was made into a Hollywood film of the same name.
Biography
Born in Prague (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Werfel was the first of three children of a wealthy Jewish manufacturer of gloves and leather goods, Rudolf... more »
Franz Werfel Poems
I am not dead. Through slit and crack
The piercing ray only glanced me,
And in the glow of self-possession
I survive once more once again... more »
So many play with you,
You play with the many,
But you never see me
There in the background,... more »
I lay in the abyss, where twisting squeezing
The lowest form of life pushed itself peristaltically.... more »
Oh the slow fall of snow,
Its unending blanketing swirl!
Yet my mind's eye was giving shape
To what couldn't be kept hidden,... more »
Solang noch der Tatrawind leicht
slowakische Blumen bestreicht,
so lang wirken Mädchen sie ein
in trauliche Buntstickerei'n.... more »
You stroke the fur of the big fine dog.
Looking way down into its eyes, you speak,
Pointing out for me the enormous sorrow... more »
Death has taken me out for a swing.
At first I didn't drop from the quickstep
In his dance and clogged right along
Until he drove the tempo up... more »
Morning Hymn
I am not dead. Through slit and crack
The piercing ray only glanced me,
And in the glow of self-possession
I survive once more once again.
Through open shutters with waves surges
A blue that does not look blue to me.
Like a baby the air's nursed itself
Full of the sun's milk that melts down.
On the sea a steamer's whistle
Blows like a rutting stag.
From mountains flashes a secret army's
Visible-invisible birth.
I am not dead. I'd like to shout loud
On this day of who gets mercy,
That today each of my sails fills
Themselves once more ...
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