to say, after the stranger who is called to go under, they themselves enter strangeness, they themselves become strangers and solitary.
Only through it course on the night's tarry pond—which is the sky above the earth—does the soul experience the earth in its "cool sap" (120). The soul slips away into the evening blue of the ghostly year. It becomes the "autumnal soul" and as such the "blue soul."
The few stanzas and lines noted here point into the ghostly twilight, lead on to the stranger's path, and indicate the kind and the course of those who, recalling him, follow him to go under. At the time of "Summer's Decline," the strangeness in his wandering becomes autumnal and dark.
One of Trakl's poems which he entitled "Autumnal Soul" sings in the second stanza from the end (118):
Fish and game soon slide away.
Soon blue soul and long dark journey
Parted us from loved ones, others.
Evening changes image, sense.
The wanderers who follow the stranger soon find themselves parted "from loved ones" who to them are "others." The others—that is the cast of the decomposed form of man,
A human cast, cast in one mold and cast away into this cast, is called a kin, of a kind, a generation. The word refers to mankind as a whole as well as to kinship in the sense of race, tribe, family—all of these in turn cast in the duality of the sexes. The cast of man's "decomposed form" is what the poet calls the "decomposing" kind (129). It is the generation that has been removed from its kind of essential being, and this is why it is the "unsettled" kind (156).
What curse has struck this humankind? The curse of the decomposing kind is that the old human kinship has been struck apart by discord among sexes, tribes and races. Each strives to escape from that discord into the unleashed turmoil of the always isolated and sheer wildness of the wild game. Not duality as such, the discord is the curse. Out of the turmoil of