much less alter it. The stanza goes on:
And softly touches you an ancient stone:
Again this "softly" is sounded, which always leads us softly to the essential relations. Again the "stone" appears which, if calculation were permitted here, could be counted in more than thirty places in Trakl's poetry. Pain conceals itself in the stone, the petrifying pain that delivers itself into the keeping of the impenetrable rock. in whose appearance there shines forth its ancient origin out of the silent glow of the tint dawn—the earliest dawn which, as the prior beginning, is coming toward everything that is becoming, and brings to it the advent, never to be: overtaken, of its essential being.
The old stones are pain itself, for pain looks earthily upon mortals. The colon after the word "stone" signifies that now the stone is speaking. Pain itself has the word. Silent since long ago, it now says to the wanderers who follow the stranger nothing less than its own power and endurance:
Truly! I shall forever be with you.
The wanderers who listen toward the leafy branches for the early dead, reply to these words of pain with the words of the next line:
O mouth! that trembles through the silvery willow.
The whole stanza here corresponds to the close of another poem's second stanza, addressed "To One Who Died Young" (129) :
And the silver face of his friend stayed behind in the garden,
Listening in the leaves or the ancient stones.
The stanza which begins
So painful good, so truthful is what lives:
also resolves the chord struck in the first line of the same perm's third section:
How sick seems all that is becoming!