187
LANGUAGE IN THE POEM

"died away" (136). It listens by singing of death. This is why the singing voice is "the birdvoice of the deathlike" (The Wanderer, 136). It corresponds to the stranger's death, his going under to the blue of night. But as he sings the death of the departed, he also sings the "green decay" of that generation from which his dark journey has "parted" him.

To sing means to praise and to guard the object of praise in song. The listening friend is one of the "praising shepherds" (136). Yet the friend's soul, which "likes to listen to the white magician's fairy tales," can give echo to the song of the departed only when that apartness rings out toward him who follows, when the music of apartness resounds, "when," as it says in "Evensong" (77), "dark music haunts the soul."

If all this comes to pass, the spirit of the early dead appears in the glow of earliness. The ghostly years of earliness are the true time of the stranger and his friend. In their glow the formerly black cloud turns golden. Now it is like that "golden boat" which, Elis' heart, rocks in the solitary sky.

The last stanza of "To One Who Died Young" (130) sings;


Golden cloud and time. In a lonely room
You often ask the dead to visit you,
And walk in trusted convene under elms by the green stream.


The friend's invitation to conversation reflects the haunting music of the stranger's steps. The friend's saying is the singing journey down by the stream, following down into the blue of the night that is animated by the spirit of the early dead. In such conversation the singing friend gazes upon the departed. By his gaze, in the converse look., he becomes brother to the stranger. Journeying with the stranger, the brother reaches the stiller abode in earliness. In the "Song of the Departed" (170), he can call out:


O to dwell in the animate blue of night.


Listening after the departed, the friend sings his song and


Martin Heidegger (GA 12) On the Way to Language