In such soft and sweet-sounding saying the poet brings to radiance the luminous sights in which God conceals himself from the mad hunt. It is thus only "Whispered into the Afternoon" when, in a poem (50) by that title, the poet sings:
God's own colon dreams my brow,
Feels the gentle wings of madness.
The poet becomes poet only as he follows that "madman" who died away into the early dawn and who now from his apartness, by the music of his footfall, calls to the brother who follows him. Thus the friend's face looks into the face of the stranger. The radiance of the glancing moment moves the listener's saying. In the moving radiance that shines from the site of the poem surges the billow which starts the poetic vision on its way to language.
Of what sort, then, is the language of Trakl's poetic work? It speaks by answering to that journey upon which the stranger is leading on ahead. The path he has taken leads away from the old degenerate generation. It escorts him to go under in the earliness of the unborn generation that is kept in store. The language of the poetry whose site is in apartness answers to the home-coming of unborn mankind into the quiet beginning of its stiller nature.
The language that this poetry speaks stems from this transition Its path leads from the downfall of all that decays over to the descent into the twilit blue of the holy. The language that the work speaks stems from the passage across and through the ghostly night's nocturnal pond. This language sings the song of the home-coming in apartness, the home-coming which from the lateness of decomposition comes to rest in the earliness of the stiller, and still impending, beginning. In this language there speaks the journey whose shining causes the radiant, ringing music of the departed stranger's ghostly years to come forth. According to the words of the poem "Revelation and Descent" (186), the "Song of the Departed" sings of "the beauty of a homecoming generation."
Because the language of this poetry speaks from the journey