it leaves behind the form of man which has decayed. Accordingly, the second stanza from the end of "Seven-Song of Death" (134) says:

O man's decomposed form: joined of cold metals,
Night and terror of sunken forest,
And the animal's searing wildness:
Windless lull of the soul.

Man's decomposed form is abandoned to searing torture and pricking thorns. Blueness does not irradiate its wildness. The soul of this human form is not fanned by the wind of the holy. And so, it has no course. The wind itself, God's wind, thus remains solitary. A poem speaking of blue wild game—which, however, can as yet barely extricate themselves from the "thicket of thorns"—closes with the lines (93):

There always sings
Upon black wall: God's solitary wind.

"Always" means: as long as the year and its solar course remain in the gloom of winter and no one thinks of the path on which the stranger with "ringing footfalls" walks through the night. The night is itself only the sheltering veiling of the sun's course. "Walk," ienai, is the Indogermanic ier, the year.

Would that the blue wild game were to recall his paths,

The music of his ghostly years!

The year's ghostliness is defined by the ghostly twilight of the night.

O how earnest the hyacinthine face of the twilight.

(Wayfaring, 96)

The ghostly twilight is of so essential a nature that the poet gave to one of his poems the specific title "Ghostly Twilight" (131). In that poem, too, wild game is met, but this game is dark. Its wildness, moreover, is drawing toward total darkness, and inclining toward the silent blue. Meanwhile, the poet himself,