Evening is the decline of the days of the ghostly year. Evening consummates a change. Evening which inclines to the ghostly gives us other things to contemplate and to ponder.

The luminous appearances of whose aspects (images) the poets have their say appear differently in the light of this evening. The essential reality that thinkers try to grasp in thought speaks other words with the onset of this evening. From another sense and another image, evening transmutes all saying of poetry and thinking. and their dialogue. But evening can do so only because it, too, changes. Day goes through evening into a decline that is not an end, but simply an inclination to make ready that descent by which the stranger goes under into the beginning of his wandering. Evening changes its own image and its own sense. This change conceals a departure from the traditional order of days and seasons.

But whither does evening accompany the blue soul's dark wandering? To the place where everything has come together in another way, where everything is sheltered and preserved for an other ascent.

The stanzas and lines quoted so far bring us to a gathering, that is to say, they bring us to a site. Of what kind is this site? What shall we name it? Surely the name must fit the poet's language. All that Georg Trakl's poetry says remains gathered and focused on the wandering stranger. He is, and is called, "he who is apart" (170). Through him and around him Trakl's poetic saying is tuned to one unique song. And since this poet's poems are gathered into the song of him who is apart, we shall call the site of Trakl's poetic work apartness.

And now, by a second step, our discussion must try to gain a clearer view of this site which so far has only been pointed out.

II

Is it possible to bring apartness itself before our mind's eye, to contemplate it as the poem's site? If at all, it can be done only if we now follow the stranger's path with dearer eyes, and ask: Who is the departed one? What is the landscape of his paths?