departed died away early. That is why he is "the tender corpse" (99, 139, etc.), shrouded in that childhood which preserves in greater stillness all the burning and searing of the wilderness. He who died early thus appears as the "dark shape of coolness." This shape also appear: in the poem entitled "On the Mönchsberg" (107):

The dark shape of coolness ever follows the wanderer

Over the footbridge of bone, and the boy's hyacinth voice,

Softly reciting the forest's forgotten legend ...

The "dark shape of coolness" does not follow behind the wanderer. It walks before him, because the boy's blue voice retrieves something forgotten and fore-tells it.

Who is this boy that died away early? Who is this boy to whom it is said

... softly your forehead bleeds

Ancient legends

And dark augury of the flight of birds? (91)

Who is he who has crossed over the bridge of bone? The poet calls to him with the words:

O Elis, how long you have been dead.

Elis is the stranger called to go under. He is in no way a figure by which Trakl means to represent himself. Elis is as essentially different from the poet Trakl as Zarathustra's figure is from the thinker Nietzsche. But both figures are alike in that their nature and their journey begins with a descent. Elis goes down into the primeval earliness that is older than the aged, decomposing kind of man, older because it is more mindful, more mindful because it is more still, more still because it has itself a greater power to still.

The boyishness in the figure of the boy Elis does not consist in the opposite of girlishness. His boyishness is the appearance of his stiller childhood. That childhood shelters and stores within it the gentle two-fold of sex, the youth and the "golden figure of the maiden" (172).