Elis is not a dead who decays and ceases to be in the lateness of a spent life. Elis is the dead whose being moves away into earliness. This stranger unfolds human nature forward into the beginning of what is yet to be borne. This unborn element in the nature of mortals, which is quieter and hence more stilling, is what the poet calls the unborn.
The stranger who has died away into earliness is the unborn one. The terms "something unborn" and "something strange" say the same. In the poem "Bright Spring" (21) there is this line:
And the unborn tends to its own peace.
It guards and watches over the stiller childhood for the coming awakening of mankind. Thus at rest, the early dead lives. The departed one is not dead in the sense of being spent. On the contrary. The departed looks forward into the blue of the ghostly night. The white eyelids that protect his vision gleam with the bridal adornment (133) that promises the gentler two-fold of humankind.
Silent the myrtle blooms over his dead white eyelids.
This line belongs in the same poem that says:
Something strange is the soul on the earth.
The two sentences stand close to each other. The "dead" is the departed, the stranger, the unborn.
But still the "path of the unborn" leads "past gloomy towns, past lonely summers" ("Song of the Hours," 95). His way leads past those things that will not receive him as a guest, past but already no longer through them. The departed one's journey is lonely, too, of course—but that comes from the loneliness of "the nighting pond, the starry sky." The madman crosses the pond not on a "black cloud" but in a golden boat. What about the gold? The poem "Corner by the Forest" (29) replies with the line:
Gentle madness also often sees the golden, the true.