which it follows? It is the spirit which in the poem "To One Who Died Young" (129) is specifically called "the spirit of an early dead." It is the spirit which abandons that "beggar" of the "Spiritual Song" (16) to his apartness, so that he, as the poem "In the Village" (75) says, remains "the poor one," "who died lonesome in spirit."

Apartness is active as pure spirit. It is the radiance of the blue reposing in the spirit's depth and flaming in greater stillness, the blue that kindles a stiller childhood into the gold of the first beginning. This is the earliness toward which Elis' golden countenance is turned. In its countering glance, it keep alive the nocturnal flame of the spirit of apartness.

Apartness, then, is neither merely the state of him who died young, nor the indeterminate realm of his abode. In the way in which it flames, apartness itself is the spirit and thus the gathering power. That power carries mortal nature back to its stiller childhood, and shelters that childhood as the kind, not yet borne to term, whose stamp marks future generations. The gathering power of apartness holds the unborn generation beyond all that is spent, and saves it for a coming rebirth of mankind out of earliness. The gathering power, spirit of gentleness, stills also the spirit of evil. That spirit's revolt rises to its utmost malice when it breaks out even from the discord of the sexes, and invades the realm of brother and sister.

But in the stiller onefold simplicity of childhood is hidden also the kindred twofoldness of mankind. In apartness, the spirit of evil is neither destroyed and denied, nor set free and affirmed. Evil is transformed. To endure such a "transformation," the soul must turn to the greatness of its nature. The spirit of apartness determines how great this greatness is. Apartness is the gathering through which human nature is sheltered once again in its stiller childhood, and that childhood in turn is sheltered in the earliness of another beginning. As a gathering, apartness is in the nature of a site.

But in what way, now, is apartness the site of a poetic work, specifically that poetic statement to which Trakl's poetry gives