The "spoke," too, is used transitively here, just as "keeps" was above, or as "bleeds" in "To the Boy Elis" (91), or "murmurs" in the last line of "On the Mönchsberg" (107).

God's speaking is the speaking which assigns to man a stiller nature, and so calls on him to give that response by which man rises from what is authentic ruin up into earliness. The "evening land" holds the rising of the dawn of the "one generation."

How shallow is our thinking if we regard the singer of the "Occidental Song" as the poet of decay. How incomplete and crude is our understanding if we insist on approaching Trakl's other poem. "Evening Land" (165), always only in terms of its final third section, while stubbornly ignoring the center piece of the triptych together with its preparation in the first section. In "Evening Land" the Elis figure appears once again, whereas "Helian" and "Sebastian in Dream" are no longer mentioned in the last poems. The stranger's footfalls resound. They resound in harmony with the "softly sounding spirit" of the ancient forest legend. The final section—where the "mighty cities/stone on stone raised up/in the plain!" are mentioned—is already overcome, absorbed into the middle section of this work. The cities already have their destiny. It is a destiny other than that which is spoken "beside the greening hill" where the "spring storm sings," the hill which has its "just measure" (128) and is also called the "evening hill" (143). It has been said that Trakl's work is "profoundly unhistorical." In this judgment, what is meant by history? If the word means no more than "chronicle," the rehearsal of past events, then Trakl is indeed unhistorical. His poetry has no need of historical "objects." Why not? Because his poetic work is historical in the highest sense. His poetry sings of the destiny which casts mankind in its still withheld nature—that is to say, saves mankind.

Trakl's work sings the song of the soul, "something strange on the earth," which is only just about to gain the earth by its wandering, the earth that is the stiller home of the homecoming generation.

Is this dreamy romanticism, at the fringe of the technically· economically oriented world of modern mass existence? Or—is