because it is that which is always already revealed for human beings and is the nearest of all that is near. This supreme finding is therefore not a free inventing [Erfinden] in the sense of a willful imagining. This finding stands within a singular necessity. What essentially prevails as that which is to be poetized cannot be a being. What is to be poetized, essentially prevailing in the poetic work, is never something that is, but rather being. If in the chorus of the poetic work of tragedy, and especially in the chorus of this Sophoclean tragedy, it is the poet who properly speaks, then it is here that he says poetically that which is truly to be poetized: being. And the poet says it in naming the hearth in the closing words of the choral song that sustain everything. The hearth is the word for being, it is that appearing that is named in Antigone's word and that determines everything, even beyond the gods. Being is not some thing that is actual, but that which determines what is actual in its potential for being, and determines especially the potential for human beings to be; that potentiality for being in which the being of humans is fulfilled: being unhomely in becoming homely. Such is our belonging to being itself. What essentially prevails as being, and is never a being or something actual and therefore always appears to be nothing, can be said only in poetizing or thought in thinking. Let us give thought to what is named in the choral ode as that which the unhomely one who merely ventures around amid beings without any way out is unable to master:
τὸ μέλλον· Ἅιδα μόνον
Ἅιδα μόνον φεῦξιν οὐκ ἐπάξεται·
dem einzigen Andrang vermag er, dem Tod.
durch keine Flucht je zu wehren.
the singular onslaught of death he can
by no flight ever prevent.
It is this One to which Antigone already belongs. and which she knows to belong to being. For this reason, because she is thus becoming homely within being, she is the most unhomely one amid beings. Such being and potential for being homely is here said in poetizing. The human potential for being, in its relation to being, is poetic. The unhomely being homely of human beings upon the earth is "poetic."
Let us bring together the words from the beginning and the closing words of Sophocles' choral ode:
πολλὰ τὰ δεινά κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει·
Vielfältig das Unheimliche, nichts doch
über den Menschen hinaus Unheimlicheres ragend sich regt.