which names the given thing. What does "to name" signify? We might answer: to name means to furnish something with a name. And what is a name? A designation that provides something with a vocal and written sign, a cipher. And what is a sign? Is it a signal? Or a token? A marker? Or a hint? Or all of these and something else besides? We have become very slovenly and mechanical in our understanding and use of signs.
Is the name, is the word a sign? Everything depends on how we think of what the words "sign" and "name" say. Even in these slight pointers we now begin to sense the drift that we are getting into when the word is put into language as word, language as language. That the poem, too, has name in mind when it says word, is said in the second stanza:
And waited till the twilit norn
Had found the name within her bourn—
Meanwhile, both the finder of the name, the norn of our poem, and the place where the name is found, her bourn, make us hesitant to understand "name" in the sense of a mere designation. It could be that the name and the naming word are here intended rather in the sense we know from such expressions as "in the name of the King"" or "in the name of God." Gottfried Benn begins one of his poems: "In the name of him who bestows the hours." Here "in the name" says "at the call, by the command." The terms "name" and "word" in George's poem are thought differently and more deeply than as mere signs. But what am I saying? Is there thinking, too, going on in a poem? Quite so—in a poem of such rank thinking is going on, and indeed thinking without science, without philosophy. If that is true, then we may and in fact must, with all the self-restraint and circumspection that are called for, give more reflective thought to that closing line we first picked out from the poem "The Word."
Where word breaks off no thing may be.
We ventured the paraphrase: No thing is where the word