why we listen now more attentively where such an experience is put into lofty and noble language. We listen to the poem that we read. Did we hear it? Barely. We have merely picked up the last line—and done so almost crudely—and have even ventured to rewrite it into an unpoetical statement: No thing is where the word is lacking. We could go further and propose this statement: something is only where the appropriate and therefore competent word names a thing as being, and so establishes the given being as a being. Does this mean, also, that there is being only where the appropriate word is speaking? Where does the word derive its appropriateness? The poet says nothing about it. But the content of the closing line does after all include the statement: The being of anything that is resides in the word. Therefore this statement holds true: Language is the house of Being. By this procedure, we would seem to have adduced from poetry the most handsome confirmation for a principle of thinking which we had stated at some time in the past—and in truth would have thrown everything into utter confusion. We would have reduced poetry to the servant's role as documentary proof for our thinking, and taken thinking too lightly; in fact we would already have forgotten the whole point: to undergo an experience with language.
Therefore, we now restore to integrity, in its original place in the poem's last stanza, the lines which we had first picked out and rewritten.
So I renounced and sadly see:
Where word breaks off no thing may be.
The poet, normally very sparing with his punctuation, has put a colon after "see." One would expect, then, something to follow which speaks in what the grammarians call direct discourse.
So I renounced and sadly see:
Where word breaks off no thing is.
But Stefan George does not say "is," he says "may be." In keeping