And yet, in making these statements, however broad their implications, we have done no more than sum up the experience the poet has undergone with the word, instead of entering into the experience itself. How did the experience happen? We are guided toward the answer by that one little word which we have neglected so far in our discussion of the poem's final stanza:
So I renounced and sadly see:
Where word breaks off no thing may be.
"So I renounced ..." How? In the way the first six stanzas say it. What we have just noted concerning the last stanza may shed some light on the first six. They must speak for themselves, of course, from within the totality of the poem.
In these six stanzas there speaks the experience that the poet undergoes with language. Something comes to pass for him, strikes him, and transforms his relation to the word. It is thus necessary first to mention the relation to language in which the poet stood before the experience. It speaks in the first three stanzas. The last line of the third stanza trails oil in an ellipsis, and so marks off the first triad from the second. The fourth stanza then opens the second triad—rather abruptly, with the word "Once," taken here in its primary meaning: one time. The second triad tells what the poet experiences once and for all. To experience is to go along a way. The way leads through a landscape. The poet's land belongs within that landscape, as does the dwelling of the twilit norn, ancient goddess of fate. She dwells on the strand, the edge of the poetic land which is itself a boundary, a march. The twilit norn watches over her bourn, the well in whose depths she searches for the names she would bring forth from it. Word, language, belongs within the domain of this mysterious landscape in which poetic saying borders on the fateful source of speech. At first, and for long, it seems as though the poet needed only to bring the wonders that enthrall and the dreams that enrapture him to the wellspring of language, and there in unclouded confidence let the words come forth to him that fit all the wonderful and dreamlike things whose images have come to him. In a former time,