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ON THE WAY TO LANGUAGE

of apartness, it will always speak also of what it leaves behind in parting, and of that to which the departure submits. This language is essentially ambiguous, in its own fashion. We shall hear nothing of what the poem says so long as we bring to it only this or that dull sense of unambiguous meaning.

Twilight and night, descent and death, madness and wild game, pond and stone, bird's Hight and boat, stranger and brother, ghost and God, and also the words of color—blue and green, white and blade., red and silver, gold and dark—all say ever and again manifold things.

"Green" is decay and bloom, "white" pale and pure, "black" is enclosing in gloom and darkly sheltering, "red" fleshy purple and gentle rose. "Silver" is the pallor of death and the sparkle of the stars. "Gold" is the glow of truth as well as "grisly laughter of gold" (127). These examples of multiple meanings are so far only two-sided. But their ambiguousness, taken as a whole, becomes but one side of a greater issue, whose other side is determined by the poetry's innermost site.

The poetic work speaks out of an ambiguous ambiguousness. Yet this multiple ambiguousness of the poetic saying does not scatter in vague equivocations. The ambiguous tone of Trakl's poetry arises out of a gathering, that is, out of a unison which, meant for itself alone, always remains unsayable. The ambiguity of this poetic: saying is not lax imprecision, but rather the rigor of him who leaves what is as it is, who has entered into the "righteous vision" and now submits to it.

It is often hard for us to draw a clear line between the ambiguous saying characteristic of Trakl's poems—which in his work shows complete assurance—and the language of other poets whose equivocations stem from the vagueness of groping poetic uncertainty, because their language lacks authentic poetry and its site. The peerless rigor of Trakls essentially ambiguous language is in a higher sense so unequivocal that it remains infinitely superior even to all the technical precision of concepts that are merely scientifically univocal.

This same ambiguity of language that is determined by the site of Trakl's poetic work also inspires his frequent use of


Martin Heidegger (GA 12) Language in the Poem