I carried to my country’s strand

And waited till the twilit norn

Had found the name within her bourn –

Then I could grasp it close and strong

It blooms and shines now the front along…

Once I returned from happy sail,

I had a prize so rich and frail,

She sought for long and tidings told:

“No like of this these depths enfold.”

And straight it vanished from my hand,

The treasure never graced my land…

So I renounced and sadly see:

Where word breaks off no thing may be.

After what we had noted earlier, we are tempted to concentrate on the poem’s last line: “Where word breaks off no thing may be.” For this line makes the word of language, makes language itself bring itself to language, and says something about the relation between word and thing. The content of the final line can be transformed into a statement, thus: “no thing is where the word breaks off.” Where something breaks off, a breach, a diminution has occurred. To diminish means to take away, to cause a lack. “Breaks off” means “is lacking.” No thing is where the word 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 the 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, 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 is lacking. “Thing” is here understood in the traditional broad sense, as meaning anything that in any way is. In this sense even a god is a thing. Only where the word for the thing has been found is the thing a thing. Only thus is it. Accordingly we must stress as follows: no thing is where the word, that is, the name is lacking. The word alone gives being to the thing. Yet how can a mere word accomplish this – to bring a thing into being? The true situation is obviously the reverse. Take the sputnik. This thing, if such it is, is obviously independent of that name which was later tacked on to it. But perhaps matters are different with such things as rockets, atom bombs, reactors and the like, different from what the poet names in the first stanza of the first triad:

Wonder or dream from distant land