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rebuild them, creating in the process those multiperspectival layers that constitute the gradual, hesitating, yet unrelenting mapping of Celan’s universe. The third stanza thus adds a further stratum to the concept of “Worthöhlen” by introducing physiological terminology, linking the wordcaves to the hollow organ that is the heart. These physiological topoi appear with great frequency in the late books and have been analyzed in some detail by James Lyon, 22 who points out the transfer of anatomical concepts and terminology, and, specifically in this poem, how the heart’s atria become the poem’s courtyards, the ventricles, chambers, and the valves, drop doors. The poem’s “you,” as behooves a programmatic text, is the poet exhorting himself to widen the possibilities of writing by adding attributes, by enriching the original wordcaves. The poem’s command now widens the field by including a further space, namely “wildnesses,” a term that recalls and links back up with the wild animal skins of the first stanza. Celan does not want a linear transformation of the word from one singular meaning to the next, but the constant presence of multiple layers of meaning accreting in the process of the poem’s composition. The appearance in the third stanza of these wildnesses also helps to keep alive the tension between a known, ordered, constructed world and the unknown and unexplored, which is indeed the Celanian Grenzgelände , that marginal borderland into which, through which, and from which language has to move for the poem to occur.
    But it is not just a question of simply adding and enlarging, of a mere constructivist activism: the poet also has to listen. The last stanza gives this command, specifying that it is the second tone that he will hear that is important. The poem itself foregrounds this: “tone” is the last word of the poem, constituting a whole line by itself, while simultaneously breaking the formal symmetry of the text which had so far been built on stanzas of two lines each. Given the earlier heart imagery, this listening to a double tone immediately evokes the systole/diastole movement. The systole corresponds to the contraction of the heart muscle when the blood is pumped through the heart and into the arteries, while the diastole represents the period between two contractions of the heart when the chambers widen and fill with blood. The triple repetition on the need to listen to the second tone thus insists that the sound produced by the diastole is what interests the poet.
    The imagery of the heart and of the circulation of the blood is, of course, a near-classical topos in poetry; Celan, however, transforms it in such a way that it becomes vital poetic imagery at the end of his century. In no way is it readable as a kind of postmodernist (in the aesthetical-architectural sense) citation or pastiche of classical poetic/decorative topoi. Numerous other poems take up, develop, and transform this and related imagery. Here, as one example, is a poem that appears a few pages after “Line the wordcaves” and that speaks of this second movement, though this time from an anatomical position slightly above, though still near, the heart:
    N AH, IM A ORTENBOGEN,
    im Hellblut:
    das Hellwort.
    Mutter Rahel
    weint nicht mehr.
    Rübergetragen
    alles Geweinte.
    Still, in den Kranzarterien,
    unumschnürt:
    Ziw, jenes Licht.
    N EAR, IN THE AORTIC ARCH,
    in the light-blood:
    the light-word.
    Mother Rachel
    weeps no more.
    Carried over:
    all the weepings.
    Quiet, in the coronary arteries,
    unconstricted:
    Ziv, that light.
    This poem centers around both historical and kabbalistic Judaic motifs ( Ziv is Hebrew for “light” and refers to the mystical light of the Shekinah, the female aspect of God, and also to various symbolic accretions, such as the figure of Sophia/Wisdom, and connects to that of Rachel, as maternal figure/personification of