26.Celan’s poem opens with images o

26.Celan’s poem opens with images of hope – two flowers that are used for healing, arnica and eyebright. He drinks from a well, another symbol of regeneration. It is only as the poet writes in the guestbook that his ambivalence makes itself present – whose name did it record/before mine? – what other guests have attended to Heidegger? He hopes for a “thinker’s word/to come,/in the heart”. The pair walk across a forest sward – unlevelled unlike, as a number of critics have pointed out, the levelled ground of Jewish mass graves.