Poetic language, in [Celan's] view, has become a rescuing device, a mode of speech barely audible and yet of sufficient intensity to wrench the poem back from the verge of its self-abolition in the realm of silence…. [When] Celan speaks of the poem's tendency towards silence he is speaking not in terms of an aesthetic absorbed from outside … but in terms of the more immediately commanding dictates of personal emotion.

For silence, in Celan's work, is felt not only as a negative situation, but also as a force…. [The premise of the early poem 'Chanson einer Dame im Schatten' is that the] man who speaks too soon is ruined and a mysterious silence triumphs: and hence, despite the poem's obvious sexual implications, it is impossible not to read it as being to some extent also a metaphor of the poet's situation—that the spoken word must ever yield...