Celan’s 21-line free-verse poem is broken into three stanzas. The first stanza contains four lines; the second stanza contains eight lines; and the third stanza contains nine lines. The poem is written in the second-person, and examines how one interacts with language. It is heavily metaphoric; meaning the action of the poem is not literal.

In the first stanza, the reader is introduced to a time and activity. The poem takes place as evening turns into night, and is built around a quest that the poem’s main actor—“you”—is undertaking: the “evening of the words” (Line 1). The quest uses a specific kind of divination: a “dowser” (Line 1), or divining rod—a pseudo-scientific forked-stick device that ostensibly locates something valuable below ground. Dowsing is most commonly associated with the search for water, and water imagery pervades this poem. Furthermore, the dowsing is done “in stillness” (Line 1), which points to it being a metaphorical act that occurs within the mind.

The first stanza then includes a description of the physical act of dowsing, which the poem also metaphorizes. In the real world, a person who uses a dowser follows it, taking steps supposedly influenced by the rod’s signals. In the poem, the dowser you use causes you to take three steps.