Most of the poem occurs at night: a time that begins with an “Evening of the Words” and ends during the dark time of what Celan calls “Wordnight” (Line 8). The evening offers a lengthening “shadow” (Line 4) that only calls attention to the footprints you leave as you craft your writing. That shadow is soon replaced by the dark in which menacing dogs invade your body.

The third stanza begins when the “last moon leaps to your rescue” (Line 13). The word “last” is ambiguous, indicating either a phase in the moon’s cycle, or the fact that the writer is doomed to never see a moon like this again.  The moon is often symbolically connected with madness, and its “beam” (Line 18) carries the past, with its inescapable pain to you, who have already tasted this sadness. The moon is connected with dogs and water, two other symbols that appear in the poem.

The motif of water runs throughout “Abend der Worte”/ “Evening of the Words.” The first line introduces the idea that the addressee is using a “dowser” (Line 1), or a divination rod that is most commonly associated with searching for water. Water returns in the second stanza with the verb “floods” (Line 7). This can be read symbolically as the Abrahamic flood where Noah and his animals were saved while most of humanity died.