Grave Judith Poem Analysis

The emphasis on the "grave" in the poem directs the reader's attention to the acts of violence and brutality. All of these images reaffirm a poetic insight communicated through directed ambiguity created by the poet; an ambiguity that must then be resolved by the individual reader’s interpretive visualization of the poem. The atmosphere of malevolence is further expounded through the introduction of an unknown Nazi guard from "Deutschland," who romanticizes the desire to meet “Margarete.” She is the love of Faust and serves as an idealized innocent blond-haired female figure; and she is ironically contrasted with “Shulamith,” another woman introduced in the poem who symbolizes a Jewish feminine figure known from the Song of Songs in the Old Testament. Shulamith is also a symbol of Israel, seen as God’s wife in the Hebrew Scriptures. Many Jewish mystics see the Song of Songs as God’s love-song for His bride, Israel. Ironically, the Nazi guard plays two …show more content…
These images appear as mournful conceits, funereal imagination, doleful dreams. The "conceits" and the "imagination" direct the attention toward the poet's creative activity. The “play more sweetly death” reminds us of Bach’s symphony “Come Sweet Death,” where “death” “as the object of sweet playing pivots directly on “death” as the subject of mastery” (Felstiner 39). The emanation of death as a product from Deutschland is probably the most difficult for the reader to visualize, especially Arabic readers. These images create a certain atmosphere malevolence that relate them back to the first theme of the poem, where the poet is forced to drink the bitter “black milk.” Celan employs all of these images to emphasize the horrendous state of evil, anguish, and terror that he had to live through before he was liberated from a forced labor camp in late