The phrase “in der That,” uses an archaic spelling “in der Tat” (“indeed,” “in fact”), adds a mock-formal, slightly antiquated tone that underscores the poem’s playful and ceremonious character. Hegel uses the phrase over seventy times in his Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) to show the way something turns into its other, the Sichanderswerden, or “self-othering“, how the presumably stable position of this or that concept is undermined.  Stomps’ humanity and possible self-assurance at the mature age of seventy seems suddenly undermined when Vau can become Pfau. Not the most common birthday card. 

The line “schlägt, mps,” brings together sound, motion, and naming: in English, “stomp” is a verb meaning to tread or walk heavily or noisily, hence a bit like the schlägt of the visor of the clock. The verb schlägt (“strikes” or “beats”) can suggest the striking of a clock or chimes. The poem thus nods back to a long poetic tradition of the link between a strike of a clock and a reminder of human fragility or mortality, most famous the English poet John Donne’s “for whom the bell tolls/it tolls for thee,”[i] while simultaneously evoking the turning of a wheel (the wheel of time, the Sieben-rad, in the next line). The strike can also refer to the dramatic moment when a peacock “strikes” by suddenly displaying its fan. The fragment mps continues the dispersion of the dedicatee’s name, Stomps, as if the poem would enact a subjective destitution, dissolving Stomp into material scraps, scattered sounds and letters (ST, the Vau for Victor, mps for Stomps, O for Victor Otto, the four o’s in the final stanza, for the four o’s in the name in etc.).

The phrase “ein Sieben-Rad” literally means “a seven-wheel” or “seven-spoked wheel.” The prefix “Sieben-” is completed by the sequence of “o”s that follows in the final stanza, together forming “70” thereby marking the dedicatee’s seventieth birthday. At the same time, the image of the wheel resonates with the peacock motif, since the circular spread of a wheel mirrors the fanned tail of the bird, each spoke corresponding to the shafts of its feathers.

The sequence “o / oo / ooo / O” introduces the poem’s final and most dazzling visual play, where language turns into graphic encounter on the page, where the poem is no longer simply describing a peacock’s tail, but rather visually enacting it. Each “o” becomes a visual sign, the “peacock eyes” (Pfauenaugen) on the fanning tail. Their gradual multiplication—o, oo, ooo—mimics the peacock’s act of fanning its tail. 

In my reading, the eyes on the peacock’s train are not so much the imaginary “eye, the misrecognition when a human looks another human in the eye, but rather what Lacan calls the gaze. The gaze is, counterintuitively, situated by Lacan, on the side of the object, not the side of the subject. In this case, the poem becomes such an object in the final stanza. To refer to my own experience as I was reading, I was caught by surprise when I discovered that the o’s in the final stanza actually displayed the peacock’s tail. I first thought, as I was reading the poem, that the final stanza was a meaningless repetition, a kind of stuttering, or an ecstatic culmination. But in any case, a collection of o’s to be read. Then I saw that o’s were actually the peacock’s fanning tail and the ‘eyes of the fan. The act of reading then turns, at least for me, into an surprising experience, as though I would have been “looked at” the entire time, but from a place, where I “do not see myself see”, to paraphrase Lacan (first we do not see the graph, but just meaningless letters). 

This involves a change of perspective. The gaze always introduces a rupture in the subject’s vision. In other words, the poem as text, and the poem as graph, or image, do not add up, do not smoothly align. One cannot gradually move from one to the other. There is a slip, a cut, when one moves from one perspective, from the poem as text, to the other, the poem as image on the page. There is a split of perspective, but within the same poem. Or perhaps one should not say split of a perspective, but rather perspective emerges as a split. This happens, in my reading, when the poem moves from text to graph, there is a certain leap. 

If we go back to peacock-motif this adds more to the poem. The play with form and ornament draws on the traditional association of the peacock with vanity and beauty, as the poem itself indulges in a kind of showing off through its enigmatic signifiers and striking, almost vertiginous visual arrangement. Furthermore, in the biblical tradition, the number seventy often marks the span of a mortal life, most famously in Psalm 90:10: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten.” Read in this light, the poem’s reference to seventy, and the introduction of the gaze, is then not merely a birthday greeting but also a reminder of the reader’s and Stomps’ finitude. The poem, however, also reverses the long tradition of associations of the peacock with immortality. There is a "self-othering" of the peacock as a symbol. In antiquity and early Christianity, the peacock was often a symbol of immortality. The poem plays on this, but also dialectically undermines it: the poem’s gaze is like a reminder of mortality, “thou art that”, you do not see the way you are inscribed in the picture before you. 

The peacock is, of course, also associated with vanity. But here the vanity, I would argue, is turned around as something more “positive”. The point is not simply “life is vain”. But rather something like: because life is finite, all the more reason to “show off”, to “turn into a peacock” (as the poem does eloquently). The display of feathers becomes rather something like an insistence through or with exposure and finitude. 

It is very interesting to look more at the o’s in the final stanza and connect them with Celan's reflections on what poetry should be. It’s another dialectical turn, a Sichanderswerden of a long poetical tradition. The O in poetry is most often thought of as the enabling apostrophe, calling the Muse: “O, Muse tell me…”. It is the call for the Muse to inspire the poet’s song. It is the enabler of poetic breath.[ii] But instead of the living voice, the o is here rather silent, as if a suspension of the living voice had been suspended, or silenced (this in fact would make it closer to the Lacanian understanding of voice, like the psychoanalyst's silence, but I leave that be...). The poem therefore stages very concretely a way to understand Celan’s difficult poetics of a breath-turn (Atemwende). It is not a call for a different kind of breath, we might say, not another kind of life, but rather a rupture in breath, a turning away from breath. This can also be read as the transition from text to gaze: Lacan phrases it thus: “you never look at me from the place from which I see you”.[iii] The same with the poem: The o’s in the poem are like stains at first, but they show as they become image rather than simply text, the reader can never look at the poem, from the same place where he is seen by it.