There is a speaker in Goethe’s poem, someone who tells the reader about the mountains and the treetops and the birds. What interested me was the person the poem was talking to, the “you” who would soon be at peace. If I were a poet who went for a walk and was reminded of my mortality, the obvious thing would be to write “I.” “I heard the birds fall silent, it made me think of death…” But instead there was this “you.” Who was addressed? Was it Goethe talking to himself? To a lover? Some hill-walking poet friend? Eventually I stopped scratching at my pad, no longer thinking about “the turning away of lyric utterance from the world,” “the subject contemplating itself,” or any of the other important-sounding literary-critical phrases whose significance was just then escaping me. For the first time in however many readings of the poem, I understood it, or perhaps I should say I felt it, physically experienced its meaning as a small cold pebble in my stomach. The “you” was me. Me in particular. I too would fall into silence. I would die.