dissociates thinking from ratiocination or obtaining knowledge. Rather, because it is connected to poetry, which is metaphorical and which makes use of signs and symbols, it is concerned with the vital force of thought, which is more significant than a collection of rational ideas: "Thinking cuts furrows into the soil of Being" (70). Elsewhere Heidegger says that thinking "accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man . . . brings this relation to Being solely as something handed over to it from Being" (217). Language, in this formulation is "the house of Being," but thinking brings Being to language (264), or, alternatively, thinking "gathers language into simple saying" (265). If poetry is connected to thought and is needed by thought, the arrival of Being at the vicinity of language constitutes poetic (metaphorical) expression.
When thought is articulated as metaphor, it encounters Being, or enables what is referred to as a direct, almost existential, experience of the language. Something as loaded with implication as this confluence of th
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