This encounter proves to be most instructive. In "Green," the next section of the poem and central among the seven colors of the spectrum, Hollander, beginning with a line from Goethe's
Color Theory,
expresses his understanding of the limits of his wandering, spectral text, which are the same limits as those of his temporal existence:
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 | | Man will nicht weiter, und man kann nicht weiter:
we
Desire nothing beyond this being of green
Nor can we reach it; and even that overworked
Part of us, the eye, wearied of the vivid, stuffed
With the beneficence of leaf, seeks not to raise
Itself toward the new giddiness of heaven, clear
Though that blue may beit would be to leave too much
Behind, the old heaviness of earthbut vaulting
The whole sequence of empurplings to alight in
Blackness, if anywhere else, in the condensed dust
Of being seen as green, turning to which darkness
Is no roving of vision, no dimming of trust. (18)
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Blue, the heavenly color of the inaccessible Law, is rejected in favor of the earthy fullness of vegetative green, the ripeness of mortality's aggadic text. (As Hollander notes at the outset of the poem, "Only at the moment of green is there time for a story.") The blackness of death, when there is no longer any "roving of vision," is "the condensed dust / Of being seen as green," the fulfillment of organic existence, not the pure transcendence of blue, the "giddiness of heaven." This is confirmed at the end of "Blue'': "Dawn comes when we distinguish blue fromwhite? / No, greenand, in agreement, eyeing the / Dying dark, our morning wariness nods" (33).
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This interplay of dawn and dusk, immanence and transcendence, beginning and end of the spectrum, is reworked yet again in "Violet," the last section of the poem. Here too nature is close at hand, reminding us of mortality: we stand "in the pale tan of/ The yet ungathered grain" (38) asking "in a / Mown oatfield what text will / The dallying night leave?" (39). The answer is provided by a number of tropes representing the menorah, now found through the completion of the poetic quest. In a beautiful expression of continued hope in continued exile, we see
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| | a last
Candle that may be made
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