Understanding a text of whatever kind requires identifying and knowing the game rules of the type or kind—the genre—of which it is an instance. The poem “Auf dem See” is one of the founding texts of the genre of so called Erlebnisdichtung, which is generally considered a poetic medium of reflection. Within this medium, language, emotion, and reflection interpenetrate each other. As such, any instance of Erlebnisdichtung relies on the experience of a psychologically constructed subject. In a literary and linguistic analysis of the first and original version of the text from 1775, we want to demonstrate, however, that by experimenting with the genre Goethe stages the lyrical speaker's paradoxical experience: an Erlebnis beyond reflection. The structural ambiguities of the first two verses constitute the starting point of our considerations, which we would like to tie together as an interdisciplinary dialogue between literary criticism and linguistics that would be productive for Goethe scholarship. The potential gains from our approach are twofold. on the one hand, linguistic analysis offers deep insights into the structure of language and thus opens up a more precise view of the structural fundaments of poetic effects. on the other hand, lyric poetry challenges linguistics in the sense that its methods and claims to generalization need to stand the test of the complexity of the text.