Lightness and heaviness

Meaning

The riddle says its thing weighs light and heavy, keeping both predicates in a deliberately puzzling description. The practical prose is more relational: prepared water is light, gentle, subtle and soft, while gold is heavy, firm and hard. The latter is an explicit contrast between participants, not a claim that one material has all these qualities in the same respect.

The English makes the two comparisons readable, while the historical riddle retains parentheses around schwer. Neither passage supplies numerical density or modern quantitative analysis. The words help explain why conjunction requires attention to unlike qualities and why a riddle’s compressed opposites should not be read as a straightforward identification test.