The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Friedrich Hölderlin · a body of lyric poems written about 1799 to 1806 · the elegies in elegiac distichs, “Der Archipelagus” in hexameters, the hymns in free rhythms after Pindar, with “Hälfte des Lebens” from the Nachtgesänge · part finished poem, part draft · scored on the body as it is read in Beissner’s Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe, with Sattler’s Frankfurt edition as the record of the manuscripts, on Hölderlin’s German, read from knowledge; no text in hand, German quoted only where its words are certain, each quotation with a plain English rendering beneath, and Michael Hamburger’s and Richard Sieburth’s English for sense
Mode
Elegy and hymn as one argument: a philosophy of history and of the poet’s office, in public and prophetic speech
Mythos
The day of the gods, their departure, the night of Hesperia, the watcher in the night and the festival of return; rivers as demigods; bread and wine as the gifts of the departed god
Phase
Written across about seven years, from the great elegies of Homburg and Stuttgart through the finished hymns to the last drafts of the Homburger Folioheft, the journey to Bordeaux of 1802 in the middle
Presentation
Lyric poems, many unprinted in the poet’s lifetime: finished elegies and hymns, poems in several versions, and drafts in overwritten layers whose texts are editorial constructions
Register
Hymnic and elegiac throughout, from the quiet of a town at evening to the call for fire and the speechless cold of the walls, in a syntax of inversion and parataxis
Scale
The course of the sacred from Greece to the West, carried by rivers, a city at night, a homecoming, a shore abroad and one poet’s vocation
Governing Proposition
The gods of Greece once lived among men, and they have gone; what is left is a night in which their gifts, bread and wine, remain as signs, and a poet who keeps watch and names what remains until the festival at which they may return. The wager of the body is that this history of the sacred can be built into one myth and one measure, in elegy and hymn, so that the withdrawal of the highest from a modern age is not lamented only but known, and kept without false consolation.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Rings um ruhet die Stadt; still wird die erleuchtete Gasse”
(Round about, the city rests; the lit lane grows still). So “Brod und Wein” begins, in a town at evening, and in eighteen lines of elegiac distichs it rises from the lane and its lamps to the night itself, as a goddess. The poem has nine strophes in three triads: the night over the city; Greece remembered as the day of the gods; their departure and the poet’s vigil. It holds the plan of the whole body in small.
The body is the poetry Hölderlin wrote from about 1799 to 1806: the great elegies of Homburg and Stuttgart, “Brod und Wein” and “Heimkunft”; the hexameter poem “Der Archipelagus”; the finished hymns, “Der Rhein”, “Patmos” and “Friedensfeier”; “Wie wenn am Feiertage”, “Germanien”, “Der Einzige”, “Andenken”, “Der Ister” and “Mnemosyne”; and from the Nachtgesänge, “Hälfte des Lebens”. On one side it is bounded by the earlier odes and the novel Hyperion, on the other by the poems of the tower signed Scardanelli; neither is part of it, and the translations of Sophocles and Pindar are its context, not the work.
Hölderlin lived from 1770 to 1843. In 1806 he was taken to the Autenrieth clinic in Tübingen, and from 1807 he lived in the tower of the carpenter Zimmer. Little of this body was printed in his lifetime. “Hälfte des Lebens” appeared among the nine Nachtgesänge in Wilmans’ Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1805; the Gedichte of 1826, edited by Uhland and Schwab, left most of the late work out. The hymns were read as a body only from Norbert von Hellingrath’s edition, whose fourth volume printed them in 1916, the year Hellingrath was killed at Verdun. So the body is part finished poem and part draft, and was largely unread for about a century.
Movement II
In the seventh strophe of “Brod und Wein” the poet turns to his friend and says what the body knows: “Aber Freund! wir kommen zu spät. Zwar leben die Götter, / Aber über dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt”
(But, friend, we come too late; the gods live, but above our heads, in another world). The gods are not dead. They have withdrawn, and the age that lives after them is a night.
The same strophe asks the body’s question: “wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?”
(what are poets for in a destitute time?). The answer is given in the shape of the whole poem. In the night the poet keeps watch. The departed god has left gifts behind, bread and wine, and they remain as signs of a presence that is gone, kept until the festival at which it may return. The theology is Hölderlin’s own, and Christ stands in it as the last of the gods, the brother of Herakles and Dionysus.
Beneath the theology is a disclosure that can be stated and holds for a reader outside it: the modern condition as the withdrawal of the sacred, lived as a historical night that must be kept rather than denied. The poems made that diagnosis before Nietzsche named it. Its price is in the late hymns, where the one who keeps the watch is undone by it: in “Mnemosyne”, “Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos”
(A sign are we, without meaning).
Movement III
The myth of the body is carried by rivers. In “Der Rhein” the river is a demigod, born pure in the mountains: “Ein Rätsel ist Reinentsprungenes”
(A riddle is the purely sprung). It breaks through the Alps, and at the hymn’s middle strophe its youth turns into its course; the poem is calculated to that turn. In “Der Ister” the Danube seems to flow as if backward toward its source, and the hymn begins on a call: “Jetzt komme, Feuer!”
(Now come, fire!).
The myth is one story, and it is built, not borrowed: the day of the gods in Greece, their departure, the night of Hesperia, the watcher, the festival. Greece and the West, the foreign and one’s own, are its two poles, and in the late hymns the poet turns from the first toward the second: one’s own is learned only by passing through the foreign. “Friedensfeier” imagines the festival itself, with its Prince of the Festival; “Der Einzige” sets Christ among the Greek demigods and strains to hold him there.
The particulars stay particular. The journey to Bordeaux of 1802 lies behind “Andenken”, which opens on a wind, “Der Nordost wehet”
(The northeast wind is blowing), and remembers the shore abroad, the gardens, a courtyard fig tree and the women of that place. The Neckar, the kin addressed in “Heimkunft”, the vintage of “Stutgard” stand in the same hymnic order as the gods, and are not dissolved into it.
Movement IV
“Patmos” opens on a single sentence: “Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott. / Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch”
(Near is / and hard to grasp the god. / But where danger is, grows / the saving power also). Nearness comes first and the god last; the syntax holds back what it names, and the line breaks between the predicate and its subject. The free hymn joins clause to clause without stating their relation, and in that hard joining a relation to the divine is enacted that could not be stated straight.
This was the departure. Pindar and Klopstock had written free hymns and Schiller philosophical elegies, and the Greek revival was the work of the age; Hölderlin turned from the serene Greece of Weimar toward a German Pindaric form with its own syntax, inversion and parataxis, the caesura and the alternation of tones as its principles. In the elegies the distich is the motion of the thought, the long line rising toward the gods and the shorter falling back to the time of need. In “Hälfte des Lebens” the form is the meaning: two strophes of seven lines, the first of summer, swans dipping their heads in “heilignüchterne Wasser”
(holy-sober water), the second of winter, where the walls “stehn / Sprachlos und kalt”
(stand / speechless and cold), and nothing between them.
The departure cost everything it could. The hymns went largely unpublished and unread for a century, and the maker’s mind gave way before the work could be finished or received. “Wie wenn am Feiertage” breaks off into prose. “Der Einzige” and “Mnemosyne” survive in three versions each, “Patmos” in a fair copy and later reworkings, and in the Homburger Folioheft lines are written over lines. Several late hymns are untitled or variously titled in manuscript; their texts are editorial constructions, and the editions of Beissner and Sattler differ.
Movement V
“Andenken” ends on a line in plain words placed exactly: “Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter”
(But what remains, the poets found). It is the law of the whole body. The gods’ day has passed; what is left is to remember it, to keep the time of need without false consolation, and to name and found what remains. The same law governs the hexameter picture of the Aegean islands after the Persian wars in “Der Archipelagus” and the broken last strophes of “Mnemosyne”, where Achilles and Ajax are dead and the human being is a sign without meaning.
What the body founded was found late. Rilke wrote “An Hölderlin” in 1914 and the Duino Elegies in the mode these poems made; Trakl’s late poems were written in the light of Hellingrath’s edition. Celan’s “Tübingen, Jänner”, in Die Niemandsrose (1963), ends on Hölderlin’s word “Pallaksch”. Benjamin, Heidegger and Adorno made the hymns a field of argument, and Adorno’s “Parataxis” (1964) read their syntax against Heidegger; Szondi, de Man and Lacoue-Labarthe followed, and Sattler’s edition returned the poems to the manuscripts as process. No reading has closed them.
Set beside the nearest pages on this desk, the body stands above the Duino Elegies (8.9), its heir, on the myth built, the swerve and the depth of return, and below it only where the state of its own text is charged. Leopardi’s Canti (8.9), the contemporary lyric body, is plainer in disclosure and better kept, and stands a step lower. The Waste Land (9.1) is more finished and wider in its reach. Across the desks, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (9.0) sets the sacred for the same age that had lost the old ground of it, and Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (8.4) stands on the same German ground of a figure facing what exceeds it, a smaller thing.
Act III · The Twelve
The severe case is that a body which includes drafts cannot claim its parts are required, because some of them are not settled. “Der Einzige” survives in three versions, “Mnemosyne” in three, “Patmos” in a fair copy and later reworkings; “Wie wenn am Feiertage” breaks off into prose. Even a finished hymn digresses: the long narrative of Christ and the disciples in “Patmos” can read as a set piece. The finished poems are made under a law of measure few lyric bodies match: “Brod und Wein” moves in three triads from night over the city to the gods’ departure to the poet’s vigil, and “Der Rhein” turns at its middle strophe. But the unit is the drafts too, and the subtractive test cannot be passed by a text its author had not decided. That holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The hostile case is that the poems disclose a theology of their own, the gods gone and to return and Christ the last of them, which cannot hold for anyone outside it, and that what remains is a sacred mood. Beneath the theology is a meaning that can be stated and holds. The seventh strophe of “Brod und Wein” says it: “Aber Freund! wir kommen zu spät. Zwar leben die Götter, / Aber über dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt”
(But, friend, we come too late; the gods live, but above our heads, in another world). The modern age is the withdrawal of the sacred, a historical night to be kept rather than denied; one’s own is learned by passing through the foreign; the human being becomes a sign without meaning. Held at the threshold because the frame that carries it is still the theology.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The charge is monotony: the register is high from first to last, and in the late drafts syntax so wrenched that transport gives way to puzzle. But height and frequency are both present, and of several kinds. “Brod und Wein” rises in eighteen lines from a town at evening to the night as a goddess. “Patmos” opens on the sentence that is the body’s motto: “Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott. / Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch”
(Near is / and hard to grasp the god. / But where danger is, grows / the saving power also). “Der Ister” begins “Jetzt komme, Feuer!”
(Now come, fire!). “Hälfte des Lebens” turns in fourteen lines from swans in holy-sober water to walls that stand speechless and cold. The elevation is terrible and serene by turns.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The myth could be called a private syncretism, Greek and Christian gods forced into one calendar, allusion on a grand scale rather than construction. It is built, and it bears weight in every major poem. The body makes one story: the day of the gods in Greece, their departure, the night of Hesperia, the poet as the one who keeps watch, the festival at which they return. Its figures are made, not borrowed: the river as demigod, “Ein Rätsel ist Reinentsprungenes”
(A riddle is the purely sprung), in “Der Rhein”; the Ister flowing as if backward toward its source; bread and wine as the gifts left by the departed god; the Prince of the Festival in “Friedensfeier”. And the particulars stay particular: the Neckar, the shore of Bordeaux, a courtyard fig tree and the women of that place.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The means were known. Pindar and Klopstock had written the free hymn, Schiller the philosophical elegy, and the Greek revival was the common project of German letters; on this view the swerve is an intensification. The departure is from Weimar’s own Greece, the serene classicism of Goethe and Schiller, its sentence and its balance. Hölderlin turned the Pindaric hymn into a German form with its own syntax, the hard joining of inversion and parataxis; made the caesura and the alternation of tones structural principles; set Christ among the Greek demigods in “Der Einzige”; and turned at the last from Greece toward the native and the West. The stake was total: the hymns went largely unpublished and unread for a century, and the maker’s mind gave way before the work could be finished or received.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The charge is that drafts have no settled form, so their form can be the instrument of nothing, and that the triadic architecture is invisible to most who read it. Where the form is finished, change it and the knowledge goes. The elegiac distich, a long line answered by a shorter falling one, is the motion of “Brod und Wein”: the rise toward the gods, the fall back to the time of need. The free hymn defers its subject and joins clauses without stating their relation, and so enacts a relation to the divine that cannot be stated straight; the “Patmos” sentence puts nearness first and the god last. “Hälfte des Lebens” is two strophes of seven lines, summer and winter, with nothing between: the form is the halving. The drafts charge the axis, since form unfinished is form not yet achieved.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Much of the commentary is philosophy using the poems, and its size could be reputation. The evidence is a century of return from readings that disagree at the root, each drawing on particular lines. Hellingrath and the George circle found a prophetic Germany; Benjamin, writing on “Dichtermut” and “Blödigkeit” in 1914 to 1915, found the poetized; Heidegger’s lecture courses on “Germanien” and “Der Rhein” (1934 to 1935), on “Andenken” and on “Der Ister” (1942), and his “Wozu Dichter?”, found the history of being; Adorno’s “Parataxis” (1964) found the syntax answering Heidegger; Szondi, de Man and Lacoue-Labarthe found the theory of tones and the caesura; Sattler’s edition found the poems again as process in the manuscripts. The questions stay open, and the text still outruns its readings.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The field is German poetry from about 1800 and the century after, and the charge is that the body moved almost nothing in its own century. Intrinsic force is very high: the late hymn reorganised what the German lyric could do, and the modern German long poem rests on it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Rilke’s “An Hölderlin” (1914) and the Duino Elegies, and Trakl’s late poems, were written in the light of Hellingrath’s edition; the George circle took them up; Celan’s “Tübingen, Jänner” in Die Niemandsrose (1963) ends on Hölderlin’s word “Pallaksch”; and for Heidegger, Benjamin and Adorno the hymns were a field of argument. The reach was delayed by a century and in English runs mostly through translation; the discount for both holds the axis just under 9.0.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Survival of the text, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across about two hundred and twenty years. The charge is heavy and is taken. Presence: the body was largely unprinted and unread from 1806 to about 1913, and the Gedichte of 1826 left most of the late work out; it was read as a body only from Hellingrath’s edition of 1916. Form: the late hymns survive as drafts in layers, “Friedensfeier” was known only in drafts until a fair copy turned up in London in 1954, and what is read as “Mnemosyne” or “Der Ister” is an editor’s construction, on which the editions differ. Since 1916 presence is continuous and wide in German, in schools, editions, philosophy and settings, and narrower in other languages. The figure stands in the lower range for a long-neglected text, a step above its floor for that century of presence.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The case against is that the late syntax can harden into mannerism, the inversions forced and the drafts unrevised, and that Goethe commanded more registers of German verse. Judged on the German, the making of the finished poems is load-bearing and of the first order. The distichs of “Brod und Wein” and the hexameters of “Der Archipelagus” hold long periodic sentences across the line without loss of sound. The free rhythms of “Der Rhein” and “Patmos” are measured by ear and by an architecture of triads. “Andenken” moves from “Der Nordost wehet”
(The northeast wind is blowing) through the gardens of Bordeaux to its last line in plain words placed exactly. The drafts are charged where their unfinish bears, on The Inevitable, The Inner Law and The Imperishable, not here.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The hostile reader says the measured, luminous “Archipelagus” and the shattered juxtapositions of the Folioheft are too far apart for one law to govern both. Take the two most distant elements: the hexameter picture of the Aegean islands after the Persian wars, and the broken last strophes of “Mnemosyne”, with Achilles and Ajax dead and the human being a sign without meaning. One law governs both: the gods’ day has passed, what is left is to remember it and to keep the time of need without false consolation, and the poet’s task is to name and to found what remains. The range is very wide, elegy to hymn to fragment, Greece to Swabia to Bordeaux, and the law holds across it. It does not hold everywhere in the drafts, where some pieces stand without their place in the order.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on what a lyric body holds, and integrated in one structure. The sacred: the departed and returning gods, Christ, the festival. History: Greece, the Persian wars, the course of the West from Asia to Hesperia. The natural order: rivers, Alps, seasons, the night. The homeland and the kin: “Heimkunft”, addressed to the relatives, “Stutgard”, the vintage. Consciousness: the poet’s vocation and the halving of a life. The polity: the fatherland and the peace. They are held together by the one law, not listed. What holds the axis is what is slight in the late body: labour, love between persons and the common life of the city, all stronger in Hyperion, which lies outside the unit.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime and The Bottomless Well at 9.4, then The Archetypal Deep and The Made at 9.3. A height reached often and in several kinds, from a town at evening to the call for fire and the speechless walls; a century of return from readings that disagree at the root; a myth of the departed and returning gods built into one story and carried by rivers, bread and wine; and distichs, hexameters and free rhythms that hold long sentences across the line without loss.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.3, held by the drafts: a body that includes poems in three versions, a hymn that breaks off into prose and lines written over lines cannot pass the subtractive test as a whole, however exact its finished poems. Next above it, The Encompassed at 8.4, for what is slight in the late body: labour, love between persons and the common life of the city.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.3, The Living Form at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, The Swerve at 9.2, The Unconcealment at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Imperishable at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by four tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.3, against 7.5), and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the late hymns and elegies of Friedrich Hölderlin, the body of poems written from about 1799 to 1806, scored as that body is read: in Friedrich Beissner’s Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe (1943 to 1985), with D. E. Sattler’s Frankfurt edition (1975 to 2008) as the record of the manuscripts. Weighed most: “Brod und Wein”, “Heimkunft” and “Der Archipelagus”; “Der Rhein”, “Patmos” and “Friedensfeier”; “Wie wenn am Feiertage”, “Germanien”, “Der Einzige”, “Andenken”, “Der Ister” and “Mnemosyne”; and “Hälfte des Lebens”. Weighed less: “Stutgard”, “Der Gang aufs Land”, “Die Wanderung”, “Am Quell der Donau” and the smaller fragments of the Homburger Folioheft. Outside the unit: the earlier odes, Hyperion, the tower poems signed Scardanelli, the translations of Sophocles and Pindar, and “In lieblicher Bläue”, known only through Waiblinger’s novel. The drafts are part of the body as it survives, and are charged where they bear. Every axis is judged on Hölderlin’s German, which is not in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. German is quoted only where its words are certain, and beneath each quotation stands a plain English rendering in parentheses, made for this page and not taken from any published translation; other passages are paraphrased. The sound of the verse is judged on the poems known closely in the German, not on every line, and the late drafts are known in outline more than line by line. Translation · Michael Hamburger’s Poems and Fragments, in its final form, was used for sense, and Richard Sieburth’s Hymns and Fragments (1984) for the late drafts; neither is quoted, and nothing in them is charged or credited to the work. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the count of lines in “Brod und Wein” and “Der Archipelagus”, the strophes of “Heimkunft”, “Der Rhein” and “Patmos”, the printing of single hymns in almanacs after 1806, the dealings of Schiller and Goethe with the late work, the occasion of “Friedensfeier”, a confession in “Der Einzige”, and which poems later composers set.