Notes to the poems
TO THE FATESFirst published in 1799. The poet's descent to Hades took place five-six years later, from which of course he never emerged.
HUMAN APPLAUSE
If you're going to hang with the gods, just say no to capitalism and the military.
TO THE SUN GOD
According to Greek legend, the Sun God Apollo stays during the dark hours with the Hyperboreans, a happy people resident at the end of the world who still honor him. The poem seems homoerotic, which would probably have pleased Apollo. That Hölderlin was not unclear on the concept is shown in his short poem below, which may or may not end with a bad pun:
SOCRATES AND ALCIBIADES"Why do you, holy Socrates, worship
this beautiful youth instead of higher things?
Why does your eye look lovingly upon him,
as if he were a god?"Who thinks deepest, loves what is most full of life.
A person who looks into the world knows
all about youth, and those who are wise
often choose what is beautiful in the end.
HYPERION'S SONG OF DESTINY
This poem appeared 1799 in the second volume of Hölderlin's novel, Hyperion. The third strophe is a good example of the visual shape of a poem matching its content: the stair-case effect demonstrates man's descent to the Unknown.
WHEN I WAS A BOY
This poem was written in 1797-98.
ONCE GODS WALKED...
This fragment from an elegy that was unfinished or lost combines two themes characteristic of Holderlin: the spiritualized, golden-age Utopia he associates with the Greek gods, and his hopelessly over-idealized projection of spiritual inspiration onto a female acquaintance, often named Diotima, derived apparently from Socrates' speech in Plato's Symposion. In this case the real-life inspiratrix is Susette Gontard.
THE COURSE OF LIFE
The fact that human progress is erratic is a determinant of human freedom. Which is not to say that our progress is erratic because we are free. The poem's imagery is taken from Heraclitus.
BREAD AND WINE
Hölderlin's great poem describing the situation of mankind after the departure of the gods was written in 1800-1801. The last lines of the seventh strophe are addressed to his friend, Wilhem Heinse, to whom the poem is dedicated.
HOMECOMING
Written after Hölderlin's return from Switzerland in the spring of 1801, it describes his return to family and friends in Swabia after descending from the mountains and crossing Lake Constance to Lindau. The Alpine landscapes are transformed into stunning venues of mythmaking.
AT THE MIDDLE OF LIFE
Written in 1803, not long before the onset of his insanity, and certainly his most famous poem. As in so many other of his poems, Hölderlin seems to foresee his own destruction.
THE NECKAR
Hölderlin's Europe-consciousness was essentially bi-polar in nature, swinging like a pendulum between Germany and Ancient Greece, with occasional forays into the Alps along the way to witness the titanic forces of "Nature" at work. Germany meant for him primarily Swabia, roughly the modern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, and of course the Neckar runs through it.
AS ON A HOLIDAY
This fragmentary yet beautifully written poem shows the poet as a heroic seer and perhaps a shamanic intermediary, a kind of spiritual lightning rod placed between the worlds of higher beings and humans, an obviously dangerous, yet exalted occupation.
CELEBRATION OF PEACE
Inspired by the Peace of Luneville, 1801. The Prince of the Festival is probably Christ, who is definitely referred to in the fourth strophe.
PATMOS
Patmos is the island where St. John lived and wrote the Apocalypse. The poem was written before February 1803 and dedicated to the Landgraf von Homburg, the ruler of a small German state near Frankfurt. The Landgraf was known as a Bible student, and is probably addressed personally in the second-last strophe.
This is the first version of the poem. Hölderlin worked on at least three further versions, and he never completed any, so that the Patmos poem in all versions is really a work in progress. In the present version, the imagery in the last four stanzas is often obscure.
In the third strophe: Tmolus, Taurus and Messogis are mountains, and Pactolus (Paktolos) is a river famous in legend for its gold ore.
The poem views the Christian gospel with Hellenic eyes. The "mystery of the wine" links the Last Supper with Dionysus, and the written Gospels were created as a human response to the impossibility of merging with godhead, of being a god oneself. Thus the Evangelists are viewed as sharing the same destiny as poets of antiquity: they are the intermediaries and seers left after the departure of the gods to recount their deeds in writings (scriptures) that endure.
REMEMBRANCE
May have been written in 1803, after Hölderlin's return from Bordeaux. He chooses the name Bellarmin for that of any close friend, as in the novel Hyperion. Like the heroes of Greece, sailors set forth upon the ocean, leaving poets behind to recount their adventures.
MNEMOSYNE
The poem demonstrates the semantic complexity often characteristic of Hölderlin's late writing, and his ability to develop thoughts in a succession of metaphors and images. This process of metaphorical thinking in poetic narrative surfaced many decades later in the writing of Rainer Maria Rilke.
The question Hölderlin presents here is whether and how it is possible to retain historical memory of past events, exemplified by the deaths of the Greek heroes. Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory. She slept with Zeus and gave birth to the nine Muses, whose activities are also by nature historicizing.
Hesiod writes of Mnemosyne:Them [the Muses] in Pieria did Mnemosyne, who reigns over the hills of Eleuther, bear of union with the father, the son of Kronos [Zeus], a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow. For nine nights did wise Zeus lie with her, entering her holy bed remote from the immortals. And when a year was passed and the seasons came round as the months waned, and many days were accomplished, she bare nine daughters, all of one mind, whose hearts are set upon song and their spirit free from care, a little way from the topmost peak of snowy Olympus. [Theogony 53-63.]
And again, he [Zeus] loved Mnemosyne with the beautiful hair: and of her the nine gold-crowned Muses were born. [Theogony 915-917.]
Pindar also writes about Mnemosyne:
If success crowns a man's venture, sweeter then than honey the libations he pours into the Mousai's [Muses'] stream. But lacking the songs to praise them, the mightiest feats of valour can but find a sorry grave a deep darkness. But for fine deeds a mirror to establish, one way alone we know if Mnamosyna's [Memory's] shining diadem will grant recompense for their labours, in the glory of music on the tongues of men. [Pindar Nemean 7 ant1.]In the poem's first strophe, the "fruits" are simply the deeds or events of history. Their memory disappears from us the same way that snakes crawl away into cracks in the floor, or between rocks. We need to remember things, but our memory is often faulty and can lead us astray like horses on crooked paths. Also there exists a tendency and a willingness to let things slide into oblivion. We should stay nestled in the present and not run away to the past or the future.
But what about the experiences of daily life, the common things we treasure, even after we make contact with something that transcends earthly life? It is like a cross planted in an alpine meadow, an act of generosity and a reminder, permitting wayfarers to speculate from a distance about what happened there.
The last strophe places us in the mythic environment of Greece. The heroes at Troy died in various ways, and we owe our knowledge of them to the fact that Zeus slept with Mnemosyne on Mt. Kithaeron — "loosening her hair" is a sexual metaphor in older literatures. Thus historical memory itself is ordained by the gods. When friends or heroes die, we need to pull ourselves together and conquer sorrow by creating a record of what happened.
OUT FOR A WALK, and LOOKING OUTWARD
During the long years of his insanity, Hölderlin was occasionally able to focus his attention long enough to write some presentable poetry, much of which resulted apparently from walks he was taken on to the countryside around Tübingen.In some of these poems, Nature reveals itself to him in the form of pictures. If you visit the Hölderlin Tower on the bank of the Neckar River in Tübingen today, you can stand in the small apartment where he was kept for over 35 years, and it is not hard to imagine how looking out through the windows across the surrounding countryside might have eventually seemed to him like looking at pictures hanging on the wall.
FOR ZIMMER
Ernst Zimmer, a cabinet-maker with whom Hölderlin stayed during the period of his mental estrangement from 1807-1843.