Hölderlin’s Mnemosyne: A Reading

Abstract

I offer a close reading of Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne“ (“Reif sind, in Feuer getaucht…”) that situates it in terms of its links to Greek tragedy and Homer. The essay explores Hölderlin’s focus on Achilles and the death of the Greek heroes Patroklos and Ajax against the notion of “poetic transport.” I also look at Hölderlin’s 2nd Böhlendorff Letter that traffics in the relation between antiquity and modernity. The essay also offers a reading of the second stanza of “Mnemosyne” in terms of Rousseau’s essay on “The Reveries of the Solitary Walker” and its appeal to the poet. As Hölderlin pursues the tense relation between memory and death, he poses questions about ethical responsibility that challenge the human being to find a path between wallowing in too excessive grief that ends in unbounded subjectivity and affirming the sense of the other that extends beyond our own self-preoccupation.

1. Poetic Transport

In his very first lecture course on Hölderlin’s hymn “Germania” from WS 1934–1935, Martin Heidegger pursues the axial status of a poetic attunement that he designates as “fundamental.” What Heidegger finds decisive in Hölderlin’s hymnic language is what he names a “heilige Trauer”/”holy mourning”/that “stellt sich den entflohenen Göt- tern, bewahrt ihre Flucht und erharrt die Kommenden”/”turns towards the gods that have fled, preserves their flight, and awaits the gods to come” (Heidegger 1989, pp. 181, 223). What Heidegger defines as “essential” here is the phenomenon of poetic transport that, he argues, dislodges us from our native habitat and thrusts us out of our customary environs, exposing us to the profound distress that accompanies such mourning. In a powerful sense, Heidegger writes, “die Grundstimmung rückt uns aus und in der Einrückung zugleich ein in die gewachsenen Bezüge zur Erde und Heimat. Die Grundstimmung ist immer entrückend und einrückend zumal”/” the fundamental attunement thrusts us out and in transporting us at the same time, thrusts us into the relations that have evolved toward the Earth and the homeland. The fundamental atttunement always transports us out and into at the same time.” Throughout these lectures, Heidegger returns to this theme of “einer wesenhaften Entrückung in das göttliche und menschliche Seyn selbst…der in der Grundstimmung der heilig-trauernden, aber bereiten Bedrängnis sich auftut und offengehalten wird”/”an essential transport out into divine and human being itself… that which opens up and is held open in the attunement of a holy mourning, yet in readied distress.” It is in the human being’s fundamental attunement to holy mourning, that is, to the fleeing and remaining absent of the gods, that the arrival/Einkehr of the gods can happen at all. Poetry, both conceived and received in this comportment, transports the poet and those able to read his work both out towards the gods and into the earth at the same time. As Will McNeill reminds us, this kind of poetic transport happens as a kind of “displacement” from our native haunts into an excentric sphere.1 Here time tears us into both past and future, displacing us in the process, even as it is solely through the labors of the poet that something endures through such displacement. In this way, poetry founds the world in words.

Despite all of the missteps attached to Heidegger’s way of reading Hölderlin, he does identify one critical feature of Hölderlin’s poetic transport of the human being, torn by time, “der Entrückung zum Gewesenem”/”transported to that which has been”/and ahead towards that which is coming” (Heidegger 1989, p. 170). But this poetic transport is, at the same time, marked by a break that Hölderlin, in his translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, named caesura. The caesura functions as a “break” or rupture in the rhythmic flow of language, interrupting the “reissenden Wechsel der Vorstellungen”/”rending or tearing change of representations” that 48 happens in tragic language (MA II, p. 310). As his example Hölderlin chooses the scene in Oedipus where Teiresias appears and interrupts the exchange between Oedipus and the Chorus about the murder(er) of King Laius. In his arrogant arrogation of a god’s power, Oedipus imagines himself to be at one with Apollo, even as Teiresias shows all too clearly that he “misses the mark” (v. 325). The Greek term here—pros kairon—refers to time and it is precisely this question about time, tragedy, and caesura that will mark the late work of Hölderlin. For Hölderlin, tragedy has as its central theme the pairing/uniting of the divine and the human, a coupling that is immediately followed by separation. Here, as Hölderlin puts it,

Die Darstellung des Tragischen beruht vorzüglich darauf, dass das Ungeheure, wie der Gott und Mensch sich paart, und gränzlos die Naturmacht und des Menschen Innerstes im Zorn Eins wird, dadurch sich begreift, dass das gränzenlose Einswerden durch gränzenloses Scheiden sich reinigt.

The representation of the tragic depends primarily on this: that the monstrousness of god and human uniting, and the power of nature becoming boundlessly one with the human’s innermost being in rage, thereby comprehends itself, that boundless union purifies itself through boundless separation. (MA II, p. 315/E & L, p. 323 trans. modified/tm)2.

Hölderlin understood that the caesura that happens in tragedy bespeaks a situation whereby the human being is transported or displaced by the temporal moment that caesura brings with it. Here Oedipus, driven on by his boundless need to know (and thus control), oversteps the limits assigned to mortals by the gods. In transgressing the sphere of appropriate knowledge, Oedipus is thus transported beyond such limits into the realm of monstrous excess and blindness that belongs to madness, destruction, and death. In both his “furious presentiment” (zornige Ahnung) and “furious excess” (zornigen Unmaas) that revels in destruction and only follows the tearing rapacity of time (der reissenden Zeit),” Oedipus stands as that tragic figure torn apart by his failure to properly grasp the limits and possibilities of language (MA II, p. 311–12/E&L, p. 320). In this way, Oedipus Tyrannus appears to Hölderlin as a manifestation of the monstrous consequences of our failure to grasp language. Ever a stranger to his birth—and thus to his sense of self—Oedipus rushes headlong to his own destruction. For Hölderlin these intimate relations between wrath (Zorn), transport, caesura, time, and the possibility of (self-) destruction constitute the very topoi that preoccupy him in his late hymns, especially in what many consider his final hymn, “Mnemosyne.”

In what follows I want to offer a close reading of “Mnemosyne” in terms of these constitutive topoi since I believe that this hymn traffics in the same tragic sphere as Oedipus does. As we shall see, it is Oedipus’ “zornigen Unmaas” “furious excess that lies at the heart of his undoing. Unwilling (or unable) to find a proper measure (Maas) for both his “zornige Neugier”/“furious curiosity” and his “Allessuchende. Allesdeutende”/”all-searching, all-interpreting” impulses, Oedipus unravels into a kind of madness where, as Hölderlin puts it, “Zuletzt herrscht in den Reden vorzüglich das geisteskranke Fragen nach einem Bewusstseyn”/“in the end what dominates in the speeches is above all an insane searching after a consciousness” (MA II, p. 312, 314/E & L, pp. 320, 322 tm). Oedipus becomes for Hölderlin both the prototype and precursor of modernity itself. That is, he stands as the figure who adumbrates the modern human being with its “desire for absolute knowledge and domination upon the earth” (Dastur 2010, p. 36). It is not merely his unbending will or boundless Vermessenheit/audacious presumption in matters that require measure that distinguishes King Oedipus from other human beings. It involves, especially for Hölderlin, Oedipus’ unbridled approach to language that marks him as a tragic figure. As Hölderlin puts it: “Weil solche Menschen in gewaltsamen Verhältnissen stehn, spricht auch ihre Sprache, beinahe nach Furienart, in gewaltsameren Zusammen hange”/”Because such men stand in violent circumstances, their language too, almost in the manner of the Furies, speaks in a more violent configuration” (MA II, p. 315/E & L, p. 323 tm). Oedipus thus stands as the paradigm for modernity, that figure who, in reaching to touch the divine, extends his reach too far and winds up being torn apart through the violence of his unbounded yearning for oneness. It is this same Oedipal yearning for oneness, I believe, that organizes the writing of Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne,” a hymn that stands in close proximity to the tragic and to the Greek relation to modernity in its German form. Before proceeding with a reading of the hymn, it is well-nigh impossible to avoid any mention of the tangled philological controversies that surround its composition, revision, and status as a “completed” text.3 In the classic edition of Friedrich Beissner there appear three separate versions; in Jochen Schmidt’s 1992 edition he also includes three different versions, although two of them are relegated to his “Kommentar” (Hölderlin 1951, II, pp. 193–8; 816–30 and Hölderlin 1992, I, pp. 364–5; 1031–52). The 1989 edition of Dietrich Uffhausen provides a pastiche of drafts from Hölderlin’s Homburger Folioheft which proves unsatisfactory according to the edition of D. E. Sattler in 2000 with the publication of volumes 7–8 Gesänge of the Frankfurter Hölderlin Ausgabe (Hölderlin 1989, pp. 156–61 and Hölderlin 2000, vol. 7, pp. 381–5 and 8, pp. 732–40). In 1992, Michael Knaupp edited yet another collection of Hölderlin’s work that has become the most respected edition among the majority of Hölderlin scholars. This edition, widely known as the Hölderlin Münchner Ausgabe (MA), also provides three separate versions, only two of which Knaupp titles “Mnemosyne.” The other poem is titled “Die Nymphe” (MA I, pp. 433–38; MA III, pp. 256–62). Although a case could be made to do an exhaustive study of all of these different versions, such a task exceeds the demands of this essay. I will follow here the Knaupp text of “Mnemosyne” (MA I, p. 437 f.), with the exception of the opening verses of the second stanza.4

2. “Mnemosyne”: Title, Structure, and Myth

Hölderlin played with various titles for this hymn about memory, recollection, Gedächtnis and Erinnerung. The D.E. Sattler edition (FHA 8, pp. 732–40) offers a range of “titles,” as do several other prominent collections. Under the optic of current philological scholarship, the older claims by Beissner and Jochen Schmidt that the title given this poem by Hölderlin—“Mnemosyne”—constitutes the “final (endgültigen) version,” can only be viewed with strong skepticism.5 When dealing with the composition process of Hölderlin’s hymns all talk of a final, definitive, or conclusive text must be abandoned. All the late hymns come to us as palimpsests written over with various drafting pens and nibs leaving the question of what layer of composition preceded or succeeded another unclear. Beyond this philological-orthographic perplexity there is the more critical question about Hölderlin’s poetic style, which defies the notions of a “final” text in itself. Hölderlin’s vital and dynamic style of poetic composition demanded the constant revision of texts so as to keep them alive and preserve their fluid character. “Mnemosyne” is exemplary in this regard given the number of alternate versions of the poem and the various marginal emendations in the Homburger Folioheft.6

“Mnemosyne” comes to articulate the very core of Hölderlin’s poetic project: to attend to the vanishing of the sacred as the leitmotiv shaping modern existence. We moderns stand “in dürftiger Zeit”/”destitute time” (“Brod und Wein,” v. 122) besieged by the departure and absence of the gods that have fled. And yet how are we to comport ourselves in this time of destitution and default? How are we to properly mourn their loss in a way that is fitting? This late hymn takes up these questions by situating them against the mythological traces of ancient Greek poetry that stand as the model for such sacred mourning. Before offering a reading of this hymn we need to recognize how much its form and structure are shaped by its dependence on the work of the ancient poets, especially Homer and Pindar.7 The 3rd version has a triadic structure with 17 verses in each, a nod to the theme of the hymn—mourning. In the Odyssey (Bk. XXIV: vv. 54–97), Achilles’ death is narrated by Agamemnon, who recounts that “all the nine Muses in sweet antiphonal singing mourned you… for ten and seven days” (Homer 1973, p. 346). Accordingly, Hölderlin’s three stanzas each contain 17 lines as a fitting tribute to the death of Achilles. But the figure of Achilles will dominate the composition of “Mnemosyne” in ways that extend beyond the formal structure of its verses. In clear terms we can read “Mnemosyne” as a text directed not only at the death of Achilles and the mourning of the fallen hero, but as a poem about our own displaced relation to the absconded gods. “Mnemosyne” takes the death of Achilles as a cipher for understanding the modern age as one lived in forgetfulness of the gods’ departure. The hero’s death, then, is less about the mourning of a single individual than it is about our indurate neglect of the gods’ departure and what this loss of the sacred signifies in our lives. In this sense, despite all the problems that attend Friedrich Beissner’s interpretation of “Mnemosyne,” I concur with his judgment that verses 35–36–

Am Feigenbaum ist mein

Achilles mir gestorben…

–constitute “the germ of the poem.”8

Mnemosyne, mother of the nine muses, serves as the goddess of memory in ancient Greek. In her office as the protectress of thoughts from and about the past, she not only provides shelter from forgetfulness but, more importantly for Hölderlin, she serves as the source of poetic remembrance. It is her knowledge and inspiration that enables the poet to sing hymnal songs of great heroes and to honor the gods. In a crucial way, then, the dedication of the hymn to Mnemosyne constitutes for Hölderlin a song celebrating the source of poetic creation. As we will see, Achilles comes to play no small role in such a vision. Drawing his own inspiration from Pindar, Hölderlin understands the poet’s task to consist in commemorating the deeds of warriors and athletes in the sacred games. What Pindar praises in his epinician odes, however, is less athletic dominance over other competitors. Rather, his eye is focused on the grace, ingenuity, and courage displayed by the victor in navigating the perils of the contest. At the same time, Pindar is keenly aware of the poetic skill necessary to confer greatness on deeds accomplished. Without poetic dexterity and skill, the athletic achievements would all too likely fall into oblivion. Hence, in his own meditation of the death of Achilles (whom Hölderlin admired deeply), the poet reflects on his beauty and “[der] Wunder der Kunst in Achilles Karakter”/”the wonder of art in Achilles’ character” (MA II, pp. 64–5/E & L, pp. 249–50). Within this context, Hölderlin praises Homer’s decision “den Zorn des Achill besingen wolle ihn fast gar nicht erscheinen lasse”/to “sing the wrath of Achilles, while hardly letting him appear at all” in his text. Hölderlin follows a similar strategy in “Mnemosyne” by only mentioning Achilles once by name, even as he crafts his poem around the tragic fate of this “poet-warrior.”9

3. Stanza One: “Reif Sind, in Feuer Getaucht…”

Much like another well-known Hölderlin hymn, “The Ister,” this one too begins with the theme of fire. And like “The Ister,” it likewise juxtaposes and conjoins this elemental power with its opposite—the element of water. From the very arche of the poem we are confronted by the primordial elements of water and fire which stand in tension with each other in ways both creative and destructive. Order stands apart from—and yet in intimate commerce with—chaos. Harmony begets discord; strife begets love, and, as in all tragedy (both ancient Greek and In Hölderlin’s “Death of Empedocles”), what reigns in the struggle between “Natur und Kunst”/”nature and art” is the primal pattern of what is “harmonisch entgegengesetzt”/”harmoniously opposed” wherein all beings unfold and come to fruition in and through the trials and conflicts that shape their path of growth (MA I, pp. 868–69/E & L, pp. 261–62). The whole poem will address this elemental-archaic process of negotiating the potentially destructive (and creative) possibilities of fire—and water—for both the poet’s own work and for its hopes of addressing the profound crisis that besets the modern age bereft of its gods. Like all of Hölderlin’s late work this hymn engages the pressing question of Dichterberuf, of understanding the poet’s vocation of attending to the crisis of forgetfulness that besets modern consciousness in the face of “Gottes Fehl”/”God’s lack/absence” (“Dichterberuf,” v. 64). Yet in a larger sense “Mnemosyne” raises the question about modernity’s relation to antiquity and the recession of ancient Greek thinking and poetizing in an age of “Enlightenment.” All of these reflections take place as a recollection of the death of Achilles whose life was a model of the very strife that the poet uncovers in the life of nature. Hence, in keeping with the decisive force of opposition and contrariety, the poet’s focus on the hero’s death begins with his birth.

From Greek myth comes the legend of Achilles’ origin. As he knew from his reading of Benjamin Hederich’s Lexikon, “as soon as he was born, his mother Thetis dipped him in the river Styx…consequently seeking to make him immortal.”10 In this process, however, Thetis had neglected to protect her son’s ankle, thus rendering him vulnerable to the perils of mortal fate. In an effort to circumvent these perils, “she covered him by day with ambrosia and by night she placed him in fire.” Against this background, Hölderlin’s Achilles comes to us as a hybrid figure, born of god and human, marked by fire and water, educated by Chiron, the centaur (who is half-horse, half-man). Chiron tutored his pupil in the skills of hunting, but also in music and the arts. Like Chiron, whom Homer calls “the most just of all the centaurs,” Achilles appears as a figure torn between the impulses of an animal and an ethical awareness of human limits.11 What gives notice here in Hölderlin’s presentation is that the rage of Achilles stands in irremediable tension with the lyrical power of a poet-warrior. Hence in Stanza One the poet reflects on the trials that afflict those who yearn for what is unbounded and risk destruction in coming up against the limits of the “alten/Geseze der Erd”/ancient/Laws of the earth” (MA I, p. 437). This Homeric sense that fidelity to the ancient laws of the earth and preservation of our memories of what has been (das Gewesene) will stand the warrior-poet in good stead shapes the language of the opening stanza. Much depends, however, on how we interpret the very first line of the text.

Hölderlin was a poet who crafted his poems in terms of beginnings and endings. Some of his most famous verses either begin or end his hymns. Here I think we can find another kind of resonance between arche and eschaton centered on Achilles’ birth and death as it reflects the larger theme of sacred mourning. Again we see the poet situating his reader between the loss of the human and the passing of the gods from the earth. In the first verse we find the hints of a poetic doubling that weave back and forth between deep ambiguity and the secure laws of the earth itself.

Reif sind, in Feuer getaucht, gekochet…. Ripe are, dipped in fire, cooked…

This opening line references ripeness, fire, and ‘cooking’ (which should be read as the ripening of fruit). Jochen Schmidt reads all these words as allusions to a cleansing epochal fire modeled on the Stoic notion of ekpyrosis, “the final dissolution of the world in fire.”12 Schmidt certainly has a point here that Hölderlin’s work was conceived in a turbulent era threatened by the Coalition Wars and both the fear of and hope for an apocalyptic turn in European history. But perhaps we might be closer to the poet’s vision when we read the reference to fire here as the baby Achilles’ surviving his “baptism into the fiery waters of the Styx” and enduring the trial by fire of his mother Thetis, who sought through magic to “burn away” the mortal elements within his body, thus rendering him immortal. Against this background, Hölderlin’s allusions to “ripening,” “fire,” “fruits,” and “earth” can be read in terms of Achilles’ maturation through his trial by fire in a double sense. Fruits ripen in nature by the light of the sun—what Hölderlin in his first Böhlendorff letter terms “Feuer vom Himmel”/”fire from heaven” (MA II, p. 912/E & L, p. 207). This heavenly fire will be understood by the poet as endemic to Greek culture– as the “heiligen Pathos”/”sacred pathos” that Homer needed to overcome “um die abendländische Junonische Nüchternheit für sein Apollonsreich zu erbeuten und so wahrhaft das fremde sich anzueignen.”/ in order “to capture the Junonian sobriety of the Occident for his Apollonian realm and so truly to appropriate the foreign.” The entire opening stanza traffics in this opposition between the ancient Greeks and the modern Germans precisely as concerns the power and manifestation of divine fire and the heavenly sun. Achilles’ destiny will be formed in and against the oppositions that pervade this strophe.

Fashioned with gnomic utterances that succeed one another in paratactic style, each metaphor stands in a hermetic relation to the overall assemblage of metaphors that appear heterogeneous to each other and to the meaning of the strophe. Fruits are ripened in natural light; allegorically, they stand for Achilles’ Bildung in the arts of war and song by Chiron who ‘ripens’ the young warrior-poet on his path to manhood. He is ‘tested’ on earth according to Zeus’ Gesetz that shapes all things in the natural and cultural world. Moreover, we can read the serpent in verse 3 as an allusion to Achilles’ mother Thetis who metamorphoses into serpentine form to elude Peleus’ advances. Accordingly, Achilles is sometimes referred to as “Schlangen-sohn” (serpent-son).13 But all of these singular connections between the dominant terms of the opening lines and Achilles need to be read through Hölderlin’s Geschichtsphilosophie (philosophy of history) that unfolds not as Hegelian progress and Aufhebung (sublation), but as a fragmentary, discontinuous process marked by disjunction and incompleteness. Hence, to raise the question “Wozu Dichter?” (“To what purpose poets?”) (MA I, p. 375) means acknowledging the poet’s role as preserving the memory of the departed gods in an epoch of godlessness. Concretely, that means poetizing this loss not only in terms of the Greek gods, but the Christian one as well. Here the dipping (tauchen) of Achilles in fire (v. 1) conjures thoughts of both Jesus’ baptism (taufen) and the tongues of fire that descend upon the apostles in Pentecostal remembrance. Fire and water, Jesus and Achilles, the joy of birth and the mourning attendant in death—each points towards the other without losing its own singular identity. Hölderlin’s Geschichtsphilosophie comes to us as a poetic call to recover the sacred power of language so as not to succumb to the nihilistic forces of forgetfulness that threaten our tenuous bond to the holy. What he calls for is resolution and tenacity, a sense of loyalty (Treue) to that which endures through time as the sacred, a vision he expresses in conjunction with Achilles in “An Eduard” (MA I, p. 286, vv. 24–26) and in “Mnemosyne” (v. 14). But Treue is threatened everywhere by the assaults of time and forgetfulness; the poet’s task consists of navigating an uncertain way through paths that are “crooked” and “unjust” (“unrecht,” v. 9).

The remaining verses of Stanza One point to the difficulties of finding one’s way along these paths. The fundamental law of all being for Hölderlin is that all things strive for union, even as they are only able to approximate such union in a mediate way, never im-mediately. Nature never lets itself be appropriated directly; even the gods cannot directly engage nature in its primordial form. As Hölderlin puts it in his commentary on Pindar’s Fragment “Das Höchste”/The Highest”: “Das Unmittelbare, streng genommen, ist für die Sterblichen unmöglich, wie für die Unsterblichen…die strenge Mittelbarkeit ist aber das Gesez”/… The immediate, strictly speaking, is impossible for mortals, as it is for immortals… But strict mediacy is the law” (MA II, p. 381/E & L, p. 336). What follows from this law “that all must enter”/”Dass alles hineingeht” (v. 3) is an insight into the tragic implications of human history. For human beings

…Und immer

Ins Ungebundene gehet eine Sehnsucht./

And always

There is a yearning that seeks the unbound.

(vv. 12–13) (MA I, p. 437)

To pursue the unbounded risks dissolution. What the poet seeks instead is a Halt im Leben, a secure place of measure and balance (Mass und Ausgleich) whereby the tensions and paradoxes that pervade our historical experience are not resolved—since resolution would terminate the constant to and fro that is necessary for engaged living. Instead, they are grasped as what needs to be integrated into our life experience. As far back as his work Hyperion, Hölderlin had prized above all the teachings of Heraclitus who understood that all things come to pass through conflict as the simultaneous play of the conference and difference (sympheromenon and diapheromenon) of all things as what are “harmonisch entgegengestetzt”/”harmoniously opposed” (MA II, p. 76/E & L, p. 275; MA I, p. 760). For Hölderlin, all things lie in a mutually interconnected relation where “mit dem Totalgefühl der Auflösung und Herstellung unendlich verflochtner ist, und alles sich in Schmerz und Freude, in Streit und Frieden, in Bewegung und Ruhe, und Gestalt und Ungestalt unendlicher durchdringt, berühret, und angeht und so ein himmlischer Feuer statt irrdischem wirkt”/”the total feeling of dissolution and creation are infinitely more enmeshed with each other, and everything interpenetrates, touches and concerns each other more infinitely in pain and joy, strife and peace, movement and rest, form and un-form, and so effects a heavenly fire instead of an earthly one” (MA II, p. 74/E & L, p. 273). Stanza One presents a “law” of historical unfolding, ein “Werden im Vergehen” (“Becoming in Dissolution”), where all fruits ripen through a process of maturation (Bildung). This same process of becoming must then come to terms with its own dissolution, a poetic philosophy of history pervaded by the separation and (yearning for) union of mortals and gods, nature and history, Hellas and Hesperia, heaven and earth. This law of Heraclitean opposition is instantiated in the image of the “Hügeln des Himmels”)/”the hills of heaven”/dreamt upon by serpents (v. 5). Here we find the juxtaposition of heaven and earth in the poetic conceit of a landscape of the heavenly, a vision that dreams prophetically of a time when humans (earth) and gods (heavens) might be united in an historical process of becoming. Before such a possibility might come to light, however, there are obstacles to confront such as “eine Last von Scheitern”/”a burden of logwood” (v. 7) that makes the paths we are following more difficult to traverse. Moreover, such paths, the poet relates, are “bös” (v. 8)—not simply “evil,” but perhaps what pertains more especially to the Achilles narrative in the poem, injurious, wrathful, or malicious. Considered in terms of the oppositional tensions unleashed in Stanza One, we are situated in the midst of a geschichtsphilosophische (philosophical-historical) struggle between the forces of dispersion/Untergang and those of unity and peaceful integration. Hesperian destiny is threatened with destruction, but if it can come to itself in and through a healthy and balanced Aus-ein-ander-setzung/confrontational encounter with the ancient Greek legacy of heavenly fire, then the possibility of a new historical epoch of poetic song might be able to celebrate the Brauttag or bridal wedding between humans and gods (MA I, p. 434, v. 5). There are, however, minatory dangers that might impede such a possibility: “Nemlich unrecht,/Wie Rosse, gehn die gefangenen/Element’ und alten Geseze der Erd’ “/”For in an unjust way/like horses go the imprisoned/elements and the ancient/laws of the earth”/ (vv. 9–12). Moreover, there is always a yearning that seeks the unbounded and aorgic that exceed measure, law, and balance. Such a gesture could undo all the hopes of poetic song to usher in a new epoch of the coming gods.

Back and forth between the boundless desire for union and the bounded constraints of ancient laws, this stanza presents a vision of forces at war with one another. But it also presents this vision in broken, fragmented utterances separated by seemingly insignificant words (such as the double ‘aber’/‘however’ of vv. 8 and 13 and the ‘nemlich’/’namely’ of v. 9) that sunder the flow and continuity of the poet’s language, leaving readers uncertain about how to connect the ruptured shards of that which the verses intimate. It would be all too easy to seize upon one such fragmentary utterance and find in it the cipher for decoding the diction of the entire stanza, but such an attempt would risk being too one-sided, since Hölderlin always places such utterances in a Heraclitean relation to other gnomai within the poem so as to maintain the counter-striving harmony of Heraclitus’ bow and lyre. What the poet seeks here is a way to preserve the dynamic tension between extremes, which is exactly how Stanza One closes. Nothing here is unequivocal or eindeutig. Human beings are torn apart by the shifting modalities of time from past to future back to the present in the play of paradox that temporality bequeaths to us as we strive to find a Halt im Leben/a secure foothold in life (vv. 8 &14, be-halten/re-tain). The poet then writes:

Vorwärts aber und rükwärts wollen wir

Nicht sehn. Uns wiegen lassen, wie

Auf schwankem Kahne der See./

Forward, however, and back we will

Not look. To let ourselves be lulled and rocked as

On a swaying skiff of the sea.

(vv. 15–17) (MA I, p. 437/SPF, pp. 258–59)

The language and imagery here is dense and enigmatic. Several commentators (Böschenstein, Philipsen, Reuss, de Man) have noted the link to Rousseau in the closing lines (Böschenstein 1989, pp. 199–200; Philipsen 2000, p. 386, and De Man 1984, p. 45). In his Reveries of the Solitary Walker, J.J. Rousseau observes in his “Fifth Walk” on St. Peter’s Island in the middle of Lake Biel in Switzerland, that his sojourn there in 1765 was “the happiest time of my life.”14 He then confesses that one of the primary reasons for this was abandoning his books and writing table and simply giving himself over to “the raptures and ecstasies” that come with observing nature. He goes on to describe one particular afternoon when he rowed to the middle of the lake, turned his eyes to heaven and let himself “slowly drift back and forth in the water” without thinking at all. It is in the “noise of the waves and the tossing of water” that he was plunged into a delightful reverie about the perpetual change and flux of nature which humans have difficulty accepting since they cling to security and routine. Rousseau then goes on to observe the vicissitudes of the heart for which nothing solid might attach itself.

Always ahead of or behind us, they recall the past which is no

longer or foretell the future which often is in no way to be.

Amidst this reverie he comes to understand that happiness is fleeting—and yet, without letting in any regret about the past or anxiety about the future, he finds that giving himself over to the lived temporality of the moment lets a kairos moment of equanimity and balance emerge. In conjunction with his experience of the natural world, Rousseau comes to understand his own existence as sufficient unto itself.

Hölderlin was drawn to Rousseau’s idyll about achieving union with the natural world in a kairos moment, yet what he engages in these concluding lines of the first stanza is far from settled. Is this an allusion to the human drive for forgetting time and wallowing in the timelessness of amnesic oneness with nature? Or is it perhaps a warning about the dangers of such a reverie and an affirmation, rather, of a need for Gesetz (law) and limitation? How we read these closing verses matters much as we seek to understand Hölderlin’s poetic vision in “Mnemosyne.” First of all, let us agree that no matter how we assess their role in the construction of this hymn, these lines serve as an axial center for linking not only stanzas 1 and 2, but as a warning call for both poet and reader. Under this optic, the allusions to Rousseau’s Reveries serve as a powerful reminder of how forgetfulness and the yearning for communal oneness can harbor destructive tendencies. Looking back towards the past and ahead towards the future are necessary experiences for us all. We all need to consider our own historical moment against the legacy of Hellas and the hope for Hesperia. Remembrance is essential for creative possibility; we cannot hope to found a new age of peace without reflecting on both the positive and negative legacies of what the Greek bequest has meant for us—and what it could mean. Mourning the loss of the ancient heroes, however, can lead to the selfsame forgetfulness of our own historical destiny as the lulling and rocking of Rousseau’s skiff on Lake Biel. Hence, as I read it, these last three lines of Stanza One proffer a warning to us that we need to gracefully negotiate the pleasures of sentimental reverie in the moment (where, following Rousseau, we wish “this instant to last forever”) with the sober realization that we must carry “eine/Last von Scheitern”/”a burden of logwood” (vv. 6–7) upon our shoulders if we wish to find our singular destinal path towards historical greatness.15 We need to integrate our mourning for Achilles (and the burden of his legacy) with our need, as Hölderlin expresses it in his second Böhlendorff letter, “wieder anfangen, vaterländisch und natürlich, eigentlich originell zu singen”/”to sing nationally and naturally again, with authentic originality” (MA II, p. 922). We find this overall sense of balancing two opposed elements in a poetic reference to Scheitern in verse 7. Scheitern refers to the Swabian dialect’s term for Scheite (sticks of firewood, faggots) yet it also offers an ironic twist on this meaning since scheitern as a verb means “to run aground, fail, miscarry.” Here, the hope for a new Einkehr der Götter/”arrival/in-turning of the gods” may run aground. Its solvency depends on the fidelity of the poet to carrying the burden of memory for the ancient Greek world, but not in a servile sense. Rather, every act of remembrance must be conceived in a new way as part of a vaterländische Umkehr/national reversal whereby the turn to antiquity via memory and remembrance must happen in consonance with a movement forward and towards a (new) poetic conception of the native, national, and homeland.16

4. Stanza Two: Crossing the Alps

As we have seen, Hölderlin’s paratactic style of composition offers few hints for how to connect the disparate allusions of his verse. Interruption, enjambment, hard jointure, and caesura all contribute to a jarring effect whereby the reader is left to puzzle together the fundamental coherence and integration of virtually every single verse within the poem. Stanza Two continues this style but in a self-reflexive way by placing questions in the very first and last lines of the stanza. I am following here the reading most editors offer of the first lines of this stanza: “Wie aber liebes? Sonnenschein/Am Boden sehen wir […]” rather than Knaupp’s. Even the form and manner of the first line’s question remains a mystery—“Wie aber liebes?”17 The very act of translating this simple query depends on the way one understands the sense of the entire poem. But before we can address the sense of this question and the role it plays in the transmission and construction of the poet’s vision, we should pause to reflect on the poetic act of “questioning” itself. Questioning lies at the heart of phenomenological reflection. What is put into question in such questioning is less an object of inquiry than it is the very basis of any possible relation to that which is placed in question. In carrying out such a process, the questioner comes to understand himself as being placed into question as well. In this self-reflective way, what matters is not the securing of answers, but an attuned listening to language so as to let language unfold in a way that lets things be the things that they are. Such poetic attunement is Hölderlin’s métier, one of the truly distinguishing elements of his poetic vocation (Diering 1992). As the opening for Stanza Two, the question:

Wie aber liebes?

functions in this way.

Several English translations have attempted to render this question in clear terms. Hamburger translates it as “But how, my dear one?” (Hölderlin 2004, p. 587). Constantine renders it as “But the things we love?” (Hölderlin 2018, pp. 172–4). Sieburth offers: “But what we love?” (Hölderlin 1984, p. 119). Jeremy Tambling presents two different translations—“How now my love? [or, How then can there be love?]” (Tambling 2014, p. 47). Emery George proffers: “How about it, dear one?,” while Chernoff and Hoover elect: “But how, my love?” (Hölderlin 20212, p. 513 and Hölderlin 2008, p. 309). As we parse the effects of these different renderings we notice two distinct issues. Firstly, several of the translators (Hamburger, Tambling, George, Chernoff/Hoover) understand the utterance as a vocative address to someone the poet loves. And all of them (excluding Tambling) insert a comma into the text to underscore the vocative effect of the question. Yet Hölderlin himself does not place a comma after the “aber.” Hence, I am inclined to follow Constantine and Sieburth in understanding the query here to be a reflection on the parlous state of the poem’s most pressing themes—how can we find some Halt (secure foothold) in the swirling, tempestuous plight that attends our age’s crisis moment? What is left to us as our task in the age of the world’s night? The second stanza will offer conflicting responses to such a question by positioning elements of opposition in contrastive ways that contradict and cross one another. Here the decisive forces of grief and mourning that pervade the poem confront nature’s cyclic rhythm of mediation and renewal. As the poet anticipates (and perhaps fears) the Einkehr or arrival of the gods, he attends to the various indirect manifestations of the divine in the polychromatic “signs of the day” (Tageszeichen, v. 24). Stanza One ends on an ambiguous note with the poet offering a pair of enigmatic utterances. Firstly, the poet announces that “we” do not want to look backward and forward. But why? Out of fear? disinterest? boredom? Other pressing matters? And, secondly, the poet weighs the possible effects of letting ourselves be rocked and lulled, as if we were drifting on a swaying skiff. The stanza ends with uncertainty—and an unspoken sense that we need to address the pressing question of whether we should give ourselves over to the passivity of accepting the idyll of Rousseau’s reverie or acknowledge its danger to achieving a grounded sense of our fidelity to a more reflective belonging to the earth. In an opening stanza that positions fire versus water as its initial and then concluding insight, we are caught in the contentious play of oppositional relations that could prove to be our undoing. The opening of the second stanza then addresses this predicament by having the poet raise the question anew in confounding terms—“Wie aber liebes?”

With this posing of the question Hölderlin draws attention to the underlying structural narrative of his hymn. Who is speaking?—and to whom? The first stanza did not address the first of these questions even as it offered its gnomai, as if pronounced from the oracular heights of Delphi. Instead, it addressed these questions to the fateful destiny of the Germans to be faithful to their native endowments, to hold on and preserve what was given to them from their Hesperian allotment. And yet to be authentically Hesperian means for Hölderlin to embrace the storms that nature (and history) present. In his second Böhlendorff letter, Hölderlin noted the power of storms to manifest “ das Licht in seinem Wirken, nationell und als Prinzip und Schicksaalsweise bildend, dass uns etwas heilig ist, sein Drang im Kommen und Gehen”/”the effect of light, shaping nationally (nationell) and as principle and destiny, so that something is holy to us, its urgency in coming and going” (MA II, p. 921/E&L, p. 214). The second stanza addresses the force and impulse of nature, “Sonnenschein/Am Boden” (vv. 18–19)/”the sunshine/On the ground.” “heimatlich die Schatten der Wälder” (v. 20)/”the native shadows of forests,” “es blühet/An Dächern der Rauch, bei alter Krone/Der Türme, friedsam” (vv. 20–22)/the smoke that “blossoms/On roof-tops near ancient crowns/Of the turrets, peacefully.” These peaceful tones seem to indicate an idyllic vision of nature and the native homeland in some kind of harmonic equilibrium. The poet then offers yet another enigmatic gnome:

…gut sind nemlich

Hat fernher gegenredend die Seele

Ein Himmlisches verwundet, die Tageszeichen/

… For good indeed

Are the signs of the Day

When the soul defiantly

Has wounded one of the Heavenly…

(MA I, p. 438/PF, p. 587 tm)

How are we to understand these “signs” of the Day? And how do we measure them against the manifestations of the natural world that constitute the first seven lines of Stanza Two? To address these questions means to offer an account of the whole scope and thematic concerns of “Mnemosyne.”

What strikes the reader here is the strong connection (and opposition) of sky and earth, height and depth, Greek fire from heaven and the tempered sobriety of Hesperian restraint. Now the poetic I retreats in favor of a communal spirit (“we” v. 19) that finds itself in balanced equipoise with the natural cycle of the sun’s movement upon the earth and the seasonal vicissitudes that yield “snow” as well as “Majenblumen” (v. 25)/”lilies of the valley.” This landscape offers a poetic vision of time as cyclical and rhythmic where season follows upon season in a way that yields peace and stability. We can find such balance in the Tageszeichen/signs of the Day that offer indications for the presence of the divine in the manifestations of nature. Once these signs appear, the poet shifts ground. Now we move from the idylls of a springtime (and a winter) landscape to the realm of space. The poet imagines here a journey across Europe—spatially—passing over the Alps, a path traversed by a “Wandersmann” or wayfarer/pilgrim who moves from the depths of the valleys to the heights of the Alpine ranges where, he comes upon a cross. How to read such a journey and such a Zeichen/sign? Here the cross—as a symbol of death and redemption—will stand in an enigmatic relation to the idyll that precedes it. To follow the sense of such a juxtaposition we need to think this spatial movement from south to north as a temporal one as well. The place of the “crossing” between time and space in Hölderlin’s poem will literally be at the place of the cross, a symbol of memory and mourning for those travelers who perished on the snow-capped peaks of the Alps. As a token of their passing, “Gesetzt ist unterwegs einmal/Gestorbenen”/the cross “is placed/There on the wayside for the dead” (MA I, p. 438, vv. 94–95). This mourning, then, concerns more than a mere lament for those who perished on Alpine peaks during their journey across a spatial divide. It configures, rather, the whole pageant of Occidental history as a movement from southern Europe northerly across the Alpine divide where Greek heavenly fire confronts its opposite in the Hesperian landscape of modern Germany. Hence, we find the poet referencing snow and lilies of the valley, both of which belong to a specific season and stand as ephemeral reminders of transience and permutability. Moreover, we can also notice how Hölderlin frames his allusion to the cross. He writes:

Denn Schnee, wie Majenblumen

Das Edelmüthige, wo

Es seie, bedeutend, glänzet auf der grünen Wiese

Der Alpen, dort, Vom Kreuze redend, das…/

And snow, like lilies of the valley

Signifying a site

Of nobility, gleams

With the green of the Alpine meadow, where

discoursing of the cross…

(MA I, p. 438)18

We could, following Beissner, read this discourse “Vom Kreuze” (v. 30) as a poetic account written “of” (vom) the cross. As he interprets it, the cross stands as a Zeichen/sign on a journey where the cross symbolizes what he terms a Marterl or “memorial tablet” that “ihr Gedächtnis ehrt”/”honors in memorythe struggles of those who have scaled the “hoher Strass” (v. 32) “the high road” and perished on the way in storms, avalanches, and accidents (Beissner 1961, p. 232). Beissner goes on to argue that this offers an antithesis to the idyllic rendering of die Tageszeichen in the earlier part of the stanza. While acknowledging the helpfulness of Beissner’s work, however, we need to acknowledge it limits. Hölderlin’s style of poetizing engages the enigma of language in such a way as to seize on ambiguity and contrariety as belonging to the ways of approaching a text. Moreover, his practice of continually revising and redrafting verses provides us with some sense not only of his dynamic composition process, but perhaps even more of his sense of embracing the polychromatic sense of a text’s meaning. Following such a practice we need to consider how multilateral themes emerge within the same poetic configuration. Here the discourse of verse 30, “Vom Kreuze redend”/”discoursing of the cross” might be read not only as speaking “of” the cross, but also—at the same time—“from” it as well. On this reading, the poet would then be addressing not only the Hesperian criss-cross with Greek antiquity, but also his own poetic journey of remembrance as one of suffering and affliction, the kind of affliction that a poet grapples with when he takes upon himself the task of becoming the voice of a Volk. Here we can read such a struggle both in terms of poetic vocation and as a geschichtsphilosophische (philosophical-historical) reflection about the need for recovering Hesperia’s bond to ancient Hellas without succumbing to the servile neo-classicism of Winckelmann and his followers. The concluding lines of the second stanza offer hints of how to approach this criss-cross of the poet’s personal suffering and of his attempt to present a Geschichtsphilosophie (philosophy of history) of the Occident in terms of the flight and departure of the gods. What links these thematic concerns is the poet’s journey of spiritual torment that gets bound up with the sufferings and sacrifice of the cross. It is in recollecting the deaths of those who perished pursuing this journey that the second stanza concludes. For these poets are the ones who, much as the poets in “Wie wenn am Feiertage…”/”As on a Holiday…” (vv. 17–18), are “distantly divining” (fern ahnend) the larger historical sense of their own personal journey of recollection. Here the poet walks—“in wrathful anger (zornig)—with the other (Dem andern)” (vv. 32–24). But why wrathfully? Hölderlin then ends Stanza Two with a pointed question:

… aber was ist diss? (v. 34)

(… but what is this?)

What does all of this mean? How are we Hesperians to make sense of the wrath, mourning, suffering, and mediatory power of the Cross as a dividing marker between antiquity and modernity? How might we grasp this symbol as a turning point within Occidental history? And how might we, as mourners of gods departed, find a proper relation to the ruptures and fissures within such a history that could provide a Halt/secure foothold for the wrathful wanderers that we are? In the very asking of this question at the end of this stanza, Hölderlin provides a perplexing transition to Stanza Three that focuses on the mourning of the ancient Greek heroes Achilles, Patroklos, and Ajax.

5. Stanza Three: Death and Mourning

The third stanza begins with a reference to a fig tree and to the death of Achilles. It then follows this memory of the death of heroes in its reference to Ajax and Patroklos.

Am Feigenbaum ist mein

Achilles mir gestorben,…

Beside the fig tree

My Achilles died on me…

(vv. 35–36)

The unresolved tensions that pervade Stanza Two—its first half’s idyll about Tageszeichen (“signs of the day” such as forests, sunshine, grass, snow, and the lilies of the valley) and the sudden, jarring shift to themes of death, the cross, peril, wrath, and the trials of an Alpine journey—come into focus in Stanza Three’s reflections on the poet’s intensely personal lamentation of Achilles’ death and the deaths of other Greek heroes. Here the poet’s journey moves from the northern sphere of Alpine heights to the southern climate of Greece where fig trees grow. With this shift we can notice a persistent return to this hymn’s essential preoccupation with memory and mourning, expressed in the poem’s opening image of fruits ripe and dipped in fire. If the thematic emphasis on this doubled relation between recollection and lamentation seemed to have gone underground as it were in early parts of this hymn, here in Stanza Three the power of “Mnemosyne”’s concentration on them returns in full force. In noticing this persistent power, perhaps here is a good place to remember that one of Hölderlin’s pressing concerns in “Mnemosyne” is to provide a grave site for Achilles, a form of poetic remembrance that seeks not only to honor the fallen hero but to provide consolation for those who live beyond his death. Thus we see the double emphasis by the lyrical I, who writes—“Am Feigenbaum ist mein/Achilles mir gestorben”/”Beside the fig tree/My Achilles died on me” (PF, pp. 588–89 tm). Here for the first time in the poem, the poetic I announces itself in the first-person as a subject. After 34 verses where the lyrical I has either concealed its narrative role in unfolding the themes of the poem or given itself over to a communal identification with the “we” of the Hesperian Volk (vv. 15, 20), in verses 35–36 the poet self-consciously embraces his own involvement in the process of bereavement and/as a turn to his own identity. And yet this turning towards the self does not happen without its own disjointure and rupture.

To situate this rupture more specifically, let us return to the final question that concludes Stanza Two—“aber was ist diss?/but what is this?” One could argue, as Bernhard Böschenstein does, that here the poet “offers no direct answer” to this question.19 And yet, in a deep and challenging way, Hölderlin does provide an answer here, although it proves to be an oracular one. By abruptly shifting registers from the traveler’s journey over the Alps to the killing fields of Homer’s Troy, Hölderlin forces us to think with him the underlying, but concealed, relation between the Wandersmann’s wrath in verse 33 and the grave of wrathful Achilles beside a fig tree in verse 35.20 There are significant differences here—topographically, historically, mythically, perhaps even poetologically—but we can also detect an inner connexus between these two diverging topoi. The Wandersmann’s wrath needs to be understood– much as Achilles’– as a drive for oneness with the divine (or nature) that leads to an identification with boundlessness—to the point of danger and self-dissolution. Against this selfsame drive, “Mnemosyne” puts forward a call to find a Halt im Leben/secure foothold in life, to try to preserve a measured sense of balance against aorgic havoc. Hölderlin had indicated as much in his “Notes on the Oedipus,” where he writes about the necessary tension between the divine and the human as something marked by monstrousness (das Ungeheure) where, in such a process, “das gränzenlose Einswerden durch gränzenloses Scheiden sich reinigt”/”boundless unification purifies itself through boundless separation” (MA II, p. 315). It is in Zorn or wrath—especially in wrath’s relation to mourning (Trauer)—that Hölderlin finds the axial center of this hymn’s poetic architecture. Achilles’ wrath, which Homer identifies in the very first verse of the Iliad as his guiding theme, is not merely a personal raging against Agamemnon (or Hector, or Troy, or…). Rather, it involves a fundamental rage at life, one that will get catalyzed through his rage at the death of his beloved Patroklos. Achilles’ rage, as Homer powerfully reveals, cannot be confined to his private concerns, however. Its force is such that it comes to define the very contentiousness that lies at the center of the whole Trojan War.

Hölderlin clearly identifies himself with the existential dimension of such Achillean wrath. In his 1799 poem “Achill,” Hölderlin details Achilles’ own suffering and lament for absent life down “in den heiligen Abgrund”/into “the sacred abyss” a focal point for his own mourning and sorrow (MA I, p. 200). In Stanza Three of “Mnemosyne,” we see—through the use of the personal pronoun—how intensely the poetic I identifies with his hero. This personal bond takes the form of the whole poem’s most pressing themes, especially the unity and opposition of Zorn (wrath) and Trauer (mourning).21 We see this same structural pattern in Homer’s Iliad. It is Achilles’ own uncontrollable wrath that brings on the death of his lover/friend Patroklos. Such unyielding wrath extends far beyond any intentionality. It is the pure boundlessness of such anger that vitiates any illusion that Achilles can reign in the consequences of what such Zorn has unleashed. We likewise see the fear of such boundless identification in Stanza One’s gnome—“Und immer/Ins Ungebundene gehet eine Sehnsucht”/”And always there is a yearning that seeks the unbound” (MA I, p. 437/PF, p. 587, vv. 12–13). Zorn exceeds the plans or intentions of those in its grip—and “Mnemosyne” attempts to grapple with the inner tensions and contradictions of such wrath, precisely as it unfolds in its relation to mourning. Such themes are hardly new to Hölderlin. Already in the first volume of Hyperion (1797), Hölderlin struggled to bring together the oppositional energies that come forth as Hyperion is led by Adamas into the world of Plutarch’s heroes. There Hyperion’s impulsiveness is tempered by Adamas’ intimate acquaintance with order and measure such that he harnesses both the centrifugal impulses of youth and the centripetal focus of equanimity and balance, where rage and mourning (Zürnen und Trauer) find their way each in tension with the other (MA I, p. 620). These selfsame tensions will get played out in the lyrical I’s attachment to (fixation on?) the fig tree beside which Achilles died.

The fig tree clearly stands as a figure of mourning and commemoration of the dead. In “Andenken” (v. 16), Hölderlin had referenced a fig tree as a symbol of his beloved Diotima, Susette Gontard, who had died while he was away in France. There too the fig tree comes to us as a chiastic image: a symbol of Southern Europe and ancient Greece (the fiery sun’s blessing of the earth’s fecundity) and as a sign of grief and sorrow. From Richard Chandler’s Travels in Asia Minor (1775), Hölderlin had learned of the connection between fig trees and the graves/barrows of Achilles, Ajax, and Patroklos (Chandler 1971, p. 40). But he also knew of this shared topos from his reading of The Odyssey (Bk. III: 103–110), where Homer conjoins the deaths of the three heroes.22 In a passage from “Fragment von Hyperion,” Hölderlin writes of Hyperion’s departure from Adamas “on the shores of ancient Ilium beneath the grave mounds that perhaps were constructed for Achilles and Patroklos, and Antilochus and Ajax Telamon, where we spoke of Greece’s past and future and much else that emerged from out of the depths of our being and returned there again” (MA I, pp. 506–7). All of the details in Stanza Three about these heroes’ deaths show how Hölderlin’s modern Hesperian conception of poetic vocation was so inextricably bound to his engaged Auseinandersetzung/confrontational encounter with the ancient Greeks. Ajax’s violent suicide, Patroklos’s ill-fated decision to adorn Achilles’ armor, the death of Achilles at the hands of Apollo—all of these fearful endings constitute for Hölderlin the death of the heroic and, more than this, the death of ancient Greece itself. For though Hölderlin’s preoccupation with the heroic in “Mnemosyne” does dominate the final stanza of the hymn, its larger theme expands one of the preeminent concerns of Hölderlin’s late work: the death of Greek art and the withdrawal of the gods from the earth. Hence, we need to grasp how the poet’s mourning at a fig tree connotes his mourning about the deus absconditus and the onset of the world’s night. For what “Mnemosyne” addresses is nothing less than the enduring crisis of the Occident, as Hölderlin sees it. In our routines and comfortable shibboleths we have become acclimated to a world where the gods have absconded and left us to confront a landscape where the sacred has withdrawn. It is the poet’s mourning over the loss of the sacred that dominates the dynamic architecture within the poem. In both “… meinest du/Es solle gehen…”/”…do you think/things should go…” (MA I, p. 430f.) and his 1803 letter to Friedrich Wilmans (MA II, p. 924f.), Hölderlin stresses that it was the ancient Greeks’ denial of their Oriental legacy as well as the neglect of their native endowments that brought on the perishing of the ancient Greek world. “Mnemosyne,” then, needs to be read as a mourning for the sacred that offers a warning to modern Hesperian humanity: we now face an epochal crisis concerning our own native identity and our hopes for a futural homecoming can only come to fruition if we learn this lesson from the decline of Greece. Cultivate balance (Gleichgewicht). Heed mediacy (Mittelbarkeit) and measure (Mass) without succumbing to mediocrity. Learn from the Greeks without a servile imitation of their genius. As the Böhlendorff letter admonishes (MA II, p. 912ff.), Hesperian humanity needs to remain faithful to what is most native in them by reversing their native inclinations in order to properly grasp them in and through a chiastic appropriation of the foreign. So much of Hölderlin’s retrieval of Pindaric parataxis has its source in such a vision. By challenging the smooth, sequential logic of narrative presentation through the use of jarring shifts that fracture continuity and succession, Hölderlin’s paratactic style draws attention to its own language as the essential “theme” of his hymns. What emerges in them is a style of composition that draws on Greek poetic form while simultaneously transforming it to craft a new language of preparing an “Einkehr der Götter/arrival of the gods.”

The focus of Stanza Three shifts from the deaths of the three heroes—“Und es starben/Noch andere viel”/”and of many others.” (vv. 44–45)—to the fate of Mnemosyne’s city, Eleutheria. Before considering Hölderlin’s cryptic style of closure in “Mnemosyne,” we should pause to notice how so many of the words appearing in this last stanza are drawn from Sophocles’ play Ajax (of which Hölderlin translated three fragments)—“Himmlische”/heavenly (v. 48), “Bächen”/brooks (v. 34), “Skamandros (v. 39), “Salamis” v. 41, “Grotten”/grottoes (v. 38), and “Trauer”/mourning (v. 51) (MA II, pp. 386–89). These all will be situated in terms of the aorgic madness that befalls Ajax when he unwittingly slays a herd of cattle, thinking they are the Atreidae. In shame and dishonor he then takes his own life in a Freitod. Is it possible to find here a link to the city of Mnemosyne, Eleutheria, which in Greek means “freedom”? Here perhaps we might understand the allusion to Eleutheria in terms of several other poignant topoi within this hymn. Eleutheria is the site of the coupling of Zeus and Mnemosyne, where the nine Muses were conceived over nine nights.

Hesiod in Theogony describes Eleutheria as the site of both the worship and the rule of Mnemosyne, mother of the nine Muses who are born just north of the city (Hesiod 2006, pp. 6–7; 10–11). Hence, it is a city bound up with the paradox of ancient Greek hymnal song since in giving birth to the Muses, Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, also provides the salve of forgetting. Poetic song’s function here, as Hesiod warrants, is “to provide forgetting for maladies and a respite from anxieties.” It is this paradoxical relation that Hölderlin finds so powerful in his own hymnal song. Beyond this, Eleutheria stands at the south slope of Mt. Kithaeron—site of Oedipus’ exposure, scene of the Dionysian maenads’ ritual dismemberment of Pentheus, place of Heracles’ slaying of the monstrous lion. It is hardly coincidental that Hölderlin chooses this topos as a reference point for his own engagement with mourning, time, memory, wrath, language, and the meaning of the tragic. Any final decoding of the unrelenting complexity of these relations to the poet and the poem exceeds our grasp. What we are left with, rather, is an oracular sense of the ambiguities and contradictions that attend to poetic composition. Attuned to reversals, chiasms, and paradoxes, Hölderlin refuses to offer any peremptory sense of the art work’s enigmatic design. It is in this spirit that he brings “Mnemosyne” to a close while avoiding the seductive prospect of closure. Instead we are left with a final gnome worthy of the oracle at Delphi. Before offering some closing thoughts on this let us situate it in terms of the last five lines of the poem.

6. Mourning in Default

Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne” comes to us as a hymn dedicated to the craft and practice of poetry as a form of sacred mourning—which means both mourning for the loss of the sacred on this earth and mourning as ethical engagement with the conditions of our shared life. Such a mourning focuses not merely on our own historical moment, but on the whole tradition that forms the fabric of our historical life. For Hölderlin, that means confronting the aporias that define us as those creatures caught between the monstrousness of the coupling of the divine/mortal and the wrath that attends to their separation. What does mourning signify, then? Perhaps we need to recognize here how powerfully ethical experience involves an awareness of limits, of renouncing the aorgic yearning for the unbounded, as verse 13 reminds us.

As he brings his hymn to a close, Hölderlin offers some hints about a proper ethical comportment toward mourning for the dead. In a complex image the poet writes how “das abendliche [sic] nachher löste/Die Loken.”/”soon after did Evening unloose/her locks of hair” (vv. 47–48) (MA I, p. 438). This can be read in chiastic ways. As a symbol of erotic yearning for union, it refers to Hesiod’s description of Zeus’ “desire for beautiful-haired Mnemosyne” (Hesiod 2006, p. 77). At the same time this allusion connects back to Sophocles’ tragic account of Ajax, who dies on foreign soil, far from his native Salamis. Unlike so many of the Greek warriors who died away from home and whose bodies were cremated, Ajax is given a burial site. His wife, Tecmessa, his son Eurysaces, and his half-brother Teucer all cut locks of hair from their own heads and place them on his grave. With this ritual practice of funerary rites, Hölderlin returns us to the crossing of two realms: mourning for the departed Greek heroes and their significance for what he terms “das abendliche,” the land of Evening. The Greek term for “evening,” hesperos, will come to form a critical element in Hölderlin’s Geschichtsphilosophie/philosophy of history of the Occident as a passage from south to north across the Alps (cf. “ein Wandersmann”/traveler, verse 32), from fiery Hellas to sober Hesperia.23 In simple terms—and very little here falls under that description—this involves us in both a looking back to the source of our own origins in Hellas, as well as looking ahead towards future possibilities for our Hesperian destiny. One of the final images is of the god laying down his cloak, signaling the end of the gods’ presence on the earth and the onset of the age of night. It is here that the death of the Greek heroes meets the failure of Greek art. If the decline of Greek art signified the forfeiture of the festal joy that once reigned in the Brauttag/hieros gamos/wedding feast of humans and mortals upon the earth, then our task consists of acknowledging the consequences of this tragic event for our own historical moment. The gods have fled; the world’s night is upon us. More than this, we cannot even begin to hear the festive call of the gods’ futural Einkehr/arrival unless we prepare their coming in hymnal song. “Mnemosyne” warns us, however, that mere mourning for the gods—or the Greek heroes—can never occupy the sole place of mourning for our Geschlecht/species. That is, it can never be a mourning about the past as a preterite happening. On the contrary, mourning must occur as a way for the poet to get past his self-indulgent attachment to ancient heroes—“my Achilles died on me” (v. 35)—and address the futural hopes of his native Volk. It is in terms of these concerns that I read the concluding lines of this difficult hymn:

•      Himmlische nemlich sind
•   Unwillig, wenn einer nicht die Seele schonend sich
•   Zusammengenommen, aber er muss doch; dem
•   Gleich fehlet die Trauer./ (MA I, p. 438)
•      For the celestial ones
•   Balk when one has not guarded his soul, not
•   Held himself together, for even so he must; for him,
•   In like manner, Mourning is in default.24

Hölderlin’s final words bespeak the double sense of fehlen—of erring and/or being in default of something. The text relates: for dem, mourning is in default. But for whom? The poet? The Wandersmann? Native Swabians? As I read it, Hölderlin’s cryptic sense of fehlen here involves much the same topoi as in Stanza One’s positioning of the poet’s fate as one caught between yearning for the unbounded and the foreign and the need to preserve our native endowments. Here Hölderlin returns to the same gnome about balance, measure, and preservation. Our proper ethical comportment towards the past, the dead, the gods, heroes, as well as the foreign and the native, demands that we tend to the care of our souls. This is our responsibility, that which we absolutely “must do”/”muss doch” (v. 50). Holding ourselves together means not giving in to the unbounded allure of grief that attends mourning. Such a way of being folds the self back into its own subjectivity and moves us away from the poet’s exhortation that we acknowledge the alterity of the other as our ethical responsibility. Originary ethics is difficult. There are no simple decalogical principles that can absolve us from the incalculably intricate task of deciding how best to live. Memory helps to situate us within this complex congeries of relations. But memory (or mourning) needs to be thought of as part of the process of caring for one’s soul, “die Seele schonend sich zusammengenommen”/”to collect his soul, to spare it” (vv. 49–50, PF: 589). It is this Platonic art of tending to one’s soul that deeply affects Hölderlin’s understanding of his poetic vocation.

At the end of this intricate and inscrutable hymn, Hölderlin returns us to its beginning in order to carry out a circuitous journey of Rückkehr/return as a way of (hopefully) transporting us, through our reading of it, in preparing a new Einkehr der Götter/arrival of the gods. Are we ripe enough, having been dipped in the fire of sorrowful mourning, to bear up under the “load of logs” (Last von Scheitern, v. 7)? Or will we succumb to the shipwreck and failure (Scheitern) of its impossible burden? In his inability to properly mourn his beloved Patroklos, Achilles carries out his own demise.25 Will the poet be able to navigate a different, perhaps more careful path of remembrance and mourning? Ever aware of the continuing danger of errancy, Hölderlin offers no final judgment about how to stay true to the path of our journey and to “preserve” its integral sense of ethical integrity. Mourning is impossible. The loss which we lament is irrecoverable and incalculable. It almost literally “tears” (reisst) us apart. In the face of such tearing, it is our task to hold ourselves together with as much ethical attunement as we can summon. This sense of what Hölderlin calls us to enact in “Mnemosyne” is perhaps best expressed in the “Preface” to Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel writes:

Death… is of all things what is most terrifying, and to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest strength… But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures death and maintains itself within it. Spirit wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment (Zerrissenheit), it finds itself.26

It is the work of remembrance, alive in Hölderlin’s hymn “Mnemosyne,” that attends itself to this task of self-finding in and through the dismemberment that threatens to shatter our lives.