Homecoming by Friedrich Hölderlin

First published: 1802, as “Heimkunft. An die Verwandten”; English translation collected in Poems and Fragments, 1966

Type of poem: Elegy

The Poem

“Homecoming” is the last of Friedrich Hölderlin’s eight elegies. It consists of six stanzas of eighteen lines each, for a total of fifty-four elegiac distichs. The poem begins with unqualified expressions of joy in the sight and sounds of a world disclosing itself in its pristine relation. It then moves to a somberness still marked by joy but wrought with care: The poet must care, if others cannot, about apprehending the divine source of joyousness and finding names for the High Ones to supersede the outworn terms that have lost the glory of radiant holiness. The naming of God, in the deity’s disclosure of himself, is a participation in creation as a constant reality. The poet, still joyous in his ability to address the higher powers (the great Father and the angels), confronts incipient despair at the apparent impossibility of new efficacious naming.

The first stanza picks up the ambiguity of the poem’s dedication, “An die Verwandten,” which might be dedicating the poem to relatives to whom the poet is returning or simply to like-minded persons whom the poet is addressing. It exhibits creation as gloriously fraught with inherently resolved contradictions: bright night under a cloud; a cloud in the act of composing the poetic lines that the poet is composing about the cloud; a gähnende valley (a valley that is gaping or yawning as it comes awake and that is swallowing—presumably swallowing the night covered by the cloud in infantile self-sustenance). The stanza begins, “There inside the Alps it is still bright night, and the cloud, composing/ Joyousness, covers it within the yawning valley.” The darkness is bright within a yawning (deep) valley that is waking with a yawn and gapingly devouring the night, covered by a cloud that is creating, as a writer creates, joyousness. The joyous pangs of beginning then issue from a young-looking, roaring and rushing Chaos, shaking in joyousness and reveling in bacchanalian discord, as dawn, like a newly born universe, moves toward order and temporality.

Above this terrestrial upheaval there is, in the second stanza, a silvery silence in which roses bloom in the snow of the mountain peaks. Above the snow, and above the light itself, dwells the pure, blissfully silent radiance of God dispensing beams of joyousness and perpetually creating life and the accoutrements of happiness. The vision of God is followed in the third stanza by assertions that whatever poets meditate upon or put into poetry is of concern or value to angels and God. Poetry, then, is a joyous acknowledgment of divinity’s constant gift, and it is directed not to recipients but to the agency of donation. The acknowledgment includes, paradoxically, an apostrophe to the poet’s fellow country-dwellers, reminding them that what he is experiencing is theirs to experience, if only through his relation of his vision to the Spirit providing that vision.

The fourth and fifth stanzas elaborate upon the homeland, the clear view or fully subjective experience of which is Spirit’s unfolding itself to the viewer. Specific parts of the German Fatherland are identified by name: Lindau, the Rhine, and the tree-filled valleys of the Neckar. Here the note of care enters into the poet’s joy at his vision of God, which is a full and clear experience of universal reality’s unfolding itself to him. The poet senses that the unfolding is in process but that the process will not be completed. To this sense of incompletion is added his care that his compatriots, who feel the joy of their homeland do not know that they feel it. Consequently they do not fulfill the provisions of their destiny. The best thing, the discovery—actually the recovery—under the holy rainbow of peace, of their native truth, is reserved from—or reserved for and yet kept from—the young and the old.

The conclusion of the fifth stanza moves into the beginning of the sixth as an invocation of the angels. The elegy concludes with the recognition that deity must be named: The outworn names have become names of names, mere words, and the poet must—but knows that he cannot—name afresh the divinity that constantly creates afresh and must always be named afresh.

Forms and Devices

Hölderlin applies the literary devices of ambiguity and paradox to an inversion of the biblical experience of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. Saul, leaving his home, was blinded by the divine light and was changed by his audience with God into Paul, God’s emissary to those whom he must persuade to eschew their earthly homes. The poet in “Homecoming” is enlightened by the darkness and is restored by his audience with God to appreciation of the joys of his homeland at the same time that he is tentatively saddened by the impossibility of relating this vision and its significance to those whom he must nonetheless encourage to fulfill themselves in their earthly homes.

Inversion is also extended to the effective use of indirection—that is, achieving a goal by distancing oneself from it. Hölderlin’s poet is seeing his home not as he had seen it while he lived there but in an entirely fresh Chaos of joyousness occasioned by his having been away from it. This achievement through indirection is analogous to the experiences of other characters in literature: Odysseus gets home by being kept away from it, Parzival finds the Grail by departing from the castle in which it is housed, Dante gets to the Blissful Mountain by going through the Inferno, Franz Kafka’s K gets closer to the Castle when he is moving away from it than he does by heading straight for it, and Pär Lagerkvist’s Tobias sustains his pilgrimage to the Holy Land by choosing to sail on a pirate ship going in a direction opposite to that of a Pilgrim ship.

Even the development of reference and allusion entails an inverseness that informs readers by disorienting them. The first stanza, for example, includes both direct references and allusions to Greek and Roman myth. Subsequent stanzas depart from such mythic terms in favor of general references to God, Spirit, and angels, alluding to the passage from classical antiquity to the Judeo-Christian Middle Ages and then to the modern age. However, they invert the Christian movement from earth to heaven so as to posit heaven’s potential disclosure of itself constantly to earth-dwellers who can apprehend heaven within the truth of home. The subjective return to the home is an almost complete removal of the anxieties and uncertainties and uneasiness of human life.

This passage, or progression, is narratively enforced by the cabalistic device of beginning each of the six stanzas with a key word: “Inside” (Drinn), “Quiet” (Ruhig), “Much” (Vieles), “Definitely” (Freilich), “There” (Dort), and “Angels” (Engel). This succession provides a sense that there is great restfulness within oneself and that there are certainly angels outside oneself. The body of the poem intones the potentiality of the angels’ provision of this great peace.