Friedrich Hölderlin
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Hoelderlin // poet's sacrifice Rachel
"oh friend, we arrived too late." "Bread and Wine Part 7",
R&B Shop, p12.
Have you ever wanted to live in another time? A time when people lived "like the
ancients, strong/enough for water[?]" This poem takes me to a lonely place,
a place where I look around and see that everything I have been waiting for is slipping
away. It is becoming harder and harder to carry the divine, unless in sleep or
insanity. The book Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper is all about the loss of beauty
from the world. We stop looking for it and we stop seeing it and we don't care to
believe in faeries anymore. It is similar to the feeling I get from this poem, that
"The divine energies/ Are still alive, but isolated above us, in the archetypal/
world." At the end of the book, Beauty (a character, and the chosen one to
keep beauty) is not unlike Noah, taking two of every animal and plant and everything
beautiful with her into her castle. So that as the world industrializes and
economizes and forgets the water we were all once strong enough to carry, there still
exists a piece of the enchantment and beauty that was. It isn't lost, but waiting.
"We waste our whole lives waiting" but perhaps this isn't so bad.
It seems as though one drop of water makes up for all the years of parched
parchment. I might not always be, but today I am willing to wait for thunderstorms,
for the moments of living that night dreams of, for craziness and sleep. How we give
up when the wait leads us to morsels that fill our mouth: "What is living
now? Night dreams of them." "In thunderstorms it will arrive.
I have the feeling often." And it is not only that these words play
and reverberate, but that "it" DOES arrive in thunderstorms. I was going
to try to pick one word, or one phrase to write about, but this poem takes me up and down
and sideways with the playfulness and strength and lacey-ness of the words, and I can't
pick just one. It takes me back to "Magic Words"; maybe the earlier time
described in "Magic Words" is the time Hoelderlin talks about being too late
for. I think everyone is fascinated by earlier times. Most people could probably
tell you the century or decade they think they would have been happiest growing up in.
When I was younger I remember talking with a few friends about how we must've been
accidentally displaced a hundred years or so. But now I suppose that we live when we
live for a reason, if nothing else than that our ideas might enhance these "too
late" times. Is this the sacrifice Hoelderlin talks about? that we
must live in dry times, waiting, waiting for rain? ("In thunderstorms it will
arrive.") He talks about this waiting as if it is a waste; he mourns the
scarcity of the divine. But is the divine really scarce? or are we waiting for
strength so we can tackle the abundance of it? And I wonder if there is not power in
the waiting. If the waiting is our sacrifice, it must be a necessary one. It
is the poet's cleansing and purification, until craziness or sleep lets her see the Wild
One.
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Holderlin // Divine??? Anne
I really liked the poem, "Bread and Wine" by the German poet/novelist Friedrich Holderlin, found on page 12 in Rag and Bone Shop. After looking at this thorough website, http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/2967/Holderlin.html, dedicated to Holderlin's work, I discovered some biographical information on the poet and found common themes in his poems. Holderlin was Born March 20, 1770 in Lauffen, Germany. His own father died when he was two, and then his step-father died as well. Holderlin attended convent schools and later studied theology. According to the website's bio, Holderlin was deemed the "master of German literature." He believed that "art reveals the nature of reality" which was a preview to the Romanticism movement. He also felt the artist is a mediator between gods and humans. It is the artist's job to transmit messages back and forth between the two.
The poem below was found on the website, but I did not see a title of it. The poem below has similar characteristics of "Bread and Wine" (Holderlin, Rag and Bone Shop, pg. 12). Both poems mention the "divine" as something desired, something to share with people, something that is hard to find or always out of reach. Both poems talk about the frustrations of being human, of being trapped on earth, unable to connect to the divine. Below, Holderlin writes:
"With our own hand to grasp the Father's lightening-flash
And to pass on, wrapped in song,
In this sense, the "divine" is poems/messages from God, which poets pass on to humanity. The poems are messages of the divine represented in the lines of poems.
In "Bread and Wine," the speaker and his friend are searching for the "divine" as well. "Oh friend, we arrived too late. The divine energies are still alive, but isolated above us, in the archetypal world" (Holderlin, Rag and Bone Shop, pg. 12). The author is too late, the "divine" is too far above them. (One definition of archetypal is: the world as it existed or an idea of God before the creation).
Once again, the "divine" is represented as something above humans in the realm of God. The "divine" is the inspiration to write poems, which are messages of God. Later in the poem: "Human beings can carry the divine only sometimes." This line reminds me that inspiration is hard to find, we cannot always be creative. Holderlin is talking about the struggle of trying to hear God's message, the struggle to find his creativity to write poems in order to transmit God's message to the people. "Divine" is used to throughout "Bread and Wine," and the word is not capitalized. If it were capitalized, I would surely see it as representing God.
Does anyone see "divine" as something to do with poetic inspiration, a message from God ....etc. ???
"Though he has to earn a living,
Man dwells poetically on this earth."
"Yet it behoves us, under the storms of God,
"But, friends, we have come too late! The gods are, indeed, alive,
"Perhaps some of the wisdom to sputter and of being
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/2967/Holderlin.html
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Holderlin // What is lost Kevin
What does it all mean? This poem has confused me more than any other poem we have read so far, save the lace curtain. The first couple lines The divine energies// are still alive, but isolated above us, in the archetypal// world. (Holderlin, Rag and Bone, 12) remind me very much of the Platonic Dualism, the separation between the real world and the world of ideas. Plato philosophized that there are two realms, one which houses all the ideal things. The ideal tree, the ideal bowler hat, stuff like that, and that it exists somewhere above us in the sky. The other world, the real world, the one we live in, is full of representations of the things in the ideal world. So the trees we look at are merely imperfect replicas of the ideal tree. This idea reappears later when it is said, "Human Beings can carry the divine only sometimes" Very rarely can people see into the realm of ideas. Holderlin might be trying to say that through the medium of art, especially poem, people can become connected to the divine, to that realm of ideas. The last several lines would certainly lead us to believe so, although Holderlin seems to not work so much with the Platonic idea, but with the idea of a divine entity that dwells in his higher existence. The poet is the link to that divine idea that has been lost in todays world.
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Hoelderlin // Just us BRAINS Adam
I hereby postulate a preposterous interpretation of Hoelderlin’s "Bread and Wine" part 7. "Oh friend, we arrived too late." "We" in this sense is the poet and the poet, in other words, yes, Hoelderlin is talking to himself. He is too late to partake in the "divine energies" because he is isolated. The irony is that he is isolated from these energies precisely because he is capable of talking to himself, that is conscious. We, in this sense, would always arrive too late, because the existence of We (mental two-ness) destroys communion with those energies. In other words, humans by nature are separated from divinity/(wildness ?). (*** please note: I think this is entirely bullshit, and I can back it up, but won’t do so here.)
We can carry the divine "only sometimes", and when is that? At night, in our dreams, when we are only the subconscious again, when we are not divided.
It is sad to note the vast majority of these wildness poems speak of a loss. We have lost our wildness. It is sadder to note that many of them attribute the cause of this loss to being human. It is heartening to see that some of them say we can regain our wildness, and that that is desirable. This poem speaks of wildness as a "Guest" who comes seldom, that we must wait for, that we must be toughened up for, that we may not be strong enough for.
Poets are magical to him…"Who used to stroll over the fields through the whole/ divine night." "Whole" here means complete, the poet could complete the human and bind the human with the divine (the divine in my reading being nature). This process of completion, this binding, is achieved by transcribing the unconscious and making ourselves coherent and unified. Preposterous.
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