Poem of the week – The Walk by Friedrich Hölderlin

Friedrich Hölderlin is often considered one of Europe’s greatest lyricists as well as Germany’s most accomplished exponent of literary Romanticism. An important thinker in his own right, Hölderlin was close friends with several of the leading philosophers of his time, including Hegel and Schelling, whom he lived with while studying theology in Wurttemberg. 

A deeply religious and compassionate man, Hölderlin sought to import the characters and themes of Hellenic literature into a familiar bucolic German setting. Greek gods and heroes traverse the arcadian climes of early 19th century Germany in his later verses. By any measurement, Hölderlin was a mystical artist par excellence. His spiralling syntax and sonata-like structures allowed him to comment compellingly on alluringly elusive themes. 

In an age when continental philosophy attempted to explain the mysterious relationship between human minds and the external world, Hölderlin strove to explore the noumenal state of nature that usually swells and stirs beyond our sensory perceptions and intellectual comprehensions. 

The 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger said in a lecture that the modus operandi of aesthetically ambitious poets was the spiritual renovation of the earth in preparation for the return of the Gods. It is a sentiment that echoes an idea succinctly expressed in a single line from a Wallace Stevens poem, where he declares, “there was a time but never a place.” The knowledge of purity, without the experience of it, seems to have been Hölderlin’s supreme compulsion. 

Plagued by madness, Hölderlin was sent to a clinic to treat his peculiarities. The failure to cure Hölderlin of his intrusive visions and eddying bouts of ecstasy and disenchantment forced his family to find a modest lodging for their insane relative. 

He moved to the first floor of a yellow tower in the city of Tübingen, owned by a local carpenter called Ernst Zimmer. Zimmer was one of the few fans Hölderlin fostered in his lifetime. Although doctors at the clinic believed that the ailing poet would only live for three years, Hölderlin resided in Zimmer’s tower for an astonishing thirty-six years.

In this week’s poem, Hölderlin’s distinctive meandering, beguiling passion and worship of nature and the inherent divinity of humankind shine through. We hope you enjoy this week’s selection as much as we did.

The Walk by Friedrich Hölderlin (1807 – 1843)
(Translated by Michael Hamburger)

You wayside woods, well painted

On the green and sloping glade

Where I conduct my footsteps

With lovely quiet repaid

For every thorn in my bosom,

When dark are my mind and heart

Which paid from the beginning 

In grief for thought and art. 

You graceful views in the valley,

For instance garden and tree

And then the footbridge, the narrow,

The stream one can hardly see,

How beautiful, clear from the distance

These glorious pictures shine

Of the landscape I like to visit

When the weather is mild and fine.

The deity kindly escorts us,

At first with unblemished blue,

Later with clouds provided,

Well rounded and grey in hue,

With scorching flashes and rolling

Of thunder, and charm of the fields,

With beauty the bubbling source of

The primal image yields.