The mighty element, the fire of the heavens and the stillness of men, their life in nature, and their confinedness and their contentment, moved me continually, and as one says of heroes, I can well say of myself that Apollo has struck me. (V, 327)
Excessive brightness drove the poet into darkness. Do we need any further testimony in regard to the extreme danger of his "occupation"? The poet's own fate tells us everything. Hölderlin's verse in Empedocles resounds like a premonition:
... He must
Leave on time, through whom the spirit spoke. (Ill, 154)
And yet poetry is the "most innocent of all occupations." So Hölderlin writes in his letter, not only to spare his mother, but because he knows that this harmless exterior belongs to the essence of poetry, just as the valley belongs to the mountain; for how else could this most dangerous work be carried out and preserved, if the poet were not "cast out" (Empedocles, III, 191) of ordinary life and protected from it by the appearance of the harmlessness of his occupation?
Poetry looks like a game and yet it is not. A game does indeed bring men together, but in such a manner that each forgets himself. In poetry, on the contrary, man is gathered upon the ground of his existence. There he comes to rest; not, of course, to the illusory rest of inactivity and emptiness of thought, but to that infinite rest in which all powers and relations are quickened (cf. his letter to his brother, January 1,1799, III, 368f.).
Poetry awakens the illusion of the unreal and of the dream as opposed to the tangible and clamorous actuality in which we believe ourselves to be at home. And yet, on the contrary, what the poet says and undertakes to be is what is truly real. So Panthea, with the clear knowledge of a friend, acknowledges of Empedocles (III, 78):
... To be himself, that is
Life and we others are only the dream of it.