We can determine this landscape accurately with respect to location and time: the poem is referring to the upper Donau valley between Beuron and Gutenstein at the beginning of autumn. So do we have here after all the depiction of a landscape, if not exactly a "realistic" depiction, then at least the portrayal of an "ideal landscape"?
Neither of these hits upon what is poetically true in this strophe. Yet it is not to be denied that the poet is referring to the one, sole, "actual" homely locale by the Donau. The actuality of what is actual here, however, cannot be grasped by our habitual concepts, which is why it is first necessary to think more clearly the essence of the river.
The river is at once locality and journeying in a concealed and originary unity. Such originary unity is different from the kind of unity that comes afterwards, merely unifying whatever is already present at hand by bringing things together. By contrast, originary unity first lets that which is unitary spring forth. yet without it springing free from the ground of this unity.
Are we given any foothold from which we could attain a more secure grasp of the originary unity of locality and journeying? Locality and journeying are here evidently not two items that are simply stuck together; rather, the one belongs to the other. Yet how? Locale and journey belong together like "space and time." For every locale, after all, is a position "in space," and to journey is to follow a sequence of steps. Such succession takes its course in "time." The sequence of "moments," in this case the sequence of individual "now-points," has, after all, from time immemorial been named a "flowing." It is presumably no accident that we speak of the "How of time." Hölderlin himself, in the course of important meditations, speaks of the "time that tears" (V, 178), just as one also speaks of being "torn along" by the "flow." Similarly, he refers to time as "meandering" (ibid., 256). Meandering is here meant as journeying and proceeding, yet also as changing (being taken away). The unity of locality and journeying would therefore have to be traced back to the unity of "space and time." We are "well-traveled" and "well-versed" as this realm. We do not need to refer at great length to the achievements of the technological era or the world picture belonging to it in order to show that we "get the picture" about the "spatio-temporal world," and that, via our calculations and machinery, we have such convincing power over its "spaces" and "times" that the space of our planet is shrinking and the annual seasons and years of human life are being condensed into diminutive numerical values for the purposes of our calculative planning far in advance. We