to be poetized, brings the dwelling of historical human beings into its essence. The poet of such poetizing therefore necessarily stands between human beings and gods. He is no longer merely a human being. Yet for the same reason he is not. indeed never is, a god. From the perspective of this "between" between humans and gods, the poet is a "demigod." If Hölderlin poetizes the essence of the poet, he must think the essence of the demigod. And he poetizes the essence of the poet in order to find the "poetic" in whose essence the truth of the dwelling of human beings as historical is grounded. Such dwelling springs from a becoming homely in being unhomely, from the journeying of locality. The "poetic" is spirit and the essence of the rivers. The poet of the poetic is the demigod. Hölderlin dearly perceives these relations in the simplicity of their essential completeness and tells of them in the most complete of the river songs. in the hymn "The Rhine." The inner hinge on which the articulation of this poetic work turns is the tenth strophe (IV, 176f.). It begins:
Halbgötter denk' ich jezt
Und kennen muss ich die Theuern.
Weil oft ihr Leben so
Die sehnende Brust mir beweget.
Demigods I think now
And these dear ones I must know,
For often does their life
So move my longing breast.
"Demigods I think now," namely now that I think the Rhine and the spirit of its river. And this spirit Hölderlin thinks "now," that is, at that time when he must say. "Now day breaks! ... may the holy be my word" ("As when on Feastday ...." IV. 151). The insight that the beginning of the tenth strophe is the inner hinge on which the Rhine hymn turns belongs among the very first preconditions for understanding this poetic work of his. By the demigods Hölderlin does not mean Rousseau, who is mentioned in the same strophe. but rather the rivers: the "most noble" of them is the Rhine itself. which is already explicitly named the "demigod" in line 31 at the end of the second strophe. (Cf. the Hölderlin lecture course of winter semester 1934/35: Gesamtausgabe. vol. 39. p. 183ff. and p. 201ff.) Compare "Bread and Wine." fifth strophe. lines 73f.: "And humans shy away from them <the heavenly>, a demigod scarcely knows how to say who they are by name ..." (IV. 1 22). The "demigod" is here thought of solely with respect to the naming of the gods and to the poet's telling naming.
The rivers are demigods. "The rivers" does not refer to all rivers in general, nor to a few arbitrary rivers. "The rivers." in the sense poetized