see nor hear nor sense the surge of the waves in the sea. The struggle with ourselves, however, in no way means inspecting ourselves and dissecting our soul through some form of curiosity; nor does it mean some sort of remorseful ‘moral’ rebuke; this struggle with ourselves, rather, is a working our way through the poem. For the poem, after all, is not meant to disappear in the sense that we would think up a so-called spiritual content and meaning for the poem, bring it together into some ‘abstract’ truth, and in so doing cast aside the overarching resonance that oscillates in the word. To the contrary: The more powerfully the poetry comes to power, the more the telling of the word prevails in pressing upon us and tearing us away. And when it does so, the poem is no longer a thing lying present before us that can be read and listened to, as it appears initially whenever we regard language as a means of expression and reaching agreement—something that we have, as it were, in the same way that an automobile has its horn. It is not we who have language; rather, language has us, in a certain way.
Everyday things become worn out, blunted, used up, and empty through their being in use. Hölderlin’s poems become more inexhaustible, greater, stranger from year to year—and can nowhere find definitive classification. They still lack their genuine historical and spiritual space. This space cannot come from without; rather, the poems themselves must create this space for themselves. If from here on we are not of a mind to hold out amid the storms of this poetry, then our attempt will indeed remain merely some kind of distraction for the curious.
We require no further extensive remarks to acknowledge that we shall not master Hölderlin’s poetry. All of us together are, in our entire Dasein, too little prepared for such a task, and what is more, we lack all the weapons of thought that are needed for this struggle. What we can provide are barely even tentative directives, the kind of inconspicuous pointing that is meant to vanish again in turn, as soon as what the pointer is meant to indicate has been firmly grasped by our eyes and in our heart. What we bring to the poetry is at best like the scaffolding on the cathedral that is only there in order to be dismantled once again. We shall now attempt anew to approach the poetry of the poem. For this it is necessary for us first to clear up two textual questions.
c) Two Textual Questions
Those who were following the text in our first reading of the poem, if they did not have the von Hellingrath edition, must have noticed two deviations: (1) In strophe V, line 76, von Hellingrath reads: