130 | IV. Interpretation and the Poet
inception abides as the clearing in-the-midst of the de-cision, as the sustaining in the balance of any assignment of the gods into divinity, of humans into humanity, of earth and of world to their essential unfolding.
The holy and beyng are, experienced and thought-ahead, names for the other inception. They cannot be displaced back into the history of metaphysics or into the first inception (φύσις) that precedes all philo-sophy. The holy and beyng name the most proper history of the other inception.
Because he ultimately encountered inception (calling it, in “As When on a Holiday . . .” and for some time after, “nature,” and then the “holy,” and then generally naming it only indirectly), Hölderlin’s word arises from that which, thinking-ahead into the history of being, must be creatively said as appropriative event and thought as the in-between, from whose time-space all beings and their fundamental configuration come to issue. But Hölderlin still does not think this in-between as a developed concept. The intimation of the holy experiences the abandonment of the “earth” by the “world,” and the distance of the gods, and the straying of the human. But this abandonment is not recognized as the abandonment of beings from beyng, and beyng is not thought as relinquishment, and the relinquishing is not thought as rejection. So, therefore, there lurks around the poetry of Hölderlin’s Hymns a danger, one that exceeds in an essential way all the usual and nonetheless expected misapplication of his word in everyday accounting: that the vaunted words are construed metaphysically and then, with the aid of Rilke’s poetry, subsequently situated in a domain in which Hölderlin’s poetry is never to be sought, because it has overcome it from the ground up. But because something unusual is sensed, and an unsaid depth intimated, it is easy to believe that one might find help in metaphysics (Schelling—Hegel).—But at the same time it is hasty to think Hölderlin’s poetry back into the history of beyng.
Should this interpretation, which is the creative thinking of beyng in thinking after the poeticized, that is, the holy, remain an error, then Hölderlin, too, would have to be included in metaphysics. Then the other inception, the essential unfolding of beyng itself, would be creatively thought, without preparation, purely from out of incipience. Then the crossing would be still more abyssal, and the end