PATMOS

For the Landgrave of Homburg

first version

(1802)

  

  So near, so elusive,

The god! And yet, where

Danger is, there grows also

That which saves.

In the dark dwell the eagles.

And fearless, on flimsy bridges,

The sons of the Alps

Traverse the torrential abyss.

Here, heaped up all around, stand

The summits of time, and friends dearly loved

Are in trouble, close by. But

On quite separate slopes.

So, now: give us chaste water.

And wings – O, give us wings! – for the high soaring

Loyalty needed to flit over chasms.

  

  So I was praying – when,

With astonishing speed,

A Genius swept me

Up and away, further from home than I’d

Ever before thought to go. In the twilight,

As I shot past, there glimmered

The shadowy woods

And the fierce yearning streams

Of my childhood; places I no longer knew.

Soon, though, fresh and radiant,

In the mysterious

Aureate haze,

With stride after stride of

The sun, suddenly looming, land

Of a thousand sweet-scented peaks,

  

  There, dazzling, before me, bloomed Asia.

And I – as a stranger, and map-less,

Amidst those great roadways

Where golden-flecked Paktolos

Flows down from Tmolus, and

Taurus stands, and Messogis,

And gardens, quiet cauldrons of flowers –

I sought for landmarks. And saw,

Shining, in the thin air, silver snow; and,

Witness to life everlasting, on

Lost crag-top walls,

Age-old ivy; and cedars and laurels,

Live pillars, upholding

The glorious

God-crafted gateways and towers.

  

  Many, indeed, are the murmuring,

Watery roads to Asia’s gates,

Criss-crossing a glitter

Of sea. Not that

The boatman is lost; he knows his islands.

But, when I heard that, amongst those

Near at hand, one

Was Patmos,

I instantly wished,

As a pilgrim, to land there

And see the dark grotto.

For, lacking sweet springs

Such as Cyprus, say, has,

Patmos, alas,

Is arid and poor,

  

  Yet is a place

Of open-doored

Homeliness.

So, when a stranger appears,

Perhaps shipwrecked, or exiled,

Maybe newly bereaved, she warmly

Bids them come in. And her children, the voices

Which fill the shimmering grove,

Where the sand falls, where the soil

Cracks apart, those sounds, the spirits,

They hear him, and tenderly

Add their lament. As, once, she

Made welcome that seer, the belovéd

Disciple, who in his youth

  

  Had walked arm in arm

With the thunderous Son of the Most High.

Chosen because he was guileless,

And sharp-eyed. He who, not least, had so closely

Observed that look on the face of the god

When, sat together at dinner, they’d shared

In the rites of the vine, and, serenely aware

Of what was to come, the ever-magnanimous Lord

Spoke of death, in fulfilment of love. Always in search,

As He was, of fresh means to communicate

Kindness, and soothe, where He saw it,

The rage of the world. For, all shall be well.

Then He died. Much, indeed, might be said

About this. And at the end the friends

Saw Him gaze, jubilant, upwards in triumph,

  

  Yet they were sad, now that

Dusk was upon them, and greatly

Perturbed, for, though their callings were weighty indeed,

Still, under the sun, these men were lovers of life.

Nor could they bear to be wrenched from

The Lord’s earthly countenance, and

From their homeland. Their souls

Were a passage of fire into iron; they walked

With His shadow always beside them.

And, therefore, He sent them

The Spirit. Whereupon, the house shook,

As, with menacing rumbles, God’s weather

Rolled in, and, deep in thought,

With heads bowed, they gathered together,

The heroes, in anticipation

  

  Of death. Even as He, now,

Having made His final, post-mortem farewells,

Majestically put out

The sun. Snapped asunder the straight beam,

The sceptre of grace. Still, sovereign. But

Sorrowful: biding His time, before

All is renewed. For it would have been

Wrong, at a stroke, to cut short the work

Of the church. And, henceforth, what

Joy to dwell in love’s darkness,

Dispensing due insights

To deep-probing eyes!

Truly, there’s plenty, even

Low down on the slopes,

To enliven the soul.

  

  And yet, it is dreadful, this

Habit of God’s, to scatter us creatures apart.

For they’d made double sure

Of the heavenly Spirit’s decree,

They well knew that they each had their own

Lonely roads they must go,

Out there in the world.

They were ready for that. But truly, it shocked them,

For a moment their hair stood on end, when,

As He hastened away, the god, of a sudden,

Glanced back one last time.

And they, yearning to keep Him,

Now that they knew what real loss was,

Reached out their hands to each other,

And vowed golden vows, like so many rope-knots –

  

  Yet, when He dies,

Round Whose beauty,

Beyond all compare, the angels

Had gleefully spun; when those once united

By what they remembered

Now shrink back apart, forgetting

Forever, it seems, what proper

Communion means; when it’s not the sand

Only, not only the willows, the wind whips away,

But also, the temples are lost;

When the Demi-God’s honour dissolves,

And that of His friends; when the Highest

Himself turns aside from this world;

When no further Immortal

Appears, either up in the skies

Or down on the fertile earth: what is this?

  

  It’s the Winnower’s cast, when he scoops up

The wheat with His shovel

And flings it out, clear, swinging it over the floor.

The husk falls at His feet, but the grain

Is released and flies free.

And whilst, as time passes,

The echoing voice will

Grow fainter – well, never mind!

God’s work, just like ours, must advance

By degrees. And, meanwhile,

The pit bears its iron,

And Etna its red-hot spewings.

So, I should have plenty

To work with, to make me an image

Of Christ, as he was, here on earth.

  

  Yet – in case, now, a tempter should come

And catch me off guard, as we walked on the road,

With sorrowful words,

So that, slave as I am, I was in this

Goaded to blasphemous folly –

Let me promptly confess: all I, with these eyes, ever saw

Was a vision of wrath. I have nothing to boast of; but have

Simply been warned. What heaven abhors

Is pretension. And, then, the consequent

Loss, amongst human kind, of true human-kindness.

For, it’s not we, not we mortals, who rule,

But we're subject to fate. Which moves,

Of its own accord, swift to its end. Yes, and when,

Through the clouds, the Saviour descends

In triumphal procession, rejoicing, then

They’ll acclaim Him, the strong ones, they’ll name Him

  

  The Sun-God. Oh, and let’s also

Join in, with our songs, and beckon him down!

For nothing’s too humble. Come that day, He’ll

Awaken the dead; all whom corruption will spare.

And, amongst those alive, there’s no lack

Of eyes waiting; still craving His gentle light.

Petals curled up, out of the glare, now.

Like mettlesome steeds,

God holds many in check.

But when (as it were) their gaze

Becomes shadowed by thought,

Un-distracted, graced by, and reflecting,

The Scriptures’ luminous peace,

They may be glad of the chance,

Thereby given, to thrive.

  

  And if, as I hope, Heaven

Looks with some favour on me,

How much more so, surely, O Landgrave,

On you! For, are you not known

As one who fears God? Even now:

These drab days. Yet, though the skies

Are tight shut, still the watchman

Remains. Christ sticks to His post.

He has inspired, His children have done, so much

That’s heroic; so many books have been written about Him;

Such events we have seen in the world, lightning bolts

All around us. An unstoppable tumult. But,

Still, He is there. For, from the outset

He knew what His chosen course meant.

  

  And we’ve waited too long. For far too long now

The heavenly glory’s been veiled. And our fingers

So clumsy, they have to be

Guided. Our hearts,

Ignominiously, pawned.

Every aspect of truth demands to be

Honoured; if any’s neglected,

It’s always a mischief.

Mother Earth we have served,

And, lately, Enlightenment also.

Albeit, naively. But what above all

The sovereign Highest requires

Is, simply, a love for solid tradition. Plus

Proper care in reading the signs of the times.

German poets, let’s stick to the task!

  

  

Hölderlin is a Christian thinker who seeks to combine a maximum loyalty to the church as a surviving matrix of folk-religious tradition with a maximum critical sensitivity to the all too natural failings of the church as a power-institution. In Patmos, accordingly, he sets out to survey church history in providential terms, as a communal learning process.

The work is dedicated to the Landgrave Friedrich of Hessen-Homburg, a devout Lutheran, the author of several polemical tracts against Enlightenment irreligion and Jacobin subversion. In the penultimate strophe the Landgrave is directly addressed. He had in fact sought to commission a poem, in celebration of traditional religious values, from the great Klopstock; but Klopstock felt himself to be too old for the undertaking. And so Hölderlin’s friend Sinclair, as a courtier of the Landgrave, had arranged for the commission to be transferred. The resultant work was presented to the Landgrave on his birthday, in January 1803.

Although the Landgrave professed himself to be deeply moved, he must also have been somewhat taken aback! For the work remains, not least in theological terms, distinctly idiosyncratic: with its stress on the necessary, paradoxically purgative God-forsakenness of the church itself; and its striking expression of anxiety with regard to the dangers of poetic idolatry. The Landgrave, as an upholder of actually existing Christian folk-religion, represented an affirmation of just one of the two fundamental principles Hölderlin is intent on reconciling. Hölderlin’s theological idiosyncrasies, on the other hand, spring from the counter-pressure of the other principle.

Strophe 1: ‘the god’ – i. e. the one true god. But the use of the definite article here immediately serves to awaken the question, how we are to recognise this god, as distinct from all the other more or less idolatrous simulacra, also called ‘God’. He is ‘near’: no great theoretical sophistication is required to approach him. But, at the same time, nevertheless ‘elusive’: endlessly liable to be misidentified in actual practice; by a distorted will. And the ‘danger’ in question, surely, consists in this elusiveness; which the poem as a whole is going to build a narrative around.

  Strophe 2: compare for instance Ezekiel 8: 3, where the prophet is likewise swept away.

  Strophe 3: the river Paktolos, in western Anatolia, is famous for its deposits of gold. It flows down from Mount Tmolus, through the ruins of ancient Sardis. Messogis is another Anatolian mountain, just across from the island of Samos. The Taurus range of mountains runs east / west through southern Anatolia.

  Strophe 4: Patmos is the small Aegean island on which John the Divine wrote the book of Revelation; having seemingly been banished there, by Roman imperial authorities intent on suppressing Christian evangelism. See Revelation 1: 9. In what follows, Hölderlin conflates the figure of John the Divine with that of John the Apostle; a quite arbitrary and unlikely assumption in scholarly terms, but normal in his day.

  Strophe 6: note the association of Christ here, as also in Bread and Wine and in The Unique One, with Dionysos, the Greek god of thunder and ‘rites of the vine’. C.f. John 15: 5. Another resemblance to Bread and Wine is the way that Christ’s death inaugurates a whole historic epoch of Night. The disciples (strophe 7) are lovers of life ‘under the sun’; but (strophe 8) he ‘puts out the sun’. In strophes 12—13, anticipating his second coming, he is named ‘the Sun God’. Yet, that new Day remains distant.

The ‘sadness’ of the disciples at the beginning of strophe 7 recalls Luke 24: 13—32: the appearance of the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus. This is also, oddly, counter-posed to the conversation ‘on the road’, with the tempter, the spirit of hubris, in strophe 12. For the coming of the Spirit: c.f. Acts of the Apostles 2.

  Strophe 11: ‘the Winnower’s cast’: c.f. the prophecy delivered by John the Baptist in Matthew 3: 11—12; also, the parable of the sower in Mark 3 – 9.

  Strophe 15: the lines, ‘Mother Earth we have served / And, lately, Enlightenment also’ (in the original, literally, ‘the sunlight’) surely refer (a) to the least intellectual form of folk-religion, essentially dedicated to prayer for fertility, and (b) to that form of religion which is, on the contrary, most exclusively intellectual.