Make It Quick, You're Holderlin Up the Line

After Jared suggested looking into him, Holderlin's been occupying my brain of late. One of the poems I like best is as follows:


The Ages of Life

You cities of Euphrates,
You streets at Palmyra,
You forests of pillars in the desert plain,
What are you?
Your crests, as you passed beyond
The bounds of those who breathe,
By smoke of heavenly powers and
By fire were taken away;
But now I sit beneath the clouds, in which
Peculiar quiet comes to each one, beneath
A pleasing order of oak trees, on
The heath where the roe-deer feed, and strange
To me, remote and dead seem
The souls of the blessed.


For some reason it felt very light to me at first, and still feels light on some level, which is odd given the flashes of dark content (that last phrase didn't really register with all its bizarre bleakness/negation until I'd read the poem several times). And even now after reading it I'm left feeling like I've just participated in some ethereal meditation while watching a city or two get hit with a wrecking ball. Maybe the metaphysics lends a buffering distance, I don't know... I find this especially cool considering this was written right around 1800, pre-a lot of stuff. Also, the enjambment here in Hamburger's translation is no more radical than that of the German
original, at least as far as I can tell. I remember Donald Justice crediting Pound with inventing free verse somewhere around 1909 (although he might've noted something special about Pound's free moment that I've since forgotten), but it seems I often come across earlier writers marching to the beat of a free jazz drummer, at least temporarily. Of course, often those instances are in fact the fragments and failures of writers who are becoming increasingly insane, but I take what I can get. Other moments in the Holderlin book are also very interesting and enjoyable, like this one, from a poem bearing the title "Colombo":

... For action, to gain is
The most amiable thing
Of all

Indigenous dwelling and order, thoroughly compact,
To learn sparse beauty and figures
Burnt into sand
Out of night and fire, full of images, telescope
Polished until it's true, high expertise, that is, for life
To question the sky.


Then later in the same poem:


... The terrestrial orb, Greek, childlike in shape
By force under my eyes
Lulling to sleep, like the spirit of poppies compressed
Appeared to me

That is wholly you in your beauty apocalyptica.


(That last line was Friedrich, not me. Unfortunately.)