The Subject of Inversion: Hölderlin’s “Wie wenn am Feiertage …”

Composed just before 1800, Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Wie wenn am Feiertage …” represents an early experiment in a style that would achieve its fullest expression in the poet’s so-called “late hymns.”¹ Formally and thematically, it is modeled on Pindar’s odes, and offers an extended meditation on the vocation of the poet and the process of poetic inspiration (Begeisterung). For these reasons, “Wie wenn am Feiertage …” is one of Hölderlin’s best-known poems. The fact that it remains a fragment, however, has also made it one of the poet’s most controversial texts. Early editions present the hymn as a unified whole, but a glimpse at the manuscript of the Stuttgarterfoliobuch reveals a palimpsest of revisions comprising two separate variants: an initial prose draft and an incomplete metrical version. In keeping with its Pindaric model, the metrical version would have been composed of nine strophes, but breaks off in the middle of the eighth.² The prose draft contains the lines that would have formed the conclusion of the hymn, but these verses trail off as well. In addition to remaining formally incomplete, the fragmentary conclusion leaves a number of thematic questions unresolved: while the hymn begins by affirming the role of the poet as a mediator between the divine and the community, its fragmentary concluding strophes are more tenuous, offering a radically divergent image of the poet. Instead of being able to convey the “holy,” the poet is “cast down” into darkness—a “punishment” reflected in the faltering of the poem itself. For a poem about the vocation of the poet, the indeterminate conclusion of “Wie wenn am Feiertage …” thus takes on a particular critical urgency. What causes the poem to stumble at the end, and what does this say about the fate of the poet?

With its fragmentary conclusion, Hölderlin’s hymn has come to exemplify some of the formal, textual, and material difficulties surrounding the editorial presentation and critical interpretation of the poet’s work. Since the poem exists in multiple drafts and fragments, it is impossible to point to a definitive version, and the fragile, indeterminate nature of the text demands special philological attention.³ Philological and editorial efforts notwithstanding, how is a reader to deal with the indeterminacy of this text, especially when faced with having to decide among several versions, each with its own interpretative possibilities? What weight (if any) should be given the text’s material conditions, its placement on the page or its situation within the manuscript? Should the alternate versions serve as the basis for resolving formal, semantic, or syntactic ambiguities in one or more drafts? And if the poem cannot be treated as a coherent whole, on what basis (if any) is interpretation possible?

Without seeking to re-open these debates, I propose that the conclusion of Hölderlin’s hymn exposes a conflict already at work in the language of the poem throughout. As a poem about the poet’s vocation, “Wie wenn am Feiertage …” incorporates a number of conventional figures for poetic inspiration. Where an earlier poetic tradition might associate such figures with the rhetorical effects of heightened expression, Hölderlin’s poem calls into question the “subjective” mode of lyric such figures imply. Rather than serving as the formal equivalent of “inspired speech,” these conventional poetic devices work to unsettle the very idea of a lyric subject. No doubt something of this order contributes to the impasse of the hymn’s conclusion. However, “Wie wenn am Feiertage …” might also be seen as a formal experiment in a different mode of lyric expressivity, one that eventually leads to the mature style of the so-called “late” hymns. From this perspective, “Wie wenn am Feiertage …” reflects on the inherent travails of the poetic process for which Begeisterung serves not only as the source of inspiration—but also its limit.

For a poem that takes the process of poetic inspiration as its explicit theme, figures of inspiration are over-determined from the start. Through the extended metaphor of a passing thunderstorm, the opening...