Hermann Hesse

> To you, islands, to you may my guardian god/Lead me! Yet from this faithful heart/Even then the Neckar shall not fade,/Nor the sweet meadows and the willows of its banks. (*“Ode on the Neckar Valley”*, 1801). Thus Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), one of the founders of German Romanticism, sings of Tübingen and its river, the Neckar—to him a cherished realm, an emblem of peace and serenity. Yet Tübingen is also the city where Hölderlin spent the long years of his madness, from 1807 until his death. Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) returns to the great poet in this short story, imagining two young men paying a visit to Hölderlin in 1823. One is the young student Eduard Mörike, residing in Tübingen to study theology and become a Protestant pastor. > To the young man in his twenties, beloved by his friends for the inexhaustible vivacity of his genius, it happened not infrequently, in certain serene moments of happiness, that the entire landscape would suddenly take on the contours of an enchanted painting, upon which he gazed with rapt eyes, sensing the world’s enigmatic beauty as a warning and almost as a subtle, concealed torment. The other is his friend and contemporary Wilhelm Waiblinger: he, too, officially a student of theology, brazenly declares his wish to > flee far from you, predestined race of obese petty priests, (…) rushing into a tavern to drown my soul in beer and wine. (…) What a clown I am, what a mangy egoist and dissolute drunkard! The former embodies purity, diaphanous and cowardly; the latter, dissolution, corrupting yet vital. Mörike (1804–1875) would end up a country vicar, trapped in an intractable conflict between sexuality and spirituality; Waiblinger (1804–1830) would die young in Rome, author of poetry and prose marked by an intense visionary world. The two young men, still oblivious to their own future, go to fetch Hölderlin to guide him to a cloister from which the now-demented poet can contemplate the placid flow of the Neckar. Poetry does not save man, the figure of Hölderlin seems to say to the two youths: > there, now, sat the man with the divine brow and a gaze ever filled with touching purity, the ghost of himself, plunged back into an empty, helpless childhood. And when > the tall, solemn man, led by the hand by his nurse, walks away to return home, the two young men part ways as well, and it will be forever: Mörike, a *slender adolescent* who still believes in poetry, and Waiblinger, determined to gamble his fate. Looming over them is what is perhaps the demented Hölderlin’s last poem: > The pleasant things of this world I have enjoyed. /The time of youthful hours, how long, /oh, how long since lost!/ April and May and July a distant season/withered away./I am no longer anything, no longer do I love life. (Probably written in 1811). The story is Hesse’s tribute to poets who likely contributed to his intellectual formation; as if Montale were to imagine D’Annunzio and Pascoli paying a visit to Carducci. There is also a reflection on Poetry, when Hesse wonders > why were they sitting here so unhappy and cheated, those poets of exaltation, the old man and the young (Hölderlin and Waiblinger), and why did he himself (Mörike), (…) sit beside them so sorrowful and discontented? (…) Was it truly the fate of poets that no sun could shine in their eyes without them having to amass its shadow in their souls? Why read it? Fluent, and a fine introduction to Hesse.