.
Toward wooded Avignon over the Gotthard
Toils the steed. Laurels
Whisper above Vergil, so that
The sun does not
Unmanfully search out his grave.
Moss roses
Wax upon the Alps. Flowers start up
At the city gates, on the level untended paths
Like crystal growth in fallow wastes of the sea floor.
Gardens bloom round Windsor. On high
Arrives from London
The carriage of the King. Lovely gardens
Relieve the season.
By the canal. Deep below however lies
The even sea, glowing.
Schifflände Flüelen: colored aquatint by Hürlimann after a drawing by Gabriel Lory, 1820: image by Adrian Michel, June 2007, from Artur Wyss-Niederer: Sankt-Gotthard
The Hölderlinian correspondences, those sudden connections between ancient and modern scenes and figures, stand in the most profound relationship to the paratactic method. Beissner too noted Hölderlin's tendency to mix eras together, to connect things that are remote and unconnected; the principle of such associations, which is the opposite of the discursive principle, is reminiscent of the serial ordering of grammatical parts. Poetry wrested both from the zone of madness, where the flight of ideas thrives, as does the readiness of many schizophrenics to see anything real as a sign of something hidden, to encumber it with meaning.
-- Theodor Adorno: Parataxis: On Hölderlin's Late Poetry, a talk given at the annual conference of the Hölderlin-Gesellschaft, Berlin, 7 June 1963; revised version first published in Die Neue Rundschau, 1964; translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen in Theodor Adorno: Notes to Literature, Volume Two, 1992
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