Paratactic Composition in Hölderlin's "Hälfte des Lebens"

Hölderlin's later hymns are typically understood as the poet's attempt to tether his poetic word to the "narrative rhythms" of a world-historical Spirit as it unfolds along a path of epiphanies from Asia, to Greece, and finally to Hesperia. "Hälfte des Lebens," the most famous of his "Nachtgesänge," is often treated as an anomaly against the backdrop of these monumental poems. By focusing on the figure of parataxis in that poem we may witness how the text enacts what may be understood as a process of "resistance" to the very narrative project to which the hymns appear to be dedicated. The formal texture of the poem, the imagist sensibility underlying it, contains elements which shall continue to subvert the soteriological shape of the hymns from within and push them in the direction of their fragmentary revisions.