The View
When into the distance passes the dwelling life of people, Where into the distance glimmers the time of the vines, Comes also the empty fields of summer,
And the forest with its dark image appears.That nature completes the image of the seasons,
That nature stays, as the seasons glide along in haste, Is from fulfillment; then high heaven gleams
Upon the people, as trees are wreathed with blooms.
According to Heidegger, this poem is Hölderlin’s final gift to us:
It opens to those who hear a view into the being Dasein of the poet, who speaks from out of the silent brightness of the dark night of his spirit that has come to rest.
The poem is a lasting gift wherein the poet’s glimpse of the essence shelters in the simple word the “whole meaning” of everything that appears, in order to entrust it to our language as “the view” for all who see. (208)
The first stanza speaks to the temporality of Nature itself wherein and whereby all things, including ourselves, sojourn. The second stanza brings his fundamental message home: “That nature stays, as the seasons glide along in haste.”
All that is given comes and goes, arrives and departs, but the giving itself (Nature, Being) “stays,” that is, remains one, whole, simple, complete.
All things flow from out of “fulfill- ment” (Nature-physis), and from out of Nature (“high heaven”) there “gleams,” there pours forth, upon us, “people dwelling,” a wholesomeness that makes us whole and brings us into the fullness of our essencing.
For the later Heidegger especially, the gleaming, glistening, glimmering, glittering, glowing that is the manifestness of Being to humans – the phos at the very core of phainesthai – calls forth from us wonder and astonishment and great joy; brightens, lightens, and opens us; inclines our thinking towards thanking; and humbles us into recognizing the limit of all our saying, language, meaning – or as the poet expressed this, cited so approvingly by Heidegger at the close of his commentary:
Yet so very simple the images, so very holy these, that one is really often fearful of describing these.
From Richard M Capobianco, Heidegger's Way of Being, Chapter 2. 'On Hölderlin On “Nature’s Gleaming”'.