Hölderlin’s rivers are not symbolic images of a higher level or a deeper religious content.  They are not a placeholder for already familiar existing German essence and life.  Hölderlin’s hymnal poetry after 1799 was not concerned with symbolic images at all.  The end of The Ister says “Yet what that one does, that river, no one knows.”  The river is concealed.  “The Rhine” poem and “The Ister poem” will not share a common “river essence/river in general” though they are both river poems.  Even if we don’t know the Donau river, the discipline of Geography can provide us precise information about it.  Such knowledge is ascertained by geography and knowable through “everyday experiences.”  But, Hölderlin is going to deny that is what a river truly is.

Humans have housing and accommodations on the river, but this doesn’t tell us fully about how the humans dwell.  These dwellings are he asulia, asylums, where life and nature are concentrated and intimate.  The abode is going to have a special locale because it is on the river.  Heidegger notes “The river ‘is’ the locality that pervades the abode of human beings upon the earth, determines them to where they belong and where they are homely (heimish).”  What the humans truly are “is” in relation to the river, and vice versa. 

We are not to approach Hölderlin’s poetry from our habitual way of knowing/representation.  Since Plato, metaphysics means the distinction between what is apprehended by the senses (aistheton) and what is seen by the mind’s eye (noeton).  The noeton are removed from the fleetingness of the senses, and so the house was not, comes into being for a while offering a limited look of houseness, and passes away eventually.  Houseness is constant and does not pass away and so is true being, alethos on.  The house is not nothing, ouk on, but deficient, me on, is in a particular transitoriness and size, material and form. 

The sensuous is the symbolic image, and the idea is the primary image (paradeigma).  All art is usually considered symbolic since it is sensuous, presented in the work such as the resonance of the word or color, stone, clay, etc. Even in realism where we take the river “as” the actual thing and think it does not represent anything else, even here, Platonic metaphysics is still in place because we are thinking the river “as actual,” and so the river “as” what is really real in it – true being, such a framework obviously not belonging to the aistheton but the noeton. Not “something,” but “something ‘as’ something.”

Hölderlin’s river poems are not symbolic placeholders using sense images about rivers that we are already familiar with in their essence, rather Heidegger argues they are a “naming” that first brings the river to its essence.  We might compare how Jesus received the divine name in Philippians 2:9 hymn only after his mission was completed. Hölderlin’s hymnal poetry is not concerned with symbolic images.  The river in the poem is not a symbol or emblem, not the image of something cryptic lurking behind it.  We will need to think symbolic image differently and so too sign and language.