In Heidegger's middle work, polysemic being bursts forth from metaphysics like the baby Dionysus from the ashes of his mortal mother's incendiary ambition to contain the divine (emerging from the ensuing conflagration wrapped protectively in concealing ivy). It is no coincidence that Heidegger appropriates Dionysus's origin myth from Hölderlin in 1935, presenting it as a poetic telling of poetry itself, understood as an explosive yet generative collision between the mortal and the divine, that is, between the time that passes away and the meaning that endures—for a time. This telling figure of poetry itself is also, for Heidegger, a dramatic and revealing "mask" that amplifies and so lets speak "the originary relatedness ... of being and non-being (presence and absence)." Heidegger thus reads this myth as expressing poetry's ecstatic insight into that "primordial unity [ureigenen Einheit]" of the knowable field of temporal-intelligibility and its never entirely knowable source.

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