  Thus, for example, just as the original “jet” of water “falls” into the fountain’s successive basins, so the “overflowing” ontological riches concealed in the ancient world were first diminished in the medieval world. “The Origin of the Work of Art” make the contentious case that this ontological diminution “begins” when concepts central to the ancient Greek understanding of being get translated into Latin without a full experience of what those concepts originally revealed (PLT 23/GA5 8). Hence the obvious appeal for Heidegger of Meyer’s suggestive line: “Veiling itself, this [first basin] overflows / Into a second basin’s ground” (PLT 37/GA5 23). What remained of these ontological “riches” in the medieval world was then transposed into and reduced further in the modern epoch which, like the fountain’s third basin, stands at the furthest remove from its original source. It thus seems clear that Heidegger included Meyer’s poem because he believed it suggestively illuminated the way the history of being unfolds as an epochal history of decline, a “fall” which results from this history’s increasing forgetting of the source from which it ultimately springs—the Ur-sprung or “origin” of Heidegger’s essay’s title—in a word: “Being” (Sein), Heidegger’s famous name for the source from which all historical intelligibility originates (by way of the disclosive “naming-into-being” which Heidegger understands as the “poetic” essence of art, as we will see in the next section). In other words, Heidegger uses Meyer’s poem to allude to the broader philosophical context that helps explain and motivate the new historical beginning he hopes art will help us inaugurate. Heidegger’s use of this particular poem suggests, moreover, that in order to accomplish this “other beginning,” Western humanity needs to learn to tap back into that original, ontological source (the overflowing “jet” of being), and that such a reconnection with the source of historical intelligibility is something art can still teach us. (Although interpreters also overlook this, the quiet presence of a homophonous “third reich” in Meyer’s poem reminds us of the deeply-troubling dimension of Heidegger’s thinking in the mid-1930s, the fact that his philosophical hopes for the future were for a brief time deeply entwined with his idiosyncratic understanding of the direction that the burgeoning National Socialist “revolution” might yet  take.)[37]