Poetry as Survival

Appendix C: Incarnating Eros

Appendix C: Incarnating Eros I realize that it is impossible for me to raise myself to the altitude of the stars, and that I am forced, therefore, to bring down the stars to my own level and to incorporate them in my own physical universe. DYLAN THOMAS, January 1934 It is not only religion that imagines and images order as being something high above this tormented earth, which seems to be ruled by flux, accident, and ceaselesschange. Philosophy and metaphysics frequently propose orderings based on abstract concepts and principles that are said to exist outside our changeable, material world. For example, in Sonnet 116, Shakespeare gazes heavenward and locates there an idealized, unchangeable symbol for love. It is a star. In fact, it may well be the polar star by which ships in Shakespeare's day took their bearings and navigated on the open sea. Such an image of an "ever-fixed" and stable object functions as an ordering principle in a world of storm and flux where the human heart can alter as quickly as the weather: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: Oh, no! it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickles compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out to the edge of doom. 225 226 Appendix C If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. The star, his metaphor for perfect love, doesn't change, doesn't even move. Serenely above it all, this "love" exists outside not only the timebound world but also the human world of embodied selves. It is abstract, transcendent —a philosophical ideal (notice that it is a marriage of minds that the poem celebrates, not bodies). Perfected, detached, its purity somehow sustains us and represents an ideal everyone can steer by. Such a love doesn't perish with the "rosy lips and cheeks" of embodied being. A belief in metaphysical ideals, like abelief in religious orderings, isbased on faith, and when that faith wanes poets must seek elsewhere for their orderings. In the West, profound cultural reorderings and displacements in the eighteenth century led many poets to lose confidence in such abstract orderings, and one manifestation of this was the rise of Romanticism. The most characteristicexpression of Romanticism was the personallyric, which became more and more secular as the self struggled with a subjectivity no longer understandable in the light of religion or metaphysics. To bring the struggle for orderings down into the timebound, secular world was also to bring it down into the human body. The English Romantic poet John Keats was a profound admirer of Shakespeare and learned a great deal about sounds from his poems. In one of his sonnets, "Bright Star," he "borrows" Sonnet n6's image of the star and its ideal quality of being beyond change (and thus something one can count on, something that can order one's world). He borrows Shakespeare's star, but he alters it and alters his relationship to it by trying to bring its quality of stability down into the timebound and body-bound world of human relationships. Here is Keatss sonnet: Bright Star Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art— Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— Incarnating Eros 227 No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death. Much as Keats appreciates the steadfast quality of the star, he notes its isolation: its "lone splendor" makes it like a hermit monk. His desire to bring the star's qualities of unchangeable endurance down into the...