10-24-2013, 11:51 PM
Meaning-wise, the poem presents a tension that I really love. The octave proceeds in much the same way that many other canonical love poems do: an effort to persuade, on the part of a virile male bard, his beloved away from her coy witholding. The rhetorical angle is aging, the decline of the relevant faculties, the possibility of regret: in a word, the ominous, impending, inescapable nature of death. Then for the sestet. The speaker points to his beloved's youthful beauty, and proclaims that it is "ever hers." And yet, he'd just spent the previous lines explaining the ephemeral nature of this very thing. How to make sense of this?
This "forever" is to be found, ambiguously enough and as the sestet resolves, in the assumption of the act of love. But this can only take place by the speaker's side, in the traversing of "forbidden doors." This is awesome, to me, in part because it points to youthful flesh as a conduit between spirits. The point of beauty can be as much to use as to admire it; its sensual exploration can serve as much to draw the Eternal in us into communion as anything else. Some ideas from counter-enlightenment thinker J.G. Hammann drive the point home:
"Meanwhile, the woman's temptation is to an artificial innocence; a secret envy of God's incorporeality and impassibility. The defence of one's virginity is another cryptic attempt at self-sufficiency. Instead, the woman must brave the ‘tongues of fire’ in a ‘sacrifical offering of innocence’, in order to realize her Godlikeness; which is not to be found in bodilessness and the absence of passion, but in passionate creativity; in the willingness to be incarnate." - Stanford Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, J.G. Hamann
It's by no means a line that hasn't been used before . . . but I'll be damned if it's not mackin' at its finest. Hope it does the trick.
This "forever" is to be found, ambiguously enough and as the sestet resolves, in the assumption of the act of love. But this can only take place by the speaker's side, in the traversing of "forbidden doors." This is awesome, to me, in part because it points to youthful flesh as a conduit between spirits. The point of beauty can be as much to use as to admire it; its sensual exploration can serve as much to draw the Eternal in us into communion as anything else. Some ideas from counter-enlightenment thinker J.G. Hammann drive the point home:
"Meanwhile, the woman's temptation is to an artificial innocence; a secret envy of God's incorporeality and impassibility. The defence of one's virginity is another cryptic attempt at self-sufficiency. Instead, the woman must brave the ‘tongues of fire’ in a ‘sacrifical offering of innocence’, in order to realize her Godlikeness; which is not to be found in bodilessness and the absence of passion, but in passionate creativity; in the willingness to be incarnate." - Stanford Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, J.G. Hamann
It's by no means a line that hasn't been used before . . . but I'll be damned if it's not mackin' at its finest. Hope it does the trick.