Benjamin Bennett (Auth.) - The Defective Art of Poetry - Sappho To Yeats-Palgrave Macmillan US (2014)

The Defective Art of Poetry
Previous Publications
The Dark Side of Literacy: Literature and Learning Not to Read (2008)
Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism: Its Trail from Baumgarten and Kant to
Walt Disney and Hitler (2013)
The Defective Art of Poetry
Sappho to Yeats
Benjamin Bennett
the defective art of poetry
Copyright © Benjamin Bennett, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-38187-3
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-47976-4 ISBN 978-1-137-38188-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137381880
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bennett, Benjamin, 1939– author.
The Defective Art of Poetry : Sappho to Yeats / Benjamin Bennett.
pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.
1. Lyric poetry—History and criticism. 2. Poetics. I. Title.
PN1356.B46 2014
809.194—dc23 2013038392
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: March 2014

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Sylvia of the many names, this book’s new owner, herself
new: I life would wish
To myself, and anyone of similar condition: Be cheerful, sir.

Our revels now are ended.
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I Elemental Poetry

One Sappho and the Wordsworth Problem 13
Two The Poem as Hieroglyph: Goethe’s “Über allen Gipfeln” 31
Part II Meter and Meaning

Three The Voices of Experience in Blake 55
Four Meter and Metaphysics: Hölderlin’s

“Hyperions Schicksalslied” 83
Part III The Symbolist Move

Five A Song to Worry about: Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne” 107
Six Stefan George and the Construction of a Poetic Idiom 127
Part IV The Political Dimension

Seven Criticism as Wager: The Politics of the
Mörike-Debate and Its Object 147
Eight The Things on Yeats’s Desk 165
Notes 185
Bibliography 193
Index 197
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Acknowledgments
For encouragement and criticism, I am deeply indebted to my col-

leagues at the University of Virginia and to the graduate and under-
graduate students who discussed parts of this book’s contents in
various courses. Especially important for the development of my argu-
ment were the expert advice of Jenny Strauss Clay, David Lee Rubin,
and David Vander Meulen, and the shrewd and spirited discussion of
an early version of chapter six, on Stefan George, when I presented it
before the faculty and students of the German Department at Indiana
University in February 2011. For invaluable assistance in getting the
manuscript material together and in organizing and paying for student
help, I am grateful to Verena Kollig, Gina Hutton, and Anne Zook.
And as always, I am indebted to the University of Virginia for research
leave and research funding. For permission to use as chapter two a
version of my essay, “‘Über allen Gipfeln’: The Poem as Hieroglyph,”
which appeared in Goethe’s Ghosts: Reading and the Persistence of
Literature, ed. Simon Richter and Richard Block (Rochester: Camden
House, 2013)—a collection in honor of Jane Brown—I am grateful to
Camden House and their editorial director, James Walker. For permis-
sion to use as chapter seven a version of my article “The Politics of the
Mörike-Debate and Its Object,” from Germanic Review: Literature,
Culture, Theory, 68 (1993), 60–68, I am indebted to the publisher,
Taylor & Francis, Ltd (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals). Thanks are
also due to Dr. Ute Oelmann of the Stefan George Archiv in Stuttgart
for kindly providing information on the copyright status of George’s
work, and to Andrew McGowan and Eddie Vega of the New York
Yeats Society for similar information concerning Yeats.
Introduction
My purpose is to present a detailed general argument about how I

think poems work—poems of the type we frequently call “lyric.”
Such an argument cannot be strictly objective or impartial. It would
not occur to me to work out my thoughts if I did not feel called upon
to make a case for the poems I happen to be interested in. Therefore,
if the argument is coherent, it will tend to exclude certain poems or
types of poem from the domain of poetry’s proper working. It will
have a polemical dimension.
I will keep this dimension as unobtrusive as possible. I have lived
long enough to know how likely it is that I will change my mind even
about things that now seem absolutely certain. Even if I hold firm to
all the general points that are made in the following chapters, I may
still wake up one morning and find that some hitherto insufferable
poem or poet suddenly makes perfect sense to me on my own terms.
But I will not sacrifice coherence to avoid polemic. My argument is
centered upon one simple proposition: poetry is a defective art. I view
this proposition, first of all, as a complement to Paul Valéry’s famous
aphorism:
Un poème n’est jamais achevé—c’est toujours un accident qui le ter-

mine, c’est-à-dire qui le donne au public.
Ce sont la lassitude, la demande de l’éditeur,—la poussée d’un autre
poème.
Mais jamais l’état même de l’ouvrage (si l’auteur n’est pas un sot) ne
montre qu’il ne pourrait être poussé, changé, considéré comme pre-
mière approximation, ou origine d’une recherche nouvelle.
Je conçois, quant à moi, que le même sujet et presque les mêmes mots
pourraient être repris indéfiniment et occuper toute une vie.
“Perfection”
c’est travail.1
[A poem is never finished—what ends it, or gives it to the public, is
always an accident: whether it be weariness, or an editor’s demand, or
the pressure of another poem. But never does the condition of the work
in itself (unless the author is a fool) exclude its being pushed further,
changed, considered as a first approximation or as the origin of a new
project. My own view is that the same subject, in almost the same
words, could be reconceived indefinitely and could occupy a whole life.
“Perfection” means labor.]
B. Bennett, The Defective Art of Poetry

© Benjamin Bennett 2014
2 The Defective Art of Poetry
Valéry is speaking here “from the author’s point of view” (du côté de
l’auteur). I propose to discuss the same basic truth—that the quality
of “perfection,” or even “completion,” can never be attributed to a
lyric poem—from the point of view of the history of poetic form.
A Simple-Minded but Not Mistaken

View of the Matter
Poetry is a defective art. This proposition is easier to defend in mod-
ern poetry than in earlier poetry, but is not restricted to any historical
age. And although my linguistic competence limits me to a discussion
of examples only from Western poetry, it is hard for me to imagine
what might prevent the types of argument I will offer from being
translated into other cultures.
In the case of Western poetry belonging to the age of print, the
defectiveness of the art is already apparent in the absence of music.
When prose is printed, the amount of language in each line is nor-
mally determined by the width of the page or the column. The first
thing one notices about printed poetry is that a different kind of line-
measurement is used; and the tradition of the form tells us that this
special type of measurement was originally musical. The decision
to put a certain amount of language into a line of printed poetry
alludes historically to the supposed decision, in an earlier age, to sing
or chant a certain amount of language in a given span of musical
time. Music is thus a necessary element of what we might call poetry’s
structural identity. But for a modern audience, who read poetry in
printed books, that music is absent. The art is therefore defective in
the sense of lacking a recognized constituent element of itself.
One can quibble here. It is not demonstrably true that all primitive
forms of poetry, even of Western poetry, were performed in a way
we would recognize as musical. But it is hard to disagree with M. L.
Gasparov’s basic point:
Verse is text that is felt to be language of particular seriousness, intended

to be remembered and repeated. The verse text makes for this object by
dividing language into defined segments that may easily be grasped by
the mind. Besides the divisions within the language as a whole—into
sentences, parts of sentences, groups of sentences, and so on—there is
here an additional division, into correlatable and commensurate seg-
ments, each of which is called a verse line. . . . It is a general requirement
that the boundaries of these segments be laid down for all readers (or
Introduction 3
listeners) by extra-linguistic means: in written poetry usually through

graphics (division into lines), and in oral poetry through a melody or a
standard intonation that resembles a melody. 2
And in any case, if we did not habitually regard the printing of verse
lines as an allusion to music, would it not disturb us when a piece
of printed meditation is entitled “Song”? And if I were asked, for
example, after hearing someone sing “Moonlight in Vermont” (which
has no rhymes), to transcribe what I had heard, would it occur to me
not to use lines of verse?
Or one might perhaps say that the music of poetry exists by
being evoked in the mind of a reader. But is music in the mind really
music—at least in the mind of someone other than an actual com-
poser? And if the poem’s music is subjective, hence strictly private,
hence (for all we know) different for every individual reader, how can
it be joined in a single structure with the strictly public and unvarying
black-and-white of the printed text? That black-and-white piece of
text belongs to no category whatever, of objects or of concepts, that
might also include the happening of actual heard music.
Or perhaps the music is by now so irrevocably absent that it has
become nonessential, so that its absence no longer counts as a defect
in the form. There are plenty of modern poems, after all, whose lines
show no trace of any underlying metrical regularity that we might
associate with music. But neither metrical regularity, nor any other
textual feature related to music, is at issue here. What I am talking
about is the question of how it happens that the lines of a poem do not
fill completely the space between margins. And once this question is
answered in the tradition by the idea of musical time—tradition in the
sense not of “actual” history, but of our habitual sense of history—
that answer continues to operate even where the poem itself does not
suggest musicality, indeed even where the idea or feeling of music is
strenuously resisted. Such resistance can in fact only serve to profile
the presence of the idea of music in the tradition, and hence, again,
the absence of the actual thing in our reading here and now.
The same basic reasoning applies if it is suggested that the sup-
posed defectiveness of modern poetry can be repaired by setting
poems to music and singing them, or by starting out with verses sung
to (say) a guitar accompaniment and printing the text only later, as
a record of the performance. Devices of this sort are only attempts
to put Humpty Dumpty together again. They profile very strongly
the historical situation to which they are a response and so reinforce
precisely the historically conditioned defectiveness of their art in the
very process of trying to heal or circumvent it. We cannot simply turn

off our traditional sense of the history of poetry; at least we cannot do
so and still hope to receive poetry comprehendingly.
Are these points an attack on the art of poetry? Not in the least.
But I do mean to attack the idea that it is reasonable to expect perfec-
tion or completeness, in more than a trivial sense, from the relations
among a poem’s various formal and expressive elements. How would
such perfection be measured? Where would it come from? Surely
not from the poem’s content. If I were satisfied with my self and my
world, what would move me to write (or sing) a poem? At the very
root of Western poetry stands Archilochus, complaining about his
lost shield.
The Need for a Less Simple-Minded

View of the Matter
There are difficulties in this form of the argument. First of all, what
about poetry in ages where music was still an integral component of
the art? My first chapter, on Sappho, does not address this question
in general; but it does demonstrate fundamental problems in the art
even without a strong separation from the practice of singing. And I
have tried to give cohesion to my argument as a whole by pointing
out connections with that first chapter in the subsequent discussions
of modern poetry. Especially important is the last chapter on Yeats,
who in my view engineers something like a complete reconstruction
of Sappho’s poetic practice.
The second difficulty that I have in mind is trickier. For the prob-
lematic relation between the poem as writing and the poem as singing
belongs to the content of poetry itself. The paper, the ink, the writing,
the book—at least since the poetry of ancient Rome—are all no less
well established, in the inventory of self-reflexive poetic tropes, than
is the idea of singing or music-making. I will discuss such scribal or
literary tropes several times in the following. And I will treat in detail
the work of two poets, William Blake and Stefan George, who, even
in the age of print, found reason to insist on strict control over how
their poems appeared on the page.
But the inclusion of the problem of writing versus singing in the
material of poetry itself opens the possibility of a poetic solution to
that problem. There are in fact some famous instances in which it
could be argued that such a solution is achieved. The music being
Introduction 5
played in the scenes depicted on Keats’s Grecian urn had already been
silenced in antiquity, simply by being represented visually. But the
intervention of “slow time” (along with the new “silence” of printed
pages) has reanimated those scenes in a completely different sense,
which can be understood as an “unheard” and now even “sweeter”
music. Does this configuration of meanings nullify any defectiveness
in the poem it belongs to, and does it therefore refute the idea of a
universal defectiveness in poetry?3
At least it is clear that we must approach the whole matter on a dif-
ferent level, a level that subsumes the question of writing versus music
while also making possible more powerful theoretical arguments.
Immediacy and Articulation

In the wake of Derrida and deconstruction, we have developed a
healthy skepticism toward the notion of “presence,” a skepticism that
perhaps embarrasses us when we read further in Valéry.
Le lyrisme est le genre de poésie qui suppose la voix en action—la voix

directement issue de, ou provoquée par,—les choses que l’on voit ou
que l’on sent comme présentes.4
[Lyric is the type of poetry that presupposes voice in action, voice issu-
ing directly from, or directly provoked by, the things that one sees or
feels as present.]
But as long as we avoid understanding presence as a general

category—as a criterion of truth or essentialness, or of philosophical
validity—we can still work with the idea that poetry is always focused
on the particular things that happen to be immediately present to its
speaker, and focused in such a way as to make available to each reader
or listener a comparable sense of immediacy. (In the case of poetry
that recollects an object understood to be distant in time or in space,
it is the experience of recollecting that must be made immediate.)
This idea cannot count as a definition of poetry. But it does for-
mulate the ancient demarcation between poetry and philosophy
as types of discourse, a demarcation whose best-known ancient
advocate is Plato, in Book Ten of the Republic, where he uses it to
disparage poetry. The dangerous charm of poetry that he speaks of—
dangerous even to a philosopher—is a temptation to abandon our-
selves to the experience of the present moment, be it lust or hilarity
or grief, a temptation that is reinforced by the mistaken belief that
since the experience in poetic form is not a real one, surrendering to it

can have no lasting effect on our character.5 And although disagree-
ment is bound to arise if we attempt to apply the idea of experienced
immediacy to modern poetry indiscriminately, still I think the heuris-
tic value of that idea will be conceded. Certainly the idea, as such, is
vague enough to require, and capacious enough to accommodate, the
several focused interpretive arguments by which I will try to give it
substance in the following chapters.
But if we accept experienced immediacy as a means of distinguish-
ing poetry from other types of discourse, it is hard to see how we can
avoid the conclusion that poetry is a defective art. For poetry is also
always a form of articulation—no matter whether it is spoken, sung,
written, printed, or graven in stone. And articulation always involves
the imposition upon its object of some sort of law or structure or
order—the order, for instance, of grammar, which is always imposed
from outside the strict immediacy of the exprimendum. (Law [nomos]
is in fact one of the terms Plato uses [604B] for that by which a poeti-
cally receptive attitude toward experience is resisted.) It appears to
follow that poetry cannot even begin to operate, as a process of artic-
ulation, without falsifying its own favored subject matter. At several
points in the following, therefore, we will run up against the sug-
gestion that in an important sense poetry aspires to (or is constantly
threatened by) the condition of silence.
What My Book Actually Does

My principal contention, again, is that poetry is a defective art. But
the truth or falsity of this contention is not really decidable. On the
one hand, texts can certainly be found that many competent readers
will consider counter-examples. On the other hand, it might be asked
whether any art, or all art, must not eventually be judged “defec-
tive” if it is questioned with sufficient severity—questioned, say, by
a Socrates.
What I propose to show, therefore, is that in the particular case
of poetry, my contention is both uniquely appropriate and uniquely
useful. Its appropriateness is fairly obvious. When we interpret
poems, we ordinarily pride ourselves on having “accounted for” all
or nearly all of what seem to us the text’s significant features; and
when we challenge an interpretation, we often do so on the grounds
that so-and-so has “failed to account for” such-and-such. Debates
of this sort gesture in the direction of a hypothetical correct or ideal
Introduction 7
interpretation in which nothing whatever is left out of account; and

the existence of such an interpretation, in turn, would demonstrate
that every identifiable element of the text in question has its necessary
place in a complete structure of meaning and feeling. Thus the poem’s
perfection would be revealed. Or perhaps even that ideal interpreta-
tion would be too much an encroachment on the poetic text, too close
to “the heresy of paraphrase”—an idea which flirts with imputing not
only perfection but sacredness to the poem.6
It happens that Cleanth Brooks, the author of that phrase, is not
himself, as a critic, hypnotized by the idea of the poem’s sacred per-
fection. His apparent inability to find a less suggestive terminology
therefore testifies to the depth at which that idea is anchored in the
tradition of critical rhetoric. Hence the appropriateness of my proj-
ect. We do not really believe in the possibility of perfection in the
domain of texts, in the possibility of a text with “no blind spots,”
a text that “prefigures its own misunderstanding” in such a way as
to make itself unparaphraseable.7 But we still find ourselves talk-
ing as if we did believe these things. And my aim, with respect to
the textual type that is most deeply involved in this problem, is to
show that that way of talking is not only unnecessary, but positively
mistaken.
The question of usefulness is less amenable to treatment in general
terms. The usefulness of my approach, if it has any, will have to be
shown by example in my arguments on specific poems. I have divided
these arguments into four parts with two chapters each.
Part I, “Elemental Poetry,” treats Sappho’s fragment 1 (the only one
of her poems about which we are fairly confident of having a complete
version) and Goethe’s universally admired little poem, “Über allen
Gipfeln”: two poems which, in my view, do practically nothing except
be poetry, operate as markers of the strictly poetic domain. That the
two poems are as widely separated as possible, in both history and
spirit, lends significance to the point that they are exactly parallel in
depending, for their exemplary poetic quality, on the presence of a
radical imperfection in their operation as discourse.
In Part II, “Meter and Meaning” are discussed, as being the two
elements of poetic form between which it is probably most diffi-
cult to establish a firm connection. I argue that such a connection
definitely exists in Blake’s four-beat alternating verse, mainly in the
Songs of Experience, and in Hölderlin’s “Hyperions Schicksalslied.”
In both cases, however, that connection serves not to complete the
poetic structure, but rather to profile precisely the unattainability of
completion.
Part III, “The Symbolist Move,” treats Verlaine’s “Chanson

d’automne” and Stefan George’s “Komm in den totgesagten park und
schau.” The arguments on defectiveness in the poetic text are not
much different here from those earlier in the book. But the main point
now is that at a particular historical juncture (late nineteenth and
early twentieth century), that defectiveness takes on programmatic
significance in the project of establishing, or reestablishing, a specific
poetic idiom.
Part IV, finally, develops “The Political Dimension” of the poetic
text’s situation in history. A famous debate on Eduard Mörike’s “Auf
eine Lampe” provides occasion to discuss the inescapable politics
of poetic criticism and the manner in which that politics reveals (by
attempting to deny) the political dimension of the poem itself. And
the book closes by treating a poem whose concern with its situation
in history and politics is more immediately evident: Yeats’s “Lapis
Lazuli.”
Larger Implications
We began above with a cue from Paul Valéry, first published in 1929.
In 1933, in a little piece “Au Sujet du Cimetière marin,” he restates
the same basic thought, with a small but significant difference. He
speaks now not merely of poems but of “intellectual works” in gen-
eral; and the ranks of those “lovers of anxiety and perfection,” who
recognize that such works are “never finished but only abandoned,”
now include prose writers as well as poets.8 Can we take this cue as
well, and expand our perspective to embrace all of literature?
It seems to me that very little attention has been paid to the politi-
cal significance and efficacy of literary form. Politically oriented lit-
erary criticism is focused ordinarily upon literature’s content (in the
sense of referent or paraphrase) or upon its quality as discourse (not
as formed and focused “work”), or upon the reception or production
of literary works, or upon the sociology or economics or psychology
of literature, or upon literary history understood as a component of
political history, if not indeed a determinant. The thought of Fredric
Jameson, which figures in the argument of Chapter Seven below, is
certainly an exception to this rule; but I cannot name any other recent
instances of comparable standing.
Our general inability or unwillingness to deal with the relation of
politics and literary form has to do with the idea of formal closure in
literature, the idea of form—on the model of sculpture or music—as
Introduction 9
a quality by virtue of which the work becomes complete and suf-

ficient to itself, thus insulated from the world of practical politics.
And of all literary types, short lyric poems are taken to exemplify
this idea most evidently. Hence the importance of an argument on
the defectiveness of lyric poetry, which means the failure there of any
idea of formal closure. Such an argument, I think, opens the whole
question of a “political dimension” in literature from an unexpected
direction.
In its ultimate scope, therefore, this book carries forward a long-
term project of mine. The political dimension of literary form has
been increasingly a concern in my work, especially in my last three
books, All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater (2005), The Dark Side
of Literacy (2008), and Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism: Its Trail
from Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler (2013), all of
which open the question of how literary form operates in the back-
ground of twentieth-century totalitarianism. But I make no claims
in this regard; and I trust that political issues will make no special
difference, one way or the other, in the value of my argument as a
contribution to the study of poetry.
Who Am “I”?
Finally, I have tried to keep my approach to the study of poetry as
nontechnical as possible. My main contention is, and remains, that
poetry is a defective art. But the effect of the following chapters, which
treat poetry of widely disparate types in four different languages, is
to show variety, not technical or systematic uniformity, in how that
central quality of poetry manifests itself.
And yet, there is one technical issue that I think requires atten-
tion: the question of the “lyric ego,” of exactly who is speaking in the
poem, who is saying “I.” The history of this question can be traced at
least as far back as section 5 of The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche
asserts that lyric poetry never in truth originates in the actual empiri-
cal subject, the “I”-sayer, who happens to have composed it. Rather,
that “I”-sayer has become, “so to speak, a medium through which the
One Subject that truly is celebrates its redemption in appearance”; the
personal “I” is thus supplanted by a universal “I.”9 Critical discussion
in the 40s, 50s, and 60s of the last century was never willing to go
quite that far; but still, scholars were uncomfortable with not being
able to pin down in theory how a poem might be differentiated in its
type from other utterances of the person who wrote it.
A reader who is interested in details of the debate on this mat-

ter might start with Käte Hamburger’s summary in The Logic of
Literature.10 Hamburger’s treatment has the advantage of a certain
distance and dismissiveness; she recognizes the existence of a ques-
tion but doubts the possibility of an answer that would make any
difference. I, for my part, am not even sure that there is a question.
There is certainly a questionableness about the identity of a poem’s
speaker, a questionableness that could conceivably include within its
scope the whole idea of personal identity. But if identity is understood
as the vessel of experienced immediacy, then any attempt to lay hold
of a specific question here, whether answerable or not, must inevita-
bly violate the demarcation between poetry and philosophy which I
spoke of above, and so make nonsense of itself.
This state of affairs, however, taken as a whole, nevertheless has sig-
nificant consequences for the study of poetry and for the understand-
ing of particular poems. For it is often necessary to recognize that
the “I”-function in a poem’s speaking is referable to several different
sources at once. The poem, it turns out, is not spoken by an “I” in the
first place, but rather by something more like an I-compound. I do not
advance this idea as a general rule. But there are three clear instances
in the following chapters where the recognition of an I-compound
proves crucial for coming to grips with a poem. In reading Blake’s
“The Tyger,” I argue that the poem’s speaking is carried out by two
opposed personalities, not as a dialogue but as an internal struggle
in which the ascendancy shifts back and forth repeatedly in mid-
sentence. In Verlaine, the typical symbolist move, by which the speak-
ing “I” is dismantled and distributed among objects, has the effect
of situating even the reading “I” at the source of the speaking, as an
element of the compound. And at the end of Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli,”
the Chinamen’s “eyes” show themselves, among other things, as a
pluralizing of the pronoun “I.”
Part I
Elemental Poetry
Chapter One
Sappho and the Wordsworth Problem
ποικιλόθρον’ ἀθανάτ’ Ἀφρόδιτα,

πα Δίος δολόπλοκε, λίσσομαί σε,
μή μ’ ἄσαισι μηδ’ ὀνίαισι δάμνα,
πότνια, θμον,
ἀλλὰ τυίδ’ ἔλθ’, αἴ ποτα κἀτέρωτα
τὰς ἔμας αὔδας ἀΐοισα πήλοι
ἔκλυες, πάτρος δὲ δόμον λίποισα
χρύσιον λθες
ἄρμ’ ὐπασδεύξαισα · κάλοι δέ σ’ γον
ὤκεες στροθοι περὶ γς μελαίνας
πύκνα δίννεντες πτέρ’ ἀπ’ ὠράνωἴθε-
ρος διὰ μέσσω ·
αψα δ’ ἐξίκοντο · σὺ δ’,  μάκαιρα,
μειδιαίσαισ’ ἀθανάτωι προσώπωι
ἤρε’ ὄττι δητε πέπονθα κὤττι
δητε κάλημμι
κὤττι μοι μάλιστα θέλω γένεσθαι
μαινόλαι θύμωι · τίνα δητε πείθω
καί σ’ ἄγην ἐς σὰν φιλότατα. τίς σ’, 
Ψάπφ’, ἀδικήει;
καὶ γὰρ αἰ φεύγει, ταχέως διώξει,
αἰ δὲ δρα μὴ δέκετ’, ἀλλὰ δώσει,
αἰ δὲ μὴ φίλει, ταχέως φιλήσει
κωὐκ ἐθέλοισα.
ἔλθε μοι καὶ νν, χαλέπαν δὲ λσον
ἐκ μερίμναν, ὄσσα δέ μοι τέλεσσαι
θμος ἰμέρρει, τέλεσον, σὺ δ’ αὔτα
σύμμαχος ἔσσο.
[You, on your many-colored throne, immortal Aphrodite, trap-weaving

daughter of Zeus, I beseech you, great lady, do not overwhelm my
heart with troubles and sufferings // but come here, if ever at an earlier
time, hearing my voice from afar, you listened and, leaving behind your

father’s golden house, you came, // your chariot harnessed; lovely and
swift sparrows, rapidly beating their wings, drew you over the black
earth down through the middle of bright heaven; // quickly they arrived.
But you, o blessed one, your immortal face smiling, asked what I had
suffered yet again and why I am calling now yet again // and what, in
my raving heart, I most wish to happen, and whom am I yet again per-
suading even you to bring to your way of loving. “Who, o Sappho, is
wronging you? // Even if she now flees, soon she will pursue; if she does
not accept gifts, still she will give them; if she does not love, soon she
will love, even without wishing it.” // Come now to me also, and release
me from heavy cares. Whatever my heart desires to be accomplished,
accomplish that, and be yourself my fellow fighter.]
The above reconstruction of Sappho’s famous complaint to Aphrodite

follows in the main the edition of Voigt and that of Lobel and Page,
with one major deviation in the sentence from line 18 to line 19, where
I prefer to read: τίνα δητε πείθω / καί σ’ ἄγην ἐς σὰν φιλότατα
([you asked . . . ] whom am I [Sappho] yet again persuading even you
[Aphrodite] to bring to your way of loving).1 This form of the Greek
text is the reading of all but one of the manuscripts of Dionysius of
Halicarnassus that contain the poem.2 It is true that on paleographic
grounds the καί (even) is made problematic by readings from other
sources.3 Still, even Page concedes (Sappho and Alcaeus 9–10) that
the problems in question seem to admit no clear solution, and con-
cludes “that emendation is required.” Or at least emendation would be
required if there were no adequate defense of the reading I prefer. And
such a defense will have to be interpretive, not paleographic.
Basic Interpretation
A couple of crucial interpretive points have long been established,
including especially Page’s insistence (12–13), and after him Sarah T.
Mace’s,4 on the importance of the repeated δητε. What has Sappho
suffered yet again, why is she calling yet again, who is meant, yet
again, to be the target of either persuading or conducting? But
there are other points that have hardly been mentioned. Especially
the words δολόπλοκε and σύμμαχος ought to have caused readers
more difficulty than they have. “Wile-weaving” or “weaver of wiles,”
sounds nice as a translation of δολόπλοκος, but only because it is
a euphemism. If Sappho is really the coiner of the word—as seems
likely—then I think we have to assume she is using the element
δόλος in a sense closer to its original and proper meaning of “bait,”
Sappho and the Wordsworth Problem 15
especially as used in fishing (e.g., Odyssey, 12.252).5 Which means

Sappho is invoking “Aphrodite, baiter of traps,” or more strictly (with
πλέκω), “weaver of baited traps”; and we must be able to explain
the epithet in this sense. As for σύμμαχος (fellow fighter), as far as
I know, the root μαχ- (Attic μάχομαι) never suggests anything but
struggle or competition against an adversary. Which means we have
to be able to answer the question: against whom is Sappho seeking
to enlist Aphrodite as an ally?
In order to get anywhere with these matters, we must view them
in relation to the poem as a whole, and in relation to other crucial
interpretive questions. In particular, to whom does the second-person
possessive adjective refer in the phrase ἐς σὰν φιλότατα (into your
love, or way of loving)? Most readers assume it refers to Sappho: the
recalcitrant beloved must be brought back “into your [Sappho’s] love.”
Therefore, Aphrodite must be speaking. But there is no firm grammati-
cal ground for this opinion. In lines 15–20, a transition from indirect
to direct questioning evidently takes place: from ὄττι δητε πέπονθα
κὤττι / δητε κάλημμι ([you asked] what I had suffered yet again
and why I am calling now yet again) to the direct question, τίς σ’,
 / Ψάπφ’, ἀδικήει; (Who, o Sappho, is wronging you?). But exactly
where does the transition take place? Before or after the question τίνα
δητε πείθω / καί σ’ ἄγην ἐς σὰν φιλότατα, the question of someone’s
persuading someone with respect to someone’s way of loving? A. J.
Beattie, already in 1957, points out
that the τίνα δ᾽ ητε πείθω . . . sentence is in series with the three ques-
tions (beginning with ὄττι δητε, κὤττι δητε, and κὤττι μοι) that
precede it; like them it depends on ἤρεο, l. 15. This connexion is guar-
anteed both by the repetition of δητε and by the presence of a 1st
pers. sing. verb (πέπονθα, κάλημμι, θέλω, πείθω) in all four sentences.
There is, moreover, a bond of meaning that unites the four verbs. By
way of contrast, we note that in the next sentence—τίς σ’  Ψάπφ’
ἀδικήει;—there is no connective particle, the verb is in the 3rd pers.
sing., and it is unrelated in sense to the other four. Thus it is plain,
despite the fact that Professor Page and others assume a change from
indirect to direct speech at τίνα δηὖτε πείθω, that no such change is
necessary, or even likely, at that point. On the contrary, the structure
of the passage suggests that this change should occur after ἐς σὰν
φιλότατα.6
In other words, as long as we take πείθω as a verb (not a noun, not

personified “Persuasion”), it is highly unlikely that anyone but Sappho
is its subject, which means that the second-person in that sentence
must refer to Aphrodite: [you asked] whom am I yet again persuading

even you to bring to your way of loving.
But then how exactly do we read ἐς σὰν φιλότατα (to your way of
loving)? Beattie’s answer to this question is simple and, up to a point,
perfectly adequate.
The meaning of the sentence will then be: “whom then do I (Sappho) urge
thee (Aphrodite) to bring back to the Love that is thine (Aphrodite’s)?”
i.e. τίνα is the object of ἄγην; σε is the object of πείθω. Sappho is in
love with someone who runs away and will have nothing to do with her
(cf. ll. 21–23), and she calls upon Aphrodite to bring this person back
to her. The Love in question belongs to Aphrodite in the sense that it is
the emotion which she inspires or the relationship between two mortals
which she favours. (180)
My own preference would be to translate ἐς σὰν φιλότατα with “into

your kind of love”; and I would eliminate Beattie’s insistence on bring-
ing the beloved back to that kind of love, which has to do with his
wish to read ἄψ as the first word of line 19. But otherwise I cannot
see anything to quarrel with in his argument. In any event, there is
no longer any interpretive objection to reading that first word as καί.
“Whom am I yet again persuading even you—in the sense of: precisely
you, whom else but you?—to bring into your way of loving?”
Revenge
With respect to the suggestion that Sappho wishes to engage with
Aphrodite in maneuvers (perhaps involving baited traps) against an
adversary, the crucial point is this: Once we are freed from what seems
to me the clear error of reading the “your” in ἐς σὰν φιλότατα as
referring to Sappho, we are also freed from the necessity of reading
strophe six to mean that the beloved will pursue you (Sappho), that
she will offer gifts to you, that she will love you. As far as I know, only
one commentator has ever suggested an alternative to this reading,
even though the actual pronoun “you” never occurs in the strophe.
But Page’s very definite formulation on this point inadvertently throws
into relief the problems in that standard reading.
Sappho’s words, “If she refuses your gifts, yet she shall be making gifts,”
can only mean “If today she refuses your gifts, tomorrow you will be
refusing hers.” And the third line is in harmony: “Today she loves you
not; tomorrow she shall love you even against her will.” Why “against
her will”? Because her love for you will then be unrequited; she will suf-
fer as you suffer now, and she will pray for relief as you do today.
So Aphrodite is made to say in the plainest possible terms: “Why
do you take this affair so seriously, and why do you keep plaguing me,
when you know very well that the roles will soon be reversed? Today
it is she who runs from you; tomorrow it will be she who pursues, you
who seek to escape.” It is at once evident that the spirit of Aphrodite’s
answer here is in perfect harmony with the tone of good-humoured rail-
lery in the preceding stanza: “Why do you keep calling me? Who is it
this time, Sappho? It has all happened so often before, and the end has
always been the same.” (15)
The crucial recognition here is that we cannot accept the standard

reading of strophe six without assuming that the love Sappho com-
plains of is really a kind of courtship game, in which lover and beloved
repeatedly exchange roles on the way to an eventual union.
Even Mace goes along with Page’s idea of a spirit of “good-hu-
moured raillery”—although she tries to do so in a manner that avoids
understanding Sappho’s love as a courtship game. She characterizes
Aphrodite’s repeated “yet again” as “ironic” (358); and she insists
that “Aphrodite’s speech alludes playfully to the fact that this poetess-
speaker’s repertoire includes a regular litany of love complaints of the
form ‘Eros . . . me, again!’” (360). I say even Mace, because it is precisely
she who points out that in fragment 130 Sappho deviates from the rel-
atively good-humored poetry of “Eros . . . me, again,” that Sappho “has
chosen to develop the darker side of this theme . . . the more pointed
paradox: desire is both alluring and repellent . . . the sinister aspect [of
Eros]” (342). And it is not clear to me why she backs away from this
view in discussing fragment 1, especially since Aphrodite’s “irony” or
good humor or playfulness, if it existed there, would have to be attrib-
uted to Sappho herself, who is after all addressing herself by way of
the goddess; and there is certainly no sign of such a spirit in the poem’s
final strophe.
In any case, I do not see how one could accept the standard read-
ing of strophe six without insisting on the poem’s basic playfulness. If
Sappho were seriously in torment and concerned mainly with relieving
her pain and satisfying her love, then surely she would desire simply
that her beloved stop fleeing, accept her gifts, and return her love.
How could she reasonably desire more than that? Is it at all likely, or
even possible, that that woman, who until now had refused her love,
will now suddenly turn about and pursue Sappho (διώκω, suggesting
close, determined pursuit) as an aggressive suitor? Page’s inference is
entirely correct. If we accept the standard reading of strophe six, then
we must treat Sappho’s love as a courtship game. Which it is obviously

not. Therefore the standard reading fails—and with it, I should think,
the whole idea of the poem’s playfulness.
The alternative reading I alluded to above, which is a vast improve-
ment upon the standard reading, was proposed by Anne Carson, who
argues that the standard reading
is not what the Greek words say. Aphrodite’s statements contain no

direct object. She does not say that the girl will pursue Sappho, she does
not say that the girl will give gifts to Sappho, she does not say that the
girl will love Sappho. She merely says that the girl will pursue, give gifts,
and love. There is an interpretation of these words available to us which
imposes no assumptions on the grammar and which, furthermore, is in
better agreement with the traditions of Greek erotic poetry. For it is not
the case generally in Greek poetry that scorned lovers pin their hopes on
a mutual reversal of erotic roles. In general, forlorn lovers console them-
selves with a much less fantastic thought: namely, that the unresponsive
beloved will one day grow up and become a lover himself, or herself,
and in the role of lover will pursue an unresponsive beloved and will
come to “know what it feels like” to be rejected.7
In other words, Sappho is asking not for a fulfilled love-relation-

ship, but for revenge on the woman who has injured her. The poem
expresses not a desire for love, or for any sort of erotic or amorous
fulfillment, but a desire for revenge on the erstwhile beloved who has
caused Sappho’s suffering.
I think Carson is unquestionably correct in her reading of strophe
six. But in developing her thought, she backs away unnecessarily from
the idea of revenge—an idea that explains neatly Aphrodite’s role as
“fellow fighter,” against the beloved now seen as an enemy—and settles
instead for “justice.” The passage quoted above continues as follows:
Within the strict conventions of Greek homosexual Eros such a revenge

[that the beloved will “come to ‘know what it feels like’ to be rejected”]
is fairly certain. There are clearly defined ages of life appropriate to the
roles of lover and beloved. In the course of time the beloved will natu-
rally and inevitably become a lover, and will almost inevitably experi-
ence rejection at least once. This idea recurs repeatedly in Greek poetry
and surely reflects a common human experience. (227–8)
But the instances of this “common human experience” that Carson

then cites are all instances of male erotic experience. Can we simply
assume that homosexual relations between women followed that
“strict” erastes–eromenos pattern?
Carson’s defense of this part of her argument, that with women, as

with men, the roles of lover and beloved belong to different times of
life, is weak:
It is a commonplace of homosexual relations between men in the Greek

tradition that the lover’s desire fades sharply as soon as the boy’s beard
begins to grow . . . It is plausible that there were parallel sentiments
among Greek women who engaged in homosexual relationships, and
that Sappho could expect to be liberated from her desire for this par-
ticular girl as soon as the girl became obviously too old to play the
role of beloved. Aphrodite’s words in lines 21–24, then, are a promise
to Sappho of release from erotic tyranny. Her promise is based on the
principle of her justice. (232)
I may be naïve, but I do not see how these ideas would work in the
case of sex acts between women. What specific physical sign, compa-
rable to a sprouting beard, would disqualify a girl as a sex-partner?
Surely not menstruation. An acceptable partner would then have to be
pre-pubertal. Exactly what form of sexual satisfaction could a woman
hope for with her?
Dover, in his book on Greek homosexuality, has a section on
women, but does not have a great deal to say because there is not
much evidence. He does mention some instances in which later male
writers refer vaguely to “a female counterpart of the male erastes/
eromenos relationship”; but the only clear depiction of female
homosexuality he produces is a red-figure vase that “shows a kneel-
ing woman fingering the genital region of another woman.”8 And
both of the women in that picture are clearly adults, well developed
with large breasts. One wonders how it could be otherwise. Sex
by digital or lingual stimulation of the female genitals will ordi-
narily entail mutuality between the partners, not the dominant–
submissive structure of man–boy sex. Even the use of the olisbos
or dildo, which makes possible (though not necessarily actual)
one partner’s assumption of a male role, does not change mat-
ters. Surely there would be no point, except perhaps cruelty, in
using that instrument on a pre-pubertal girl. It may be that young
women were initiated into homosexual practice by older women,
but probably not until they were, precisely, young women. In any
case, Sappho never speaks explicitly about losing a beloved to the
natural ravages of time. When she loses a beloved, it is usually (as
in fragment 131) because the young woman is lured away by one
of her poetic-pedagogical rivals.9
The Two Faces of Aphrodite

I return, then, to my contention that in strophe six as Carson reads it,
Aphrodite is promising Sappho that the erstwhile beloved, now seen
as an enemy, will soon fall in love with someone else and will then
suffer all the pains that Sappho had suffered from falling in love. This
is not simply an assurance that nature will take its course. Aphrodite
is promising to carry out Sappho’s revenge personally by trapping the
new enemy in a trap baited with some specially attractive woman—or
perhaps even with a man. Hence the epithet δολόπλοκε (trap-
weaving), which now makes perfect sense, as does the idea of Aphrodite
as (Sappho hopes) a “fellow fighter.” And Sappho has asked for exactly
this promise, in asking the goddess to bring the young woman to her
“way of loving.”
But what exactly is Aphrodite’s “way of loving”? In spite of the
likely mutuality of the sex acts involved, it is clear that love relation-
ships, in the view that Sappho ascribes to Aphrodite, are understood
to be inevitably asymmetrical. One person falls in love and suffers
pain; the other person, even without intending it, inevitably inflicts
pain. And Aphrodite is now called upon to keep Sappho, as a “fellow
fighter,” on the same side as herself, the side that inflicts pain and suf-
fers as little as possible.
This reading of the poem also answers a question we have not yet
brought up. Why does Sappho begin by asking Aphrodite not to crush
her heart with pains and sorrows? Surely she is appealing to Aphrodite
for relief from pains and sorrows that she is already suffering. Is she
therefore asking the goddess not to continue inflicting pain on her? It
is hard to read such a suggestion out of the actual words. This point
is perhaps not strong enough to have much probative value. But the
passage would be at least a little easier to read if we could infer: do not
crush my heart with pains and sorrows, crush hers instead.
And then, what shall we make of the suggestion in ll. 18–19—faint
as it may be—that two separate functions are ascribed to Aphrodite:
the sponsorship of a specific “kind of love,” and the “bringing” of
particular individuals to that kind of love? I think this suggestion is
best understood in connection with the poem’s very strong emphasis
on the goddess’s bright Olympian qualities: she is first seen enthroned,
and called πότνια (great lady); she leaves her father’s “golden dwell-
ing” and travels to earth “from bright heaven”; she receives the epithet
ἀθανάτα (immortal), which is used routinely of Olympians in the plu-
ral but is very rare in the singular, and so suggests special emphasis.10
What is operating here in the background, it seems to me, is the fact

that Aphrodite has two separate identities: Aphrodite as παῖς Δίος,
child of Zeus; and the pre-Olympian Aphrodite, whose birth is related
by Hesiod (Theogony, 188–200) in a story that explains her relation
to the island of Cyprus. Olympian Aphrodite, I claim, is being asked
to entrap and deliver the erstwhile beloved to Cyprian Aphrodite. And
on the nature of Cyprian Aphrodite as a possible goddess of revenge,
we might consider the following strophe, which apparently refers to a
mistress of Sappho’s brother:
Κύπρι καί σε πικροτάταν ἐπεύροι

μηδὲ καυχάσαιτο τόδ’ ἐννέποισα
Δωρίχα τὸ δεύτερον ὠς πόθεννον
εἰς ἔρον λθε.11
[Kypris (Cyprian Aphrodite), may Doricha find even you a most harsh
(or cruel or hostile) goddess, and may she not boast saying that he fell
desperately in love (with her) a second time.]
I am suggesting that at least for Sappho’s purposes, the attractive and

tempting goddess is Olympian Aphrodite, whereas Kypris—a kind of
sister to the Erinyes!—is the goddess’s dangerous and vengeful aspect.
And even if it cannot be shown that Sappho knew the story related by
Hesiod, still the strophe above, alongside fragment 1, shows that she
distinguishes two Aphrodites, the one serene and divinely smiling, the
other exceedingly cruel or harsh.
The trouble, of course—from Sappho’s point of view—is that you
cannot have one Aphrodite without the other. By invoking the bright
Olympian goddess, and insisting on her Olympian qualities, you find
yourself trapped into exposing yourself to the cruel and retributive
goddess, trapped (by the bright Olympian bait) in an endless cycle of
seeking revenge and undergoing exactly the torment you have sought
to inflict. Without an understanding of this dimension of the poem’s
meaning, I do not see how we could account for its most striking struc-
tural feature, the separation of a number of distinct times (repeatedly
in the past and now, δητε [yet again], in the present speaking) at
which Aphrodite is called upon. The inescapable implication is that
although the goddess had been favorably inclined at earlier times,
she has not remained Sappho’s “comrade in arms”! By calling upon
Aphrodite at all, Sappho is always also, willy-nilly, calling upon the
avenging goddess, and thus exposing herself yet again to precisely the
Cyprian, avenging Aphrodite. (Hence, ultimately, my preference for
the καί in line 19: I am asking even you for my revenge, you who are
essentially also the author of my suffering.) There is no way out of the

cycle, and there is no way to stop asking—yet again—for release from
the cycle, which is parallel to the endless cycle of transgression and
revenge (revenge being itself always a new transgression) that arises
from justice as advocated by the Erinyes.
Wordsworth and the Representation

of Passion
By invoking Aphrodite as child of Zeus, Sappho is perhaps even glimps-
ing distantly the possibility of something like the Olympian equity that
is later imagined as setting an end to the cycle of revenge in the house
of Atreus—to take the best-known example. But for Sappho, or for
love in general, there is in reality no end, no equity, no resolution,
no balance, no symmetry. There is never anything but the cycle, the
vicious cycle of desire and pain and rage and, “yet again,” the help-
less renewal of desire. Precisely Sappho’s insistence on the goddess’s
bright Olympian qualities, precisely her gift to the goddess (for it is her
own gift, her own breathtaking invention), the gift of that impossible
sparrow-drawn chariot, precisely, thus, her extravagant flattery of the
goddess, is a measure of how desperate her situation is, her entrap-
ment—in the final analysis, all our entrapment, always “yet again”—in
the implacable cycle of love. Wordsworth insists famously:
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:

it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion
is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually
disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the sub-
ject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually
exist in the mind.12
But for Sappho, I think, there is no gap of inner emotional self-repro-

duction between the original passionate situation and the language
of the poem. There is no moment of “tranquillity,” no pause between
revolutions of the wheel; the poem’s speaking, in its focus on revenge,
is but the motor and signal for yet another revolution of the wheel.
There is thus no gap here between the immediate kinesis of passion
and the unfolding of language. And precisely the absence of such a
gap, I contend, is in Sappho’s practice the aim of poetry, the reason
for poetry. There is perhaps not enough extant text to support this
contention in general. But I think I can claim that it is valid for the
present poem; and beyond that, I advance it for what seems to me its
heuristic usefulness.
In any case, as I have suggested, my view of the matter places
Sappho’s idea of poetic language in diametrical opposition to that of
Wordsworth, who asserts:
[The Poet] has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing

what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings
which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise
in him without immediate external excitement.
But whatever portion of this faculty we may suppose even the great-
est Poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt that the language which it
will suggest to him, must often, in liveliness and truth, fall short of that
which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those
passions, certain shadows of which the Poet thus produces, or feels to
be produced, in himself. (737)
Sappho, I think, would object—and I would agree with her—that even

in the most spontaneous and violent emotional outbursts, the funda-
mental gap between passion and its expression in language is never
missing. As long as the utterance is in any degree understandable, the
structures (however primitive) that make it so must also necessarily cre-
ate in it a category-difference from the passion itself, from its original
unarticulated surge. Only by means of the highly complex operation
of art—in something like Sappho’s insistence on the cycle, the wheel
of passion, which reincorporates the moment of Wordsworthian “con-
templation” into the movement of the original passion—can the gap be
removed and a place actually be made in language for passion itself.
What we call ordinarily (with Wordsworth) the “expressing” of
emotion in language must always include a component of “contempla-
tion.” Wordsworth in his theorizing is only being empirically honest on
this point; a moment of contemplation, in the sense of intelligible stasis
or structure, is present in every conceivable utterance, in even the most
rudimentary grammatical forms and relations, let alone in cases where
grammar is augmented by an attentiveness to meter and euphony. This
inevitable moment of stasis in verbal expression—hence of separation
from the headlong kinesis of passion itself—is what brings it about, for
Wordsworth, “that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are
voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of
enjoyment” (740). And this enjoyment, in turn, is essentially the same
as the pleasure that Aristotle says is created by the mimetic distancing
of the observer from even unpleasant objects (Poetics, 1448b).
My contention, however, is that pleasure in this sense is not the

business of poetry for Sappho. For Sappho—and in my opinion, in
fact, for ancient Hellas in general—the business of poetry is the verbal
mastery of existence, the collection of as much as possible of existence
under the dominion of language. But with respect to the passions, this
poetic project encounters a special problem. It is true that the opera-
tion of Wordsworth’s “tranquillity,” or of Aristotle’s mimetic distance,
does subject passion to a kind of verbal control. The trouble is that
the imposition of stasis changes the very nature of the object; con-
trol is achieved, but what has been controlled is no longer passion
itself in the strict sense. And Sappho, as I read her, solves this problem
by locating her poetic speaking not in the midst of passionate love,
but in the moment when love has mutated into tormenting enmity
and the thirst for revenge, in the moment, therefore, when the greatest
possible distance from her original passion has been attained. For it
now turns out that this greatest possible distance is no distance at all,
that it is merely one more propulsive surge in the unceasing wheel of
passion, hence that passion itself, in its perfect kinesis, has now been
adequately represented in the utterance after all—in a move that also
includes and nullifies the distance of singer from song. To put it dif-
ferently, aboriginal Kypris—who in herself is nothing but the sign of
a complicatedly passionate cosmic event that is at once both castra-
tion and ejaculation, an event that is present etymologically in her
other name, “Aphrodite”—has now been successfully integrated into
the Olympian pantheon. In a strong sense, Sappho’s poem can be said
to create Aphrodite as πας Δίος, child of Zeus.
Of course, the original difficulty remains. You cannot have the one
Aphrodite without the other. Precisely Olympian Aphrodite becomes
the “baiter of traps.” But still, exactly this difficulty, along with its
unavoidability, is the successful representation of helpless passion in
the poem (compare Mace [344] on “unwelcome helplessness”), and
thus constitutes, in my view, Sappho’s real achievement—without
ceasing to be a difficulty.
Sappho and Homer

My point about Sappho’s poem as an act of vengeful aggression places
me not far from a long tradition of reading Sappho alongside Homer.13
The main parallel with the prayer to Aphrodite is found in Iliad 5,
in the prayer to Athena of wounded Diomedes (115–20), asking for
restored strength and an opportunity to avenge himself on Pandaros,
who had shot him, and justifying the request (as Sappho does hers)
by recalling favors the goddess had already granted in the past: if
ever, εἴ ποτέ, you stood by my father, says Diomedes; if ever, αἴ ποτα,
you heard my cry and came to me in the past, says Sappho. The idea
of Aphrodite as a “fellow fighter” supports this parallel—which is,
of course, supported further by the idea of revenge (with its implied
adversary) that I have insisted on.
The most complete and interesting treatment of what is going on
here, between Sappho and Homer, is given in my opinion by John J.
Winkler, who speaks of “multiple identification”:
Sappho is acting out the parts both of Diomedes and of Aphrodite as

they are characterized in Iliad 5. Aphrodite, like Sappho, suffers pain
[from the wound made by Diomedes’ spear, 352–4], and is consoled
by a powerful goddess who asks “Who has done this to you?” (373).
Aphrodite borrows Ares’ chariot to escape from the battle and ride to
heaven (358–67), the reverse of her action in Sappho’s poem (Benedetto,
who refers to the poem as “Aphrodite’s revenge” [!]). Sappho therefore
is in a sense presenting herself both as a desperate Diomedes needing the
help of a goddess (Athena/Aphrodite) and as a wounded and expelled
female (Aphrodite/Sappho) seeking a goddess’ consolation (Dione/
Aphrodite).14
Sappho, that is, elbows her way into the middle of Homer’s singing,
but in such a way that she does not present a single clear target by
which it might gain control over her; “and she restores the fullness
of Homer’s text by isolating and alienating its deliberate exclusion
of the feminine and the erotic” (Winkler 175). Presumably with her
divine “fellow fighter” at her side, Sappho thus takes up a struggle
with Homer himself.
The only trouble with Winkler’s account is that he does not give
Sappho enough credit. He prides himself on what he calls “a kind of
cultural bi-lingualism on our part” (162), which has to do with our
supposed “anthropological” sophistication, our ability to see through
others’ prejudices. But when he speaks of Sappho’s “exquisite control”
(171), of her assuming “a role . . . as the smiling, tolerant, ever helpful
ally of her own thumos, ‘spirit,’” I cannot help thinking that I hear a
typical modern view of women as the reconcilers, the pacifiers, the
comforters. (And this only a few pages after a mention of Monique
Wittig [162]!) Whatever may be the case for ancient Greek women
in general, I cannot see anything of that modern woman in Sappho.
She speaks charmingly; that is the tactics of her revenge. But there is
steel behind every syllable. The poem’s last words seek not a comforter
or peacemaker but a fighter; and those words are rendered the more
daring and desperate by our knowledge that the “fellow fighter” in
question, as Kypris, will inevitably turn against Sappho again, will
subject her “yet again” to the inevitable torment of the lover, as she has
in the past. The endless and ceaseless cycle of passion that the poem
evokes—with no breathing space whatever, no ἀνάπνευσις (Iliad,
16.43)—is as demanding and comfortless a field for heroic resolve as
ever a war was, if not more so for lacking the consolation of loyalty.
Winkler is certainly correct when he speaks of multiple Aphrodites
in the poem. But he is wrong in looking for multiple Sapphos. There
is but one Sappho here, as focused and determined in the immediate
presence of passion as ever, say, a Sarpedon in the presence of death
(Iliad, 12.326–28).
Winkler, in the end, reads Sappho as Wordsworth would. But
Sappho is an opponent of the view that would eventually become
Wordsworth’s, or for that matter Aristotle’s. And it is this opposition,
more than just her sex, that makes her an opponent of Homer. By no
means all her poems carry the hidden steel I find in the complaint
to Aphrodite—although, of course, she could be openly scornful and
nasty on occasion, probably on more occasions than we know about.
But even where she is simply passionate and loving, precisely this is her
weapon in the contest with Homer. To the memory-like qualities, the
breadth and relative relaxation of Homeric song, no matter how vio-
lent its content, she opposes the tight focus of passion. And when she is
at her best, as in the poem we have been looking at, she forces together
the two strictly irreconcilable elements of what I call the Wordsworth
problem—the sheer kinesis of passion and the architecture of language
in poetic form—into a miraculous union. Actually, of course, such a
union remains impossible. But Sappho attacks the problem with a skill
and energy that give it sharper contours—as a problem, as an inherent
defect in poetic form—than anywhere else in antiquity, and contours
at least as sharp as anywhere later.
A Second Perspective
Not a great deal of Sappho’s poetry still exists in readable form. But
fortunately there is one other poem whose relation to the Aphrodite-
prayer makes possible some very important insights: fragment 31,
φαίνεταί μοι κνος. Especially important is the contrast between
the two songs. The speaker of the poem to Aphrodite is situated at
that point in the cycle of passionate life that is furthest removed from
passion itself, whereas the speaker of poem 31 is situated in the very

midst of her passion’s most violent movements. It is almost as if Sappho,
in the two poems, were experimenting with extreme limits in the proj-
ect of mastering passion as such, not merely its idea, in poetic form.
There are problems in reading poem 31, some of which we will
come to in a moment; but the general outlines are fairly clear. Winkler’s
translation reads:
That one seems to me to be like the gods, the man whosoever sits facing
you and listens nearby to your sweet speech and desirable laughter—
which surely terrifies the heart in my chest; for as I look briefly at you,
so can I no longer speak at all, my tongue is silent, broken, a silken fire
suddenly has spread beneath my skin, with my eyes I see nothing, my
hearing hums, a cold sweat grips me, a trembling seizes me entire, more
pale than grass am I, I seem to myself to be little short of dead. But
everything is to be endured, since even a pauper. . . . (178)
The first problem here is whether the man with Sappho’s beloved
should be understood to be real or hypothetical (“whichever man sits
facing you”). Winkler deviates from most of the scholarly tradition by
deciding firmly in favor of the latter.
The anonymous “that man whosoever” . . . is a rhetorical cliché, not an

actor in the imagined scene. . . . The ordinary protocols of marital bro-
kerage in ancient society are a system of discreet offers and counter-
offers which must maintain at all times the possibility for saving face,
for declining with honor and respect to all parties. . . . Sappho’s hint that
“someone” enjoys a certain happiness is, like Odysseus’ identical state-
ment [Odyssey, 6.158–9], a polite self-reference and an invitation to
take the next step. Sappho plays with the role of Odysseus as suitor
extraordinary, an unheard of stranger who might fulfill Nausikaa’s
dreams of marriage contrary to all the ordinary expectations of her
society. (179–80)
But this question, even if it is ultimately undecidable,15 does not change

the most important feature of the poem for our purposes.
The crucial point is that Sappho lists the symptoms of passionate
love from the point of view of one who is in the midst of experienc-
ing them. The verbs all suggest experienced immediacy and, beginning
with the verb for “see,” they keep to the present indicative, which in
Greek is a progressive form, referring to actions or events now in prog-
ress. This factor contributes significantly to the parallel with Homer,
because in the balance of his speech (6.160–9), after the formula about
how fortunate a bridegroom will be, Odysseus is expressing (however

deviously or mendaciously) feelings awakened in him here and now by
seeing the person who is actually before him. What we have, then, in
Sappho, is an account of passionate love seen from inside the moment
of its highest intensity.
And this poetic situation produces an exemplary instance of the
Wordsworth problem, since for Wordsworth the poet’s point of
view cannot be located in such an inside. Not only for Wordsworth.
Curiously enough, it is, of all poems, no. 31, to which Denys Page
is referring when he recalls Wordsworth to the effect that “Sappho
recollects her emotion in tranquillity” (Sappho and Alcaeus 136).
Recollecting is precisely what Sappho is not doing here, and certainly
not in anything like “tranquillity.” She is in the midst of the experience
she is talking about. It is the Wordsworth problem, and nothing else,
that keeps readers from recognizing this simple fact.
One reader who is not thrown off, however, is Dolores O’Higgins.
O’Higgins concentrates, more consistently than any other critic I have
read, on the poem as constituting (not merely in some sense repre-
senting) an event in progress. She insists, in particular, on keeping the
manuscript reading ἀλλ’ ἄκαν μὲν γλσσα ἔαγε . . . [but silently my
tongue has been broken], in spite of the metrical hiatus between the
last two words.
The hiatus in line 9 has placed the reading eage in doubt. I believe with
Nagy, however, that it is deliberate, intended audially to reproduce the
“catch” in the poet’s voice; Sappho dramatically represents herself as
being almost at the point she describes—losing her voice altogether. It
is a critical loss for an oral poet, and a paradoxical and dramatic begin-
ning to the poet’s response.16
The reference to oral poetry is somewhat beside the point here, as

O’Higgins herself makes clear a bit later.
For Sappho . . . the poet’s voice is the instrument of seduction. Sappho’s

verb eage (“shattered” 9) describing her tongue metaphorically associ-
ates this “symptom” also with a warrior’s death on the battlefield. Just
as the Homeric warrior defines, defends and justifies himself with a
sword, so the poet with a tongue. Sappho is disarmed, her voice a splin-
tered weapon, like the sword or spear of a doomed warrior who has
encountered an immortal or immortally aided foe. (161)
The one thing Sappho needs in order to attract her beloved is the first
thing she is robbed of by the sight of just that beloved.
The only important point missing in O’Higgins’s argument so far

is the recognition that in the final analysis, the “foe” that threatens
Sappho’s voice with enforced silence is the Wordsworth problem, the
obvious need for reflective distance in poetry, the obvious impossibil-
ity of speaking poetically in the full immediacy of passion—hence the
impossibility of success in the task that poem 31 apparently sets itself.
But O’Higgins comes at least to the brink of this point in her discus-
sion of the last of the poem’s existing lines,
ἀλλὰ πὰν τόλματον ἐπεὶ † καὶ πένητα †

The expression pan tolmaton is not simply an exhortation to endure,
although connotations of endurance are present. In this martial context
pan tolmaton may be translated “all can be dared.” [Better would be: all
must be dared.] It is a call to arms providing a dramatic peripeteia within
the poem itself. The poem which ironically records the poet’s own near
death, repeated in the past and again imminent, now reveals itself as a
lethal weapon. Whether it was the girl’s voice or appearance (or both)
that seduced Sappho, it is her own voice with which she plans to attack
in her turn, uncannily recreating her fractured weapon. (161–2)
And on the level of voice considered as poetic voice:
It is not merely a question of survival, of enduring recurrent brushes

with death or approaches to death; as far as the poem is concerned,
death is a threat that is never fully realized. But the terrible silence,
which threatens both the poet’s existence as a poet, and the existence of
this or any poem of Sappho, actually and repeatedly assails her. The act
of poiesis resists the obliteration that passion threatens, and the exis-
tence of the poema proclaims a permanent triumph over the recurrent
threat of poetic non-being. (163–4)
This is as clear a statement of the Wordsworth problem as I think can

be found in existing Sappho scholarship.
To look at it the other way round, all passionate poetry in a sense
aspires to the condition of silence, because only silence could be consid-
ered an adequate direct representation of passion in formal language.
In chapter Two, we will look at a poem in which the line “The little
birds are silent in the woods” mimics the birds’ singing, and so evokes
the whole paradox we have been discussing, since, as O’Higgins points
out, silence is simply not an option for poetry.
The only troublesome idea in O’Higgins’s formulation is that of
a “permanent triumph.” Passion is everywhere in Sappho, but I, for
my part, cannot find anywhere a sense of permanent triumph, or
permanence of any sort. What Sappho does is “dare everything,” cre-

ate a poetry of passion in the very teeth of the Wordsworth problem,
the problem that makes such poetry impossible. Does she succeed? For
a moment at a time perhaps. But anything like a “permanent” success
is out of the question. Her permanent achievement is her insistence on
the problem as a problem, her refusal to back away from it, her implac
able laying bare of a fundamental defect in the very idea of a passionate
poetry. O’Higgins is very eloquent on the matter of Sappho’s profes-
sional courage: “Sappho’s poem, in its final stanza, dramatically wills
itself into existence despite the silencing nature of its subject” (164).
These words, understood in relation to the Wordsworth problem (the
silencing opposition between passion and poetic form), are about as
complete a summation of Sappho’s work as I can imagine.
Chapter Two
The Poem as Hieroglyph: Goethe’s

“Über allen Gipfeln”
Über allen Gipfeln

Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.1
[Over all peaks / Is quiet, / In all treetops / You detect / Hardly a breath; / The
little birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait, soon / You too will rest.]
The Problems
Commentators are practically unanimous about the tenor of Goethe’s
little poem “Über allen Gipfeln”: release of tension, imminent repose,
harmony, and so on. My own sense of the poem—at least of its final
version, as it appeared in print from 1815 on—is different. I find in it
practically nothing but dissonances, incongruities, contradictions. And
I think the recognition of these qualities produces a distinctly better
overall reading of the text than most others.
1. The first jarring element is the title: “Ein gleiches” (Of the same
sort). Ordinarily we do not expect a poem’s title to present interpre-
tive difficulties—or if it does, then only after we have worked our
way through the poem itself, as in the case of Goethe’s “Ganymed.”
But the title “Ein gleiches”—with lowercase “g,” hence requiring to
be completed by an understood noun—compels us to look elsewhere
to discover what it refers to. For most commentators, “look else-
where” means simply “look elsewhere on the same page”—in either
the 1815 edition or the “Ausgabe letzter Hand”—where we find above
our poem the poem “Wandrers Nachtlied” (Wanderer’s Night-Song).

But does this help us? Does the phrase “Ein gleiches Nachtlied” even
mean anything in normal German? In the obvious parallel instance,
where a “Kophtisches Lied” is followed by a poem titled “Ein andres”
(WA 1:130–31), there is no problem. “Ein andres kophtisches Lied”
(Another Coptic Song) makes perfectly good sense. And when the
poem “Räthsel” (Riddle) is followed by a poem called “Desgleichen”
(The Same, WA 3:153–4), we don’t even have to worry about an
understood noun.
Still, “Ein gleiches” does obviously refer to the other poem on the
page. But exactly how? We can answer this question by considering
the sentence: Hans sang ein Lied, Fritz sang _____. If we replace the
blank by “ein anderes,” the sentence means: H. sang a song, F. sang
a different one. If we use “ein gleiches,” it means: H. sang a song,
F. sang another of that kind. In the first case, the possibility is opened
for us to be interested in how the two songs differ. In the second case,
the attitude expressed is at least mildly dismissive: just another one
of the same type, basically the same song, “das gleiche Lied,” all over
again; there is nothing special to be said about either one. Is Goethe
thus suggesting that we not trouble to interpret his two texts, that we
simply take cognizance of them as two instances of a relatively simple
type?
2. Then consider the first line, which in just three words and six syl-
lables manages to be monotonous. Each trochaic unit is occupied by
one word, and the relation between stress and unstress (the drop-off)
in each word is exactly the same. The original version (according to
Herder and Luise von Göchhausen), “Über allen Gefilden” (Over all
the landscape), is much more graceful. Another possibility would have
been “Über all den Gipfeln” (Over all those peaks), which would have
not only varied the stress level (in normal speech), but also suggested,
via the demonstrative adjective, a pointing at mountain peaks in the
distance. As the line stands, we get the impression that the speaker
feels himself more or less in the midst of mountain peaks, a feeling that
makes better sense for “Wipfel” (treetops) than it does for “Gipfel.”
3. The third and fourth lines end in another apparent prosodic
mistake. In German, when the pronoun “du” immediately follows its
verb, as in the combination “Spürest du,” that pronoun is enclitic; in
normal speech it attaches itself as an unstressed appendage to the verb
preceding and so has no business in rhyming position, where a stress
is required. (It is the enclitic quality of the second-person pronoun in
Germanic languages that brings about the ending -st, where -s would
be more normal in the Indo-European family. The -t of the ending is
what remains of the pronoun “du” [or “thu” in earlier English] from
The Poem as Hieroglyph 33
the extremely common instances where it follows the verb.) The last
line of the poem calls our attention to this mistake by showing a con-
trasting instance, where the combination “du auch” (you too) creates
an idiomatic stress for the “du.” Thus, in a kind of prosodic joke, the
word is unstressed where it should be stressed and vice versa.
4. Then we have to worry, as some critics have,2 about the verb
“spüren” (detect), which, when we are talking about the possibility
of a breath of wind, almost has to refer to experience via the sense of
touch. Therefore, it is difficult to imagine that breath of wind in the
treetops, where one could apprehend it only by sight or hearing. But in
this case, we are not necessarily talking about a mistake or dissonance
in the poem. We might, rather, interpret the clause as expressing a kind
of generalized synaesthesia, an idea of the human sensorium as a single
indivisible unit.
5. The next problem involves the line, “Die Vögelein schweigen im
Walde.” Does “schweigen” mean “are silent” or “fall silent”? The past
tense in German can be either an absolute past (referring to events,
as in narrative) or a past imperfect (with progressive meaning, refer-
ring to continuing conditions or actions). But the present, when con-
text does not prohibit it, is usually a progressive tense. If you ask
someone what daddy is doing, the answer in German might well be,
“Er liest seine Zeitung.” But in English it would never be, “He reads his
paper.” English would always use the special progressive construction,
“He is reading his paper,” for the meaning that is simply given in the
German present. Therefore our first impulse, in reading Goethe’s line,
is to understand: the birds are silent in the woods, not fall silent. And
the problem is that one’s perception of birds in the woods is mainly
auditory, not visual, especially at a time of day when they do less flying
about. The first five lines of the poem contain only statements that can
be taken to express sense perceptions. But the objects referred to in the
line 6, the birds, if they are silent, are probably altogether unavailable
to the speaker’s senses, which means they must be understood strictly
as products of his imagining or remembering mind.
This impression is strengthened by the diminutive, which was added
in the final version. The original had had “Vögel” (birds). For this
diminutive, if the birds are not immediate sense objects, must be not
a literal but an affectionate diminutive—the dear little birdies—which
again locates the thought strictly inside the speaker’s mind. Why this
curious shift from a mind responding to the outside world to a move-
ment of strict introspection? Especially when, in its sound, its dactylic
lilt, the line in question imitates not the absence or the silence of the
birds, but precisely their singing!
6. And finally, the word “balde” is at least a little disturbing. It

means basically “soon,” but has the connotation of: swiftly, suddenly,
even violently. Its cognates include English bold and bolt. It is there-
fore a bit difficult to reconcile with the idea of a time in the future that
is approaching slowly or gently.
It seems to me that all these issues must be dealt with. But in them-
selves they do not indicate a clear interpretive path into the text. One
has to find one’s way by experiment, by trial and error, which is how
I arrived at the reading below. The trouble is that when I now set
that reading forth as an argument, its starting point must seem merely
arbitrary. I ask patience of my reader, therefore, in the hope that the
completed argument will justify its opening. In any case, I will inter-
pret the printed revision—not the original poem of September 6, 1780,
which I assume had “Gefilden” and “Vögel” in lines 1 and 6, despite
Goethe’s vague diary entry of August 27, 1831. My claim is that when
it occurred to Goethe to revise the poem—probably after 1805, for the
edition of 1815—he saw and seized the opportunity to create some-
thing completely different in spirit from the original.
The Opening Lines as a Neoplatonist

Diagram
The replacement of “Gefilden” with “Gipfeln” in line 1, which may
have been considered very early on,3 has two separate effects. It not
only creates the uncomfortably choppy rhythm of line 1, but also pro-
duces the problem of the rhyme on unstressed “du,” since without
rhymes in lines 1 and 3, there is no necessary expectation of a rhyme
in line 4. The decision to use “Gipfeln” is thus at the very core of the
revision, and is the point at which I will begin.
But just this point is where I shall probably require the reader’s
maximum indulgence. For I am going to suggest that the insistent tro-
chaic rhythm of the opening line is meant to suggest a visual image, a
three-pointed zigzag line that might be seen as precisely a representa-
tion of “Gipfel” (peaks), of a mountainous skyline.
/\/\/\
And I am going to suggest further that “Über allen Gipfeln”—by con-
trast with a possible “Über all den Gipfeln”—can be taken to mean
not only “above all those mountain peaks,” but also “above all peaks
or pinnacles or extremities in general, beyond everything that has the
quality of a maximum.”
This last reading is made possible by the fact that the word “Ruh”
does not refer unambiguously to the idea of a quiet sky. Doubtless this
idea is present in the word. But if we insist upon it too strongly, we
will tend to lose sight of the most striking and curious feature of line
2: that it is composed of only two words, which in a number of ways
are exactly equivalent to each other, both capitalized, each having one
syllable, each having three letters. It is as if, in looking at this line on
the page, we were looking at the perfectly balanced pans of a scale.
And if we are willing—say, for the sake of experiment—to accept the
idea of a latent visuality in line 1; and if, accordingly, we are willing
to seek meaning in the visual aspect of line 2 on the page: then we
will not have any trouble interpreting that two-word line. It expresses,
Neoplatonically, the idea of Being (on) as opposed to Becoming
(genesis)—as set forth, for instance, in Plato’s Timaeus, 27D–28A—
the idea that that which truly is (Ist) undergoes no form of change and
so may be regarded metaphorically as evincing a condition of perfect
rest (Ruh).
“Gipfel,” by contrast, are maxima, points of highest achievement.
Therefore they presuppose motion, striving, and so belong to the realm
of Becoming. But beyond all “Gipfel,” beyond everything that can pos-
sibly be achieved by striving, beyond the groping jagged edge of the
sensible world, is the level of the intelligible and the unchanging, to
which alone the attribute of being (that it “is”) applies.
We can go further. If Goethe is operating here with both the visual
and the auditory aspects of the poem—how it looks on the page and
how it sounds when spoken—then the association of the former with
Being and the latter (which unfolds in time) with Becoming, is fairly
obvious. In this sense, it is fitting that in the first line, where the realm
of Becoming (the peaks) is being spoken of, the visual (or eternal)
component of the meaning is latent, like the intimations of Being that
we might receive in the sensible world, but without having a direct
encounter. In the second line, however, which is dedicated to Being
itself, the visual presence of the words is practically all there is. If we
try to “read” the line in its Platonic sense, to unfold its meaning dis-
cursively, we shall always, in one way or another, arrive at the formula
“Ist = Ruh,” which is absurd, if for no other reason than that it equates
a finite verb with a noun. The only way to grasp that line in its philo-
sophical sense is simply to contemplate it, to stare at it. It is nothing
but visual.
What exactly am I suggesting about Goethe’s creative procedure

here? That having studied Platonic and Neoplatonic thought in who
knows how many authors, he then sits down to cram it all into as
innocent-looking a poem as he can cook up? Of course not. The inno-
cent poem itself is undoubtedly the first step. And when it comes time
to revise that poem, Goethe is immediately struck—as I think we all
should be struck—by the strangeness and the philosophical possibili-
ties of the two-word second line. From there, especially since the word
“Wipfel” is already present to suggest a rhyme, it is no very great dis-
tance to the introduction of “Gipfel” and the consequent working out
of the poem’s philosophical dimension.
But still, why bother? What is gained by developing the philosophi-
cal dimension of such a small and relatively unassuming text? This is
the question we will conclude with.
The Descent of Man

Of all the varieties of more or less Neoplatonic thought that were avail-
able to him, Goethe seems to have been most taken with Hermetic or
emanative philosophy. At least this philosophical tradition supplies the
basic shape for the “personal religion” (WA 27:217) of his youth that
he describes at the end of Book 8 of Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry
and Truth). And for Goethe, as for most Hermetics, the crucial phil-
osophical problem is to explain the function of man in the cosmic
system of emanations. Goethe approaches this task by starting with
the response of the Elohim to Lucifer’s disastrous move of universal
“Concentration” (219). They initiate a countermove of expansion
which restores “the actual pulse of life” (220). And then:
This is the epochal moment where that which we know as light appeared,
and where that which we customarily call Creation began. No matter
how much this Creation gained step by step in variety, through the con-
tinuing vital energy of the Elohim, still there was lacking an entity that
would be suited to reestablish its original connection with the godhead,
and therefore man was created, who was meant to be in all respects
similar, indeed equal to the godhead. (220)
There are, of course, problems that make it inevitable “that he [man]

must become at once the most perfect and imperfect, the happiest and
unhappiest creature” (221); but his inborn destiny is not affected. Man
begins existence on the level of creation or Becoming, but is entrusted
ultimately with a universal restorative task on a level comparable to,

or indeed higher than (depending on whom you read) that of Being
itself.
I offer this as an introduction to lines 3–5 of our poem. The basic
structure of everything that is (Being/Becoming) is diagrammed in
lines 1–2; and now we encounter a “du” (you), which, no matter how
one interprets it in detail, must certainly be thought of as human. But
Goethe’s revision, which (we saw) has the effect of bringing out the
prosodic problem of the enclitic “du,” thus also creates an exact image
of the two conflicting aspects of Hermetically conceived humanity.
For in the auditory rendering of lines 3–5, which corresponds to the
realm of Becoming, the “du,” representing humanity, is unstressed,
not particularly noticeable, one created thing among others. But in
the poem as we see it on the page—or metaphorically, in the realm
of Being—that same word is immediately recognizable as a rhyme,
an indispensable structural component of the whole. And as a rhyme,
moreover, it is directly associated with “Ruh,” one of the mysterious
names of Being itself.
This metaphysical duality in human nature, however, as Goethe
makes clear in Dichtung und Wahrheit, is in itself a source not of com-
pletion or fulfillment, but of tension and suffering. And our under-
standing of this point creates a new kind of bifurcation in the poem,
parallel to that between the visible and the audible. For even without
any change in the words of lines 3–5, the revision puts us in a posi-
tion to carry out two different and fundamentally opposed readings of
those lines, an intellectual reading (with a view to the level of Being)
and a sensual reading (confined to the realm of Becoming).
The latter, which was probably the reading anticipated by the origi-
nal version of the poem, turns on what I called the suggestion of “gen-
eralized synaesthesia” in the verb spüren. The idea of seeing or hearing
the wind in the treetops as if one were feeling that wind directly sug-
gests an immediate and intimate involvement with nature by way of
all one’s senses at once, thus a state of personal satisfaction or fulfill-
ment. But the intellectual perspective (created in the revision) recog-
nizes that fulfillment as illusion, as merely sensory, as an entrapment
in Becoming; and it reads the absence or fading of “Hauch” (breath) as
a failure of divine spiritus or pneuma, or as God’s refusal to rustle in
the treetops, as he sometimes does in the Old Testament (e.g., 2 Sam.,
5:24).
Thus the two halves of the diagram in lines 1–2 are transformed
into a powerful internal tension or dissonance in lines 3–5, raising the
question of how, for humankind, that tension can be resolved so as
to make possible the carrying out of our divine mission of universal

reconciliation.
Those Dying Generations

Or perhaps more modestly: Can we at least produce and undergo an
intimation of that ultimate reconciliation by creating a bridge between
the objects of intellect and those of sense, between intelligibles and
sensibles, noeta and aistheta—a bridge that in Plato is identified with
beauty (e.g., Phaedrus, 249–50)?
This brings us to the turning point in the poem, at least in a
Neoplatonist reading: the line, “Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde”
(the little birds are silent in the woods). I have already pointed out
that the change of “Vögel” to “Vögelein” introduces an element of
affection on the speaker’s part and also gives the line a sound that sug-
gests birdsong. But the change is actually more basic. The original line,
“Die Vögel schweigen im Walde,” can be translated: you cannot hear
any birds in the woods. But when those otherwise entirely unspecific
“birds” are given a concrete attribute—even if it is only smallness, not
yet lovability—then we are compelled to keep them as the sentence
subject in our translation: the little birds are silent in the woods. (The
sentence, “You cannot hear any little birds in the woods,” would raise
the question: but you can hear the big birds?) And this new transla-
tion, which the revision insists on, forces us—as I noted above—to ask
how the speaker knows anything about those little birds if he cannot
hear them.
For an answer to this question, we turn to the most influential
Neoplatonist of them all, Plotinus. I see no reason to disbelieve Goethe’s
description of his youthful enthusiastic reading of Plotinus, in a note
dictated for Book 6 of Dichtung und Wahrheit but not included in the
final version (WA 27:382). And in Plotinus we read:
And soul’s power of sense-perception need not be perception of sense-

objects, but rather it must be receptive of the impressions produced by
sensation on the living being; these are already intelligible entities. So
external sensation is the image of this sensation of the soul, which is in
its essence truer and is a contemplation of forms alone without being
affected. (Enneads 1.1.7)4
The relevance of this passage to the revision of “Über allen Gipfeln” is

suggested by its resonance with the Plotinus-debate Goethe later stages
in “Aus Makariens Archiv,” nos. 17–28 (WA 48:196–9)—nine trans-

lated passages (from Enneads 5.8.1) followed by his own responses,
all from 18055—which also opposes the mental (soul-borne) represen-
tation and the physical representation of sensible objects, in this case
works of art.
Goethe’s “Vögelein,” then, are in the first instance not birds con-
sidered as physical objects, as sensibles, but rather their intelligible
“forms” (eide), the knowledge of which does not require physical evi-
dence. In lines 3–5, a tension had opened between two readings of the
same words, between a hope for satisfaction and comfort on the level
of the senses (generalized synaesthesia) and a criticism of any such
hope from the perspective of intellect, a criticism that had culminated
in a negative evaluation of the phrase “hardly a breath,” the last word
being understood as “spirit.” And now, in line 6, intellect simply takes
over, asserting its superiority over sense experience by perceiving the
forms of birds in a manner of which any direct physical perception
would be a mere phantom image (eidolon).
This much fits well enough with our speculation above about
Goethe’s revision of the poem. Prompted by the obvious (if originally
unintended) Neoplatonic significance of the line “Ist Ruh,” Goethe
quickly recognizes the diagrammatic possibilities that arise from a deci-
sion for “Gipfeln” instead of “Gefilden.” The inner tension of lines 3–5
then offers itself without any further revision. And now only one addi-
tional change—a very ingenious one, from “Vögel” to “Vögelein”—is
required in order to decide that tension, the implied struggle in lines
3–5, in favor of the level of soul or intellect or Being.
But this idea of the poem’s genesis creates problems. Unless my
reading of the “du” (you) in line 4, as bearing a Hermetic idea of
humankind, is completely wrong, what Goethe requires after line 5
is not a victory of soul or intelligence, but rather a reconciliation of
the opposing tendencies in human nature, as an intimation and pre-
lude to the universal reconciliation for which humanity was created.
And where does the element of affection come from, in the diminu-
tive “Vögelein”? Plotinus explicitly denies the presence of affect in the
“sensation of the soul.” And why, above all, should the line be altered
so that its sound can reasonably (with the aid of context) be taken to
imitate birdsong, hence to imitate the opposite of those birds’ presum-
ably intellectual silence?
The poem “Wandrers Nachtlied” (“Der du von dem Himmel bist,”
[WA 1:98]) appeared in Goethe’s Werke of 1806–10 unaccompanied
by “Über allen Gipfeln,” which did not appear in print until the Werke
of 1815–19. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the final revision
of the latter poem was not done until after Goethe’s little debate with
Plotinus in 1805. Does the poem, then, like the debate, invoke Plotinus
(in this case cryptically) mainly in order to disagree with him? If so,
exactly how?
The first of the two main aphorisms in which Goethe responds to
Plotinus’s insistence that we must prefer the intellectual version of
artistic form over its material manifestation reads as follows:
Man kann den Idealisten alter und neuer Zeit nicht verargen, wenn sie
so lebhaft auf Beherzigung des Einen dringen, woher alles entspringt,
und worauf alles wieder zurückzuführen wäre. Denn freilich ist das
belebende und ordnende Princip in der Erscheinung dergestalt bed-
rängt, daß es sich kaum zu retten weiß. Allein wir verkürzen uns an der
andern Seite wieder, wenn wir das Formende und die höhere Form selbst
in eine vor unserm äußern und innern Sinn verschwindende Einheit
zurückdrängen.
(“Aus Makariens Archiv,” no. 26; WA 48:199)
[One cannot blame the idealists of older and of recent times when they
insist so energetically on heeding the One, from which everything origi-
nates and to which everything may be led back. For it is true that the
animating and ordering principle is so hard pressed in the phenomenal
world that it hardly knows how to preserve itself. But then we cut our-
selves short on the other side when we force the formative act and higher
form itself into a unity that vanishes before our outer and inner sense.]
There is more wit than substance in this little paragraph. “Beherzigung”

(heeding, taking to heart) is close to a mockery of the attitude of con-
templation or immersion required by The One of Neoplatonism; “it
hardly knows how to preserve itself” burlesques the relation of princi-
ple to phenomenon; and when we hear that that principle is pressured
“dergestalt” (in such form) in the world of appearances, the etymology
says as much as the sentence.
But at the end, the allusion to “our outer and inner sense” is an invo-
cation of Kant on space and time (Critique of Pure Reason, §§ 2, 6),
which sets the stage for the second aphorism:
Wir Menschen sind auf Ausdehnung und Bewegung angewiesen;

diese beiden allgemeinen Formen sind es, in welchen sich alle übrigen
Formen, besonders die sinnlichen, offenbaren. Eine geistige Form wird
aber keineswegs verkürzt, wenn sie in der Erscheinung hervortritt,
vorausgesetzt, daß ihr Hervortreten eine wahre Zeugung, eine wahre
Fortpflanzung sei. Das ist der Vortheil lebendiger Zeugung, daß das
Gezeugte vortrefflicher sein kann als das Zeugende.
(“Aus Makariens Archiv,” no. 27; WA 48:199)
[We humans are dependent on extension and motion; it is in these two

general forms that all other forms, especially sensate forms, reveal them-
selves. A mental form, however, is not at all mutilated by emerging in the
phenomenal world, provided that its emergence is a true engendering, a
true procreation. That is the advantage of physical engendering, that that
which is engendered can be more excellent than what engenders it.]
The point is that “we humans” are limited to a particular way of

thinking and talking about things. (Hence the invocation of Kant—
even though the use of the concept “form” in three conflicting senses
tramples on Kant’s terminological scrupulosity.) It may on some plane
be true that intellectual form is superior to manifest form, but we can-
not assert such a truth, or apply it, or draw conclusions from it, with-
out violating our basic human limitedness. The witty tone of the first
aphorism acknowledges such limitation precisely by playing with the
possibility of skirting it, by juggling notions with which neither we nor
the speaker (as mere humans) can have any fundamental familiarity.
The main question raised by the second aphorism, however, is what
exactly “a true engendering, a true procreation” is supposed to mean.
I think Goethe is referring to this question when he says in the third
aphorism, the last of the series (“Archiv,” no. 28; WA 48:199), that a
full development of the ideas suggested would be very complicated
and difficult. And yet, an answer to exactly this question is indicated in
line 6 of “Über allen Gipfeln.” If I form in my mind an intellectual rep-
resentation of sensible objects—say “Vögel,” silent birds in the trees—
and if I view that representation as a victory of the intellectual over
the sensible (over space and time, extension and motion); if indeed I
attempt to exploit it as a vehicle (the wings of the soul) by which to lift
myself out of the material realm altogether: then, again, I am violating
the basic conditions of human existence. My task as a human being,
rather, is to invest that representation, that “intellectual form,” with
bodily energy—with something like the affection that sees not “Vögel”
but “Vögelein”—and thereby to insist upon its material manifestation
as something akin to a work of art. Only then does my victory truly
become a victory in the human sense—not as a separation of the intel-
lectual from the material, but rather as a force tending to fulfill the
Hermetic human duty of reconciliation.
(Plotinus himself in fact suggests something quite close to this atti-

tude when, in the same section that I quoted from above, he speaks
of “the descent of the soul,” of the soul’s “illumination [of] what is
below it” [Enneads 1.1.12; trans. 119]. And the single passage in the
Enneads that is most crucial for Hermetic or emanative philosophy,
4.8.6, speaks repeatedly of how each level of existence has the obli-
gation to generate or beget or bring forth [German: zeugen] what is
below it.)
Unquestionably intellect is superior to the senses, and possesses a
form of freedom that is absent in sense experience. But to cultivate
that freedom strictly in its own domain—here Goethe parts company
with Kant—is to fail at a basic human task. The duty of intellect is
to assert and express itself in the material domain, to immerse and
commit itself here as a generative force, so that intelligibles and sen-
sibles may enjoy a newly harmonious relation with one another—
which relation, in turn, is the offspring that is “more excellent” than
its progenitor by heralding the universal reconciliation whose vessel
we are.
The sound of line 6 sets the seal on Goethe’s poem as a fulfill-
ment of this duty. Again, the auditory aspect of the poem is associated
with the realm of Becoming, and line 6 as birdsong resides exclusively
in that auditory aspect. Neither the sight of the words on the page,
nor the sense of the words in our mind, can produce it. In order to
reach a decision about whether an imitation of birdsong is present or
not, we cannot proceed otherwise than by speaking the words aloud
and listening to them. In fact, even if we decide that the line does not
sound like birdsong, we have still thereby responded to, and so insisted
upon, the quality of the poem as an audible object in material reality—
like a bird. Our activity thus still meets the basic criterion for “true
engendering.”
Poetry and Science

I would be less than honest if I did not admit that a serious logical
difficulty arises at this point. There is a clear opposition between my
reading of “Über allen Gipfeln” and the well-known reading that was
carried out by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson in 1949, which says in part,
“There is in [the poem] not a simile, not a metaphor, not a symbol.
Three brief, simple statements of fact are followed by a plain assertion
for the future.”6 It seems obvious that Wilkinson would have disagreed
profoundly with every single assertion in my reading of the poem.
The trouble is that I have no grounds on which to return the favor.

I think Wilkinson makes a couple of specific mistakes about the text.
But if I were to challenge the basic tenor of her reading; if I were to
suggest that she reads too literally, that she takes every semiotic unit at
face value, that more critical and intellectual distance is required of a
poetic interpreter: she would be in a position to answer that in raising
these points, I am arguing against myself, because exactly the type of
reading that she conducts is authorized—if not insisted upon—by my
understanding of the poem. For if the true task of intellect is to com-
mit itself in the material domain as a generative force, how can it not
be the proper task of poetic interpretation to illuminate and develop
a corresponding tendency in poetry wherever possible? And if I were
to complain that commitment is not the same thing as abdication, she
would respond—
But no, let me give her response verbatim: Nonsense (she would
say), I have not abdicated anything, least of all the intellect. Have I not
couched my thought in words and sentences—sentences, I might add,
that aspire to be both intelligent and sensitive? You, on the other hand,
have ignored the implied admonition that you yourself deduced from
the poem’s title. You have overdeveloped intellect in the direction of
mere theory. In doing so, you have produced an argument that is not
only vacuous, but vacuous by its own showing, and should never have
been made in the first place.
Clearly I cannot meet these objections by attacking what I will call
Wilkinson’s experiential approach to the poem. (She discusses the
larger order of nature in her reading, but still ends by insisting on
“the complete assimilation of experience into language without the
intervention of conceptual thought” [25].) My own reading compels
me to accept her approach unqualifiedly. My only chance is to argue
that the experiential approach and the Neoplatonic or “conceptual”
approach must operate side by side in a reading of the poem—which
is difficult to imagine, not because the approaches conflict but because
they are simply incommensurable. My Neoplatonic reading may in the
end authorize or advocate an experiential reading, but precisely that
move of authorization or advocacy is theoretical in character and so
distances itself decisively from the realm of immediate experience. Of
course, the poem’s title, “Ein gleiches,” by exactly the same reasoning,
can be taken as a sign in favor of my reading. Its implied dismissive-
ness strongly favors as simple an experiential reading as possible, a
reading that would minimize any difference from the other poem on
the page. But precisely this favoring does not itself belong to such a
reading and in fact—by suggesting it as a possibility—also relativizes
it, calls it into question, opens the door, so to speak, for a more philo-
sophical approach.
But this remark does not solve my problem. And the possibility of
parallel but incommensurable readings actually creates a new prob-
lem. For if my argument succeeds, one consequence of it will be that
the poem is fundamentally defective, in the sense of lacking unity.
By being shown to admit incommensurable readings, the poem will
have been shown to be in effect two different and incommensurable
poems. There may be ways of making sense of this disunity or defect:
as the sign of a defect in experience itself, or as a sign of the cosmic
defect that defines our Hermetic mission. But there is no way of get-
ting around it.
Perhaps the idea of a basic defect in experience is where I should
begin the defense of my reading of “Über allen Gipfeln,” for it brings us
back to the period of roughly 1805–08, the time of Goethe’s renewed
study of Plotinus and the likely time of his final revision of the poem.
The text that attracts our attention at this point is one famous para-
graph from the foreword to the Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors), a
paragraph which, according to the Tag- und Jahres-Hefte, was written
in early 1807 (WA 36:10).
It is after all a very strange demand, which is sometimes made, but not
fulfilled even by those who make it: one should present experiences
without any theoretical connection, and leave the reader or pupil to
form his own conviction in his own way. For the mere looking at a thing
gets us nowhere. Every looking becomes an observing, every observing a
pondering, every pondering a linking, and so one can say that with every
attentive look into the world we are already theorizing. But to do this,
to undertake this, with consciousness, with self-knowledge, with free-
dom, and—dare we say?—with irony: such skillfulness is needed, if the
abstraction that we fear is to be made harmless, and if the experiential
result that we hope for is to become alive and useful. (WA pt. 2, 1:xii)
The matter under discussion here is scientific observation; but the

thought (especially for someone who considered himself a good criti-
cal reader of Kant) applies to experience in general: there is no such
thing as a strictly immediate sensory experience of nature; experience
is defective in the sense that the theorizing mind has already begun to
interfere with it as soon as one opens one’s eyes.
Abstraction, or theorizing, cannot be eliminated even from our sen-
sory relation to nature. The attempt simply to avoid theorizing—say,
by seeking to imitate a Rousseauistic primitive—leads only to confu-
sion and self-deception. In order to achieve, as nearly as possible, an
unmediated relation with nature, we have no choice but to embrace

our theorizing and learn to prosecute it in a specially skillful manner
by which its “harmful” effects—its distortion of nature’s immediacy—
may be neutralized. Exactly what this means is clarified, to an extent,
later in the Farbenlehre.
Man kann von dem Physiker nicht fordern, daß er Philosoph sei; aber
man kann von ihm erwarten, daß er so viel philosophische Bildung habe,
um sich gründlich von der Welt zu unterscheiden und mit ihr wieder im
höhern Sinne zusammenzutreten. Er soll sich eine Methode bilden, die
dem Anschauen gemäß ist; er soll sich hüten, das Anschauen in Begriffe,
den Begriff in Worte zu verwandeln, und mit diesen Worten, als wären’s
Gegenstände, umzugehen und zu verfahren; er soll von den Bemühungen
des Philosophen Kenntniß haben, um die Phänomene bis an die philoso-
phische Region hinanzuführen. (no. 716; WA pt. 2, 1:285)
[One cannot require that the physicist be a philosopher; but one can
expect that he have enough philosophical background to separate him-
self thoroughly from the world and then come back together with it in
a higher sense. He should form a method that accords with observation;
he should avoid transforming observation into concepts and concepts
into words, and then treating those words, and operating with them, as
if they were objects; his knowledge of what a philosopher does should
enable him to raise his phenomena up to a philosophical level.]
Goethe does not mean that we should avoid words and concepts.
How, if not by systematic conceptual thought, does a philosophizer
“separate himself thoroughly from the world”? The trick is to employ
conceptual intellect so as to coax phenomena into arranging them-
selves as a structure or hierarchy by which “higher rules and laws are
revealed directly to the [sensory] intuition” (no. 175; 72).
It is not easy to apply this thought in detail. Later in life, Goethe
himself appears to have lost confidence in the ability of the individual,
acting alone, to theorize his or her way back to direct contact with
nature “in the higher sense.” In 1828 he writes:
There exists a delicate empiricism that makes itself profoundly identi-

cal with the object and thereby becomes theory in the true sense. But
this intensification of intellectual ability presupposes a highly culti-
vated age. (“Betrachtungen im Sinne der Wanderer,” no. 126; WA pt. 2,
11:128–9)7
But for present purposes it is enough to recognize that the intellectual

process envisaged in the Farbenlehre—the sharp theoretical separation
from nature that eventually leads back to that same sensuous nature,
but “in a higher sense”—corresponds exactly to the path described

by a Neoplatonic or Hermetic interpretation of “Über allen Gipfeln”
(which was probably revised at about the time of that scientific work),
a metaphysical excursion that leads back eventually to an understand-
ing of the text as nothing but a direct response to nature.
Indeed, when Goethe speaks of theorizing “with irony,” it is likely
that he is thinking as much of poetry as of science. At least the reading
of “Über allen Gipfeln” that I have suggested is nothing if not ironic.
It arrives logically at a point where—by insisting on the commitment
of intellect in the realm of Becoming—it calls into question not only
its own method and content, but its very right to exist. And is this
paradoxical process not exactly parallel to what must be meant by
“theorizing with irony,” theorizing in a manner that questions its own
procedure on a deep enough level to counteract its otherwise normal
and necessary tendency to interfere with an immediate intuition of
nature?
The poem, in the reading I have suggested, becomes a kind of hiero-
glyph—by which I mean a picture whose representational content is
fully recognizable, but which also operates as a character in an audibly
realizable and intelligible script. Like the experiential aspect and the
metaphysical aspect of Goethe’s poem, the pictorial aspect and the
semantic aspect of the hieroglyph are strictly separable, thus in effect
incommensurable. For the picture can always be regarded simply as
a picture, while its sense as script can be read aloud and understood
with no reference to the visible figure. There is an absolute categorical
divide between the two activities, between comparing a picture with
an imagined original and grasping the sentence meant by a series of
characters. And this divide remains in force even if (in the case of the
hieroglyph) the sense of the character in some manner suggests the pic-
ture, even if (in the case of the poem) the metaphysical reading implies
the necessity of an experiential reading.
Thus we are brought to the question on which everything else
depends. Why should Goethe, or anyone, want to write a poem of
the sort I have described? Or perhaps more to the point: why take a
small and charming and innocent celebration of natural experience,
scribbled on the wall of a cabin on the Gickelhahn,8 and revise into it
the complexity of a metaphysical/experiential hieroglyph?
At least one answer to this question is staring us in the face. The
primary aim of Goethe’s scientific work was not to achieve tangible
results—although the possibility of “elevated praxis” is not excluded
(“Aus Makariens Archiv,” no. 78; WA pt. 2, 11:115)—but rather
to affect how people think: above all to prevent the spread of an
oversystematic mode of thought, a treating of concepts “as if they

were objects,” that he associates especially with Newton, a mode of
thought that tends strongly to alienate us from our own experience.
And in this endeavor, science and poetry go hand in hand, as we are
told in the last lines of another poem from the period in which we have
been particularly interested.
Freue dich, höchstes Geschöpf der Natur, du fühlest dich fähig,

Ihr den höchsten Gedanken, zu dem sie schaffend sich aufschwang,
Nachzudenken. Hier stehe nun still und wende die Blicke
Rückwärts, prüfe, vergleiche, und nimm vom Munde der Muse,
Daß du schauest, nicht schwärmst, die liebliche volle Gewißheit.
(WA 3:91)9
[Rejoice, highest creation of nature, you feel yourself capable of rethink-

ing the highest thought to which she had soared in creating. Pause here
and look backwards; consider, compare, and receive from the Muse the
full sweet certainty that you are seeing, not merely fantasizing.]
But of all the qualities of scientific thought that need to be encour-

aged, surely “irony” is the one that belongs most clearly in the poetic
domain. And surely, as I think we have seen, the revised “Über allen
Gipfeln” offers its reader practice in exactly the sort of irony science
requires: the adoption of a thoroughly abstract line of thought, but in
such a way as to prevent its losing contact with experience.
Goethe on the Gickelhahn

The general issue of experience, finally, suggests one further answer to
our question. I have mentioned Wilkinson’s early essay as an exam-
ple of “experiential” reading of “Über allen Gipfeln”; but actually it
represents only one specific type of experiential reading, which I will
term transparent. Wilkinson bases everything on the assumption—
which she herself formulates as an assertion concerning “the complete
assimilation of experience into language”—that language can be made
transparent to experience. She explains that she is not referring merely
to the evocation of “mood” (22). The experience to which she claims
the poem’s language becomes transparent is a large, complex total-
ity involving both objective and subjective elements (24), and involv-
ing, on the subjective side, not only Goethe’s perceptions, sensations,
and feelings, but also his instincts, his memory, his habits of mind,
his knowledge. Even the later revisions—which Wilkinson seems
to assume did not come all that much later (25)—only increase the
poem’s focus on that experiential totality, which we may call: Goethe
on the Gickelhahn, or more specifically, Goethe atop the Gickelhahn
on the evening of 6 September 1780.
The trouble with this way of reading the poem is that Goethe
emphatically rejects it. When he speaks of the “philosophical” attitude
that a physicist should adopt—in a passage we looked at above—he is
referring to the philosophical understanding that words can never be
transparent with respect to their referents. This is also part of what he
means later in the Farbenlehre when he says: “Man bedenkt niemals
genug, daß eine Sprache eigentlich nur symbolisch, nur bildlich sei und
die Gegenstände niemals unmittelbar, sondern nur im Widerscheine
ausdrücke” (no. 751; WA pt. 2, 1:302; one cannot remind onself too
often that a language is actually only symbolic, only figurative, and
never expresses objects immediately but only as reflection). The belief
that words can be transparent with respect to the phenomena they
name is what leads to the scientifically corrupting practice of treating
those words “as if they were objects.” And if someone were to tell me
that that limitation may apply to science, but that it is overcome by
the magic of poetry, it would be my turn to say: Nonsense. Where does
Goethe—or anyone—ever suggest that poetry can somehow operate
outside the fundamental conditions of its own linguistic medium?
In fact, the limitation we are speaking of affects experience (the sup-
posed domain of poetry) more immediately and obviously than it does
phenomena (the domain of science)—which is one reason why Goethe
finds poetry useful in his scientific work. The word is never fully trans-
parent with respect to its referent, but is always interposed before it
as a more or less alien presence. Many scientists would argue that if
you now introduce additional qualifying words (the more the better),
you will eventually enclose the phenomenon in a reasonably adequate
description. It is, I think, precisely in order to oppose this view that
Goethe associates his science with poetry. For in the case of poetry, it
is obvious that every additional word of explanation only takes you
further away from the immediacy of the experienced moment.
Of course, this point is especially obvious as applied to the words
of poetic interpretation, which lead to disagreements that force the
target experience ever further into the background. Wilkinson says,
for instance, that in the line “Ruhest du auch,” “it is impossible to
emphasize the du except by a violation of metrical stress” (24). I insist,
on the contrary, that that “du” receives an idiomatic stress in our nor-
mal speaking of the phrase “du auch,” and that normal speech, not
some idea of meter, is the appropriate criterion here. And by the time
this dispute is adjudicated, through the invocation of who knows how

many authorities, the poem’s experience will be practically forgotten.
But on what grounds could one possibly assert that similar consider-
ations do not also apply to the words of the poem itself? If poetry makes
the mistake of striving for transparency with respect to experience, it
will thwart its own aim in exactly the same way as interpretation. As
long as one believes in the existence of a moment of significant and
powerful experience in relation to which the poem is meant to become
transparent, all one’s attempts to understand the poem are defeated
automatically by the operation of language at its most basic level.
My final point is that this difficulty is countered in poetry by the
technique of the hieroglyph, and in criticism by the practice of hiero-
glyphic/experiential, as opposed to transparent/experiential, reading.
For not only can the hieroglyph never become transparent, it can never
even participate in the illusion of transparency. The two elements of
the hieroglyph, again, are incommensurable, which means that as
soon as it threatens to become transparent with respect to its picto-
rial object, its quality as a bearer of sense obtrudes, and as soon as it
threatens to become transparent with respect to its sense, its quality as
a picture reminds us of its alien presence. The hieroglyph is therefore,
so to speak, always opaque.
A full account of the operation of hieroglyphic form in “Über allen
Gipfeln” would involve a rather extensive series of symmetrical argu-
ments. But most of those points are arrived at easily enough and do
not need rehearsing. I will mention only that the poem’s hieroglyphic
quality has the effect of preserving its experiential aspect, the figure of
Goethe on the Gickelhahn, from the corrosive influence of an other-
wise overdescriptive language, a language that would otherwise tend
to be understood as seeking transparency. It is true that in carrying out
this act of preservation we lose what had otherwise seemed a certain
detailed intensity in the experience. But that intensity would have been
delusive anyway; and in addition, we have learned from the metaphys-
ical aspect of the poem that in preserving the experience—precisely by
sacrificing that delusive intensity—we are fulfilling a sacred human
duty. What else, after all, but this act of preservation and sacrifice,
can be meant by the idea of committing the intellect as a generative
force in the world of Becoming, in concrete immediate experience?
And what else can be meant, mutatis mutandis, by the idea of carrying
phenomena, preserved as phenomena, upwards into “the philosophi-
cal region”?
Goethe claims in his diary that on the eve of his eighty-second birth-
day he climbed the Gickelhahn again and saw the old inscription, “Über
allen Gipfeln ist Ruh pp.”10 I have read commentators who suggest
that the confusion of the elderly must have caused him to recall seeing
“Gipfeln” there, not “Gefilden.” But I have never detected much in the
way of senile confusion in Goethe, and I am not prepared to accept it
here. He sees “Gipfeln,” and not “Gefilden,” because he understands
that without the revision of the original poem into a hieroglyph, the
experience on which everything depends, Goethe on the Gickelhahn,
could not have been preserved as the object of his recollection.
The Watching Game?

Only the last two lines remain to be discussed; and at first glance, they
do not seem to offer much in the way of difficulty or complication.
Once the hieroglyph is established, the poem’s basic work is done.
“You,” now—despite starting from an intellectual vantage point—
have found a way to commit yourself unreservedly in the realm of
Becoming and mortality. You have thus in effect already enacted your
death, your ultimate repose, as a human duty; all that remains now is
that you wait for it to arrive, a death that will be hardly distinguishable
from the experience of approaching sleep that you have both insisted
upon and sacrificed for the sake of its preservation.
But I am still bothered by the word “balde,” and now actually by
the word “Warte” (wait) as well. If the second line of the poem is a
kind of balance or equation between a finite verb and a noun, is it pos-
sible that in the second line from the end, a finite verb (now an impera-
tive) and a noun are crammed into the same word? Can we read the
last two lines as a condensed version of the sentence: “Du, der du nur
Warte bist, balde ruhest du auch” (You, who are nothing but a van-
tage point [Warte], soon you too will rest)? This reading would not be
inconsistent with the idiosyncratic “religion” of Book 8 of Dichtung
und Wahrheit, hence with the needful Hermetic reading of “Über allen
Gipfeln.” The “religion” passage ends with the understanding,
daß wir uns in einem Zustande befinden, der, wenn er uns auch nie-
derzuziehen und zu drücken scheint, dennoch Gelegenheit gibt, ja zur
Pflicht macht, uns zu erheben und die Absichten der Gottheit dadurch zu
erfüllen, daß wir, indem wir von einer Seite uns zu verselbsten genöthigt
sind, von der andern in regelmäßigen Pulsen uns zu entselbstigen nicht
versäumen. (WA 27:221–2)
[that we find ourselves in a condition which—even if it seems to drag us
down and oppress us—still gives us the opportunity, indeed makes it our
duty, to raise ourselves up and, though we are compelled on one hand to

take the form of a self, to fulfill the purposes of the deity by not neglect-
ing, on the other hand, to un-self ourselves in regular pulses.]
The association of sich entselbstigen (self un-selfing) with the condi-

tion of being “nothing but a vantage point” is fairly clear: the condi-
tion of a perspective (Warte) inside Creation from which and in which
the Elohim (or divinity in whatever form) may contemplate themselves
and so reestablish a connection (“Verbindung” [WA 27:220]) with just
that otherwise alienated Creation.
Or perhaps we shall think, one last time, of Plotinus, and of the
argument on contemplation in Enneads 3.8. The higher one rises on
the scale of essences, toward the One or the Good, the more fully man-
ifest becomes the truth that all existence is constituted fundamentally
by contemplation (theoria), that action (praxis) never occurs except
for the sake of contemplation. It follows that the highest possible con-
dition for an individual is not that of one who contemplates (which
would still involve a kind of action by that “one”), but that of a pure
vessel of contemplation, the place (Warte) where contemplation or
observation happens, the condition, perhaps, that Plotinus describes
in Enneads 6.9.10–11, in which the seer and the seen are no longer dis-
tinguishable, a condition of rest (stasis, compare Ruhe) so perfect that
it is not distinguishable as a condition from the individual whose con-
dition it is. And, of course, time is absent from this condition; “balde”
now simply means “now.”
The trouble, of course, is that this reading of the last lines is not
accounted for in my speculations (or anyone else’s) about the poem’s
genesis. I cannot see how the double function of the word “Warte” can
be excised from the poem’s basic structure; but I also cannot see how
it got there in the first place.
Part II
Meter and Meaning

Chapter Three
The Voices of Experience in Blake
The use of meter as evidence in interpretation is always questionable,

because meter as such does not mean anything. Hermeneutics in gen-
eral may be subject to logical difficulties; there may be an unavoidable
circularity in all interpretive arguments. But if, in interpreting, we start
out from the denotation of words and phrases, we are at least working
with facts of the same type as the conclusions at which we are aiming,
namely “meanings.” If we start out from meter, we are working with
facts of a fundamentally different type. In order to make a connec-
tion with meaning we must therefore already have a clear idea of the
meaning we expect to find. In the line “quadrupedante putrem sonitu
quatit ungula campum” (Aeneid, 8.596), the dactylic rhythm suggests
hoofbeats; but in the lines “This is the forest primeval. The murmur-
ing pines and the hemlocks,” the same rhythm suggests nothing of the
kind. We know this because we know the meanings of the words and
phrases.
There are some ways in which meter can be of use to an interpreter.
Certain meters, like elegiac couplets or dipodic trimeter, allude to spe-
cific genres and so influence mood and meaning; or an interpreter
might need the distinction between, say, a chanting and a speaking
voice. But considerations of this sort will generally be peripheral or
ancillary.
Iambic and Trochaic Meter in Blake

[N.B. Five poems are treated in detail below. Their full texts appear at
the end of the chapter.]
In the case of Blake, however, especially in the Songs of Experience,
simple metrical facts are sometimes crucial to interpretation in that
they reflect the character of the act of speaking, by which I mean not
the character of the speaker or persona but that of the act itself. One of
the prominent general qualities of poetry—having to do with its pre-
sumed roots in musical performance—is that we think of its language

as an action in progress, not merely as a pattern of signs. (Valéry says,

“voix en action.”) Even when reading a poem in a book, we are taught
to make a special effort to imagine its being spoken aloud. It follows
that the character of the act of speaking is a legitimate concern of
interpretation; and meter may have something important to tell us in
this connection, since metrical categories have to do with the process
of realizing language as sound. Meter is not the only possible approach
to the question of the character of the act of speaking. But in this area
of inquiry we might pay special attention to metrical facts.
And yet, what exactly do we mean by “metrical facts”? Even in a
short poem the total number of describable facts can be made as large
as we wish, depending on our subtlety in distinguishing different stress-
levels or tones or syllable-lengths or types of vowel or consonant. But
in the case of four-beat alternating verse in Blake’s Experience, and in
some of his other poems, I think that one very simple metrical fact, the
distinction between iambic and trochaic lines, provides the basis for
important interpretive insights.
In English verse, despite the frequency of metrical inversion in the
first foot of iambic lines, this distinction is one of which we are usu-
ally conscious; and at least in the texts I will deal with, there is almost
never the slightest doubt about which category a line belongs to. The
line “It is a land of poverty,” in the “Holy Thursday” of Experience, is
unquestionably iambic even though it begins with a stress in normal
reading; and even though the first syllable of “And their sun does never
shine” is not stressed in normal reading, still the line is unquestionably
trochaic.1
Or would it be more reasonable to say simply that this poem
employs optional anacrusis? The occurrence of iambic and trochaic
lines seems too clearly patterned to admit this way out. In each of the
four stanzas there is just one iambic line, the last line in each of the
last three stanzas, the first line in the first; and the first stanza is also
the only one in which all four lines rhyme, which supports the sense
of a pattern with variation. There are other instances in Experience of
patterns with suggestive variation. In “The Fly,” if we count each pair
of lines as a metrical unit, the pattern that emerges is (T = trochaic,
I = iambic): TI—TI—TI—IT—TT. The first three units establish an
expectation which is then thwarted in the fourth by an inversion and
in the fifth by a further variation. In “The Angel” we find a more com-
plex pattern: IITT—TTTI—TTIT—TTTT. Perhaps we would regard
this as no pattern at all if its progression, toward more trochaics and
culminating in a stanza of nothing but, were not similar to that of
“The Fly.” Thus each poem suggests a way of looking at the others;
The Voices of Experience in Blake 57
and we shall now at least not dismiss as wasted effort the attempt
to find some metrical pattern in “The Tyger”: TTTI—TTTT—TIIT—
TTTT—TITI—TTTI. I will argue that there is in fact a pattern here, a
pattern similar to one found in other poems of Blake, and intelligible
by way of that similarity.
Before we go on, let me concede that even if it can be shown plau-
sibly that the distinction between iambics and trochaics is significant
for understanding Blake’s poetry, it is still not likely that Blake delib-
erately used that distinction as an expressive device. What we are talk-
ing about, rather, is Blake’s habitual manner of hearing his own verse.
Depending on the character of the act of speaking in each particular
case, the verse naturally drifts in an iambic or a trochaic direction. It
follows that the project suggested by the present chapter cannot be
considered complete until all of Blake’s four-beat alternating verse has
been discussed. What I have to offer is only a start on this project.
The Condition of Mind in the “Holy

Thursday” of Experience
But what does the distinction between iambic and trochaic meter say
about the act of speaking? A hypothesis suggests itself for the “Holy
Thursday” of Experience: In the two central stanzas, the iambic line
states a conclusion drawn from data recorded in the three trochaic
lines. The trochaics are used for assertive or unreflected speaking:
the recording of impressions received by the mind from without, the
immediate reaction to such impressions (“Can it be a song of joy?”),
undeliberated surges of visionary thought. The iambic line in each
stanza carries out a reflective act, a conclusion or classification or
qualification. Even in the divergent first stanza this distinction applies.
The opening iambic line, “Is this a holy thing to see,” represents the
speaker’s decision to consider the ensuing experience in terms of the
category of holiness. It is a reflection before the fact.
But how does the fourth stanza work? The logic of the first three
stanzas seems simple enough: in “a land of poverty,” a land character-
ized by the starvation of infants, it is in effect always winter, since those
victims’ normal enjoyment of the seasons and their bounty is inhib-
ited. The converse of this proposition (implied by it in logic) would be
that where the normal rhythms of nature obtain (sun and rain, spring
and fall), no infant needs to go hungry. But the first three lines of
stanza four—opening with the logical connective “For”—substitute a
stronger form of this thought: “Babe can never hunger there.” And the
preter-logical character of this assertion, it seems to me, suggests an

imaginative or visionary energy in the speaking, an assertion of energy
that is represented in the trochaic meter.
“Babe can never hunger there” is a statement of unreflecting par-
adisal vision; but the statement immediately following, “Nor poverty
the mind appall,” though grammatically parallel to it, is completely
different in the character of its speaking. It is a reflection upon the
speaking of the whole poem, this poem which shows precisely a
mind (the speaker’s) being appalled by poverty. Hence the iambic
meter. In fact, despite its brevity, that line is a rather complicated
reflection. If we read it to mean that where sun and rain alternate
normally there is no such thing as poverty to appall the mind, then
it becomes a deliberate affirmation of the visionary surge of the line
preceding. But its ambiguous grammar also suggests the question:
in a normal world of natural rhythms, does poverty, even if it exists,
necessarily appall the mind? And this question suggests a somewhat
different way of looking at the whole poem: The visionary surge in
the first three lines of stanza four is not simply juxtaposed to the
condition of being appalled, but is now a rejection of that condition,
a mental self-energizing in defiance of the real existence of poverty.
Is the mind primarily appalled or primarily exalted? No decision is
arrived at on this point: how the mind should respond to its knowl-
edge of poverty, or how in this poem the mind does respond. But
the continued openness of the question itself constitutes a reflection
that takes us back to the poem’s beginning, a reflection upon the
appropriateness of the “holy” as a category for judging either social
or natural conditions.
“The Mental Traveller” and “The

Golden Net”
There is more to be said about “Holy Thursday.” But it will help if we
first leave Experience and talk about two poems from the Pickering
manuscript, “The Mental Traveller” and “The Golden Net” (483–86),
both in four-beat alternating verse. The remarkable thing about “The
Mental Traveller,” considering the apparent freedom with which Blake
switches between iambic and trochaic elsewhere, is that of the poem’s
104 lines not one is trochaic, with the possible exception of line 30,
“Wandring round an Earthly Cot.” I call this a “possible” exception
since the trochaic meter here could easily be a slip of the pen; the addi-
tion of one syllable in either of two ways, “Wandering” for “Wandring”
or “around” for “round,” would make the line iambic with standard
inversion in the first foot. And in the stanza following (lines 33–36),
even though each line has at least one extra unstressed syllable, the
feeling is still iambic, especially in the context of the whole. At any
rate, if there is any sense whatever of metrical variation in the poem,
it is confined to the two stanzas beginning with line 29—which also
include the unusual disyllable “filled,” where we would probably
expect “filld”or “fill’d.”
That such strict metrical consistency should be observed in “The
Mental Traveller” makes sense in view of that poem’s quality as a
single extended reflection upon the circular process of reflection by
which the “mental” is constituted. The images in this iambic poem
are all images of the mind, of mental activity, never images that arrive
unbidden or from without. The senses do not respond here to stimuli,
but rather “the Eye altering alters all / The Senses roll themselves in
fear / And the flat Earth becomes a Ball” (ll. 62–64). If the metrical con-
sistency of the poem relaxes at all, then it does so only in lines 29–36,
which represent the developmental apex of the male or active mental
principle, the point where it stops acquiring its riches and begins to
spend them, where the direction of mental development reverses and
the driving reflective force of the eternal cycle abates for a moment—
precisely that force which insists on iambic meter. (No less remarkable
than the metrical consistency of “The Mental Traveller” is the reverse
case of the Songs of Innocence. In all the extended passages of four-
beat alternating verse in Innocence—the poems “Introduction,” “A
Dream,” and “On Anothers Sorrow,” and the internal six-line sections
in each stanza of “The Lamb”—there is only one iambic line, “An
infant groan an infant fear” [“On Anothers Sorrow,” l. 10].)
“The Golden Net” is perhaps not a more difficult poem than “The
Mental Traveller”; but it has a special complexity which is reflected
in its meter. Like “The Mental Traveller,” it seems focused on an event
taking place in the mind of the speaker. But the pattern of its iambic
and trochaic lines suggests a different type of event. If we take the first
two lines as an introduction, preceding the appearance of the main
theme in “Alas for woe! alas for woe!” then the remaining 24 lines
are structured thus: 5I + T + 6I // 6T + I + 5T. The poem falls into two
exactly symmetrical halves, an iambic section with one trochaic line
seven lines from the center, and a trochaic section with one iambic line
in exactly the corresponding position. (And at the turning point from
iambics to trochaics, Blake here stresses the same two words, “And in,”
in opposite ways, a feature that also appears in lines 19–20 of “The
Tyger.”)
If the hypothesis I have suggested is correct, then it would follow

that the poem represents an act of reflection, on the speaker’s part,
which then takes on the quality of an external object that confronts
him or indeed oppresses him, in the form of the golden net that inhibits
the rising of his “morning.” I think there is a parallel here to what Los
understands as the source of Satanic disorder when, his left sandal upon
his head in sign of mourning, he says, “Mine is the fault! I should have
remember’d that pity divides the soul / And man, unmans” (Milton,
pl. 8, 102). The emotion imputed to the speaker of “The Golden
Net” by the three Virgins is pity; and the iambics of reflection suggest
that it is self-pity, pity of his own condition, which, having “Clothd”
itself in a repeatable triple formula, now appears in the first trochaic,
“Dazling bright before my Eyes,” as a separable object. This move of
objectification—which Los would call a division of the soul—is pre-
cisely the “Net of Golden twine”; and the speaker signals his complic-
ity in the move by generalizing his condition, which he now describes
as “the woe / That Love & Beauty undergo.”
It is here, in the midst of the sentence that begins with the word
“Pitying,” that the main transition from iambic to trochaic verse
occurs. This transition, which reflects the transformation of an inter-
nal act of reflection into an external agency of oppression, cannot pos-
sibly be recorded as a continuous narrative by the person to whom
(or in whom) it happens. It cannot be the object of a valid reflection
without losing its character as a transition to the strictly external. (The
same problem does not arise in third-person narrative, as in The Book
of Urizen where we observe objectification in “A self-contemplating
shadow, / In enormous labours occupied” [pl. 3, 71].) And Blake’s
writing acknowledges this difficulty by a discontinuity in that central
sentence (ll. 11–16). The subject of the predicate “Melted all my Soul
away” cannot be anything other than the infinitive phrase “To be con-
sumd in burning Fires etc.,” which had at first appeared to stand in
apposition to “the woe” two lines earlier. Thus, in the unfolding of a
kinetically ambiguous sentence, the condition of being consumed in
fire changes from one which the speaker contemplates into one which
he undergoes.
The actual moment of change from iambics to trochaics occurs in
the line, “And in tears clothd Night & day.” The two lines preced-
ing are still iambic, I think, because they represent a last desperate
clinging to reflective distance. It must be recognized that the speaker
is mistaken when he apparently regards the three virgins and their
vestments as three parallel types of “woe.” Fire and wire are not paral-
lel ideas here. Wire, as a means of binding, is the move of moralistic
self-suppression by which desires are made “ungratified,” thus pain-

fully burning, to begin with. It follows that the words “ungratified
Desires” constitute a climax in the poem considered as an act of
speaking. They are a valid diagnosis of the speaker’s condition, which
they therefore also enact; for the move of self-diagnosis (hence self-
definition) is the move of self-suppression all over again, a setting of
limits to the self. This move (in iambics) is still reflective; it refers to the
self. But it is not a move that can be sustained as knowledge or under-
standing; it melts away into nothing but misery, and the speaking now
becomes uniformly trochaic. The single remaining iambic line, “Over
the Morning of my Day,” is merely a gesture, an instance demonstrat-
ing that reflection itself has now been imprisoned, now only deepens
the speaker’s entrapment in the condition he has reflectively created
for himself. Inner and outer woe are now identical; and their harmony
is signaled paradoxically by the “Smile” that seals the speaker’s impris-
onment in himself and his making of selfhood (the net) into a prison.
Dreaming and Remembering

Suppose, therefore, that our working hypothesis is valid. What are
the consequences with respect to the question of the perfectibility of
poetry as form or practice? Shall we say that the inclusion of meter
among meaningful elements increases the self-containment of each
work, hence its perfection? On the contrary. The association of the
difference between iambic and trochaic verse with the character of
the verse as an act of speaking calls attention precisely to the absence
of that act, as a strict act, in the printed etching before us; calls atten-
tion therefore to the universal defect of poetry in the age of print—
assuming my argument in the Introduction is valid. Not that Blake
can be said to “use” meter as an index of that defect. The operation of
meter in his four-beat alternating verse, again, appears to arise primar-
ily from how he instinctively hears his own writing. But I think it can
probably be maintained that this sense, this hearing, together with its
failure in the printed versions of his “songs,” is a factor in his shifting
of effort ever more toward the prophetic “books,” in which the quality
of the artifact supplants the idea of the act of speaking (or singing) as
a center of meaning.
And yet, there are a couple of instances in the Songs of Experience
where the tension between song and artifact—a tension measurable by
meter—plays a role in the poem’s meaning. “The Angel,” for instance,
shows a movement comparable to that of “The Golden Net,” the
movement from an innocent state to a state of experienced and regret-

ful age; and the three woeful Virgins in the latter poem suggest why
the state of the “maiden Queen: / Guarded by an Angel mild” should
be characterized by “woe.” As also in “Ah! Sun-flower,” with its “pale
Virgin shrouded in snow,” virginity is related to misery in the sense of
unfulfillment, which includes an element of power (“Queen”) since it
is uncommitted: the power exercised by a virgin over her frustrated
suitor, the power of Enitharmon over Los at a certain stage, or of Vala
over Luvah, a power which begins by being “Witless,” not yet charac-
terized by coy design. But the security that belongs to such true inno-
cence (“Witless woe, was ne’er beguil’d”), its incorruptibility, loses its
very nature when the innocent soul grows aware of it; it becomes a
source of “heart’s delight” which must now be concealed, because the
soul knows that its security has depended precisely on its unknowing-
ness. The dreamer’s “delight” may thus be structurally parallel to the
“Smile” in “The Golden Net.”
Once the speaker has learned to dissemble, the state of “Witless
woe” no longer exists, which means that the angel of security has
also fled. But this event is followed by the curious line, “Then the
morn blush’d rosy red,” in which there is a sense of hopefulness, espe-
cially if “the Morning of my Day” in “The Golden Net” is a paral-
lel. At this point we need to consider the operation of time in the
poem. The vocabulary of time, “both night and day,” “both day and
night,” is already present in the stanza preceding; but the reversibility
of the phrase suggests reversibility in the idea, hence not time at all in
the sense of progression, but rather an unchanging state that includes
the clock’s whole circle. This idea of an absence of time is underscored
in “The Angel” by what seem temporal anomalies in the first two stan-
zas. “The Golden Net” begins with nothing but the idea of “woe,”
which then takes shape as self-pity and self-suppression as the speak-
ing proceeds; but in “The Angel,” the self’s virginal power with respect
to itself is already articulated (in the idea of the self as “a maiden
Queen”) before “woe” is even mentioned, a woe now described as
“Witless,” even though the knowable angel in charge of its innocence
is already present.
These features of the first two stanzas, however, seem anomalous
only as long as we expect the content of the speaking and the character
of the act of speaking to move forward in step with one another—as
in “The Golden Net.” And in the case of “The Angel” such an expec-
tation must be modified by the speaker’s quality as rememberer of a
dream, hence as one whose speaking unfolds on a different level of
consciousness from that of its content, a level on which the original
chronological shape of the dream is not necessarily preserved. The

re-ordering of the dream material thus calls our attention to the dis-
tance of the feigned immediacy of the speaking from what it speaks of.
And thus, in turn, we are positioned so as to be disturbed or puzzled
yet further by the line, “Then the morn blush’d rosy red.”
For the word “Then” clearly signals an establishment, or re-estab-
lishment, of sequential time in the poem—heralded by the idea of cau-
sality in “So he took his wings and fled.” Time now moves forward
again, step by step. But does this temporal process take place inside
or outside the dream? Is the “morn” part of the dream, or is it a real
morning in which the speaker wakes up and leaves the dream behind?
Or does this question even make sense? Is there any substantial differ-
ence between a remembered dream and a remembered reality, if both
are viewed purely as contents of memory? How is memory, under-
stood strictly as a mental act, different from dreaming? And therefore,
in this poem, has the speaker’s dream ever actually ended?
The Artifact and the Moment

This is the kind of situation that cries out for an application of what
we have learnt so far about Blake’s metrical sense. Not that we should
expect meter simply to answer our questions. What we require is
a way of orienting ourselves with respect to possibilities and com-
plexities which are less than fully articulated in the poem’s denotative
unfolding.
If we treat the first couplet of “The Angel” (like that of “The Golden
Net”) as a separable introduction, as the establishment, also in iam-
bics, of the poem’s reflective questioning, then the rest of the poem
consists of: five trochaic lines describing the presumably dreamt state
of unfulfilled but secure innocence; an iambic line describing (predict-
ably) the beginning of self-conscious mental activity; two trochaic
lines in which the angel flees and the morn appears; another iambic
line in which self-consciousness is carried beyond self-concealment to
overt self- protection; and a concluding section of five trochaic lines
which mirrors the first section. (Note the symmetry: 5T + I + 2T + I +
5T.) Each of the trochaic sections represents a different state or event;
and the transitions from each to the next are accomplished by moves
of reflection in the iambic lines. The mechanism of the first transition
can be inferred from the relation between the morning’s blush (sug-
gesting repressed emotion) and the speaker’s concealing his “heart’s
delight.” In the trochaic phase (ll. 9–10), the preceding self-conscious
act is realized as an apparently external, directly experienced phenom-

enon: “tho it appears Without it is Within / In your Imagination of
which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow” (Jerusalem, pl. 71,
225); or as is said of Albion, “All his Affections now appear without-
side” (Jerusalem, pl. 19, 164). Hence also the trochaic meter in the
line “With ten thousand shields and spears,” even though this phrase
is grammatically an integral part of the clause in the iambic line pre-
ceding. The speaker’s attempt to fortify his self and protect it against
time’s resurgence turns out to be precisely what traps him and renders
him helpless in time, in the time that now grays his hair; his own
mental weapons are thus as it were instantly turned against him, in
trochees, as if from without.
The poem’s metrical structure thus draws our attention very strongly,
again, to the question of time. An initial state of innocence (ll. 3–7),
in which timelessness is represented by the clock’s whole reversible
circle, is disrupted by a move of conscious dissimulation (l. 8) which
effects a transition to sequential time and causality (ll. 9–10). Then a
move of defensive or fearful consciousness (l. 11) traps the speaker
in exactly what he had feared, the condition of time as nothing but
helpless mortality (ll. 12–16). Time in “The Angel” is thus a trap pre-
cisely for him who fortifies himself against it. But this reading still says
nothing about the act of speaking, which is where meter ought to be
helping us.
We need to look at Blake’s idea of time as a whole. For time is not
only a constraint or a trap. It is also the only way of passing from
eternal unrealization or unfulfillment to eternal redemption. “Time is
the mercy of Eternity; without Times swiftness / Which is the swiftest
of all things: all were eternal torment” (Milton, pl. 24, 121); “O holy
Generation! Image of regeneration!” (Jerusalem, pl. 7, 150). Or we
think of Enitharmon’s “New Space to protect Satan from punishment”
in Milton (pl. 13, 107), which cannot begin becoming an avenue of
redemption until, as the first step, “a Time” is given to it; “for in Beulah
the Feminine / Emanations Create Space. the Masculine Create Time,
& plant / The Seeds of beauty in the Space” (Jerusalem, pl. 85, 243).
Time belongs to fallen nature; but the Fall can be viewed in a positive
light, as the nurturing soil for beauty and happiness (“Nor can any
consummate bliss without being Generated / On Earth” [245]), pro-
vided it is mastered actively and affirmatively by the soul as a means to
redemption—this being what is symbolized in Los’s resolutely active
building of Golgonooza, his creative acceptance of the Fall: “His
Spectre divides & Los in fury compells it to divide” (Jerusalem, pl.
17, 161). Or more specifically, we encounter in Jerusalem a composite
Mary, who in other versions of the myth might have been described as
a “maiden Queen” but who now insists on her fall and pollution: “O
Mercy O Divine Humanity! / O Forgiveness & Pity & Compassion!
If I were pure I should never / Have known Thee; If I were unpolluted
I should never have / Glorified thy Holiness, or rejoiced in thy great
Salvation” (pl. 61, 212).
The blushing morn in “The Angel,” therefore, is certainly an objec-
tification of the speaker’s fallen self-consciousness, the blush of his
self-concealment, but not yet in the sense of despair. It is, rather, a
beginning of time, a moment of decision, the moment at which time is
not yet a trap, but can still be affirmed and realized as redemption; it is
the “Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find / Nor can his Watch
Fiends find it, but the Industrious find / This Moment & it multiply. &
when once it is found / It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly
placed” (Milton, pl. 35, 136). In the second iambic line of “The Angel,”
however, in his reflection upon this crucial moment, the speaker arms
his fears—or remembers arming his fears—which idea has two distinct
meanings: he arms himself against what he fears from time, against
change and death; but also, by fearing time rather than affirming it
actively, he actually arms his fears against the redemptive aspect of
time (“the morn”), which otherwise might relieve them, and so traps
himself in his selfhood. The guardian angel of original innocence now
returns as the summoning angel for a higher innocence or redemption,
but the gates of the self are closed against him; the self, precisely by
fearing and so resisting time, has now become subject to time as the
mere process of aging.
Thus we are faced with another version of the question of time: Is
the dream, the vision of the soul’s moment of decision, past or pres-
ent? (This question is focused upon in “The Angel,” by the uniform
past tense, in a way that it is not in “The Golden Net.”) The introduc-
tory couplet, in its two iambic lines, favors the former alternative: the
speaker is looking back, in the reflective move of memory, at a dream
he has already had. But the manner in which the meter—the pres-
ent speaking of the poem—generates in its phases the dream’s content
favors the idea of a present vision. The poem is set up so as to make
the dream in a sense both past and present, thus (like the “Moment”
described in Milton) a moment outside of time, the moment of deci-
sion; it is itself the crucial “morn” that it speaks of. The bridging of
the gap between past and present here is parallel to the bridging of
the distinction between remembering and dreaming that we discussed
above. And the combination or overlapping of past and present is also
a version of the governing paradox of poetry. If a poem’s content were
ever strictly past, the poem would not have the quality of immediate
kinesis (or song) that makes it poetry. If a poem’s content were ever
strictly present, then there would be no room, no perspective, for for-
mal speaking, and Sappho’s threatening imperative of silence would
be imposed literally.
This poem, then, “The Angel,” considered from the speaker’s point
of view, actually is the moment of decision that is described at its two-
line trochaic center. The content of the dream is the frightening aspect
of time, the truth that time, if we do not somehow master it actively
and realize in it the path to redemption, will master us and render our
existence meaningless. The speaker, therefore, precisely in recalling the
dream, is faced here and now with the decision between fearful resis-
tance and fearless resolve: a decision whose urgency is underscored by
the threatening past tense in which he himself is constrained to tell it.
That he asks “what can it mean?” only makes the situation more omi-
nous. The dream means that it is time now, at the time of the speaking,
for him to assume resolutely the labors and afflictions of Los; if he is
really ignorant on this point, then he has failed himself. In recollecting
his dream the speaker experiences a definite apprehensiveness about
his situation in time; but such apprehensiveness (such “fears”) and its
possible consequences are precisely the content of the dream.
Time has no inherent shape or nature. It is what we make of it; its
malleability is already suggested in the possibility that the speaker’s
“dream,” although grammatically in the past, is still being dreamt here
and now. And this condition affects not only the speaker but also the
reader. For in reading this poem I am directly challenged to unravel
its allegorical significance (“what can it mean?”); and if I succeed in
doing so, then I too, as well as the speaker, find myself confronted
with something to be apprehensive about, here and now. I too, like
the speaker, precisely by thinking about the dream from a certain
distance of objectivity (in solving the allegory), find myself essentially
in the midst of it, which means that not only the gulf between present
and past, but also that between my individuality and the speaker’s,
has been bridged. Not only time, but also our apparently closed-off
selfhood, at once both protected and imprisoned by its “ten thousand
shields and spears,” is thus shown to lack inherent necessity. That I
still nevertheless do experience time, therefore, and that I still under-
stand the poem objectively, as someone else’s utterance, is in turn
revealed as a more or less arbitrary mental action on my part, not
necessarily a move of submission, so that the way toward an active
and affirmative mastery of time, for the sake of redemption, lies open
before me.
But for me as a reader, the seal upon this situation is provided by the
universal defect of poetry in an age of print: the uncomfortable tension
between the poem as song and the poem as artifact, a tension which is
exactly parallel to that between dreaming the dream and remembering
it. The resonance between the speaker’s situation and mine (the poem’s
I-compound, as I called it in the Introduction) is redoubled thereby, a
resonance that is itself shot through with paradoxes and problems.
The tension between song and artifact cannot be removed but must
somehow be made reversible. In time as history, the artifact is present
and the song past; in time as imagination or energy, the song is present
and the heavy artifact past. And both I and the speaker are balanced at
the moment of decision between these two versions of time.
The poem thus unmasks our whole temporal existence as a dream,
in the dark night of Albion’s death, and places before us the decision
about how we shall dream it: whether we shall retreat in fear from
its consequences and attempt to regard it as a mere dream (or cor-
respondingly, to read the poem merely as a speculative allegory); or
whether we shall insist resolutely upon its reality and so undertake
the building of Golgonooza. In any case, the question of the act of
speaking—of its degree of immediacy and of its character—is crucial
at every stage of interpretation, and so brings us back repeatedly to
the issue of meter.
Speaking and Asking

For a critic, the tension between song and artifact poses as difficult a
problem as for a poet. It seems hardly possible that we can actually
talk about anything but the artifact, the ostentatiously perfect artifact
that modern text-editing puts before us. And yet we recognize—not
only from the argument above but from the whole history of writ-
ing about poetry since the eighteenth century—that the meaning of a
poem cannot be divorced from the character of the poem as a verbal
or mental act, here and now, an act of speaking.
To take an extremely simple example, the rhyme “am / name,” in
the poem “Infant Joy,” from Innocence, stresses the idea of perfect
identity between what the infant is and what is attributed to it. But the
very act of attribution, the act of speaking—especially when imputed
by imagination to the infant herself, which divides the source of the
speaking in two—also inevitably disrupts that identity, by virtue alone
of the use of two different words, “am” and “name.” A joyous totality
has been articulated into two elements, joy and that which is named
so, so that the speaker finds himself in a position to say “Sweet joy
befall thee,” implying that joy is now an accident which may or may
not occur. And this delicate sense of doubt, which corresponds to the
detachment from immediate speaking and hearing that is created by
our dependence on the artifact, is the reason for the poem’s second
stanza, where the speaker simply refuses to entertain such doubt. What
else might we mean by the “meaning” of the poem, if not the resolute,
practically defiant innocence of that second stanza considered as a
strict act of speaking?2
The problem of song and artifact, of how to lay hold directly of the
act of speaking in poetry, is what always lends potential significance to
the study of meter. But there is one type of poetic speaking that makes
that problem especially acute, the speaking of questions. On one hand,
the question is obviously less amenable to being absorbed into the
condition of artifact than other forms of speaking. A statement, an
apostrophe, an exclamation, even a command or request or plea, can
ordinarily stand on its own as an act of speaking which, when com-
plete, does not strain the limits of the artifact that records it. A ques-
tion, by contrast, at least until it is answered, insists upon its quality as
an act still in progress; it opens an area in the domain of speech that
still needs to be filled.
But on the other hand, precisely for this reason, poetry in the form
of question makes us more directly aware of what the limits of the
artifact deny us. The quality of continuing act which is implied in prin-
ciple by the utterance as a question is simply ignored, in effect obliter-
ated, by the artifact-form in which the utterance reaches us. As far as
the artifact is concerned, the response to the question is not being held
in abeyance; it is simply not there. It might even be maintained that
questions in poetry are fundamentally hypocritical, insofar as they
costume themselves as a step toward realizing language as activity in
progress while in truth, as represented in the artifact, they cannot pos-
sibly make good on that promise.
In any case, the form of the question is very important in Blake’s
poetry. And he takes up the question of questioning in the poem
“Auguries of Innocence,” where we hear that “The Questioner who
sits so sly / Shall never know how to Reply” (492). This couplet is
related to another in the same poem, “We are led to Believe a Lie /
When we see not Thro the Eye” (492), and thence to a fuller version of
the same thought at the end of “A Vision of the Last Judgment”:
I assert for My self that I do not behold the Outward Creation & that
to me it is hindrance & not Action it is as the Dirt upon my feet No
part of Me. What it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not
see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an
Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is
the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye
any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look
thro it & not with it. (565–6)
Or we read in “The Everlasting Gospel”: “Humility is only Doubt /

And does the Sun & Moon blot out / Rooting over with thorns &
stems / The buried Soul & all its Gems / This Lifes dim Windows of
the Soul / Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole / And leads you to
Believe a Lie / When you see with not thro the Eye / That was born
in a night to perish in a night / When the Soul slept in the beams of
Light” (520).
The “Doubt” expressed in humble or “sly” questioning, in the
pretense of seeking objective clarity “with” the eye, in truth only
imposes its own opaque “blot” on nature. To see “with” the eye is to
inquire of the eye concerning external reality; to see “through” the
eye is to radiate divine humanity into the apparently external world
and so to find it reflected there: “Each grain of Sand / Every Stone on
the Land / Each rock & each hill / Each fountain & rill / Each herb
& each tree / Mountain hill Earth & Sea / Cloud Meteor & Star / Are
Men seen Afar” (712). We have already discussed an instance of this
dynamics in the poem “The Angel,” where the question “what can it
mean?” suggests a posture of doubt, hence a threatened postpone-
ment of the decision which in truth is the poem, the decision between
time as history and time as imagination. But that decision cannot be
postponed. Its postponement is itself a decision in favor of time as
history, in favor of seeing “with not thro the Eye.”
Or we might reconsider the poem “Holy Thursday” in Experience.
The first line expresses a self-conscious mental action, the speaker’s
decision to approach his experience via the intellectual category of
holiness and via the question, accordingly, of whether this category
applies to what he “sees.” But by asking his question, that speaker is
doubting the holiness of things, thus attempting to “see with not thro
the Eye”; and this mode of vision, which “Distorts the Heavens from
Pole to Pole,” is what transforms the “rich and fruitful land” into “a
land of poverty.” It is the questioning posture alone that produces the
mentally determined vision of “Babes reducd to misery, / Fed with cold
and usurous hand.”
Then, however, by contrast with this relatively obscure meta-
phor, the auditory image in “Is that trembling cry a song?” gives
the impression of immediate experience, as if an external world

were suddenly impinging upon the speaker’s consciousness, via
the senses. The “Babes reducd to misery” are seen with the mind’s
eye, but the “trembling cry” is actually, corporeally, heard by the
speaker. For the world brought into being by doubt is a world of
division, in particular the division between subject and object. By
seeing “with” the eye, the speaker has positioned himself so that
the world must disclose itself objectively, via the senses as distinct
from the intellect. And in this world of division, not only babes,
but men in general are “Fed with cold and usurous hand”; that is,
we depend for our existence upon agencies which are “cold” in the
sense of external, no longer continuous with the imagination, and
“usurous” in the sense that they take more than they give, since by
being maintained in this “land of poverty” we are denied the rich
land of vision.
But in that second stanza, a curious thing happens. The world of
division and objects and knowledge via the senses, which had been
brought into being by the poem’s first doubting question, is now itself
questioned. “Can it be a song of joy?” Is the world of misery perhaps
only a mental figment? This questioning is still tentative, still thwarts
its own implied visionary desire by seeking support in external real-
ity (reality seen “with” the eye) and is therefore immediately crushed
by the almost statistical response, “And so many children poor?” For
the time being at least, the conclusion is inescapable: “It is a land of
poverty!”
And yet, that hopeful but timid question, “Can it be a song of joy?”
seems to have an effect after all. For as we have seen, the poem eventu-
ally does find its way back from the knowledge of poverty to a kind of
visionary equipoise in the lines, “Babe can never hunger there, / Nor
poverty the mind appall.” Even the factual existence of poverty—if
we read these lines in that sense—carries out a visionary function by
occasioning a move of conscious mental defiance, defiance, perhaps,
against the very idea of fact.
The form of questioning, as a form, insists on the quality of language
as action in progress—even in “The Angel”: “what can it mean?” But
this action can be oriented in two opposite ways. The questioning of
doubt participates in the Fall, in the generation of a dark world of
objects and confusion. But there is another type of question, a question-
ing of nascent hope, of visionary need, perhaps even of honest wonder
(“what can it mean?”), that tends in the opposite direction, toward
vision and Redemption. Indeed, even the first type of questioning—in
that it demonstrates by example that the character of the world is a

mental act—can be understood as a form of visionary questioning.
The two types of questioning thus have a tendency to merge, which
brings us to that poem of Blake where they are completely welded
together, a poem that is made of nothing but questions.
Self-Known Symmetry
I refer, of course, to “The Tyger” (24–5). As far as basic interpretation
is concerned, I do not pretend to go much beyond Hazard Adams’s
work of about half a century ago.3 Adams begins his discussion
with a simple and cogent justification of his use of the “system” of
Blake’s later prophecies in interpreting the poem. The “system,” he
argues, is not an esoteric philosophical schema, but, in Blake’s view, is
“simply the conventions of poetic symbolism” (54), and is as opera-
tive in the early poems as in the later ones, though not yet as fully
mythologized.
As the reader acquaints himself with the poem’s clearly symbolic diction,
the symbolical and allegorical tradition in western poetry, and finally
Blake’s own symbolical world, the poem gathers force. It is true that
the reader is, to a certain degree, reading back and away from the poem
into the world from which it has come, but even this is consistent with
Blake’s own view of the world: Man creates the world by the process of
imagination; reading back and away from the poem is also reading back
and into one’s own mind. In one sense, at least, Blake wrote poems that
the reader himself creates. (60)
This idea recalls our discussion of “The Angel” above, and forms a
point of contact between that poem and “The Tyger.”
In interpreting “The Tyger,” Adams refuses to take the opening and
closing stanzas as a kind of riddle, to which a single answer must be
found. He argues, rather, that everything in the poem is ambiguous,
that the single text is in truth at least two different texts, depending on
whom one imagines as its speaker.
The tiger-maker is not God, simply defined. He is a false god or the true
God depending upon the speaker’s perspective. Urizen would consider
the maker of the tiger a false god, a devil . . . Therefore, if the questions
of the poem are taken as spoken by the materialist they imply fear-
fully that the creator of the tiger is some kind of interloper, a breaker of
order. . . . But from the visionary perspective, the same questions are merely
rhetorical. The same interlopers [in the mold of Icarus and Prometheus]
are not evil creatures but heroic representatives of energy. (63–4)
Everything depends, in other words, on how we understand the act of

speaking, which brings us to the question of meter.
The metrical structure of “The Tyger” is not strictly congruent with
its division into stanzas. It has four parts: stanza 1 (TTTI); stanzas 2–4
(5T + 2I + 5T); stanza 5 (TITI); and stanza 6 (TTTI). The second ele-
ment is obviously crucial, and shows the same type of exact symmetry
that we observed in “The Golden Net” and “The Angel.” I am not
going to suggest, however, that that metrical symmetry is a reflection
or correlative of the tiger’s. (“Symmetry,” for Blake or for us, does not
need to mean balance around a central point anyway.) Nor is it even
necessary to think of Blake’s use of symmetrical patterns in meter as
intentional. As far as I can see—as I said earlier—the meaningfulness
of Blake’s meter is simply a reflection of how he habitually heard his
own verse. I do not see why this point should apply any less to large
metrical patterns than to the iambic or trochaic feeling of individual
lines. Blake, it seems, imagines (and hears his own imagining) in large
symmetrical units.
If we examine the metrical symmetry in “The Tyger,” we immedi-
ately recognize in its two wings the two main perspectives identified
by Adams: the Urizenic perspective in stanza 2, with its fearful vision
of starry expanses and an unfathomable abyss; and the prophetic fig-
ure of Los the blacksmith in stanza 4. It seems likely that here—as in
“The Angel,” which also exhibits metrical symmetry—we have a poem
of decision.
But in “The Tyger,” the decision in question is better articulated
than in “The Angel.” In stanza 2, the physical sense at the center is that
of sight, the “fire” of the eyes. In stanza 4, the sense focused upon is
that of hearing. Not only the characteristic noise of a smithy suggests
hearing, but also “hammer” and “anvil,” malleus and incus, are the
anatomical names for two of the three small bones or ossicles in the
mammalian ear. And yet further, the dimension of stanza 2 is obviously
space, specifically the “distant” relation between heaven and earth as
suggested by the figures of Icarus (“On what wings”) and Prometheus
the stealer of fire. But in stanza 4, the dimension is time: anticipated
in line 11 by the words “And when” and the idea of a beating heart;
then developed by the image of the chain, which also occurs in The
Book of Urizen, with Los’s “forging chains new & new / Numb’ring
with links. hours, days & years” (pl. 10, p. 75). The basic scheme, then,
looks like this:
lines 5–9 lines 12–16

Urizen Los
Sight Hearing
Space Time
[Stasis] [Kinesis]
And the interesting thing about this structure is that it is self-

reflexive. It contains within itself a choice that affects its character as
a whole. For the overall symmetry may be regarded either as a simple
static balancing of opposites (the Urizenic view) or as an action in
progress, a coming to life, a supersedure of stasis by kinesis (the pro-
phetic view). Therefore we can complete the scheme by adding “the
poem as visible artifact” to Urizen’s column, “the poem as audible
song or action” to Los’s. As in “The Angel,” decision in “The Tyger”
turns out to be representable by the fundamental defect of poetry in
an age of print.
The Two Voices

We must therefore understand the poem not only as a scheme or dia-
gram, but also as an action in progress, which is already made clear
to us by its presentation as a series of questions. We must form a clear
idea of the poem’s voice or voices. Adams argues convincingly that
two different voices overlap in the poem, a Urizenic voice and a pro-
phetic (Los-like) voice. My suggestion attempts to develop this point.
Of the two voices, I contend, Urizen’s is predominant in every trochaic
line, that of Los in every iambic line—except in stanza 5.
This view does not contradict my point about a symmetrical struc-
ture of perspectives in the poem. Perspective and voice are disjoint
categories here, just as we would expect them to be in a context domi-
nated by the opposition between the poem as artifact (visible, corre-
sponding to perspective) and the poem as song (audible, corresponding
to voice). A result of this disjunction is that there are moments of very
high tension in the poem, especially in stanza 4, where the voice of
Urizen is compelled to articulate the perspective of Los. But this ten-
sion is the life of the poem, not the death of the interpretation.
If my view is accepted provisionally, as a hypothesis, then it fol-

lows that the poem is spoken mainly in Urizen’s voice, with reflec-
tive responses or interruptions in the spirit of Los. This is, I think,
as it must be. In the fictional situations in which he appears in the
prophetic books, Los is a very forceful and eloquent speaker. But he
himself explains why he could never become anything like the disem-
bodied speaker of a lyric poem: “I must create a System, or be enslav’d
by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to
Create” (Jerusalem, pl. 10, 153). It is only by what Los calls reasoning
and comparing that the voice of a lyric poem establishes itself. Images
or feelings or ideas are presented in the poem and arranged so as to
provide a context for each other and themselves. Poems do not “cre-
ate” in the strict sense. Their business is to illuminate experience by
reordering it ingeniously.
Therefore, if a poem is going to be set up so as to incorporate the
voice of Urizen and that of Los, Urizen’s must be the principal speak-
ing organ. It seems to me in fact that precisely a Urizenic voice—a
fearful, resentful voice, concerned for stability, for order, and worried
about a possible breaking of order, worried about what Adams calls
“interlopers”—is the only possible vehicle by which a prophetic voice,
the voice of Los, can find its way into a poem even for a moment.
For that prophetic voice, which proclaims “Systems” only in order
“to deliver Individuals from those Systems” (Jerusalem, pl. 11, 154),
is what Urizen fears most of all; and the gaps in his discourse that this
fear produces are points where the voice of Los, as a kind of inter-
loper, an unwilling move of self-reflection in the speaking, makes itself
heard—in iambics.
The first such opening for a prophetic voice is given in the line
“What immortal hand or eye,” where the Urizenic speaker is about to
ask how the outrageous (system-defying) tiger could ever be created.
The words “hand or eye” suggest the truth that every act of percep-
tion (eye) is already an act of creation or shaping (hand), that “the Eye
altering alters all,” that there is no stable, quasi-visible objective order
of things in an “external” world, that the strict separation of subject
and object cannot be maintained. And in response to these involuntary
suggestions in the Urizenic discourse, Los whispers iambically, in line
4, that what is created in violation of the law of subject and object is
not disorder at all, but a form of “symmetry.”
The poem’s main voice, however, continues to imagine the produc-
tion of the tiger as a violation of natural or divine law (the crime of an
Icarus or a Prometheus), and incorporates the relation of hand and eye
into this thinking by way of the idea of seizing fire. Now, armed with
at least a categorizing of the tiger’s existence, as crime, that Urizenic

voice can return to the difficult idea of creation and rationalize the
equivalence of hand and eye still further; he trims that idea to fit his
own world by equating it with the idea that one who makes something
must employ both strength and planning: “And what shoulder, & what
art . . . ” But in this trimming, in bringing the idea of creation down to
earth, he has only given the hidden prophetic speaker license to imag-
ine the making of an actual living being (“Could twist the sinews of
thy heart? / And when thy heart began to beat,” in iambics), not merely
an abstract “symmetry.”
It will be noted that both of those first two eruptions of the pro-
phetic voice begin with the word “Could,” whose counterpart in the
poem is the word “Dare,” which replaces it in the last stanza’s reca-
pitulation of the first. Most commentators regard “Dare” as the more
energetic and prophetic of the two verbs. Adams says,
In stanza 2 the word “dare” dramatically replaces the word “could” of

stanza 1. Physical strength to create the tiger is evidently not the only
necessity—there must be will; the figurative journey is both physically
and spiritually difficult. In the prophecies the tenacious spirit is Los.
(p. 69)
But I think this understanding of “could” and “dare” needs modifica-

tion. “Could” has two meanings: “was able to” and “would be able
to.” It thus suggests the attitude of one who looks at the tiger and is
encouraged, thinking: that creative act was once possible and there-
fore may be possible again. This is the attitude of a Los. The word
“dare,” by contrast, suggests the attitude of one who reacts to the
tiger with fear and outrage: how dare anyone create that beast? The
meaning of “dare” undergoes change in the course of the poem. But
as far as stanzas 1 and 2 are concerned, I think the contrast is as I
have stated it.
The prophetic voice gains entry into the poem in the line “Could
frame thy fearful symmetry,” its way having been opened by the
Urizenic speaker’s fear of a creative act that might confound the whole
idea of an object-world. That speaker then seizes upon the idea of
order violated as a means of categorizing the tiger mythologically.
Now he attempts to press his supposed advantage by concluding that
creation may be regarded as something not much more than a physi-
cal process—“And what shoulder, & what art . . . ”—no longer the
metaphysical order-breaking he had feared. But precisely the physical,
the immediate, the “particular,” is Los’s element, that realm in which
“every thing exists & not one sigh nor smile nor tear, / One hair nor
particle of dust, not one can pass away” (Jerusalem, pl. 13–14, 158).
Therefore the prophetic voice again supervenes: “ . . . Could twist the
sinews of thy heart? / And when thy heart began to beat . . . ” Creation
is now avowedly physical. The tiger is now brought to life, and so
brought a step closer to the main Urizenic speaker—no longer safely
generalized—who defends himself in the line, “What dread hand? &
what dread feet?”
Blake himself was apparently bothered by this line, and altered it
in one copy to “What dread hand formd thy dread feet?” (794). But I
think we can understand what the trochaic or Urizenic speaker is get-
ting at in the line’s printed version. The prophetic voice in the poem is
the voice advocating creation—as opposed to order and stability. And
this voice has now committed itself to the physical, the immediate, the
particular, just as Los commits himself to the fallen world for the sake
of redeeming it. But the fearful trochaic speaker points out that proph-
ecy or creation has thus placed itself on the same level as the beast it
has created. “What dread hand? & what dread feet?” The hand of the
creator and the feet of the creature are now level and equal, character-
ized by the same adjective. The Urizenic speaker is still fearful—the
adjective he chooses is “dread”—but he has challenged the very idea
of creation (which is the danger of dangers) by refuting the precedence
of creator over creature.
Self-Made Symmetry
This brings us to stanza 4, the point of maximum tension, where the
voice is uniformly Urizenic, the perspective that of Los. The willing
descent of the prophetic voice into particularity has brought the tiger
to life. The Urizenic speaker, in his need to combat the idea of creation,
now imagines the creature, the tiger, endowed with the creator’s last
prerogative, that of thought. He proceeds from the physical organ,
the tiger’s “brain,” to the “deadly terrors” that presumably form that
organ’s intellectual content or product.
And now, for the first and only time in the poem, the verb
“Dare” occurs in a position of metrical stress: “what dread grasp, /
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!” In stanza 2, the unstressed “dare”
had expressed fear at the order-defying moves of an Icarus or a
Prometheus. In stanza 4, from the trochaic speaker’s point of view,
the question is simply scornful. Now that the prerogative of thought
has been usurped by the tiger, the creator has no more leverage.
Those “deadly terrors” now simply cannot be clasped. The tiger still
exists, as a terrifying focus of evil in the world’s darkest part; but
the even more terrifying possibility of creating the tiger, of the tiger
as a focus of system-defying prophetic energy, has now supposedly
been ruled out.
This is what happens in stanza 4, in the view of the Urizenic speaker
of its trochaic lines. But at the same time, the words of that stanza—
unbeknownst to this speaker!—also articulate the prophetic perspec-
tive of a Los. In the total scheme of things, represented in our diagram
above, the poem as act belongs on Los’s side of the division. But in
stanza 4, where the Urizenic voice predominates and perfects its sys-
tematic resolution of the tiger-problem, the prophetic force must find
a way to assert itself on the level of the poem as artifact. Just as the
fallen world provides Los with scope for his redemptive activity, so
the poem as visible artifact provides him with a vehicle of expres-
sion when direct speaking is denied him. In stanza 4, we hear the
voice of Urizen dismissing scornfully the possibility of finding in the
tiger an act of prophetic creativity; but at the same time, in the very
same words, we also see the figure of Los the blacksmith, with the
“deadly terrors” of prophetic thought firmly in his grasp. The poem
as a whole, in its defective condition, torn between voice and artifact,
is thus both a symptom of the Fall and (prophetically considered) a
token of Redemption.
The mechanism of the poem is dialectical, driven by the tensions
between prophecy and system, creative energy and objective order, the
poem as act and the poem as artifact. And the shape of the dialectic is
circular. At the beginning the tiger is nothing but a focus of fear, what-
ever your worst fear happens to be. For the poem’s speaker, the worst
danger is disruption of a stable world-order, a danger which inhabits
his own voice as a threatening reflective knowledge in the iambic lines.
His specific responses to the tiger are what gives the tiger, for him,
exactly the form he fears: his mythologizing of creativity as sinful dar-
ing; his reduction of creativity from the metaphysical to the physical;
his attempt at a refutation of the very idea of a creating power by
attributing thought to the created thing. But the result of this process is
that the possibility of the tiger’s creation, the thought behind the tiger,
has been reabsorbed into the tiger itself. The tiger now has no con-
text, no relation to anything else, hence no specific nature. It is again
nothing but a focus of fear, a self-generating singularity in the world’s
darkest part, but itself “burning bright.” Therefore the poem, like “The
Mental Traveller,” is ready to start all over again from the beginning,
which is what it does.
Symmetry and Decision

This reading of the poem leaves two elements still unconsidered, stanza
5 and the change from “Could” to “Dare” in stanza 6. Stanza 5, as an
interruption in the poem’s otherwise practically seamless circularity, is
definitely a problem. But it can be approached by way of meter. If we
are willing to recognize, as I think we must, that the contest of two
struggling voices, Urizen and Los, is suspended here, then the stanza
breaks down into two pulses of thought (trochaic) and counter-thought
(iambic): the first pulse establishes the historical context (“When . . . ”)
for the coming question, the second is the question itself. And this
questioning interruption in the poem’s dialectical cycle is necessary in
order to maintain the quality of decision in what might otherwise eas-
ily degenerate into a poem of advocacy.
In the poem as a perfect cycle, without stanza 5, it is obvious that
I am meant to prefer the voice and perspective of Los over those of
Urizen. But this preference cannot be executed as a simple choice, fol-
lowing from a rational consideration of alternatives. Taking the side
of Los must mean thinking not in the form of reasons but in the form
of “deadly terrors,” which Blake experiences directly when Los engulfs
him in Milton: “Twas too late now to recede. Los had enterd into my
soul: / His terrors now possess’d me whole! I arose in fury & strength”
(Milton, pl. 22, 117). A decision is not the same thing as a choice. A
decision does not occur unless something of transcendent significance
is at stake. The purpose of stanza 5 is to bring the stakes of “The
Tyger” into focus.
The first couplet of thought and counter-thought is almost enough
in itself. Like most commentators, I think it is futile to try to make
sense of the line “When the stars threw down their spears” without
referring to Urizen’s account of his fall in The Four Zoas, where the
stars are originally his sons, and where his response to “the mild &
holy voice” that had said “Go forth & guide my Son who wanders on
the ocean” is recounted as follows:
I went not forth. I hid myself in black clouds of my wrath

I calld the stars around my feet in the night of councils dark
The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away
We fell. (F. Z., pl. 64, 344)
Given the general relation in Blake between the Fall and the origin
of the physical universe, I think we are safe in interpreting the stars’
nakedness as a discarding of their human vestments or lineaments in
order to become mere distant lights (“fled naked away”) in the sky.
The line in “The Tyger” thus refers to the time when nature ceased to
be pervaded throughout by imaginative human being and took on the
character of objective reality, those “distant deeps or skies” in which
we must now seek the fire of our lost imaginative power.
But in the second line, the critical reflection or counter-thought,
those same stars are imagined as retaining (or regaining) enough of
their aboriginal humanness to weep tears of pity or contrition over our
depleted universe. Thus the question is raised: How shall we position
ourselves with respect to our fallen world? Simply to accept the fallen
world as a material conglomeration, to accept the stars as nothing but
“naked” stars, would be to despair, to violate a knowledge that is built
into our very humanity. But we also cannot afford to be comforted by
that same knowledge, or by the tears we know to be shed for our fallen
condition. For to accept such comfort would be, in the end, no differ-
ent from accepting the fallen world itself, thus merely despair by a dif-
ferent route. We are offered, so to speak, a choice between choice and
decision: We can make a choice between comfort and despair, which
is really no choice at all; or we can learn to live like Los, “in fury,” on
the horns of the dilemma those alternatives represent.
Hence the two forms of the final question. The first form, “Did
he smile his work to see?” resurrects the entirely nonspecific “he” of
stanza 2 and asks basically whether the world with its tiger is a good
thing or a bad thing. All it does is present us with the alternatives
of comfort and despair. But the second form, the counter-question,
which stresses the “he”—“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”—
challenges the first by asking: what exactly is that “he” supposed to
mean? Is there such a “he” in the first place, whose smiling or not
might be a matter of interest to us? On one hand, it seems impossible
to imagine the tiger as somehow beyond the scope of creation. How
could we then assign it any attribute at all, even that of existence? But
on the other hand, the character of the tiger, as a self-creating focus of
fear, is to raise exactly that question about the unity of creation.
Hence also, finally, the verb “Dare” that opens the final line. The
dilemma in which stanza 5 leaves me is that of having to understand
the tiger as a reality, but not as a possibility, not as something that
“could” be. I now have no choice but to accept the Urizenic “Dare,”
but in the sense that I myself take the responsibility for sinful or
ungodly daring. Precisely this move, and no other, is capable of dis-
rupting the poem’s perfect circularity and introducing at least the inti-
mation of a progressive element, a true kinesis, an opening toward
redemption.
But again, the poem has this quality only when it is read in the
spirit of decision, “in fury” at the intractability of its questions, yet
stubbornly unwilling turn away from those questions. And the crucial
point, for the larger purpose of this study, is that this idea of decision
is itself not merely an idea. It is represented for us constantly, here and
now, by our situation with respect to the radically defective form of
poetry, torn apart from ourselves on the dilemma of the poem as act
and the poem as artifact.
Poems Discussed in Detail

Holy Thursday
Is this a holy thing to see,
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reducd to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song?

Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
And their sun does never shine.

And their fields are bleak & bare.
And their ways are fill’d with thorns.
It is eternal winter there.
For where-e’er the sun does shine,

And where-e’er the rain does fall:
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.
The Golden Net
Three Virgins at the break of day

Whither young Man whither away
Alas for woe! alas for woe!
They cry & tears for ever flow
The one was Clothd in flames of fire
The other Clothd in iron wire
The other Clothd in tears & sighs
Dazling bright before my Eyes
They bore a Net of Golden twine
To hang upon the Branches fine
Pitying I wept to see the woe

That Love & Beauty undergo
To be consumd in burning Fires
And in ungratified Desires
And in tears clothd Night & day
Melted all my Soul away
When they saw my Tears a Smile
That did Heaven itself beguile
Bore the Golden Net aloft
As on downy Pinions soft
Over the Morning of my Day
Underneath the Net I stray
Now intreating Burning Fire
Now intreating Iron Wire
Now intreating Tears & Sighs
O when will the morning rise
The Angel
I Dreamt a Dream! what can it mean?

And that I was a maiden Queen:
Guarded by an Angel mild:
Witless woe, was ne’er beguil’d!
And I wept both night and day

And he wip’d my tears away
And I wept both day and night
And hid from him my hearts delight
So he took his wings and fled:

Then the morn blush’d rosy red:
I dried my tears & armed my fears,
With ten thousand shields and spears.
Soon my Angel came again;

I was arm’d, he came in vain:
For the time of youth was fled
And grey hairs were on my head.
Infant Joy
I have no name
I am but two days old.—
What shall I call thee?
I happy am
Joy is my name,—
Sweet joy befall thee!
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee;
Thou dost smile.
I sing the while
Sweet joy befall thee.
The Tyger
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare sieze the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Chapter Four
Meter and Metaphysics: Hölderlin’s

“Hyperions Schicksalslied”
Hölderlin is unquestionably a philosophical poet. His work not

only reflects serious thinking on philosophical matters, but also
has clear connections with the academic philosophy of nineteenth-
century Germany, connections stemming from his early friendship
with schoolmates Hegel and Schelling. The trouble is that these facts
lead most interpreters of Hölderlin in a heavily philosophical direc-
tion. Especially the difficult later verse is treated as if its true genre
were that of speculative philosophy, not poetry; it is telling that the
most widely quoted commentator on Hölderlin is probably Heidegger.
In the following, I will argue that precisely the metaphysical dimension
of Hölderlin’s thought requires an attentiveness to the minute techni-
cal particulars of verse-writing.1
Hölderlin’s Metrical Sense

The poem I want to treat in detail was printed as quoted speech
(or singing) in Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion. The title (“Hyperions
Schiksaalslied”) was added by later editors.
Ihr wandelt droben im Licht
Auf weichem Boden, seelige Genien!
Glänzende Götterlüfte
Rühren euch leicht,
Wie die Finger der Künstlerin
Heilige Saiten.
Schiksaallos, wie der schlafende
Säugling, athmen die Himmlischen;
Keusch bewahrt
In bescheidener Knospe,
Blühet ewig
Ihnen der Geist,
Und die seeligen Augen
Bliken in stiller
Ewiger Klarheit.

Doch uns ist gegeben,

Auf keiner Stätte zu ruhn,
Es schwinden, es fallen
Die leidenden Menschen
Blindlings von einer
Stunde zur andern,
Wie Wasser von Klippe
Zu Klippe geworfen,
Jahr lang ins Ungewisse hinab.2
[Hyperion’s Song of Fate: You walk around up there in the light on
soft ground, blissful genii! Gleaming divine airs touch you lightly, as an
artful woman’s fingers touch sacred strings. // Fateless, like the sleeping
infant, breathe the heavenly ones; chastely preserved in a modest bud,
their spirit blooms eternally, and their blissful eyes gaze in silent eternal
clarity. // But to us is given that we rest at no place; they fade, they fall,
suffering humans, blindly from one hour to another, like water thrown
from cliff to cliff, the year long down into the uncertain.]
In order to understand what is happening metrically in this poem, we

must begin with some historical context. The poet Friedrich Gottlieb
Klopstock had suggested that the German language is especially well
suited for imitating ancient Greek meters; he had himself shown the
way in many odes and in an epic, Der Messias, written mainly in hex-
ameters. In his essay on the subject, he still speaks of long and short
syllables; but in practice—especially in the practice of other German
poets who follow him, like Goethe and Hölderlin—stress is substi-
tuted for long, unstress for short.3 But an attentiveness to metrical
rules is still insisted on. Therefore, even in the apparently free verse of
“Hyperions Schiksaalslied,” we are inclined to look for repeated met-
rical patterns. [N.B. Readers not comfortable in German do not need
to read the following section carefully. I will summarize its results in
the sequel.]
If we look for significant metrical patterns, there is plenty to find:
1. Frequent instances of the relatively unusual choriamb (–⏑⏑–)

in emphatic line-ending position: droben im Licht; Rühren
euch leicht; Ihnen der Geist; Stätte zu ruhn; Ungewisse hinab
(–⏑|–⏑⏑–).
2. Frequent lines ending in short adonics (–⏑⏑|–⏑): Heilige Saiten;
bescheidener Knospe; seeligen Augen; Bliken in stiller; Ewiger
Klarheit; uns ist gegeben; Blindlngs von einer; Stunde zur andern.
We might also have counted lines 3, 4, 7, 8 of the last strophe,
except that those lines fit in more smoothly with the feeling of
Meter and Metaphysics 85
a dactylic cascade and do not suggest an ending. Lines 5 and 6

(Blindlngs von einer / Stunde zur andern) interrupt that cascade
like jutting rocks (“from cliff to cliff”). The “short adonic” is
more familiar to most readers as the typical end of a hexameter,
or a hexameter cadence, and is called that below.
3. Three instances, at the beginning of strophes one and two and
in the poem’s last line, where stressed syllables appear to suc-
ceed one another directly. Since “you,” the heavenly ones, are
being contrasted with “us” mortals, it is reasonable to read the
initial “Ihr” (you, plural) with a stress, hence to scan the line
with an opening spondee or antibacchius: ––⏑|–⏑⏑–. The open-
ing of the last line, “Jahr lang,” can hardly be anything but a
spondee. And the word “Schiksaallos,” which can be scanned as
a cretic or amphimacer (–⏑–), might also be read, especially with
Hölderlin’s spelling, as a molossus (–––). It should be noted that
a spondee or a molossus very strongly suggests stability, lack of
motion. We recall the spondaic “Ist Ruh” in Goethe’s poem. The
same is also true of the strongly symmetrical cretic and choriamb.
Which raises the question of what these emphasized metrical
elements are doing in the poem’s last strophe, whose ostensible
content is precisely the absence of any stability or certainty.
4. Several important instances of metrical resonance between
whole lines or phrases. If we read the poem’s initial syllable as
unstressed, then the first line is metrically identical to the second
line of the last strophe: ⏑–⏑|–⏑⏑–. If we read the initial syllable
as stressed, then in meter only a single trochee differentiates the
poem’s first line (––⏑|–⏑⏑–) from its last (––⏑|–⏑|–⏑⏑–). Again,
these relations create an interpretive problem by suggesting the
idea of cyclicity (as does also the word “year”), the idea of a con-
nection between the poem’s end and its beginning. In content the
poem does not seem cyclical at all. It begins in heavenly stability
and then plunges into human transience.
5. A strong sense of repetitive, unchanging stability, especially
in the second strophe. If “Schiksaallos” is read –⏑–, then the
first two lines are metrically identical: –⏑|–⏑⏑|–⏑⏑; indeed, a
third occurrence of the same pattern follows immediately in the
words “Keusch bewahrt / In bescheidener,” which, however, are
no longer a single line. If we focus on phrases, not lines, then
“Keusch bewahrt / In bescheidener Knospe” repeats exactly the
meter of “Schiksaallos, wie der schlafende / Säugling.” And “ath-
men die Himmlischen” repeats the meter of “seelige Genien”
and “Finger der Künstlerin,” while “Blühet ewig / Ihnen der
Geist” echoes, and almost rhymes with, “Götterlüfte / Rühren

euch leicht.” And the seal is set on this pattern of self-repeating
stability by a triple repetition of the hexameter cadence: “Und
die seeligen Augen / Bliken in stiller / Ewiger Klarheit.” Which
makes us wonder, yet again: why the next stanza, where insta-
bility is insisted on, opens with the same cadence, “Doch uns
ist gegeben”; and why the last two lines of strophe two are
repeated metrically in the lines “Blindlings von einer / Stunde
zur andern,” which suggest stability only in the sense of a hope-
less attempt to resist the irresistible downward plunge of the
language at this point.
6. A few more wrinkles that suggest connections between meter
and meaning. The metrical pattern ⏑–⏑–⏑ occurs only three
times in the poem in the form of a clearly marked phrase: Auf
weichem Boden, Auf keiner Stätte, ins Ungewisse. And these
phrases, in turn, are the only ones in the poem that create the
idea of a ground to stand on, or lack thereof. The three forms
of this idea seem completely different. “Auf weichem Boden”
(on soft ground) names the presumably actual ground where
the gods walk around; “Auf keiner Stätte” (at no place) sug-
gests a constant changing of ground; “ins Ungewisse” (into the
uncertain) denotes a simple absence of ground. Or are these dif-
ferences as strong as they at first appear? “Auf weichem Boden”
(on soft ground) invites comparison with the idiomatic phrase
auf festem Boden (on solid ground), hence the suggestion that
perhaps the existence of those promenading “genii” is not well
founded after all. Perhaps all of us, mortals and immortals,
are in some sense in the same unstable, uncertain, unfounded
situation.
7. And finally, special importance for the question of whether a
prosodic unit is symmetrical, whether the unit remains the same
when read backwards. We can distinguish the following catego-
ries: (1) strong symmetry (SS) in symmetrical units beginning
and ending on stress, like the choriamb; (2) weak symmetry (WS)
in symmetrical units beginning and ending on unstress, like the
three ground-naming units, ⏑–⏑–⏑; (3) weak asymmetry (WA)
in asymmetrical units that begin and end on similar syllables
(either both stressed or both unstressed), like lines 4 and 7 of the
second strophe; and (4) strong asymmetry (SA) in asymmetrical
units that begin and end on dissimilar syllables, like the last two
lines of strophe two and line 2 of strophe three.
By analyzing the first strophe alone we can already see how clear the
structure is that emerges. Line 1 is marked by two instances of SS, the
unobtrusive spondee with which it opens and the strongly marked
choriamb with which it finishes; and line 2 is divided by its comma
into a WS and an SA. Line 3, then, appears to be yet another SA, but
when read together with the rest of its syntactic unit in the following
line, it takes the form SS: –⏑⏑–⏑–⏑/–⏑⏑–! And the strophe finishes,
in lines 5 and 6, with WS and SA. Thus the progression SS—WS—SA
is stated twice; and this repetition is emphasized in lines 3–4 by the
dramatic resolution of what at first appears to be a second SA into an
elaborate and very strong SS which begins the second statement of the
whole pattern.
A similar progression is found in strophe two. The first line, con-
sidered by itself, is divided by its comma into SS—WS, apparently
continuing the pattern of strophe one. But if we consider syntactic
units, between commas, rather than line divisions, the first two lines
resolve into SS—WA—SA. And this new pattern, SS—WA—SA, is
repeated line by line in the rest of the strophe, with an extra emphatic
SA at the end. The structure is exceptionally clear here, since in all
three statements the middle element, WA, has exactly the same metri-
cal form: wie der schlafende / Säugling; In bescheidener Knospe; Und
die seeligen Augen.
Thus we have two strongly profiled progressions beginning in SS
and ending in SA. And in spite of the argument in paragraph 5 above
that the repeated hexameter cadence in strophe two is a mark of sta-
bility, we are tempted to understand SS as suggesting repose, SA as
suggesting movement, hence the progressions SS—(WS or WA)—SA
as echoing the poem’s whole movement from divine repose to human
instability or transience. But strophe three, the cascade-strophe, resists
such an interpretation. The WS of line 1 (which sets the tone for the
dactylic cascade in the metrically identical lines 3, 4, 7, and 8) is fol-
lowed in line 2 by the first and only occurrence in the poem of an
SA that begins with unstress and ends with stress, thus suggesting
upward rather than downward motion. Then, after a distinct pause,
the cascade begins, with two WS succeeded by two (downward lean-
ing) SA. If strophe one or strophe two is our model, we shall now
expect a modulation to SS that would enable the downward move-
ment, SS—WS—SA, to continue with renewed energy. But instead, in
lines 7 and 8, the verse moves quietly back from SA to WS, as though
a nadir had been reached at which downward changes naturally into
upward movement. And in line 9, finally, SS is arrived at emphatically,
but as the poem’s conclusion, not as the initiation of a new downward
plunge. Also, the double SS in that final line (opening spondee, clos-
ing choriamb) brings us back in a circle to the poem’s beginning. The
dactylic–trochaic feeling of helpless downward tumbling is not elimi-
nated; but it is strongly opposed by an accompanying sense of upward
movement and overall cyclicity.
The poem’s meter, therefore, seems full of interpretive possibilities,
but possibilities that are consistent neither with one another nor with
the surface meaning of the text. On one hand, the meter suggests a
relatively obvious progression from divine repose and stability, in the
first two strophes, to the helpless downward plunge of human fate in
the third. But on the other hand, there are suggestions that the relation
of stability and instability is reversible, and that the movement of the
complete poem can be taken as cyclical. How shall we interpret this
situation as a whole? And why should precisely meter play the role
that it apparently does here in the production of meaning?
Art and Nature: The Reversible

Metaphor
Let us approach these questions first by way of the poem’s metaphors.
In strophe 1 the verb “Rühren” (touch) suggests strongly that in the
clause “Wie die Finger der Künstlerin / Heilige Saiten” (as an artful
woman’s fingers sacred strings), “fingers” are the subject and “strings”
the object. Just as the “gleaming airs” touch “you” (the genii), so the
artist’s fingers touch the “sacred” musical strings. The metaphorical
proportion is, Glänzende Götterlüfte : euch (Genien) :: Finger : Saiten
(gleaming divine airs : you :: fingers : strings). But on the other hand,
the attribute glänzend (gleaming) is more easily associated with the
strings of a lyre than with the player’s fingers; and the attribute heilig
(sacred) bears a direct semantic relation to the word “Götterlüfte”
(divine or godly airs) so that the proportion Götterlüfte : euch ::
Saiten : Finger (divine airs : you :: strings : fingers) is suggested—which
would require, as German grammar permits, taking “Heilige Saiten”
as the subject of the “Wie” clause. (We would read: as sacred strings
touch the artist’s fingers.) This possibility also accommodates the cat-
egorical relation inanimate (airs, strings): animate (you, fingers); and
I think it is clear, therefore, that the syntax, and hence the metaphor,
must be read both ways, that it is a reversible metaphor, comparable
to the reversible meter of lines 3–4 and 5.
Another interesting thing about this metaphor is that it involves a
latent image, that of the Aeolian harp or wind-harp, which is suggested
by the association of breezes, in one term of the comparison, with lyre-

strings in the other. The Aeolian harp is a device by which nature (the
wind) is induced to transform itself directly into art (music) without
the agency of a conscious mind; it is a device by which the latent
artistic potential of nature itself is realized. Indeed, if we regard the
“divine airs” as parallel to the “sacred strings,” it is suggested that the
strings of the instrument perform the active rôle in the production of
music, that the strings “touch” and so make use of the player’s fingers,
not vice versa; which in turn suggests the general idea that humans
are not the creators of art but rather the vehicle by which art realizes
itself. And this idea fits into Hölderlin’s Schillerian “higher nature”
theorizing, where the ultimate aim of culture (the artistic organization
of human existence) is understood to be the reattainment of nature on
a higher level.4 When art or culture reaches its proper perfection, it no
longer has the character of a human overcoming of nature, but has
rather that of an unbroken continuity with nature.
But this point does not yet explain the idea of nature as an actual
producer of art, or the connection between this idea and the main
theme of the poem we are considering, human fate in its tragic aspect.
We can begin to fill in these connections if we turn to Hölderlin’s
“Grund zum Empedokles” (the philosophical “basis” for his planned
tragedy Empedocles), where we read:
In pure life [life in its perfected form?] nature and art are only harmoni-
ously opposed. Art is the blossoming, the perfection of nature; nature
becomes divine only through connection with a multifarious but har-
monious art. When each of the two is entirely what it is capable of
being, and each connects with the other, makes good the defect of the
other—since each must have a defect in order to be entirely what it can
be in its particularity—then perfection has arrived, and the divine is in
the center between them. More organic, more artificial humanity is the
blossoming of nature; more aorgic nature, when it is felt purely by a
purely organized, purely humanized human being, gives him the feeling
of perfection. But this form of life is present only in feeling and is not
present for knowledge. (FA, 13:870)5
This passage balances the Schillerian idea that the true aim of art is to
bring forth a higher nature by the idea that the true aim of nature is to
bring forth art, that both man in his civilized (organized) aspect and
the art he produces are in truth “the blossom of nature.”
The relevance of these ideas to the poem we are looking at becomes
clear once we understand Hölderlin’s terminology in detail. By organisch
(in the phrase “organic . . . humanity”) he does not mean “organic” in
the usual sense, but rather transliterates the Greek adjective ὄργανος,
“working, fashioning.” “The organic,” in the sequel, is related to
“spontaneous activity, art, reflection, drives and powers of formation,
beautiful form, the ego, particular existence” (FA, 13:870–71); it refers
to that which generates particularity, either to that which creates artis-
tically or to that which realizes itself by assuming a comprehensible
form within firm limits. “The aorgic,” on the other hand (compare
the more usual Greek ἀεργός, “idle, not working”), is related to “the
incomprehensible, the unfeelable, the unlimited, generality”—concepts
that cluster in the vicinity of the Kantian-Schillerian “sublime.” The
organic and the aorgic are aspects of a totality of being which is pri-
mordially unified, but which in normal human life appears in the form
of a separation: where the organic belongs mainly to humanity and
human works, while the aorgic characterizes those aspects of nature
that are beyond human control or comprehension.
The separation between the organic and the aorgic, moreover,
though it constitutes a disruption of the true unity of being, is not
only inevitable but desirable, for the pure or unified form of life “is
present only in feeling and is not present for knowledge.” Division is
required for life to be realized as an object of knowledge; and precisely
the feeling of perfect oneness with a perfectly unified nature (a feeling
Hölderlin calls “Innigkeit” [FA, 13:870]) produces such division. For
when I experience too deeply the unity of art and nature, then by con-
sequence I experience my own specific humanness, my “organic” qual-
ity, as potentially unlimited; by being a man I appear in my own eyes
a god—hence the relevance of these ideas to the figure Empedocles, as
Hölderlin sees him—and I am tempted to expand my “organic,” intel-
lectual, formative power into the infinite. But it now also follows that
from my point of view, nature must appear ever more aorgic, indeed
infinitely so, insofar as it resists me or remains beyond my comprehen-
sion. Thus the organic and the aorgic separate, and each tends toward
the infinite, toward its own proper extreme.
But the paradox then develops one step further, for in their separa-
tion and “mutual influence” the organic and the aorgic each tend to
assume the character of the other: “nature has been made more organic
by humanity’s shaping and cultivating . . . and man has become more
aorgic, general, infinite” (FA, 13:871). When, in experiencing the true
oneness of my creative self with the objective world, I give my organic
humanness free rein, this move violates precisely the organic quality
that it asserts, for the organic is by definition the controlled, the par-
ticular, the limited. The very idea of a self now becomes problematic;
the potentially infinite self loses knowledge of itself; now the endless
confusions of self-consciousness are experienced. Like Empedocles,

I have understood my own essential divinity; but in the very act of
understanding it I find myself separated from it, unable to realize it.
My own self, from my own point of view, loses its clarity of outline
and takes on the incomprehensible, infinite quality of the aorgic; while
nature, correspondingly, the world of objects—which, precisely by
being mere objects, enjoy a more clearly circumscribed existence than
that of the reflective, confused self—puts off its character as the great
vague womb, the formless Platonic Receptacle, and takes on a rela-
tively clear shape, becomes a quasi-artistic or “organic” vision toward
which the anguished self now strives.
It is not difficult to follow this metaphysical psychology if we keep
in mind that the organic and the aorgic constitute a metaphysically fun-
damental tension (comparable to that between “form” and “material”
or “person” and “condition” in Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education
of Man), the tension between the comprehensibly particular and that
against which the comprehensibly particular is recognized as such. It
is this tension by which existence is realized as experience, so that the
form taken by its elements (the organic and the aorgic) is conditioned
by the particular state of an individual’s consciousness. What interests
Hölderlin in working on his Empedokles, however, and what inter-
ests us in dealing with the “Schicksalslied,” is the tragic aspect of this
thinking:
In the center [between original “Innigkeit” and the renewed, reflective

awareness of the unity of being which is derived from the interchange
of categories] lies struggle and the death of the individual, that moment
where the organic lays down its ego-ness, its particular existence that
had become extreme, and where the aorgic lays down its generality, but
where this laying-down takes the form not of a primordial ideal inter-
mingling, but of the most intense real struggle. (FA, 13:871)
This struggle is the individual’s struggle with his fate. The artistic, indi-
vidualized shape taken by nature, nature’s work of art, is the assertive
individual’s fate, “the death of the individual,” the inevitable, orderly
mechanism of retribution by which the individual’s violation of the
original simple harmony of being is at last put right.
This is the crucial point for our purposes, for it establishes a connec-
tion between the idea of nature as artist and the idea of tragic human
fate. In the primordial state of human being, the organic individual
exists in perfect harmony with aorgic nature; it is as if, in humanity’s
works, vague, infinite nature were achieving its own artistic realization,
as it does in the Aeolian harp. And later, after an inevitable process of
reflection upon this truth has disrupted that primordial harmony, the
eternal balance of being is reestablished when the confused, aorgic self
at last receives a clear individuality once more, in the form of a strictly
ordered, organic fate that appears to be imposed upon it from without,
as an organization of the originally aorgic object-world. Even here the
metaphor of the Aeolian harp is applicable. Man, in expanding his
originally organic self toward the infinite and thereby violating the
primordial harmony of being, poses a challenge to nature; and nature,
confronted with this human contrivance, produces the ultimate work
of art, the ultimate form and limit of reflective existence, in the form
of human fate and mortality.
In any case, if we assume this metaphysical narrative as a basis for
the “Schicksalslied,” we can already form a fairly clear idea of how to
resolve the question posed by the metrical suggestion of upward or
cyclical movement toward the poem’s end. For the anguish of human
fate, the collision of organic and aorgic, can also be regarded as a “rec-
onciliation” of the two (FA, 13:871), hence something like a return
or restitution, at least an intimation, of the original unity of man and
nature.
Mediate Articulation: The Gods

as Genii
There are plenty of problems in this metaphysics, especially in my cur-
sory sketch of it. But the only problem we need to concern ourselves
with here is that of articulation, essentially the same problem that
occupies Sappho. For articulation does not escape the consequences of
its own activity as speaking, which is an “organic” activity. Indeed, in
the case of the Empedokles-metaphysics, complete and adequate artic-
ulation (toward which, surely, every articulation aspires) would con-
stitute an absolute maximum of the organic, the imposition of strict
form upon the very origin of the organic in its primordial separation
from the aorgic. But if the metaphysics in question is valid, then that
maximum or infinite development of the organic must already have
lost itself in confusion and taken on the quality of the aorgic. Which
means it has failed as an articulation of the metaphysics it pretends to
expound.6 Therefore, if we assume that the poem nevertheless aims
somehow to come to grips with that metaphysics in language, it fol-
lows that the procedure must be in some manner indirect; the ultimate
content of the utterance cannot simply be articulated in its entirety. And
the device of entrusting a crucial component of the poem’s thought to
its meter is especially well suited for this situation, precisely because
meter cannot be logically related to meaning. The relation between
meter and meaning is never more than a matter of surmise, always
suffers a logical gap by which the problem of complete articulation is
prevented.
But then on what grounds can we assert or assume, in a particular
case, that there is any relation between meter and meaning to begin
with? Obviously this question can never be answered for more than
one case at a time; and in the case of “Hyperions Schicksalslied,” we
can begin by discussing the idea of the gods. The word “Genien” in
line 2 denotes intermediaries between the divine and the human (Lat.
genii), which reminds us of the mediating function of the Aeolian
harp, that contrivance by which the presence in nature of an “organic”
or essentially human capability is made manifest to us. Provisionally
formulated, the suggestion is that the gods, or at least the genii of
strophe 1, are a device by which the true unity of art and nature,
the ultimate reconciliation of the anguished, reflective self and the
apparently external world, is revealed to us even in the midst of our
anguish. This suggestion is strengthened by the possibility of paral-
lelling the “euch” (you) of line 4 with “the fingers of the artist,” as
though the gods were art-creating members of man. And it also illu-
minates the curious phrase “Auf weichem Boden” (on soft ground),
which offers itself as a contrary to the more common auf festem
Boden (on solid ground). The gods exist not upon the solid ground of
empirical reality, as observable facts, but rather in the uncertain fluid
realm of the imagination. Even the verb that is first applied to the
genii, wandeln, while in context it clearly means “walk around,” also
contains a strong suggestion of change and changeability; its reflexive
form simply means “change.”
At least in strophe 1, then, we can detect behind the façade of
the language the suggestion that the gods are in truth our own con-
trivance for coming to grips with the eternal or divine component
of our nature, with the truth that “organic” humanity is the needful
indirect path by which a unified primordial being must eternally find
its way back to itself. That is to say, the function of the gods, in the
form of genii, is exactly analogous to the function we are inclined
to ascribe to the poem’s meter: they carry out a mediation between
ourselves and our own true divinity, a mediation that is made neces-
sary by the impossibility of direct knowledge of that divinity, which
is essentially the same impossibility as that of a direct articulation of
the poem’s metaphysical meaning. Just as meter is a device by which
the poem can say what it means without pretending or claiming to
say what it means, so the gods are a device by which we may know
ourselves without admitting or claiming that it is our very selves that
we know.
The pretense or the claim, in either of these cases, would be self-
defeating, would falsify our knowledge, invalidate our articulation. If
we wish genuinely to know the truth or to articulate our knowledge,
then we must do so gently or lightly, without insisting on confirmation
of our achievement. Precisely this understanding is suggested in lines
3 and 4, where the “Glänzende Götterlüfte” (gleaming divine airs),
which touch the gods “lightly,” are clearly associated with the process
of poetic speaking. The only one of our senses by which air cannot be
perceived in one way or another is that of sight; and we shall therefore
tend to take the attribute glänzend as a synaesthetic metaphor, stand-
ing for an impression received by some other sense, specifically the
sense of hearing, as is indicated by line 6. The air is brilliant (“gleam-
ing”) in that it vibrates with music, or with the divine musical art of
poetry; and this suggestion is reinforced by an interlingual bridge from
the word Luft to the word aria or “air” (also in German, Arie) in the
meaning of “song.” What is said by the lines “Glänzende Götterlüfte /
Rühren euch leicht,” therefore, is also what is being done by them. The
poet is as it were touching the image of the gods lightly with his song;
he addresses them as “genii” or intermediaries, but refrains carefully
from taking the next logical step of claiming them as images of a divin-
ity immanent in himself or in mankind generally.
This perspective upon the first strophe enables us now to answer
a question we have not yet even asked: Why is the “artist” in line 5
female, not male? The question is underscored by the poem’s meter. In
the first two strophes, there are three main explicit metaphors, in the
phrases: Wie die Finger der Künstlerin (as the fingers of the [female]
artist); wie der schlafende / Säugling (like the sleeping infant); In bes-
cheidener Knospe (in a modest bud), which last compares the mind of
the gods to an opening flower. But the last two of these phrases (the
ones in strophe 2) are both scanned ⏑⏑|–⏑⏑|–⏑, while the phrase in
strophe 1 contains an extra syllable. But if the gender of the artist were
masculine, the line would read Wie die Finger des Künstlers, and the
metrical consistency would be perfect! I contend, therefore, that just
as there is a latent or phantom image in strophe 1, the very important
image of the Aeolian harp, so also there is a phantom line in that stro-
phe, the line about the fingers of the male artist. If we pay very close
attention to the meter—as I have suggested we must—then in our view
of the poem, the actual line 5 and the masculinized phantom line 5 are
in a strong sense both present.
And if we ask now why this should be, the answer is not diffi-
cult. For Hölderlin, as for all German speakers, and for speakers of
practically all European languages in his time, the concept “man”
is gendered masculine, the concept “nature” (Latin natura, German
die Natur) feminine. Thus the co-presence of the actual line and the
phantom line produce one further, metrically mediated intimation of
the same truth that is suggested by the phantom image of the wind
harp: that art may be regarded, with equal validity, either as a human
product or as a product of nature by way of humanity as its vehicle,
which truth in turn leads toward the truth of man’s ultimate unity with
nature, hence the truth that humanity and divinity are ultimately not
different from one another.
Strophe 1 is thus very nearly a complete poem in its own right. The
speaker begins by addressing the gods from the perspective of one
who looks up to them; they are “droben,” “up there.” But the terms he
uses—“genii,” wandeln, the idea of a “soft ground”—suggest subtly or
gently that the separation between gods and humans may not be abso-
lute. Then come two lines in which the poem, so to speak, takes stock
of itself in this sense: “Glänzende Götterlüfte / Rühren euch leicht”
(gleaming divine airs touch you lightly). Like the imagined breezes of
heaven, the poet’s “air” or song touches the gods gently; at this point,
only the strictly reversible meter of that clause suggests the reversibil-
ity of the relation between gods and humans or between nature and
art. But then the final two lines insist on the idea of reversibility as
the strophe’s main content: in the reversible metaphor (do the fingers
touch the strings or vice versa?); in the introduction of the latent image
of the wind harp; and in the reversible gender of the “artist.” The pro-
cedure is still gentle, subtle, not formulated. But the strophe has taken
shape nonetheless (“organically”) as the self-reflexive bearer of a clear
metaphysical meaning.
The Dilemma of Meaning

If Paul de Man had carried out the interpretation above, he would
probably have said that the first strophe, by doing exactly the gentle
“touching” that it speaks of, “signifies its own rhetorical mode” and
so becomes an exemplary instance of “literary language.”7 In other
words, he would attribute a kind of perfection to it, which is precisely
what Hölderlin does not do.
The problem is that even in poetry, there is no way to carry out suc-
cessfully the task of touching the truth gently, as Hölderlin imagines
it. You can, on the one hand, be so subtle or gentle in your treat-
ment of truth that your meaning cannot reasonably be read out of
your text. But then you have accomplished nothing. And if, on the
other hand, it is possible to infer your meaning from your text—as
I think I have shown is the case with Hölderlin’s first strophe—then
you have already gone too far. For how can it be guaranteed that your
gentleness will be preserved in your reader’s understanding? The lines,
“Glänzende Götterlüfte / Rühren euch leicht,” wonderful as they are,
probably mark the point where Hölderlin goes too far.
This point can be inferred directly from the Empedokles-metaphysics
itself. Every self-conscious articulative move, however gentle, is inevi-
tably an assertion of the “organic,” an encroachment into the aorgic,
hence an instance of disunity and confusion, not knowledge. And yet,
there is no way to avoid this excessive step, except perhaps the way of
absolute silence. As soon as you actually say anything at all, as soon
as you assert a meaning, you have already gone too far. It is this truth
that is acknowledged in strophe 2: in the change from second person
to third, in the renaming of the gods, in the unapologetic contradic-
tions in metaphor, in the meter’s merciless repetitiveness.
In the first strophe the gods are addressed directly, thus included in
the same discursive fabric as the speaker. In the second strophe they
are no longer “genii” or intermediaries, but rather, as “the heavenly
ones,” they are located outside the immediacy of the discourse and are
referred to in the third person. In strophe 1, readers must make a num-
ber of relatively obscure connections: Luft-air-song, the Aeolian harp,
gentle touching as a discursive technique, universal reversibility. But
once these connections are understood, the metaphors make perfect
sense. In strophe 2, on the other hand, the metaphors have a tendency
to lose coherence. Sleep, or oblivion, may perhaps be associated with
a condition of “fatelessness,” insofar as fate normally involves aware-
ness; but surely a sleeping infant, especially a “Säugling” or babe at the
breast, will be thought of as a creature with a future, hence a fate. And
something that is preserved inside a “Knospe” or bud is by definition
not yet in the condition of Blühen or blossoming. It is as if the speaker,
in talking of the gods, were attempting to say things that cannot be
said, things that his discourse cannot accommodate.
The world of the gods is now entirely detached from ours and entirely
closed off. The air no longer “touches” those gods but is breathed or
incorporated by them. When they “look,” with their blissful eyes, they
do not look anywhere or at anything. They “look” but they apparently
do not see. In German, the verb blicken is frequently used with in plus
accusative: you can in die Ferne blicken (look into the distance) or ins
Tal blicken (look into the valley) or even in den Spiegel blicken (look
into the mirror). But the gods of strophe 2 simply “Bliken in stiller /
Ewiger Klarheit” (gaze in [not into] silent eternal clarity), with the
dative case, suggesting a form of looking or gazing that has no direc-
tion or destination outside itself, looking with the eyes of a statue. And
as I pointed out in paragraph no. 5 under significant metrical patterns
above, even the meter now becomes repetitive—frozen, statue-like—at
first unobtrusively, then insistently in the three concluding hexameter
cadences. It is as if strophe 2 were attempting to sum up both itself
and the preceding strophe once and for all, and in the process to set an
emphatic end to the poem.
All these features of strophe 2 are direct consequences of strophe
1: not logical or conceptual consequences, but consequences of that
first strophe considered as an act of speaking. Even in the process of
attempting to temper that act, to make it gentle or “light,” the speaker
of strophe 1 has gone too far in the matter of articulation. He has
committed, or recommitted, the primordial verbal crime of extending
the domain of the “organic” in the direction of the infinite, toward a
mastery of metaphysical truth. The result is that he is now absolutely
separated from truth, separated from the essential divinity of his own
being, which now stands over against him in the form of the absolutely
remote “heavenly ones.” And this separation—the poem’s meter sug-
gests, by performing an emphatic end to the poem at this point—is the
human condition once and for all, admitting no possibility of further
change.
The Act of Speaking

The second strophe, in other words, rounds the poem off into an
unchanging artifact—which it after all is, on the printed page. But
there are fissures in that artifact, like the “accidental” cracks and dents
in Yeats’s lapis lazuli. It takes shape as an artifact, its two parts are
held together in a fabric of cause and effect, only by way of our under-
standing the first part as the opposite of an artifact, as an act of speak-
ing. And one of the means by which its quality as an artifact is asserted
is meter, which belongs to the idea of language as kinesis or action.
We are faced here with a problem familiar to us from our discussion
of Blake: the problem of the poem as visible artifact vs. the poem as
audible song. But in the present case, this problem is compounded by
the situation of Hölderlin’s poem as part of a novel. On one hand, the
poem gains a certain kinetic quality from its inclusion in a fictional
action; it is easier to think of the poem as an action if we have an

idea of the circumstances under which that action is carried out. But
on the other hand, the novel in general—and the epistolary novel in
particular!—is much more emphatically and fundamentally a written
form than the form of lyric poetry, and so, in the particular case, fore-
grounds the poem’s quality as writing. Thus the tension between the
qualities of action and artifact is raised to a maximum; and the prob-
lem is brought very strongly into the center of our understanding.
And that problem—of poem as artifact vs. poem as action—is read-
ily translatable into the terms of the Empedokles-metaphysics. If the
poem, from my point of view, is once and for all an artifact, then it is
the same thing and by consequence says the same thing every time I
attend to it. There is no way for me to avoid thinking the whole of the
poem’s metaphysics as if it were a formulable doctrine. There is no way
for me to touch that truth “gently”; it is always simply there, as what
I have understood irrevocably to be the artifact’s meaning. Therefore
I am always in the condition suggested by strophe 2, the condition of
having gone too far with respect to truth, hence the condition of being
permanently excluded from the true extent of my own humanity.
Now going too far, overextending the “organic,” thus disrupt-
ing the primordial unity of being, is strictly unavoidable. Such dis-
ruption belongs to the very nature of being human; we cannot hope
to achieve our proper humanity except by an “eccentric path” (FA,
10:276) leading through confusion and self-alienation. But there is a
difference between the condition of having gone too far and the pro-
cess or action of going too far. In the former case, my humanity has
become an inescapable trap; in the latter, it is expressed as a free act.
And it is this going too far, as a process or action, that will character-
ize my reading if I can somehow find my way back from the poem
as artifact to the self-representing “artistic” kinesis of strophe 1; if I
can manage to appropriate the poem not merely as a verbal action in
progress, but as such an action on my own part. Only by way of this
sort of kinetic reading can my humanity orient itself not toward the
Empedokles-metaphysics as mere doctrine, but toward the great cycle
and the restoration of universal unity that is implied by that metaphys-
ics as human destiny.
That such a kinetic reading of the poem is possible is suggested by
what I called the “fissures” in the realized artifact of strophes 1 and
2: the fact that that artifact takes shape as such only by way of stro-
phe 1 considered as act or kinesis, not merely meaning, and only with
the assistance of the inherently kinetic factor of meter. And of course
the possibility of going beyond strophes 1 and 2 is also suggested by
strophe 3: by its very existence, and also by its production of some-

thing like an allegory of the whole Empedokles-metaphysics. For what
strophe 3 states, very simply, is not only that all human beings die,
but that we are all always in the process of dying. And it is precisely
death—or by extension the anticipation of death in every moment of
our experience, in our constant encounter with an “organic” fate—
that closes the metaphysical circle and sets the seal of truth upon the
idea of an ultimate unity of art and nature, of humanity and divinity.
Strophe 3 thus resolves the poem into an allegory of the whole life of
the mind, a narrative that starts with the inaugural act of the creative
or poetic imagination, the projection before ourselves of the image
of gods in an attempt to come to grips with an intuition of our own
immanent divinity. Then follows the stage of alienation or remote-
ness from the gods (strophe 2), which is an inevitable consequence of
the quality of that inaugural act as an overstepping of its own inher-
ent bounds, as a disrupting of exactly the harmonious balance of the
organic and the aorgic by which the aboriginal unity of humanity and
divinity had been constituted. But it is in this condition of alienation,
or over-individuation, that we then encounter our fate, “the death of
the individual,” by which the balance of organic and aorgic is restored,
the circle closed.
Kinetic Reading
But where does this understanding of the poem, as an allegory of the
life of the mind, leave me as a reader? Is it implied that I can read the
poem successfully, as an articulation of the metaphysics behind it, only
by continuing to live my life and die my death? Which would mean,
presumably, leaving the poem in its condition as a strict artifact. If so,
then what is that third strophe doing there? Why not simply leave me
to my own devices at the end of the second?
We need to look at strophe 3 in detail. And we can begin by noting
that the first and fourth lines apparently offer us a choice, in that the
words “uns” (us) and “Die leidenden Menschen” (suffering humans)
are identical in their referent. “We,” after all, are the “suffering humans”
referred to. The question, therefore, is how I am to position myself
with respect to that idea: shall I view suffering humanity from within,
as a participant, as one of “us,” or shall I view “suffering humans”
from a detached perspective, as it were in the third person? And this
choice, in turn, is analogous to the choice between a kinetic reading of
the poem, a reading that realizes the poem as action here and now, and
what we might call an intellectual reading, which takes the poem as a

given linguistic artifact and sets about deciphering it as such.
The same choice is suggested in the verbs “schwinden” (fade) and
“fallen” (fall). Schwinden ordinarily suggests “to dwindle, to fade from
view,” thus presupposing the detached point of view of an observer,
whereas falling is easily imagined as an experience one is undergoing
here and now. But in this case, the relation is not quite as clear-cut. It
happens that schwinden can also refer to immediate subjective experi-
ence, to a failing of one’s strength, for example; and of course falling
can refer to an event that is observed from without.
And if we feel that there is a certain ambiguity operating here, this
feeling is reinforced by the implications of the word “Stätte.” The dif-
ference between this word and the other common German words for
the general concept of “place”—words like Platz, Ort, and Stelle—is
that “Stätte” is very often used to denote a sacred or beloved or some-
how consecrated place. A famous passage in Goethe’s Torquato Tasso
reads,
Die Stätte, die ein guter Mensch betrat,

Ist eingeweiht; nach hundert Jahren klingt
Sein Wort und seine That dem Enkel wieder. (ll. 80–82)
[The place where a good man stood is consecrated; a hundred years
later, his word and his deed still reverberate there for posterity.]
The very concept “Stätte” includes the idea of persisting through time,
so that the statement in Hölderlin’s poem, “to us is given that we rest
in no Stätte,” comes close to suggesting a contradiction: between the
detached view of humans’ failure to remain at any of the permanent
places they pass through, and the involved or kinetic experience of
never having anything like a permanent place to begin with.
A similar tension is created by the relatively unusual word
“Blindlings.” In context, in connection with the idea of falling, there is
an echo of the word häuptlings (headlong, head first), hence a sugges-
tion of the concept of uncontrollability. But in its normal usage, and in
its etymology, blindlings suggests “blindly,” perhaps in the metaphori-
cal sense of: without knowledge, or without foreknowledge. Thus
we arrive at the same combination of conflicting perspectives that is
created by the word “Stätte”: the detached perspective from which
humanity’s plunge through time is clearly known but uncontrollable,
and an involved perspective in which our plunge unfolds blindly, with
no detached knowledge of itself. And again, this opposition of per-
spectives is parallel to the opposition between an intellectual and a
kinetic reading of the poem, and hence to the opposition between the
poem as artifact and the poem as an unfolding action.
But what is signified by the tendency of these oppositions not to
remain clear-cut, the tendency of their elements to get combined, to
encroach upon each other? I think we can understand what is happen-
ing here if we go back to the opposition between the poem as artifact
and the poem as action, the opposition that marks a defect in poetic
form precisely because its two elements inevitably interfere with one
another. Hölderlin, I contend, uses the basic defectiveness of poetic
form to signify a truth concerning the relation between kinetic read-
ing and intellectual reading, and hence a truth concerning the relation
between fate as experience and the knowledge of fate. All these oppo-
sitions, the poem suggests, are characterized by mutual interference of
their elements. In particular, fate is not merely what happens to us; it is
what happens to us, uncontrollably, even in the presence of our exact
and detailed knowledge of its happening. That we are detached specta-
tors to our own fate, to our inevitable mortality, is precisely what gives
our mortality the character of fate in the first place.
It follows further now, by analogy, that precisely my experience
of the problem of intellectual vs. kinetic reading can be understood
as itself a kind of kinetic reading, an involvement in the poem as an
action. The poem, merely by being a poem, by offering itself as an
instance of poetic–musical tradition, produces the problem of intellec-
tual vs. kinetic reading; and my experience of that problem therefore
counts as direct involvement in the action by which the poem con-
stitutes itself, hence as a kinetic reading. The words “uns” and “Die
leidenden Menschen” suggest a choice between kinetic and intellec-
tual reading. Let us designate as K1 the reading offered by the word
“uns,” a kinetic reading that is somehow completely separate from
any intellectual reading. Then K2 would be what might be called the
secondary kinetic possibility I have just described, which arises from
an understanding of the inseparability of the kinetic and the intellec-
tual, an understanding of the unavoidability of mutual interference in
that opposition. Does kinetic reading in the sense of K2 solve all our
problems in dealing with Hölderlin’s text?
Meter and Material Form

In fact, one important problem remains. And it is still the same problem
with which this chapter began: the problem of reconciling our sense of
the poem’s movement as a simple downward cascade with our sense
(mainly from meter) of a basic cyclicity in the poem. Kinetic reading in

the sense of K1 would require that the poem as artifact (and the cor-
responding process of intellectual reading) simply vanish as a factor in
our understanding, which is impossible. Kinetic reading in the sense
of K2 avoids this difficulty by positioning our experience of the poem
at exactly the point where that impossibility arises, where the kinetic
aspect of reading is always necessarily contaminated by the intellec-
tual. But reading of type K2 still takes the form of an unmitigated
downward plunge. It operates only by being constantly subject to an
uncertainty concerning its own nature; it remains kinetic only by never
being quite kinetic enough, by being subject to a constant intellectual
contamination that we recognize belongs inherently to the reading of
poetry as an experience. It represents, for me as I read, something like
a triumph or culmination of the aorgic. And where, in relation to this
experience, is fate? Where is the great cycle? Where is nature in the new
“organic” form that is promised both by the Empedokles-metaphysics
and by the poem’s meter, in the form that must be offered me as both
an ideal and a doom?
This question turns out not to be difficult. We made the transition
from K1 to K2 by recognizing that reading of type K1 can never hap-
pen in reality. A similar recognition with respect to type K2 leads to a
further type of reading—call it K3—which may at last prove adequate
to the tasks that the poem sets us. In particular, strophe 3 of the poem
offers a description of what reading in the sense of K2 would look and
feel like if it existed, an endless plunge from uncertainty to uncertainty,
“ins Ungewisse hinab,” a constant reexperiencing of my inability to
pin down my reading as either kinetic or intellectual. And reading in
this sense depends absolutely on the fundamental defect of poetry, the
tension between the poem as action and the poem as artifact. But in its
role at the origin of type K2 reading, the artifact does not really oper-
ate as an artifact, as a material entity. It operates rather as the process,
which I have called “intellectual reading,” by which a hypothetical
type K1 reading is always necessarily contaminated. Thus type K2 read-
ing requires the material artifact in order to operate, yet at the same
time cannot accommodate that artifact in its strict materiality. And
this contradiction compels us to recognize in K2 reading, considered
as a headlong uncontrollable plunge, the same hypothetical status we
had earlier recognized in type K1.
But K2 reading, even as a hypothesis, still requires the strict, change-
less material artifact, and is therefore indissolubly bound to that arti-
fact. And this relation undermines it (reduces it to a mere hypothesis)
by stabilizing it, removing its character as a headlong plunge. K2
reading still is, by definition, a headlong plunge, but now—being tied,

in my reading, to the material artifact—can no longer be strictly the
headlong plunge that it is. In other words, it has become a different
type of reading altogether, type K3. But K3 reading, which involves
the hypothesis of the headlong plunge along with the recognition of
its impossibility, is still an event in my immediate personal experience
of the poem. That is, it is an instance of kinetic reading, in which the
kinesis of types K1 and K2 is preserved, but has to be preserved in the
only possible form of kinesis that can also accommodate stability, that
of the cycle. Which brings us back to the beginning of this chapter and
to the Empedokles-metaphysics.
And if we inquire into the exact meaning of the concept “material
artifact” in this argument, it is fairly clear that in the first instance
“material” must mean “non-semiotic.” The material artifact includes
all those elements or qualities of the artifact that do not participate
directly in the inherently illimitable (headlong) process of verbal
meaning or signification. The simply visible or audible word belongs
to the strict material artifact, whereas the readable or thinkable word
does not. But in order for those visible and audible elements to consti-
tute an “artifact,” in any reasonable sense, not only their materiality
is required, but also an identity. They must be held together by some-
thing comparable to an architectural plan. In the case of the artifact’s
visible aspect, this architecture is supplied by the arrangement of lines
on the printed page, especially with the unusual sloping margin that
Hölderlin uses. And in the artifact’s audible aspect, the architecture is
meter—it being understood, as above, that any connection between
meter and meaning is strictly conjectural, that meter is never directly
involved in the semiotic process.
It is the poem as a strictly material artifact, then, that serves in
the end as both an allegory and a symbol of fate, of newly “organic”
nature, of the closing of the great metaphysical circle: an allegory inso-
far as it affects the intellectual component of reading, a symbol as it
affects the kinetic component.8 Perhaps it will be objected: The poem
as a “strictly material artifact” is the poem as it was before I ever
began reading it, a form of the poem which, for all intents and pur-
poses, ceases to exist as soon as reading gets underway. How can that
form of the poem operate as an allegory or symbol in its relation, pre-
cisely, to my reading? As a response to this objection I offer the whole
argument of the present chapter: Hölderlin’s poem is set up in such a
way as to provoke not only my reading, but also a repeated question-
ing of my reading. My reading repeatedly encounters problems that
divert it from its course: the problem of articulation; the problem of
the semiotic artifact, with its unavoidable fissures; the problem of a

kinetic reading which is both necessary and unachievable. In the end,
there is literally nothing left by which I might make sense of my own
reading, except exactly that strict material artifact that had been left
behind at the very outset. The poem in a sense leads us back to that
artifact, in a great circle that is the image of its metaphysical vision,
back to that original artifact which remains as mute as ever, but whose
silence has been made eloquent by my circular journey.
Two final points need to be made for the sake of conceptual clar-
ity. First, the poem as a strictly material artifact is not the same thing
as the artifact that appears in the problem of artifact vs. action. The
problem of artifact vs. action is a problem in the reader’s relation to
the poem, hence a problem that cannot arise until after the strict mate-
rial artifact has been left behind in favor of the semiotic artifact, the
object of intellectual or distanced reading. Otherwise one might be
tempted to conclude that the quality of meter as an architectural ele-
ment in the strict material artifact somehow bridges the gap and solves
the problem of artifact vs. action. In fact that problem remains insol-
uble and an aspect of the irremediable defect in poetic form, a defect
without which the circular argument of this chapter could never have
been made.
And finally, in a fully developed reading of “Hyperions Schick
salslied,” as in the case of “The Tyger,” the possibility of choice for a
reader is superseded by the necessity of decision. Reading of type K3
does not arise from the choice suggested between “us” and “suffering
humans,” but rather—like the needful reading of Blake “in fury”—it
cannot happen except by my turning decisively away from the very
idea of reading, away from choosing, away from reasoning and com-
paring, which in Hölderlin’s case means my dispensing decisively with
the semiotic artifact in favor of the strict material artifact (comparable
to Blake’s relief etchings, considered as nothing but objects?) which
simply does not exist for a reader.
Part III
The Symbolist Move

Chapter Five
A Song to Worry about: Verlaine’s

“Chanson d’automne”
Chanson d’automne
Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon cœur
D’une langueur
Monotone.
Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure.
Et je m’en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.1
[Song of autumn: The long sobs of the violins of autumn injure my heart
with a monotonous languor. // All suffocating and pale when the hour
strikes, I remember old days and I weep. // And I go away on the bad
wind which carries me off, this way and that, like the dead leaf.]
Worries
When Emil Staiger, in his Grundbegriffe der Poetik, discusses Verlaine’s
little “Chanson d’automne”—as one of his first and presumably “pur-
est” examples of “lyric style”2—he quotes only the poem’s last stanza.
But he has only actually read three words in the poem, which do not
even occur in that stanza, the words, “une langueur / Monotone.” For

Staiger, as for many readers of the poem, those words establish the
poem’s mood. And once this point has been understood, all further
thinking is restricted to the task of showing how that mood is elabo-
rated and nuanced, by semantic and formal and auditory suggestions,
in the rest of the text. We might be inclined to say, for example, with
Staiger:
The second line [of the last stanza] sounds almost the same as the first,
except that the nasal—it appears—has been displaced as if in a careless
game. The words “vais—mauvais, delà—à la” can hardly be considered
rhymes; the tongue forms the same vowel as if it were on the point of
babbling senselessly. The fleeting “la” in rhyming position empties the
language of its last bit of weight. One might say that something despair-
ingly playful becomes audible; the sounds alone instill into us the mood
that the sight of windblown autumn leaves has prepared for us. (14)
The mood of the poem, its “monotonous languor,” must thus be

understood to outweigh definitively the now weightless language,
including any stray suggestions we might detect in individual words
or phrases.
We need not, it seems, bother ourselves about the fact that “the
dead leaf” in the poem’s last lines is singular, not plural. (I will come
back to this fact in a moment.) And we certainly need not, indeed we
must not, be over-subtle to the point of suggesting that the unusual
French phrase “vent mauvais” might be understood as a translation of
English “ill wind,” hence as an invocation of the proverb, “An ill winde
that bloweth no man to good.”3 The trouble with such a suggestion is
that it interrupts violently what would otherwise be the poem’s flow—
not only by alluding to an external text, but by forcing us to switch
languages as well. And flow is important—even more so in modern
poetry than in ancient rhetoric, where it is present etymologically—
because it is the principal sensory metaphor by which we imagine a
poem’s artistic unity, its eventual resolution of all dissonances, healing
of all ruptures. Heaven knows, if we did not succeed in giving our-
selves over unreservedly to the mood or flow—in a movement com-
parable to dying (one meaning of nous en aller)—we might even start
worrying about things like the irreducible discrepancy between the
insistence on audibility, in the word chanson, and the simple fact that
we only actually have that “song” as a text on the silent piece of paper,
la feuille morte, before us.
There are many difficulties or dissonances in the poem that bear wor-
rying about. Starting from the top: Is there any specific reason—apart
A Song to Worry about 109
from the influence of the poem’s supposed mood—for comparing the

sound of violins to the sound of sobbing, especially the sound of vio-
lins in the plural, as opposed to the plaintive tone that (one supposes)
can be produced best by a single instrument? And how is one entitled
to speak of “the violins of autumn”? Is autumn, of all the seasons,
somehow uniquely characterized by “violins”? Such questions will
be regarded by some as nothing but an admission of poetic illiteracy,
inability to accomplish the basic metaphorical calisthenics by which
one gets ready to read poetry. But if I manage actually to answer those
questions—as I think I will—that objection will die on the vine.
My next worry concerns the phrase “D’une langueur / Monotone.”
A phrase of this form, accompanying the verb blesser, would ordinar-
ily name the instrument or action by which the injury (in whatever
sense) is inflicted. In this case, however, there seems no room for doubt
that it also names the injury itself and even the result of the injury.
A monotonous languor is inflicted upon my heart by a monotonous
languor, leaving behind a monotonous languor. By paraphrasing thus
I do not mean to make fun of the poem. On the contrary, this com-
plex ambiguity can be regarded as a stroke of genius, expressing in
only four words the condition of being so completely submerged in
an unhappy and unchanging mood that even the distinctions among
past (the instrument), present (the injury), and future (the continuing
consequences) have become meaningless. But then we have to worry
about the verb blesser itself, which names a striking or decisive event,
the sort of sudden event that creates a future markedly different in
character from the past. If we are willing to confront such worries, we
find ourselves faced with a very complicated psychological situation,
which will take some work to unravel.
The Scene
At the beginning of the second stanza we are faced with a new prob-
lem. Why does it occur to the poem’s speaker to characterize himself as
“pallid”? Must we imagine him looking into a mirror while he speaks
or meditates? I think the answer to this question has already been
supplied by the word “suffocant” (in place of the more normal suf-
foquant—an Anglicism?) which I take to imply, among other things,
that the window is closed. My point is that these few words, in the
context of the whole poem, set a very detailed scene for the poem’s
speaking. The speaker is indoors (“suffocant”) looking out through a
closed window at trees and leaves blown about by an autumn wind.
It is evening, dusky but still light enough to see outside, and a light is
on in the room beside him; otherwise he would not be able to see his
reflection (“blême”) in the window. This basic situation—the speaker
is watching the superimposed images of himself and an external
event—is interesting not only in itself, but also, clearly enough, in rela-
tion to the poem’s complicated psychology.
Then the clock in his room strikes the hour—with a certain sud-
denness that is represented by the anticipatory “quand” in rhyming
position. In order to understand fully the significance of this event, you
have to know—from long experience, which probably excludes most
younger readers nowadays—exactly what the striking of a relatively
large mechanical clock sounds like. The first thing you hear is not the
bell being struck, but the movement of the mechanism as it prepares to
strike—just as we hear the “quand” before the “Sonne l’heure.” And in
many clocks—again I have no alternative but to appeal to experience—
that preparatory movement sounds exactly like the indrawn breath of
someone sobbing. In English, with quite remarkable inaccuracy, sob-
bing is commonly represented by the syllables “boo hoo.” However,
I refer not to the louder sound of sobbing, which is produced while
exhaling, but rather to the sound that someone sobbing makes each
time he or she inhales through a convulsively constricted throat and
vocal apparatus—as it were “suffocatingly.” Exactly that sound, as I
say, is made by many relatively large mechanical clocks when prepar-
ing to strike. And in clocks that strike slowly, the sob is heard before
every stroke, which makes room for the plural “sanglots.”
We thus have a kind of provenance for the idea of sobbing in the
first line of the poem, although its association with “the violins of
autumn” still needs to be explained. But that explanation also belongs
to the poem’s scene. If we ask exactly what the speaker is looking
at, through the window in which he also sees his own image, the
concepts “wind” and “leaf” provide us with enough information to
answer specifically: He is watching the newly leaf-stripped branches
of trees being blown about in the wind. And he is reminded of the
small forest of violin-bows that one may observe at any orchestra or
even chamber concert, all constantly in motion, but in a generally syn-
chronized motion that suggests the idea of their being moved by a
single wind. These metaphorical violins, moreover, are “the violins of
autumn,” autumn being the only season in which the two phenomena
needed to support the metaphor—naked tree branches and proverbial
windiness—occur together.
The scene of the poem’s speaking thus serves an important
explanatory purpose with respect to the poem as a whole. But it also
requires explanation in its own right. First of all, what is it doing

there, why should the poem be embedded in a specific scene to begin
with? And if the scene is felt to be necessary, why not present it
straightforwardly in the form of a narrative? Of course, such a nar-
rative would make the poem much longer, and so would deprive it of
the quality of a glimpsed instant of life. But in reality it does not have
that quality anyway. The only way for a reader to understand the
scene in a lighted room with a clock is not by suddenly glimpsing it,
but by analysis, by rereading and carefully working out the various
possible relationships among connotations of the individual words.
And even when one has completed an analysis of this type, there are
still gaps in the result that one has to worry about—for example, the
attribution of sobbing not to the actual clock but to the metaphori-
cal violins.
Time
It is time to begin discussing the thought that holds the poem together,
in the sentence, “I remember old times and I weep.” There are two
widely different ways to regard this sentence. It can be understood
naively, as an immediate convulsive response to experience, exactly
like the weeping it speaks of. But it can also be understood to open
onto the inherent paradox of experience in time, or the paradox of
memory. If I have forgotten completely an event of yesterday or of
years ago, then while it is true in an absolute sense that that event
is past, it is not effectively past for me, not something I might weep
over. In order to be truly past, in the sense of experience, it must first
be rescued from the past by memory, it must be brought into a new
kind of present. If I weep over something because it is past, therefore,
that weeping is never the strictly spontaneous reaction to a given state
of affairs, but always includes a movement of reflection in the form
of memory. The “long sobs” of Verlaine’s first line are not only the
sobs of the clock but also—and rather more obviously—those of the
speaker himself; and the reflective component of that sobbing is rep-
resented by the compound image he sees in the window glass, where
the metaphorical transfer of misery is made, from himself (his pallid
face) to the “violins.” It should be kept in mind, moreover, that the
idea of weeping is thus supported by two separate sensory correlatives,
one auditory (the striking clock) and one visual (the reflected face of
the person who actually says “je pleure”). Which establishes a parallel
with the two separate conditions of the poem as a whole, stretched as
it is between the very first word, “Chanson” (auditory) and the very
last words, “Feuille morte” (visual).
The principle of that metaphorical transfer—by which weeping
is attributed to the “violins”—may perhaps be given by an allusion
to Vergil: “sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt” (things
weep, and mortal sorrows touch the mind: Aeneid, 1.462).4 For
the paradox of memory belongs to a more general paradox of time
and mortality. Time “itself”—to the extent that we can think about
it—seems unquestionably to have the character of a “vent mauvais,”
an ill wind that drives all of us, without exception and uninterrupt-
edly, in the direction of death. It is not—in “itself”—contoured or
articulated, but is terrifying because of exactly the opposite quality, its
relentless, undeviating monotony. And yet, on the other hand, weeping
requires “things.” We cannot experience time except precisely in its
articulations, in the striking of a clock or the beating of a heart, or in
the contours, the self-overlapping, that it receives from memory. This
is the paradox of temporal experience as a “monotonous languor”
that also always has the character of a decisive event, a blessure, a
newly inflicted wound.5
The paradox can be generalized further. For the whole of the exter-
nal world—all of what confronts me as reality and provides a struc-
ture within which I can orient myself and know of my own existence,
all of what Aeneas calls “things”—is also in the end only an obstacle
in the flow of time, an articulation or contour by which that flow,
my own helpless mortality, is revealed to me, brought repeatedly to
my attention. What seems otherwise to be the problem of the poem’s
scene—why is it not narrated? why is it only permitted to emerge as a
pattern of inferences which is constantly washed away by the poem’s
sonorous forward movement?—can now be understood as a represen-
tation of the paradox in its generalized form. Reality (represented by
the scene) is always in the process of being washed or wafted away
by my own personal knowledge of mortality. “Sunt lacrimae rerum.”
It is never in truth possible to look at the world without also seeing
the superimposed image of one’s own deathly pallor. The narration of
scenes or stories, as if they were substantial objects, is only the hope-
less attempt to deny this unalterable fact of life.
Where Am I?
Several things are worrisome in the final stanza even before we get to
the relation between the “dead leaf” and the printed page on which
we are reading the poem. In the first clause, if the “bad wind” has to
do with death, then the idiomatic meaning of the verb, “to die,” fits
well enough. But what about the preposition? What would we mean,
precisely, if we were to say of the poem’s speaker, “il s’en va au vent
mauvais”? The preposition à, with s’en aller, ordinarily indicates a
destination: for example, “Verlaine s’en est allé à Londres,” Verlaine
went away to London. In the case of the poem, however, it seems that
the action of departing—by being comparable to dying and by being
repeated, apparently, in the line “Qui m’emporte”—were an effect of
being already helplessly in the power of that ill wind. Is the speaker the
agent of his own departure or not? Is he moving toward the ill wind,
or is he being moved by it? The similarity of this prepositional ambigu-
ity to that of “D’une langueur / Monotone,” with respect to the verb
blesser, throws both ambiguities into relief.
Another difficulty in the last stanza perhaps helps us here. I mean
the line “Deçà, delà.” Considered as description, this line is accurate
enough. Especially on city streets, but even in open space, the wind
never blows fallen leaves in anything like a straight line. It moves
them, rather, “this way and that,” in eddies and leaps and reversals.
But does this insistence on descriptive accuracy not conflict with the
idea of the “vent mauvais” as representing the relentless, unvarying,
“monotonous” movement of time in the sense of mortality?
I think we can find our way through these questions by reference
to the idea of the first person in general—the grammatical and experi-
enced “ego.” The quality we associate most immediately with the ego,
with my sense of my self, is that of unity. It is Kant who systematizes
this association in his notion of transcendental or pure apperception—
the representation “I think”—without which no form of unity would
ever happen and experience would never take shape in the chaotic mul-
tiplicity of intuitions. But this perhaps ultimately Christian idea of the
strict unity of the self, by being made ever more explicit and insistent in
an age of bourgeois individualism, is also opened to doubt. Rimbaud
writes famously to Izambard in May 1871, “JE est un autre.”
In Verlaine’s poem we have already noted the tendency toward
contradiction and multiplicity in the speaking ego. Precisely the ego’s
structuring of its experience of time, in reflection and in memory, only
exposes it more directly and completely to its own mortality, to the
monotony of dying, to a constant, unchanging experience (“langueur”)
which is itself contradictory in also having the character of a constantly
re-inflicted wound. In effect, actually, it is a self-inflicted wound, since
the whole experience springs from the ego’s move of resistance against
it. Hence the apparent paradox of agency in that ego’s “going away.”
Mortality is always both the ego’s own responsibility, in its resistance,

and an absolute inexorable force prior to any individual operation,
any “ego.” The ego, that is, both departs toward the ill wind (as a
self-constituting act of reflection) and is swept away by it (as a vessel
of mere suffering). We think of the scene in the lighted room, where
the speaker sees in the window both himself (ego as reflection) and
the autumn wind (inexorable mortality). And this whole complex of
thought, concerning the ego’s constantly finding itself on both sides—
“on this side and on that”—of the most fundamental issue raised by
its existence, is summarized in the line “Deçà, delà.”
But ego-multiplication, the “I-compound” I spoke of in the
Introduction, has another important aspect: the sharing of ego-ori-
ented experience between speaker and reader in the unfolding of a
poem. What we still call “lyric” poetry, as if it were being sung to us
accompanied by the poet’s plucking, is most often meditative poetry,
poetry that costumes itself as solitary meditation on the part of who-
ever it is who speaks the word “I” in it. It is to meditative poetry in this
sense that Northrop Frye means to apply John Stuart Mill’s “wonder-
ful flash of critical insight,” the supposed recognition that the artist
“is not heard but overheard.”6 But the wonderfulness of that insight,
its seductive succinctness, does not make it any less wrong. We do not
merely hear the poet’s meditation. We are taught incessantly, after all,
in all levels of school, that we must recognize and appreciate feelings
in poems, presumably by some form of empathy. We are taught to
assume, in other words, that our task as readers is to experience the
speaking “I” in the poem as if it were our speaking “I.”
In itself, of course, this assumption is impossibly vague. But one of
the great accomplishments of the symbolist poets, including Verlaine,
is to give it firm contours. Hugo von Hofmannsthal says, “Wollen wir
uns finden, so dürfen wir nicht in unser Inneres hinabsteigen: draußen
sind wir zu finden, draußen”7 (If we wish to find ourselves, we must
not climb down into our interior: out there we are to be found, out
there). And in saying this he is almost certainly thinking of the “regards
familiers” (familiar glances) with which, according to Baudelaire’s
“Correspondances,” external things in the world look at us. My own
person, in other words, my own ego, is distributed among external
objects, as the speaker’s ego in Verlaine’s poem is made to reside in
objects that carry out its weeping, its self-reflection, its memory, its
experience of time, its submission to mortality.
And one important consequence of this technique is that the poem’s
speaker no longer enjoys a privileged interior perspective. All the
elements by which he is constituted as an ego are “out there” in the
scene and the objects he speaks of, “out there” in almost exactly the
same way that they are out there with respect to me as I read. Which
means that the meditative idea, the idea that I myself am somehow
situated at the ego-center of the poem’s speaking, now makes sense
in an entirely new way. The poem’s series of constituent paradoxes,
the series of both–and couples discussed above, is now augmented by
a doubling at the very source of the speaking, where both the actual
speaker (whoever that might be) and I the reader are accommodated
in the I-compound whose experience is being recorded.
Finally, if we continue along this line of thought for a bit, our atten-
tion is drawn to a bizarre possibility that has to do with the puzzling
assertion, “Et je m’en vais.” The verb s’en aller means basically: to go
away. And while our knowledge of the place from which such a going-
away occurs is practically always tacit, still that knowledge must nev-
ertheless exist as part of the verb’s basic meaning. But in the text we are
looking at, it is not easy to specify what place or situation the poem’s
speaker claims to be leaving behind—unless we stand back and think
of the whole communicative situation involving speaker and reader. In
this case we would read “je m’en vais” to mean: Now, reader, this being
the last stanza of the poem, I am going away, extricating myself from
the communicative situation in which I (as another version of myself)
have shared with you a moment of immediate experience (in the room
with the clock) and the fabric of thought that belongs to it. Or yet fur-
ther: Now, reader, I am leaving you behind with nothing but “the dead
leaf,” the silent piece of paper. We might even be tempted to rewrite
the poem’s last lines, although with the addition of a syllable that ruins
them prosodically: the speaker is “séparé de la feuille morte,” perhaps
even “libéré de la feuille morte” (separated or liberated from the dead
leaf). This is a bizarre possibility, the idea of the speaker’s removing
himself from the poem’s communicative process. But is it a possibility
at all? Does it have any role in the poem’s meaning?
The End of the Poem

Let us assume that in worrying about the statement “je m’en vais,” I
hit upon the idea of construing it as an attempt to finish the poem, to
terminate the communicative process in which, for a time, the poem
has entangled my ego. The actual ending of the poem, the last pair of
lines—by contrast with the possible alternatives I suggested above—
now represents the necessary failure of any such attempt. The speak-
ing ego of the poem has not somehow vanished or “gone away.” Far
from it. That ego now inhabits metaphorically the tree-leaf and so,
by a lexical bridge, inhabits the actual palpable page I am reading.
There are thus actually two scenes in the poem. Just as the scene in the
room with the clock has entangled me, so now the scene I myself am
enacting, my reading the book, has entangled the poem’s speaking ego,
whether he will or no.
Or to put it less fancifully: If I assume, with the aid of symbolist
technique, that the reading of a meditative poem is carried out by
means of an ego-bridge connecting me to the poem’s speaker, then
such an ego-bridge, once established, cannot be broken by anything
that is said in the poem. If the poem says “I am going away,” then the
basic reading situation implies that I read that statement as if I were
making it, which gives it a force completely different from the force it
would have if it were spoken by a person clearly distinct from myself.
Indeed, that statement, originating with me as a reader, would suggest
a kind of self-abandonment on my part, hence a more complete com-
mitment of myself to the poem as process, hence a strengthening of the
ego-bridge, not a breaking of it.
The meditative assumption, on which all these considerations
depend, the assumption that I read the word “I” in the poem as if I
myself were the origin of it, is only an assumption, not in any sense a
verifiable fact. But it is a peculiar kind of assumption and has, if we
think it through, some peculiar consequences. For once it is made, by
any particular reader for any particular poem, it implies logically that
the poem can never end, that that reader can never be finished with
that poem. I do not mean that I can never stop reading or thinking
about the poem in question. What is implied is that in the course of
my thinking about the poem, I can never arrive at a truly satisfying
conclusion; I can stop reading it, but I can never finish reading it.
(Thus we arrive once more, from another direction, at Valéry’s asser-
tion that a poem is never finished.)8 For to finish reading the poem
would mean to find in it a kind of path leading conclusively out of
it, leading me back to my own customary undoubled or unsplintered
ego—a path that would make the statement “Et je m’en vais” literally
true, for “me.” And this cannot happen because, according to the med-
itative assumption from which I have started, everything in the poem
is regarded by “me” in exactly the double sense that was supposed to
be left behind. The poem, that is, can never end. The oscillatory move-
ment, “Deçà, delà”—between the two fundamentally different ways of
experiencing mortality, between the active and passive versions of ego
experience, between “my” ego and the ego-augment I receive as the
poem’s reader—goes on indefinitely, even sweeping up and carrying
along with it the seeming blunt finality of the lines, “Pareil à la / Feuille
morte.”
I contend that this whole complex of thought is invoked in Verlaine’s
poem by the line “Et je m’en vais”—which is the simplest possible
example of an element in the poem designed to provide a way out, a
true end to the poem. But such a design cannot be realized, the poem
cannot be finished. Where exactly does this leave us?
Either/Or
My contention, in a more general form, is that Verlaine’s poem is a
poem about poetry, both a poem and a meta-poem at the same time.
And in its quality as a meta-poem, it includes in its subject matter
what I have called the “meditative assumption,” the assumption that
I cannot read this type of poem adequately without managing some-
how to participate in its speaking, rather than merely hear it; I must
experience the ego that speaks or meditates in it as in some manner
my own ego. The poem itself clearly insists on this assumption. The
symbolist move, the distribution of the ego in external objects, sug-
gests it. There are questions raised by the text that are almost purely
lexical in character, yet can hardly even be understood as questions
if one does not understand them in relation to one’s own personal
experience: especially the questions raised by the locutions blesser
de and s’en aller à. And the meditative reading posture, my view-
ing of an external object (the poem) while viewing myself at the
same time, is reflected or mirrored back at me in the figure of the
speaker looking both at and out his window. Indeed, the allusion to
Vergil—which is not easily dismissed, given that things (res), both
the clock and the “violins,” are imagined as weeping—has the effect
of anchoring the meditative posture in the whole of European cul-
ture, whose forefather Aeneas we picture standing before works of
art in Carthage and seeing in them both themselves and an image of
his own condition. And yet further, not only the meditative assump-
tion itself, but also its quality as an arbitrary choice, is insisted upon
in the implications of the statement “je m’en vais” when spoken by
a poem’s meditative ego.
But the meditative assumption, or the making of that assumption,
marks a boundary separating the condition of reading the poem from
the condition of not reading it. And like the meditative assumption
itself, this difference has some peculiar properties. You cannot get
from one side to the other by a continuous path. There is no form of
transition from one condition to the other. The meditative assumption,

again, is only an assumption, which means that there is no reason for
reading, and no cause of the condition of reading, in the condition of
not-reading. And the impossibility of the poem’s being finished, in the
sense developed above, means that no cause or reason can operate
in the other direction, toward not-reading from reading. Either one
condition obtains or the other obtains. Nothing straddles or leaps the
gap. The two conditions are disjoint and incommensurable.
This type of difference not only belongs to the content of the meta-
poem, but is also prefigured and brought to our attention in the poem
itself. The experience of mortality is a clear instance. It is either “a
monotonous languor” or the condition of being suddenly wounded,
as if by the striking of a clock. But even though these two types of
experience have nothing whatever in common, still we have seen that
the problem of experiencing mortality is such that each resides inextri-
cably in the other. And if we require a tangible symbol of this paradox,
we need only think of the situation of someone sitting before a closed
window in a lighted room at evening, seeing both his own reflection
in the window and the autumnal scene outside. Both objects are seen
uninterruptedly; they occupy the same visual space, each resides in the
other’s. But one can only look at one of those visual objects or at the
other, without any form of transition between the two possibilities.
And of course the same idea of difference is part of what is suggested
in the line “Deçà, delà.”
Or perhaps, instead of thinking of the conditions of reading and
not-reading, we should cast the matter in spatial terms, as a difference
between my being inside the poem, as an involved participant in its
unfolding, and my being outside it, as a mere observer. In chapter six,
we will discuss a more linguistically oriented version of this differ-
ence in connection with the very highly developed symbolist poetry of
Stefan George. But a change in terminology does not get us around the
question we started with: where am I left by the poem’s either/or? by
the impossibility of either finding a direct path into the poem’s inside
or extricating myself once I am there?
The Basic Defect of Poetry and

Its Repair
I pointed out in the Introduction that the way poetry is printed
alludes to its original musicality, a musicality—whether or not strictly
historical—that is absent in our situation as silent book readers. It

is as if to remind us of this state of affairs that Verlaine’s poem is
stretched between the words “Chanson,” at the very beginning, and
“Feuille morte” at the very end. The idea of the dead leaf here insists
further that the presumed original musicality of poetry is irrevocably
past. All modern poetry, on this view, by alluding in its form to a music
it no longer possesses, is fundamentally nostalgic, an instance of “Je
me souviens / Des jours anciens / Et je pleure.”
The view of poetry thus suggested is what opens a gap between
the poem’s inside and its outside, between an involved, immediate
participation in the poem’s unfolding (as if at a performance) and
the mere deciphering of a sign of my exclusion. And it seems clear
now that our task as readers is to repair that gap or rift or defect as
fully as our imaginative powers permit us to. (We recall the implied
imperative of “kinetic reading” in Hölderlin.) We must start from
the “Feuille morte” on the desk before us, and bend all our efforts
toward reconstituting mentally the presumed original “Chanson”
of which it is a pale imitation. Or to look at the matter histori-
cally, our task as readers is to retrieve from the dim past, at least
for a moment, some remnant or frisson or simulacrum of the pas-
sionate personal immediacy that we imagine characterized poetry
in ages when it was truly “lyric.” And the difference between our
actual situation, here and now, and the ancient situation for which
we weep, belongs clearly to the meaning of the scene presupposed
by Verlaine’s poem.
What I do now when I read poetry, namely, is sit alone before the
piece of paper and stare at it, attempting to use it as a window into
a better, freer, less suffocating world, where I would not be frustrated
constantly by the reflection of my pale modern solitary visage. In the
age of the true chanson, by contrast, my experience of the poem would
have been not solitary, but part of a communal proceeding carried
out by a group of people gathered within earshot of the singer. And
surely the implication is that when you and I both manage—each for
him- or herself—to find our way into the poem’s inside, into the condi-
tion of truly reading it, it will turn out that we are not strictly solitary
after all, but on some level in communication with one another. What
conceivable purpose could the exercise of reading a poem have, if not
to restore, at least for a moment, an ancient condition of language, a
profound and immediate communicativeness, in our own age where
language is unceasingly corrupted by political and commercial pro-
paganda, bourgeois trivialities, technical exclusivity, and God knows
what else?
More Worries
I think it is clear that the line of thought I have just described is invoked
in Verlaine’s poem. But invoked in what sense? As a claim? Does the
meta-poem claim that the poem, when read properly, will foster a new
depth of communication among its readers, a communicative bond
perhaps modeled on the ego-bridge or I-compound by which my own
subjectivity is assumed to be co-speaking what I read? Is this how we
are meant to imagine the operation of the poem’s inside, as a constant
comforting awareness of the possibility of true communication and
community even in our increasingly regimented and depersonalized
world?
It is at least very difficult to read the poem in this optimistic man-
ner. Such a reading would fit better a poem that introduced itself as a
“Feuille morte” and ended by pronouncing itself a “Chanson.” And the
ego-bridge that would have to serve as a model for deep human com-
munication is itself called profoundly into question in the poem’s last
stanza, not only by the implications of the statement “je m’en vais,” but
also by the speaking ego’s eventual insistence that it belongs not to the
visionary or communicative level of the poem, not to the “Chanson,”
but to the level of mere print on paper, the “Feuille morte.”
Thus our attention is drawn to another of the poem’s worrisome
words, “Pareil” (like, or similar or parallel to). An obvious way to
read the four last lines is: [the wind] which carries me off, this way
and that, like the dead leaf. But as I have noted, a problem is cre-
ated immediately by the unassuming singular definite article “la”—in
rhyming position! For the sake of the obvious reading, most readers
would probably have preferred to see “à une feuille morte” or “aux
feuilles mortes” ([like] a dead leaf or the dead leaves). Thus the possi-
bility of construing the last phrase as “the dead page” is given promi-
nence. But problems are created by this construction as well. The ego
who speaks the poem is an entity that belongs by definition to the
nonmaterial realm of thought and imagination. Therefore, while it
may be subject to something like the oscillatory motion of leaves or
a leaf, how can it possibly be related—except perhaps negatively—to
the strictly material and unmoving piece of paper on the desk before
me? I argued above that the poem’s speaking ego is entangled in the
scene of reading just as I am entangled in the scene at the window.
But he is entangled thus as a co-reader and co-speaker, not as the dead
piece of paper.
This problem, like the problems before it, opens the door to further
possibilities. We are now tempted to question our understanding of the
word “Pareil.” Does it refer, as we had assumed, to the pronoun “me”

in “Qui m’emporte” (which carries me off), or does it perhaps refer
to the noun “vent mauvais” (bad wind)? The latter is certainly pos-
sible in grammar, and would indeed be the preferred possibility if the
passage read, for instance: “le vent qui m’emporte, deçà, delà, pareil à
un catcheur” (the wind which carries me off, this way and that, like a
wrestler). Moreover, the association of “Pareil” with “vent mauvais”
makes sense on the level of the meta-poem in an important way. For
in the modern age, when the singer is no longer immediately pres-
ent to an audience of real listeners, the poem’s speaking ego, the moi,
depends for his very existence on the printed page. At least in relation
to me, the reader, that page gives birth to him. But on the other hand,
the printed page, as a dead page, also constantly undermines or contra-
dicts his existence, at least his existence in the quality of singer which
his poem’s title claims for him. Thus it is precisely the printed page
that throws him back and forth, this way and that, between existence
and nonentity—just as the ill wind of mortality stretches us constantly
between the extremes of monotony and sudden anguish.
The result of these considerations, if their validity is admitted, is
something close to a poetic miracle. The actual page on the desk before
me, in its uncompromised materiality, has now become an operative
symbol in the linguistic-imaginative texture of the poem. An actual
palpable bridge has been created between the mental world and the
material world. But this miraculous situation obtains only to the extent
that we recognize that the poem’s speaking ego is constituted by noth-
ing but contradiction, that he achieves existence only at the price of his
own nonexistence. Which means: The poem is miraculous only to the
extent that we recognize in it an irrecoverable failure of communica-
tion. The ego-bridge, upon which the poem’s communicativeness (if
it had any) would have to depend, either simply fails to exist, or, if it
does exist, subjects my own personal ego (by way of my participation
in the same I-compound) to the same destructive self-contradiction
that characterizes the poem’s ego, and so thwarts communication by
undoing the possibility of a communicating agent. And this either/or,
in its turn, echoes the existential “Deçà, delà” that constantly under-
mines the integrity of the speaking anyway.
The poem’s feeling or mood, if there is such a thing, is thus in real-
ity negative to a degree that would be difficult to match anywhere
in European poetry. We can go further in this direction. The poem’s
speaker, in seeking to communicate his experience of mortality, paral-
lels himself to the dead leaf. And precisely our understanding that that
parallel need not hold, that the “dead leaf” can be paralleled instead
with the ill wind, brings us to a recognition of how that ego is after
all shackled to the “dead page,” which produces both his existence
and his nonexistence. Which is as much as to say that that ego has
after all managed to escape (“je m’en vais”) from the communicative
process, although only as part of yet another “Deçà, delà” that keeps
him tantalizingly out of our reach. Even the page before me on the
desk, precisely because of its miraculous preter-material reach, does
not escape that oscillation.
Or let us reconsider the condition of being “inside” the poem,
a condition that involves my participation in an I-compound, my
assumption that the “I” in the poem expresses directly not only the
speaker’s subjectivity, but mine as well. Clearly there can be no objec-
tive warrant for this assumption. It is a mere assumption. The pos-
ture adopted by a reader of poetry is mere convention, but we might
be tempted to say that the act of adopting that posture is still an
act of solidarity, of communication with others. It is part of how we
construct a truly human world. (This is how Kant views the act of
aesthetic judgment.) Presupposed by this view, however—in Kant’s
case, explicitly—is at least a structural, if not a substantive unifor-
mity in the human ego, the idea that all of us mean pretty much the
same thing when we say “I.” And this presupposition is exposed to
a relentlessly corrosive doubt in Verlaine’s poem—especially if we
worry about the line “Et je m’en vais.” It follows that we must now
renounce the possibility of regarding that basic poetic assumption
as the same assumption, or even a similar assumption, in different
individuals. The assumption remains in force—for me certainly, and
perhaps also for you, but who knows in what form?—while the
poem’s communicative efficacy is nevertheless denied utterly. Or to
put it more dramatically: we are invited to participate in the poem (by
co-meditating), only to discover, after we accept the invitation, that
we have arrived, one by one, at a condition of strict nonparticipation,
absolute aloneness, trapped, one at a time, in the implacable (perhaps
“monotonous”) non-repeatability of the ego.
One Last Worry: The Problem of

Negativity
The poem, once I am “inside” it, cannot finish. But this quality
depends entirely on how I happen to read, on the assumptions I make,
and cannot be understood to follow necessarily from the structure or
content of any particular text—even if that text, like the “Chanson
d’automne,” has a prominent meta-poetic component in which the

needful assumption appears to figure centrally. It follows now, how-
ever, that reading poetry—not poetry itself, but the reading of it—is in
general a dangerous business. For once I have begun reading a poem in
the manner that Verlaine’s use of the symbolist move suggests, by way
of the assumption that I now participate in a doubled subjectivity at
the poem’s center; once I have thus committed myself to the “inside”
of the poem: the poem can never be closed up and dispensed with, but
must always remain in the background of my thinking, as unfinished
business, as a kind of constant irritant or stimulus. Even after I have
stopped reading and returned to the “outside,” the poem must remain
an unclosed gap in my experience of the world—or to use Verlaine’s
metaphor, it remains as an open wound.
At least this consequence holds if we agree, as I have argued, that
the continued openness of the poem—despite its arising from an “ego-
bridge,” an intimate combination of my own ego and another—is not
somehow an intimation of deep intersubjective communication, not a
constant background awareness, in my life, of the possibility of per-
fected human communication, of an ultimately universal humanity.
Verlaine’s poem, I have argued, demonstrates the untenability of such
optimistic reasoning. Certainly in the case of the “Chanson d’automne,”
the unending poem remains in the background of my thinking not
as a comforting assurance of universal humanity, but as exactly the
opposite, as the constant nagging worry—more than just speculation
or suspicion, but not quite knowledge—that there is no such thing as
universal humanity or true intersubjective communication, that my
existence is in the end nothing but my own “monotonous” personal
exposure to mortality.
Thus several meta-poetic issues are opened. Does the negative con-
sequence I have sketched apply only to specific poems, like the one
before us? And given the basic defect of poetry—that poetry, in the
age of the printed book, always invokes a quasi-musical immediacy
and communicativeness that it can never actually deliver—what task
must the poet set himself or herself? To struggle against that defect,
to seek to repair or “transcend” it? Or to accept and develop it, as the
symbol of an existential defect that, for all its presumed universality,
arises in only one human life at a time and is therefore practically
impossible to lay hold of in structured thought or discourse?
A poet who chooses the first path can be confident that readers
and critics of the poem will always be in a position to develop and
magnify and propagate its meaning. For the more one talks about
universal humanity and true human communication, the more one’s
talking appears to instantiate—and so, by a corrupt Hegelian magic,

to demonstrate—its own thought.
But the other path is infinitely arduous, blocked constantly by
the problem of negativity. How shall I insist on the impossibility
of communication without pretending to communicate my convic-
tion. Or as a logical positivist might put it: The absolute failure of
communication—as opposed to corrigible misunderstanding—may
for all we know be a fact in some manner; but it is not a fact that
it makes any sense to talk about. And talking about the negative,
accordingly, is exactly what Verlaine’s poem does not do. It achieves
its actual negativity only when I have stopped reading it and permit-
ted it to assume its necessary quality as a wound or a worry embed-
ded in the “outside” world, in the condition of not-reading.
Do these considerations imply that with the “Chanson d’automne,”
Verlaine has made a general decision with respect to the meta-poetic
issue of the poet’s task? For my own part, I cannot think of any other
poem of Verlaine’s about which I would be inclined to attempt the same
sort of negative argument as in the case of the “Chanson d’automne.”
And there are plenty of his poems that would obviously resist such an
argument: the poems of “Sagesse,” for example,” especially “Écoutez
la chanson bien douce,” or for that matter the introductory “Soleils
couchants” in the same series as the “Chanson d’automne.”
But on the other hand, does the “issue” of the poet’s task, as I have
described it, really involve a choice? Or does the “Chanson d’automne,”
as a poem about poetry, not perhaps demonstrate rather that in the
end there is no choice, that every poem, no matter how cheerful or
sentimental or confidently communicative, is in the end fundamentally
negative—precisely in its struggle against the basic defect of poetry,
and therefore in its inevitable exposure of the futility of that struggle?
“L’étude du beau,” says Baudelaire, “est un duel où l’artiste crie de
frayeur avant d’être vaincu.”9 (The study of the beautiful is a duel
where the artist cries in terror before being defeated.)
The Cubist Paradox

The key to understanding the “Chanson d’automne” is the scene in a
lighted room with a clock and a closed window. And the method by
which that scene is evoked or created is very similar to the procedure
of analytical cubism. Various elements of the scene, or various per-
spectives, are separated and distributed throughout the poem—not in
what we might consider their natural order, but according to where
there is room for them in the very tight rhyme scheme and meter and
syntax. The scene does not take shape gradually as the poem pro-
gresses. Indeed, the first element that is offered us, the “violins,” is not
imaginable as part of a scene until, at the very end, we are in a posi-
tion to deduce the idea of moving tree branches from the concepts of
“wind” and “dead leaf.” Time, in the sense of the poem’s quasi-audible
unfolding, thus has no effect on the scene and is not present in it. The
scene is simply there, all at once, as if newborn in the moment when
we recognize it in the midst of the poem’s otherwise confusing sugges-
tions. Despite the striking of a clock in it, it gives a strong impression
of instantaneity.
From the point of view of my actual time in reading and thinking,
that scene is not characterized by instantaneity. But in relation to what
we might call the poem’s virtual or structural performance-time (as
chanson), its linear unfolding from syllable to syllable, the idea of the
scene as a dimensionless instant clearly obtains—an instant marked
perhaps by a single stroke of the clock. Thus the scene—which in a
strong sense is the poem, as the organizing scaffold and multivalent
allegory of its meaning—is situated in an instant-like universe that is
strictly incommensurable with the linear, cumulative, time-like opera-
tion of language. And the poem as a whole (if the word “whole” now
even makes sense) is constituted by this unbridgeable rift.
A paradox that is exactly parallel, a paradox involving exactly the
same opposition of wholeness and fragmentation, characterizes ana-
lytical cubism. The subject of the painting—let us say, a “Man with a
Guitar” (Braque)—is an indispensable component of the work of art,
but has also been relegated to a logical or discursive form of existence
(since it exists only by being deduced) which is strictly incommensura-
ble with the flat materiality of the painting. And as in Verlaine’s poem,
the rift that results is constitutive for the whole work of art.
I mention the parallel with modern painting in order to counter the
possible perception of my final point as an outlandish one. For while
it is true that the constitutive rift or fault or wound cannot be read in
the poem’s text, it is equally true that the corresponding rift cannot be
seen in the painting. And therefore, in Verlaine as in Braque or Picasso,
since its existence cannot be denied, its location, as I have suggested,
must be “outside” the actual work, in the midst of the condition of
not-reading or not-seeing, as a discontinuity, a rift, in the whole fabric
of my existence.
Chapter Six
Stefan George and the Construction

of a Poetic Idiom

[Come into the park that is said to be dead and look: / the shimmer of
distant laughing shores, / the pure clouds’ unexpected blue / lights up
the ponds and the colorful paths. // There take the deep yellow, the soft
gray / of birches and of boxwood, the wind is warm, / the late roses
have not yet fully wilted, / select and kiss them, and braid the garland. //
Do not forget these last asters either, / the purple around the tendrils of
wild vines / and also what has remained of green life / be consoled for it
gently in the autumnal vision.]
[THE WORD: Wonders from afar or dream / I brought to my
country’s edge // and waited until the gray Fate / found its name in her
well—// then I could grasp it close and strong / now it blossomed and
shone throughout the border land . . . // Once I arrived from a good voy-
age / with a gem rich and delicate // she searched long and announced
to me: / “Nothing is sleeping here in the deep reaches” // whereupon it
slipped out of my hand / and my country never received the treasure . . . //
Thus I learned sadly to renounce: / No thing may be where the word is
lacking.]1
The first of these two texts is probably one of the best-known poems
among educated speakers of German. I do not say: one of the best-
known poems in the German language. Because I am going to argue
that that poem, Stefan George’s “Komm in den totgesagten park,” is in
a strong sense not written in the German language.
Gateway
It is, first of all, a gateway poem. The speaker and his companion (if
there really is one) are standing at the entrance to a “park,” ready to
go in. We too, I suggest, are standing at a gate, which is represented
in part by the word totgesagt. We have a choice. We can dismiss that
word, by reading into it only the easiest of its possible meanings: said
or thought to be dead, declared dead. Or we can open it up and take a
good look at it. “Schau,” we are told. “Look.”
Does totgesagt really mean only totgeglaubt (believed to be dead)
or perhaps für tot erklärt (“declared dead,” which would suggest
totgesprochen, parallel to freigesprochen)? It seems to me that there
is at least one further meaning here alongside the others: that totge-
sagt also suggests totgeredet, or zu Tode geredet, meaning “talked to
death.” This meaning is supported by a very interesting pattern in
the poem. The first word of the last line of each stanza is a more or
less outrageous play on two different verbs or on two widely differ-
ing meanings of the same verb. The case in the last stanza is clearest,
Stefan George and the Construction of a Poetic Idiom 129
where the imperative “Verwinde,” by association with the verb flech-

ten (to braid) in the previous stanza, and with the suggested verb
ranken (to wind, as vines), obviously evokes the idea of “entwin-
ing” or “interlacing” the asters and the greenery into some sort of
woven structure. But in common usage, the verb verwinden has only
one meaning: “to get over,” to finish grieving for something. I will
come back later to the way in which these two aspects of the word
“Verwinde” are related. And I will also come back to the beginning
of the last line of the first stanza, where the verb “Erhellt” contains
a play on the third singular present indicative, erhält, of the verb
erhalten.
But first let us consider the apparent imperative “Erlese,” which
opens the last line of the second stanza. The implied verb erlesen is
almost never used, either nowadays or in George’s time, as a finite
verb. But its past participle, the adjective erlesen (choice, of high qual-
ity), occurs often in normal German. And from this readers can easily
infer the sense in which the finite verb is being used here: to select care-
fully, according to high standards. But there is still a problem, because
“Erlese” is not the correct imperative form of that implied verb, which
would be erlies. The word “Erlese” therefore operates as a kind of
signpost for readers. It is an incorrect form of a practically nonexistent
verb, and yet we understand it perfectly well. We can understand this
poem, it tells us; but we can do so only by putting aside our knowledge
of common German. And even this is only a first step. I will argue that
we can read the poem adequately only by shedding our whole normal
idea of “understanding” a piece of language.
But the word “Erlese” is also the opening word of a stanza’s last
line, and fits the pattern of word plays. The parallel with such verbs
as erstechen, erschießen, erschlagen suggests the possibility of giving
erlesen the meaning: to read to death. Which brings us back to the verb
totsagen and supports the meaning I have suggested: to talk to death.
And this meaning of “Erlese”—like its incongruous form—has impli-
cations for how we read. Reading the poem, we infer, is always a kind
of killing (erlesen), always a leaving-behind (verwinden) of the poem.
But the imperative “Erlese” tells us that we must read nevertheless.
Where does this leave us, what is our exact relation to this text?
If we imagine a comma after “Erlese,” we can understand the whole
line to mean: “Erlese sie [die Rosen] und küsse sie und flicht den
Kranz” (select the roses and kiss them and braid the garland). How
does the meaning “to read to death” fit into this line? It is a peculiarity
of the German language that in order to pronounce the verb küssen,
one has to purse one’s lips as if one were actually kissing something.
And if we reflect for a moment, it must occur to us that in the process
of speaking any words at all, for instance “Die späten rosen,” we in
a sense touch those words with our lips and thus kiss them. If we are
willing to think of words as something like opaque physical objects—
rather than abstract, transparent semiotic operators—it follows that
we kiss every word we speak. Whenever we speak a word, we remove
it from the lifeless inventory of language in the sense of langue, and
transform it into a parole. We bring it to life with a kiss and breathe
it forth, as a living physical thing, into the world. And in doing so, we
also expose it to the unavoidable fate of all living physical things in the
world. In effect we read it to death.
Opposed Views of Language

The idea of talking or reading things to death, or kissing words to
death, is not as far from the philosophical mainstream as one might
think. Umberto Eco explains perhaps more clearly than anyone else
the manner in which a thing, once you refer to it in language, “is no
longer a mere physical object . . . [but] has already been transformed
into a semiotic entity.”2 For all anyone knows, that thing may still
exist somewhere in a strictly extra-semiotic or extra-linguistic form.
But it no longer exists in such a form for you—if it ever did. You have
spoken to death the “actual,” extra-linguistic thing, whatever that may
have been. You have replaced it by its name. You live in a world that
is constantly contaminated by speaking, including yours. You have in
a strong sense forgotten how to carry out the simple action of looking
at real, unverbalized objects in reality; you have forgotten how to obey
the simple command: “Look.”
This view, the idea that language possesses a power or dominion
relative to everything that one can think of as existing in the world, is
essentially Heidegger’s view, although he himself expresses it in much
more positive terms. He says, for instance:
Das Sein von jeglichem, was ist, wohnt im Wort. Daher gilt der Satz: Die
Sprache ist das Haus des Seins. . . . Der Dichter hat erfahren, daß erst das
Wort ein Ding als das Ding, das es ist, erscheinen und also anwesen läßt.
Das Wort sagt sich dem Dichter als das zu, was ein Ding in dessen Sein
hält und erhält.3
[The being of anything that is resides in the word. Therefore this
statement holds true: Language is the house of Being. . . . the poet has
experienced that only the word makes a thing appear as the thing it
is, and thus lets it be present. The word avows itself to the poet as that
which holds and sustains a thing in its being.]4
The “poet” Heidegger is talking about, in these passages from

Unterwegs zur Sprache, happens to be Stefan George. In particular, he
is attempting to paraphrase the last lines of George’s late poem, “Das
Wort”: “So lernt ich traurig den verzicht: / Kein ding sei wo das wort
gebricht” (The Word: Thus I sadly learned to renounce: / No thing
may be where the word is lacking). If we understand how completely
wrong Heidegger’s reading of these lines is, it will help us to situate
George’s view of language.
Heidegger does not understand either humor or irony. It does not
occur to him to ask: How can the “kleinod reich und zart” (rich and
delicate gem), which certainly exists in stanza four when the speaker
has it with him, now suddenly fail to exist or somehow liquefy in
stanza six, merely because gray fate cannot find a name for it “in her
well”—which presumably means, in the German language? Obviously
a joke is being made here, at the speaker’s expense, especially in view
of the verb “sei” in the last line. For that line must mean either: “It
is said that there is no thing where there is no word for it” (implied
indirect discourse), or: “It is decreed that there shall be no thing if
there is no word for it” (implied imperative). The point is that the
poem’s speaker accedes timidly to what people say or to what has
been decreed; he accedes to the idea of totsagen (speaking to death),
rather than maintain firmly that the thing (which he after all holds in
his hand) does nevertheless exist.
And the context of this little dramatization should be clear to any-
one who has looked at the whole of George’s poetic activity. The poem
is about translation. Heidegger assumes that the title “Das Wort” refers
only to the name for some exotic object, a name that cannot be found
“in the deep reaches.” (He is easily seduced by the word tief.) I con-
tend, on the contrary, that that delicate “gem” which the speaker has
brought back from abroad is a word (the “word” of the title) which
the speaker has found in a foreign language, a foreign word for which
there happens to be no native equivalent. The speaker of the poem
simply gives up when he is told that there is no “name” in his language
for the foreign concept he has brought home. He makes the mistake
of regarding words in general as names, as characterized by semiotic
transparency relative to “things” in the world.
My main point in the present chapter is that this doctrine of semiotic
transparency is not by any means how George views language, at least
not the language of poetry. If it were, he would never have been able to
make the translations that constitute close to half his published work.
He would have been stymied by every foreign word that did not have a
direct German equivalent. I contend therefore that words, for George,
are not strict semiotic entities and do not possess any Heideggerian
power or dominion among existing things. Words, rather, are simply
things—things with certain special characteristics, but not different in
kind from other things. Their being is as much physical as it is men-
tal or semiotic. They are material things that exist truly only when
we kiss them into life—and into death. When they happen to “name”
things—which not all words do, not even all nouns—then there is a
special relation between the name and the thing. But it is not a rela-
tion of power or dominance. The word and the thing—each as mortal
or transient as the other—have simply found their way to each other
in a temporary moment of illumination on the way to death. Hence
the imperative “schau.” Look. We are asked to open our eyes and see
in nature not the death of reality at the hands of language, not totsa-
gen, but rather a single primordial reality, embracing both things and
words, in which we ourselves, as the realities we after all are, con-
stantly participate by speaking.
From this perspective we can understand what George hoped to
accomplish with all his translating. For if there is no strict category dif-
ference between words and things, then it follows that the very idea of
one particular language is misleading. No single language—say, German
or French or ancient Greek—can be said to constitute a discrete system
of meaning. But rather all languages, since they are constantly intermin-
gled with all the other existing things in the world, are also constantly
intermingled with one another. The network of relations that connects
words and things—a network that includes, but is not restricted to, the
relation of “naming”—must constantly violate the supposed boundaries
between languages. At least these statements are valid for the languages
of poetry. And the business of poetic translation for George (which
he calls Umdichten [recomposition] in the case of Shakespeare and
Baudelaire) is to demonstrate by example the true interpenetrated con-
dition of poetic languages—not to find “names” in German for experi-
ences or feelings that others had named in English or French.
The Question of Meaning

This point brings us back to the poem we started with. Let us ask
honestly: What can possibly be meant by the lines, “Dort nimm das
tiefe gelb das weiche grau / Von birken und von buchs”? “Take the
deep yellow, the soft gray of birches and of boxwood.” Are the colors
yellow and gray meant to be understood as the colors of birch and
boxwood? Then why not birke, singular, to reflect the parallel with
singular “buchs”? And although it happens that the leaves of the com-
mon European white birch turn a rich deep yellow in autumn, where
in the imagined scene shall we find a “soft” gray? The bark of that
birch is a brilliant gray, almost white. And what does any of this have
to do with the boxwood, which is an evergreen? Perhaps we are meant
to think of the wood of the box-tree (hence the singular?) which is
used in some musical instruments and ranges in color from grayish
white to yellow. But how could we possibly think of the finished wood
when considering the trees in an outdoor scene? The possibilities are
endless, and some of them are positively bizarre. If, as an experiment,
we were to take the line-ending after “grau” as a strong punctuation,
then the sentence would be divided in two, the second part being,
“[Dort nimm] von birken und von buchs” (Take there of birches and
of boxwood). And would we then not be tempted to read the German
von as parallel to the de by which French forms its version of the parti-
tive genitive in Latin, meaning “some”? The line would read, in effect:
Prends des bouleaux, “take some birches”; prends du buis, “take some
boxwood.”
Is this farfetched? I respond: “farfetched” with respect to what?
And the answer can only be: with respect to any reasonable meaning
of the words in context. But my whole point is that “meaning,” as we
normally understand this concept, is not, in George’s view, the prin-
cipal function of poetic language. Meaning is one of the things that
words do, but only one, only one of the associative tendrils by which
they reach out and connect with other words, other languages, and
other types of existing thing, tendrils by which they reach out and con-
nect and interweave and, in the hands of a competent artist, eventually
form a kind of wreath or garland, a “kranz.” And the more farfetched
the connections are, the larger and better and more comprehensive
will be the finished product. The words, “Dort nimm das tiefe gelb das
weiche grau / Von birken und von buchs,” are not restricted to convey-
ing a specific imperative or visualizing a specific scene. They open a
large complex of interconnections that includes at least: the German
language, the French language, the Latin partitive, observations in
elementary botany, and examples of fine inlaid woodworking. Anyone
who claims to know what these lines “mean” is talking nonsense.
Am I implying that all of George’s poems are constructed like the
first poem of Das Jahr der Seele, that one must approach them all
exactly as I have approached this one? The answer is no. “Komm in den
totgesagten park” is a unique poem in George’s work. It is a gateway
poem, a gateway into its volume and indeed a gateway into the whole
of George’s subsequent writing. And as a gateway, it is a programmatic
poem, meant to show us as clearly as possible the attitude toward lan-
guage that we must adopt in order to deal successfully with the poems
that follow it. It is therefore focused very strongly upon its own lan-
guage, far more strongly than could reasonably be required of poetry in
general. The same basic sense of language, we are assured, will operate
in all the other poems we read; but it will be nowhere near as close to
the surface, nowhere near as emphatically insisted upon, as here.
Another objection that might be raised at this point is a bit more
difficult. Cannot everything I have said still be reduced to questions
of meaning? The poem as I have presented it is full of wild ambigui-
ties, but still ambiguities, which are types of meaning. There are some
obvious ways of answering this objection. It is true, for instance, that
the idea of kissing words as we speak them is a meaning of the poem.
But when we actually do kiss them, as the imperative urges us to,
the words themselves, in that action, are manipulated as something
quite other than bearers of meaning—even though they have not by
any means lost contact with the “roses” they name. And while tot-
sagen can possibly be understood to refer to the attribution of an
abstract and immutable meaning to words, a meaning that demate-
rializes and so kills the thing; erlesen, strictly speaking, in the sense
of “read to death,” exposes not only the thing but also the word to
death, thus fails to enforce the category distinction (between word
and thing) by which meaning first arises. But more is needed before
we can orient ourselves adequately with respect to these newly
opaque words—these words, incidentally, which do not possess an
identity independent of the specially designed typeface in which they
are meant to be printed.
Tenses and Time

Let us think about verb tenses in the poem. Line 7 begins with the
words, “Die späten rosen welkten noch nicht . . . ” If the line had
stopped there, its meaning would be entirely unambiguous: the late
roses had not yet begun to wilt. But then the word “ganz” is added,
and the whole meaning changes. (We will discuss a second case in a
moment, where a line’s last word changes everything.) Now the line
must apparently mean: the late roses have (or had) not yet completed
the process of wilting. The trouble with this reading, however, is that
the tense of the verb seems incorrect. We are reading not the actual line
in the poem, but a line that we ourselves have composed: Die späten
rosen sind (or waren) noch nicht ganz gewelkt. George is in general
not fond of periphrastic verb forms, and would have been happier if
German had formed its perfect and pluperfect by inflection alone—
like ancient Greek. But does this justify using the simple past as if it
were a perfect or a pluperfect, especially since we cannot tell which of
the two it is supposed to be?
On one hand, line 7 has a reasonably clear meaning, which we
understand perfectly well: the roses are (or were) not yet completely
wilted. On the other hand, that meaning does not belong to the actual
words in the line. It could be maintained, in fact, that those words
cannot have any positive meaning at all, because the implications of
the preterite “welkten” are logically contradicted by the implications
of the adverb “ganz.” The line is thus made up of two components: a
meaning and a sequence of words. But the two are only loosely related
to one another; and we are left with the question: What are the words
doing there, if their presence is not fully accounted for, or even primar-
ily accounted for, by their function in producing and supporting the
meaning? The words, in effect, are simply standing there on the page,
without doing what is ordinarily expected of them, as if they were
heavy, recalcitrant material objects.
Perhaps there is a way to avoid this conclusion. One might say:
Of course, the words of line 7, taken strictly by themselves, do not
mean: The late roses have not yet finished wilting. But in their con-
text, they do mean exactly that. In a sense, this statement accurately
describes the situation we find ourselves in. But it is a dangerous form
of description. If “context”—by which we denote an assumed consen-
sus about what the text as a whole ought to mean—can be permitted
to overrule the recognized implications of verb tenses, then where do
we draw the line? How do we keep any text from meaning anything
at all that a consensus wants it to mean? And who decides on the
makeup of a qualified consensus by which “context” is determined?
And if these problems must be worried about whenever there is a
disputed or difficult question of meaning, perhaps it follows that the
very idea of meaning, as we ordinarily employ it, is corrupt. Which
brings us back to what I contend is George’s project in Das Jahr der
Seele: the establishment of a poetic idiom composed of opaque, essen-
tially material words, in which the function of meaning, while not
absent, is also not unduly privileged, not privileged to the point of
being corruptible.
The next line whose meaning is changed completely by its last word
is: “Vergiss auch diese lezten astern nicht” (do not forget these last
asters either). The situation here is especially interesting, because the
function of the “nicht” (not) turns out not to be primarily negation.
The clause “Vergiss auch diese lezten astern,” by itself, makes perfectly
good sense in view of the complex meaning of the imperative “Erlese,”
since reading to death is surely a form of forgetting; the truncated line
says: read these asters to death too. But the clause in this form, with-
out the “nicht,” places the action firmly in the present; we are told (or
someone is told) to forget “these” asters, to kill (erlesen) in our mind
something that is otherwise immediately present to us. But whenever
we are told not to forget, it is suggested thereby that the thing in ques-
tion is already slipping into the past. The word “nicht” thus functions
as a temporal marker, creating a shift from present toward past, which
is then reinforced in the other “auch” line, “Und auch was übrig blieb
von grünem leben” (and also what remained of green life). The pret-
erite “blieb” here is neatly parallel to the preterite “welkten,” except
that it is not necessarily incorrect. Geblieben war would perhaps be
preferable, but “blieb” is perfectly good if we are referring to the past.
In the other case, the strong present feeling in the clause “der wind
ist lau” (which I will come back to) perhaps forces us to understand
“welkten” as a present perfect, which does not make it any less incor-
rect. But with the word “nicht” in line 9, we have shifted from present
feeling to past feeling. It is as if the poem itself were slipping into the
past, as if, in reading it, we were reading it to death or forgetting it or
getting over it (verwinden).
Time and the Text’s Inside

This brings me to my last major general point about the poem. It is
conceived as an interlude, a temporary concatenation of words and
meanings that is simply no longer there when we (whoever we may
be) are finished with it. It does not possess (it refuses to possess) the
permanent or monumental quality that verbal constructions lay claim
to when we think of them as bearers of a nonmaterial, therefore imper-
ishable meaning. And a similar point applies to George’s whole idea of
a poetic idiom. The highly Latinate Tuscan that Dante employs in the
Commedia is meant to unify the Italian language as a whole. Middle
High German is devised over time as a medium in which poems might
be equally intelligible in different dialect regions. I think Blake, in the
prophetic books, is attempting to carry out a revision of the whole
English language by eradicating its mechanisms of generalization. But
George’s poetic language has no such universalizing tendency. It is there

only on occasion, only when we need it, only as a characteristic of cer-
tain momentary radical interruptions in the humdrum life of standard
German.
Hence his marked insistence on formal closure. Each poem is
a momentary eruption of the poetic idiom, an eruption which then
completes itself and disappears, like a bubble. (We think of the incon-
gruous instantaneous quality of the scene in Verlaine’s “Chanson
d’automne,” which disrupts anything like a flow of meaning in the
poem.) Or in the imagery of the text we have been discussing, each
poem is a kind of braided “kranz” or circular garland which becomes
what it is by marking itself off as a closed area strictly separate from
the normal operation of the German language. Hence also the two
sides of the imperative “Verwinde.” If the sense were actually, “Braid
or weave the asters and greenery into the garland we are making,”
then the line would have to finish with an accusative, ins herbstliche
gesicht (into the autumnal vision) or something of the kind. Therefore
the establishment of the dative, in the word “im,” has an effect similar
to that of the word “nicht” in line 9. It marks a passing of time inside
the poem’s structure. The garland, the presumed accusative object that
never arrives, has disappeared because it is finished, and the impera-
tive “Verwinde” can now mean only: Get over it, do not mourn for it.
But how shall we read the phrase “im herbstlichen gesicht”? I am
going to suggest that the phantom phrase, the phrase (with accusative)
that never happens, ins herbstliche gesicht, is destroyed by a temporal
anomaly in its own bosom. Once the operation of the poem is suf-
ficiently complete to be thought of as visible, as a “gesicht,” as a face
or vision, it is ipso facto too late to weave anything more into it. The
interlude is over and has been superseded by a closed, visible struc-
ture. Therefore the phantom phrase is transformed in the very moment
of its conception; accusative becomes dative, just as one meaning of
“Verwinde” now supplants the other. Again, time happens inside the
poem. The words and their meanings are not exempt from it; they
undergo change—and in the case of the last line’s phantom accusative
phrase, even destruction. Thus the last line arrives at a point that could
not have been anticipated at its beginning, at the suggestion that “im
herbstlichen gesicht,” in the presence of the completed, quasi-visible,
meaning-like residue of what had once been a poem, we do our best to
refrain from grieving for what is now lost.
In order for this argument to work, it must be true that an inside and
an outside can be distinguished with respect to the poem we are look-
ing at, and with respect to poetry in general. From outside the poem,
as I look at the words on the page and think about their meaning,
those words and meanings are not subject to time—at least not within
the scope of my experience. I may, in my time, learn more about the
poem; my views may develop. But neither the words before me nor
their meanings (however multiple and complex) actually undergo
change. Only on the inside (wherever that may be), where the words
are not different in kind from the mortal, material things they name,
are words and meanings subject to time, capable of real change.
Nor is this idea of an outside and an inside of poetry (for George as
for Verlaine) at all unprecedented. We think, for instance, of Goethe’s
poem “Gedichte sind gemalte Fensterscheiben,” which exploits meta-
phorically the difference between stained glass seen from outside and
from inside the church. But George works out the distinction in (I
think) unprecedented detail. Especially important is the understanding
that the condition inside, the operation of the poetic idiom, is never
more than temporary, always on the point of ending, always a mere
interlude. In at least a good deal of European poetry, the poem’s for-
mal closure, the finished structure of rhyme and meter, offers itself
as a symbol of the poem’s supposed permanence. In George, on the
contrary, that finished structure is a sign, precisely, that the poem is
finished, that at least for the time being, it is over and done with, hav-
ing run its strictly limited course. The poem on the printed page has
the opacity of a tombstone; it blocks our access to what had once been
the poem’s living inside. But this discouraging opacity also serves as a
symbol for the more powerful opacity that those very same words will
possess as elements of a poetic idiom, whenever the uniformly mate-
rial and mortal inside is somehow once again kissed into life. The one
quality that the poem’s words will never possess, on either the inside
or the outside, is semiotic transparency with respect to a meaning.
The Inside-Out Structure of the Poem

Is there anything specific in the poem that actually supports this specu-
lation? Consider the clause, “der wind ist lau” (the wind is warm). It
has nothing whatever to do with the poem’s main action, the collecting
of plants and colors and plant-words and color-words, all meant to be
woven into a garland which, once finished, assumes the quality of a
vision or “gesicht.” And yet it is itself planted right in the middle of that
action. What is it doing there? Two things catch our attention. It con-
tains the only occurrence in the poem of the verb sein (to be)—which
is specifically avoided in the two uses of a preterite for a perfect. And
it occurs at the poem’s high point, the moment just before the verbs,
starting with “welkten,” begin to drift toward a past meaning and so

signal the interlude’s approaching end. To borrow a metaphor from
Freud, we might call that clause the poem’s navel, the single fleeting
point at which the poetic inside is fully enough established to permit
the use of the verb “ist.” (The only other present indicative in the poem
is the ambiguous “Erhellt,” which we will come to in a moment.)
But what does that clause mean? It means nothing at all, or at least
nothing except what it would mean if it were spoken to you in a real
outdoors situation by a companion with whom you could either agree
or disagree depending on the condition of your nerve endings. It is
entirely and emphatically devoid of the type of meaning one ordinar-
ily expects from poetry—or from any sort of text—and stands thus as
a sign of the absence of exactly that sort of meaning in the poem as
viewed from the inside. On the printed page, viewed from the outside,
those four words are a cryptic message whose content (we cannot call
it a “meaning”) is nothing but the immeasurable distance from which
we receive it, the strict category difference between the immediate,
material idiom in which it is spoken and the semiotic idiom in which
we read it. It comes to us, so to speak, from another world.
For obvious reasons, we cannot pin that other world down for
inspection, the world inside the poem. But we do know some char-
acteristics of its idiom; and we know something about the process by
which we may accept that idiom’s unappealable interlude character
and return from the inside to the outside, the process named Erlesen,
or reading to death. The main question that remains, therefore, is:
How do I proceed in the opposite direction, from the outside to the
inside? How do I enter the poem’s inside? Which brings us finally to
the poem’s first stanza, the gateway stanza to the gateway poem.
We began with the word totgesagt. Let us now look at the word
“park,” which has two clearly distinct meanings in German, depending
on whether one has in mind a city park or a castle park, a Stadtpark or
a Schloßpark. A park, that is, is either an artificially preserved piece of
nature inside a large area (a city) covered with civilization in the form
of architecture; or else it is an artificially preserved piece of nature
that surrounds a single piece of architecture (a castle). And in all of
Das Jahr der Seele, there is no clear way to decide between the pos-
sible meanings of “park” in its first line. The word thus provides an
instance of what I will call the inside-out structure of meaning in this
first stanza, the evocation of images characterized by a center and a
circumference that are interchangeable. Does nature surround civiliza-
tion or does civilization surround nature? Both possibilities inhabit the
word “park.”
That this doubling is in fact a structuring principle in the poem

becomes clear if we look at the following lines. “Der schimmer ferner
lächelnder gestade” (the shimmer of distant laughing shores): if we
consider this line not in context but in isolation, we receive the impres-
sion of a large expanse of water, over which we can barely make out,
in the shimmering haze, distant beckoning shores. The scene is mainly
water, with a few glimpses of land. And in line 4, that scene is turned
inside out. Now the scene is mainly land—land we can walk on, with
“paths”—in which occasional small bodies of water, the ponds or
“weiher,” can be seen.
Of course, the “context” smoothes out this apparent contradiction.
If line 3, “Der reinen wolken unverhofftes blau” (the pure clouds’ unex-
pected blue), is an appositive to line 2, then it becomes clear that the
“distant shores” are not real, but are merely a metaphor for the occa-
sional patches of (beckoning, cheerful) blue that appear in a cloudy
sky. But can we allow the “meaning” of the stanza to be determined
by this binary distinction between what is real and what is (merely) a
metaphor? Can we be satisfied with the conclusion that line 2 “turns
out” not to be a real description—a conclusion which follows inescap-
ably from our normal inclination to regard the sentence as transparent
with respect to a single coherent experience? And if we are not satis-
fied with that conclusion—if we insist, as I think we must, that the
scene suggested by line 2 in isolation is as much a part of the poem as
the scene in line 4—then does it not follow that we are reading against
our normal inclination to seek meaning behind sentences? Even line 3,
if we interrogate it closely, is an instance of the inside-out opposi-
tion which it apparently reconciles. Does that line suggest small blue
patches in a mainly cloudy sky? How could such clouds be considered
“pure”? Or does it suggest bright, white, sharply outlined clouds that
set off by contrast the blue of the expanse in which they float? In this
case, how could the blue be “unexpected”? The unanswered questions
here prevent us from deciding in favor of one possibility over the other,
and so create the inside-out structure that combines both.
Moreover, the inside-out relation, starting with the word “park,” is
definitely a structure. The apparently opposed elements in it depend
on each other and support each other. The “blue” in line 3 is the blue
of the clouds, not of the sky, because only the contrast with the clouds
makes it the “unexpected” blue that it is; and surely purity is an attri-
bute donated by the small clear patches of blue to the clouds that
occasionally reveal them. Or we think of the word “weiher” in line 4,
which means “ponds” of water but also suggests the verb weihen, “to
consecrate.” Those little ponds are the residue or memory-fragments
of the expanse of water in line 2. In this capacity they integrate the

apparently opposed scene in line 4 into the larger structure; and this
integrating move is understood as a consecration. The justification
of this idea is perhaps not yet clear; but at least we no longer have
any difficulty with the multiple meanings of the verb “Erhellt.” Each
element of the inside-out structure, by contrast or opposition, illumi-
nates and interprets the other (erhellen), and so ultimately preserves
the other (erhalten) by sustaining in existence the structure on which
it depends. Except perhaps that the parallel with erlesen also suggests
understanding erhalten as “hold to death,” hence that part of what is
preserved in the inside-out structure is change or mortality, as opposed
to the pretended permanence of “meaning.”
This whole inside-out structure, finally, is established in the gate-
way stanza of George’s gateway poem because it is an allegory of the
relation between language and world. Is the world confined within
a Heideggerian “house” of language, or is language only one inhab-
itant, among others, of the world? Is the actual palpable reality of
things in truth only a shimmering mirage in the distance (like the
Kantian thing-in-itself) separated from us by exactly the language we
employ to lay hold of it with names? Or are languages (plural!) more
like small reflecting pools in the larger landscape of our thoroughly
material existence? In fact, as the allegory suggests, these two views
of language depend on one another. Our poetic landscape, the space
inside the poem, is consecrated by the watery residue or memory of
exactly the type of meaning that is excluded from it. For if poetic
language were not an exceptional case, a kind of miracle, it would
not have the radically mortal, hence temporary character that pre-
vents the pretense of nonmaterial meaning by which language other-
wise talks its world into submission. And ordinary language, in turn,
which operates on the assumption of semiotic transparency, needs
the possibility of poetic language as a constant challenge, a kind of
anti-church, a repeated intimation of mortality, without which it
would degenerate into mere architecture, unable to muster sufficient
originality and energy to carry on precisely its work of universal
dominion.
The Way In
But the most important thing about the inside-out structure is that
it shows us how we might actually find our way into the idiom of
poetry. (For Verlaine, the way into the inside of the poem involves
specific reading assumptions. But it is hard to read out of his text

exactly how, with what sort of commitment or energy, those assump-
tions must be made.) The idea of starting out in our accustomed world
with our accustomed semiotic idiom, and then making the transition
to a strictly material idiom, seems an obvious impossibility. The very
concept of a word includes the concept of a meaning, no matter how
difficult or obscure. In order to “find our way” (as I have put it) into
the idiom of poetry, must we therefore dispense with the very concept
of words? And even supposing we could do such a thing, how could
we still think of the result as an “idiom”?
This is where the inside-out structure comes in. When we under-
stand a poem, or any piece of language, it seems to us ordinarily that
we proceed from the understanding of relatively small parts, usually
words, to that of larger parts, until our various partial interpretations
come together in a single cohesive statement or experience which we
now take to be the meaning of the whole—especially since it had prob-
ably already been influencing our partial interpretations as a precon-
ceived notion, perhaps inferred from “context.” And at this point we
stop. Why should we go further?
But suppose we go further anyway. Suppose we start asking about
far-fetched puns and travestied foreign languages. Suppose we decide
to include in our partial interpretations not only the meaning of a line,
but also the meaning of the same line without its last word. Suppose
we treat an obvious metaphor as if it were a scene in its own right. The
overall meaning we had arrived at quickly disintegrates, and soon even
the new partial meanings we insist on begin to lose the character of
meanings. How can a word in a text mean something if that meaning
does not operate in generating or supporting a meaning of the whole
text—or we might say, of its “context”? The words for a moment take
on a new quasi-material character; the extreme edge or outside of
interpretation has transformed itself for a moment into the center, the
inside, of a new alien, non-semiotic world.
Can we remain there? If so, then only long enough, as it were, to
pronounce (and kiss) the four monosyllables, “der wind ist lau.” For
it is our nature to make sense of our surroundings. In the case of the
poem we have been talking about, we have dismantled the autumn
day it evokes; but we have also arrived at the idea of a gateway poem
with respect to a poetic idiom. And how is this arrival not itself a new
“gesicht,” a vision, thus a form of meaning after all? We have found
our way into the poetic idiom, and in accordance with what we already
knew to be its strict interlude character, we have found our way out
again in almost the same motion. (This is George’s understanding of
the basic defectiveness of poetry: the poem is composed of two incom-

mensurable aspects, an outside and an inside, and the inside is avail-
able to us only in the movement of losing or leaving it.)
But again, even if we agree that that fugitive moment of illumina-
tion exists, with what justification might we call it an “idiom”? I will
suggest a brief answer to this question, without going too far into its
implications. The proper idiom of poetry, for George—and specifically
the idiom of the poem “Komm in den totgesagten park,” as seen from
the inside—is not a new language but a primordial form of language,
language as it must have been at its origin, before its development (or
degeneration, if you prefer) into a semiotic system. The theory of lan-
guage thus presupposed is comparable to that of Hamann or Herder,
or that of Shelley in “A Defence of Poetry,” in that it places poetry at
the very beginning, as the activity that first organizes the assemblage
of meanings to which words are then eventually regarded as being
transparent.
Perhaps a more interesting comparison is that with Walter Benjamin’s
“On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” For Benjamin is
in a position to recognize the tendency of poetry-centered theories of
language toward something like Heidegger’s doctrine of the dominion
of language with respect to all things that are. And he opposes this
tendency at the very outset of his argument, where he insists on “Die
Unterscheidung zwischen dem geistigen Wesen und dem sprachlichen”
(The distinction between the mental entity and the linguistic entity):5
Die Ansicht, daß das geistige Wesen eines Dinges eben in seiner Sprache
besteht—diese Ansicht als Hypothesis verstanden, ist der große Abgrund,
dem alle Sprachtheorie zu verfallen droht, und über, gerade über ihm
sich schwebend zu erhalten ist ihre Aufgabe.
[The view that the mental essence of a thing consists precisely in its
language—this view, taken as a hypothesis, is the great abyss into which
all linguistic theory threatens to fall, and to survive suspended precisely
over this abyss is its task.]
By insisting upon the presence of a geistiges Wesen (mental or intellec-

tual essence) even in things, and upon its separation from language—at
least in our perspective—Benjamin creates a tension that drives his
thinking beyond all possibility of a Heideggerian resolution, beyond
even the idea of poetry, toward God and the word of revelation.
George in effect responds to exactly the same problem, but he does
so by moving in exactly the opposite direction: by recognizing not
an intellectual or mental nature in things, but rather a fundamental
material nature in language. The organizing task of language is orig-

inally carried out, by poetry, from within the very bosom of mate-
rial nature. And the understanding of this truth—the understanding,
indeed, that that organizing task is even now, and always, still in the
process of being carried out—is made available to us in poems. God
and revelation are not needed in this view. We need only open our
eyes to the scattered reflecting pools of poetic language by which our
world is consecrated even in its aboriginal and in truth still undiluted
materiality.
Part IV
The Political Dimension

Chapter Seven
Criticism as Wager: The Politics of

the Mörike-Debate and Its Object
In May 1990, a translation of the famous debate on Mörike’s “Auf eine

Lampe,” involving Emil Staiger, Martin Heidegger, and Leo Spitzer, was
published in PMLA. Herbert Lindenberger, the coordinator of that
“Special Topic” issue on “The Politics of Critical Language,” appar-
ently offers the debate as an example of how different critical idioms
clash in an historical and political arena. But he says nothing whatever
about actual political implications in the discourse he comments on;
and what we observe in the debate itself is not conflict at all, but collu-
sion under the mask of disagreement, a collusion that we see through
as soon as we recognize how bad an exegesis is proposed by all three
discussants. The questions Lindenberger asks—mainly about the dif-
ferent historical views of literary study that inform the debate—are
interesting; and he answers them accurately enough. But the question
that needs to be asked is: What is there in Mörike’s harmless looking
text that is dangerous enough to cause those three major critical minds
(despite their differences) to join in violently suppressing it?
Basic Exegesis
A number of extremely simple exegetic points are left entirely out of
account in the famous debate, points that no competent undergradu-
ate teacher (and not many alert undergraduate students) would fail to
raise in classroom discussion. The text reads:
Auf eine Lampe

Noch unverrückt, o schöne Lampe, schmückest du,
An leichten Ketten zierlich aufgehangen hier,
Die Decke des nun fast vergeßnen Lustgemachs.
Auf deiner weißen Marmorschale, deren Rand
Der Efeukranz von goldengrünem Erz umflicht,
Schlingt fröhlich eine Kinderschar den Ringelreihn.
Wie reizend alles! lachend, und ein sanfter Geist

Des Ernstes doch ergossen um die ganze Form—

Ein Kunstgebild der echten Art. Wer achtet sein?
Was aber schön ist, selig scheint es in ihm selbst.1
[ON A LAMP: Sill undisplaced, o beautiful lamp, you still grace, / on
light chains delicately hung here, / the ceiling of the now almost forgot-
ten entertainment room. / On your white marble bowl, whose rim /
the ivy wreath of golden-green bronze encircles, / weaves gaily a band
of children their ring-a-rosy. / How charming it all is! Laughing, yet a
soft spirit / of gravity flows over the whole form—/ An art object of the
genuine type. Who attends to it? / Yet what is beautiful seems blissful
(shines blissfully) within itself (in him).]2
1. The word “verrückt” in German can mean “displaced” or

“moved out of its proper place,” but more commonly means “crazy”
or “insane.” The form “unverrückt” would be unusual in the latter field
of meaning; but in poetry the suggestion “not yet insane” is inescap-
able. How this suggestion might fit into a reading of the whole poem
is not immediately clear; but the idea of “light chains” does provide
the beginning of a context. In German as in English, “chains” are a
common metaphor for bondage; and “light” chains suggest a relatively
easy bondage, hence the idea of sanity or reason (the condition of not
yet being insane) as a relatively tolerable sacrifice of freedom.
Even in the meaning “not yet displaced,” the idea “unverrückt”
causes trouble, given the curious idea that the hanging lamp adorns
the ceiling from which it is hung. What the lamp is meant to “grace”
or “adorn,” if anything, must surely be the whole décor of which it is
a part, that room devoted to recreational pursuits for which Mörike
uses an antiquated, baroque term, “Lustgemach.” One gets the impres-
sion of an antiquated, decaying situation, an erstwhile unity of deco-
ration now falling apart into fragments of itself—so that the lamp
now “adorns” only the ceiling. Thus we find ourselves in the vicinity
of Staiger’s reading of the poem as a vessel of nostalgia for a classi-
cally integrated aesthetic experience (“Dialogue,” 418–19). We are not
yet aesthetically insane; our basic sensibilities are still sound. But the
world in which those sensibilities make sense is crumbling around us.
The trouble with this reading is that it fails to account for an obvious
move of self-reflection in the text. By focusing on the lamp alone, by
presenting it as a self-contained thing of beauty, the text in fact carries
out exactly the movement of Verrücken, of taking the lamp out of its
surroundings, that it denies in its first two words.3
2. Consider next the little word “nun.” “Nun fast vergessen” does
not mean exactly “now almost forgotten,” which in German would
Criticism as Wager 149
be “jetzt”—or more idiomatically—“heute fast vergessen.” “Nun,”

by contrast with “jetzt” or “heute,” means “now” in a sense tending
toward “irreversibly, once and for all.” “Es ist nun so” means “that’s
the way it is, there is no more changing it.” Thus we arrive at a seman-
tic collision. “Nun ganz vergessen” would be normal and would mean,
“now—once and for all—completely forgotten.” But Mörike’s phrase,
as it stands, suggests that the lamp, once and for all, is in a condition
of “almost . . . ,” a condition that implies continuing change and is even
conceivably reversible, thus not “once and for all.”
This observation could be considered oversubtle if it were not
quickly reinforced by the phrase, “Der Efeukranz von goldengrünem
Erz” (the ivy wreath of golden-green bronze). In copper alloys, like
bronze (“Erz”), green is the color of corrosion, of verdigris or German
Grünspan. But green is also the natural color of the proverbially
evergreen (nonperishing, uncorroded) ivy that the bronze garland
represents (Calhoon 11). On the level of metaphor, corrosion, like
forgetting (“nun fast vergessen”), is an insidious process that we per-
ceive not as a process, but only by being made suddenly aware of its
results; it thus not only attacks actual material permanence, but also
undermines (proverbially, Matt. 6:19–20) any feeling of permanence
we might form. But in the case of Mörike’s lamp, the corrosive pro-
cess produces a strong threefold image of precisely permanence. The
remaining yellowish color (which the verdigris, to be sure, unmasks as
not “gold”) suggests mineral permanence in the vegetable form; the
ivy’s evergreen is evoked; and the agreement in green-ness between
the bronze garland and what it imitates suggests the permanence of
achieved representational adequacy.
This pattern of paradox, moreover, when we follow it out, suggests
strongly a Heideggerian reading of the poem—although not the read-
ing Heidegger himself offers in response to Staiger. For the combination
of unshakable permanence with dynamic emergence—the emergence
of intense awareness from (almost) forgetting, the emergence, from
a process of decay, of a work of art more complex and perfect and
permanent than it could ever have been earlier—is exactly the combi-
nation of qualities that Heidegger reads in the ancient Greek notion
of Being.4 Mörike’s idea of forgetting could in fact be paralleled with
Heidegger’s “Seinsvergessenheit,”5 which is not a forgetting of Being,
but a forgetting or concealment or absence that belongs to and con-
stantly confirms Being in its inevitable quality as emergence. Mörike’s
“nun fast vergessen” is a formula Heidegger could have made much
of: once and for all almost forgotten, hence permanently loaded with
a potential for emergence which, were it a strictly unrealized potential,
not also necessarily and permanently actual, would not in truth be

potential (have power) to begin with.
3. The trouble with this hypothetical reading of the poem is that it is
not a reading of the poem. It is perhaps not as vacuous as what Spitzer
calls the “precious pomp of words” (“Dialogue,” 429) in Heidegger’s
response to Staiger. But it lacks the quasi-narrative cogency we look
for in the reading of a particular text; it merely restates the supposed
metaphysical accomplishment of certain verbal patterns in an entirely
generalized space. And in addition, it runs afoul of the tendency of the
poem’s vocabulary to emphasize the superficial and the peripheral.
We hear of the “Rand” (rim) of a marble “Schale”—which can mean
anything bowl-shaped, but is also proverbially opposed to “Kern”
as shell to kernel—upon which children dance in a “ring,” a circum-
ference for which no center is named. And the word “reizend”—no
matter where we locate its exact meaning on a scale that includes
“charming,” “tempting,” “intriguing,” “arousing,” “irritating”—
always implies at least an abeyance of completion or satisfaction,
which makes it difficult to understand Mörike’s lamp as the focus of
any ultimate truth.
Or let us consider the phrase in which the word “reizend” occurs,
“Wie reizend alles!” “How charming [?] it all is,” which effects a sud-
den blurring of the poetic vision. The minutely observed detail of the
lines preceding is now summarized in the vague concept “alles”—
which could refer to the whole scene or event, or even merely to its
emotional ambiance, not specifically to the lamp at all. The words
“Wie reizend alles!” say nothing whatever about the lamp or art or
beauty or transience or Being. Their content is nothing but the emo-
tional state of the person speaking them. The word “How” (“Wie”)
is thrown at us in all its conventional colloquial meaninglessness, in
a manner, precisely, that avoids telling us exactly “how” the object is
charming, or “how charming” it is—by comparison, say, with other
experiences. For all their pretensions to aesthetic “feeling,” interpre-
tive “tact,” and philosophical depth, our three debaters manage to
blind themselves completely to this sharp stylistic break. “Wie reizend
alles!” These words are nothing but the outward symptom of an emo-
tional event in the speaker, an event we can have no direct knowledge
of, not even to the extent of knowing what has caused it.
It is true that the words that follow—“lachend, und ein sanfter
Geist / Des Ernstes doch ergossen um die ganze Form”—do to a degree
articulate the emotional event in question. And it is true that this artic-
ulation does correspond to an articulation in the object, between the
presumably “laughing” children depicted on the lamp’s bowl and the
bronze garland which is connected to the “spirit of seriousness” by

way of the idea of being “poured” (“ergossen”), which suggests “cast”
bronze (gegossen).
But these relations do not affect the stylistic break in the words
“Wie reizend alles!” Why not allow the emotional aspect of the object’s
articulation to develop directly out of the object’s description? If the
aim of the poem is to articulate the speaker’s rapt attentiveness to an
object from which he derives an inspired knowledge of the beauti-
ful, why interrupt the process with three words (“Wie reizend alles!”)
that draw our attention precisely to the unaccountable, unknowable,
in effect non-object-related quality of emotional experience? That the
suggestion of a correspondence between the structure of this experi-
ence (laughter tempered by seriousness) and the structure of the object
follows those words, does not by any means imply that the experience
is somehow immersed in the object—that the object somehow sees the
observer, in the manner of Rilke’s archaic Apollo. Otherwise, why not
let the experience, for a reader of the poem, simply grow out of the
description without any prompting?
On the contrary, the actual succession of elements in the poem
questions the speaker’s attentiveness to the object; it suggests the ques-
tion of whether the apparent objectivity of lines 1–6 is not in truth
merely the speaker’s arbitrary allegorizing of the object to fit his own
prior emotional state. The possibility of one form of allegory is already
present in the lamp’s bowl shape, encircled near its top by a garland,
which suggests the image of a human head, a head perhaps in danger
of becoming “verrückt” (crazy). (Mörike in fact presented the poem
to his wife Gretchen;6 and it is Goethe’s Gretchen, in Faust, who com-
plains, “Mein armer Kopf / Ist mir verrückt.”)
4. This possibility brings us to the matter of the poem’s humor, its
actual “laughing.” The participle “aufgehangen,” for instance, is not
grammatically correct. In German (unlike English) the strong verb
hangen (hing, gehangen) is used only for the intransitive meaning
of “hang,” whereas “hang” as a transitive verb is translated by the
weak verb hängen (hängte, gehängt), which is originally a factitive,
meaning “to make to hang.” In correct German, therefore, “By light
chains . . . hung” would be “An leichten Ketten . . . aufgehängt.” The
trouble is that “aufgehängt,” as a common idiom, suggests strongly
“hanged” in the sense that a criminal is hanged. This suggestion would
probably not have attracted notice if Mörike had simply written “auf-
gehängt” (and adjusted the meter). But the incorrect “aufgehangen”
prompts us to ask: why not “aufgehängt”? whereupon our attention
is drawn precisely to the suggestion of “hanged,” which also resonates
with the possibility of seeing in the lamp’s bowl the representation of

a human head, the head of a person hanged and hanging.
These are comical suggestions, and as such they fit with the idea
of laughter and with the prominence of superficial imagery, as well
as with the comical aspect of the word “unverrückt.” And all of this
comic feeling is reflected again in the poem’s meter, dipodic trimeter,
which is the only form of German iambic verse that most readers will
immediately recognize as a parody of ancient Greek, since it is used for
dialogue in Attic tragedy. But once we recognize the parody, we recall
that iambic verse in Greek is originally and proverbially associated
with lampooning, with a decidedly ungentle form of humor.
A Reading of Reading
All these tendencies—the subtle but rough humor, the insistence on
surface and periphery rather than depth, and especially the possibil-
ity of a compound allegory, which allegorizes even its own necessary
operation as allegory in the constitution of the “beautiful”—suggest a
reason why Staiger, Heidegger, and Spitzer unanimously ignore some
of the simplest signifying features of Mörike’s text. The three critics are
all intent on preserving the idea of lyric poetry, especially German lyric
poetry since the eighteenth century, as a symbolic form—“symbolic”
in a sense that is opposed to “allegorical” and derived from certain
remarks of Goethe that do not actually refer to poetry. The poem, in
this view, transcends its dependence on lexical and syntactic conven-
tions and becomes an instantaneous, quasi-visual revelation of truth,
as if it were a simple material object (say, a lamp) in contemplating
which we might suddenly be inspired. Allegory, as a succession of
conceptually decipherable figures, is thus excluded, as are laughter
(especially gallows humor) and superficiality. But to understand the
political component of that preference for the “symbolic,” we need to
go further into the poem.
Is the phrase “Ein Kunstgebild der echten Art” (an artwork of the
genuine kind) simply a complicated way of saying “a genuine art-
work”? It is not a normal or colloquial way of doing so. The concepts
echt and Art in German are normally related in quite a different way.
Something is echt (genuine) if and only if it belongs to a particular
Art (type or kind). This is the relation between the Latin words genu-
inus and genus. A diamond is genuine if it truly belongs to the type or
genus of diamonds; a poem is echt if it belongs to the Art of poems.
And the important point is that the question of the genuineness of the
genus, of whether the Art itself is echt, never arises. A particular Art
or genus must simply be assumed as the ground for any judgment of
genuineness. To say that an artwork is of the genuine genus, strictly
speaking, would be to imply that this genus of artworks belongs to the
(genuine?) genus of genera, and so on ad insaniam.
Mörike’s line, whatever we imagine it says, does permit the possibil-
ity of this absurdity to arise, and so suggests the question of whether
there is such a thing as the genus of “art-works,” whether it is ever
really possible to distinguish particular objects as true or genuine
works of art. The question of artistic or aesthetic judgment is thus
raised, and is answered, in a sense, not by a statement or image, but
by the question: “Wer achtet sein?” “Who notices it? Who pays atten-
tion to it?” Whether or not an object is beautiful, or a true work of
art—this question suggests—depends entirely on whose point of view
one adopts in looking at it. An object cannot simply be a work of
art; it cannot belong to some established genus of such works. It only
becomes a work of art by virtue of someone’s paying a particular kind
of attention to it. (Hence the allegory of the allegorizing head.) The
genuine genus of works of art is marked as genuine precisely by its not
being a genus in the normal sense, in the sense that its scope simply
determines the “genuine”; it is, rather, an Art in the more difficult
sense of a way of being, the way in which a work of art is what it is
only by becoming what it is in the response of an attentive observer.
There is, to be sure, an easier way to read the next-to-last line: “It
is a true work of art, which [therefore?] practically no one notices.”
But in the context established by the suddenly nonobjective words
“Wie reizend alles,” I do not think that the problem of genus and the
genuine, as I have sketched it, can be overlooked or dismissed. The
clear parallel, in form and sound and etymology, between the words
“Lustgemach” and “Kunstgebild[e]” (related to the near-synonymous
concepts of machen and bilden, respectively), confirms this point. For
this parallel appears to contain a crucial difference. Whereas Lust (plea-
sure) names what the room, the “Lustgemach,” is used for, Kunst (art)
names presumably the spirit or method by which the “Kunstgebilde” is
created. Or does it? The parallel between the words suggests the pos-
sibility that what Kunst really names, after all, is also a use we make of
certain objects, the manner in which we pay attention to them, not any
quality actually inherent in the object itself or its making.7
But the simpler sense of the penultimate line is not lost. It operates
especially in relation to the question of exactly what manner of paying
attention to an object constitutes the object as a work of art. For the
answer to this question, clearly, is that we use an object as an artwork,
and so make it an artwork, by paying attention to it as if we were not

paying attention to it; as if our attentiveness, focus it as we might,
were always arrested at the periphery or “shell” and were never an
attentiveness to the thing itself; as if the object were so perfect as to be
sublimely indifferent to our attention, hence never really “noticed” or
“respected” (another meaning of achten) in the first place. The work
of art is thus by its nature in the condition of being “nun fast verges-
sen”; it is always (once and for all) “almost” forgotten, insofar as our
recollection of it, our attentiveness, never succeeds in drawing it fully
into the bowl of our attention, but manages only to keep it balanced
precariously, so to speak, on the rim. Our knowledge of an object is
always a kind of appropriation, a Verrücken (displacing) of the object.
It moves the object out of what the very concept of “object” requires
that we imagine as its own system of relations, into our system of
thinking. But the work of art is that object which we attend to in such
a way as to maintain at least the illusion of its being “Noch unver-
rückt,” not yet actually displaced or appropriated by our attentiveness
to it.
Nothing in this interpretive argument says anything whatever about
the art-object itself. The argument (like this aspect of the poem) is
strictly psychological, referring only to the mental process by which
we constitute an object as art, that mental process that is the artwork’s
mode (or Art) of being what, for our purposes, it is. (What the work
“is,” for us, is therefore an allegory of our thinking about it, a bowl
shaped like a head.) In any case, Heidegger’s objection to Staiger’s
reading of “scheint,” in the last line, as “esse videtur,” is thoroughly
misguided (“Dialogue,” 421). No German writer, without providing a
very clear context, could conceivably expect a reader to exclude from
consideration the meaning “seems” of the verb “scheint.” To be sure,
this meaning does produce a difficulty. An object can be “blissful in
itself” (reading “ihm” as “sich”). But this relation would be a self-
relation within a perfectly integrated identity, whereas the relation
of seeming (like Latin videri) is passive, the inherently questionable
and mutable relation to a strict Other; to justify “seems,” we need to
assume an implied “to us.” Conceivably, if the relation of the object
to itself were one of tension or conflict, “seems” would present no
problem; but the idea of bliss (Seligkeit, the state of souls—once and
for all—in heaven) implies an absolute self-sufficiency that must by
definition be inaccessible to seeming. And what this difficulty points
us toward, again, is a psychological reading, the idea that the object’s
supposed self-perfection is constituted by our way of looking at it—by
how it “seems” to us.
But if a relatively obvious psychological reading of the poem is one

of the things that Staiger (despite reading “seems”) and Heidegger
and Spitzer are all at pains to avoid, then it is because they have a
positive interest in sustaining the opposite of a psychological read-
ing, which in this case is a hieratic reading. The operation of the
mind, in this view, is secondary; what matters is the sacred object,
in contemplating which the speaker’s mind is utterly absorbed, as in
an instantaneous “symbolic” revelation. There follows thus an exact
and self-serving analogy with the critic’s supposed contemplation
and presentation of the poem. That Staiger regards “the art of inter-
pretation” (the topic of his lecture from which the “Dialogue” devel-
ops) as a kind of priestly office, requiring of its practitioner both an
inner vocation and a rigorous program of training, is entirely clear;
and neither Heidegger nor Spitzer disagrees with this attitude except
in matters of detail.
Paradox and Irony

There is one more exegetic error that Staiger, Heidegger, and Spitzer do
not even try to rid themselves of; and it is the most egregious of them
all. In the last line, “Was aber schön ist, selig scheint es in ihm selbst,”
is the pronoun “ihm” really only an unusual reflexive form, referring
to the subject “es”? Without doubt, the possibility of a reflexive mean-
ing is suggested here. But the form “ihm” (not “sich”) requires that we
at least consider the possibility of a non-reflexive antecedent. And such
an antecedent is obviously present in the preceding line, in the pronoun
“Wer.” It is unusual to use an interrogative pronoun as the antecedent
of a positive personal pronoun, but certainly no more unusual than to
use “ihm” as a dative reflexive pronoun. “Who is that on the phone?”
we might say. “Tell him I’m not here.”
There is thus a clear bifurcation of meaning in the last line. The
reference of “ihm” to the lamp is definitely present: “felix [or perhaps
‘beatum’] in se ipso videtur esse,” or “feliciter [beate?] lucet in eo ipso.”
Even Heidegger still takes “ihm” to refer to the lamp, although he
insists he is not reading it as a strict reflexive (“Dialogue,” 421).8 But
if “ihm” is taken to refer to “Wer,” an equally complex structure of
meaning arises; namely,
1. The work of art. Who pays attention to it? (Implied response:

no one.) But the basic structure of the beautiful (“Was aber
schön ist,” in general) glows (“lucet”) even in the psychological
make-up of that “no one,” even in the mind of people who dis-
regard art. Or:
2. The work of art. Who is capable of respecting it for what it truly
is, beyond the superficial structure of “rim,” “shell,” “ring”? Yet
our very inability to penetrate the object’s nature (the genus in
which its artistic genuineness resides) engenders in us a feeling
of the object’s aloof self-sufficiency, so that the object “seems”
self-containedly blissful in us.
This bifurcation echoes and develops the division between a hieratic

reading (“ihm” referring to the lamp) and a psychological reading
(“ihm” referring to “Wer”) of the poem.
But the relation between these two readings is not symmetrical. The
psychological reading is a criticism, if not a debunking, of the hieratic
reading, since it exposes the sacred object as being sacred only in our
taking it thus. Half-submerged in the language is in fact a laughing,
a mocking at any reading for depth, an iambic lampooning of that
symbol-seeking urge as the head of a hanged man, of a person who is
dead in the sense of being unable to acknowledge his or her own living
psychological role in the production of the beautiful. And if this is the
case, why does the psychological or critical aspect of the thought not
more obviously dominate in the text? Why does the poem not look
more, for instance, like a poem of Heine?
The answer to this question is contained in the poem’s first two
words, “Noch unverrückt.” For the unmasking or diagnosis of the
mental process, in the individual, by which the supposed aesthetic
“object” is in truth constituted, itself leads (as diagnosis) toward a
kind of insanity. If the quality of objective independence and self-
sufficiency in the aesthetic object is part of what is created by our
manner of attending to it; if the object’s existence “in itself” (“in ihm
selbst”) is really only a mental event in the perceiver (“in ihm selbst”);
and if this is true precisely of the aesthetic object, whose integral self-
identity is a principal element of its specific nature (its Art or genus):
then how shall we avoid exposing our own diagnostic description of
this situation to exactly the type of critical diagnosis we ourselves
propose? Does our diagnostic argument not tend necessarily to liber-
ate the object from its aesthetic fetishizing, thus to set a value upon
the unaestheticized objectivity of the object as it “really” is, thus to
fetishize the object’s own inviolable identity all over again?
The psychological critique of aesthetic experience, therefore, can-
not be wrenched free of that experience (cannot be thus verrückt),
cannot stand over against the experience objectively, without itself
becoming a practically insane (verrückt) generalization of exactly the

attitude it criticizes. The critique can remain valid and reasonable only
by containing itself precariously within aesthetic experience itself, as
an ironic or profoundly self-doubting undertone. Which is exactly
what happens in Mörike’s “not yet insane” discourse, in the com-
plexity of the concepts echte Art and “scheint” and “in ihm selbst,”
in the revealing ejaculation “Wie reizend alles,” and especially in the
suggestion of a suppressed psychological allegory. The lamp—we
are tempted (one sense of reizen) to say—appears (“scheint”) radi-
cally self-identical, hence symbolically revelatory, only by way of its
dependent quality (hanging as if on chains, German abhängig) as an
allegorical image of the mind that wishfully projects its supposed
self-identity. It gives the impression of perfect self-containment, para-
doxically, only by way of an external similarity, its similarity to a
garlanded human head that keeps itself precariously in equilibrium
(“Noch unverrückt”) only by sustaining the superficial idea of a joy-
fully circular aesthetic experience (“Ringelreihn,” uncritical child-
like simplicity) which in truth only masks (like the “Schale” or outer
“shell” of thought’s vessel) the sad circularity of psychological self-
knowledge, much as the allegory itself (in another sad circularity) is
masked by the text’s ambiguities.
What attracts the speaker (what he finds “reizend”) in the object,
is an allegory of his own mental condition, in which stability and
representational sanity (like the green of the ivy) are really only the
effects of a corrosive process they must eventually succumb to, a pro-
cess in which his serious thought (“Geist des Ernstes”) frames and
sets off and so insists upon the merely temporary quality (like child-
hood) of its own joyful component. That the allegory is an allegory,
in fact, already undermines or corrodes the joyfully revelatory nature
of the object. Sanity, the reasonable and fruitful attentiveness to real
objects, is not a permanent state but a precarious balance, between
carefree inattention (the children in their circle, mindful only of
themselves) and an inexorable self-criticism that threatens to swamp
the object in fruitless, essentially insane speculation. Sanity is the
condition of being “not yet”—not quite yet—insane. We are not very
far from Heine after all. As readers of the poem, in fact, thus con-
fronted not with an object at all, but only (circularly) with a model
of our own allegorized and psychologized response, we must recog-
nize that our condition is in a sense one step further along toward
insanity than what we imagine is the speaker’s. The poem, by being
a poem (not an actual lamp), thus is its own message, the motor of
its own kinetics.
The Critical Wager

This reading of the poem, in its potentially infinite self-reference, per-
haps itself borders on the insane. But it is useful as a demonstration
of what has been resolutely overlooked in Mörike’s text, and useful
as a basis for understanding the politics of the critical debate that
overlooks it. For it follows from the considerations above that every
reasonable reading of the poem must be characterized by the same
internal critical instability as the poem itself, which means that an
authoritative reading is impossible.
And it is the idea of an authoritative critical stance that unites
the arguments of Staiger, Heidegger, and Spitzer. Far from attacking
Staiger’s notion of an “art” of interpretation that becomes authorita-
tive in reflecting upon and accepting its own “subjective” component
(“Dialogue,” 411), Heidegger actually only suggests a metaphysical
anchoring that would make it more authoritative. And Spitzer in turn
merely empties the debate of its remaining dangerous tendencies by
insisting implicitly upon broad erudition as a criterion of authority—
however arbitrary and exclusive, in the case of his own essay, the selec-
tion of scholarly cross-references may be.
The idea, the mere possibility, of an authoritative critical stance,
the validity of the critic’s hieratic posture, is crucial here. In this sense
the disagreements among Staiger, Heidegger, and Spitzer prove conve-
nient, since they prevent the emergence of any single specific critical
statement whose claim to authority might be open to a direct chal-
lenge. The hieratic posture as such, with minimum specification of any
doctrinal content, is what that debate is ultimately aimed at preserv-
ing. And what is interesting politically about this aim is its quality as
a political wager.
The idea of the wager is crucial in any discussion of the politics
of literary criticism and theory, the question: Under what political
conditions will a given critical convention and specific critical writ-
ings retain permanently their status as definitive or exemplary cultural
documents? Critical writing is inescapably aware of its quality as “sec-
ondary” literature; a main effect of critical writing is to remind itself
constantly of this quality by creating or encouraging a canon (how-
ever contested) of “primary” literature that we assume will continue
to be culturally influential even when its specific political or social
or religious purport has become outdated. Critical thought, therefore
(operating constantly in the presence of its contrastingly permanent
canon), is inevitably faced with the question of its own survival as a
cultural initiative, and so inevitably involves, on some level, a wager

concerning the political future in which it will (or will not) continue to
be read and discussed.
Among major left-wing critics of the twentieth century, for example,
I think it is fair to say that Georg Lukács is now more or less in eclipse,
whereas Walter Benjamin receives a great deal of attention, and that
this state of affairs has to do with the importance, especially in later
Lukács, of a political wager that is now generally thought to have
failed. But once we have begun to think in these terms, we must ask
whether the success of its implied wager is really a criterion by which
critical thought ought to be judged. Especially in the case of left-wing
criticism, is it not possible to attach value precisely to the specificity
and daring of a wager like Lukács’s, and to worry about whether what
we admire in Benjamin may perhaps be the sign of a failure of nerve?
Our main concern here, however, is the fabric of apparent disagree-
ment among Staiger, Heidegger, and Spitzer, which actually masks a
deep unanimity on the political wager of criticism. All three critics are
betting on a maximally authoritarian form of government, a political
situation in which their assertion of the critic’s interpretive authority
(whether as “artist” or philosopher or pedant) will be accepted and
more or less officially fostered as a justification of authority in gen-
eral, while at the same time its self-imposed restriction to the aesthetic
domain keeps it from being regarded as a political danger. What we
have here, in other words, is criticism looking for a boot to lick—any
boot at all, as long as it is strong enough to promise the kind of per-
manence that literary criticism by nature cannot independently prom-
ise itself. And as payment for its place in an authoritarian intellectual
canon, this Staigerian criticism offers its pedagogical component, the
training of new generations of boot-lickers. Staiger himself shows the
way, in his groveling to Heidegger.
I am not referring to any specific political opinions of the three crit-
ics in question. My point concerns the political wager inherent in their
critical practice, which remains what it is even in spite of sincere per-
sonal opinions that might conflict with it. In order to bring this politi-
cal wager into focus, a comparison with the politics of New Criticism
is useful, since, as Lindenberger points out (“Dialogue,” 401), Staiger
is often regarded as a German New Critic, and since in at least one
influential attack on New Criticism, by Roy Harvey Pearce, Spitzer—
whom I here tar with the same brush as Staiger and Heidegger—is
mentioned prominently as offering a valuable corrective to the sup-
posed historical–political irresponsibility of the New Critics.9
It seems to me that at least a major segment of New Criticism exhib-

its the honest resolve to practice criticism without a political wager. By
“honest” I imply that this resolve—however pointless we may judge it
in the end—is not merely a rhetorical posture, but actually informs the
whole work of critical inquiry. When R. P. Blackmur opens his essay
on “A Critic’s Job of Work” by asserting that “Criticism . . . is the for-
mal discourse of an amateur,”10 I think he has successfully described
his own procedure, in this essay and elsewhere. But the honest attempt
to avoid altogether the making of a political wager in criticism, if what
I have said holds, necessarily involves the renunciation of any claim
to cultural permanence; it entails that the critical writing be wholly
reconciled to the transitoriness of its own operation in its culture. And
I think this condition is actually fulfilled in much of the best New
Critical writing.
Blackmur’s criticism of critics (including himself) arrives repeat-
edly at the idea of a gap between the cultural–historical usefulness
of a critical work and what the work actually says, a gap that is larg-
est in precisely the best critical writing, “since an active mind tends
to overestimate the scope of its tools and to take as necessary those
doctrinal considerations which habit has made seem instinctive”
(347). The newness and value of I. A. Richards’ thought, according to
Blackmur, becomes available only at the expense of its being “exag-
gerated” or indeed turned “upside down” in Richards’ actual writing,
which is thus disqualified as an authoritative instance of precisely its
own accomplishment (358). And a similar sense of the provisional or
temporary informs John Crowe Ransom’s plea for an “ontological”
criticism, which ends by conceding its inability to come to grips with
what it cannot help calling the “ontological density” of much mod-
ern poetry.11 We find ourselves, here, at a very great distance from
the authoritative hieratic attitude of a Staiger. Nor does the idea of
“touchstones,” as Ransom insists on it, at all stabilize the critical dis-
course. On the contrary. Suppose, as Cleanth Brooks suggests, that the
inherently paradoxical language of poetry undergoes a form of cor-
ruption or dilution in Wordsworth.12 Can the critical discourse that
records this relation possibly escape finding its own structure mir-
rored in precisely the text that it finds suspect, a structure which, like
Wordsworth’s language, evokes the inviolable hard brightness of the
touchstone (Donne or Shakespeare) but in the process also inevitably
marks itself as violated and ultimately dispensable?
I will not defend New Criticism politically. The attempt to avoid
making any political wager, even if it is an honest attempt, is still itself
a political move, and a highly questionable one. Blackmur’s suggestion
for an “amusing exercise” that would sweep together “the insights of

Freud and Fascism and Marxism” and relate them to Church doctrine
(341), is perhaps (even in 1935) more than just a piece of individual
stupidity. And to the extent that Jameson’s notion of “ethical” criti-
cism is valid, in its relation to ressentiment,13 the political critique of
New Criticism does not require the identification of a specific wager.
But the distinction between honest and dishonest criticism is still
useful for charting the literary landscape in political terms. The dif-
ference between New Criticism and Staiger’s endeavor in “The Art
of Interpretation” is measurable, very simply, by the amount of sheer
exegetic violence Staiger commits on his chosen text. It is true that
in my own reading of Mörike’s poem, direct exegesis and the grop-
ing of interpretation are inextricably mingled. It is true, theoretically,
that a strict distinction between exegesis and interpretation can never
be sustained. But I think I have shown that a strict distinction is not
needed here. As a matter of simple degree, the points that Staiger and
his quibblers miss include several that are sufficiently obvious to indi-
cate clearly, in the minds that miss them, the presence of an extraneous
agenda, not all that deeply hidden, which must take the form ulti-
mately of a generalized authoritarian political wager.
Especially interesting is Spitzer’s role in this critical skit. Spitzer’s
reputation, in his own time and in ours, is based not on any large
syntheses or assertions of principle, but on his tireless essayistic activ-
ity, his constant erudite skepticism vis-à-vis the philosophically over-
inflated arguments of other critics. His function, we feel, was to keep
criticism honest. But in this particular case, his contribution tends in
exactly the opposite direction. It is as if the basic dishonesty of the
debate as Staiger and Heidegger set it up, its complicity in advance
with any politics willing to canonize it as a repository of the authori-
tarian idea, escaped Spitzer’s scrupulously microscopic gaze by dint of
sheer brazenness. And with this, perhaps something is said about criti-
cal microscopy in general, however scrupulous it may be.14
The Poem in History

But why Mörike’s “Auf eine Lampe”? “These verses require no com-
mentary. Whoever knows German will grasp the words of the text”
(“Dialogue,” 410). Why does Staiger choose this text about which to
make this manifestly untrue statement? In what sense, namely, is this
little poem a political text, whose meaning must be suppressed for
the sake of establishing the quasi-priestly “art of interpretation” as
a cultural fixture? It seems to me that what Jameson says about the

novel is relevant here.
The novel is the end of genre in the sense . . . [of] a narrative ideologeme

whose outer form, secreted like a shell or exoskeleton, continues to
emit its ideological message long after the extinction of its host. For
the novel, as it explores its mature and original possibilities in the nine-
teenth century, is not an outer, conventional form of that kind. Rather,
such forms, and their remains—inherited narrative paradigms, con-
ventional actantial or proairetic schemata—are the raw material on
which the novel works, transforming their “telling” into its “showing,”
estranging commonplaces against the freshness of some unexpected
“real,” foregrounding convention itself as that through which readers
have hitherto received their notions of events, psychology, experience,
space, and time.
(Jameson 151)
When we read Spitzer’s summarizing formulation about Mörike

(“Artistic inspiration is modulated here—in a kind of natural and
majestic idyll” [“Dialogue,” 432]) against the actual complexity of the
text, we recognize that Spitzer is naming what the poem shows, not
what it is. What we have in Mörike is poetry about poetry, about
conventional generic moves in the lyric form, poetry with a deep struc-
tural similarity to Heine’s. We must not be too quick to assume that
the form of the short lyric poem offers no space for confronting the
generic with the unexpectedly real. We recall the manner in which the
words “Wie reizend alles!” suddenly inject into the text’s apparent
rapt attentiveness to its object the possibility that the object’s char-
acter is entirely the result of an allegorizing move by the speaker. The
effect, the shift of perspective, is perhaps not as strong as in Heine’s
well-known stanza that says, in part, “Yes of course, you’re my ideal,
but you’ll have to excuse me, I’m very busy today.” But it is of the same
basic type, and implies in the same way a general commentary on the
lyric genre.
And once we understand that Mörike’s text is not a “poem” in the
sense that this designation excludes the type of nineteenth-century
political meaning that we associate normally with the novel, we are
also in position to recognize a further level of allegory in it, an allegory
of complicity. Jameson, glossing Althusser, dismisses as a “mirage . . . the
vision of a moment in which the individual subject would somehow be
fully conscious of his or her determination by class and would be able
to square the circle of ideological conditioning by sheer lucidity and
the taking of thought” (Jameson 283). This problem is paralleled in
structure, if not exactly in content (hence allegorically), by the inability

of Mörike’s lyric speaker to transcend the pretended selfless aesthetic
contemplation of which his own words imply a profound psychologi-
cal critique. Indeed, the form of aesthetic allegory, the shrinking from
direct statement, is itself an instance of the gropingly self-conscious
complicity that is allegorized. The speaker is “not yet insane,” has not
yet made the typical fruitless leap of early nineteenth-century socialism
into the pretense of transcending his individual situation, of integrat-
ing his consciousness by knowledge of its social determinants.
The temptation to take such a leap out of the aesthetic, to justify
his individual consciousness by denying complicity in the social or
cultural situation of which the attempt at aesthetic self-stabilizing is a
symptom, is definitely present in the poem, in the speaker’s exclama-
tion, “Wie reizend alles!” Given the sudden loss of sharp focus in these
words, hence the feeling that the speaker has stepped back from his
own experience, it would not be at all surprising if the poem’s next
word were “Aber . . . ” How charming (or how tempting) it all is—but
my own reflective consciousness has passed beyond that state and is
now able to assert a valid objective criticism of it. And the meaning
of the poem hinges on the fact that this temptation, the temptation to
pretend that consciousness can achieve control over its own situation,
is successfully resisted. It is now no longer possible to say exactly what
the speaker thinks. His avoidance of the “Aber” could conceivably be
a simple nostalgic retreat, not a discursive negotiation with his own
inevitable complicity at all. But it also no longer matters what the
speaker thinks. The discourse, in any particular version of the speak-
er’s mind, has been indelibly marked by its larger historical situation.
This is what neither Staiger nor Heidegger nor Spitzer can face up
to in Mörike’s text. Staiger chooses the poem, consciously or not, pre-
cisely because it is a marked text, but a text in which the marking is
subtle enough to make him confident of his ability, as an interpre-
tive “artist,” to erase it. And erase it he does, with the assistance of
Heidegger and Spitzer, who, for all their quibbles, resolutely concur
in equating the text, by implication, with the supposedly achieved and
reconciled consciousness of its speaker. For the authoritative pretense
of this critical practice involves the vesting of authority in a specific
type of naturally gifted and appropriately trained individual conscious-
ness; and it therefore cannot admit—in practice, although Heidegger,
in some form, would admit in theory—the recognition that individual
consciousness is never integrated to an extent that might justify its
permanent authority in any aspect whatever of human existence. It is
a critical practice, therefore, that instinctively seeks out and attempts
to erase any intrusion of the real nineteenth century into its cherished
textual preserve. Heine, since everybody knows he is a troublemaker,
can perhaps be tolerated. But when a strongly “classical” idiom, like
Mörike’s, fails to respect the zoning laws and starts building into the
actual air of history, then the big guns are rolled out and rumble at
each other until the poem lie beaten flat.
Chapter Eight
The Things on Yeats’s Desk
LAPIS LAZULI
(For Harry Clifton)
I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.
All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,
Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise

When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;

His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.
Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.
Every discolouration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes, mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.1
In an argument aimed at reconciling the ideas of art and defect, it

is probably inevitable that we should eventually find our way to the
lines:
Every discolouration of the stone,

Every accidental crack or dent
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows.
Some readers of this poem, Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli,” are led by its con-
cern with history to think of the imperfections in the surface of the old
Chinese sculpture as “ravages of time.”2 This inference is questionable.
The thing about stones like lapis lazuli is that they are never perfect to
begin with. When you undertake to represent your artistic vision by
carving in such a stone, you automatically accept as part of your work
the “accidental” imperfections that are already there. I will try, in any
case, to show parallels to this state of affairs in Yeats’s relation to his
The Things on Yeats’s Desk 167
own quirky and imperfect artistic medium, the English language. It

is perhaps worth noting that the principal fault that contemporaries
found with Callimachus’ sculptural work was that he over-polished it
(“handled marble as if it were bronze”?), that he tried too hard to get
rid of the materially conditioned imperfections in it.3
Tragic Action and Tragic Revelation

Imperfection or defect, conditioned by the materiality of the artistic
medium, is always there from the outset. This truth, precisely in this
form, has a clear parallel in the historical vision of Yeats’s poem. In
order to grasp this point, we must understand in detail the lines:
All men have aimed at, found and lost;

Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
“Black out” is a technical term from the theater, referring to the prac-
tice of marking a division between scenes by extinguishing all the
stage lighting for a moment, leaving stage and auditorium in dark-
ness. What these lines contain, therefore, is the plan or scenario for a
two-part theatrical presentation—which is perfectly expectable in the
poem’s Hamlet–Lear section. The first of the two scenes in question—
the scene titled “All men have aimed at, found and lost”—contains
the tragic action, the aiming, finding, losing that make up a plot, the
“tragic play” that “All perform,” which is always a different play, a
different plot or scene, for different performers in different times. Then
comes a black out, a scene division. And only then, in a separate sec-
ond scene, comes tragic revelation, “Heaven blazing into the head,”
that revelation which is always the same, never changing “by an inch
or an ounce.” The tragic revelation, in other words, is never part of
the tragic action, but is always strictly separate from it, as it were in a
scene of its own.
Without tragic action there could be no tragic revelation. But tragic
action is never capable in itself of producing tragic revelation. Even if
“all the drop scenes” were to “drop at once”—even if all tragic actions,
all plays, were performed simultaneously—the quantity and quality of
tragic revelation would be unaffected; whence it follows that from
the point of view of tragic revelation or truth, any particular tragic
action (which is to say, all tragic action, viewed as a plurality of “drop
scenes”) is nonessential, temporary, incomplete, defective. Tragic action
operates as the inevitably defective material medium in which tragic

revelation must be represented. “Tragedy wrought to its uttermost”
certainly refers to tragic revelation. But by way of the etymological
suggestion (in “uttermost”) of standing “outside,” the meaning of that
phrase also includes the irreducible discrepancy between tragic action
and the truth that it aims at but can never contain: which produces
what one might call the hyper-tragic quality of our condition, our abil-
ity to grasp the existence of a truth to which, from within the defec-
tive materiality of the tragic action, we are denied all direct access,
a truth of which our understanding is never anything more than a
rambling or a raging—or for that matter, a complaint of “hysterical
women.” Heaven does (we are assured) eventually blaze into the head,
but always—as for Oedipus at Colonus—one scene beyond our par-
ticular tragic lives, never in time for us to make any use of, or derive
any advantage from, the revelation.
The Overlapping of Historical Ages

Let us turn now to the (as it were) material imperfections in Yeats’s
linguistic medium. First, we notice at least three etymological ple-
onasms: “hysterical women” (since the root of “hysterical” implies
femininity); “if nothing drastic is done” (since the root of “drastic”
refers to doing); and “by an inch or an ounce” (since the two measure-
words are cognate, both derived from a root meaning the twelfth
part). Of course, none of these phrases is a pleonasm in the sense that
would suggest a violation of basic good style. The problems in all of
them arise from what could be dismissed as “accidental” qualities
of the evolved language. But those qualities are nevertheless undeni-
able, and undeniably cause a moment of pause, or even discomfort,
for an educated reader. In fact, etymological pleonasm might even
seem expressively appropriate in this particular poem, since it always
involves an overlapping of separate historical stages in the given lan-
guage, like the overlapping of Kings Billy or of “old civilizations”
built again.
But pleonasm is ordinarily considered a stylistic defect because
it involves saying over again something that has already been said
in another word or phrase. The etymological gestures at pleonasm in
Yeats’s first verse paragraph are therefore also perhaps appropriate in
an entirely different way, because that paragraph is about people who
say things that do not need saying: the “hysterical women” (or maybe
Edmund Dulac)4 who insist on reminding us of the danger of war that
we all recognize anyway, and on drawing conclusions from that dan-

ger in domains (like poetry and art) where they are pointless. Thus a
couple of language-conditioned accidents, which could be considered
defects, are exploited artistically to create a kind of parody.
Other parodic devices occur in that initial section of the poem.
Surely the speech of the panicked women will be hasty and breathless,
attempting always to say several different things at once, which is sug-
gested in, “They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.” An analogy is
concealed here: palette is to brush as fiddle is to bow (as the flat thing
supported by your left hand is to the thin thing held in your right). But
the parodied women rush clumsily through those images of artistic
activity leaving just two words intact; and in the process they produce
the ridiculous image of trying to scrape music with a paintbrush or
get pigment out of a violin. Yet further, the clause “if nothing drastic
is done” tries to say two different things at the same time: if nothing
is done; and, if something drastic is not done. But the result of this
compression is a logical impossibility, since the concept “nothing” can-
not accommodate a specific attribute like “drastic.” Thus, as above,
a linguistic defect (here a defect in logic) is made to serve an expres-
sive purpose as parody. And finally, if we worry about the strange
apparent subjunctive in the last line, “Until the town lie beaten flat,”
it must occur to us that the mood there can be understood as optative,
expressing a wish—which, again, would parody the attitude of the
hysterical women, whose excitement must contain an element of mali-
cious desire for the catastrophe that would justify their fears.
The Hamlet–Lear section, which now follows, and in which the
parody disappears, nevertheless also ends with an etymological pleo-
nasm, “It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.” As far as I can see,
this is the last such pleonasm in the poem, and it has two functions. It
looks backward in that its repetitiveness suggests the qualities of stasis
and sameness in that single tragic revelation which is never affected
by the details of the tragic action. And it looks forward by returning
our attention to the idea of an overlapping of disparate historical peri-
ods, which is then taken up and given its definitive form in the next
section.
On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,

Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
The overlapping of historical ages is here concentrated into a sin-

gle syllable in the word “put,” which can be either a preterite or a
participle. “Old civilisations,” the line says, which were themselves

already doomed, which had already in effect been “put to the sword”
(participle), were also in the process of putting to the sword (preterite)
old civilizations no different from themselves: the old overlapped by
the no less old.
And then the poem arrives at a moment of climax and summary in
the line “Then they and their wisdom went to rack.” Not only were
those “Old civilisations,” as such, reduced to ruins in the course of
history, but their “wisdom” was also lost. Nothing significant, in other
words, has ever been learned from the cycle of destruction (in the
name of civilization) that makes up history. There is no progress, no
accumulation, in wisdom; the only wisdom that survives is the wis-
dom that has always been there, in the scene of revelation that follows
when the tragic action (the putting to the sword) is finished. In one
sense, “everybody knows or else should know” that the town will,
sooner or later, “lie beaten flat.” But such knowledge neither results
from an historical learning nor produces such learning. There is never
any knowledge concerning what might or must be “done.”
Yeats as His Own Ghost

At this point, however, at this moment of climax, the poem takes a
very peculiar turn. In the second section, after the parody of the “hys-
terical women,” the idea of a theater stage—on which the actors are
immersed in their roles, but also detached from them, thus “gay”—is
a natural development of the thinking. But in the middle of the third
section, what calls forth the relatively obscure figure of Callimachus?
Retrospectively, with the lapis lazuli in mind, the idea of an excessively
fastidious artist is perhaps appropriate as a contrast. But why should
that idea come up at exactly the point where it does?
I think the answer to this question has to do with the words “drap-
eries” and “lamp chimney.” When used (in the singular as a rule) with
reference to sculpture, the word “drapery” means cloth draped over the
human body. But “draperies,” in twentieth-century Ireland or anywhere
else in the modern world, ordinarily means heavy window-hangings
or something similar; and this latter meaning comports much better
with the idea of “sea-wind” sweeping the corner—if the draperies, for
example, happen to be half drawn over an open French window on a
summer evening, somewhere on the west coast of Ireland. The word
“draperies,” I mean, creates a bridge from the idea of ancient sculpture
to the reality, here and now, of William Butler Yeats sitting at his desk
and writing. We know it is evening because of the image “lamp chim-

ney,” which forms a second, confirming bridge between Callimachus
and the present poet—upon whose desk, of course, the lapis lazuli is
also standing, alongside the lamp.
(In fact, in the summer of 1936 when he wrote the poem, Yeats was
at his place in Rathfarnham, near Dublin, within reach of winds from
the Irish Sea. But his old bones were already destined for Drumcliffe,
where they now lie; and I imagine him in 1936 imagining himself in
one of “those grey country houses of Sligo,”5 or perhaps in his grand-
father’s house, exposed to the fresher breezes of the open Atlantic.
In any case, “Riversdale,” his house in greater Dublin, certainly had
electric lighting in 1936, a time when much of the rest of Ireland did
not.)
What happens here in the poem, in my view, is this: The think-
ing reaches a climax. The idea of a constant overlapping of different
ages—which includes the recognition that my thinking in the present,
if I take its associativeness aright, is always a rebuilding of the past—
combines with the understanding that no serious end is ever served
by such thinking, no accumulation of “wisdom.” This combination, in
turn, insists upon the question of why I, here and now, should involve
myself as a thinker in that pointless shuffling of historical “drop
scenes” as if they were a pack of cards. My attention is thus drawn
to my present surroundings—real or imagined. The moving drapes at
the window suggest the word “drapery,” hence sculpture; my lamp
chimney, real or imagined, combines with my knowledge of classical
antiquity to focus that suggestion; and in a sudden further overlapping
of historical ages, the figure of Callimachus springs into view.
I do not mean to assert that this account represents accurately what
actually happened in Yeats’s mind while he was writing the poem. The
point is that we, in reading the poem, are offered the opportunity “to
imagine [him, Yeats] seated there,” putting together the poem’s images
in the manner I have sketched. Or indeed, depending on how much
biographical knowledge we happen to possess, we might imagine him
“seated there [on the east coast]” imagining himself “seated there [on
the west coast]” writing the poem. It is even tempting to conclude at
this point that we have uncovered an intelligible dynamic structure in
the poem, a structure not in word-meanings but in the immediacy of
our experience as readers, as if the poem had reached out and actu-
ally imposed a shape on reality, perhaps in a sense on history itself.
I am seated here—or as the object of my own thinking, I am seated
there—imagining Yeats “seated there,” who in turn is imagining the
Chinamen “seated there.”
But this structure, if such it is, is made of nothing but accidents—

the concatenation of accidents that suggests Callimachus, the acciden-
tal cracks and dents that enable Yeats to form his idea of “the little
half-way house / Those Chinamen climb towards,” the comparable
house that arises from the variously answerable question of where
Yeats is writing the poem, which is related variously, in turn, to the
place where I happen to be reading it. And strictly speaking, the con-
cepts of structure and accident are not compatible. If accidents form
a structure, then as structural elements they have a necessary or intel-
ligible relation to one another, a relation by virtue of which they are
no longer accidents. But in regard to the poem we are looking at, the
uncompromised concept of accident is unavoidable. At one end of the
scale, we know that the stone does actually exist, and that the cracks
and dents Yeats speaks of are unquestionably accidental with respect
to the work of art. And at the other end of the scale, I know even
more directly that the particular situation (the “house,” so to speak)
in which I do my own reading and imagining is only one of innu-
merable readerly possibilities, hence strictly contingent or accidental.
The poem, when we look at it dispassionately, does not as a whole
offend either our aesthetic or our logical sense; but our reading of the
poem, when we reflect upon it, quickly involves us in a conceptual
contradiction—between structure and accident. Without itself being
obviously faulty, in other words, the poem offers itself as the instance
of an art (as social practice) that is radically defective.
The only possible way to avoid that contradiction would be to
determine somehow that the poem has no structure whatever, which
is absurd. Where there is no structure there is no determination to
begin with; and the act of reading cannot reasonably be said to have
taken place where no structure has been determined. However per-
fect or wonderful we may consider the poem, therefore, the art of
which it is an instance is still fundamentally flawed, and flawed in
exactly the same way as Sappho’s art: as an organized attempt to
accomplish the absolutely and eternally impossible, to master and
control and contain in language the strict accidental immediacy of
experience.
Hamlet and Lear and the Actors

We can now go back and understand the Hamlet–Lear section of
the poem in more detail. The range of reference in the first line, “All
perform their tragic play,” cannot be limited. Everybody, even those
“hysterical women” who do not seem to recognize it, is performing

his or her “tragic play.” And the following lines, “There struts Hamlet,
there is Lear, / That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia,” suggest that all those
innumerable tragic actions can be divided into a relatively small num-
ber of patterns, a Hamlet-pattern, a Lear-pattern, an Ophelia-pattern,
a Cordelia-pattern, and so on. One thinks of the 26 realizable phases
of the moon in A Vision, 26 patterns that include all possible human
types. But neither in “Lapis Lazuli” nor in A Vision does the type to
which my tragic action belongs determine my existence or my person
in its entirety. The number of possible combinations of internal and
external accidents within each type is as large as the variety we actu-
ally observe in human populations; and the gap between my tragic
type and the concatenation of accidents that shapes me in detail is
what creates the perspective from which I can adopt a “gay” attitude
toward my fate and toward fate in general.
Everybody, that is, finds himself or herself in the situation of an
actor playing a part. But what exactly is meant by the line, “They
know that Hamlet and Lear are gay”? In the relation between actor
and character, it would be more normal to attribute gaiety or carefree-
ness to the actor, to that real person who, after the “great stage curtain”
has dropped, comes out and stands before it, still in costume but now
with a satisfied smile and a demeanor that has sloughed off entirely
the cares and suffering by which all our attention had been occupied
for the past hour or two. And on the other shore of the metaphorical
divide: if I succeed in managing my own life like the playing of a role,
if I thus achieve a certain detachment from the inescapable pattern
of my fate, then surely it is my ability to be “gay” that is increased
thereby, not that of my role, my pattern, my Hamlet or Lear.
What is meant, in the first place, by the suggestion that “Hamlet
and Lear are gay”? That “Hamlet rambles and Lear rages” is certainly
no more a sign of gaiety than Ophelia’s suicide or Cordelia’s response
to her father’s plight. The only conceivable answer to this question, as
far as I can see, is that Hamlet and Lear, and Ophelia and Cordelia, are
imperishable and unalterable as the characters they are; that they are
gay or carefree in the sense of never being able to expect anything other
than what they get; that no matter how numerous and various their
incarnations, the myriad accidental differences among those who play
them, they themselves remain portals to exactly the same tragic revela-
tion, which “cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.” But each character
is such a portal or vessel, each arrives at his or her perfect unity, only by
being entrusted to actors, whose limitless variety brings that ultimate
unity into focus by contrast. And yet, for all their differences, the actors
must be competent, must be “worthy their prominent place in the play,”

which means exactly that they must know “that Hamlet and Lear are
gay”; they must understand the carefree imperishability and the unal-
terable visionary mission of their characters. Precisely this knowledge,
on their part, constitutes their artistic perspective, the carefree distance
from their roles that enables them too, in their turn, to stand truly gay
before the curtain when the play has finished.
Thus, in a strong sense, the gaiety of the actors creates that of the
characters, who, but for the limitless accidental variability of perfor-
mance, would never be anything but sufferers in the one narrow tragic
action assigned them. At the end of the evening, therefore, it is in truth
Hamlet himself and Lear himself who are applauded before the curtain,
Ophelia herself and Cordelia herself who receive bouquets handed in
from the wings. The distinction between performer and performance
has practically disappeared: “How can we know the dancer from the
dance?” And as in the case of the lapis lazuli, the work of art is now
constituted as what it truly is—as a strictly singular and unalterable
vision—only by the limitlessly plural and variable and accidental ele-
ments in its realization.
The Stone and Its Closing

Thus we come to the matter of the lapis lazuli itself, and the poem’s
two last sections. Calvin Bedient, in one of the surprisingly few critical
studies of the poem, begins as follows:
In the famous concluding stanzas of “Lapis Lazuli,” Yeats, far from

writing an “Ode to,” or feeling teased “out of thought” by, the Chinese
carving young Harry Clifton had given him on his seventieth birthday,
treats it as an obstacle to overcome, a pod to open, a seed to plant. It is
not an object that seduces him; rather, he wishes to seduce it, or more
strictly, to seduce himself by what he can make of it.6
And it is hard to disagree with him when he asserts, more particularly,

“that Yeats, at first subservient to the anonymous Chinese sculptor,
an attentive spectator of his work, outpaces him along the same path
on which he found him, driven forward by an unconquerable feel-
ing for movement and the co-existence of opposites” (32). Yeats, “in
making the stone blossom spatially [into a mountain] . . . also injects it
with time” (28); he “demonumentalizes the carving, opening its sealed
integrity with a metaphysical crowbar, permitting time’s burglaries
out of his own love of vital stirrings” (20). Or more prosaically, he
transfers the stone from its original frozen materiality into the fluid
medium of language.
But Bedient blinds himself to one of the most important devices by
which this transference is effected. He asserts:
The present-tense of “Are carved” is of course conventional in art

description (e.g., “the upper portion of the canvas is painted blue”).
“Are carved” means less that the Chinamen “were carved” than that
they “show carved contours.” (25)
The true parallel in painting would be something like, “the birds

depicted on the canvas are painted blue,” which would be wrong in
exactly the same way as “Two Chinamen . . . Are carved in Lapis Lazuli.”
The birds in the painting’s fictional world simply are blue. And “Are
carved” is not properly a predicate of the Chinamen in the same way
that perhaps “are walking” would be. I do not mean that Yeats has
made a mistake here. My point is that by including the mode of rep-
resentation in a simple predicate of the represented figures, Yeats has
managed to suggest a form of huge self-awareness in those Chinamen,
as if they were able share our perspective upon the work of the sculp-
tor, or at least to carry that perspective around with them as a proper
predicate, as part of their own immediate reality.
The Chinamen thus manage to live both inside and outside their
own actual world, a condition which is suggested again in the lines:
And I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene
If we stop reading at this point, it can seem to us that the Chinamen

are seated “on the mountain and the sky,” which they of course are, in
the sense that their images are superimposed on that of the landscape.
In their own world, the Chinamen are staring at the mountain and
the sky; in our world they are placed atop, seated upon, that scene.
And they themselves, in the fluid suggestiveness of the poem, seem
endowed with the ability to experience both worlds at once.
But this condition of living both inside and outside one’s immedi-
ate world is exactly the condition of the actors, and the condition of
Hamlet and Lear “themselves,” insofar as their very nature depends on
realization by a variety of others. It is the condition of living knowingly
in an overlapping of historical ages, of living in a Dublin that is also
a Sligo and where suddenly Callimachus himself pops into relevance.
And it is, finally, the condition that enables one to remain “gay” even
in an age where the “hysterical women” are probably entirely correct

in their prophecies of doom.
It is, moreover, a condition which is never wholly manifest to us,
but which we have the impression here of glimpsing through fortu-
nate chinks or defects in our language: in the ability of the language
to confound incompatible types of predicate without ceasing to make
sense; in the tendency of language in general to throw forth, in the
course of its unfolding, significant possibilities of meaning which are
then obliterated when the utterance takes its final stone-like shape—
when the words “they stare” (suggesting a static, stony way of look-
ing) are added to the last passage quoted above, for example. It does
not seem to me unreasonable to suggest that the “mournful melodies”
requested in the line immediately following the statement “they stare”
are meant as mourning for just that inevitable loss of kinesis in the
completed statement, as also in the undeniable stoniness of the stone,
however brilliantly the language as motion has managed to loosen it
here and there.
Bedient wants very much to read the poem as an instance of
“ecstasy” (21, 30, 33, 38), not utterly unbridled ecstasy, but “joyful
freedom within formal necessity” (37). But the ultimate formal neces-
sity we are faced with—that the poem endures, and that we receive it,
in the form of a page and a half of print—is more than just the gentle
setting of a limit to “joyful freedom.” It is a form of existence that is
entirely incommensurable with “joyful freedom” (strictly incommen-
surable, thus not even an opposite); and this relation of incommen-
surability—since Bedient is after all entirely right about the poem’s
unswerving inclination toward ecstasy—is an undeniable defect in the
poem, a defect conditioned, as in several examples discussed earlier, by
the whole history of the art of poetry.
Wonderful things happen in the poem’s two last sections. We have
not yet looked at the lines: “Over them flies a long-legged bird / A
symbol of longevity.” As in the passages treated above, there is a lin-
guistic chink in these lines, through which enormous vistas may be
glimpsed, a chink created by the apposition of “bird” and “symbol,”
which makes “flies” into the grammatical predicate of “symbol.” The
trouble is that that predicate is inappropriate. Only the bird actually
flies, whereas the symbol is what the bird is in a strictly abstract space.
Symbols don’t fly. Or maybe they do. Yeats could conceivably have
Blake in mind here:
How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?
Or: “When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius. lift up
thy head!”7 And surely the actual flying bird is already a symbol in
the world as modern poetry imagines it under the aegis of Baudelaire’s
famous stanza:
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers

Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.8
Or we think of the definitive symbolist profession of faith in Stefan

George’s rejection of any category difference between words (the ulti-
mate symbols) and all the real material things of the world.
All this history and all this thinking is in effect invoked by Yeats
with the simplest of verbal gestures. But it is invoked in vain. It does
not offer itself for possession. Bedient quotes the poem’s last lines, and
then insists:
The mobility of the scene, its ravaged and ravishing engagement with
time, is now beyond calling back. Impossible to undo such an imagina-
tive commitment, to halt and charge fancy with cheating. Simply, the
imagined scene has become more real than the one the poet acts in, even
if it is the expression of his acting. (31)
I do not think that this point can be sustained in this form. The allu-
sion to Keats is apt, but the other way round: Adieu! The fancy cannot
cheat so well. Adieu! the poem ends and resolves itself into a struc-
ture on paper. The chinks close, the statements now make sense, the
motion and the vision are gone. The inherent problem or defect of
Western poetry, in all of its forms that we have looked at, cannot be
circumvented—whether it is the basic problem of articulation as in
Sappho and Goethe, or the problem of representing speech as an act,
or the problem of the printed text. And my contention is that exactly
this problem, this hopeless situation, forms the occasion not only for
“mournful melodies,” but for the gaiety of those “ancient, glittering
eyes” as well.
mid many wrinkles

We began by talking about etymological pleonasms in the poem’s first
two sections; and we went on to talk about what I called “chinks” in
the language of the last two sections, instances where the language’s
inevitable lack of systematic perfection permits meanings to arise that

do not after all belong to the completed statements in which we find
them. These are, so to speak, accidental cracks or dents in the language
considered as a more or less natural block from which the poem must
be carved. But we have not yet talked about what is perhaps the most
suggestive single accident that the English language has to offer, the
homophony that connects the words “I” and “eye.”
The situation of the speaking “I” in Yeats’s poem is complex and
mutable. In the poem’s first word and first section, it identifies itself
not as an eye, but as a listener or newspaper-reader, as one who can-
not help being aware of current political discussions in a Europe now
rushing headlong toward World War II. Then, at the beginning of the
second section, in the words “All perform their tragic play,” it asserts
itself as its own voice and becomes that voice. But it is still, after all,
only a voice. It cannot offer anything of substance in place of the “hys-
terical” speculations it asks us to turn away from. It does suggest the
possibility of a condition in which one might live, like an actor, both
inside and outside the immediacy of one’s “tragic play.” Here, for the
first time in the poem (in Bedient’s words), “Yeats experiences the
enkindling of his imagination as a power to be what it sees” (31). But
there are problems. The idea is originally Blake’s: “he became what he
beheld”;9 and no reader of Blake (certainly no Yeats) would regard
this event as the satisfactory conclusion to a poetic endeavor. The only
possible ground or warrant for the suggestion that we be what we see
is the tragic vision, “Heaven blazing into the head.” But this vision is
not available to us as ground or warrant, as any form of knowledge
that we might possess or employ. The voice of the “I” is suggestive, but
its suggestions are still empty.
Therefore, in the third section, the “I” takes a step toward becoming
not voice but “eye,” by turning to face the relatively objective material
of history. It is concerned now to find the precondition of becoming
“gay” in history itself, in the overlapping of historical ages, in the idea
that living in history is always the rebuilding of this or that past civi-
lization that has gone “to rack.” And in the course of this turn toward
history, by a miraculous chemistry among apparently random word-
associations, a real “I”—no longer merely the first-person pronoun
but W. B. Yeats himself, along with the objects on his desk—comes
into view in the lamplit shadows of the language. The concentrated
attempt of the poem’s speaking voice to articulate directly a posi-
tion opposed to that of the “hysterical women” had been brilliant
but futile. Now, however, in an entirely unfocused glance at history,
seeking nothing in particular, lumping everything together—“On their
own feet they came, or on shipboard / Camel-back, horse-back, ass-

back, mule-back”—language produces as it were of its own accord the
moment of new visionary concentration that gives the poem its final,
appropriate direction.
The “I” had attempted to identify a “tragic” position of its own
in the confusing political debates of its time. And only afterward, by
a kind of accident, does it find the strictly real version of itself that
might have provided the substance for such an identification. What
is the next step? A repeated attempt at self-identification would only
repeat the failure of the first; the tragic vision remains out of reach.
The “I” has no choice now but to renounce that shadowy moment
of self-knowledge and press forward, no choice but to become more
“eye” than ever by restricting itself absolutely to the object before it
on the desk.
And this move of renunciation works perfectly. The word “I” is rep-
resented now by the word “doubtless”—my “I” being, for Descartes,
the unique area of my experience that is exempt from doubt. The
poem’s “I” now willingly steps out of the central position and iden-
tifies itself with the musician, “doubtless a serving-man.” He speaks
tentatively of how the stone “Seems,” until his imagination gains
confidence and now insists positively that “doubtless plum or cher-
ry-branch / Sweetens the little half-way house.” Meanwhile, the sug-
gestively displaced predicates attached to “Chinamen” and “symbol”
have emerged, as it were of their own accord, along with the parable of
“crack or dent.” (Not to mention the attribute “little,” which operates
inside the fictional world, but also suggests an artist’s or spectator’s
understanding of spatial perspective.) Everything is ready; the stone
has been swept up into the fluid medium of language. And now that
it has given its imagining eye over entirely to the compound reality of
the stone, the “I” itself, at last, can speak its own name again, emphati-
cally, in rhyming position, in an utterance—“and I / Delight to imagine
them seated there . . . On all the tragic scene”—which again magically
erases the difference between enveloping-world and world-observed,
between character and actor, between being and seeing. The poem’s
ecstasy (its literal standing outside itself) climbs constantly to new
heights, until the words “they stare” arrive and resolve that magical
utterance into a statement and thus destroy the magic—thus terminate
the undeniable if still accidental magic which, for a moment at least,
had managed to assert a position entirely incommensurable with any
possible world of political debate.
Our revels now are ended. Accordingly, “One asks for mournful
melodies”—one of the Chinamen, or “One” as the impersonal pronoun
(in yet another “crack or dent” in the language)? Then one last flicker of
the poem’s revels or ecstasy or miraculous self-possession appears in the
word “Accomplished.” Does it mean that the “fingers” have skill or that
they are carved with skill, or somehow both? But then the poem closes
itself into a fully accomplished statement once and for all. Be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. What is there to be cheerful about? How is it
that the “eyes” in the last two lines are still “gay”—especially if we take
them as a kind of plural of “I,” hence a last resort or retreat of the poem’s
speaker? Is it perhaps because that “I” has become a kind of plurality?
I think we find ourselves here once again in the domain of sym-
bolist poetry, at least in the sense I tried to work out in chapters five
and six above. The “I” is eventually established as a principal focus of
meaning in “Lapis Lazuli”: not immediately, as in Verlaine’s “Chanson
d’automne,” but by degrees—first surreptitiously, in the vision of Yeats
and the things on his desk, then “doubtless” in the imagination’s self-
assertion, and then triumphantly: “and I / Delight to imagine them
seated there.” And in modern poetry, this focus automatically brings
with it the meditative assumption (the assumption that the poem’s “I”
is shared by readers, thus pluralized), hence the understanding that
strictly speaking, the poem cannot end. That the poem nevertheless
does end has important consequences, which were discussed in con-
nection with Verlaine above.
But Yeats may in a sense have actually found a way to accomplish
what Verlaine seems to suggest in the line “Et je m’en vais.” The “I” of
“Lapis Lazuli” does not attempt to escape or die, but rather focuses
itself ever more tightly, beyond the reach even of imagination, until
it sees nothing but its own seeing in the obsessively observed “eyes”
of the Chinamen. And this impossibly strict unity of focus, beyond
even the impossibly observed “fingers” of the musician, here at the
poem’s impossible end, now encounters itself as an absurd, homo-
phonic plural, a plural that repeats and recollects: (1) the plurality of
first-persons produced by the meditative assumption, which in turn
brings about the impossibility of the poem’s ending; (2) the magical
plurality of perspectives, the ecstasy, that arises from the stone as both
world and work, a magic that cannot possibly survive the inevitable
resolution of the poem into text or statement; and (3) the plurality of
identities created for every individual in the incessant overlapping of
historical ages that makes up experience. I think it is this moment of
willing renunciation and recollection, in the plural “eyes,” that makes
those eyes “gay.”
For me as a reader, the process is carried out most perspicuously in
the operation of the meditative plural. I, a reader, imagine Yeats (“I”)
seated there, at his desk, imagining himself (“I”) seated there—at the
same desk?—imagining the Chinamen (plural “eyes”) seated there, on
and in the stone. The poem as motion, ecstasy, magic, is related here
to the suggestion of a mise en abîme or infinite regress, and is thus
costumed almost as a threat—whereupon the rigid and pitiless termi-
nation of the poem, in the less liquid than stony, less immediate than
primordial (“ancient”) glittering of the “eyes,” arrives as a kind of
relief, a restoration of at least the possibility of untroubled gaiety in
the here and now.
Or we think of the necessary interlude-character of poetic language
in Stefan George. Yeats is perhaps not aiming for a poetic idiom in
exactly the same sense. But he does maneuver the English language
into a position where it erupts—as it were accidentally, of its own
accord—in sparks and shards of meaning very like those we observed
in “Komm in den totgesagten park,” strictly fugitive meanings that can-
not survive in the language as a fully evolved semiotic system, a vehicle
of statement. Therefore the insistence, at the end of “Lapis Lazuli,” on
the quality of the poem as statement, the insistence on a hard mineral
glitter even more finished and impenetrable than that of the stone, is
an insistence on the inevitable, an insistence on the defectiveness of its
art, on the cleavage of the art into two incommensurable domains: that
of the poem as statement, and that of whatever the mysterious kinesis
was that has now been lost. And as in George, both domains are pre-
served by the insistence on their separation, as opposed to whatever
uncomfortable and dishonest compromise might be imagined. Both
domains are protected by that separation, here the separation of “I”
from “I” in the “eyes” which are therefore—having affirmed or indeed
incorporated the inevitable defect, and so made peace with it—“gay.”
We recall that in George’s poem the little sentence “der wind ist lau”
operates as a kind of cryptic message from the lost yet preserved realm
“inside” the poem. I am inclined to think of the ghostly vision of Yeats
at his desk writing, behind the invocation of Callimachus, as the same
sort of message, left for us from a world that unquestionably exists (in
geographical detail) yet is also separated from this world, for readers,
by a gulf of strict incommensurability.
Poetry and Politics

But what of the poem’s political dimension? This question is
approached most directly by way of the paradox of what it means
to understand a poem. Given the basic defect in poetic art, which in
general takes the form of an unavoidable coexistence or collision of

strictly incommensurable domains—passionate immediacy vs. reflec-
tive articulation; singing or speaking vs. written or printed form;
Becoming vs. Being; words as material objects vs. words as signs; tran-
sience vs. permanence; magical experience vs. statement; tragic action
vs. tragic vision—which last opposition, in Yeats, is interesting because
it works both ways, making the sense of the defect reversible while
leaving its defective nature unchanged: tragic vision is the permanent
universal summary but, even for a reader, is also understood as that
which is out of reach. Given this constitutive defect in poetic art, it
follows that understanding a poem includes the certainty that I have
failed to understand it, that the move of understanding has situated
me where one fundamental aspect of the poem’s operation is strictly
out of reach.
In the opening sections of “Lapis Lazuli,” I think Yeats suggests
that this mode of understanding is called for in the realm of history
and politics as well. The trouble with “hysterical” politics is that it
lays claim to a complete grasp of its historical situation. It knows per-
haps not exactly what needs to be done in the current crisis, but at
least certainly that some “drastic” action is required. And the basis
of this knowledge is precisely the experience of overlapping histori-
cal ages that produces, in the poem’s third section, the ghostly vision
of Yeats writing and the crucial turn toward the stone. The hysterical
politician, like the poetic visionary, undergoes a kind of ecstasy, trans-
ported outside his or her immediate historical situation onto a plane
from which that situation can be observed more or less objectively.
The difference is that the politician regards this transport as a vehicle
of knowledge, whereas the poet (or poetic reader) understands it as
the sign of a defect, a separation of self from self, a tragic action that
can be known only by knowledge in the form of “Heaven blazing into
the head,” a knowledge which is never there until it has ceased to be
useful as knowledge. The politician wishes to exploit the visionary
plane as a viewing platform somehow strictly outside of history; the
poetic visionary accepts it as the intrusion into experience of another
historical age no less blind than our own, as an instance of the con-
stant blundering inter-intrusion of ages by which experience in history
is constituted—not somehow displayed to our intellect.
We are reminded of the essentially political allegory of complicity
in Mörike’s “Auf eine Lampe,” the recognition that there is no such
thing as a point of view detached from one’s condition of historical
belonging, an allegory that criticizes a confident Hegelianism in the
same way that Yeats’s view criticizes a self-induced (thus ultimately
self-satisfied) historical–political hysteria. But in Yeats, as in Mörike,

we might be tempted to question whether any real significance in
the domain of practical politics can be attributed to what is after
all mere poetry. Hence the importance of the debate that was dis-
cussed in chapter seven, for whose participants Mörike’s harmless-
looking poem evidently represented a political danger of existential
proportions.
Yeats’s procedure is in a sense more self-contained than Mörike’s. If
we ask what right he has to express himself as a poet in the political
domain, his response is very simple. It is politics, in particular “hysteri-
cal” politics, that has intruded into the domain of poetry, not vice versa.
Practical politics, the actual business of managing the world from day
to day and from year to year, has been abandoned in favor of a poli-
tics of prophecy, of crisis, of impending doom, a politics which has
appropriated and disfigured a fundamentally poetic understanding of
the world, a politics which more or less deliberately mistakes the need-
ful defectiveness of experience in history, the nagging simultaneity of
different ages, for an avenue of perfect prophetic knowledge. In effect,
Yeats is pleading for a politics that actually does what needs to be done
in the here and now, rather than make “drastic” demands on itself that
cannot possibly be fulfilled. He offers the defectiveness of poetry, the
accidental cracks or dents, as an image of the confusing but perhaps
still manageable defectiveness with which politics must operate.
Politics conducted properly, with an acceptance of the limits of its
understanding, thus in truth has a good deal more in common with
poetry than most modern politicians are in a position to recognize.
I think it is not at all unreasonable to suggest that an awareness of
this state of affairs, in the form in which I have set it forth, is what
enables Yeats, throughout his career, to maintain a sense of himself as
an actor in both fields of endeavor. This does not mean, of course, that
he regards poetry as a form of politics or politics as a form of poetry.
A poem printed in his Last Poems, titled “Politics,” expresses open
disdain for the idea that politics embraces the whole “destiny of man”
in our age. But the point is that both poetry and politics, when con-
ducted properly, involve the acceptance of a radical, irreparable defect
in themselves. Here too, therefore, the separation must be maintained.
Anything like a synthesis or mutual assimilation of poetry and politics
would presuppose an element of positive wholeness mediating between
them. What the two endeavors have in common is in truth nothing but
defect, a defective condition which, when named, is unstrung by the
very act of naming, except perhaps when it is called “the foul rag and
bone shop of the heart.”
Notes
Introduction
1. Paul Valéry, Œuvres, ed. Jean Hytier, 2 vols. (n.p.: Gallmard, 1957, 1960),
2:553.
2. M. L. Gasparov, A History of European Versification, trans. G. S. Smith
and Marina Tarlinskaja (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 1. The use
of line divisions to represent the originally auditory recognition of poetic
segments (e.g., hexameters) is already found in antiquity. See M. B. Parkes,
Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the
West (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992), 97–8.
3. See the discussion of this poem in my book, The Dark Side of Literacy:
Literature and Learning Not to Read (New York, 2008), 75–81, which is
focused upon the nonetheless unalterably defective communicative situa-
tion that the poem presupposes.
4. Œuvres, 2:549.
5. See Republic, 598D–608B. The psychological argument, on poetry’s insin-
uating itself by means of the supposition that its unreality makes it harm-
less, is found in 606A-D.
6. “The Heresy of Paraphrase” is the title of the last chapter of Cleanth
Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947).
7. See Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading
of Rousseau,” in his Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis, 1983), 139, 136.
8. Œuvres, 1:1497.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed.
Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999),
1:47.
10. See Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, 2nd ed., trans. Marilynn
J. Rose (Bloomington: Indiana, 1973), 262–92. The original German,
Die Logik der Dichtung, appeared in three editions, in 1957, 1968, and
1977.
1 Sappho and the Wordsworth Problem

1. See Eva-Maria Voigt, ed., Sappho et Alcaeus: Fragmenta (Amsterdam:
Athenaeum, 1971), 29–33, and Edgar Lobel and Denys Page, eds.,
Poetarum lesbiorum fragmenta (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 2–3.
186 Notes
2. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, De compositione verborum, 173–9.

3. See the editions mentioned in note 1, and Denys Page, Sappho and
Alcaeus: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1955), 9–10. I think I understand the importance of
P. Oxy. xxi. 2288; but I am not sure I understand why a single mark
resembling the top of a ψ or a φ should be permitted to discredit abso-
lutely a reasonable reconstruction from other sources.
4. Sarah T. Mace, “Amour, Encore! The Development of δητε in Archaic
Lyric,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 34 (1993), 335–64.
5. I am not familiar with the etymological evidence, but every dictionary I
was able to consult lists “bait,” or German “Köder, Lockspeise,” as the
word’s original meaning.
6. A. J. Beattie, “A Note on Sappho Fr. 1,” Classical Quarterly N. S., 7 (1957),
181.
7. Anne Carson, “The Justice of Aphrodite in Sappho 1,” in Reading Sappho:
Contemporary Approaches, ed. Ellen Greene (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
U. of California P, 1996), 227.
8. K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge: Harvard, 1978), 173.
9. On Sappho and her competitors, professional or otherwise, see, for exam-
ple, Page, Sappho and Alcaeus, 133–38.
10. See Page, Sappho and Alcaeus, 5.
11. Fragment 15. I use the reconstruction in Lobel and Page (Voigt does not
go as far), but with the superlative suggested by, for example, Max Treu
in Max Treu (ed.), Sappho, 2nd ed. (Munich: Ernst Heimeran, 1958), 34,
rather than Page’s comparative (Sappho and Alcaeus, 45), which I think
makes less sense.
12. William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1800), in Thomas
Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt, eds., The Poetical Works of
Wordsworth (London: Oxford, 1936), 740.
13. For a very detailed study of the Sappho–Homer relation, see Leah Rissman,
Love as War: Homeric Allusion in the Poetry of Sappho (Königstein/Ts.:
Anton Hain, 1983).
14. John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex
and Gender in Ancient Greece (New York, London: Routledge, 1990),
170. The inner reference is to V. di Benedetto, “Il volo di Afrodite in
Omero e in Saffo,” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 16 (1973),
121–3.
15. The disagreement turns on the meaning of ὄττις in line 2: φαίνεταί μοι
κνος ἴσος θέοισιν / ἔμμεν’ ὤνηρ, ὄττις . . . The meaning of ὄττις (Attic
ὅστις) would normally be not “who” but “whoever.” But there are compli-
cations here, which are admirably set forth by Page (Sappho and Alcaeus,
20), who shows three clear possibilities: “(i) ‘That man is fortunate, inas-
much as he sits opposite you (and so would anyone else who did the
same)’, (ii) ‘Any man who sits opposite you is fortunate’ [Winkler’s prefer-
ence], (iii) ‘That man, whatever his name might be, who is sitting opposite
you, is fortunate’” [Page’s preference, and mine].
Notes 187
16. Dolores O’Higgins, “Sappho’s Splintered Tongue: Silence in Sappho

31 and Catullus 51,” American Journal of Philology 111 (1990), 159.
“Nagy” refers to Gregory Nagy, Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic
Meter (Cambridge: Harvard, 1974), 45.
2 The Poem as Hieroglyph: Goethe’s

“Über allen Gipfeln”
1. Goethes Werke, “Weimarer Ausgabe, ” 143 vols. (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–
1918), 1:98. Further references to this edition are abbreviated “WA.”
2. For example, Peter Heller, “Gedanken zu einem Gedicht von Goethe,”
in Versuche zu Goethe: Festschrift für Erich Heller, ed. Volker Dürr and
Géza von Molnár (Heidelberg: Stiehm, 1976), 76–120. See 79 for Heller’s
worry about the mixture of sight and touch in line 4. Heller regards him-
self as a “minority” commentator (78) on the poem; but his (well-argued)
insistence on ambiguity has more to do with the whole character of the
“classical” movement than with the specific text.
3. WA 1:392, mentions the following manuscript: “St: Einzelhandschrift g,
Beilage eines der Briefe Goethes an Frau v. Stein vom Sept. 1780 (Ausg.
Fielitz 1, 276).” “Fielitz” means: Göthes Briefe an Frau von Stein (orig.
1848, ed. A. Schöll), 2. Aufl., ed. W. Fielitz (Frankfurt/Main, 1883). And
the “g” in WA means: written by Goethe himself in black ink. But all of
the twentieth-century references I have found to this document dismiss
it as a careless copy made by Charlotte von Stein from memory, and no
one takes its readings seriously. Still, it does have “Gipffel” (actually “alle
Gipffel,” accusative!), not “Gefilden,” and could conceivably be evidence
of early wavering on Goethe’s part.
4. The translation is from Plotinus, orig. Greek and trans. A. H. Armstrong,
7 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard, 1966), 1:109.
5. A manuscript of those fragments was included in a letter to Zelter of 1
September 1805. See also the letter of 29 August 1805 to Friedrich August
Wolf.
6. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, “Goethe’s Poetry” (orig. 1949), in Wilkinson,
E. W. and L. A. Willoughby, Goethe: Poet and Thinker (London: E. Arnold,
1970), 21. I hope it will not be considered unfair of me that I conduct a
kind of debate with the late Prof. Wilkinson, who is no longer in a posi-
tion to respond. I do so because I think she is still the most formidable
possible opponent, even now. To say that her essay, like most of her work,
is eloquent and persuasive, is an understatement, and the fact that it is
also in some ways seriously mistaken does not diminish its importance.
7. See also Goethe’s long letter to Zelter of October 5, 1828, which includes
this aphorism.
8. The Gickelhahn, or now more commonly Kickelhahn, is the highest hill
(sometimes charitably called a “mountain”) in the vicinity of the small
city of Ilmenau.
188 Notes
9. This poem, “Metamorphose der Thiere,” may well have been written
originally around the same time as “Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen,”
perhaps 1798. But it is also clearly referred to in the note “Hexameter zur
Morphologie” in Goethe’s diary of November 10, 1806. At least the poem
was worked on, perhaps revised and finished, at this time.
10. The abbreviation “pp.” here does not mean pages, but stands for Latin
“pergite,” meaning essentially “etc.”
3 The Voices of Experience in Blake

1. All the texts of Blake that I refer to can be found in David V. Erdman, ed.,
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Newly Revised Edition
(New York: Anchor, 1981). Page numbers in parentheses are those of this
edition.
2. I suppose this little argument can be considered an answer to the question
posed by Hazard Adams, William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems
(Seattle: U. of Washington, 1963), 4: “how much that does not seem triv-
ial or obvious can be said about the following poem?” He is referring to
“Infant Joy.”
3. Hazard Adams, William Blake, especially ch. 3, “‘The Tyger’ as an
Example,” 52–74. See note 2.
4 Meter and Metaphysics: Hölderlin’s

“Hyperions Schicksalslied”
1. In my book Beyond Theory: Eighteenth-Century German Literature and
the Poetics of Irony (Ithaca, 1993), 64–115, I attempted to counter this
philosophizing tendency by taking one of Hölderlin’s earlier, shorter,
less cryptic poems, the Alcaic ode “An die Parzen,” and subjecting it
to a detailed analysis with the aim of showing that not only as state-
ment, but also as a form of enactment, it insists on a radically ironic
and social experience of language. See also the argument on Heidegger
and Hölderlin in my Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism: Its Trail from
Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler (Lewisburg, PA, 2013),
131–3.
2. The text is from Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke: “Frankfurter
Ausgabe,” ed. D. E. Sattler (Frankfurt: Roter Stern, 1975ff.), 11:761–2.
Further references to this edition are marked “FA.” In introducing the
poem, Hyperion calls it “ein Schiksaalslied” (FA 11:761).
3. See the essay “Von der Nachahmung des griechischen Silbenmaßes
im Deutschen,” in Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Ausgewählte Werke
(Munich: Hanser, 1962), 1038–48.
4. See the “Fragment von Hyperion” (FA, 10:47).
Notes 189
5. I translate Hölderlin’s “organisch” as “organic,” even though this is not a

normal use of the English word. An explanation follows in the next para-
graph. And “by a purely organized, purely humanized human being” trans-
lates “vom rein organisirten, rein in seiner Art gebildeten Menschen.”
6. On the problem of talking about fate, see my “The Thinking Machine,”
Revue internationale de philosophie 65, no. 255 (1/2011): 7–26. I think
this essay will also clarify my reasons for looking at Hölderlin’s notes for a
stage drama in this metaphysical connection.
7. De Man, 136. See Introduction, n. 7, for the complete reference.
8. Allegory and symbol are understood here more or less in Goethe’s sense.
The present instance is one of the very few where I would agree that
Goethe’s idea of “symbol” makes sense in a poetic or literary context. The
one passage in Goethe’s work that seems to suggest the use of his idea of
“symbol” to describe a basic poetic technique (WA, 42/2:146), although
it does discuss “allegory,” does not itself contain the word “symbol.” On
these matters, see my Beyond Theory, 204–5, 215–16, and my Goethe’s
Theory of Poetry: Faust and the Regeneration of Language (Ithaca, 1986),
153–58.
5 A Song to Worry about: Verlaine’s

“Chanson d’automne”
1. The text is from Paul Verlaine, Choix de poesies (Paris: Fasquelle, 1961),
27.
2. Emil Staiger, Grundbegriffe der Poetik (Zürich, 1946), 13, my translation.
3. This is the form of the proverb in John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 12th
ed. (Boston, 1951), 17, who cites as his source John Heywood, Proverbes
(orig. 1546), pt. 2, ch. 9. The form in which I recall learning the proverb is,
“’Tis an ill wind that blows no man to good.” The phrase “vent mauvais,”
in any event, smells English to me. And even if it does not refer to the prov-
erb, it is certainly part of a complex of very strong echoes of Shelley’s “Ode
to the West Wind” in Verlaine’s poem. Verlaine could have known Shelley’s
poem in translation—in case one has doubts about how much English he
absorbed at the lycée. On these matters, see V. P. Underwood, Verlaine
et l’Angleterre (Paris: Nizet, 1956), 23–9.
4. I have seen this line translated in any number of ways that attempt to ratio-
nalize the idea of things’ having tears. The unrationalized translation I have
provided is meant to reflect how the line may have appeared to Verlaine,
who after all does attribute sobbing to things.
5. The two elements of the paradox in this form may perhaps be understood
to correspond to Bergson’s “temps” and “durée.” But Bergson does not
seem prepared to admit that even “temps,” in his definition, has its place in
human experience, as the knowledge of mortality. For mortality, although
evidently a function of time, is not subject to the effects of duration. It
does not develop; it is not affected by being known or recalled. It is simply
190 Notes
there—“monotonously” there, or as Bergson might have said, mathemati-

cally there.
6. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum,
1966; orig. 1957), 5.
7. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” in his
Erzählungen, erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, Reisen (Frankfurt/Main: S.
Fischer, 1986), 497. This volume belongs to the series of Hofmannsthal’s
Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden.
8. This assertion is quoted at the beginning of the Introduction above: “Un
poème n’est jamais achevé—c’est toujours un accident qui le termine, c’est-
à-dire qui le donne au public.” Paul Valéry, Œuvres, 2:553. See Introduction,
n. 1 for the reference. There is a larger theoretical issue involved here, which
Derrida formulates famously: “il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” See Jacques
Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore,
1976; orig. French, 1967), 158. That is to say, once you have engaged a text
in any manner, there is no direct way out of it again. For a general com-
mentary on this theoretical matter, see the section on “Hermeneutic Space”
in my All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater (Ithaca, 2005), 172–6.
9. Charles Baudelaire, “Le Confiteor de l’artiste,” in his Œuvres complètes
(Paris: Laffont, 1980), 163.
6 Stefan George and the Construction

of a Poetic Idiom
1. Both poems are reproduced from the first edition of Stefan George, Gesamt-
Ausgabe der Werke: Endgültige Fassung, 18 vols. (Berlin: Bondi, 1927–34).
The first is from vol. 4, Das Jahr der Seele (1928), 12; the second from vol.
9, Das neue Reich (1928), 134. The translations are mine.
2. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN, 1979), 164. See also the
sections on “Content and referent” and “Meaning as cultural unit” (58–68).
3. Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Stuttgart: Neske, 1959), 166, 168–9.
4. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New
York: HarperCollins, 1982), 63, 65–6.
5. This phrase and the sentence quoted below are from Walter Benjamin,
Angelus Novus: Ausgewählte Schriften 2 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,
1988), 10. The translation is found in Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays,
Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York:
Schocken, 1986), 315.
7 Criticism as Wager: The Politics of the

Mörike-Debate and Its Object
1. Eduard Mörike, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Herbert G. Göpfert (Munich: Hanser,
1964), 85.
Notes 191
2. My own attempt at a translation. Compare the translation in “A 1951

Dialogue on Interpretation: Emil Staiger, Martin Heidegger, Leo Spitzer,”
trans. Berel Lang and Christine Ebel, PMLA 105 (1990): 413. The prob-
lems in translation will become clear as we go on, especially the need for
those awkward parentheses in the last line.
3. For a very neat and exact formulation on this point, see Kenneth
S. Calhoon, “The Urn and the Lamp: Disinterest and the Aesthetic Object
in Mörike and Keats,” Studies in Romanticism 26 (1987): 3–25, who says,
“The lamp’s metamorphosis into an art work is contingent upon its being
freed of its practical function; however, the poem also recognizes that to
invest an object with a superordinate meaning is itself an instrumentalist
operation which deprives the object of its identity” (9).
4. Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Frankfurt/Main:
Klostermann, 1983), 63–8.
5. Martin Heidegger, Zur Seinsfrage (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1956),
34–42.
6. Eduard Mörike, Mörikes Werke, ed. Harry Maync, 3 vols. (Leipzig und
Wien, 1914), 1:425.
7. Calhoon (18) notes the parallel of “Lustgemach” with “Kunstgebild” and,
on good evidence, unearths the erotic undertone not only in the word
“Lust,” but also in the image of the lamp. The suppression of erotic under-
tones then in turn parallels, in my argument, the poem’s suppression of its
own psychological diagnosis of aesthetic experience.
8. I suppose Heidegger is using “lucet” almost as an impersonal verb, for
which there is precedent in Vergil: “There is a blissful shining in it itself
(that which is beautiful).”
9. Roy Harvey Pearce, Historicism Once More: Problems & Occasions for
the American Scholar (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969), 23, 24.
10. R. P. Blackmur, Form and Value in Modern Poetry (Garden City:
Doubleday, 1957; orig. 1946), 339.
11. John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, CT, 1941), 335.
12. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry
(New York, 1947), 124–6, 148–50.
13. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act (Ithaca, 1981), 58–60.
14. In his “Linguistics and Literary History,” in Linguistics and Literary
History: Essays in Stylistics (New York, 1962), Spitzer presents himself
in a manner not unlike Staiger’s, by describing his “method” (1, 38) as
no real method at all, but a combination of philological training with
the ability to experience an “inner click” (7) of comprehension. And like
Staiger (“Dialogue,” 410), he appeals to the hermeneutic circle for jus-
tification (19–20). The quality of his writing as power play is not as
transparent as in Staiger. But surely it is a very powerful subterranean
self-doubt that becomes manifest in his (to say the least) surprising invo-
cation of Hitler: “I would advise every older scholar to tell his public the
basic experiences underlying his methods, his Mein Kampf, as it were—
without dictatorial connotations, of course” (1).
192 Notes
8 The Things on Yeats’s Desk

1. Richard J. Finneran, ed., The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 2nd ed.
(New York: Scribner, 1996), 294–5. All quotations of Yeats’s poetry are
from this volume.
2. See, for example, Earl G. Ingersoll, “Yeats’s ‘Quarrel’ with Keats: History
and Art in Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli,’”
Yeats Eliot Review 10 (1989): 59.
3. The cognomen given Callimachus, or adopted by himself—according to
ancient sources—was κατατηξίτεχνος, which I have seen translated in
any number of different ways. To me it suggests: one who makes himself
miserable (as it were, dissolves in tears) with taking artistic pains. See
Pausanius, Description of Greece, 1.16.6–7, where the golden lamp for
Athena is also described, and Pliny, Natural History, 34.92.
4. Ingersoll, 58, and note 9.
5. Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats: 1865–1939 (New York, 1943), 146.
6. Calvin Bedient, “Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’: Romancing the Stone,” Yeats: An
Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 7 (1989): 17–41.
7. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plates 7 and 9, in The Complete Poetry
and Prose of William Blake, 35, 37. See ch. 3, n. 1.
8. The first stanza of “Correspondances,” in Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres
complètes, 8. See ch. 5, n. 9.
9. Milton, 3.29. See also, Jerusalem, 34.50, 54; 36.9, 14, 19; 44.32, in The
Complete Poetry and Prose, 97, 177, 178, 187.
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Baudelaire, Charles. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Laffont, 1980.
Beattie, A. J. “A Note on Sappho Fr. 1.” The Classical Quarterly N. S., 7
(1957): 180–3.
Bedient, Calvin. “Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’: Romancing the Stone.” Yeats: An
Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 7 (1989): 17–41.
Benjamin, Walter. Angelus Novus: Ausgewählte Schriften 2. Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp, 1988.
———. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by
Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken, 1986.
Bennett, Benjamin. Goethe’s Theory of Poetry: Faust and the Regeneration of
Language. Ithaca: Cornell, 1986.
———. Beyond Theory: Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the
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Blackmur, R. P. Form and Value in Modern Poetry. Garden City: Doubleday,
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Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Newly
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Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry.
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Calhoon, Kenneth S. “The Urn and the Lamp: Disinterest and the Aesthetic
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Carson, Anne. “The Justice of Aphrodite in Sappho 1.” In Reading Sappho:
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(1989): 57–60.
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Catullus 51.” American Journal of Philology 111 (1990): 156–67.
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Spitzer, Leo. Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics. New York:
Russell & Russell, 1962.
Staiger, Emil. Grundbegriffe der Poetik. Zürich: Atlantis, 1946.
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Index
Adams, Hazard, 68, 71–5, 188n2–3 Ebel, Christine, 191n2

Althusser, Louis, 162 Eco, Umberto, 130, 190n2
Archilochus, 4 Empedocles, 90–1
Aristotle, 23–4, 26 Erdman, David V., 188n1
Armstrong, A. H., 187n4
Fielitz, W., 187n3
Bartlett, John, 189n3 Finneran, Richard J., 192n1
Baudelaire, Charles, 114, 124, 132, Freud, Sigmund, 139
177, 190n9, 192n8 Frye, Northrop, 114, 190n6
Beattie, A. J., 15–16, 186n6
Bedient, Calvin, 174–80, 192n6 Gasparov, M. L., 2–3, 185n2
Benedetto, V. di, 25, 186n14 George, Stefan, 4, 8, 118, 127–44,
Benjamin, Walter, 143, 159, 190n5 177, 181, 190n1
Bergson, Henri, 189–90n5 Göchhausen, Luise von, 32
Blackmur, R. P., 160–1, 191n10 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7, 29,
Blake, William, 4, 7, 10, 55–82, 97, 31–51, 84, 100, 138, 151, 152,
104, 136, 176–7, 178, 188n1, 177, 187n1, 187n3, 189n8
192n7, 192n9 Greene, Ellen, 186n7
Braque, Georges, 125
Brooks, Cleanth, 7, 160, 185n6, Hamann, Johann Georg, 143
191n12 Hamburger, Käte, 10, 185n10
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 83,
Calhoon, Kenneth S., 149, 191n3, 124, 182
191n7 Heidegger, Martin, 83, 130–2,
Callimachus (the sculptor), 167, 141, 143, 147, 149–50, 152,
170–2, 175, 181, 192n3 154, 155, 158–9, 161, 163,
Carson, Anne, 16, 18–19, 20, 186n7 188n1, 190n3–4, 191n2,
Clifton, Harry, 174 191n4–5, 191n8
Heine, Heinrich, 156–7, 162, 164
Dante, 136 Heller, Peter, 187n2
de Man, Paul, 95, 185n7 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 32, 143
Demetz, Peter, 190n5 Hertz, Peter D., 190n4
Derrida, Jacques, 5, 190n8 Hesiod, 21
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 14, Heywood, John, 189n3
186n2 Hitler, Adolf, 191n14
Donne, John, 160 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 114,
Dover, K. J., 19, 186n8 190n7
Dulac, Edmund, 168 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 7, 83–104, 119,
Dürr, Volker, 187n2 188n1–2
198 Index
Homer, 14–15, 24–8 Ransom, John Crowe, 160,

Hone, Joseph, 192n5 191n11
Hutchinson, Thomas, 186n12 Richards, I. A., 160
Hytier, Jean, 185n1 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 151
Rimbaud, Arthur, 113
Ingersoll, Earl G., 192n2, 192n4 Rissman, Leah, 186n13
Izambard, Georges, 113 Rose, Marilynn J., 185n10
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 44
Jameson, Fredric, 8, 161, 162,
191n13 Sappho, 4, 7, 13–30, 66, 92,
172, 177
Kant, Immanuel, 40–2, 44, 90, 113, Sattler, D. E., 188n2
122, 141 Schelling, Friedrich, 83
Keats, John, 4–5, 177 Schiller, Friedrich, 89–90, 91
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, Schöll, A., 187n3
84, 188n3 Selincourt, Ernest de, 186n12
Shakespeare, William, 132, 160, 167,
Lang, Berel, 191n2 169, 172–4, 175
Lindenberger, Herbert, 147, 159 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 143, 189n3
Lobel, Edgar, 14, 185n1, 186n11 Smith, G. S., 185n2
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 55 Sophocles, 168
Lukács, Georg, 159 Spitzer, Leo, 147, 152, 155,
158–9, 161, 162, 163,
Mace, Sarah T., 14, 17, 24, 186n4 191n2, 191n14
Mill, John Stuart, 114 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty,
Molnár, Géza von, 187n2 190n8
Mörike, Eduard, 8, 147–64, 182–3, Staiger, Emil, 107–8, 147, 148–50,
190n1, 191n6 152, 154, 155, 158–63, 189n2,
191n2, 191n14
Nagy, Gregory, 28, 187n16 Stein, Charlotte von, 187n3
Newton, Isaac, 47
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9, 185n9 Tarlinskaja, Marina, 185n2
Treu, Max, 186n11
O’Higgins, Dolores, 28–30, 187n16
Underwood, V. P., 189n3
Page, Denys, 14, 15, 16–17, 28,
185n1, 186n3, 186n11, 186n15 Valéry, Paul, 1–2, 5, 8, 56, 116,
Parkes, M. B., 185n2 185n1, 190n8
Pausanius, 192n3 Vergil, 55, 112, 117
Pearce, Roy Harvey, 159, 191n9 Verlaine, Paul, 8, 10, 107–25, 137,
Picasso, Pablo, 125 138, 141–2, 180, 189n1
Plato, 5–6, 35–6, 38, 91 Voigt, Eva-Marie, 14, 185n1,
Plotinus, 38–42, 44, 51, 187n4 186n11
Index 199
Wilkinson, Elizabeth M., 42–4, Wordsworth, William, 13, 22–4, 26,

47–9, 187n6 28–30, 160, 186n12
Willoughby, L. A., 187n6
Winkler, John J., 25–6, 27, 186n14, Yeats, William Butler, 8, 10, 97,
186n15 165–83, 192n1
Wittig, Monique, 25
Wolf, Friedrich August, 187n5 Zelter, Karl Friedrich, 187n5, 187n7

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The Defective Art of Poetry

To myself, and anyone of similar condition: Be cheerful, sir.

Part I Elemental Poetry

Two The Poem as Hieroglyph: Goethe’s “Über allen Gipfeln” 31

Part II Meter and Meaning

Four Meter and Metaphysics: Hölderlin’s

Part III The Symbolist Move

Six Stefan George and the Construction of a Poetic Idiom 127

Part IV The Political Dimension

Eight The Things on Yeats’s Desk 165

For encouragement and criticism, I am deeply indebted to my col-

My purpose is to present a detailed general argument about how I

Un poème n’est jamais achevé—c’est toujours un accident qui le ter-

B. Bennett, The Defective Art of Poetry

A Simple-Minded but Not Mistaken

Verse is text that is felt to be language of particular seriousness, intended

listeners) by extra-linguistic means: in written poetry usually through

very process of trying to heal or circumvent it. We cannot simply turn

The Need for a Less Simple-Minded

Immediacy and Articulation

Le lyrisme est le genre de poésie qui suppose la voix en action—la voix

But as long as we avoid understanding presence as a general

since the experience in poetic form is not a real one, surrendering to it

What My Book Actually Does

interpretation in which nothing whatever is left out of account; and

Part III, “The Symbolist Move,” treats Verlaine’s “Chanson

a quality by virtue of which the work becomes complete and suf-

A reader who is interested in details of the debate on this mat-

Sappho and the Wordsworth Problem

ποικιλόθρον’ ἀθανάτ’ Ἀφρόδιτα,

[You, on your many-colored throne, immortal Aphrodite, trap-weaving

B. Bennett, The Defective Art of Poetry

The above reconstruction of Sappho’s famous complaint to Aphrodite

especially as used in fishing (e.g., Odyssey, 12.252).5 Which means

In other words, as long as we take πείθω as a verb (not a noun, not

must refer to Aphrodite: [you asked] whom am I yet again persuading

My own preference would be to translate ἐς σὰν φιλότατα with “into

The crucial recognition here is that we cannot accept the standard

we must treat Sappho’s love as a courtship game. Which it is obviously

is not what the Greek words say. Aphrodite’s statements contain no

In other words, Sappho is asking not for a fulfilled love-relation-

Within the strict conventions of Greek homosexual Eros such a revenge

But the instances of this “common human experience” that Carson

Carson’s defense of this part of her argument, that with women, as

It is a commonplace of homosexual relations between men in the Greek

The Two Faces of Aphrodite

What is operating here in the background, it seems to me, is the fact

Κύπρι καί σε πικροτάταν ἐπεύροι

I am suggesting that at least for Sappho’s purposes, the attractive and

essentially also the author of my suffering.) There is no way out of the

Wordsworth and the Representation

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:

But for Sappho, I think, there is no gap of inner emotional self-repro-

[The Poet] has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing

Sappho, I think, would object—and I would agree with her—that even

My contention, however, is that pleasure in this sense is not the

Sappho and Homer

Sappho is acting out the parts both of Diomedes and of Aphrodite as

passion itself, whereas the speaker of poem 31 is situated in the very

The anonymous “that man whosoever” . . . is a rhetorical cliché, not an

But this question, even if it is ultimately undecidable,15 does not change

how fortunate a bridegroom will be, Odysseus is expressing (however

The reference to oral poetry is somewhat beside the point here, as

Two The Poem as Hieroglyph: Goethe’s “Über allen Gipfeln” 31

Four Meter and Metaphysics: Hölderlin’s

Six Stefan George and the Construction of a Poetic Idiom 127

Eight The Things on Yeats’s Desk 165