vanished people=Hieros

David Stockhoff · 11 Nov 2011, 22:47 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:47:02 -0500
Subject: (urth) vanished people=Hieros
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On 11/11/2011 4:11 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> David Stockhoff wrote:
>
>>> I think that's a very Western, modernist view of poetry, to which
>>> Khayaam probably did not subscribe.
>>>
>> But Khayaam didn't write the poem. Fitzgerald did.
> Well, he translated it, which is kind of like writing a whole new
> poem. (Traductore, traduttore.) But even FitzGerald is a bit early for
> modernism, I believe.
>

That's true. But to be precise, it's not about poetry per se but about 
metaphor. All metaphors invoke at least four meanings. If we say, Strike 
off the head (of the beast), we invoke (1) a head (2) a beast's body (3) 
Saddam or your favorite Hitler stand-in (4) Iraq or Al-Qaeda or 
whatever. Every part has at least two meanings. There is a source word 
and a target word and additionally a potentially hidden figurative means 
or mechanism (in this case the body) by which to relate them, without 
which the metaphor fails.

That's what I meant. This poem needs to get stuck on something to be 
more than a clockwork of literal things: A strikes B strikes C and the 
poem gets to its destination like a train "down the ringing grooves of 
change." We have disparate images on top of one another describing two 
events in parsimonious language that reuses some elements and introduces 
others as it goes along. What caught Wolfe's ear?

Morning flings a stone into the bowl of night, setting stars to flight; 
a hunter catches a tower in a noose of light. Both are Dawn, so we know 
the stars fled the light. But they must connect in other ways too. 
Together, they must describe a magical, contradictory, paradoxical 
moment; they are not two views of a blackbird.

Where did the stone go? The stone is a means by which Morning causes the 
stars to "flee" or vanish; it is part of the "bowl of night full of 
stars" metaphor as James notes. It doesn't need to be Venus, or anything 
else, but Venus is available, as is the sun. It doesn't need to be 
anything in the second event, but it is awkward to imagine the stone 
being a thing that is also in the second event, as Gerry notes---the sun 
is clearly implied there by the word "light" and is nothing like a 
stone. Venus is more like a stone. But again, it is not needed. For 
Wolfe's purposes, both work great and I have no preference.

Where was Morning before she came? Morning precedes and follows the poem 
as a personified process, encompassing it. She initiates and completes 
the process that is herself. She is not quite present but she will be.

Where did the hunter come from? Night is still present in the second 
event, robbed of its stars. Morning is not yet present, or else the 
noose would be invisible: it is Night that makes the noose visible. What 
else may persist? Unless the sun is known as a noose-hunter, it is 
rather awkward to invoke a new metaphor or image not even fully imagined 
until the last line (though the third line tells us he not a killer but 
a catcher of things).

What does the sun catch but not kill? Perhaps the sun catches that which 
it illuminates, but that's hard to read from "the Hunter in the East has 
caught" if you don't react, "Oh, the Sun, that old Hunter in the East. 
Of course." I argue that the Hunter is already there---and is known by 
the reader to be there, because he's there all summer and fall---and has 
snared his prey at the moment he himself disappears.

It is this paradoxical act of disappearing in plain sight---achieving 
victory in defeat---invisibility in visibility---that the poem describes 
as the moment of dawn. Wolfe turns it a bit inside out, but it works on 
so many levels: the way evil works for good; the way the gods favor 
those they would destroy; to see me, look!; the way all things turn into 
other things; the way Severian saves Urth by destroying it in this very 
book. The New Sun stuff just rams it home.

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