NP: The Phoenix and the Turtle(dove)

[Glenn Scheper]

'Nother web gem:
http://phoenixandturtle.net/excerptmill/underwood.htm
Survey of Scholarship on Shakespeare's The Phoenix and the Turtle.

The reference here is to sympathetic communion. This is a doctrine that is universal, though of course implicit among all primitive peoples a belief that things that have been intimately associated are mystically bound together even after separation and far removal. The fates of the two parts are interlinked. So distance and space do not enter into the question.'

Cunningham commits himself to the specific, whereas Ranjee is vague and desultory. He begins his essay by saying that 'the use of some field or system of ideas in the writer's tradition" often serves as a principle of order, serv-ing 'as a scheme or paradigm by which material of another order is apprehended"; in this case, 'the material of courtly love in Shake-speare's Phoenix and Turtle is treated in terms of scholarly theology".

The souls of the Phoenix and Turtle merge in a love dimension very like NOUS and become one soul (so far as personality is concerned) and yet each is identifiably "Turtle" and "Phoenix."

According to Cunningham (pp. 269-70), the poem "concludes with a threne over the urn where their cinders lie, to the effect that Beauty and Truth (that is, Love and Constancy) are now dead, for these were their ideal forms, the substances of which any sub-sequent appearances are shadows."

It is metaphysical in a more obviously intellectual way than most 'Metaphysical' poetry"; it states its problems "in the philosophical language of the time" with a rigorous clarity. 'One move towards understanding the poem, then, is to define some of its terms.'

'The Phoenix and Turtle,' writes Campbell, is related to Chaucer's Parlement of Fowles and particularly to the abstruse symbolism of emblem literature which flourished during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in England and on the Continent. The distinctive char-acteristic of an emblem, usually an engraved figure, is that it has a meaning more general and abstruse than the representative signifi-cance of the drawing. For example, the figure of the turtledove was a time-honored emblem of conjugal love; while the phoenix was the emblem of something unique. Here it stands for the phoenix's absolute and eternal devotion to the turtledove. . . . [Shakespeare's] theme is the mystical union of the two.

To what degree Shakespeare's phrasing may have been prompted by the biblical thought that in the resurrection "they shall neither marry nor be married" remains conjecture. In the metaphysical vein the phrase would permit of translation in terms of such love as that celebrated by Donne in his "Valediction," love so completely and purely a union of minds and souls that it rests not in physical union, which is the essence of "sublunary love."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_and_the_Turtle
The Phoenix and the Turtle

Let the bird of loudest lay,
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.


But thou, shrieking harbinger,
Foul pre-currer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever's end,
To this troop come thou not near.


>From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feather'd king:
Keep the obsequy so strict.


Let the priest in surplice white,
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-divining swan,
Lest the requiem lack his right.


And thou, treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender mak'st
With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st,
'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.


Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.


So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.


Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
'Twixt the turtle and his queen;
But in them it were a wonder.


So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix' sight:
Either was the other's mine.


Property was thus appall'd,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was call'd.


Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either-neither,
Simple were so well compounded


That it cried how true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none
If what parts can so remain.


Whereupon it made this threne
To the phoenix and the dove,
Co-supreme and stars of love;
As chorus to their tragic scene.


THRENOS.

Beauty, truth, and rarity.
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos'd in cinders lie.


Death is now the phoenix' nest;
And the turtle's loyal breast
To eternity doth rest,


Leaving no posterity:--
'Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.


Truth may seem, but cannot be:
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.


To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.


I can answer this paradox, the heiros gamos:
The union although apart of the autofellator
and the autocunnilingtrix. Perhaps a certain
virginity is requied. Plath is no Dickinson.

cf:
Emily Dickinson Complete Poems.
Part Four: Time and Eternity
X
 
I DIED for beauty, but was scarce  
Adjusted in the tomb,  
When one who died for truth was lain  
In an adjoining room.  
   
He questioned softly why I failed?         5 
“For beauty,” I replied.  
“And I for truth,—the two are one;  
We brethren are,” he said.  
   
And so, as kinsmen met a night,  
We talked between the rooms,         10 
Until the moss had reached our lips,  
And covered up our names. 


I recently met a young girl, and there were
many of the attendant spiritual effects, as
at other times, but this one included robust
verbal communication of a sexual nature. E.g.,
"Fuck me Jesus Christ. Fuck you Jesus Christ."
over and over, and more explicit encouragment.

This, laid on Revelation, is the throne, and
all the seven stars and seven churches, and
four beasts and 24 elders, rolled into one;
Not laboriously weighed and separated onto
seven coital partners, as I have labored.

It's reversal (69) is the 3.5 days and the
3.5 years of the two witnesses. Notably, it
says "they loved not their lives unto death"
suggesting to me they were so enraptured in
each other, that they forsook their own monadic
completion, that poetic death of the autoerotic,
so Revelation contrasts both those poems.

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.