CHAPTER ONE

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Few of us are prepared to accept the statement that the language

of poetry is the language of paradox. Paradox is the language of
sophistry, hard, bright, witty; it is hardly the language of the
soul. We are willing to allow that paradox is a permissible
weapon which a Chesterton may on occasion exploit. We may
permit it in epigram, a special subvariety of poetry; and in satire,
which though useful, we are hardly willing to allow to be poetry
at all. Our prejudices force us to regard paradox as intellectual
rather than emotional, clever rather than profound, rational
rather than divinely irrational.
Yet there is a sense in which paradox is the language appro
priate and inevitable to poetry. It i the scientist whose truth
requires a language pflrged of every trace of paradox; appar
ently the truth which the poet utten can be approached only
in terms of paradox. I oventate the case, to be sure; it is pos
sible that the title of this chapter is itself to be treated as merely
a paradox. But there are reasons for thinking that the oventate
ment which I propose may light up some elements in the nature
of poetry which tend to be overlooked.
The case of William Wordsworth, for instance, is instructive
on this point. His poetry would not appear to promise many
examples of the language of paradox. He usually prefen the
direct attack. He insists on simplicity; he distrusts whatever
a

sophistical. And yet the typical Wordsworth poem is

based upon a paradoxical situation. Consider his celebrated

T1oe Well Wro.. ht Un1

seems

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,

The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration. . . .

The poet is filled with worship, but the girl who walks beside
him is not worshiping. The implication is that she should re
spond to the holy time, and become like the evening itself,
nunlike; but she seems less worshipful than inanimate nature
itself. Yet
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in A braham's bosom all the year;
A nd worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.

The underlying paradox (of which the enthusiastic reader may

well be unconscious) is nevertheless thoroughly necessary, even
for that reader. Why does the innocent girl worship more
deeply than the self<onscious poet who walks beside her? Be
cause she is filled with an unconscious sympathy for all of na
ture, not merely the grandiose and solemn. One remembers the
lines from Wordsworth's friend, Coleridge:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
A ll things both great and small.

Her unconscious sympathy is the unconscious worship. She is

in communion with nature "all the year," and her devotion is
continual whereas that of the poet is sporadic and momentary.
But we have not done with the paradox yet. It not only under
lies the poem, but something of the paradox informs the poem,
though, since this is Wordsworth, rather timidly. The compari
son of the evening to the nun actually has more than one di
mension. The calm of the evening obviously means "worship,"

1h La ...... of........

even to the dull-witted and insensitive. It corresponds to the

trappings of the nun, visible to everyone. Thus, it suggests not
merely holiness, but, in the total poem, even a hint of Pharisai
cal holiness, with which the gi rl's careless innocence, itself a
symbol of her continual secret worship, stands in contrast.
Or consider Wordsworth's sonnet, "Composed upon West
minster Bridge . " I believe that most readers will agree that it ia
one of Wordsworth's most success ful poems; yet most students
have the greatest difficulty in accounting for its goodness. The
attempt to account for it on the grounds of nobility of senti
ment soon breaks down. On this level, the poem merely says:
that the city in the morning light presents a picture which is
majestic and touch ing to all but the most dull of soul; but the
poem says very little more about the sight: the city is beautiful
in the morning light and it is awfully still. The attempt to make
a case for the poem in terms of the brilliance of ita images also
quickly breaks down : the student searches for graphic details in
vain; there are next to no realistic touches. In fact, the poet
simply huddles the details together:

silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields . . . .

We get a blurred impression..:..points of roofs and pinnacles

along the skyline, all twinkling in the morning light. More than
that, the sonnet as a whole contains some very flat writing and
some well-worn comparisons.
The reader may ask: Where, then, does the poem get ita
power? It gets it, it seems to me, from the paradoxical situation
out of which the poem arises. The speaker is honestly surprised,
and he manages to get some sense of awed surprise into the
poem. It is odd to the poet that the city should be able to "wear
the beauty of the morning" at all. Mount Snowden, Skiddaw,
Mont Blanc-these we'ar it by natural right, but surely not

,.... w.a1 w....ld u..

grimy, feverish London. This is the point of the almost shocked

exclamation:

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill

smokeless air" reveals a city which the poet did not know
man-made London is a part of nature too, is lighted
by the sun of nature, and lighted to as beautiful effect.

The

"

existed:

The river glideth at his own sweet will .

A ri ver is the

most "natural" thing that one can imagine; it

has the elasticity, the curved line of nature itself. The poet had
never been able to regard this one as a real river-now, unclut
tered by barges, the river reveals itself as a natural thing, not
at all disciplined into a rigid and mechanical pattern: it is like
the daffodils, or the mountain brooks, artless, and whimsical,
and "natural" as they. The poem closes, you will remember, as
follows:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

The

in the poet's insight of the morning, has earned its

to be considered organic, not merely mechanical. That is
why the stale metaphor of the sleeping houses is strangely re
newed. The most exciting thing that the poet can say about the
houses is that they are asleep. He has been in the habit of count
ing them dead-as just mechanical and inanimate; to say they
are asleep" is to say that they are alive, that they participate
in the life of nature. In the same way, the tired old metaphor
which sees a great city as a pulsating heart of empire becomes
revivified. It is only when the poet sees the ci ty under the sem
blance of death that he can see it as actually al i ve-qu ick with
the only life which he can accept, the organ ic life of "nature."
It is not my intention to exaggerate Wordsworth's own con
sciousness of the paradox involved. In this poem , he prefen, as
right

"

city,

is usual with him, the frontal attack. But the situation is para
doxical here as in so many of his poems. In his preface to the
second edition of the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth stated that
his general purpose was "to choose incidents and situations
.from common life" but so to treat them that "ordinary things
should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect." Cole-
ridge was to state the purpose for him later, in terms which
make even more evident Wordsworth's exploitation of the para
doxical: "Mr. Wordsworth
was to propose to himself as
his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day,
and to excite a feeling analogow to the supernatural, by awak
ening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and di
recting it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before
us
" Wordsworth, in shon, was consciously attempting to
show his audience that the common was really uncommon, the
prosaic was really poetic.
Coleridge's terms, "the charm of novelty to things of every
day," "awakening the mind," suggest the Romantic preoccupa
tion with wonder-the surprise, the revelation which puts the
tarnished familiar world in a new light. This may well be the
raison d'ltre of most Romantic paradoxes; and yet the neo
classic poets use paradox for much the same reason. Consider
Pope's lines from "The Essay on Man" :

'llle ......... of .......

In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;

Bom but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
A like in ignorance, his Reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much

Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Great Lord of all things, yet a Prey to all;
Sole Judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl'd;
The Glory, ]est, and Riddle of the world!

Here, it is true, the paradoxes insist on the irony, rather than

the wonder. But Pope too might have claimed that he was

treating the things of everyday, man h ims elf and awakening

his mind so that he would view himself in a new and blinding
light. Thus, there is a certain awed wonder in Pope jus t as there
is a certain trace of irony implicit in the Wordsworth sonnets.
There is, of course, no reason why they shou ld not occur to
gether, and they do. Wonder and irony merge in many of the
lyrics of Blake; they merge in Coleridge's A ncient Mariner.
The variations in emphasis are numerous. Gray's "Elegy" uses
a typica l Wordsworth "situation" with the rural scene and with
peasan ts contemplated i n the light of their "betters." But in
the "Elegy" the balance is heavil y tilted in the direction of
irony, the revelation an ironic rather than a startling one :
8

The Well w.... ht U

,

Can storied urn or animated bust

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath1
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust1
Or Flatt'ry sooth the dull cold ear of Death1

But I am not here interested in enumerating the possible varia

tions; I am interested rather in our seeing tha t the paradoxes
spring from the very nature of the poet's language: it is a lan
guage in which the connotations play as grea t a part as the
denotations. And I do not mean that the connotations are im
portant as supplying some sort of frill or tri mm ing something
external to th e real matter in hand. I mean that the poet does
not use a notation at all-as the scientist may properly be said
to do so. The poet, within limits, has to make up his language
as h e goes.
T. S. Eliot has commented upon "that perpetual slight alter
ation of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and
sudden combinations," which occurs in poetry. It is perpetual;
it cannot be kept out of the poem; it can only be directed and
controlled. The tendency of science is necessarily to stabilize
terms, to freeze them into strict denotations; the poet s tendency
is by contrast disruptive. The terms are continually modifying
each other, and thus violating their dictionary meanings. To
,

'

,.. ..... .... .. ,. .....

take a very simple example, consider the adjectives in the first

lines of Wordsworth's evening sonnet: beauteous, calm, /Tee,
holy, quiet, bTeathless. The juxtapositions are hardly startling;
and yet notice this : the evening is like a nun breathless with
adoration. The adjective "breathless" suggests tremendous ex
citement; and yet the evening is not only quiet but calm. There
is no final contradiction, to be sure: it is that kind of calm and
that kind of excitement, and the two states may well occur to
gether. But the poet has no one term. Even if he had a polysyl
labic technical term, the term would not provide the solution
for his problem. He must work by contradiction and qualifi
cation.
We may approach the problem in this way: the poet has to
work by analogies. All of the subtler states of emotion, as I. A.
Richards has pointed out, necessarily demand metaphor for
their expression. The poet must work by analogies, but the
metaphors do not lie in the same plane or fit neatly edge to
edge. There is a continual tilting of the planes; necessary over
lappings, discrepancies, contradictions. Even the most direct
and simple poet is forced into paradoxes far more often than
we think, if we are sufficiently alive to what he is doing.
But in dilating on the difficulties of the poet's task I do not
want to leave the impression that it is a task which necessarily
defeats him, or even that with his method he may not win to a
fine precision. To use Shakespeare's figure, he can
,

with assays of bias

By indiTections find diTections out.

Shakespeare had in mind the game of lawnbowls in which the

bowl is distorted, a distortion which allows the skillful player
to bowl a curve. To elaborate the figure, science makes use of
the perfect sphere and its attack can be direct. The method of
art can, I believe, never be direct-is always indirect. But that
does not mean that the master of the game cannot place the
bowl where he wants it. The serious difficulties will only occur

10

when he confuses his game with that of science and mistakes the
nature of his appropriate instrument. Mr. Stuart Chase a few
years ago, with a touching naivete, urged us to take the distor
tion out of the bowl-to treat language like notation.
I have said that even the apparently simple and straight
forward poet is forced into paradoxes by the nature of his
instrument. Seeing this, we should not be surprised to find poets
who consciously employ it to gain a compression and precision
otherwise unobtainable. Such a method, like any other, carries
with it its own perils. But the dangers are not overpowering;
the poem is not predetermined to a shallow and glittering soph
istry. The method is an extension of the normal language of
poetry, not a perversion of it.
I should like to refer the reader to a concrete case . Donne's
"Canonization" ought to provide a sufficiently extreme instance.
The basic metaphor which underlies the poem (and which is
reflected in the title) involves a son of paradox. For the poet
daringly treats profane love as if it were divine love. The can
onization is not that of a pair of holy anchorites who have re
nounced the world and the flesh. The hermitage of each is the
other's body; but they do renounce the world, and so their title
to sainthood is cunningly argued. The poem then is a parody of
Christian sainthood; but it is an intensely serious parody of a
son that modern man, habituated as he is to an easy yes or no,
can hardly understand. He refuses to accept the paradox as a
serious rhetorical device; and since he is able to accept it only
as a cheap trick, he is forced into this dilemma. Either: Donne
does not take love seriously; here he is merely sharpening his
wit as a sort of mechanical exercise. Or: Donne does not take
sainthood seriously; here he is merely indulging in a cynical
and bawdy parody.
This poem, along with seven other poems discussed in this book, may be
found in Appendix Three. The texts of the two other poems discussed, Macbeth
and The Rape of the Loclc, are too lengthy to be included, but the passap ex
amined in 11101t detail are quoted in full.

II

,.. ... .. .... .. ... ....

Neither account js true; a reading of the poem will show

that Donne takes both love and religion seriously; it will show,
further, that the paradox is here his inevitable instrument. But
to see this plainly will require a closer reading than most of us
give to poetry.
The poem opens dramatically on a note of exasperation. The
you whom the speaker addresses is not identified. We can
imagine that it is a person, perhaps a friend, who is objecting
to the speaker's love affair. At any rate, the person represents
the practical world which regards love as a silly affectation. To
use the metaphor on which the poem is built, the friend repre
sents the secular world which the lovers have renounced.
Donne begins to suggest this metaphor in the first stanza by
the contemptuous alternatives which he suggests to the friend:
"

"

... chide my plllsie, or my gout,

My five gray haires, or ruin'd fortune flout....

The implications are: ( 1) All right, consider my love as an in

firmity, as a disease, if you will, but confine yourself to my other
infirmities, my palsy, my approaching old age, my ruined for
tune. You snd a better chance of curing those; in chiding me
for this one, you are simply wasting your time as well as mine.
(1) Why don't you pay attention to your own welfare-go on
and get wealth and honor for yourself. What should you care if
I do give these up in pursuing my love.
The two main categories of secular success are neatly, and
contemptuously epitomized in the line
Or the Kings reall, or his stamped face

Cultivate the coun and gaze at the king's face there, or, if you
prefer, get into business and look at his face stamped on coins.
But let me alone.
This conflict between the "real" world and the lover absorbed
in the world of love runs through the poem; it dominates the

Tile Well w,.... t Un

12

1ee0nd stanza in which the torments of love,

10

vivid

to

the

lover, affect the real world not at all -

What merchants ships have my sighs drown'd1

It is touched on in the fourth stanza in the contrast between the
word "Chronicle" which suggests secular history with its pomp
and magnificence, the history of kings and princes, and the word
"sonnets" with its suggestions of trivial and precious intricacy.
The conflict appears again in the last stanza, only to

be resolved

when the unworldly lovers, love's saints who have given up the
world, paradoxically achieve a more intense world. But here
the paradox is still contained in, and supported by, the domi

by giving up this one.

nant metaphor:

so

does the holy anchorite win a better world

But before going on to discuss this development of the theme,

it is important to see what else the second stanza does. For it is

in this second stanza and the third, that the poet shifts the tone
of the poem, modulating from the note of irritation with which
the poem opens into the quite different tone with which it
closes.
Donne accomplishes the modulation of tone by what may
called an analysis of love-metaphor. Here,

as

be

in many of his

poems, he shows that he is thoroughly self-conscious about what

he is doing.

This second s tanza, he fills with the conventionalized

figures of the Petrarchan tradition: the wind of lovers' sighs,

the floods of lovers' tears, etc.-extravagant figures with which
the contemptuous secular friend might

be

expected to tease the

lover. The implication is that the poet himself recognizes the

absurdity of the Petrarchan love metaphors. But what of it?

may

The very absurdity of the jargon which lovers are expected to

talk makes for his argument: their love, however absurd it

appear

to

the world, does no harm to the world. The practical

friend need have no fears: there will still

be

wan to fight and

lawsuits to argue.
The opening of the third stanza suggests that this vein of

13

n. La .......... .....

irony i s to b e maintained. The poet points out t o h is friend the

infinite fund of such absurdities which can be applied to loven:

Call her one, mee another flye,

We'are Tapers too, and at our owne cost die

For that matter, the lovers can conjure up for themselves plenty
of such fantastic comparisons: they know what the world thinks
of them. But these figures of the third stanza are no longer the
threadbare Petrarchan conventionalities; they have sharpness
and bite. The last one, the likening of the lovers to the phoenix,

is

fully seriow, and with it, the tone has shifted from ironic

banter into a defiant but controlled tenderness.

The effect of the poet's implied awareness of the lovers'

ap

parent madness is to cleanse and revivify metaphor; to indicate

the sense in which the poet accepts it, and thus to prepare

for accepting seriously the fine and seriowly intended metaphors

which dominate the last two stanzas of the poem.
The opening line of the fourth stanza,

Wee can dye by it, if not live by love,

achieves an effect of tenderness and deliberate

resolution. The

loven are ready to die to the world; they are committed; they

are not

callow but confident. (The basic metaphor of the saint,

one notices, is being carried on; the lovers in their renunciation

of the world, have something of the confident resolution of the
saint. By the bye, the word "legend"-

. . . if unfit for tombes and hearse

Our legend beein Donne's time meant "the life of a saint.") The loven are
willing to forego the ponderous and stately chronicle and to

well wrought, it provides a finer memorial for

accept the trifling and insubstantial "sonnet" instead; but then

if the urn

be

With the finely contemptuow, yet quiet

one's ashes than does the pompous and grotesque monument.

phrase,

"halfe-acre

14

tombes,"

the world which the lovers reject expands into some

thing gross and vulgar. But the figure works further; the pretty
sonnets will not merely hold their ashes as a decent earthly
memorial. Their legend, their story, will gain the m canoniza
tion; and approved as love's saints, other lovers will invoke
them.
In this last stanza, the theme receives a final complication.
The lovers in rejecting life actually win to the most intense
life. This paradox has been hinted at earlier in the phoenix
me taphor Here it receives a powerful dramatization. The Iov
en in becoming hermits, find that they have not lost the world,
but have gained the world in each other, now a more intense,
more meaningful world. Donne is not content to treat the lovers'
.

discovery as something which comes

them passively, but

to

rather as something which they actively achieve. They are

like

the saint, God's athlete:

Who did the whole wof'lds soule contract, and drove

Into the glasses of you,. eyes

The image is that of a violent squeezing as of

powerful

hand.

And what do the lovers "drive" into each other's eyes? The
"Countries, Townes," and "Courtes," which they renounced in
the lint stanza of the poem The unworldly Ioven thus become
the most "worldly" of all.
.

The tone with which the poem closes is one of triumphant

achievement, but the tone is a development contributed to b y
various earlier elements. One of the more important elements

a little further analysis.

which

works toward our acceptance of the final

figure

of the phoenix, which will bear

paradox is the

The comparison of the lovers to the phoenix is very skillfully

related to the two earlier comparisons, that in which the Ioven
are like burning tapers, and that in which they are like the

eagle

and like the tapers, it burns. We have a

and the dove. The phoenix comparison gathers up both:

.elected leries of items: the phoenix figure seems to come in a

the phoenix is a bird,

n. L....... of ......

IS

says. and rattles off in his desperation the fint comparisons that
natural stream of

assoc iation.

"Call us what you will," the lover

occur to him. The comparison to the phoenix

seems

thus merely

another outlandish one, the most outrageous of all. But it is this

the poet goes on

most fantastic one, stumbled over apparently in his haste, that

to

develop. It really describes the lovers best

and justifies their renunciation. For the phoenix is not two but
one, "we two being one, are it"; and it burns, not like the

rise the same

taper

at its own cost, but to live again. Its death is life: "Wee dye and

" The poet literally justifies the fantastic asser

tion. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to "die" means

to experience the consummation of the act of love. The Ioven

after the act are the same. Their love is not exhausted in mere
lust. This is their title to canonization. Their love

is

like the

phoenix.
I hope that I do not seem to juggle the meaning of die. The
meaning that I have cited can

be

abundantly justified in the

so does Dryden. Moreover, I do not think that I give it undue

literature of the period; Shakespeare uses "die" in this sense;

emphasis. The word is in a crucial position. On it is pivoted

the transition to the next stanza,

Wee can dye by it, if not live by love,

A n d if unfit for tom bes . . .
Most important of all, the sexual submeaning of "die" does not
contradict the other meanings: the poet is saying: "Our death
is really a more intense life"; "We can afford to trade life (the
world) for death (love), for that death is the consummation of
life"; "After all, one does not expect to live by love, one expects,
and wants, to die by it." But in the total passage he is also say
ing: "Because our love is not mundane, we can give up the
world"; "Because our love is not merely lust, we can give up the
other lusts, the lust for wealth and power"; "because," and this
is said with an inftection of irony as by one who knows the world
too well, "because our love can outlast its consummation, we

16

are

minor miracle, we are love's saints." This passage with its

liant paradox with which the poem closes.

ironical tenderness and its realism feeds and supports the bril
There is one more factor in developing and sustaining the

final effect. The poem is an instance of the doctrine which it

as

serts; it is both the assertion and the realization of the assertion.

The poet has actually before our eyes built within the song the
"pretty room" with which he says the lovers can be content.
The poem itself is the well-wrought urn which can hold the
lovers' ashes and which will not suffer in comparison with the
prince's "halfe-acre tomb."
And how necessary are the paradoxes? Donne might have said
directly, "Love in a cottage is enough." "The Canonization"
contains this admirable thesis, but it contains a great deal more.
He might have been as forthright as a later lyricist who wrote,

And let the rest of the world go by." He might even have imi

"We'll build a sweet little nest,/ Somewhere out in the West,/

tated that more metaphysical lyric, which maintains, "You're

the cream in my coffee." "The Canonization" touches on

all

these observations, but it goes beyond them, not merely in

dignity, but in precision.

submit that the only way by which the poet could say what

"The Canonization

"

says is by paradox. More direct methods

may be tempting but all of them enfeeble and distort what is

,

to be said. This statement may seem the less surprising when we

reftect on how many of the important things which the poet has
to say have to be said by means of paradox: most of the language
of lovers

is such-"The Canonization" is a good example; so is

most of the language of religion-"He who would save his life,

must loe it;" "The last shall be fi rst Indeed, almost any in
sight important enough to warrant a great poem apparently has
."

to be stated in such terms. Deprived of the character of paradox

with its twin concomitants of irony and wonder, the matter of

Donne's poem unravels into "facts," biological, sociological, and
economic. What happens to Donne's lovers if we consider them

11

,.. La .. ..... of .......

"scientifically," without benefit of the supernaturalism

which

the poet confers upon them? Well, what happens to Shakespeare's

lovers, for Shakespeare

uses the

basic metaphor of "The Canoni

zation" in his Romeo and juliet? In their first conversation,

lovers play with the analogy between the lover and the

to

the
p ilgrim

the Holy Land. Juliet says:

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch

A n d palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
Considered scientifically, the lovers become Mr. Aldous Hux
ley's animals, "quietly sweating, palm to palm."
For us today, Donne's imagination seems obsessed with

the
the sense in which the lovers become one
the sense in which the soul is united with God. Frequently, as
we have seen, one type of union becomes a metaphor for the
other. It may not be too far-fetched to see both as insta nces of,
and metaphors for, the union which the creative imagination
itself effects. For that fusion is not logical; it apparently violates
science and common sense; it welds together the discordant and
the contradictory. Coleridge has of course given us the classic
description of its nature and power. It "reveals itself in the
balance or reconcilement of opposi te or discordant qualities: of
sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the
idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative ;
the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects;
problem of unity;

It is a great and illuminating statement, but is a series

a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual or

der

"

of paradoxes. Apparently Coleridge could describe

no other way.
Shakespeare, in one of his poems, has

the

imagination in

the

effect

of

given a description that

oddly parallels that of Coleridge.

Reason in it selfe confounded,

Saw Division grow together,

The Well Wrotht Ura

18

To themselves yet either neither,

Simple were so well compounded.
I do not know what his "The Phoenix and the Turtle" cele
brates. Perhaps it was written to honor the marriage of Sir John
Salisbury and Ursula Stanley; or perhaps the Phoenix is Lucy,
Countess of Bedford; or perhaps the poem is merely an essay on

Platonic love. But the scholars themselves are so uncertain that

I think we will do little violence to established habits of think
,

ing, if we boldly pre-empt the poem for our own purposes. Cer
tainly the poem is an instance of that magic power which Cole
ridge sought to describe. I propose that we take it for a moment
as

a poem about that power;

So they loved as love in twaine,
Had the essence but in one,
Two distincts, Division none,
Number there in love was slaine.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance and no space was seene,
Twixt this Turtle and his Queene;
But in them it were a wonder

Propertie was thus appalled,

That the selfe was not the same;
Single Natures double name,
Neither two nor one was called.
double, and today with our multiplication of sciences, it

P recisely ! The nature is single, one, unified. But the name is

tiple.

is mul
If the poet is to be true to his poetry, he must call it neither

two nor one: the paradox is his only solution. The difficulty
has intensified since Shakespeare's day: the timid poet, when
confronted with the problem of "Single Natures double name,"
has too often funked it.

to our own might bear

Phoenix."

history of poetry from Dryden's time

as

its subtitle "The Half-Hearted

n. Lane.... of Po..dox

19

In Shakespeare's poem, Reason is "in it selfe confounded" at

the union of the Phoenix and the Turtle; but it recovers

to

admit its own bankruptcy:

Love hath Reason, Reason none,

If what parts, can so remaine . . . .
and it is Reason which goes on to utter the beautiful threnos
with which the poem concludes:

Beautie, Truth, and Raritie,

Grace in all simplicitie,
Here enclosde, in cinders lie.
Death is now the Phoenix nest,
A n d the Turtles loyall brest,
To eternitie doth rest
.

Truth may seeme, but cannot be,

Beautie bragge, but tis not she,
Truth and Beautie buried be.
To this urne let those repaire,
That are either true or faire,
For these dead Birds, sigh a prayer.

Having pre-empted the poem for our own purposes, it may

not be

too outrageous to go on to make one further observation.

to which we are summoned, the urn which holds the

The urn

ashes of the phoenix, is like the well-wrought urn of Donne's

"Canonization" which holds the phoenix-lovers' ashes:

it is

the

poem itself. One is reminded of still another urn, Keats's Gre

ciao urn, which contained for Keats, Truth and Beauty,

as

Shakespeare's urn encloses "Beautie, Truth, and Raritie." But

there is a sense in which all such well-wrought urns contain the
ashes of

phoenix. The urns are not meant for memorial pur

poses only, though that often seems to be their chief significance

to the professors of literature. The phoenix rises from its ashes;
ll

or ought

to rise;

but it will not arise for all our mere sifting

and measuring the ashes, or testing them for their chemical con
tent. We must be prepared to accept the paradox of the imagi
nation itself; else "Beautie, Truth, and Raritie" remain en
closed in their cinden and we shall end with essential cinden,

for all

our pains.