On autumn and the anguish of the poet (April, part 5)

Sonnet 73 presents us the painful perception that the poet has on his own diminishing life-forces as age moves on. It has a sad tune and its images are of a beautiful melancholic tone. John Berryman, an American poet who commited suicide at age 57, thus talked about sonnet 73:

"The fundamental emotion is self-pity. Not an attractive emotion. What renders it pathetic, in the good instead of the bad sense, is the sinister diminution of the time concept, quatrain by quatrain. We have first a year, and the final season of it; then only a day, and the stretch of it; then just a fire, built for part of the day, and the final minutes of it; then -- entirely deprived of life, in prospect, and even now a merely objective "that," like a third-person corpse! -- the poet. The imagery begins and continues as visual -- yellow, sunset, glowing -- and one by one these are destroyed; but also in the first quatrain one heard sound, which disappears there; and from the couplet imagery of every kind is excluded, as if the sense were indeed dead, and only abstract, posthumous statement is possible. A year seems short enough; yet ironically the day, and then the fire, makes it in retrospect seem long, and the final immediate triumph of the poem's imagination is that in the last line about the year, line 4, an immense vista is indeed invoked -- that the desolate monasteries strewn over England, sacked in Henry's reign, where 'late' -- not so long ago! a terrible foreglance into the tiny coming times of the poem -- the choirs of monks lifted their little and brief voices, in ignorance of what was coming -- as the poet would be doing now, except that this poem knows. Instinct is here, after all, a kind of thought. This is one of the best poems in English."
(in: The Sonnets)

Man's conscience of hte finitude of his individual, egoistic self, is probably the deadly result of the eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, in Genesis 2. To be or not to be? With open eyes, man was finally able to ask the impossible question. The image that follows is John Everett Millais' Ophelia:

Time's mowing scythe (April, part 4)

Sonnet 60 presents to us the singer's perplexity as to time's effect on man, both physically and spiritually. Again, time is the motor of change and decay, as expresses the first quatrain by the figures of waves, in one of the metaphors most frequently reproduced in popular Brazilian language and communication. This personified figure, Time, the giver and taker of the flourish of youth, produces old age, by transfixing, delving and feeding on perfection, in order to produce weakness and disintegration before which nothing stands.

Again, against Time's cruel hand, verse and praise introduce the beloved into eternity. Poetry is here identified with hope, and as the relief to the inexorable fate of all that is young, art's perfection is proposed in contrast to the coming imperfections of the old age.

Rembrandt van Rijn, one of the most famous painters in the Golden Age of the Dutch visual arts (17th century CE), was also one of the most fruitful painters in self-portraits, and the collection of the portraits he produced all through his life, from youth into old age, is a touching and profound example of how arts can provide a beneficial reflexion on the matter of aging. The following paintings portray the painter in, respectively, 1634 (at around age 28, like myself today) and 1660 (at around age 54):

Beauty, art and immortality (April, part 3)

Sonnet 18 is written towards the singer's loved one. Verses 1/2 state that this one is "more temperate" than a summer's day. Temperance is the key concept here, which disqualifies the days of summer as theme to the poem. It is a poem about eternity, and under the writer's clear and bright language, nature's instability becomes obvious in verses 3-8. Rough winds, short-dated leases, exceedingly hot sunny days, the occasional dimness of sunlight, the decline of everything from its fair state and nature's randomness and unpredictability, all are elements that this singer's eyes see unfit for his song about temperate and unchanging timelessness.

This loved person's summer is not a day. It's not even a summer made of many days. It's eternal. Death shall never brag about this person, because they have nothing in common: the singer's beloved does not walk in the shades of death. One might think of the Greek god Apollos here, as the god of eternal summer and light - the always fair, the always bright Apollos. Nevertheless, we see again the strong influence of biblical language:

For instance, compare verse 11 of the sonnet ("Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade") with the ideas expressed in John 14:30 ("the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me"), Psalms 23:4 ("though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death"), 1 Corinthians 15:54,55 ("Death is swallowed up in victory, O death, where {is} thy sting?"). We see here that this eternal godly young beloved is actually the one in Psalm 45, the one against which Death cannot brag, the one in which Death has nothing. This one is the perfect object for this poem of immortality, the perfect mirror for a song whose images are all never-changing: light and fairness in perfection. The 12th verse, at the end of the third quatrain, announces the overcoming of time.

Then, at the final couplet, we meet the ingenious affirmation of the mutual and simultaneous influence of the poem and the object of the poem over each other. Firstly, we have seen how the singer chose this person as an object, due to this person's temperance, constancy and fairness; thus, this person has caused such a song to exist (and again, we think of Psalm 45:1, in which the tongue of the writer is put in motion in praise to the King's fairness). Now, the singer affirms that the song will make this person immortal, creating an inversion and a reciprocality which well conclude this eternal song in the form of a circle: the youth which first gave life to the poem, now shall draw his own life from it, forever.

Poetry, art and beauty as the key to overcoming death and time. As many times in Western poetry, here we see Shakespeare's assertion to that.

Of clouds and pilgrims (April, part 2)

Reminds me of a Brazilian poet called Cecilia Meirelles, whose themes often revolve around being in time for a brief moment and heading into not being. She sings because the moment exists, she says, and never gives too much thought to her own finitude, although she is aware of it. Here, nimbleness and grace are the answer to overcoming time, and as she draws on pictures of clouds and stars and the depths of the sea, she identifies spontaneously with these images of eternity. In her feminine, medieval song universe, endlessness is like the gardens and springs which she sees resurrected at the opening of a bottle of perfume: airy, light, free, irresistible. These ideas are all central to her book "Viagem" (Voyage).
How different the world of the psalmist in Psalm 39! As we see a man broken down by his own mistakes and flaws, he desperately tries and reaches out, no longer able to refrain from speaking. His anguish is fire, and it makes his tongue sing. God is fire, and He makes the singer sing. It is then that the psalmist seeks relief from his own fallen person into the idea of eternity and the person of YHWH.
He is a pilgrim, he says. Someone who is destined to be seen but for a limited section in time. Relief is granted, because imperfection will certainly cease, consumed by its own burning urge to sing. Perfection, on the other hand, is eternal and merciful. This pilgrim longs to see his ending and no longer bee looked upon by the self-existant YHWH. He seeks God's knowledge of manly mortality, but not God's accusations. This knowledge is the passive, contemplative one of the philosopher, and not the active designation of the judge who points out. The knowledge of relief, the knowledge of the one who turns away from the object of his knowing.
From fire the pilgrim sings and asks for the vision of his end. Once God removes from him the outer aspect of his burden by turning away His compassionate but inspector gaze, the pilgrim will even be able to breathe.

April readings, part 1

Sonnets 18, 60 and 73 by William Shakespeare are a collection of Elizabethan texts on aging, death and the overcoming of time. The term "Elizabethan" must not be seen as limiting these sonnets' potential to convey in a both broad and deep manner the rich subtleties of a perception which stretches far over boundaries of epoch and literary tradition. Together, the texts are a good sample of how inclusively Shakespeare was able to both consider and communicate the experience of ephemerality and change. Each sonnet a particular universe of image and metaphor, the three of them suggest that beauty, art and ultimately poetry are the key to rise above time.

While the Sonnets sing against the deleterious effects of the hours by focusing our vision on the image of the beloved, Psalm 39 is the voice of a man who turns to himself and finds it difficult to truly become conscious of his own finitude. Nevertheless, he seeks shuch a conscience because of his own wickedness, and finds contemplating his frailty to be the only cure to his anguish. The possibilty of death, then, and not death itself, becomes the point of relief for this singer's journey into not being. Hoping on the Eternal, here, is the way to overcome time: the consciousness of one's transitoriness as the way for eternity to manifest presently while one is still under time's influence.

[suggested reading for April: Shakespeare's sonnets 18, 60 and 73; Psalm 39, from The Bible]

2009 - Reading Suggestions

Each work will be discussed for a month. Readers are encouraged to share their views through their comments, in English.

1 - april: Sonnets 18, 60, 73, by W. Shakespeare, and Psalm 39, from The Book of the Psalms of Solomon

2 - may: The Secret Cause, by Machado de Assis

3 - june: Illness as metaphor, by Susan Sontag and The Book of Job, from The Bible

4 - july: Ward number 6, by Anton Chekhov

5 - august: The Alienist, by Machado de Assis

6 - september: The Death of Ivan Iilitch, by L. Tolstoi

7 - october: Stories of Diancecht and Miach, in celtic myth, and The Immortals, by Jorge. L. Borges

8 - november: The Imaginary Invalid, by Molière

9 - december: The Country Doctor, by H. de Balzac