“The Story of Aglauros, transform’d into a Statue” (lll) – Ovid
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Tag: “The Divine Comedy” – Dante
May 1, 2020
“Metamorphoses” (The Giants’ War, VII) – Ovid
“The Garden of Earthly Delights“ (1510 – 1515)
Hieronymus Bosch
__________
Nor from his patrimonial Heaven alone
Is Jove content to pour his vengeance down;
let me say something about Heaven
here, a concept that is quite different
from the earlier Ancient Greek and
Roman understanding of the term,
was it, for that matter, even a term
then, of the Ancients, that would’ve
meant nothing other to them than
the blue sky above, not at all an
area reached by extraterrestrial
transcendence
the abode of the gods and goddesses
at the time of Ovid was Mount Olympus,
and had been for centuries, much closer
to the earth than the more ethereal home
we imagine of the gods today, every one
of them, however professedly uniquely
supreme, otherworldly
all gods, note, no goddesses, what’s up
with that, I’ve long wondered
the Underworld was for the Ancients
the dwelling place of the departed,
somewhere deep beneath the earth,
or at the very ends of all the seas,
never totally beyond the very
cosmos, as our prevailing faiths
now uniformly preach
the image of Heaven, Hell, and
Purgatory for that matter, that last
a completely Catholic invention – to
account for the salvation, however
partial, of innocent souls deprived
of Heaven for not having been
christened, though not able yet, at
so early an age, to have sinned –
was pretty well codified by Dante
in the 14th Century in his
masterpiece, The Divine Comedy,
a daunting, but profoundly
illuminating read, which has
shaped our impression of these
several possible afterlives ever
since
see above
this particular translation, however
magisterial, but crafted after over a
thousand years of Catholic cultural
domination, cannot avoid the impact
of the Catholic understanding of
Heaven
neither, now, can we, for that matter,
intimately imbued as we are with
the binding faiths of our relatively
more recent forebears
be therefore perspicacious
Aid from his brother of the seas he craves,
To help him with auxiliary waves.
later, we’ll learn that Jove’s brother
of the seas is Neptune, god of all
aqueous things
The watry tyrant calls his brooks and floods,
Who rowl from mossie caves (their moist abodes);
rowl, or roil, upset
mossie, mossy
And with perpetual urns his palace fill:
To whom in brief, he thus imparts his will.
Neptune is stockpiling water, with
the help of his conforming waterways
Small exhortation needs;
no time, in other words, no need,
to do much coaxing, much
exhortation
your pow’rs employ:
use, put into action, or employ,
your pow’rs
And this bad world, so Jove requires, destroy.
Jove, god of gods, is here commanding,
authorizing, orchestrating
Let loose the reins to all your watry store:
Bear down the damms, and open ev’ry door.
The floods
will inexorably follow
stay tuned
R ! chard
January 10, 2017
“When You Come” – Daniel Goodwin
“The Accolade“ (1901)
___________
When you come to greet me, shyly,
wearing nothing but your love for me
I will come to meet you halfway
like a falcon returning to your wrist.
And when you raise your arm,
trembling ever so slightly,
I will alight and let you pull
the velvet shroud over my eyes.
—————–
courtly love, an idea of love that took
shape in the 12th Century in what would
become France eventually, though its
development soon touched all the
countries, or kingdoms then, of Europe,
became the primary subject of poetry
and literature especially through the
influence of Eleanor of Acquitaine,
without a doubt the most powerful
woman in Europe during her reign as
Queen of France after her marriage to
Louis Vll, which was annulled after a
time for her having not borne Louis
any sons, then with Henry, Duke of
Normandy, who then became Henry ll
of England, with whom she had
Richard l, the Lionheart, as well as the
later King John – the wonderful film,
“The Lion in Winter” with Katherine
Hepburn as Eleanor is a brilliant
account of her later life with Henry
and their fractious sons, featuring
as well Peter O’Toole as Henry, and a
young Anthony Hopkins as Richard
her patronage of the arts in general
then, from her position of power,
allowed, much as it would today any
potentate, the dissemination of
courtly love as a cultural ideal that
ultimately led to some of the greatest
works of our Western cultures, notably
Dante‘s “The Divine Comedy“, where
Dante courts chastely the married
Beatrice, who becomes indeed even
an intermediary for him during his
passage through Paradise
the idea, through the interpolation of
the Catholic Church, was that courtly
love should be pure, unconsummated,
a noble admiration and reverence of
an object of adulation within the strict
constraints of an impossible physical
conjunction, the model being, of course,
the emulation of the worship of the
Virgin Mary
Cervantes‘ “Don Quixote“ is a later
example of this same disposition,
though by this time, 1605 to 1615,
the practice of courtly love had
been sullied by too many evidently
corrupt practitioners, and a more
cynical therefore culture, so that
Don Quixote despite his blameless
pursuit of Dulcinea, his unwitting
muse, is made out to be a fool
given the context of his more
contentious times, albeit a benign,
and somewhat heroic, fool
but my very favourite such story is
that of Edmond Rostand‘s “Cyrano
de Bergerac“, whose long nose
makes him disparage his own
chances of ever achieving the love
of his beloved, Roxane
José Ferrer got an Oscar for his
superb performance of Cyrano in
1950, but my ideal remains that of
Gérard Dépardieu, a complete
wonder, in 1990, both very much,
however, worth your time
all this as a preface to the poem
above, When You Come, which
seems to me of that tradition,
despite having been written in
2014 according to its inclusion
then in the Literary Review of
Canada, perhaps because of the
introduction of the falcon, not at
all a contemporary image, but
fraught with the impression of a
love that is all devotion instead
of conquest, a kind of love that
in my particular circumstances
I’ve come to reach for rather
than anything less refined
true love, in other words, can
never not love, as I’ve said earlier
Richard
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