Once again it is the birds who celebrate the Requiem, this time for a human being. . University University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The "fact" of the poem is that the Phoenix and the Turtle are dead, but we are given this fact in terms already heightened by praise. Cunningham, J. V. "'Essence' and the Phoenix and Turtle." Spenser gave similar advice to his readers elsewhere, as in the proem to Book II: it is advice we do well to remember when reading Shakespeare's sonnets or the poems which he contributed to Poetical Essays. He goes on to suggest (p. 202) that this is why Shakespeare and other former supporters of Essex wrote no elegies for the Queen in 1603. In short, the vulgar lover knows neither self-control, respect, responsibility, gentleness, nor fidelity. Love and joy greeted Elizabeth in 1558 when she ascended the throne of England and from her a 'bewtyful order of government followeth' (fol. 7v, 8). reverence forms a common bond.' In the stormy east-wind straining, The pale yellow woods were waning, The broad stream in his banks complaining, Heavily the low sky raining Over tower'd Camelot; alliteration metaphor personification simile The lover who is possessed by vulgar passion seeks the sensation of sex in order to avoid confronting the kind of desire that calls for emotional maturity. Alituum stipata choro volat illa per altum, 77: 'Constant inde sibi seu nidum, sive sepulchrum'. ut hardly a peer to that, I doubt.13. 561-3. (p. 123). Jove describes Blenerhasset's iconographie isle, Lyly's Utopia inhabited by elves, angels, Diana and Venus, the island of the poets where magic and supernatural forces can resolve all personal and political evils. 17 Compare these lines from Troilus and Cressida: "O madness of discourse, The union of Truth and Beauty achieved in the mutual flame of the Phoenix and the Turtle is contrasted with their present divorce in a world which may still hold lovers 'either true or fair,' but cannot allow 'the pure union of the two qualities in one and the same woman.' The latest commentators have hardly done justice to Heinrich Straumann's interpretation of the poem. Underlying the choice of choric birds may well be the scheme of the four elements, since the Phoenix represents fire, the soaring eagle the empyrean or air, the swan water, and the crow earth.29. In this apparent contradiction lies the deeper meaning of the poem. 21 The myth of rebirth was used by the dramatist in the chronicle plays only, to suggest generation and perpetuity or dynastic continuity: 1 Henry VI, iv, vii, 92; 1 Henry VI, I, iv, 35; Richard III, IV, iv, 424; Henry VIII, v, v, 40. No little part of this virtuosity lies in its two subtle shifts in key: first from the invocation to the anthem, then from the anthem to the threnos. No; tis thwart to sense, The anthem presents reasoning about Love;24 it is not Love that speaks. The conflict between Reason and Passion, the subject of so many sonnets of the time, found its resolution in an ideal Love guided (as Pietro Bembo says in The Courtier) by Reason. Dana Ramel Barnes. And there due adoration still she finds. Red evokes emotional instability and subjugation. Marston also takes care to paper over the cracks glaring in the edifice of Shakespeare's contribution: these are that the pair of birds vanish 'leaving no posterity'. . -ither words all have the implication to a place / time / end, the selection of the meaning of location, time, or consequence depending on the context. 50 (Chapel Hill, 1964), p. 88. We may conclude that Chester wrote, or revised, his poem for the marriage of John Salusbury and Ursula Stanley late in 1586, and that he made some additions a year later. Emphasis is laid on the uniqueness and matchless beauty of a heavenly creature secure of immortality, crossing our path for a while, proud and lonely, and flying back to her far country.15 Before this rare and unapproachable splendour one feels the tremulous awe and wonder of the poet. Reason in itselfe confounded, The usual connection with death is here, but not the connection with carrion. 11 Various other readings have been cited for these lines, but I fail to see their relevancy to the poem. Thou shalt behold a second Phoenix love . It was married chastity. Ed. But she is taken to Paphos in Phaethon's chariot, while Nature regales her with a long account of the cities of Britain and the deeds of King Arthur. The praise of vertuous maids in misteries . 32 See L'Influence de Ronsard sur la Posie Franaise by M. Raymond (Paris, 1927), pp. Othello's egotism, which grounds his love, which grounds indeed all human love, is the ineradicable cause of love's death. ", 3 Ellrodt says (p. 108) that "any hint of survival in a world beyond is withheld.". The second half of the line is soft and prolonged; the first half hits us with three stresses, two of them curt and inescapable. But the poem itself gives us no warrant for this assumption. (1944), 347-8. Countries, Townes, Courts: Beg from above The ceremony, initiated with a firm command for the loudest lay, ends with a quiet proposal, rather permissive than imperative, for a sighed prayer. That thy sable gender mak'st Next, follows the imaginative journey called 'A meeting Dialogue-wise betweene Nature, the Phoenix and the Turtle Doue'. So shall she leave her blessedness to one 4 (December 1952): 265-76. Ellrodt (pp. Shakespeare's approach was different. The Phoenix, 'the bird of Araby', is there among more familiar fowl, and pronounces the Absolutio super tumulum. In that year Shakespeare wrote his most enigmatic prophecy, the poem commonly known as The Phoenix and the Turtle, in a book permeated by this sense of crisis, looking to the future, gathering up and reviewing the iconography and myths of Elizabethan succession drama and pageantry. Join hands, &c. Now joined be our hands, This emphasis is repeated by the strong stress on "Death," the first word of the second stanza. By metamorphosed wonder. 4 W. H. Matchett, The Phoenix and Turtle (The Hague, 1965), p. 65. Since Jonson and Marston had recently been engaged in the violent Stage Quarrel we cannot suppose that either would have invited the other to contribute; and Shakespeare and Chapman both seem unlikely editors. of Shakespeare (Philadelphia, 1938), pp. . Only in the closing lines did they muster the standard array of paradoxes which later poets marshalled to various ends. (The observation is of course also made by Chester.) Join hearts and hands, so let it be, Authenticity has long ceased to be a problem, despite the poem's unusual and even unique appearance within the Shakespearean canon. Dana Ramel Barnes. . 7 The N. E. D. quotes from 1558: "I will that my executors . An hundred naked maidens lilly white, One may further add that the legendary bird could be feminine in Elizabethan poetry even when 'she' typified a male lover or hero.23 No ambiguity was intended: a female Phoenix could be a symbol of rarity irrespective of sex. So rare creation? Both the Threnos and the introductory poem are written in trochaic heptasyllabics: in the introductory poem these are arranged in quatrains, with occasional octosyllabic lines to accommodate feminine rhyme, but in the Threnos the lines are arranged in triplets, without intrusive octosyllabics. Shakespeare's handling of paradox is far more serious and philosophical than in the poems of Lactantius and Claudianus41 or in the conceits of most sonneteers. Out of the fire, but a more perfect creature? Only the transference of a liturgy in praise of chastity to the praises of Amor should perhaps be noted here. One none-like Lillie in the earth I placed; The startling tunefulness of the Phoenix, together with the appropriateness of the 'defunctiue Musicke', the customary dirges that round life off, are the positive values by which we judge the distasteful 'shriking'. She asks. 5 Lee L. Charbonneau-Lassay, Le Bestiaire du Christ (Descle, 1940), p. 634. . Restless rest, and living dying. 7 Marie Axton is followed, with slight qualification, by Anthea Hume, who explores the framework of Loves Martyr as a whole to find evidence, especially in Chester's contribution, of a deliberate discrediting of Essex as false love, the earl thus being seen as a false turtle in contrast to Grosart's true one ('Love's Martyr, "The Phoenix and the Turtle", and the aftermath of the Essex rebellion', Review of English Studies New series, 40 (1989), 48-71). Again, chaste love is a condition of being which counteracts both the escapist alienation of vulgar love and the civilized subjectivity which sublime love substitutes for genuine feeling and participation. Let the bird of loudest lay, On the sole Arabian tree, Herald sad and trumpet be, To whose sound chaste wings obey. Again, I shall not elaborate the poem's paradoxes of love on the same scale as Mr. Alvarez, who in his essay15 is so keenly alert to every linguistic possibility, ambiguity, or complexity in these lines. 19v), In Love's Martyr Shakespeare and his fellow poets were writing about a mystery, but they wrote coherently and in terms readily intelligible to any of their contemporaries. 18 John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes (1598), defines Rasin as 'a tree in Arabia whereof there is but one, and on it the Phoenix sits'. And its second cry, its admission of defeat, rests on a stressed conditional. Apollo's chariot is clearly the only possible vehicle for such a destination. Already a member? But the fervor of all such studies has been inevitably cooled by the realization that Shakespeare had only to reach for one of the most popular Elizabethan poetical miscellanies, The Phoenix Nest (1593), and read Matthew Roydon's "Elegy for Astrophil" to find a model for his memorial tribute: the eagle, the swan, the turtle-dove, and the phoenix introduced in fitting order. In each instance the nature whose sphere is this world ascends to the higher world, receives a transcendent grace or perfection there, and brings it back as an exemplar to the world. Sanctum quoque Are they or are they not both dead? 5 Grosart, ed., Loves Martyr, p. 10. However, before turning to the poem proper we should at least consider one other recent attempt to make sense of Shakespeare's poem in connection with the part played in Loves Martyr by Chester and the Salusburys. There is a palpable discrepancy, unperceived by Reason, between what it says and does, and the contrapuntal tone of the Anthem's glad tribute; that is, we are offered a view of Reason it cannot have of itself, and the whole Threnos is set up on the basis of this dramatic irony. After endeavouring to express this miraculous oneness, to realize vividly an unapprehended absolute, the poet could only maintain this exalted pitch by ending the 'tragic scene' on a further negation in the Threnos. While they themselves are 'Poore sacrifices of our enmity', the statues at least, placed beside each other, Juliet's given by Montague and Romeo's by Capulet, will provide a 'patterne of love' for the time to come.