Salon des Refusés discussion
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The Phoenix Riddle
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From jstor website, which offers essays for free as long as you only upload a couple at a time...https://www.jstor.org/stable/27709270...
One of the reason this notion of puzzles, or riddles, or difficult questions in poems caught my eye is because in Buddhism philosophy or teaching we have "koans". Koans are like a puzzle that seems impossible to solve.In control systems, or poor managerial styles...authrotiy figures may resort to "double binds"...doctrines or directions that can never be accomplished. It's a way to control chicldren in a toxic family...or a way to control staff when managers are not well-deveoped persons.
A koan is like a double bind...but its a healthy double bind. In Buddhism practice the koan is a way to go beyond the intellect or mind/ego and see things connected and using almost like an unconscious means to solve puzzles of thought. Often it can feel like a "peak experience" to 'solve' a puzzle and I feel it is related t a sense of learning through experience. Like a paradigm shift in our minds.
Here is an excerpt fro wiki...
' The popular western understanding sees kōan as referring to an unanswerable question or a meaningless statement. However, in Zen practice, a kōan is not meaningless, and not a riddle or a puzzle. Teachers do expect students to present an appropriate response when asked about a kōan
Koans are also understood as pointers to an unmediated "Pure Consciousness", devoid of cognitive activity. Victor Hori criticizes this understanding:
[A] pure consciousness without concepts, if there could be such a thing, would be a booming, buzzing confusion, a sensory field of flashes of light, unidentifiable sounds, ambiguous shapes, color patches without significance. This is not the consciousness of the enlightened Zen master.
According to Hori, a central theme of many koans is the 'identity of opposites':
[K]oan after koan explores the theme of nonduality. Hakuin's well-known koan, "Two hands clap and there is a sound, what is the sound of one hand?" is clearly about two and one. The koan asks, you know what duality is, now what is nonduality? In "What is your original face before your mother and father were born?" the phrase "father and mother" alludes to duality. This is obvious to someone versed in the Chinese tradition, where so much philosophical thought is presented in the imagery of paired opposites. The phrase "your original face" alludes to the original nonduality.
Comparable statements are: "Look at the flower and the flower also looks"; "Guest and host interchange" '
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan
I'll look at this eastern wisdom later, Candy, right now I am still struggling with the first two stanzas ...I think I must have been at school when I first read this poem, as I remember taking line one to mean that the poet was having difficulty kissing his girlfriend because she was chattering too much. Of course it doesn't mean that at all. It is addressed to another friend, whose sense of duty and business is oppressive to the poet, who can only think about love.
(But the friend might be Donne himself, suddenly aware of how being in love cuts across all the values and activities that society has forced upon us.)
"Or the King's real, or his stamped face"
-- the two directions we may take in society, serving it (the King's real face), or making money out of it (the King's face stamped on the coinage). Brilliant compression of ideas.
"When did the heats which my veins fill
Add one more to the plaguy bill?"
Very pertinent in the world today, when a rising temperature is evidence of the plague we might pass on to another, sending the death tally up by one. By the way, my edition has "Add one man .." but the meaning is the same of course.
As for the phoenix riddle,
"The phœnix riddle hath more wit
By us; we two being one, are it."
Are you not irresistibly reminded of The Phoenix and the Turtle with its 2 = 1 theme?
So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Surely there is some connection.
I was most definately reminded of "The Phoenix and The Turtle" and I think that's why I was grabbed by this poem so quickly. I felt like there was a "call response" to that poem. I also noticed the line about the plague and am so fascinated to think how they were living in times so similar to us. I always just thought it was because of terrorism that the art of the time is so relevant to us...to realize how they lived through the plague is so disturbing.
I might share this here...although you may have already seen it....but it has been meaningful to me..
https://www.aish.com/ci/a/Shakespeare...
With this line...what came to my mind and I can not shake it is Plato."The phœnix riddle hath more wit
By us; we two being one, are it."
Plato...“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.”
And Lawrence Durrell called marriage the beautiful two headed monster.
Candy, I think that is very good connection. I found the whole long myth athttp://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposi...
(Search for "the sexes were not two".)
I read your notes on "koan", and Ms Rieke's paper with great interest, but I did not find Ms Rieke convincing here. Perhaps I take the idea of a riddle in poetry too literally. To me, this is a poetic riddle:
My first is no proof of my second,
Though my second's a proof of my first.
If I were my whole, I should tell you
Quite freely my best and my worst.
One clue more: -- If you fail to discover
My meaning, you're blind as a mole;
But if you will frankly confess it,
You show yourself clearly my whole.
This is not easy to solve, but if you CAN do something it is no proof that you DID it, while if you DID do something it proves you CAN do it. And if the poet confessed freely her faults and virtues she'd be CANDID, which is the answer. Similarly you are CANDID if you frankly confess.
This is a "charade" by Christina Rossetti. Here is another one of hers, much easier, which I did manage to solve. See if you can get it without google help:
How many authors are my first!
And I shall be so too
Unless I finish speedily
That which I have to do.
My second is a lofty tree
And a delicious fruit;
This in the hot-house flourishes--
That amid rocks takes root.
My whole is an immortal queen
Renowned in classic lore:
Her a god won without her will,
And her a goddess bore.
(Best to ignore the middle two lines of the 2nd stanza.) The poems are meaningless until the answer is found, but beyond the answer do not yield much further meaning. Donne is not like this.
Ooh great thoughts on these riddles in poems. You are very good at this...I find I start getting nervous and sweating LOL trying to solveRosetti...Diana? Eve?
No this is different than Donne.
I am also curious about the idea of canonization in this poem of Donne's. So...yet...is it not the title that is the puzzle. What is being cannonized in Donne's poem? I think this poem is like Romeo and Juliet. It's always been so frustrating that when people think of the greatest love stories they often say R & J. How can that be a love story!!! It never works out!!!
I think it's a little like Casablanca. I was a teen when I first saw Caablanca and I was so troubled by it. I thought what a horrible mess.
It wasn't till I saw it a little later...only a couple years later that I had already earned that their love wa sheld immortal by their memory and they honoured the world by not returning to a relationship.
In this way I see this poem by Donne as so understanding that story, embedding love, saves the love in memory and in poem form. That love does become eternal when its in art.
Oh dear...I've just made myself cry Ha ha I am such a spa...I'll be back...
(Not Diana, but you are on the right track there. Let's leave it and see if anyone else gets the answer.)The poem is so Catholic; I think that's a difficulty for you as Buddhist, me as Protestant. Let's take it bit by bit:
"Call her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die..."
A fly, like Lear's "the gilded fly doth lecher in my sight", is any flying insect, dragonfly, butterfly or moth, and a taper, or candle, can attract flying insects. A candle lit by a worshipper in a Catholic church usually has a small cost. A candle, like the phoenix, is consumed by its own flame. The lovers, poet and mistress, die at their own cost. If they are candles nobody purchases them, they pay for themselves.
"if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse"
Catholic churches don't have surrounding graveyards, the tombs are inside, often very grand. The lovers cannot expect a "half-acre tomb", only some poems like the one we're reading here.
"We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms",
Jesus compares heaven to a roomy house,
"John 14:2 In my Father's house are many mansions ..."
But then the switch as the poems become hymns sung in church, and the lovers get turned into saints,
"by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for Love."
The worshippers buy candles, which they surround like fluttering moths, and the last stanza is then a prayer which they make to the saints in heaven. The "beg from above" as I understand it (we ought to ask Christine from Shakespeare fans) is how prayers to saints are made in the catholic tradition: you ask them to intercede with the Almighty on your behalf.
Canonisation is nowadays a purely Catholic matter. Does the church control what a saint is patron of? I don't know. I know that if you want auto parts for a car you might pray to Santa Francesca Romana (see https://www.wantedinrome.com/news/s-f... ), and there is St Valentine anyway, but I guess poet plus mistress become patron saints of lovers.
Ashamed to say I've never seen Casablanca . . .
Oh my gosh!!! Why don't we start a thread for Cassablanca...you must see it! It's been ages since I watched it. But if you can find a copy....then I will watch it too.I see what you mean by the Catholic imagery...I might see if I can get my resident Catholic, husband Stagg to take a look at this poem.
Later...
in the meantime your analysis has given me much to think about and so much of Catholic imagery, metaphor...is actually pagan. And that belongs to all of us LOL.
I guess my overwhelming feeling is this is some sort of forbidden love. Is it an older man with younger lover? Or is it forbidden and judged by his companion because he is too apssionate...and that takes him away fro the passion of faith and spiritual life? In some ways Donne seems to be saying the church and faith are one thing....but human love is so much more powerful. Which for many people it is true its so easy to feel that sense of intensity with human love yet we often are taught that religion, spiritual life is where we find that transcending sense?
The crime he speaks of is that roamntic love is more spiritual thanin church?!
"Call us what you will, we are made such by love;
Call her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,"
Thank you for the candle with tapers...
I forgot it could be a candle. As I really keep reading it as "demising"...there is a taper candle that would extinguish itself by burning...but love tapers off sometimes. Our energy, our faith, focus these taper off too.
And we in us find the eagle and the dove.
This is great because it shows us the idea of two different people having something in common. If this is a male and female love affair...their natures transcend stereotypes. They have contrasting traits in both lovers. This is also intriguing me as if it could hint at a gay relationship too. And again...or...an age difference. There is something flawed about their love...because it is being judged by the person listening to the poem.
"The phœnix riddle hath more wit
By us; we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit."
Okay this seems to confirm it is a love between two genders. But they are again being presented as similar. Is this an example of how gender has been created more in contemporary times than it was in Shakepseare's time...I think so.
"We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love."
I'm not sure what this means to me. Death, or tapering off as a candle...or energy...is recurrant in the poem. It is really death? Or is it some other kind of ending between lovers?
Im just aprking this here...stll thinking..."We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms"
For mnemonics using a mansion, building, or temple for memorizing. We call the side of our forehead "temple"...and I see that as relating to where spiritual meaning, life, love resides. When Jesus said he could build a temple in three days...he builds it with human company. When Jesus says his fathers house, heaven has many mansions, that in my mind...says it is because he is using the "houses" as mnemonics. "Houses" of astronomy/astrology.
five sections 9 lines. 45 lines all together
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 = 45
Mansion..."The word also was used in Middle English as "a stop or stage of a journey," hence probably astrological sense "temporary home" (late 14c.)."
https://www.etymonline.com/word/mansion
"We die and rise the same, and proveMysterious by this love."
As you say, very puzzling.
It's somewhere in "The Interpertation of Dreams" where Freud says that the point in a dream where the dreamer becomes impatient of analysis, trying to bypass a difficulty, or saying "it meant nothing", that this is the point that will take the ego down the rabbit hole into the id, and has to be pursued by the analyst. I think the same thing can happen in lyric poetry, that the most difficult point can be the one where you find a deep meaning.
I have the idea that each of the Songs and Sonets has a "Single Point Of Maximum Obscurity", SPOMO for short, so in "Song" it is the mandrake root, in "the good morrow" it is the seven sleepers den, here it is the phoenix and the idea of the mysterious. Not that I'm claiming to know what the spomos mean ...
The phoenix, as you say, is male + female = neuter, like Plato's monsters in The Symposium, or like neutron + proton = zero charge. As a myth it is so much more attractive than Genesis, where woman is created as an afterthought, to keep man happy.
Either Donne knew the obscurely published "phoenix and turtle", or he and S shared a common cultural myth.
Perhaps "mysterious" means "religious mystery". In Christianity, the incarnation and resurrection are often called mysteries, perhaps also the transfiguration, ascension, the event at pentecost ... Then the lovers are creating something to worship. Was the phoenix ever worshipped?
Ops, I didn't see this post when I checked in the other day. sorry to be slow to react!Yes, I agree one hundred percent that the "mysterious" is the religious mystery. I think it refers both to the secrets involved in practicing "rites" or rituals...as well as more mainstream understood mysteries. I'd like to do some thinking about the idea of "religious mystery"
I think the more common or mainstream understanding of religious mystery is resurrection and incarnation. However there are other Christian mysteries....but I need to think.
How could the sahred cultural myth of phoenix and turtle...why did it captivate both these poets? That is a mystery I am also fascinated with...
Three new poems all at once??? Is this wise, when reading just one has taken more than three weeks? I think you will have to schedule them. I suggest the "batter my heart" sonnet first.(No time for "Casablanca" with all this Donne going on!)
Regarding post 7, I'm sure you could have got it with a bit more thought, but you suggested Diana. Very close, and all you have to do is go through the list of Greek goddesses. Only two were queens. It is not Hera, so must be Persephone, queen of the underworld, daughter of Demeter, abducted by Hades. Then, like Diana, you have to pick the Latin name. PROSERPINE, daughter of Ceres, abducted by Pluto. ("Proserpine" not so well known as a name, admittedly.) From this you can make sense of the other verses. A PROSER coule be taken to mean a windbag spouting prose,
And I shall be so too
Unless I finish speedily
and a PINE is "a lofty tree that amid rocks takes root." PROSERPINE = PROSER + PINE. But why the fruit? It must mean "PINEapple". Perhaps in actual charades this would be allowed.
Oddly enough, it all seems to connect with her brother's painting, except that the dates of poem and painting are too far separated. And DGR's Proserpine holds a pomegranate not a pineapple,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proserp...
Hopeing to begin some discussion of Donnes work...I was attracted to this poem title because it was so monolithic or authroitarian sounding...
The Canonization
BY JOHN DONNE
For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,
Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout,
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honor, or his grace,
Or the king's real, or his stampèd face
Contemplate; what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.
Alas, alas, who's injured by my love?
What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veins fill
Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
Litigious men, which quarrels move,
Though she and I do love.
Call us what you will, we are made such by love;
Call her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find the eagle and the dove.
The phœnix riddle hath more wit
By us; we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for Love.
And thus invoke us: "You, whom reverend love
Made one another's hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
(So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize)
Countries, towns, courts: beg from above
A pattern of your love!"