She
She stood on the stairway,
Poised to descend;
Her dark eyes shown brightly,
My heart she’d amend.
Blessed be the woman
Whose love will endure
Whose virtue is righteous
Whose faith strong and sure.
Blessed be the woman
Whose word is her bond,
Whose beauty is precious,
A gift from beyond.
No mercy rains on us
If we fail at real love,
Moving through the beauty
To one reigning above.
I just spent hours writing an essay on the app “Notes,” and when I tried to copy and transfer it to Squarespace, I apparently hit the wrong thing and it all disappeared. There’s a way to retrieve such things as long as you hit nothing after the loss except the retrieve button. I accidentally hit a “t” and that is what I got back: “t.” All that work! Well, there are no accidents. An essay can be rewritten; verse, not so much.
In the essay, I began by apologizing for the verse, thinking that the idea was right but that versification of it left perhaps a great deal to be desired. What inspired the verse and the essay was that I had just spent the preceding hour watching and listening to the lovely Maria Coman singing Psalms with male backup. The most moving was Psalm 135 (136). As I was thinking about what I had seen and heard I wondered and hoped that the beauty and virtue reflected in her voice and appearance were real and true, that she was what she seemed: This also is Thou (but neither is this Thou). That led me to reflect on the varying historical perspectives reflected in our literature, the kind of texts many teachers do not have their students read any more.
in the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century the most significant subject for seeing the divine reflected in reality was the woman, especially through the eyes of Romantic Love: for Dante it was Beatrice (see “La Vita Nuova,” #19 and, of course, “The Divine Comedy” where Beatrice, an image of divine grace, comes down into limbo to send Virgil into the dark wood to rescue “Dante,” the lost sinner. In Edmund Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” the character Una plays a similar function in helping rescue the Red Cross Knight who has seriously gone astray in the first book. My next example would be the character of Cordelia in “King Lear,” along with Desdemona in “Othello,” wherein Othello loses sight of the lady’s virtuous character, her real goodness reflected in her beauty, and sees just the opposite in her, and is so wrought up by the machinations of Iago, that he ties to remove the offending vision from reality altogether by murdering her.
Shakespeare , it seems to me, is also always concerned with the revealing function of his female characters in the wonderful romantic comedies. In Shakespeare’s last play, for example, “The Tempest,” note what Ferdinand says about Miranda when he first sees her:
“Most sure the goddess on whom these airs attend….O you wonder.“ While he continues that vision later in the play, the really interesting aspect to note here is what Miranda says when she first sees him: “I might call him / A thing divine, for nothing natural I ever saw so noble.” The vision works both ways as each sees in the other the possibility of the divine as well. Are poets liars (yes and no) or is what they see written so that we might see it too? Not “airy nothings” but the reality of what we were made to be. In the Bible the lunatic does see devils, Dante the lover does see the divine in Beatrice (a brow of Florence), and the Poets do document the meaning they see precisely.
My final example is Eve in Milton’s “Paradise Lost” wherein Adam (in book 4, I think) defines Eve’s revealing function before their disobedience ruins it for a time. Since I have already used up my quotting allotment I shall simply send you to the wonderful text.
Perhaps the most important point to make here finally is that Dante saw the Divine revealed in a young woman who walked the medieval streets of Florence. For an extensive commentary on this idea one would do well to read Charles Williams’ “The Figure of Beatrice.” In a significant way it’s the pervasiveness of the Christian perspective during these cultural times that enables the Christian poet to see through the cultural courtly love perspective of the time with its somewhat adulterous perspective (see Lancelot and Guinevere’s adulterous romance when she is married to King Arthur). In Dante characters who refuse to see what romantic love means and what truly stands behind it, end up in Hell; Francesca in that sense is the obvious counterpart of Beatrice, as Paolo is the counterpart of Dante who is on his way to Beatrice and Heaven and union with the Divine, the Holy Trinity.
Here is a brief glimpse of what Dante, truly in Love, sees in Beatrice:
Love saith concerning her: “How chanceth it
That flesh, which is of dust, should be thus pure?”
Then, gazing always, he makes oath: “Forsure,
This is a creature of God till now unknown.”
She hath that paleness of the pearl that’s fit
In a fair woman, so much and not more;
She is as high as Nature’s skill can soar;
Beauty is tried by her comparison.
For Dante, this particular woman reveals the Divine, the Absolute. According to the verse she is the perfection of Nature as far as Beauty is concerned, and Goodness. He sees in her, I think, the Beatrice God intended, a reality potentially present in each of us, though usually hidden or obscured by our fallen natures. It takes the eyes of the Lover (and the Poet) to see it. As Shakespeare wrote, “The lover, all as frantic, / sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.” “Brow” here would be an ordinary Egyptian girl. While King Theseus [MND] is somewhat cynical about the relationship between the “lunatic, the lover and the poet,” he is still insightful about what happens in their “seeing”: they are “of imagination all compact.” Imagination thus enables the vision to take place, especially in the poet: “The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from Heaven to earth, earth to Heaven, and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name.” Theseus, we might say, is a no-nonsense realist. While he has wooed Hippolita and won her love in battle, after all, he does not appear to identify himself with the lover as he defines him. Hippolita after all is a Queen, not a “brow.”
In some sense I think the role of the Virgin Mary in Christian thought and theology from the early centuries on must also have contributed to the ability to see what loving a woman really means. “Hail Mary full of grace.” Mary’s role and revealing capacity are central in Catholic Christianity. This woman is the central image of the right response to the presence of God: “Let it be to me according to thy word.” And she is without sin, what fallen humanity was meant to be. Beatrice after all leads Dante to Mary finally in the Paradiso. One step further and you might notice that the image of the lovers is a central Christian image: Christ is the bridegroom, and the Church made up of individual men and women is the Bride.
By the end of the seventeenth century as most educated people used to know a radical change in perspective had taken place in western culture, primarily I suppose due to the rise of the scientific perspective and new ways of thinking about the nature of reality. Culturally the dominant theological perspective is Deism with the dominant attitude among many intellectuals being: Neither is this Thou. The only revealing function of reality for the Deist is that of the machine and of course of the mechanic who made it: finding a well-running watch, you might easily infer that there is or at least was a watchmaker.
The best literature of the eighteenth century, I think, is the satire, reflecting in a sense that something significant in the culture has been lost. Two authors who reflect that loss regarding the revealing capacity of the feminine are Swift and Pope in the first half of the century. In “The Modest Proposal,” for example, there is the social and cultural problem of over population and starving Irish children. The genuinely socially concerned narrator has a rational solution. Let the children grow to be a year old and then sell them for food. The proposal is reasonable but inhuman and the narrator doesn’t really seem to notice that. The evil characters in Lear use the same rational justification to murder their parents and others and finally one another. What’s lost here is the perspective of “right reason,” the intuitive faculty that enables us to “just see” the inhumanity at work in Goneral, Regan, and Edmund, as well as the Modest Proposer.
A similar rational perspective is operative in “Gulliver’s Travels,” implicitly in the first two books, explicitly in the final book. The revealing capacity of the feminine has long gone. The only thing the Yahoo female reveas is lust, concupiscence, a raging desire for Gulliver. She has a human female body but lacks humanity, especially the capacity to love. Of course the horses ironically lack human bodies too but they are rational creatures who also lack the capacity to love, to the point where they reject Gulliver from their culture. Gulliver, however, is so taken with their point of view that when he returns home he rejects his loving wife to sleep in his stable with his horses. One might notice in the fina section that the true revealing capacity of the human is now located in the Portuguese sea captain who rescues Gulliver and treats him as the Good Samaritan treated the beaten Jew, even though Gulliver does nothing to deserve his kindness.
The third work that reveals the failed capacity to see the beyond in the woman is Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” where he attitude between the male and the female is that of war with all sorts of sexual overtones. The only thing translated to “Heaven” in the poem is the lock of hair, too precious to be left below. While it’s been some time since I have read the poem, it seems to me that’s the way it ends. Belinda is beautiful but she is simply a thing to be assaulted and from which a trophy might be taken. The meaning of honor, the virtue, is thus lost or deflected.
This “thinking” was apparently written last December and I have done nothing since then for this weblog. I don’t know why I didn’t “publish it then; I think I wanted to develop the eighteenth century ideas from “Gulliver” and “The Rape of the Lock.” However, after more or less rereading this prose and verse, I have decided to, so to speak, put it out there. And move on. Remains to find an image:
Well, that was interesting. I hit this image from my files to see what it was and the machine attached it. Obviously it’s an image of the Resurrection, but whose I don’t remember. I’m afraid if I hit something wrong the entire page will disappear; so somewhat appropriately for the third week of Easter, the Resurrection it is.
