Poem of the Day: Alfred, Lord Tennyson

From The Princess 

    Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; 
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; 
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: 
The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with me. 

    Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost, 
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me. 

    Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars, 
And all thy heart lies open unto me. 

    Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves 
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me. 

    Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, 
And slips into the bosom of the lake: 
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip 
Into my bosom and be lost in me. 

--Alfred, Lord Tennyson

T.S. Eliot once said that Tennyson had the finest ear of any poet in English since Milton, to which W.H. Auden replied that "he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia that he didn't know; there was little else that he did." Thus the Modern dumps on the Victorian, and disillusioned crankiness will always win out over hopeful optimism, which was Tennyson's primary intellectual stance. 

But back to that fine ear, which even Auden was willing to grant him. The silken sounds of this lovely little lyric certainly prove the point. And its interpolation into the plodding tedium of The Princess maybe also proves Auden's other point. A professor of mine once called the line "Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars" a "sterile conceit," which crushed me, because it was a favorite of mine. I see what he means:  The allusion to the myth of Danaë's impregnation by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold (she gave birth to Perseus) doesn't really add anything of substance to the poem. Another professor of mine thinks the image may have been inspired by this painting of Danaë by Titian:

Tennyson's friend Arthur Hallam -- the one he wrote In Memoriam about -- referred to the painting in one of his last letters. 

Some think that Tennyson was aiming for the poetic effect of the Persian verse form known as ghazal; it doesn't strictly follow that structure, but the images of lilies and peacocks and the repeated line endings "with me ... on to me ... unto me ... in me ... in me" give it the flavor of a ghazal, which typically has a refrain.               

Poem of the Day: Algernon Charles Swinburne

From Atalanta in Calydon 

When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, 
     The mother of months in meadow or plain 
Fills the shadows and windy places 
    With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain; 
And the brown bright nightingale amorous 
Is half assuaged for Itylus, 
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces, 
    The tongueless vigil, and all the pain. 

Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers, 
    Maiden most perfect, lady of light, 
With a noise of winds and many rivers, 
    With a clamour of waters, and with might; 
Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet; 
Over the splendour and speed of thy feet; 
For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers, 
    Round the feet of the day, and the feet of the night. 

Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her, 
    Fold our hands round her knees, and cling? 
O that man's heart were as fire and could spring to her, 
    Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring! 
For the stars and the winds are unto her 
As raiment, as songs of the harp-player; 
For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her, 
    And the southwest-wind and the west-wind sing. 

For winter's rains and ruins are over, 
    And all the season of snows and sins; 
The days dividing lover and lover,
    The light that loses, the night that wins; 
And time remembered is grief forgotten, 
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, 
And in green underwood and cover 
    Blossom by blossom the spring begins. 


The full streams feed on flower of rushes, 
    Ripe grasses trammel a travelling foot, 
The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes  
    From lear to flower and flower to fruit; 
And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire, 
And the oat is heard above the lyre, 
And the hoofèd heel of a satyr crushes 
    The chestnut-husk at the chestnut-root. 


And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night, 
    Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid, 
Follows with dancing and fills with delight 
    The Maenad and the Bassarid; 
And soft as lips that laugh and hide 
The laughing leaves of the trees divide, 
And screen from seeing and leave in sight 
    The god pursuing, the maiden hid. 


The ivy falls with the Bacchanal's hair 
    Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes; 
The wild vine slipping down leaves bare 
    Her bright breast shortening into sighs; 
The wild vine slips with the weight of its leaves, 
But the berried ivy catches and cleaves 
To the limbs that glitter, the feet that scare 
    The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies. 

--Algernon Charles Swinburne

I never read this opening chorus from Swinburne's play Atalanta in Calydon without thinking of this: 

Winterstürme wichen 

Wintry storms have vanished

dem Wonnemond,

before Maytime;

im mildem Lichte leuchtet der Lenz;

in a gentle light springtime shines out.

auf linden Lüften leicht und lieblich,

On balmy breezes light and lovely

Wunder weben er sich wiegt; 

it weaves miracles as it wafts.

durch Wald und Auen weht sein Atem, 

Through woods and meadows its breath blows,

weit geöffnet lacht sein Aug'. 

wide open its eyes are smiling.

Aus sel'ger Vöglein Sange süss er tönt,

Lovely birdsong sweetly proclaims it,

holde Düfte haucht er aus: 

blissful scents exhale its presence.

seinem warmen Blut entbluhen wonniger Blumen,

Marvelous flowers sprout from its hot blood,

Keim und Spross entspringt seinter Kraft. 

buds and shoots grow from its strength.

Mit zarter Waffen Zier bewingt er die Welt;

With an armory of delicate charm it conquers the world.

Winter und Sturm wichen der starken Wehr: 

Winter and storms vanish before their stout defense.

wohl musste den tapfern Streichen 

At these bold blows, of course, 

die strenge Türe auch weichen, 

the stout doors yielded too,

die trotzig und starr uns trennte von ihm.

for stubborn and hard they kept us from the spring.

Zu seiner Schwester schwang er sich her;

To its sister here it flew.

die Liebe lockte den Lenz: 

Love decoyed the spring.

in unsrem Busen barg er sich tief;

In our hearts it was hidden deep;

nun lacht sie selig dem Licht.

now it smiles joyfully at the light.

Die bräutliche Schwester befreite der Brüder;

The sister as bride is freed by her brother.

zertrummert liegt, was je sie getrennt;

In ruins lies all that kept them apart.

jauchzend grüsst sich das junge Paar:

Joyfully the young couple greet one another.

vereint sind Liebe und Lenz!

Love and Spring are united!

--Richard Wagner, Die Walküre, Act I, scene III

(translator unknown)

Well, okay, advantage Wagner. After all, he had his music to plump up his verse. But I think a case can be made for Swinburne as an underrated poet. The rest of Atalanta in Calydon, like most English closet dramas, is fairly dull stuff. But this opening chorus, despite some heavy-footedness in its alliteration and imagery ("lisp of leaves and ripple of rain"), has some lovely moments. And its evocation of the arrival of spring anticipates Wagner's by five years.   

Swinburne's tragedy was to be born British in the age of Victoria. He wanted to be a poète maudit like Baudelaire or Rimbaud, but they do things differently in France, and at his baddest he resembles nothing more than a naughty schoolboy. His alcoholism and masochism led to a nervous breakdown, and when he recovered he became a respectable citizen and even got nominated for the Nobel Prize. Given that the Nobel people managed to overlook Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Borges, et al., we can be grateful that they didn't bite this time. 

Poem of the Day: Wallace Stevens

Anecdote of the Jar 

I placed a jar in Tennessee, 
And round it was, upon a hill. 
It made the slovenly wilderness 
Surround that hill. 

The wilderness rose up to it, 
And sprawled around, no longer wild. 
The jar was round upon the ground 
And tall and of a port in air. 

It took dominion everywhere. 
The jar was gray and bare. 
It did not give of bird or bush, 
Like nothing else in Tennessee. 

--Wallace Stevens

How odd that my favorite 20th-century poet should have been a Taft Republican insurance company executive, of whom a colleague is supposed to have said, on reading his obituary in the New York Times, "I didn't know Wally wrote poems."

Stevens can be a tough nut to crack, unless you keep in mind one thing: his great theme is the transformative power of the imagination. It's what we have instead of religion ("Sunday Morning"); it's an intermediary between us and reality ("Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"); it is God itself and "the ultimate good" ("Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"). Everything else in Stevens' poetry is just window dressing. 

But what window dressing, what wit, what imagery, what mastery of sound! Take the first line of this one: "I placed a jar in Tennessee." Why Tennessee? Why not Arkansas, or Washington, or Delaware, or any of several other three-syllable states? Of course, he needed a state with some wilderness in it, which maybe rules out Delaware, and Washington introduces that confusion between state and city, but when it comes to "slovenly wilderness," Arkansas would do as well as Tennessee. Except that then we'd have "jar" and "Arkansas," which sounds too easy. 

And then there are those odd tricks of diction: the archaic inversion of "And round it was"; the phrase "of a port in air," which has commentators going in circles; and the mind-bending double negation "It did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee," with a further conundrum in the phrase "give of." Almost every one of the poem's 12 lines has something to taunt the explicators. 

But really I think the poem is a response to Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." It's not an ode, it's an anecdote (which lawyer Stevens probably knew wouldn't stand up as evidence in court). It's not a Greek vase, it's a Tennessee jar. It doesn't have a "brede / Of marble men and maidens overwrought, / With forest branches and the trodden weed"; it's "gray and bare" and doesn't portray any people, or even any birds or bushes. It's as plain and commonplace an artifact as you can find. And yet when he puts it in place, it makes Nature behave. Which is what art does -- even the simplest human creation like a jar sitting on a hill. The "slovenly wilderness" still sprawls, but the imagination has put it into perspective, has tamed it. And "fictive things" (jars, poems, Grecian urns) "Wink as they will."  

Poem of the Day: Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ode to the West Wind 

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, 
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead 
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, 

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, 
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, 
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed 

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until 
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow 

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill 
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) 
With living hues and odours plain and hill: 

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; 
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear! 

II 

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion, 
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, 
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, 

Angels of rain and lightning; there are spread 
On the blue surface of thine aëry surge, 
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head 

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge 
Of the horizon to the zenith's height, 
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge 

Of the dying year, to which this closing night 
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, 
Vaulted with all thy congregated might 

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere 
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear! 

III 

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams 
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, 
Lulled by the coil of his crystàlline streams, 

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, 
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers 
Quivering within the wave's intenser day, 

All overgrown with azure  moss and flowers 
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou 
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers 

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below 
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear 
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know 

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, 
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear! 

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; 
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; 
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share 

The impulse of thy strength, only less free 
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even 
I were as in my boyhood, and could be 

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, 
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed 
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven 

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. 
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! 
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! 

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed 
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. 

V 

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: 
What if my leaves are falling like its own! 
The tumult of thy might harmonies 

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, 
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, 
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! 

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe 
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! 
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth 
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! 
Be through my lips to unawakened earth 

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? 

--Percy Bysshe Shelley 

People have trouble with Shelley. Partly it's that his revolutionary attitudes seem to us naive, partly that his verse is more rhetorical and less sharply focused in its imagery than his contemporary Keats's. But mostly, I think, it's his name. A line like "I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!" from the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" sounds like something a guy named Percy Bysshe Shelley would do. 

It's too bad about the name Percy, and woe betide the kid whose parents are so cruel as to name him that. (Not that there are many of them; the name peaked in the 1890s and now is virtually nonexistent. I actually had an uncle named Percy, who was born back when it was still popular, but the only other Percys I can think of are Percy Sutton, the former Manhattan borough president, and Percy Kilbride, who played Pa Kettle opposite Marjorie Main's Ma in B-pictures of the 1940s.) 

But Percy Shelley was no pantywaist (neither were Sutton, Kilbride and my uncle for that matter). Nor was he what Matthew Arnold called him, a “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.” Arnold's attempt to emasculate Shelley probably stemmed, ironically, from that eminent Victorian's shock at Shelley's revolutionary attitudes toward things like marriage and sex. 

Anyway, the "Ode to the West Wind" is one of my half-dozen favorite lyric poems, and I think it has a sweep and power that rivals Shakespeare and Milton. So there. It's also one of those poems that, like Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," has a clear five-act structure: 

Exposition: The autumnal west wind has arrived to scatter dead leaves but also the seeds that will reawaken in the Spring.
Conflict: The destroyer role of the wind seems to predominate over that of the preserver. 
Crisis: Is it possible that only destruction will prevail? 
Struggle: The speaker recognizes that his fear of the wind's power echoes his own loss of hope in the possibility of spiritual and social change and renewal. 
Resolution: The speaker regains faith that renewal will occur, that Spring will follow Winter, and that his words and ideas will spread and take hold. 

But of course it's not just a didactic poem. It's also a brilliant use of terza rima, the meter of Dante's Divina Commedia, which is also about death and rebirth. Shelley is not a hard-edged imagist like Keats. His verse depends on the reader's ability to hold all its elements -- imagery, sound, symbolism, dramatic tension -- in the mind at once. There are few more beautiful stanzas in English than the middle section of the poem, with its evocation of an underwater world that is touched by the wind's power, but it doesn't stand alone. And while I understand the objection that "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" is a little too melodramatic, a little too much like "I shrieked and clasped my hands in ecstasy," I argue that it works in context, that it's a dramatic turn that precipitates the reconciliation in the last stanza. 

Poem of the Day: William Shakespeare

Sonnet XXX

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought 
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, 
And with old woes new wail my dear Time's waste. 
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, 
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, 
And weep afresh love's long since canceled woe, 
And moan th' expense of many a vanished sight;
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, 
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er 
The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan, 
Which I new pay as if not paid before. 
   But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, 
   All losses are restored and sorrows end.

-- William Shakespeare

Not my favorite Shakespeare sonnet. It's one of those in which the final couplet too abruptly cancels out the rest of the poem. Still, it's full of wonderful soundplay, from the sibilants of the opening lines (sessions ... sweet silent ... summon ... remembrance ... things past) to the grieving open vowels of the later lines (moan ... foregone ... woe ... woe ... o'er ... fore-bemoanèd moan ... before). 

But I really chose this one because of remembrance of things Proust. This was the sonnet that Scott Moncrief chose to allude to when he went to translate the title À la recherche du temps perdu. Or rather, to mistranslate it. For Shakespeare is writing about what Proust called "voluntary memory" -- the effort to summon up things past -- whereas Proust is equally concerned with "involuntary memory," the way the past looms up unbidden when invoked by some sensory nexus -- a smell, a taste, a sound. True, Proust's narrator goes "in search of lost time" (the currently preferred translation of the title), but he succeeds only when conditions (most famously, the taste of a cookie crumb in a spoonful of tea) favor it. 

Still, you can see how the sonnet might have appealed to Scott Moncrief, for not only is "remembrance of things past" a classier sounding title in English than "in search of lost time," the sonnet itself is concerned with many of the things that troubled Proust's narrator: dead friends, old lovers, obliterated landmarks. But Proust's novel doesn't have a tacked-on couplet or coda to cancel out the sadness of those memories.  

O Calcutta!

The following review appeared today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

A DEAD HAND: A Crime in Calcutta

By Paul Theroux

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 279 pp., $26

There's a house-of-mirrors moment in Paul Theroux's new novel when his narrator-protagonist, a travel writer named Jerry Delfont, meets up in Calcutta with a travel writer named Paul Theroux.

“What I knew about Theroux,” Delfont writes, “is what everyone knew about him. He was known for being intrusive, especially among the unsuspecting – strangers he met on trains, travelers who had no idea who he was, people thinking out loud in unguarded moments. I suspected that much of what he wrote was fiction, since he'd started his writing life as a novelist.” Delfont concludes from their conversation that Theroux is insincere, a phony, driven and competitive and envious. “I also knew that he was going to write about me, about meeting me, and that he'd get everything wrong.” 

So what we have here is Paul Theroux writing about Jerry Delfont writing about Paul Theroux. It's an oddly self-conscious moment, though whether it's self-deprecating or self-aggrandizing on Theroux's part is a little hard to say. It also plays only a tangential role in the plot: Theroux is there to find out what Delfont knows about a mysterious American woman named Merrill Unger, and Delfont isn't willing to let Theroux know that he knows a lot about her. 

There’s a lot Delfont doesn’t know, too, and that forms the plot of the novel. He meets Mrs. Unger (as he continues to think of her even after they’ve become intimate) when she sends a letter to him at his hotel in Calcutta. She explains that her son is an admirer of his writing and that a friend of her son’s  may be in trouble: The friend woke up in a fleabag hotel to find the body of a dead boy on the floor. She wonders if Delfont could help her son’s friend.

Delfont is afflicted with writer’s block, which he refers to as “dead hand.” (That’s not the only explanation of the title the novel provides.) So he goes to see Mrs. Unger and gets involved in more than he expected. He learns that she’s very wealthy, that she runs a kind of home for children she picks up on the Calcutta streets, that she’s a devotee of the goddess Kali, and that she gives a terrific tantric massage. He learns that she despises Mother Teresa, with whom she once worked, as a fame-seeker and celebrity hound who “believed that poverty made people better.”  He learns other things, too, which we won’t go into here, except to cite the warning of his friend Howard, who works at the American consulate: “a lot of foreign women get goddess complexes.”

As a novelist, Theroux has made a kind of specialty of stories about people who go to places where they don’t really belong and consequently get into major messes, the way Allie Fox does in The Mosquito Coast, for example. And Jerry Delfont’s problem is that he – one of the “big pink foreigners”  -- doesn’t belong in “populous Calcutta, city of deformities,” no matter how infatuated he becomes with Mrs. Unger.

In fact, Mrs. Unger herself gives him the bitterest insight: “India [is] a culture of evasions. This country is very dirty. It’s impossible to tell the truth here. The truth is forbidden, especially in writing. Anyway, a truthful book about India would be unbearable – about spite, venom, cruelty, sexual repression, incest, and meaningless crimes.” Later, Delfont would reflect, “Of all the foreigners I met in India, she was the one who was most at home.” 

Is “A Dead Hand” a truthful book about India? It certainly has all those “unbearable” things that Mrs. Unger enumerates. It also has an abundance of richly drawn characters, Mrs. Unger the most enigmatic and scariest of them. Theroux has used his travel writer’s eye and ear and his novelist’s imagination to craft a tense, disturbing, funny and horrifying book around all of them.

Poem of the Day: Arthur Rimbaud

Voyelles 

Vowels 

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles 
     A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels 
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes:  
     I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:
A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes 
     A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies 
Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles, 
     which buzz around cruel smells, 

Golfes d'ombre; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes, 
     gulfs of shadow; E, whiteness of vapours and of tents, 
Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombelles; 
     lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cow-parsley;
I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles 
     I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips
Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes; 
     in anger or in the raptures of penitence; 

U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides, 
     U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas, 
Paix des pâtis semés d'animaux, paix des rides 
     the peace of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of the furrows 
Que l'alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux; 
     which alchemy prints on broad studious foreheads; 

O, suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges, 
    O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds, 
Silences traversés des Mondes et des Anges: 
     silences crossed by Angels and by Worlds      
-- O l'Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux! 
     -- O the Omega, the violet ray of Her Eyes! 


L'étoile a pluré rose au coeur de tes oreilles, 
     The star has wept rose-color in the heart of your ears, 
L'infini roulé blanc de ta nuque à tes reins; 
     the infinite rolled white from your nape to the small of your back; 
La mer a perlé rousse à tes mammes vermeilles, 
     the sea has broken russet at your vermilion nipples, 
Et l'Homme saigné noir à ton flanc souverain. 
     and Man bled black at your royal side.

-- Arthur Rimbaud (prose translation by Oliver Bernard)

What is poetry but sounds and images? Well, there's meaning, but for Rimbaud that's often a secondary consideration. He was 18 and in the middle of his affair with Verlaine when he wrote this sonnet-plus-envoi. Aside from "Le Bateau ivre," it's probably his best-known poem. But whether it's a serious account of the author's synaesthesia is doubtful. Notice that Rimbaud has altered the usual sequence of vowels -- AEIOU -- to put O at the end, just as omega is the final letter of the Greek alphabet. And that O is the one vowel associated not only with a color but also with a shape: the circle of a trumpet's bell and of the irises of "Her Eyes." And that blue is the only color missing from the envoi. Of course there are many interpretations, some hinging on Rimbaud's interest in alchemy, others on his indulgence in absinthe (aka "the green fairy"), still others examining his attachment to his blue-eyed mother. It's probably a bit of all of these, but none of them explains it fully. Which is why he's one of the greats.

       

What I'm Reading

The Case for God, by Karen Armstrong 

Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms. ... The same applies to the creation myth that was central to ancient religion and now has become controversial in the Western world because the Genesis story seems to clash with modern science. But until the early modern period, nobody read a cosmology as a literal account of the origins of life. (p. 15) 

This seems to imply that there were no conflicts over myths "until the early modern period." But of course there were. What Alfred North Whitehead called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness" has always been with us. Ancient peoples believed that their gods and the records of their doings were more than just symbolic representations of "a reality that transcended language," and they were willing to go to war to prove it. The Bible vs. science controversy arises from a belief in the absolute truth of, on the one hand, Scripture, and on the other, scientific method. And each side fears that granting only symbolic status to any part of its ideology undermines the entire ideology and must therefore be fought for.  

In our own day, the God of the monotheistic tradition has often degenerated into a High God. The rites and practices that once made him a persuasive symbol of the sacred are no longer effective, and people have stopped participating in them. He has therefore become otiosus, an etiolated reality who for all intents and purposes has indeed died or "gone away." (p. 16)

Hence the fury over the magazine cover that asked:

Poem of the Day: Rainer Maria Rilke

from Sonnets to Orpheus 

O dieses ist das Tier, das es nicht giebt. 
     O this is the animal that does not exist.
Sie wußtens nicht und habens jeden Falls 
     But they didn't know that, and, in any case, 
-- sein Wandeln, seine Haltung, seinen Hals, 
     they loved it -- loved its gait, its stance, 
bis in des stillen Blickes Licht -- geliebt. 
     its neck, loved the light in its quiet gaze. 

Zwar war es nicht. Doch weil sie's liebten, ward 
    It never was. But since they loved it,  
ein reines Tier. Sie ließen immer Raum. 
     a pure animal became. They always left space. 
Und in dem Raume, klar und ausgespart, 
     And in that space, unoccupied and bright, 
erhob es leicht sein Haupt und brauchte kaum 
     it calmly raised its head and scarcely needed 

zu sein. Sie nährten es mit keinem Korn, 
     to be. They fed it not with grain, --  
nur immer mit der Möglichkeit, es sei. 
    only with the promise of its being. 
Und die gab solche Stärke an das Tier, 
    And this gave the animal such power, 

daß es aus sich ein Stirnhorn trieb. Ein Horn. 
     that a horn sprouted from its brow. One horn. 
Zu einer Jungfrau kam es weiß herbei -- 
    White, it strode up to a virgin -- and was, 
und war im Silber-Spiegel und in ihr. 
      in the mirror's silver and in her.

--Rainer Maria Rilke (translation by Edward Snow)

The Sonnets to Orpheus were written partly in response to the death of a 19-year-old young woman, a friend of his daughter's. Their central theme is the imagination's ability to bring things into being -- the power of art to create and transcend. In this case, it's an animal that never was: the unicorn. Unicorns have become so associated with kitsch, the bedroom decor of pre-teen girls, that they've lost much of their magic, and it takes a wizard-poet like Rilke to bring it back. Edward Snow's letter-perfect translation, though it loses the rhymes that knit together the original poem, has its own magic.       

What I'm Reading

The Case for God, by Karen Armstrong 

Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capabilities of mind and heart. This will be one of the major themes of this book. (p. xiii)

This makes religion sound like yoga or dieting or vowing to read ten pages of Proust every day: one of those worthwhile pastimes that one resolves to take up on New Year's Day, and not the central and most powerful guide to life. But that's okay. It's a definition that I, being something of a spiritual lazybones, rather like. 

[The] rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related. (p. xv) 

And related partly because each is an alarmed reaction to the other.  

If the historians are right about the function of the Lascaux caves, religion and art were inseparable from the very beginning. Like art, religion is an attempt to construct meaning in the face of the relentless pain and injustice of life. As meaning-seeking creatures, men and women fall very easily into despair. They have created religions and works of art to help them find value in their lives, despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary. (p. 8) 

Yes, and art has gained the upper hand. Sometimes religion's attempts to construct meaning only produce more "relentless pain and injustice." A recognition of this, and of the fact that humans -- not god(s) -- "have created religions," has caused many of us to turn for consolation to the arts and not to religion. 

The desire to cultivate a sense of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic. (p. 9)

Human beings are so constituted that periodically they seek out ekstasis, a "stepping outside" of the norm. Today people who no longer find it in a religious setting resort to other outlets: music, dance, art, sex, drugs, or sport. (p. 10) 

Which explains why religions have traditionally been hostile to most of these other outlets.