XII 60): When I gaze upon Theron, I see all things; but if I should behold all things save him, I should see nothing. It is also a metanarrative commentary on Reason's idea of sexual love. Each of these must be acknowledged and only a reverent, loving response will sustain the miracle. The Turtle is the intrusion of the Elizabethan political paradigm into the myth: only a Turtle Dove can kindle flame for the rebirth of Chester's Phoenix because Chester writes of kingdoms where monarchs die and loyalty falls in question. Rosalin's Complaint voices a monarch's reproach to her subjects, and her poet's reassurance that the transcendent power of love will preserve the body politic. It was married Chastitie. Whereas Robert Ellrodt finds it to be 'throughout funereal', Prince, whose imagination it particularly fired, describes even its analytic terminology as having 'a kind of ethereal frenzy'; Peter Dronke agrees with him, though in more muted accents, in finding the mood of the poem exhilarating.26 Then there is the question of what traditions combine in The Phoenix and the Turtle. Empson, William. Within my heart is the sweet-tongued This is also a key theme of the book. That due to thee, which thou deseru'st alone. Pico della Mirandola, like certain neoplatonists among the early Church Fathers, had identified the Logos and Holy Spirit of the Christian Trinity with the Ratio (Nous) and Anima Mundi (Psyche) of the Plotinian one. Thus she makes her Threnos. This conceit is as old as the Greek Anthology.20 So too the Turtle in Shakespeare sees his right (his proprium) 'Flaming in the Phoenix sight'. The strong, unexpected stress-pattern, in a context of abstractions and praise, realizes the birdsmakes them realand suggests their relative worthlessness. The 'wonder' of the union startles Reason because the phenomenon is empirically inadmissible. Rather, his love for Cleopatra mysteriously transcends physical 'dotage' ('Eternity was in our lips and eyes'), and he progresses from mere appetite to a committed self-forgetfulness: Then in the midst a tearing groan did break. Done by the best and chief est of our moderne writers, with their names subscribed to their particular workes; never before extant. SOURCE: "'Single Natures Double Name': An Exegesis of The Phoenix and Turtle," in Generous Converse: English Essays in Memory of Edward Davis, edited by Brian Green, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1980, pp. Deus, cui proprium est misereri et parcere, So the poem begins. 53-4). Not only is the traditional turtledovewhich has no role in the phoenix legendsa female,12 but, of the two birds, it would seem the more feminine, smaller, softer, less colorful and less imposing. . ), it is clear that (until 1938 at least) the great majority have been per sonal or historical readings. . We must attempt to attend to the variety of meanings. by John Wain, p. 4. 4 By "the poet," I mean the speaker of the words, a fictional character, if you like, whose voice we hear. . 14 Petrarch was mentioned by H. E. Rollins in his 1931 edition of The Phoenix ' Nest and Wilson Knight has cited, but not analysed, nos. Shakespeare follows Chester in making the Swan figure the poet's own troth; Apollo's bird, unlike the shrieking harbinger, prophesies at death 'prosperity and perfect ease'. 10 Lactantius, 11. I sang that chylde And that is why the Threnos focuses on the death of the Phoenix and the Turtle; death is the consequence of the kind of love which is described in the Antheme; such love, in this world, leads to the mutual flame in which both lovers perish. The poet's dividing of the symbolic birds leads into the anthem in which Reason, said to be undone, actually asserts itself to present its own view of the event. Mongst our mourners shalt thou go. We are aware of the solemnity and dignity of the lines and the event, but, in addition, we are aware of the poet4 behind them. What the Threnos shares, however, with Neoplatonic thought is its scorn of Petrarchism. It cannot be claimed that the tree was never 'vacant', since the Phoenix only sat on it for his dawn and death rites.9 Besides, some time elapsed between his immolation and rebirth.10 The 'herald sad' may surely be allowed to blow his trumpet from that tree. WebFigurative language has multiple uses, such as conveying complex ideas and emotions quickly or simply adding beauty to the writing. Now, Astrophel's and Stella's well-known 'flame' became 'mutual' while remaining chaste. But the poem itself gives us no warrant for this assumption. . 19 Some scholars think that this poem is anonymous because it is unsigned; but the title page describes the 'new compositions' as being by authors 'whose names are subscribed to their several workes', which means presumably that a poet's name follows the group of poems he has submitted. There of that Turtle Dove we'le understand: The language of its lines is crisp and gnomic, each line having a certain lapidary separateness, yet behind the lines we sense the creating mind impelling them together into lyricism. Example of immortali love. When wasting time expires her tragedy; Truth may seem, but cannot be. . 19 The suggestion is strengthened by the stage imagery, "Chorus" and "Tragique Scene.". The traditional palingenesis is flatly contradicted by the next line: "Leauing no posteritie." (Begot of Treasons heyre) thus to rebell . 1 The subtitle may well have been added by the editor or the compositor of Loues Martyr (see Chapter 3, footnote 4), but the division is, at any rate, clear in the text. They evoke a strong emotional reaction. A. W. Bennett's statement, when he was confronted with a similar situation regarding Chaucer's Parlement of Foules: Even if we were to discover definite evidence of such an occasion, the discovery would illuminate this poem no more than the knowledge of any similar origin or setting . But the apparent clarity of the Threnos is deceptive. That birds did sing to make it heauenly. Why should we think that Shakespeare's conceit of Reason transcending herself in Love has any metaphysical import, and is more than merely a striking metaphor for love's irrationality? In the first of these variations (stanza seven), the paradox appears in its most obvious, numerical, terms. I find no other definition which makes sense in the line. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. Seemeth this concordant one, We might arbitrarily assign it to the swan, or consider it a song arranged by the poet for a choir of birds, the heart of his carefully planned ceremony. What Pylades did to Orestes prove, Reason is not dogmatic; we have here not direct assertion, as in the paradoxes of the anthem, but statements uncertain and conditional. [In the following essay, Axton focuses on The Phoenix and Turtle as "a politically philosophical poem " related to the succession of Elizabeth I.]. The mood of Troilus and Cressida is even more bitter. But let us now leave aside the bird-masses, and leave aside also the emblem-books in which such figurae can likewise be found, and turn to what is perhaps more relevant here: to Marston's and Chapman's Phoenix and Turtle poems, which follow Shakespeare's in Chester's volume (ed. Four golden Swords before the King did beare, vii-x) of Chester with the Hertfordshire JP, resident at Royston, and favours Robert Chester of Denbighshire, who appears with Salusbury and Ben Jonson in Christ Church MSS 183 and 184. And as the turtle Dove Just as it is by transcending the world that Plotinus's divine principles are the source of perfection in the world, so the two birds, precisely by departing from the world, become its angeloi; the lovers, by living towards the fulfilment of their love in death, provide a 'patterne of love' for the world they leave behind. Not least in presenting problems for interpretation is the fact that as well as possessing inherent complexity, The Phoenix and the Turtle is only one1 of several poems by various hands collected by Robert Chester, himself the fullest contributor, in a volume called Loves Martyr which was published in 1601.2 Attempting to puzzle out internal and external correspondences calls to mind the predicament of the man in a sequence of New Yorker cartoons who, after contriving to arrange various floating jigsaw shapes of land into an island on which he triumphantly stands, sees approaching other men on their islands with whom he must now attempt to form a peninsula. 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. Shakespeare's The Phoenix and Turtle is a short poem originally published as part of the collection Love's Martyr, compiled by Robert Chester in 1601. So they lov'd, as love in twain Troth is exemplified in the actions of Phoenix and loyal Dove, in command and obedience, in mutual vows and in mutual sacrifice. The word "bird" has appeared only one other time in the poem, in the first line. A theologian could see a parallel in the Trinity, with Son and Spirit, Phoenix and Dove, dying eternally into the Father. Number there in love was slain. Ellrodt (pp. 1998 eNotes.com It is clear that the arguments posed in modern re-examination of Shakespeare's Phoenix are not to be resolved in the light of literary tradition and conventions. In Love 's Martyr, according to earlier critics, Chester equates the phoenix with Queen Elizabeth and the turtle with her rebellious lover, the Earl of Essex. The tyrant bird is too absorbed in its own clamour to appreciate the offensiveness of the noise. Certain symbolic birds are being commanded either to attend, or to keep away from, a ceremony. The "sole Arabian tree" may, upon first encounter, suggest the possibility, but subsequent stanzas rule it out. There is none such Rollo May (New York, 1961), pp. Note: When citing an online source, it is important to include all necessary dates. The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, Happiness is like a turtle living in the sewer. So I, which long have frid in love's flame, . 14 A. H. Dodd, 'North Wales in the Essex Revolt of 1601', E.H.R. Phoenix and Dove are a vow, a song, a prayer, an ideal cherished against mutability. That chastity of this kind should be styled 'married' might still be puzzling. The Threnos closes with an exhortation which, on surface reading, may suggest paradox. 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'. In these troubled times, travel has come down to a trickle. Before looking at the poem in specific detail, we need to address the question of its place in the wider context of historical, especially personal, allegory, which in turn means surveying the main arguments that have been presented over the past century. "The Phoenix and Turtle - Love, Chastity, And Desire" Shakespearean Criticism 95-101. Death is a nest; something is born. 13 It is here that Elizabeth Watson finds that Chester's purpose is to offer an allegorical tribute to the Queen, Arthur initiating a line which culminates in Elizabeth (see Watson, pp. in personis proprietas et in essentia unitas'. Prince, the editor of the 1960 Arden edition of The Poems, remarks (p. 179, n.) that "Most commentators agree that this bird's identity is left uncertain. 9 'Shakespeares lyrische Gedichte', Jahrbuch, 28 (1893), 274-331. Word went round among the circle of poets to whom Sir John was known, and they decided to celebrate the knighthood, which had completed his restoration of his family's fortunes, by reusing Chester's theme. It was that too, but now Elizabeth Boyle was being presented by the greatest poet in England with a work of art of consummate skill, which love had prompted and which should. This is not only to say that the whole of 'kinde' is united in mourning a poet's death (a theme that spans from Moschus' Lament for Bion to Lycidas), but that emblematically the birds can give an exemplum of love, and an insight into death and immortality, which has a purity and self-sufficiency beyond what human images of grief could convey: The skie bred Egle roiall bird, Discusses The Phoenix and Turtle as "a poem of mourning, a meditation on the hard fact of mortality.". The rain seemed like an old friend who had finally found us. Shakespeare's Phoenix may now be securely 'pigeonholed' in the tradition. But thou shrieking harbinger, Foul precurrer of the fiend, Augur of the fever's end, Two distincts, Division none. The traditional image of the Turtle as a bird dedicated to Venus but chaste in its one mating for life combines here with the Phoenix to suggest the concept of absolute constancy in married life. In Bernard Silvestris' De Mundi Universitate Natura ascends to Tugaton, the Idea of the Good, the 'suprema divinitas' of the highest heaven, to obtain there the perfect archetype of man, which she will fashion on earth. 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. 21 The proportion of three-stress lines in the threne is actually no higher than in the rest of the poem. Simile: The gardener says to Mary "both of us as sour as we look" and it Is this the true example of the Heart? Property was thus appaled, Neither two nor one was called. Jane would have ten siblings in the next thirteen years, but Chester refrained from adding further stanzas for these, though he was still at Lleweni as late as 1604, when he witnessed a deed executed by Sir John Salusbury.8 (Another witness was Robert Parry, author of Sinetes Passions, 1597, a book of poems which he dedicated to Salusbury.) Of impure thoughts, or uncleane chastity: One might add that the flock of birds following him after his rebirth represented the crowd of the elect.30 Furthermore, the mystical significance of the turtle dove had a wide range, embracing Divine Sapience, the Blessed Virgin, the Church and the contemplative soul.31 The Phoenix, though queenly in Shakespeare's poem, like Spenser's Sapience, might therefore stand for the second Person of the Trinity and the Turtle might represent either the Church betrothed to Christ, or the soul rapt in contemplation.
