David Bircumshaw wrote:
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I took particular exception to Jeff's claim that in respect of Veronica
Forrest-Thompson's
"And, O, many-toned, immortal Aphrodite,
Lend me thy girdle.
You can spare it for an hour or so
Until Zeus has got back his erection."
that " intertextuality in ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, mythical and literary
figures are mentioned. Aphrodite, Zeus, Pleiades, Dis, Sappho, Shakespeare,
Swinburne, Tennyson, Eliot, Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus are all
brought into play. However, it is unimportant whether the reader knows who
they are."
I think in the above it is important that the reader knows who Aphrodite and
Zeus are. It isn't that I 'rule out' non-meaning, but if Eliot and Dis were
substituted (in that order) for the misbehaving Olympians it would affect
the register of meanings ;)
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I think it goes beyond this, dave – the lines refer not simply to any old
Aphrodite, but specifically to Sappho’s Fragment 1 -- D.A.Campbell, _The
Greek Lyric_, Vol. 1, pp. 52 ff., beginning, in Campbell’s translation,
“Ornate-throned immortal Aphrodite, wile-weaving daughter of Zeus ...” [he
of the erection in the fourth line quoted]. Importantly, the poem employs
the Greek name for the goddess – if she had been called Venus, the poem
would have made a different sense.
Like it or not, the poem isn’t simply exploiting intertextuality (though it
does that too) but is specifically referential (like it or not) – the title
is that of a poem by Swinburne, and the first two lines of the poem are
verbatim from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129.
Swinburne and Sappho continue in the lines immediately after the ones quoted
above:
Here where all trouble seems
Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams.
The moon is sinking, and the Pleiades,
Mid Night; and time runs on she said.
I lie alone. I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead.
Be my partner and you’ll never regret it.
Gods and poets ought to stick together;
They make a strong combination.
So just make him love me again,
You good old triple goddess of tight corners.
And leave me to deal with gloomy Dis.
There we have lines 2-4 of Swinburne’s own Garden of Proserpine followed by
Sappho’s Fragment 168B – “The moon has set and the Pleiades; it is midnight,
and time goes by, and I lie alone” (Campbell’s translation again) – so that
we have Swinburne followed by Sappho blended into the line from Tennyson,
before we hit the register-shift of, “Be my partner ...”
I’d agree with Tim (if I’m not misconstruing him) that the poem works even
without a specific knowledge of all of the allusions, but to pretend the
allusions and references are unimportant reduces the text. The poem works
its way towards finally establishing what might be seen as a contemporary
register, an attempt at synthesis, in which both archaism and reference are
totally absent:
I loved you and you loved me
And then we made a mess.
We still loved each other but
We loved each other less ...
Whether the demands made by the poem are fair ... But then, it could
perhaps (intertextuality again) be seen as Ezra Pound mediated by
J.H.Prynne.
Robin
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