There's a flying trickster in that wood,
And we shan't be there to help with our love...
- Auden, "We have brought you, they said, a map of the country" - sestina
from _The Orators_.
There are plenty of dark woods to choose from - even Potter's Forest of Nead
("If you go down to the woods today..."). There is, drat it, a word missing
from one line: it should be -
As if you could back out *of* the dark wood
the way you came...
I think the last line-and-a bit have to do with the seductions of a
melodramatic view of sex -as a metonym for experience in general, the
genitals standing in (or up) for the whole body - a view in which the life
of the senses is full of death-songs and shrieking furies. "Lenient amor",
the grazing libido, knows no distinction between "innocence" and
"experience", and cannot be seduced because it cannot be diverted from
itself - this is the "childhood" whose end is "more childhood". Imagine
trying to pitch (as in pitching a movie, but think also of the female
singing voice in the melodrama - see Stanley Cavell on this) the melodrama
of seduction to a child. It's as if you had to be seduced by the idea of
seduction before you could be seduced (to the pure, all things are pure...).
As a satire on self-help, and also the lyric poem as therapeutic recourse,
this section hinges on the trope of the lost or seduced innocent, the
ensnared and befouled inner child who has to recover her integrity and
self-worth. This trope ends up depraving the therapeutic subject by causing
her to fixate on the moment of seduction, a moment which can never quite be
located and which becomes itself the subject of a feverish enquiry. There is
a nice (well, OK, a nasty) satirical point to be made by asking about the
nature of the satisfactions offered by the lyric poem which seeks the origin
of the poet's wounded consciousness.
Dominic
----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin J. Walker" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2002 2:23 PM
Subject: Re: They're rodentlike, and they're virtuous...
> This is very suggestive & touches a deep chord. I wish I understood the
> apparent reference to Psyche in the last line & a half. I thought
> immediately of Rilke's _The Departure of the Prodigal Son_ ~ "Now to
depart
> from all that confusion/that's ours and yet does not belong to us/.../from
> all those things that as with thorns/attach themselves to us once
> more.../.../to see, half-guessing, how impersonally,/ how over all our
heads
> occurred the woe /that childhood was full of to the brim -" etc. (only a
> rough impromptu translation by me). The babes in a wood who will never be
> happy or good also come to mind.
> Martin
>
