There must be a connection between apprenticeship (as in pastoral) and 
monuments of the mind's own magnificence.  Lycidas is a pastoral -- a 
pastoral elegy -- or an eclogue both virtual and vocational -- that not only 
demonstrates that Milton has studied Virgil (and others who have studied 
Virgil), but that the rhythms both narrative and prosodic for Paradise Lost 
are within his powers, and likewise an engagement with European Literature 
sufficient to add to it.

Let us try to contextualize "the disposition of Virgil's remains," and even 
while considering "the singing-masters of" a poet's soul.

Pastoral -- traditional pastoral -- is very "literary."  It may not be 
wholly "meta," but it has come to seem rather focused on itself.  If we are 
inclined to argue that the recoupment of a text's model is necessary for the 
proper understanding of a text, then the pastoralist or the critic needs to 
follow Alpheus and Arethuse back from Theocritus' Sicily to his 
predecessors' Arcadia, or the Mincius back to Virgil in Mantua.   The 
pastoral genre tell us about this recourse and recurrence:

   O fountain Arethuse, and thou honoured flood,
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds,
That strain I heard was of a higher mood  (Milton Lycidas, 85-87)

The river-nymph Arethusa, as addressed here, had departed Arcadia to 
re-arise from beneath the sea as a fountain in Theocritus’ Sicily.  She 
further serves as Virgil’s pastoral muse, when he addresses the project of 
his last eclogue, and asks for an inspiration purely hers (for she is asked 
to inspire a poem about love, but free of the kind of jealousy that caused 
her original submarine flight):

This last labor, Arethusa, grant to me … So, when thou slidest under 
Sicilian waters, may bitter Doris not mingle her wave with thine, begin . . 
. (Ecl. x.1, 4-5)

Moreover, a recoupment of some kind of predecessor may also be that of a 
kind of virtual youth, a "childhood of literature" ("rustics").  "Sailing to 
Byzantium" means sailing back.  In Yeats’ poem, the phoenix-like soul of an 
aged man can surmount the physical reduction of his body to a dilapidated 
scarecrow; the soul acquires the jubilation of a youthful or spiritual body 
by studying "monuments of its own magnificence."  It must clap its hands and 
sing -- even if it lacks hands.  My student-colleague Daniel Heins points 
out to me that Yeats’ fellow Blake editor John Ellis reports that shortly 
before dying, Blake started singing--ecstatically--while claiming that the 
songs--or the singing masters of his soul--were not his own.  But if going 
back to Blake explains the singing, what about the clapping?  "At the last 
solemn moment" of Blake’s vigil over his dying brother Robert, the 
engraver’s "visionary eyes beheld the released spirit ascend heavenward 
through the matter-of-fact ceiling, ‘clapping its hands for joy’--a truly 
Blake-like detail.  [...] such scenes [...] With him [...] were work’y-day 
experiences," Gilchrist tells us in his Life of Blake.  Moreover, the dead 
brother’s spectre was instrumental in revealing to Blake the technical means 
for facsimilating his designs.  Blake’s plate showing Milton’s star entering 
Blake’s left foot reverses a nearly identical plate labeled "Robert," as 
Blake’s ‘relief engraving’ reverses normal ways of engraving, which reverse 
an image to begin with. 	

For Yeats’ comparable rejuvenation and self-recognition, his speaker 
imagines a time-traveling conveyance to the capital of Eastern Christendom 
and the Eastern Empire.  But what about the sages standing in the holy fire 
there?  Three years before his poem’s publication the poet journeyed not to 
Byzantium, but Ravenna, where a multitude of ecclesiastical buildings are 
famous for their art-defining mosaics, St. Lawrence beside his fiery grate 
among them.  In a letter Yeats says "I had just finished a poem in which I 
appeal to the Saints in ‘the holy fire’ to send death on [the model of] 
their extasy."  He reports he tested his spirits’ powers of clairvoyance to 
explain this image, and they referred him to Blake’s illustration of "Dante 
entering the Holy Fire."  Yeats found, moreover, that Blake’s picture with 
the phoenix-like metamorphosis of one of Dante’s thieves in "the temporal 
fire" presented the inverse picture and plate number.   We are inclined to 
say that Yeats had been tracked to his sources--and/or that he has led his 
correspondent to them.

There are no less than five poets on the last, flaming terrace of Mount 
Purgatory, and two them are called sages (Purg. XXVII, 69,  saggi):  Virgil 
and Statius, who enter the fire with Dante, inside of which the poets Guido 
Guinizelli and Arnaut Daniel sing to him about their own poetic traditions. 
 Here the "singing school" in which one is trained is love-poetry.  But that 
is hardly the only school Dante was trained in, and it is obviously Virgil 
who is almost presented as a school-master.  Dante reserves his name for the 
climax of an extended sequence of such love poets as have been mentioned, 
whose own names, in the long run, only the Commedia has rescued from 
literary Limbo.  But   Dante’s own name appears uniquely in the text, as an 
epiphenomenon of the supercession of the authority of Virgil, upon Dante’s 
own accession to mastery over the matter, models, and metier peculiar to 
medieval letters and song.  The earthly paradise is a kind of transcendental 
pastoral.

Thus Yeats’ sages standing in God’s holy fire belong to a Dantean chorus of 
poets.  But what about their "school"?  Yeats has apparently sand-bagged the 
Dante reference twice over, for in approaching the noble castle in Inferno 
IV the pilgrim "saw assembled the fair school of that lord of highest 
(l’altissimo) singing" (92-93).   Here Dante shares the company of five 
followers of Apollo from the Classical past -- Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, 
Virgil -- who are also referred to as sages (savi, "savants," 110).  "The 
seigneur of highest singing," Virgil himself, is the "famous sage" from 
Inferno I, 89, whom the others are commanded to honor as "the highest poet" 
in Inferno IV, 80 (l’altissimo poeta).

	The disposition of Virgil’s remains comes up several times in the Comedy, 
but wherever his body might lie, his soul is alive and well in Dante’s 
school--or poem.  As Dante puts himself among "The names made famous" 
(L’onorato nominanza, Inf. IV, 76) in the noble castle of limbo and flaming 
fire of purgatory so does Yeats’ poem forecast a conservation and recovery 
of identity through literature:  Blake in relation to Milton, Yeats in 
relation to Blake, and Northrop Frye in relation to the authors like Yeats 
celebrated in his book The Educated Imagination, where one chapter is called 
"The Singing School."

The communion achieved by this collation with an authoritative past also 
haunted the future author of Four Quartets, who seems to meet the familiar 
compound ghost of Virgil and Yeats in the streets of London:  "no artist has 
his meaning alone"; "His significance, his appreciation, is the appreciation 
of his relation to the dead poets and artists [...]; you must set him, for 
contrast and comparison, among the dead."  Yeats anticipates an almost 
alchemical purgation in Byzantium, but he does so in contemplation of 
Dante’s final burial-place, which is in Ravenna.  He finally asks to be 
gathered into "the artifice of eternity," yet ‘artifice’ insists that 
"Eternity" -- in Blake’s aphorism -- "is in love with the productions of 
time."  Pastoral seems itself to be one of those productions.

PS Our youthful enthusiasms may embarrass us, but they might also command a 
fellow-traveller's loyalty.  I was twenty once, e.g.:

In some men great imagination is disastrous,
Persons whom it quickens while it throttles:
– Villiers, who thought himself a papal prince,
And Nerval the ruined Acquitanian.

Phantasy in other men is equally intense,
But leaves its proud possessor cerebral and detached:
Des Esseintes, Saturnian and Byzantine,
And voiding for his concept, Mallarmé.

Between the lines that widened every margin
The poet lay down letters’ bluest blood,
Hemorrhaging chlorine.  Authority of art
Had underwrit what these all unstintingly undertook,
  
Magnificent expenditure of spirit:  reliant on the same –
Gifts conferred on you in lieu of pens and money –
You drew on vaults trust-funded by H. James,
Gave blood from veins flooded with Hart Crane.
  


On Sat, 7 Jun 2008 12:14:34 -0400
  David Wilson-Okamura <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Several years ago, I organized an online discussion of Virgil's Eclogues; 
>we got through #5. If anyone's curious, the record of our conversation is 
>still available here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eclogues/messages/1. 
>Last spring I tried again, with some undergraduates. We finished this time, 
>in the sense that we read all ten poems. But I didn't feel that we'd got 
>IN, if you know what I mean, and I was grateful when we moved on to the 
>Georgics.
> 
> This summer, I'm trying the Eclogues again, and I'd like to share 
>something that's bugging me, in hope that someone can set me my feet back 
>on the path of righteousness. Are you ready for it? Virgil's Eclogues (and 
>Spenser's SC) are all about poetry. How very meta! (Q: Why are University 
>of Chicago students smarter than Harvard students? A: Everything Harvard 
>can do, Chicago can do meta.) What's wrong with that? There are, it seems 
>to me, at least two objections which meta-poetry is open to:
> 
> 1. It has no content. A dog chasing his own tale is fun to watch, but he 
>can't really eat it. To change the metaphor, it's sterile. To change the 
>metaphor again, it's cut off from real life.
> 
> 2. Sure, there is no "singing school but studying / Monuments of its own 
>magnificence." But that (the art world of Byzantium) is no country for 
>young men. What do young men -- the kind who are supposed to write pastoral 
>-- know about poetry? Who but a young poet would write twaddle like this? 
>"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the 
>truth of the Imagination." Oh please. Double oh please. License to spew 
>thee out of my mouth. The heart is deceitful above all things and 
>desperately wicked: who can know it?
> 
> Before I go on, let me say this in favor of youth. If you read English 
>history, you get the impression that having a boy king is a bad thing. But 
>if you read Bible history, a boy king can be wonderful, especially when you 
>need a reformer (like Josiah). Young people are willing to rock the boat. 
>They don't measure (because they haven't experienced yet) the real cost of 
>their actions. They aren't invested yet in the status quo. They can be 
>uncompromising, because they haven't themselves been compromised yet by the 
>World. They wield a terrible, SWIFT sword. That kind of thing terrifies old 
>men -- terrifies and shames them.
> 
> This doesn't explain, though, why young people should be drawn to one of 
>the harder tasks there is in poetry, which writing pastoral is. First, you 
>have to master the low/thin/paired-down style. That's hard. Shakespeare 
>could do it ("Never, never, never"), but not until his forties. Second, if 
>poetry is going to be your subject, you have to know something about poetry 
>that is worth saying. On the one hand, the world of poetry seems brave to 
>young people, because it is new to them; that's something. On the other 
>hand, while they may be passionate about Poetry, they usually haven't read 
>very many poems; their tastes tend to be narrow. Mine were, anyway. If it 
>wasn't romantic/Romantic, I wasn't interested. Satire was lost on me. I 
>liked comedy, but I didn't value it. Which brings me back to problem #2, 
>what do young people know about poetry?
> 
> O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this 
>death?
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr. David Wilson-Okamura    http://virgil.org          [log in to unmask]
> English Department          Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
> East Carolina University    Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------

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James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121