131-3), and the second involves the Phoenix with the Turtle upon their resolving to die together on her funeral pyre.15 Mention of a second turtle complicates matters, as we may imagine, but Brown is equal to answering this. the use of heptasyllabic metre in the first couplet and octosyllabic in the second of each stanza, as opposed to Shakespeare's use of outer and inner rhyming quatrains, with nearly perfect heptasyllabic metre until the threnos): Sigh they did, but now betwixt Totaling eighteen stanzas of verse, Shakespeare's The Phoenix and Turtle was first published in 1601 as part of Robert Chester's Love's Martyr or Rosalin's Complaint. Its subject involves the funeral of a mythic phoenix and a turtle dove, two creatures that together are generally thought to represent the ideals of constancy and love. slaine.". However dull and turgid the style may be, the note of exaltation rings true in the celebration of oneness. 1The Parlement of Foules (Oxford 1957), pp. Hooke explains why the sixty-seven year old Queen was to him 'perfect beauty' and in what terms we must understand his 'love and desire' to be united to her: The glory which then she gayned, she hath not lost, but increased it by her growing in graces and giftes euen in this her age meete for a Queene: so should we giue case vnto her, to testifie vnto vs, that the loue & desire we had vnto her in her youth, is not dead nor decayed in vs towards her in her age; but as the blessedness of her government doth still deserue our loue, so we should loue her, as long as she gouerneth . 25 Straumann, Phnix und Taube, Zurich, 1953, pp. Donne introduced a further innovation in describing the two lovers as making up one Phoenix. . . Whatever one is to say about topical allusionsand it would be foolish to deny their existence out of handmust be said after we have considered what is manifestly the writer's main intent, and the scheme of his book or poem as a whole; we are likely to find that the more sure and satisfying the imaginative work, the less important will become the topical references, or autobiographical scaffolding.1. On the sole Arabian tree, Now the love between the Turtle and his Queen is described in language used by lawyers and poets for their phenomenon of the king's two bodies: Though there be in the king two bodies, and that those two bodies are conjoined, yet are they by no means confounded the one by the other.13. The Turtle shares in the birth of the new Phoenix by whole-heartedly yielding to the flame. They married in 1586 and soon had two children, a daughter called Jane (the recreated Phoenix) in 1587, and a son named Harry in 1589. Yet 'married chastity' (1. Reason's senses can never give it a full knowledge of what has actually happened. On the contrary, recent commentary has found that it possesses great resonance; the quarrel turns rather on matters of emphasis. But heapeth up great store of spicery; The central part of the poem quoted above refines in exact, technical, scholastic language the relationship of the lovers. An excellent essay on the poem is by Walter J. Ong, 'Metaphor and the twinned vision' Sewanee Review LXIII (1955) 193-201. By the time the Phoenix and the Turtle were mentioned, we were ready to consider how they might be related to Love and Constancy, but we felt no necessity to relate them to a world of actual birds. 24 So Grosart in his edition of Loves Martyr (New Shakspere Society, 1878), followed by W. H. Matchett, op. In figurative language the reader must determine the writers intended meaning, as the words by themselves do not express it clearly. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana, 1950), pp. The allusions in the novel also add layers of meaning. In its opening stanzas, The Phoenix and Turtle rallies and organizes 'noble' inclinations of the human will, and purges it of 'vulgar' love. Therefore resolving, what it was, to know, Out of the fire, but a more perfect creature? And, clearly, the true and fair who are urged at the end to sigh a prayer at the urn of these dead birds are those who only seem true and fair. 6), Religion & iustice with many peaceable fruites thereof, which Elizabeth leaveth established to his handes, shall through the faithfullness of his ministry be reviewed and polished, to florish in perfect bewtie. Alliteration. Love has reason, reason none, if the mourning birds can, with the loyal Turtle, see their right flaming in the Phoenix sight: Whereupon it made this Threne, What the Threnos shares, however, with Neoplatonic thought is its scorn of Petrarchism. This is the 'Eighth Song' from Astrophil and Stella, the following stanzas of which may have influenced Shakespeare as he wrote (allowing for some metrical differences, e.g. But the unity of Shakespeare's vision is not the metaphor of one Phoenix, echoing the traditional idea of the bird's bisexuality; it is a unity that transcends Neo-Platonic philosophy of love with its psychological paradox of lovers who die to self and yet live, each in the beloved. Is gone himselfe into your Name. There of that Turtle Dove we'le understand: For the omission of the second definite article, see Murray Copland, 'The Dead Phoenix', Essays in Criticism 15 (1965), 279. Pelican, Swan and Dove are each seen as embodiments of a single transcendent truth, constancy until and through death. Why is this? Grace in all simplicitie, Truth may seeme, but cannot be, 44-54. Sewanee Review 63, No. Laura is, indeed, so insistently identified with the Arabian bird that the symbol might appear to be a hall-mark of Petrarchism. Jove describes Blenerhasset's iconographie isle, Lyly's Utopia inhabited by elves, angels, Diana and Venus, the island of the poets where magic and supernatural forces can resolve all personal and political evils. Let the bird of loudest lay. . There is an effect, even if it seems to come about per accidens rather than to follow from the nature of the love-death. "Whereupon," it says, Reason "made this Threne." 100-8) gives a broad survey of the classical, Platonic, and Petrarchan influences, while J. V. Cunningham tries to show that the central part, or anthem, reflects the medieval scholastic refinementand consequent displacementof Platonic (specifically Plotinian) thought. The traditional symbolic aura of the crow has been shifted. Furnivall doubted it was Shakespeare's in 1877, but later changed his mind. 22Elizabethan Critical Essays (ed. 20 That is, unless we accept Dugdale's attribution to him of another Stanley poem, the epitaph on Sir Thomas Stanley's monument in Tong church, Salop. Brown challenges Grosart's identification (pp. Donc, jalouse de l'Un, Muse uniquement une, And comes the thus attir'd, alas poore soule. The second date is today's In 1593 a miscellany called The Phoenix Nest was published, in which appeared Matthew Roydon's elegy for Sidney. The poet prays for himself, his fellow subjects and for his Queen; they are all earthly doves, mortal, subject to imperfections of heart, and he calls for divine grace to free them from the serpent Envy, to transform them to the Paphian Dove, that they may share 'perfect troth'. The thirteenth stanza offers information; it is almost in the nature of a stage direction,19 like the earlier announcement, "Here the Antheme doth commence." it may seem as if the first of these figures, Proprietas or individuality, is simply protesting against the nature of the two lovers, which has both distinctness and unity, and that this stanza is therefore only a repetition in other terms of the earlier 'So they loved as love in twaine, Had the essence but in one . XII 60): When I gaze upon Theron, I see all things; but if I should behold all things save him, I should see nothing. What type of figurative language is used in this sentence? For possible personal allegories, which are not of present interest, see R. A. Underwood, Shakespeare's 'The Phoenix and Turtle': A Survey of Scholarship, Studies in English Literature (Elizabethan), No. This two-in-one death manifests to the society in which the lovers had lived the destructiveness of its discord and thereby allows that society to win a vestige of the lovers' perfect concord. Because but one at once did ere take breath Figurative language can be used to: SOURCE: "The Phoenix and the Turtle: The Poem Alone," in The Phoenix and the Turtle: Shakespeare 's Poem and Chester's Loues Martyr, Mouton & Co., 1965, pp. The poem displays a number of birds which listen to a (human) speaker's lament for Astrophil (Sidney); this elegist commends the rare love of Astrophil and Stella (though he does not call either of them phoenix or turtle) and impresses upon his audience that such a love is unlikely to be seen again. In its disturbed cry, Reason tries to praise the 'Truth and Beautie' of love, but succeeds only in obscuring the source of their wonder. Attempts at exclusively identifying the 'bird of loudest lay' tend to ignore that the Turtle is equally relevant to the opening statement, since the poem concerns itself with its relationship with the Phoenix and nowhere else in the first five stanzas does the Turtle appear. WebReading Eggspress includes 220 structured comprehension lessons designed to teach a range of comprehension strategies, and increase in difficulty as children progress. Chapman, like Shakespeare, appears to have contributed a single poem. Corruption quakes to touch such excellence, See my article 'Shakespeare's Heroic Elixir: A New Context for The Phoenix and Turtle ', Studia Neophilologica 51 (1979). Simile: The gardener says to Mary "both of us as sour as we look" and it And on them, burne so chaste a flame, Furthermore, the crow is specifically addressed as chaste. Who did the whole worlds soule contract, and drove Chester prays that he may lead a poetic journey to a land where Envy has no power. The swan is to serve as priest, its whiteness suggesting both the proper garment and the required purity. Now, in the last line, the word "bird" reappears, undercutting the whole symbolic structure and leading us back to actual birds and out of the poem again. Ovid's bird is in fact a parrot, but Baldwin observes that in Metam. William H. Matchett represents another strain of critical thought, similar to that of Dronke, that observes Shakespeare's rendering of paradoxical language in The Phoenix and Turtle. Created by. In a mutuali flame from hence. And (now first) consecrated by them all generally, to the love and merite of the true-noble Knight, Sir John Salisburie. 561-3. XIX (1952), 265-76. One countrey with a milke-white Dove I graced: "'Their Tragic Scene': The Phoenix and Turtle and Shakespeare's Love Tragedies." The British Journal of Aesthetics 10, No. In The Phoenix and Turtle, Green argued, Shakespeare explores the interaction of all three. Figurative language uses figures of speech to be more effective, persuasive, and impactful. A troublesome labour . Turbaque prosequitur munere laeta pio. But in Shakespeare's poem, through this very paradox, the bird symbolism becomes the fitting expression of the tension created by a certain type of 'Platonic' love. Though we desire it, if it were attained, one or both would be destroyed. The Soule of heavens labour'd Again, chaste love is a condition of being which counteracts both the escapist alienation of vulgar love and the civilized subjectivity which sublime love substitutes for genuine feeling and participation. Shakespeare's contribution to Loves Martyr is unlikely to have been first conceived as a mere complimentary puff, as F. T. Prince surmises, allowing only 'a chance conjunction of images' to precipitate 'a sudden intensity of emotion in the poet'. Sacrificing herself for her brood, the Pelican had been a timeworn figure of Christ and been adapted to honour Elizabeth.9 The Swan, sacred to Apollo, shadows the poets themselves who, in Love 's Martyr, sing at the approach of death to tell of the sadness of mortality yet prophesying 'prosperity and perfect ease'. Among the creatures of kinde, Similarly, in its intellectual celebration of spirituality, the Threnos seems to present a counterpart to vulgar love. Saw Diuision grow together, The publication of Eastward Ho! But the fervor of all such studies has been inevitably cooled by the realization that Shakespeare had only to reach for one of the most popular Elizabethan poetical miscellanies, The Phoenix Nest (1593), and read Matthew Roydon's "Elegy for Astrophil" to find a model for his memorial tribute: the eagle, the swan, the turtle-dove, and the phoenix introduced in fitting order. The Phoenix and the Turtle's ascent into perfect union, and their return in the scattered vestiges of perfection, can thus be seen in perspective to one of the permanent structures in European poetry and thought. Shakespeare, as any survey of his sources at once makes clear, drew inspiration from other literary works rather than directly from history, politics, or philosophy (a practice which in its way bears out Sidney's argument in The Apology for Poetry for literature's supremacy over other disciplines). Though praise is deserved, the anthem is overly ingenious. The critical practice of regarding the poem as a meditation on its own stylistic medium (which at one time was applied to all poetry) has long been discredited; but here is one poem which appears none the less to benefit from such an analysis.33 Even so, to take the line that the poem regards itself as its subject still seems not to be enough to account for all that it achieves. Since the second is praise only at the expense of a possible belittling of the hero and heroine, the first is perhaps preferable. or part of the anthem? . . Describes The Phoenix and Turtle as an "emblematic representation of [Shakespeare's] self-conscious understanding of poetry" and a "metaphoric crystallization" of his forthcoming tragic dramatic form. 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. So betweene them Loue did shine, The text of PhT used in the present essay is The Poems, ed. To use Coleridge's terms, the poem has more than usual emotionand at the same time more than usual order. That chastity of this kind should be styled 'married' might still be puzzling. SOURCE: "The Phoenix and the Turtle," in Orbis Litterarum, Vol. Reason's threne, in its emphasis on death and the absence of posterity, makes it clear that what parted has not remained. Evidence that he consulted Loves Martyr is produced by A. H. R. Fairchild in 'The Phoenix and Turtle: a critical and historical interpretation', Englische Studien, 33 (1904), 337-84. Calling the work "a perplexing love-elegy, traditional and yet obscure," Green outlined sexual desire in this love-tragedy as a synthesis of three traditional forms: Neoplatonic, Elizabethan, and Petrarchan. Their lovedeath figures a process which can show itself in any sphere of existence, because a single poetic apprehension can bind together 'ci che per l'universo si squaderna'. (The legendary Phoenix, sole of its kind, had no need of sex.) Phoenix references have appeared repeatedly over the centuries until the present day, including JK Rowling's 'Fawkes', Professor Dumbledor's familiar in the Harry Potter books. In discussing the line, I suggested that we should perhaps avoid this possible belittling of the lovers in a context of praise. 9 The phoenix sat on an unnamed tree for his morning rites (Carmen de ave phoenice, 11. G. Smith, London 1904) II 201 ff. We have had some preparation for this straining of metaphor in the poet's insistent division of the birds on the basis of a mixture of traditional and newlycreated symbolism. Vol. [In the following essay, Bonaventure dismisses tragic or paradoxical readings of The Phoenix and Turtle, highlighting instead the poem 's final "harmony of. [In the following essay, Matchett analyzes The Phoenix and Turtle with an emphasis on structure, versification, symbolism, and the "texture of complexities and ambiguities in the poem. 31 Aldrovandus, Ornithologiae Tomus Alter, xv, ix, pp. This is not puzzling if one remembers the age's continuing pre-occupation with the theory of the monarch's two bodies, single nature's double name. He would be hesitant about incurring ridicule as the patron of Chester's stuff: it might be acceptable in North Wales, but scarcely in London. Reason is uneasy, and feels the need to reassure itself by explaining what has taken place before its own eyes. Theological overtones are present, but the simpler reading is preferable because of the emphasis on reducing to cinders and on enclosing (in an urn, as becomes clear in the final stanza). Shakespeare wrote The Phoenix and The Turtle, said to the first Metaphysical poem. After the first five stanzas of the poem, as we saw, the poet's "staging" is so successful that the event begins to occur; while witnessing the arranging of a future event, we find ourselves, with the an-them, suddenly in the midst of it. Chester continued to write poems for Christmas and New Year at Lleweni and in compliment to members of the family, Blanch Wynn, the wife of John Salusbury's half-brother, and Dorothy Halsall, sister of Ursula Salusbury, among them. Malone had no doubt that it was genuine, though the mid-nineteenth century experienced a current of scepticism which persisted until Grosart published his edition (here at least his influence has been positive). Antony's unique, phoenix-like vigour gives a new dimension of reality and meaning to sexual love.9. In Alain de Lille's De Planctu Naturae the goddess, complaining to the creator about the sexual transgressions of mankind, receives once again the exemplars of all human qualities from on high, while her poet sees this event in ecstasy and awakes remembering it. As he follows him, Marston delicately points out that Shakespeare, despite his good intentions, has not quite told the truth about them:19. In the tenth stanza, Property is living and active; it is appalled. Shakespeare's poem, like Chester's whole story, celebrates three aspects of a single miracle: the bird sitting upon the sole Arabian tree, the act of sacrifice, and the 'rare-live urne' itself. When a poem is a tissue of ambiguities, we may ascribe them either to carelessness or to failure in the face of great difficulty, or we may presume that they serve a purpose. The pregnant remarks of C. S. Lewis in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), pp. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. The final use of paradox in the poem is an unobtrusive demonstration that metaphorical praise is not to be taken literally. Shakespeare chose to do the same in the only occasional poem which, so far as we know,20 he ever wrote. These lines have been taken as somewhat ludicrous, "almost like a Falstaffian quip at some over fanatic Puritan pair. The stanzas have advanced in two waves: the first, gathering strength through the arranging of a ceremony, broke upon us with the actual song of that ceremony, leaving the poet behind as it carried us into the event itself; the second, gathering strength through increasing personification, now breaks upon us as one of the personified abstractions asserts its will to sing a song of its own. This conclusion is related in another way to the metaphysics of the Antheme. WebIn order to show how this capturing of one-sidedness and two-sidedness occurs in literature, Ong examines Shakespeares poem, The Phoenix and the Turtle (1601). 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. Uploaded by Ava Jakubowski. An allegory is not a cryptogram; so, rather than go on a biographical or political treasurehunt, it seems better to take Chester at his word, and to search out that particular kind of truth of love which is adumbrated in the love-death of Phoenix and Turtle. WebThe creative use of figurative language in this song make the song interesting and demonstrative. 116-30. There is none such 4 Giordano Bruno, The Heroic Frenzies I.i, trans. 38. Lest the Requiem lacke his right. Shakespeare, invited to contribute to a volume in honour of Sir John's elevation to the rank which his grandfather had held, chose to offer an aesthetic variation on a myth which had been used to celebrate the start of his restoration of the family's fortunes. In this resource students will use a visual graphic organizer to help explain the figurative language "There is no rose without thorns" from the novel Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan. 72-6. About that time Sir John may have casually mentioned Chester's earlier poem of celebration, composed at the outset of his climb back to reputation,16to Jonson or some other of his Court-beautifying poets, who then saw in the theme of the Phoenix and Turtle unrealized possibilities for poetic exploitation. 2 (April 1970): 169-79. This is developed in the manner of a traditional Planctus Naturae, and it is useful to bear in mind the poetic uses that had been made of this pattern. Stated more simply, it is important to recognize the dramatic form even of a poem which might seem to be spoken by the author. go'dramatize the speaker's anxiety, as do the verbal qualifications and alternations between direct and indirect tenors of address. eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question. The Phoenix and the Turtle were two and yet attained a single essence of love. "The Phoenix and Turtle - Further Reading" Shakespearean Criticism Rollo May (New York, 1961), pp. But this is not the end of the play. Let my true harty thought my lines commende. It is, in fact, far more metaphysical than Ficino's. Remonstrance, if any, was no doubt met with the authority of George Steven's Preface to his edition of the plays (1793), which denied any significance to Shakespeare's lyric poems; or in America, with Emerson's damning praise of them as poets' poems.3 But the scholar of the mid-twentieth century, whatever his locus, cannot ignore the flash of light which The Phoenix and the Turtle throws on Shakespeare's relation to seventeenth-century poetic development. Like the Phoenix, the Catholic Church is one, yet united with the 'greater Phoenix', 'ce Phoenix Christ unic' (f. 54v), which shows that Donne's 'Two Phoenixes' in his 1613 Epithalamion may not be so great 'an offence against tradition and poetry alike' as Wilson Knight claims (p. 207). That breath of troth creates the Phoenix from the 'rare dead ashes' in the 'rare live urn'. Furthermore, that the selfsame should not be the same (1. Whereupon it made this Threne, The many levels of significance are not disguised under an allegory but plainly set forth. 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. Antony's 'noble' love effectively transmutes Cleopatra's caprice and selfishness, her 'baser' impulses, into 'Immortal longings', which both fulfil and extend her consciousness and feelings: 'Husband, I come!/ Now to that name my courage prove my title!/ I am fire and air' (V.ii.287-89). On the one hand, there is the Threnos's assertive and doctrinaire rational mode, which expresses itself in a deliberate and inflexible rhyme-scheme and in a discursive, syllogistic rhythm in order to establish 'factual' truth. None the less, he is surely right to argue that Shakespeare consulted Chester's verses and incorporated their 'mystical-allusive' manner in his response (Honigmann, p. 109), though he probably did not do so until Ben Jonson showed him Chester's miscellaneous compilation. One Phoenix borne, another Phoenix burne. Web9270 " ESSENCE " AND THE PHOENIX AND TURTLE and Constancy) are now dead, for these were their ideal forms, the substances of which any subsequent appearances are shadows. Stanzas seven through eleven are aimed at increasing the praise by increasing our wonder at the rare quality of the relationship. A. Till their harts had ended talking. Yet nothing suggests that it arose from the mutual flame either as its natural offspring or as a poem inspired by the recorded experience. 2 May 2023
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