It is entirely probable that Chester's patron would have been glad to have Shakespeare in the volume on the latter's own terms. In the last three lines of the sixth stanza, the occasion for the ceremony is first mentioned, but the very nature of the assertion is ambiguous. Ceremony and formality hold the poem at a distance from personal involvement and, until Reason cries out and asserts the loss more simply, the very praise is contentious. Elizabeth Watson, writing principally about Chester's contribution (and assuming that Shakespeare followed his lead), proposes the identification with the Queen and then says that the Turtle need not represent anyone particularly; 'the allegory operates on the spiritual plane . Nature identifies the ancient founders of noble civilizations by giving an account of 'Britain Monuments' reminiscent of the Faerie Queene, Book II canto 10. (p. 123). WebThe phoenix has captured the imagination of poets over the centuries. so at her departure, she will bequeath vnto her people a legacye aboue all estimation, as namely herself dyeing revived in one of her owne blood, her age renued in his younger yeeres; her aged infirmities repaired in the perfection of his strength, her vertues both of christianytye, and princlyke qualytie, doubled vpon him, who shall arise and stand vp, a man, in steede of a woeman, retayninge in his lyfe, the memory of her never dying honor: expressing in his lyfe patterne of her clemency & iustice, and preserving to his owne glory, & his peoples comforte, the state of his kingdome as he found it . This contrast between quatrains and triplets is reflected in the diction, which is recondite and ambiguous in the introductory poem but simple in the Threnos. 35 Price's suggestion that Poe or Mallarm might 'help us to approach The Phoenix and the Turtle' as pure poetry, however sensitive and stimulating, might prove misleading in the perspective of literary history. This is the paradox which Shakespeare exploited. A section on birds, which may well have inspired Shakespeare when he came to the chorus of mourners in his own poem, leads into a dialogue between the Phoenix and the Turtle as the latter helps in the preparation of the Phoenix's funeral pyre and at last joins her on it. For example, Chaucer speaks of 'The wedded turtel with hir herte trewe' (line 355), which tells us why the Phoenix and the Turtle are ideally mated in Shakespeare's poem. In the Summons, the two incompatible responses to death dramatize a conflict similar to the Neoplatonic idea of a noble and a vulgar love. 12 Lee, Life of Shakespeare (1916 edition), p. 272. 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. 363-73). Mentions The Phoenix and Turtle as "a celebration of ideal love" and briefly surveys Shakespeare's use of language and symbolism in the poem. One none-like Lillie in the earth I placed; [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. This historical excursion ends with Phoenix admiring London as the centre of law and government. WebFigurative language has multiple uses, such as conveying complex ideas and emotions quickly or simply adding beauty to the writing. Have in their sweetnes sang you golden theames; 77: 'Constant inde sibi seu nidum, sive sepulchrum'. And the Turtles loyall brest, It was first printed without any title as one [In the following essay, Ellrodt examines Elizabethan and Renaissance sources of phoenix imagery and explores the symbolic importance of this mythic bird in Shakespeare's The Phoenix and Turtle.]. O twas a moving Epicidium!20 Carleton Brown (Poems by Sir John Salusbury and Robert Chester, EETS [London, 1914], pp.xlvii-liv) points out that Robert Chester of Royston was admitted to the Middle Temple on 14 Feb. 1600 and might there have met Sir John Salusbury (MT 19 Mar. William H. Matchett, The Phoenix and the Turtle (The Hague, 1965), sees Chester as a 'poetic pack rat'; his interpretation of Chester's intentions rests upon the view that Essex is the Turtle. Although Reason is not aware of the irony of its confidence, it certainly is aware of its antagonism towards the intuition of love. And her rich beauty for to equalize: The voice, however, continues to be the one we have been hearing in the anthem, reporting in the past tense and offering praise. SOURCE: "The Phoenix and the Turtle," in Orbis Litterarum, Vol. For if it were a benefitt at first to be united with so peereles a prince into our body, of a most peaceable, most honorable, most religious comon weale, let vs acknowledge the goodnes of god in continuinge that benefitt. That will not burn but by true Loves desire.18, None the less, Brown's argument that Loves Martyr pays allegorical respect to the Salusburys' hopes, misfortunes, and achievements is by and large acceptable, despite the persisting awkwardness of the missing Turtle's identity. The Pelican, the bird of self-sacrifice par excellence, watches the love-death and comments on it as Chorus. In a number of paradoxes the birds express the mystery of two perfect loversthat each by losing outside himself in the other, finds himself only there; that by ecstasy, by standing outside himself in the other, each lover comes to his own fullest self-realisation; that it is in their unity that their individuality is made perfect; that by surrendering all claim to Propertie, to proprietas, by having nothing, they possess all things. "]. Though Hamlet is not thematically focused on love, we may discern in the idealism and disillusionment of Hamlet himself something of the mood of our poem. The flame of perfect love burns all the brighter in an atmosphere of intense purity. Concepts replace creatures as the anthem begins (line 21): love, constancy, distance, essence, possession, property, reason, confusion. As he follows him, Marston delicately points out that Shakespeare, despite his good intentions, has not quite told the truth about them:19. The imperatives'Let. The lovers are one and two, since each dies in himself and lives in the beloved. Each of these must be acknowledged and only a reverent, loving response will sustain the miracle. The swan that was in presence heere, Ed. Nature fears the fires of this kingdom are too 'dull and base' to renew the Phoenix. Sweete flattery, then she loues but me alone. What the Threnos shares, however, with Neoplatonic thought is its scorn of Petrarchism. His revisions, which I suggest were made when he knew that Ursula Stanley was to be married, are too careless or hurried to allow the older material to fit the new purpose.4 His primary interest remains with the Phoenix, which, in the circumstances of the marriage, he then makes feminine. The first poem has several nonce-words: precurrer, defunctive, distincts; and the contrived ambiguities of the anthem have no place in the dirge of mourning which follows it. 'Danielle' in a poem in Christ Church MS 184 refers to Ursula Salusbury as 'of egles brood hatcht in a loffie nest'. Foule precurrer of the fiend, Shakespeare's Phoenix may now be securely 'pigeonholed' in the tradition. On the basis of Christ Church MSS 183 and 184, containing poems by Chester, Salusbury and Ben Jonson, Brown conjectures that the Denbigh Chester served the Salusbury family, perhaps as chaplain. 107-9, xi. The opening stanzas' modification, fashioning, and refinement of emblematic allegory is what gives the poem its air of confident self-possession. Achilles turns out to be a cutthroat, slaughtering Hector ignominiously. To themselues yet either neither, Figurative language uses figures of speech to be more effective, persuasive, and impactful. Furthermore, the crow is specifically addressed as chaste. 1, September, 1969, pp. Essays in Criticism XV, No. We'le take our course through the blew Azure skie, Herald sad and trumpet be, To whose sound chaste wings obey. But from Phoenix-Laura to 'Phoenix-Stella' (Astrophel, XCII) the celestial glory somewhat faded into the light of common day. 2 (April 1970): 169-79. but "Let . Du Monin's is not a passion for oneness in union, but the striving of the philosophic mind for unity, the rapturous assertion of God's and the Soul's and the World's oneness, the eager demonstration that the heavens, the planets and the seasons, the four elements and the four humours, and all the arts and sciences are but one. The temptation to see here a further heraldic allusion to the Corbett family of Moreton Corbett in Shropshire should probably be resisted. Loue and Constancie is dead,Phoenix and the Turtle fled, That by this separation I may giue: His very subject, the Phoenix and the Turtle, was a modification of the Phoenix myth which implied disbelief in, or at least disregard for, the time-honoured legend. Although the song has a somber theme, it conveys positive message regarding self esteem and not settling for less, which is relayed to the listener without using profanities or graphic adult content. Of the 1601 contributors, Shakespeare was undoubtedly the feather in the Chester-Salusbury cap. Here the Antheme doth commence, Yet in 1601 there was no agreement about who that successor should be; without unanimity Elizabeth's demise would produce no second Phoenix. 36Canzoniere, 185, 321; Fontani Carmina; 'Eridanus', I, xi; Ideas Mirrour, 'Amour 6'; Ronsard, 'Pangyrique de la Renome' in uvres, ed. Though the 'two-in-one' paradox may have been handled lightly by many love poets, the topic in itself was not 'far too slight', as Alvarez claims (p. 14), to support 'the logical structure of the poem'. The antithesis 'Death''nest' (taking 'nest' to be a place of nurture) modulates through the concept 'loyal' and comes to 'rest' in 'eternity'. If my argument so far has been valid, the main intent of the poem would be, roughly speaking, as follows. 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. Reason absurdly presumes to own a higher mode of knowledge, in much the same way that Petrarchan idealization purports to be the ultimate experience of romantic love. As three most jointly set Again, there is the matter of the birds' emblematic value: how much of this is received wisdom, and how far is it original to Shakespeare? Honigmann imagines that it is enough to answer this question by pleading Shakespeare's undoubted virtuosity by the age of twenty-two, citing the youthful accomplishments of such as Milton in support. It was intended, as Chorus Vatum declares, 'to gratulate an honourable friend' who had just been 'worthily honoured' with a knighthood. Natura ascends to heaven and pleads with Jove for mankind. It is, furthermore, quite appropriate for the herald to be on the sole Arabian tree, for that is where the Phoenix has died and that is where its funeral will take place. So they loved as love in twaine, Yet 'married chastity' (1. Poetry will give eyes of faith to both disheartened monarch and disbelieving subject. According to Harington it also signifies 'the mind of man being gotten by God', overcoming its earthboundness and mounting to the contemplation of heavenly things. In that year Shakespeare wrote his most enigmatic prophecy, the poem commonly known as The Phoenix and the Turtle, in a book permeated by this sense of crisis, looking to the future, gathering up and reviewing the iconography and myths of Elizabethan succession drama and pageantry. She asks. I have found no entirely satisfactory conjecture as to an exact meaning for the words "treble dated." The second part of the book follows with an Invocatio and dedication, two short poems by Ignoto, then Shakespeare's poem, four by Marston, one by Chapman, and four by Jonson. Nature now regales her royal bird with Ovid's tales of metamorphoses, of maidens threatened by lust transformed into flowers, and with stories of herbs, trees and flowers whose medicinal properties remedy human ills. The bird is here given a symbolic function as a "harbinger," a "precurrer," an "augour" (the root of this word refers to divination by means of birds), a foreteller or forerunner of evil and death, an unharmonious, shrieking bird, and this bird is ordered to keep its distance. Two-in-one becomes three-in-one as the ideational pattern of the opening line of the threnos ('Beauty, truth, and rarity') demonstrates. The ceremony is to be either a funeral or a commemorative service, an "obsequie,"7 but to call it also a "Session" is to bring in judicial and parliamentary overtones and to suggest the possibility that a judgment is to be formed after a deliberation. In these troubled times, travel has come down to a trickle. in personis proprietas et in essentia unitas'. According to Green these traditions correspond to attitudes of sexual love described as "vulgar," "chaste," and "sublime," respectively. In so far as "Whereupon" implies not merely sequence but motive, I would take the singer of the anthem to be saying that Reason, as a result of having been confounded and vanquished by Love, offered its respects to the Phoenix and the Dove by composing a dirge. So too in Alain's Anticlaudianus the ascent of Prudentia in the chariot, whose horses are the senses, is followed by receiving in a state of ecstasy the idea of human perfection, and by bringing a copy of it down to the world. Types of Figurative Language Imagery Simile Metaphor Alliteration Personification Onomatopoeia Hyperbole Idioms Irony Euphemism Metonymy Antithesis Apostrophe Assonance Paradox Litotes The Phoenix and the Turtle are unitedfusedby one mutual flame which transforms them, raises them to a new level of being to which the terms of human individuality and unity do not apply. 29 Compare Luc, 1009, 'The crow may bathe his coalblack wings in mire.'. Since we hardly expect criticism, we shall choose the explanation which adds to the praise. . What of the world? But thou shrieking harbinger, Foul precurrer of the fiend, Augur of the fever's end, And a little later, to persuade this bird to come with her to Paphos: There is a country Clymat fam'd of old, 124-5). Compares the political motivations of Robert Chester's Love's Martyr and Shakespeare's The Phoenix and Turtle, contending that both examine "the theme of mutual love" between a monarchspecifically Queen Elizabeth Iand her subjects. Shakespeare Quarterly XII, No. And the herald's staff draw near, no one would have doubted that Mercury, not Mars, or Apollo, or some undetermined god, was in question.). Nature assures Phoenix of Jove's promise and conveys the doubting bird to Paphos Isle, passing not through space but through time. The Phoenix and the Turtle were two and yet attained a single essence of love. Shall star-like rise, as great in fame as she was, 27Commentarium, II, 8; Dialoghi, ed. And he does this not merely because of the machinations of Iago, but because his love contains the seeds of its own corruption. 132-4, and Poems by Salusbury and Chester, ed. See also S.M. The poem, which has been called "the first great published metaphysical poem", has many conflicting interpretations. Of this strange nature that a thing inseparate That all virtues or qualities should be united in one Phoenix creature or mistress was a commonplace in Renaissance love poetry. Who did the whole worlds soule contract, and drove There is no escaping the stress-pattern here. Her rare-dead ashes, fill a rare Hue vrne: Though they augmentors of my thraldom be.19, The conventional association of the Phoenix with the renewed pangs of the lover may have half-consciously connected the myth of rebirth with torment rather than with triumph in the minds of many Elizabethan love poets. Fortunately, I pulled up an article on it which said it is one of the more confusing poems in English literature, so I feel a little better. Donne's poem informs the reader sufficiently of its context, a temporary separation between lovers as one of them leaves to go on a journey, whereby a Neoplatonic argument can be seen to meet an immediate need for consolation. Such unity leads to death. Word Count: 23912. Sidney, indeed, provides a good yardstick, for he had produced at least one poem which resembles at points The Phoenix and the Turtle. Whether the art of paradox does this alone or whether thematic depth is sounded is not easy to decide. But the apparent clarity of the Threnos is deceptive. In Anthonie and Cleopatra this pattern is not just established per accidens, but springs, for Cleopatra at the end of the play, from her very conception of love. . Surely the latter possibility should be thoroughly investigated before we settle for either of the others. Full concord all your lives was you betwixt, 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). WebOn Target Almost There Needs Improvement Rhetorical Appeal, Device, and Figurative Language Identification 20-16 points Correctly identified rhetorical appeals, devices, and figurative language used in the closing argument and pasted the entire sentence from the passage 15-9 points Correctly identified some of the rhetorical appeals, devices, and But with the last sentence here I cannot agree. Love and joy greeted Elizabeth in 1558 when she ascended the throne of England and from her a 'bewtyful order of government followeth' (fol. Jove reassures Nature and prescribes a journey; Nature and Phoenix leave Arabia-Brytania in the chariot of the sun, journeying to Paphos Isle, where they find 'a second Phoenix loue'. Reason, the next stanza states, saw that Division was being overcome; nevertheless to themselves the lovers seemed neither 'self nor 'other', for while souls are simple, theirs had become indissoluble. They are particularly difficult to dispose of because they change their physical form to mimic a person's greatest fear. As first printed in 1601, the poem includes only one line not ending with a punctuation mark, and, though this is, grammatically, a runon line, here too the final stress and the harsh final consonants enforce a rhythmical pause: From this Session interdict Mine eyes shall answer teare for teare of thine. .' 4 Giordano Bruno, The Heroic Frenzies I.i, trans. Thus A. Alvarez discovers in Shakespeare's argument 'a stringent logic' while F. T. Prince declares Shakespeare's use of analytic terminology 'free and rhapsodic, a kind of ethereal frenzy', in a poem which 'consists in a marriage between intense emotion, and almost unintelligible fantasy'.2 To the same editor, nothing could be 'further from the methods of Donne's love-poetry than the method of this poem'. Yet it is not unimportant that the very existence of the Phoenix should still have been a matter of debate.38 Donne's open negation becomes a bold and modern assertion of the critical spirit. After endeavouring to express this miraculous oneness, to realize vividly an unapprehended absolute, the poet could only maintain this exalted pitch by ending the 'tragic scene' on a further negation in the Threnos. At least social decorum is not being entirely repudiated; the traditional King of the birds is to be admitted by virtue of his office, and in spite of the fact that he is a tyrant. It will thus be 'married chastity'. Although the abstract middle stanzas are brilliantly turned, everything they achieve lies within the Renaissance habit of antithesis and its stylistic deployment of oxymoron. 203-204; T.W. Elizabeth effectively died with the earl: 'Though the Queen lived on, in losing Essex she had, it might be thought, lost her future. At dawn the monks arise to say matins: they sing their antiphons, and the birds chant the responses.8. The basic meaning of 'mine' here is 'an abundant source of supply'24: the lover finds a world in the eyes of his beloved. The Phoenix and the Turtle are not related to abstract ideals individually, but through their relationship to each other. It invites no ascent along the well-known ladder leading up to the contemplation of the Heavenly Beauty, though a ray of it may flash through the flaming eyes of the Phoenix, her earthly reflection. Henry Hooke, in the same troubled year 1601, writes 'Of the Succession of England' and, although prose is his medium, his language is that of Love's Martyr? That the Turtle saw his right, VII, 49, p. 200, Bk. They cannot therefore be anything but chaste, for concupiscence in such a relationship is not possible to either. In the world of the play, neither love nor honor can existnot, that is to say, the real thing. 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. And for short time an endlesse moniment. Jonson was still establishing his career; despite successes with his first plays, he had not reached the pinnacle of fame he was to achieve with Volpone and the great comedies of 1606 to 1614. Shakespeare had experimented with this metre some years before, in Loves Labours Lost,22 and the poem had been reprinted in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, and again in Englands Helicon, 1600. See Matchett (p. 119), who uses the point (not such a strong one) against him and in support of Grosart.
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