I've been meaning all week to put down a few comments in relation to Davies' Orchestra and the Roethke, and at last find myself with that most precious of all possessions, a bit of spare time.
St. Luke's pointed out earlier in the thread that the focus of Davies' poem is the musica universalis or the music of the spheres, and the universal dance that accompanies that music. (For those unfamiliar with the concept of the music of the spheres, I put a little basic information and a few pictures in a blog entry awhile back, which might prove helpful:http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=4861). Again, as St. Luke's has already said, the opening lines of Roethke's poem:
Quote:
Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
refer to this old way of understanding the workings of the universe in terms of a universal music and a universal dance. The lines might also be a criticism of our current culture. Is there something wrong, something lost to an age that no longer can "think the universe could hum?" I think that in some ways this relates to the number of questions in the Roethke that Virg. has been attending to. Orchestra is a poem that, in many ways, provides a cohesive vision, a delightful answer to the workings of the universe. It suggests the way everything is connected to everything else by means of the cosmic dance. Roethke's poem not only questions whether we can still imagine such an answering vision, but also, if it is no longer possible to think the universe could hum or that everything is connected in a delightful universal dance, then he questions what it all means. We see things dancing, but don't know the wherefore, don't know the prime mover: "What's the cue?" (Roethke, "The Partner" ln. 17) Of course the questions in the Roethke don't neccessarily have to imply a criticism of the modern age. They do, however, suggest a mind wondering, inquiring into the meaning or lack of meaning in the world. What are the living? What happens in the animal movements of bears and men? What happens when two bodies meet? "Did each become the other in that play?"
One of the loveliest things about Davies' Orchestra is the way it lightly plays with, and intertwines thoughts about both love and the cosmos. The framing story of Davies' poem is a classic carpe diem pitch from one of the suitors of Penelope (Odysseus' faithful wife from the Odyssey). He invites her to dance, which she obviously interprets as at least prelude to a sexual advance, and prudently denies. What follows is his defense of dancing starting with the origins of the universe and the dancing of the cosmos as ordained by love. In the context of the frame story, there is obviously a certain bias of the poem to calling upon love as being central to the universe, with the goal of getting the girl to give in. Yet the pleasure of the poem, like many of the best poems in the same period (there's a very Spenserian feel to Orchestra) is that, while it never transcends erotic love, never leaves the body entirely behind, it none-the-less broadens into much more than that. While the poem starts with erotic love as it's theme, it continually moves ("moves" of course, being a key word for both the Davies and the Roethke) back and forth between physical love and physical movement, and a wider universal sort of love, and a movement of the mind and, ultimately, of the soul. Every imaginable thing: sun, moon, planets, plants, animals, gods, graces, words...is a part of the dance, which in turn owes its origins to love, but exactly what sort of love shifts gracefully and seamlessly throughout the poem. At times dancing seems like a metaphor for love; at times both seem like a metaphor for erotic love. At other times all of the above merge into an inclusive vision of universal movement. At one point he even alludes to a specifically erotic tale, that of Venus and Mars caught in Vulcan's net, only to claim that they were simply engaged in an innocent bit of dancing :
Quote:
This is the net wherein the sun's bright eye
Venus and Mars entangled did behold;
For in this dance their arms they so imply
As each doth seem the other to enfold.
What if lewd wits another tale have told,
Of jealous Vulcan and of iron chains?
Yet this true sense that forged lie contains.
This cleaning up of a familiar lusty myth is partly just a flirtatious bit of fun. Taken within the framing story one could read it as the suitor telling Penelope..."see they were only dancing and we should dance just like Venus and Mars ":brow: It's also just another example of the way the poem dances around the themes of love, sex, physical movement, and the way they all relate to one another. What seems to be an amorous entanglement may in reality be a dance. In other places, what would seem to be merely movement takes on amorous overtones: the sun loves the earth, there are even hints that rhetoric can make words a bit "licentious":D
Quote:
For Rhetorick clothing speech in rich aray
In looser numbers teacheth her to range,
VVith twentie tropes, and turning euery way,
And various figures, and licentious change:
Roethke, of course picks up on this playful and delicate blurring of the lines between love and sex and dancing and divine vision, and in turn produces his own nuanced lines entwining them all. In Roethke's poems, however, while there is a similar degree of movement between the various shades of love and experience, there is, in places, less assurance about how all these things relate, anf more unease; less lightheartedness in the play.
My personal sense of the mind behind Roethke's poem is one that is troubled and has been taking comfort in that delightful and moving vision of the Renaissance poet. There's something comforting, perhaps cathartic, in his obvious attachment to the beat, the meter, of the poem. There's something about the way he frames his questions that makes it seem as though the writing of them is in some sense providing him answers. The poem seems like a pleasant but fragile break in a time that otherwise has been filled with profound uncertainty. I think one of the central lines has to be that in the Dante stanza of "The Vigil":
Quote:
All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.
This is a description of love, but could just as easily be a description of poetry. Part of what Roethke seems to desire to do is to "summon a vision and declare it pure," but it is uncertain whether that is entirely possible to a mind that may no longer be capable of thinking the universe can hum; it may not even be desirable in a world "for the living. Who are they?" Certainly part of Roethke's poem seems to be an even more explicit version of the carpe diem elements of Orchestra. He suggests that "The flesh can make the spirit visible," and the answer to the question who are the living, could certainly be that they are those who die; the answer to life is in le petit mort at the conclusion of the poem. Another part of the poem is an attempt to form some sort of pure vision, while still acknowledging on a certain level, the impossibility of doing so, either in life or in poetry.
Quote:
Roethke in describing the "body" of his fate intends to speak of the multiple fates which comprise a life, perhaps his life up to this point. Is the next line adjoined to this one? The light which alters the "light" is the metaphor for each small fate illuminating the next as he (we) moves through a life. So it might follow that Roethke doesn't view fate as a predestined end but one shaped and formed by all influences, definitely including a poetic ancestry.
I would also add that to anyone who has been reading a lot of Renaissance poety, the idea of a "fate" as an allegorical human figure is likely also at play, giving the term body the potential for a slightly more literal valence.
