So, it took me a while, but I am just going to jump in and share my week. I began Plaint of Nature, read until page 71 (yes, it does start on page 67), and then had to stop and read another book first. It was the lines: “If these kisses were honey-sweet with moisture, and grown honey-sweet, they would form a honeycomb in my mouth. My life breath, concentrating entirely on my mouth, would go out to meet the kisses and would disport itself entirely on my lips so that I might thus expire and that, when dead itself, my other self might enjoy in her a fruitful life” (Plaint 71). I noticed three things, first and least interesting, the almost Shakespearean “thus with a kiss I die” notion. Then there was a moment of Catullus:
I would be kissing your honeyed eyes forever. /…/
even if our kisses/
grew to such profusion/
they outnumbered sheaves/
ripening in the wheat field.[i]
The kisses in the plural in both of these poems suggest a continuous or plentiful occurrence, necking as opposed to one brief peck, and the idea of the kisses being fruitful clearly refers to procreation in the first example, whereas in the second they produce more pleasure. But, having kisses being united with harvest, is to me at least, a novel idea.
Then the third thing: whenever there are honeyed kisses of any sort being exchanged, there is the Song of Songs, “your lips are honey, honey and milk / are under your tongue” (Bloch 77).[ii] By the time I got to Page 73, where “a woman glided down from an inner palace of the impassible world and could be seen hastening her steps in my direction,” a goddess enters the scene, the object of the poet’s concentration, and the Song of Songs came further into play. We are told in no uncertain terms that her hair is gold, really gold, which does not line up with the Song because the subjects of that work are dark-haired. But then we get to “her forehead” and “her brows,” and a listing of attributes begins (Plaint 74). This makes “the serene peacefulness of her eyes” seem to me a lot like “the doves of your eyes” found in the Song, partly because of the listing that is associated with both sections of both poems, but also because of the symbolic meaning of a dove (Bloch 73). “Her nose, balsam-like…neither unduly small nor abnormally prominent” is given both a scientific sounding measurement of its size and a romantic one because of its exotic balsam perfume, much like the measuring aspect of “your proud nose the tower of Lebanon/ that looks toward Damascus,” and is also romanticized by the exotic locales of the imagery (Bloch 101). “Her lips…challenged the recruits in Venus’ army to kiss them” while not much like “a crimson ribbon your lips,” continues the listing, and the army imagery as well as the ribbon imagery provides us with the visual cue of lines, phalanxs, that we link to her mouth (Bloch 73).
My favorite, “her teeth by a certain uniformity in colour resembled a configuration in ivory,” reminds me so much of the lines, “your teeth white ewes, / all alike, / that come up fresh from the pond,” and both of these descriptions are working hard to make it clear her teeth are straight and well shaped (Bloch 73). The “red of her face, wed to the white of muslin,” became “my beloved is milk and wine,” “the smooth and refined chin,” became “the curve of your cheek / a pomegranate” (Bloch 73). Then, there is a return to the more scientific measuring of the anatomy of this lady, “her neck, quite normal in length and moderately slender, prevented its nape from being close-wed to the shoulders,” which is decidedly less romantic than “your neck is a tower of David/ raised in splendor, / a thousand bucklers hang upon it, / all the shields of the warriors,” or “a tower of ivory,” but still follows along the biblical pattern (Bloch 73,101). The “apple-like breasts” of this lady are reminiscent of the lines “your breasts are two fawns, / twins of a gazelle, / grazing in a field of lilies,” as the mention of fruit evokes shape, size, and sweetness which is mirrored in the ideas of uniformity and tenderness of the fawns (Bloch 75). “Her arms, shining from afar” evoke the jewel imagery of the biblical version linked to the same physiology, “a golden scepter with gems of topaz,” and the “gentle curve of her flanks” links to the line “the gold of your thigh / shaped by a master craftsman” (Bloch 89, 99).
All in all, I felt these were important connections to be made between the two texts, because we know (and I leave this open and begging for comment) that our poet, Alan of Lille, was aware of the biblical text. Instead of assuming that this list, though a unique perspective in comparison, was not modeled on the Song of Songs, it seems much safer to assume that it was. Regardless of whether one views the biblical poem as a physical expression of divine love or of mortal love, both apply here as well; is the lady a goddess or a mortal? Or is she a representation of a natural force? Does any of these interpretations make the connections less valuable?
1 comment:
Truly inspired connections, Amelia. Reading this, I was reminded of the dicey exegetical history of the Song of Songs - the rather strained and desperate attempts by various commentators to interpret this sensual, erotic poem as a description of the mystical love between Christ and the Church, or what have you. (I remember, for example, the account in one of the articles on race that we read earlier of medieval churchmen tying themselves in knots to allegorically explain the dark skin of the woman in the poem.) Does Alan of Lille's rewriting of Song of Songs pose similar interpretative difficulties for his work? You allude to his evident attempts to tame some of the racier material in the Song - turning its sexually charged descriptions into more neutral, objective, scientific-measuring language. However, that original charge still seems to lie beneath most everything he writes, even when it is not quite glaringly apparent in his long, lustful surveying of the body of Nature.
I guess the point I'm trying to get at is, does this sensual, lustful, florid, poetic side of Alan, which seems to be figured in his use of the Song of Songs, complicate, problematize, or even work completely against his rational/religious/pro-procreative agenda in the same way that the Song of Songs itself tends to undermine the religious allegorizations of it? Is there a frivolity, an irrational exuberance, an aestheticism, a pure pleasure-drive (a Lacanian/Edelmanian jouissance, perhaps?) cutting across Alan's polemic agenda? It seems so...
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