To discuss a poem or any other literature for that
matter, especially when it belongs to the class called modernist, as the poems
of our present attention do, in terms of the interaction of levels is already
to touch on one of the things underlying its very nature. For if with a poem
before one, one is looking at a specific organization of words where in the idiom
of Axiomatic Functionalism (Mulder and Harvey qtd. in Akwanya 2010) all
features are functional, with the result that every individual item is separately
relevant to the integrality of the whole, it must be because there is a founding
sustained relation, that is, interaction, between all the elements, and the
finer properties of these elements that all together constitute this poem. And
this interaction need not necessarily be happening at a level immediately
apparent; it suffices that at the poem’s most basic constitutive level, it is
lodged.
Pessoa’s
‘Between Sleep and Dream’ comes in quite handy for a validatory exploration of
this claim, for if
Between sleep and dream,
Between me and that which is in me,
The who I suppose myself to be,
An endless river flows (stanza 1),
it is on the condition
that ‘sleep,’ ‘dream,’ ‘me,’ and ‘that which is in me’ are all in their own
individual strengths discrete, distinguishable entities, on the condition that
their separate identities are perceptible and assignable apart from one
another, and of course from the ‘endless river’ flowing between them. At any
rate this is the logical impression
derivable at the most superficial level. But that is all the thing is—an
impression. For there seems a subtle yet sure intransitivity lodged in the
midst of all the seeming transitivity, of fluid motion, which spurs the
otherwise discrete elements into interaction. For though the poem presents the
image of mobility, most visible in the metaphor of the traveling ‘river,’ this
is the kind of futile if frustrating motion of ‘Parachute’ (Lenrie Peters) which
takes place from point A to point A, and in our particular poem also in point A,
and through point A. Little wonder that in stanza 3 the river ultimately finds
its way back to point A despite diverse and distant travels, just as ‘Jumping
across worlds/ In condensed time’ (Peters, lines 28-29) only finally brings
‘We’ back ‘always [to] the starting point (line31), there being clearly, arguably,
‘nowhere to go’ (line 26), and the ports of departure and destination in the
last analysis are really one.
This results in a dense and
slippery semantics as elements proliferate in meaning and the self splits up
into imprecise, often irreconcilable, possibilities of being (Akwanya 1997).
Whereas it is the infinitesimal life, the ‘pulse,’ that separates the two
bigger halves in the ‘Creatures of Flame,’ in ‘Between Sleep and dream’ it is
the ‘river’ that separates ‘me’ from the inclusive ‘me.’ And the relationship
between ‘me’ and ‘that which is in me’ is parallel to the relationship between
‘sleep and dream.’
This parallelic pattern of lines
1 and 2 (Between sleep and dream,/ Between me and that… in me) already begins
to hint at the subtle, inevitable interaction of these apparently discrete
elements, a pattern which also suggests that though in the perception of the
Speaker ‘sleep and dream’ are distinguished from himself and that in himself,
as they from each other, this ‘sleep and dream’ is really his sleep, his dream.
That ‘sleep and dream’ in their capacities as discrete individualities have, as
it were, of their own accord exercised, are
exercising, their influence on him, to the extent that he himself begins to
appear to himself also in two discrete lights, one arguably, the sleeper, the
other the dreamer, without this most unhabitual association preventing the
latter from being lodged right inside the former. These movements of
suggestiveness are already moves of interaction of the distinct elements, of
the levels.
The appropriation of the Speaker
as the sleeper-dreamer is, of course, not without a validation in ‘If I
wake…’(stanza 3). But even the very mode of the endless flowing river cutting
its route right between the ‘sleeper-me’ and ‘dreamer-me’, which is ‘in me,’
suggests and opens up another path for the communicative interaction of the
poetic existents, with the river as the life-line. This is not, however after
all, altogether unlikely, if we remember from Frye (Anatomy 124) that the literary universe is one in which everything
is potentially identical with everything else, so that as in the present poem,
the ‘sleep,’ the ‘dream,’ ‘me,’ the ‘Who’ in me, and the very river flowing
between these, having once come together in this associative interaction, can
no more appropriate themselves, can no more be appropriated, in terms exclusively
of themselves, effectively barring the already inscribed markings of the
others.
This impossibility is precisely,
it appears, the poem’s internal motor-power, for from stanza 2, as if the river
has flowed into it by the sheer impulsiveness of the process already triggered
off, we are reading:
It passed by other banks,
Diverse and distant,
In those different travels
That every river takes (stanza 2).
And not even
the diversity and variety of these travels have been efficacious in keeping the
split ambivalent self of the Persona purely apart and distinctive, nor the
river itself from eventually finding him again, for ultimately the river, after
what must clearly be an ‘awkward’ (‘Parachute’ line 30) flow, and as though in
spite of itself, ‘… arrived where now I live,/ The house I am today’(stanza 3).
And the pattern of the ‘me’ being apart from the ‘Who’ though ‘in me’ already
established in the inaugural stanza subsists in the Persona being at once the
habitation, ‘The house I am,’ where this river willy-nilly arrives, ‘has
arrived,’ and the inhabitant of this habitation.
This situation of inescapability
of the existents from one another is further emphasized in the nature of the
verbs used in this poem. But for ‘feel’ in line thirteen and ‘ties’ in line
fifteen, all the verbs in this poem are intransitive, hence consolidating the
immobility of the self. But just like the ‘river’ which starts and ends where
it starts, the transitivity of these two verbs are only quasi. In ‘in that which ties me to myself,’ we find
this when we consider that the action of ‘tie’ is conveyed from an individual and
back to the same individual:
And he who I feel myself to be and who dies
In that which ties me to myself (stanza 4,
emphasis ours).
But even the river’s very
arrival is not without its own condition, namely, that there be no meditation
‘on myself,’ no waking whatsoever, for if I dare to wake, however briefly, ‘it
has passed away,’ with all the intense sense of emptiness and agony of a loss so
impacted on the Speaker:
It passes if I meditate on myself;
If I wake, it has passed away (stanza 3).
At this level, yet, is a pattern already initiated
from the foremost stanza; for the whole movement of the poem is appropriated
‘Between sleep and dream/ Between me and that which is in me,’ as the condition
of possibility of the river’s flow, its route being no other than this
borderline of slumbering unawareness and the quasi-awareness of dream. At any
event, it is only in this state of things that the Speaker is aware of himself
as containing both ‘me and that which is in me,’ or at least it is only under
its condition that he perceives
himself in this light.
The relationship between the
pronouns that constitute the persona of this poem is palindromical, so that
that one can take the place of the other in the next moment. None of them is
any definite thing. Hence we are confronted with such pronouns as ‘I,’ ‘me,’
‘who,’ ‘myself,’ ‘that’ and ‘he,’ each referring to one piece of the split
self. But we are unable to tell them apart. For instance, in line two, ‘me’ seems
to be the container of ‘that’ but in line fourteen, both ‘me’ and ‘that’ appear
to have shed off their initial identities so that ‘me’ takes the place of
‘that’ and ‘that’ takes yet another identity.
Even the ‘sleep’ of the first
line is not the same as the ‘sleep’ of the penultimate line, not only because
they are functionally different. Also, we eventually notice that the first
‘sleep’ is a state which corresponds to the ‘me’ of the second line and which
contains the inclusive ‘dream’ (which also corresponds to the inclusive
‘that’). But the second ‘sleep’ is the present state of the inclusive ‘that’—and
we should remember that this ‘that’ is contained in the first ‘sleep’. Thus are
we confronted with an individual who tends to transmute into things that will
soon dissolve back into its initial self again. And this initial self, just
like the ‘flame’ from which the persona of Hofmannsthal’s ‘Creatures of Flame’
emerges (and will dissolve back into), is insubstantial and unable to be
grasped. It evokes the myth of chaos.
It does also appear that part of what is at
issue in the poem, increasing and deepening the level-interaction, is the
Persona’s striving to make this situation of affairs ‘Between sleep and dream,’
a full waking experience. Only this move is always already rendered futile, for
it negates the very conditions of its accomplishment, by daring to ‘meditate,’
to ‘wake,’ so that the desired realization ‘passes’ in the first instance, and
in the second ‘has passed away’ altogether. This inevitable frustration is what
ensures that the Persona collapses back into slumber, if only to retain even
this hardly substantial vision of himself. For there is a sense in which ‘dream’
in the poem relates to the Speaker’s prime desire to know and possibly possess
himself as an ideality, a composite, undisintegrated self, himself as the ideal
other, not the frail, finite,
constrained self of his waking, himself as dream-emancipated reality. This probably is the poem’s
lingering opposition between the self as ‘me’ and the self as ‘that… in me,/
The who I suppose myself to be,’ between ‘he who I feel myself to be and…/…
that which ties me to myself’(stanza 4). And such is the severity of the
antagonism that ‘The who I suppose myself to be,’ ‘who I feel myself to be’ is
marked for death, and knows death in its very bonding to ‘me’—it ‘dies in that
which ties me to myself’ (lines 13-14). The sense of profound loss evoked (to
say nothing of the tireless emotiveness attached throughout to this inner ‘me’
by the persona) by this dying experience heightens and punctuates the ‘dream’
as the Speaker’s utmost craving, or else the tone would not be so sombre, and
perhaps rueful too.
But an even
subtler twist has been introduced to the interactive process in the final
stanza whereby even the flowing river itself becomes identified, perhaps by a purely
miscibility process, with the ‘dream,’ this faraway, mortal ideality of a self,
since
And he who I feel myself to be and who dies
In that which ties me to myself,
Sleeps where the river flows—
That river without end (stanza 4).
Under this economy the interior self also mingles
subliminally with the flowing river, being now the self who ‘Sleeps where the
river flows,’ so that there is no certain telling if this self has or not quite
simply become the ‘river without end’ itself. And it is significant that it is
this self alone that appears capable of keeping to the condition under which
only the persona can at least perceive it, be aware of it, and the river’s
flow. For this is the self that does not bother to ‘meditate’ or ‘wake,’ but
just ‘Sleeps’ on, with the result that the ‘river flows…’ for it ‘without end,’
and does not pass, has not passed away like in the third stanza.
There
is another aspect to this tension which appears in the facility in the various
distinct levels to be at once identified with all the others, and yet as
themselves. But neither this is entirely new to Frye who writes, ‘the things…
identified… each retains its own form’ (Anatomy 123). And it is at the heart of
this tension that he finds at once the unity and variety of literature: ‘A work
of literary art owes its unity to this process of identification with, and its variety, clarity, and
intensity to identification as’ (124).
This effectively complicates into what Akwanya has called ‘the expansion of the
possibilities of being’ (Verbal Structures), so that in Hofmannsthal’s
‘Creatures of Flame,’
We are creatures of flame. The butterfly:
the intensity of
a
short life and fragility become color ( stanza 1, lines 1-2),
no more can be purely aberrant, or unprecedented. For
then we are looking at a maximal metaphorisation process whereby the magic of
words has been set up and activated (Akwanya 1997:91). For ‘creatures’ would
imply that ‘we’ has not appeared by accident, but by the intervening creative
activity of whatever force behind the assembling of the raw material, ‘flame,’
from which ‘we’ is constituted. This also means that ‘we’ is, must needs be, a
being of particular precariousness, in its eternal liability to dissolution,
for it is only the subtle facility of this creator’s activity that holds
‘flame’ in place that ‘we’ may be born. Or else ‘we’ is not, ‘we’ ‘unbecome[s]’
(Lesmian, ‘Uninhabited Ballad’), or else ‘we’ is blown out, faces the peril of
being blown out, match-flare-like, in ‘wind’s breath’ (Okigbo, ‘Watermaid ii’),
which is probably always already ontologically its lot, its state of being,
before the creative hand’s intervention.
But is this not always already
the nature of the stuff of which ‘We are’ made, the very essence of ‘flame’? So
that henceforth all the other appurtenances of ‘We,’ all that pertains to any
existent implicated in ‘We,’ including ‘death’ itself, shares of necessity in
this rather terrible tendency towards fleetingness, towards dissolution: ‘My
death is like a shadow, my life aquiver, a pulse
in the light’(emphasis ours). ‘[T]he
intensity of a short life’ is, therefore, also what is emphasized in the
metaphor of the ‘shadow…quiver…pulse.’ And everything in this poem points to
this fleetingness, and to the essence of the person who is dissolving away as
the lines are progressing.
Is there any need talking about
the shortness of the poem, the meditation itself? But there are other things,
subtle but more vociferous, that still speak of this fleetingness. For
instance, at the phonological level, we notice the consistent and gradual
depletion of the number of syllables in each line as the lines progress. In
line one of stanza one, the syllables are seventeen in number, and it decreases
to sixteen in line two, to fifteen in line three and finally to nine, in the
last line of the second stanza:
We are creatures of flame. The butterfly: the
intensity of
a
short life and fragility become color. My death is like
shadow,
my life aquiver, a pulse in the light; I am so
close
to death it makes me proud, cruel and demonic.
Unmoved, I flutter from Helen’s lips to Adonis’ wound.
I
love
my death, the flame, more than anything.
Could it not be
for this purpose that there is the glaring absence of any connective element
between ‘I am so close to my death’ and ‘it makes me proud,’ so that the last
line is relatively and helplessly short? Yet, in the second stanza, that the
persona is ‘unmoved’ seems to account for the sudden resuscitation which
culminates in the increase in the number of syllables, from twelve in the last
line of the first stanza to fifteen in the first line of the second stanza. But
it is just like the ‘pulse,’ for it diminishes again, this time to nine in the
last line of the poem. Remarkably, we still find this depletion in the structural
reduction, first in the form of the indentation, and then in the shift from the
plural first person pronoun, ‘We’ to the singular ‘I.’
And it does seem to be this
helpless and expeditious liability to dissolution of the self into the source
of its existence that in turn spurs elements into interaction in ‘Creatures of
Flame;’ and appears too to be precisely what the persona finds exultant, a
cause for pride, having perceived it as suffused with ‘color’: ‘the intensity
of a short life and fragility become color’ (lines 1-2), ‘I am so close to
death it makes me proud’ (lines 3-4). And such is the intensity of his posture
that he can even go out of his way to initiate, himself, as it were, the
movement of proximity to death, without perturbation: ‘Unmoved, I flutter from
Helen’s lips to Adonis’ wound’ (line 5). For this also makes him ‘cruel and
demonic’ (line 4), and there certainly is something cruel, if only to oneself,
in fluttering in the active, butterfly-like, ‘from Helen’s lips to Adonis’
wound,’ with all the evocations of the sensual pleasures of a kiss in the
former, to the acute pains of a festering injury in the latter. Yet ‘I/ love my
death, the flame, more than anything.’ Is there not something ‘demonic’ in this
poise, something that makes to vitiate even the apparent deliberateness of ‘I flutter’
with a touch of convulsiveness, rendering its initial aura of being purely
volitional suspect?
Meaning is of course just as
slippery in ‘Creatures of Flame’ as is ‘Between Sleep and Dream.’ For one, the
‘flame’ from which ‘we’ are created is not entirely equivalent to the ‘flame’
which is used in apposition with ‘death’ in the last line. This is true since
the ‘death’ which it is synonymous with in line three is likened to ‘shadow.’ And there is no way of relating shadow with
flame in terms of synonymy, unless of course, one is taken as the shadow of the
other. But the metaphor of the ‘Pulse’ presupposes that there is the pre-state
before the ‘pulse,’ then the pulse, and then the return to that initial state,
with the result that we can think of the
flames as two halves of one whole which is separated by the brief
‘pulse’—and pulse is synonymous with
life. The briefness of the ‘pulse’ is synonymous with the expeditiousness of
the ‘flutter’ from ‘Helen’s lips to Adonis’ wound.’ Again, it appears that the
‘color’ which the ‘intensity of short life and fragility’ transmutes to is
synonymous with his being ‘proud, cruel and demonic,’ since it is also that ‘short
life (his nearness to death) that imbues him with these qualities.
Yet
all this as indicated already is really because ‘We are all creatures of
flame,’ with the result that other, otherwise, distinguishable existents: the
butterfly, my death, and so on, which all in their various specific strengths
constitute an interactive level, or what in Axiomatic Functionalism is seen as
‘features,’ gain in amplitude, having breached their specificities, interfering
with the others in a symbiotic expansion of the possibilities of their beings.
For the singular word ‘flame’ has become ‘the occasion of the appearance [of
the others],’ has ‘will[ed] the appearance of [the others in a]…. [p]rocess
that accounts for the emergence of the self-contained and internally coherent
structure that is [the] poem’ (Akwanya 91), ensuring what in Aristotle is
encountered as the poem’s organic wholeness.
This reading has inevitably
thrown up patterns of semblance and cross-complimentarity between the two
poems. This, as a matter of fact, is because it is this cross-complimentarity and
semblances that most readily bring to notice the very things on which the said
interaction of levels is tailored. In both poems, it would appear that there is
one big whole which has been split into three parts, in such a way that one
part is between the other two, and the part in-between is transient in nature, appears to be that which is intensely ‘short and fragile’ (‘Creatures
of Flame’), and ‘which dies’ (‘Between sleep and Dream). The one in-between is
the one whose nature is to dissolve so very quickly, so that the remaining two
parts are forced to re-unite back into that stupendous whole. It is however the
one in-between, that constitutes the present existence of the whole. In
‘Creatures of Flame,’ the persona’s
attitude to it is that of repulsion and so anticipates, with desire, an
escape from it; but in ‘Between Sleep and
Dream,’ the persona finds it unwieldy and disturbingly insubstantial.
‘Creatures of Flame’ seems to be
that very meditation which would eternally elude the persona of ‘Between Sleep
and Dream.’ But this meditation is such that is taking place at the same time
that the persona is dissolving away. And the outcome of this meditation is that
the persona finds himself indeed favoured that he is escaping his present
state: ‘I love my death, the flame more
than anything.’ But this repulsive attitude to life is something that is
recurrent in Hugo. For instance in ‘The Actor Herman Muller,’ the persona’s
attitude of dread towards the stage into
which Actor Muller has stepped is hinged on the fact that no ‘curtain’ will
mercifully ‘fall’ on it: ‘on which no curtain mercifully falls’ (line 6). Hence it can be argued that in the ‘Creatures
of Flame,’ the persona’s ‘love’ for his ‘death’ stems from the fact that it
will ‘mercifully’ draw the ‘curtain’ on this present life, not necessarily
because he loves what constitute the ‘death.’ In point of fact, he seems to be
unable to grasp the nature of this ‘death’ which he claims to ‘love more than
anything.’ Hence the much he can make of it is that it is ‘like a shadow.’
‘Creatures of Flame’ seems to be
in some kind of continuum with ‘The Actor Hermann Muller,’ for whereas the
persona of the former is expectant of the next existence that awaits him, which
he finds shadowy, Actor Muller has assumed this existence (death) and
has found it a greater tragedy. But the “Creatures of Flame” is different from
“Between Sleep and Dream” in that the former is less tragic, not in the sense
that the situation of the persona is less tragic, but in the sense that the
persona’s attitude to his situation is not tragic at all, just like the Ernest
of Wilde’s Importance of Being
Ernest.
Both poems identify with the
modernist tradition, which celebrates the impossible, the irrational and the dislikable.
Works Cited
Akwanya, A. N. Semantics and
Discourse: Theories of Meaning and Textual Analysis. Enugu: New Generation Books, 2010.
—. Verbal Structures. Enugu:
Acena, 1997.
Aristotle. Poetics Trans. S. H.
Butcher. Orange Street Press, 1998.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of
Criticism. New York: Atheneum, 1970.
Hofmannsthal, Hugo Von. "Creatures of Flame." Modernist Literature of Continental Europe:
Anthology of Poetry/Short Story.
n.d. 10.
__. "The Actor Hermann Muller." Modernist Literature of Continental Europe: Anthology of Poetry/Short Story. n.d. 9.
Lesmian, Boleslaw. "Uninhabited Ballad." Modernist Literature of Continental Europe: Anthology of Poetry/Short Story. n.d. 21-22.
Okigbo, Chris. "Watermaid ii." Ed.Donatus Nwoga. West African Verse. London: Longman,
1984. 34.
Pessoa, Fernando. "Between Sleep and Dream." Modernist Literature of Continental Europe:
Anthology of Poetry/Short Story. n.d. 34.
Peters, Lenrie. "Parachute." Ed. Jonh Reed and Clive Wake. A Book of African Verse. London: Heinemann, 1964. 51-52.
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