Every Reader's Keats

This is the thirteenth of a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In the Every Reader’s Poets I limit my focus to the discussion of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. A general introduction “Why Read Poetry?” is also posted on this site.

The poems discussed follow the essay.


     I hesitate to write about John Keats, for to me he is like a youthful romance, somewhat embarrassing while inspiring what I still experience late in life as ingenuous heart-felt affection. Keats, more than any other single writer, attracted me to poetry with his dedication to beauty, his clearly cut concrete imagery, and his lovely melodies.

     His appeal may have been enhanced by his biography, an exemplary Romantic life. Born to parents of modest circumstances – his father had tended horses in a stable attached to an inn which he later rose to manage, but he died when the author was eight. His mother sent him to school where he acquired the reputation of being a bit wild, indolent, and prone to fist-fights, but it was there that he attained a love of Classics (though not a scholar’s expertise) and a dedication to literature, winning an academic prize at the age of thirteen. The following year his mother died and he was sent to live with his grandmother who promptly apprenticed him to the family’s medical practitioner. Successfully completing the apprenticeship, Keats went to something like a residency in London well on his way to qualifying for the Royal College of Surgeons. Yet the more he wrote and entered into a literary scene, the more he resented the time he had to devote to medicine; he ultimately abandoned that work for the dubious career of a full-time poet.

     “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is perhaps the best-known sonnet from Keats’ earliest collection, but to me a little-praised piece provides a clearer model of the poet’s sensibility. The sonnet beginning “Give me a golden pen . . .” was an occasional impromptu written in a matter of minutes toward the conclusion of a social visit. It is nothing but a series of images, each if which renders more precise the subjective experience. Keats begins with the pen, as memorializing the pleasant hours in verse fixes their memory and enables their lasting significance. The pen is golden because of the value of such preserved felicity, the adjective suggesting as well the gap between real and ideal which for Keats only art can bridge. With characteristic extravagance Keats then imagines himself leaning “on heaped-up flowers.” The experience, while sublimed by aesthetic distance (“in regions clear, and far”), sounds almost hedonistic in glad sensuality. The poet proposes beginning with “a tablet whiter than a star,” a vision of the absolute immediately succeeded by a series of concrete images, a more palpable version of the beauty Keats experiences as semi-divine. Having asked for a “tablet” on which to write, he moves to a different art, his poetry now figured as the heavenly music of the blessed. For Keats the mention of celestial song is too vague, he renders the idea photographic, specifying the angelic hand at a particular moment, “the silver strings of heavenly harp atween,” and then goes on to add “a pearly car,” and then “pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar.” Just as he is only just trying his artistic abilities, the presumably newly minted angel has “half-discovered wings.”

     He is then able not only to hear the music of the spheres, but to transcribe a part on his page. Amazed at the sublimity he has attained he exclaims, “For what a height my spirit is contending!” just before the final line reminds the reader that this extraordinary afflatus has been attained simply by passing the evening among sympathetic friends. His reliance on his fancy, and his idealistic aspiration toward the sublime are clear and enthusiastic, and his method of reasoning through images already established.

     A similar pattern is discernable in “Sleep and Poetry” in which, after repeating the familiar sentiment “life is but a day,” Keats proceeds also to identify life with “A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way/ From a tree’s summit” and then, even more extravagantly to “a poor Indian’s sleep/ While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep/ Of Montmorenci.” This fatalistic description is then immediately succeeded by more positive images: “the rose’s hope while yet unblown,” “the reading of an ever-changing tale,” “the light uplifting of a maiden’s veil,” and “a pigeon tumbling in the summer air.” He then concludes the series with an altogether optimistic figure “a laughing school-boy, without grief or care,/ Riding the springy branches of an elm.” Note however, that the burden of mortality is never denied, the rose, the story, the maiden, the pigeon, even the “laughing school-boy” each must come to an end, and Keats was acutely aware that he, too, shared that fate toward which one may cultivate an enlightened acceptance, but which one cannot escape.


     Keats’ odes are likely his best-known works, and of them surely the popular favorite is his meditation on a Greek vase of the sort that fills many little-visited galleries in the great museums of Athens and Paris and New York. The ode had evolved in English literature into a far more flexible form than it had in antiquity. (Pindar possesses sufficient complexity that a reader might think he is “free-styling,” to use an almost contemporary idiom.) Keats here devised an original form though he used a traditional name which to him signified strong emotion and a certain looseness of structure.

     The poem is an ekphrasis, a literary description of a work of art. He begins writing not about the pictured scene as much as about his lack of knowledge of what is before his eyes. What does the scene represent, he asks, who are represented, what is going on?

     One might be tempted to reduce the poem to the neat concluding apothegm.


"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."


     While this may seem to declare an unconflicted aestheticism, wholly satisfied by the rapt contemplation of an objet d’art, such a reading would ignore the balancing complaint that runs through the poem, a lament about mortality and the transience of things, painful facts that lead the poet to seek solace in the art of antiquity. Ancient Greece, fetishized in Europe since the Renaissance, was particularly valued by the Romantics (many neo-Classical writers having a taste for Rome), and Keats hopes to escape the terms of human existence, what Marvell called “the iron gates of life,” by contemplation of the clay object. The boughs are “happy,” because they exist outside of time. Of course, their happiness is a construction of the human observer as is their beauty.

     The survival of a beautiful work of art promises a sort of immortality, though at the price that it remain a perpetually “unravish’d bride,” a “cold Pastoral,” while those who appreciate it weep and laugh and celebrate and sicken and die. The poem may, in fact, be said to be about the gap between the feeling, desiring, temporally limited subject and the perfect, timeless object. This opposition, present from the start never develops or changes; there can be no honest resolution. The questions of the first stanza return unchanged in the fourth, while stanzas two and three praise the incorruptible perfection of the scene. What Keats appreciates on the vase the love, the “mad pursuit” and “wild ecstasy” are the very things which in human life he seeks to transcend: the “heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,” the burning forehead” and “parching tongue” all of which evidence strong emotion.

     Keats’ ode “To Autumn” represents another attempt to come to terms with the evanescence of beauty. While springtime is a common theme since the earliest poetry, the autumn, he rightly suggests, is comparatively unappreciated. He invokes no eternal work of art, but rather celebrates the fullness, the perfection of the full maturation of the harvest season, followed though it is by the death of annuals and the chill of winter. In a lush elaboration of Shakespeare’s formula from King Lear “Ripeness is all” Keats details the country scene. The first stanza notes the beauty of the season’s fruit and nuts and suggests people’s joy at collecting this bounty, surely a strong emotion since prehistoric times, but the second stanza is decidedly more Romantic, almost decadent.

     Autumn is personified as a languid, dreamy, “careless,” “half asleep,” as though “drows'd with the fume of poppies,” and the theme of soporific intoxication is echoed by the mention of the “cyder-press.” This suggestion of anaesthesia allows the observer, perhaps, to feel satisfaction in the moment like the bees who “think warm days will never cease,” and to ignore the inevitability of approaching death and barrenness.

     Yet the final stanza defines the music of the season first in the “wailful choir the small gnats” mourning and rising among the “sallows,” or willows that grow by the river. Willows are a common gravestone motif, but the next image, the bleating lambs, is less funereal, and the lambs are succeeded by the sound of the crickets, the robins, and the swallows. The poem ends with this chorus asserting the value of life despite the shortening days. In nature, of course, the cycle continues, the new will replace the old, assuring a sort of immortality, while the individual human subject will come to an end.

     Keats developed a passionate attachment to Fanny Brawne to whom he wrote "My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you – I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. . .Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you." He reworked a sonnet “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” he had composed earlier to express his love.

     Again, his focus is the gap between the temporal and the eternal absolute he identifies with her and likens to a star. The first eight lines, the octave, portray her as “stedfast,” “eternal,” “unchangeable,” gazing passively over earth, in fact, not unlike the “Grecian urn.” He can participate in this divinity through his love. “Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,” he can feel himself “awake for ever in a sweet unrest.” In this condition of aroused passion he feels in part at least redeemed. If he must die, it will be in a “swoon” of love at which the lover could hardly complain.

     Keats’ literary career was frustrated by low sales – the four volumes published during the poet’s lifetime sold less than a few hundred copies. Apart from the praise of Leigh Hunt and other friends, the critical attention his work attracted was fierce and scathing, more political and social than literary. Keats and his circle were condemned as the “Cockney school” of poetry. The poet had asked that his epitaph be simply “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water,” but his friends added a protest against his treatment by critics which they maintained contributed to his death. “This grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies.”

     Keats remains a poet to whom I can return repeatedly for his lovely melodies and pregnantly suggestive images. In a certain mood I find Shelley is often airy and abstract, Wordsworth plain in language though sometimes tangled in meaning, Coleridge philosophical, and Byron casual and hasty. While, readers may perceive Keats’ weaknesses, I for one have a prejudice in his favor. In a letter he defined “Negative Capability” as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It is in art that meaning may be constructed without revelation or positivism. Keats, whose life was difficult in a number of ways, managed to build an imaginative world true to his experience yet lit with joy.




Give me a golden pen, and let me lean
On heaped-up flowers, in regions clear, and far;
Bring me a tablet whiter than a star,
Or hand of hymning angel, when 'tis seen
The silver strings of heavenly harp atween:
And let there glide by many a pearly car
Pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar,
And half-discovered wings, and glances keen.
The while let music wander round my ears,
And as it reaches each delicious ending,
Let me write down a line of glorious tone,
And full of many wonders of the spheres:
For what a height my spirit is contending!
'Tis not content so soon to be alone.




Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."




To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.




Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

Two Brief Notes on Daphnis and Chloe

I quote from Moses Hadas’ translation in the old Doubleday Anchor paperback Three Greek Romances with its charming cover by Diana Klemin.

     Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe is the most popular of the Hellenistic romances and, in the opinion of many, the finest. The story, translated into French by Jacques Amyot in 1559, inititated a revival of the pastoral romance genre, influencing Honoré d'Urfé, Torquato Tasso, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In more recent times the work inspired paintings by Boucher in the 18th century, Gleyre in the 19th century, illustrations by Klimt and lithographs by Chagall in the 20th, as well as an opera by Offenbach and a ballet by Ravel.
     This interest and my own is founded on the narrative’s presentation of the powers of love. Under the mythological symbols of Eros, Pan, and the Nymphs, the intensity of human sexuality, what D. H. Lawrence much closer to our own age would have called its divinity, is presented with power and subtlety. Similar to the Pervigilium Veneris in its wonderful belated passion, the story is perhaps primarily a paean to life conceived as the reproductive power of nature. Yet at the same time as he recognizes the glorious but undifferentiated song of the creation’s renewal, the writer never slights the human element, with its burden of free will and an almost modern share of self-consciousness and self-contradiction.

1.
     The opening ekphrasis of a work of art supposedly displayed in the Lesbos grove of the Nymphs, a place itself of surpassing beauty, full of tree and flowers and watered by a fructifying stream. There, the author relates, he saw “fairest sight” he had ever seen, not the landscape but rather “the painted picture of a tale of love.” He claims that “an interpreter of the picture” detailed its story to him which he then set down. Thus, in a way, the supposed painting is an illustration of his narration; while in another his story is a partial depiction from a very human perspective, of the élan vital observable throughout the biological world.
     For the picture includes much more than a highly distilled version of the courtship of Daphnis and Chloe in its depiction of “young lovers pledging to one another.” The first image is of women in childbed and others tending infants, not ordinarily considered erotic situations, though they are rapidly enfolded in a grander scheme of fertility as sheep and shepherd are introduced until it is not entirely clear who is tending whom. All are united in a coherent mutually invigorating and passionately warm net of relationships.
     In front of the backdrop, though, in the human realm, one sees not only the lovers, but also “pirates” and “invaders.” These in fact are mentioned immediately before Longus assures the reader, “all these scenes spoke of love.” Intruders who impede the course of love are comparable to Catullus’ grumbling old men or the lauzengiers and gilos who out of jealousy or malice present obstacles to the troubadour’s affairs. Without conflict there can be no drama and therefore, from Greek New Comedy times through the most recent Hollywood romantic comedy, some force must separate the man and woman. When they overcome and can join together, the happy ending has arrived.
     Yet the figure of a pirate has a further significance in Longus. At the close of Book I Daphnis suffers the prolonged frustration of having admired Chloe’s naked body yet still not having sex with her. Far from a generalized Ovidian lovesickness, Daphnis is simply experiencing intrusively urgent sexual desire. He considers this state of suffering to be worse than the ordeal of his capture by pirates. “His soul,” one reads, “was still tarrying with the pirates,” who alarm him less than his beautiful beloved “for he was young, and a rustic, and so far ignorant of the piratical ways of love.”
     This final phrase, unique in the book, suggests not that he is dwelling on his adventure among the pirates, but rather that his experience of being on love is similar, that love is necessarily in some way piratical, which is to say selfish and domineering. The idea may seem out of place in a love story in which the leading characters are both impossibly naïve. Both are portrayed as child-like in their innocence and thus “pure” in their love. The primary view of love in Daphnis and Chloe is extravagantly unselfish; Daphnis, after all, recoils from initiating sexual intercourse for fear of hurting Chloe. Nature stands in the background, with its undoubtedly necessary, beautiful, and “right” drive to reproduce. This small dark grace note tempers the celebration of love, reminding readers that passion can make one miserable as well as elated and suggesting the many love relations which are less ideally mutual than Daphnis and Chloe’s in which one partner (or both) actually seeks to govern the other.
     The pirates in the story thus represent both the impediments love often encounters as well as the potential within love for a selfish desire to possess.

2.
     Only a few pages short of the end of Book I (1.30.6) is a scene in which Daphnis crosses a stream while escaping his pursuers. Not only are the pirates weighed down by their armor; Daphnis hitches a ride as “securely as if he were riding in a wagon” by seizing the horns of two cows heading across. This fanciful image is vivid and memorable in itself, but it also serves to introduce an odd digression.
     The author relates by the way as an interesting fact that cattle can swim better than people, but then in place of returning to his story, he continues to elaborate the point, conceding that waterfowl are even more at ease in the water and adding a second exception -- “and, of course, fish” – as though he were being scrupulous about facts in a natural history treatise. Not willing to drop the theme even at that, he notes that “an ox is never in danger of drowning, unless his hoofs become softened in the water and drop off.” This surely sounds as though it has roots in some ancient authority, though I have not traced it. With a flourish Longus then concludes the passage by noting that the animal’s swimming skills are proven by the many locations named Oxford (in Greek Βόσπορος) in the world.
     The passage stands out for its singularity but also because, though it has no relevance to the larger story, the author with a sort of lavish liberality not only raises the topic but then extends it. He possesses a sort of grand vision of the sort that tends to appear toward the end of an age in which every detail is worthy of examination since all are of equal significance. I am reminded of Athenaeus’ diners who never hesitate to spin off into a discussion of anything whatever, or of Robert Burton’s essays, or of the unpredictable, stream-like flow of conversation in a social group or of reminiscence on a page of Proust. Longus here is leisurely and learned and quaint, a collector of curious lore like a provincial Victorian cleric erudite in Greek and Latin but assigned a church among farmers, who keeps his erudition active by expounding as an amateur on local antiquities or butterflies or varieties of moss.
     I would be hard put to justify this passage in terms of the efficient design of the story’s aesthetic structure, but I, for one, welcome it as a reader. In the end it does contribute toward an understanding of the author’s sensibility, civilized and sophisticated, omnivorously curious, and friendly to all learning. I am reminded of a professor with whom I studied in graduate school who never prepared a lecture, but simply took off from the text under discussion and flew about with the freest of association from Sumer to situation comedies to Milton leaving some students nonplussed. It is because of him that my own advanced study, this note, for example, seemed to me plausible, yet he was not to everyone’s taste.

Ekphrasis in Apollonius: Jason's Cloak

     Jason, the hero of Apollonius of Rhodes’ Hellenistic epic the Argonautica, may surprise the first-time reader with his failures of resolve and fits of depression. He is repeatedly described as améchanos, which in his case means he simply does not know what to do. This apparently unheroic attribute is thrown into high relief by the fact that the same word was used of Achilles and Hector in the Iliad with a diametrically opposed meaning, something like “irresistible” or “undefeatable.” [1] Just as the Marvel comic superheroes of the sixties appealed to their audience by being more vulnerable than the old-style Superman and Batman, this new sort of compromised protagonist seemed appropriate in the belated Alexandrian world. Yet the poet never abandons the grand old encyclopedic reach of epic, and there are moments when Apollonius strives to present an orderly symbolic pattern that ambitiously aims at representing everything.
     Perhaps the most dramatic compressed example of such an image is Jason’s marvelous cloak. Jason pauses at Lemnos on his way to capture the Golden Fleece. Invited to an audience with the local queen Hypsipyle (and unaware that the island’s women have slaughtered all the males), Jason dons his grandest cloak, a magnificent garment covered with embroidered scenes described in an ekphrasis of nearly fifty lines. [2] The seven scenes ornamenting the garment, which outshone the rising sun (725) include a variety of mythological scenes. Such a work of art resembles the symbolic ambitions of a coat of arms or a Baroque title page and tends toward encyclopedic images like mandalas, magic diagrams, or a bank of stained-glass windows in a Gothic cathedral. Parallels include the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad (or the pseudo-Hesiodic “Shield of Heracles”), the similarly shining cloak the incognito Odysseus wore, or, in a different medium, the song of Orpheus that follows in Apollonius.
     Critics have read the cloak as an overture-like anticipation of the themes of the epic, but epic itself seeks to be all-inclusive, so its themes tend to epitomize all themes. The ekphrasis is neatly tied to the specifics of the poem in its end, but its center is surely an attempt to symbolically capture the most significant terms of human reality as though in a miraculously wide-angle lens.
     The first scene, of the Cyclopes forging Zeus thunderbolts, provides an image of technical expertise heightened by its setting in the divine realm. Just as the Argonautica itself is a work of art, the production of metal, clearly an astonishing transformation to early peoples witnessed by the role of gods like Hephaistos and Egyptian Ptah, the Germanic Wayland, the Yoruba Ogun, and others. [3] The poet thus associates his own art with this heavenly production.
     The marvel of the cloak is represented by its luminescence, a characteristic on prominent display in this representation of the spurting flames and shining lights of the god’s thunderbolts. The brilliance of the work parallels the dazzling images of poetry and reinforces the identity of humans as art-producing, symbol-making creatures. The human connection becomes more explicit with the following image, the construction of Thebes by the sons of Antiope, Amphion and Zethus, who lived as humans in spite of their divine parentage. [4] The garment, a tour de force of embroidery, serves as an example of the development of the technical skills, including art and poetry, that distinguish human beings. These initial scenes portray technical skill in the service of the divine, serving the ends of fate, one might say.
     The next panel of the cloak portrays Aphrodite with the shield of Ares, neatly combining the strongest instinctual passions of sex and violence, eros and aggression. In an ingeniously clever image, the lovely goddess’ tunic is said to have slipped below her breast and, the poet reports, her body was reflected in the shield. (746) Thus the primary psychic preoccupations of our species (and, to a large extent, the rest of the animal kingdom) are reflected in a single compressed code, adding these elemental drives to the construction of culture implied in the first two pictures.
     The violent portion of this complementary pair is then foregrounded in the picture of the defeat of the herdsmen sons of Elektryon by their relatives, the Taphian raiders. This incident, like most mythic episodes, only a single term in a lengthy and interwoven series of events extending backward and forward in time, emphasizes the role of brute force in the world. The scene is also linked to the present narrative through Elektryon’s descent from Perseus whose myth parallels that of Theseus in many details.
     The following image again emphasizes the complementarity of love and aggression in a representation of Pelops’ winning of Hippodamia through his victory in a chariot race with Oenomaus, her father, who had killed the eighteen earlier suitors who had proved slower. Without tracing the many links backward and forward to Tantalus, Perseus, Agamemnon, and others, it is sufficient here to note the preeminence of eros and Todestrieb.
     A new element enters with the sixth image, that of Apollo shooting at Tityos as he attempts to abduct Leto. Here is the inverse of the dutiful Titans of the first image, as the giant impiously seeks to dispossess Apollo of his love object. Once more, love and aggression are impossibly intertwined, the complementary dynamos that motivate action, yet here it is Tityos’ impiety, his deviation from the Olympian script, that causes Apollo to act.
     The final image refastens the chain of pictures to the current tale. Phrixos is yet another babe threatened by a hostile maternal figure. While his double falls to his death, Phrixos is protected by an established city on the margin of the known world. His sons in fact join the crew of the Argo after being rescued. His fleece is the object of the quest.
     The whole series, then, defines humanity as artists and technologists, motivated by powerful forces of love and death, suspended between divine and human realms, constantly threatened by untamable forces, making a way forward in life like the hero Jason who is undertaking an all-nut-impossible task. The generic images of human passions are clearly linked to the main plot line in a myriad of ways. Yet the plot of the Argonautica, the endlessly branching related myths, and the images, and the stories depicted on Jason’s cloak, all these do not provide conclusions as much as they suggest bipolar oppositions that organize the tensions and problems of human experience.



1. See Iliad, XIII, 726 and XVI, 29. The Homeric heroes do, of course, have their moments of confusion, hesitation and despondence. The difference is a matter of degree.

2. I, 721-767.

3. These include the the Vedic Tvastar, the pre-Islamic Qaynan, the Sumerian Gibil, the Hungarian Hadúr, the Finnish Ilmarinen, the Gallo-Roman Gobannos, the Slavic Svarog, and the Celtic Creidhne, Goibniu, and Gofannon.

4. Of these two, the first is associated with art, poetry, and music, and the second with hunting and livestock raising, though both are described as participating in the building of Thebes’ walls and both are sufficiently human to die.

5. See Daniel Odgen’s Perseus for a catalogue of similarities.