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the margin. Yet Narcissus did not expect, when he looked in the
stream, to find in his hair a serpent coiled to strike, nor, when he
looked in his own eyes there, to be met by a look of hate, nor, in
general, to discover himself at the center of an inexplicable ugliness
from which he would be bound to avert himself. On the contrary, he
sought out his image everywhere because it was the principle of his
nature to do so and, to go a step beyond that, because it was the prin–
ciple of his nature, as it is of ours, to expect to find pleasure in what
he found. Narcissism, then, involves something beyond the prime
sense of the word. It involves, also, this principle, that as we seek out
our resemblances we expect to find pleasure in doing so, that is to
say, in what we find. So strong is that expectation that we find nothing
else. What is true of the observations of ourselves is equally true of
the observations of resemblances between other things having no
relation to us. We say that the sea, when it expands in a calm and
immense reflection of the sky, resembles the sky, and this statement
gives us pleasure. We enjoy the resemblance for the same reason
that,
if
it was possible to look into the sea as into a glass and if we
should do so and suddenly should behold there some extraordinary
transfiguration of ourselves, the experience would strike us as one of
those amiable revelations that nature occasionally vouchsafes to fav–
orites. So, when we think of arpeggi we think of opening wings and
the effect of the resemblance is pleasurable. When we read Ecclesiastes
the effect of the symbols is pleasurable because as symbols they are
resemblances and as resemblances they are pleasurable and they are
pleasurable because it is a principle of our nature that they should
be, the principle being not something derived from Narcissism since
Narcissism itself is merely an evidence of the operation of the prin–
ciple that we expect to find pleasure in resemblances.
We have been trying to get at a truth about poetry, to get at
one of the principles that compose the theory of poetry. It comes to
this, that poetry is a part of the structure of reality.
If
this has been
demonstrated, it pretty much amounts to saying that the structure of
poetry and the structure of reality are one or, in effect, that poetry and
reality are one, or should be. This may be less thesis than hypothesis.
Yet hypotheses relating to poetry, although they may appear to be
very distant illuminations, could be the fires of fate, if rhetoric ever
meant anything.
There is a gradus ad metaphoram. The nature of a metaphor is,
like the nature of a play, comic, tragic, tragi-comic and so on. It
may be poetic. A poetic metaphor, that is to say, a metaphor poetic
