308
MARIUS BEWLEY
And to the sun, earth turned her flower of sex,
Acanthus in the architects' limpid angles;
Close priests allegorized the Orphic egg's
Brood, and from the Academy, tolerant wranglers
Could hear the contemplatives of the Tragic Choir
Drain off man's sanguine, pastoral death-desire.
It was said stone dreams and animal sleeps and man
Is awake; but sleep with its drama on us bred
Animal articulate, only somnambulist can
Conscience like CQ/Wdor give the blood its head
For the dim moors to reign through druids again.
The main idea seems to
be
that purity of faith is always adulterated
by its priests and its laws. We are given a picture of the Temple in"
Jerusalem, and the way the Pharisees misunderstood, seeing in the
Messiah to come not a Redeemer but a power symbol. Unfortunately,
"scroll-tongued" reminds me of butterflies rather than of law-mouthing
priests, and the imagery on the whole seems more suited to Nineveh
or Babylon than to Jerusalem. The obscurity of the next verse seems
unjustified in the face of the comparatively simple statement it
is
making. We have left the Hebraic for the Greek world with its acanthus–
capitalled temples. Here, just as at Lough Derg with its praying
pilgrims, faith has various faces. There are the "fundamentalist" Orphic
priests who teach the doctrine of the cosmic egg from which Eros
and
a whole cosmogony emerged. Plato's Academy, after Plato's death, be–
came a center of agnostic criticism; and, of course, there are those
whose deepest religious experience is in the catharsis of tragedy and
art.
As for the next lines, any explanation that will lay Cawdor has
to
be
from the exegete's brain untimely ripped. But the verse may mean
something like this: there are three kinds of earthly existence: in–
animate, animal, and human. Man in his complexity incorporates some–
thing of all three. In this context the dreaming stone would stand for the
primitive, the repressed, the subconscious, towards which there is always
a gravitational pull to return. This attraction men feel towards the
dark and hidden exists strongly in religious instinct. One remembers
here the Druidesque imagery with which Stevens celebrated his ideal
worshippers in "Sunday Morning":
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant
in
orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous delJ()tion to the sun,
