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PARTlSA REVIEW
since birth. Identity in this context means unity with variety, as is also the
identity in which one's hands and feet and head are identified by being parts
of the same thing. Then again, the book I have just read is in a sense identi–
fied with me, having entered the continuum of my own life. Let us explore
this conception of personally involving metaphor a little further.
I have never found any formula better to begin with on this topic than
"the lunatic, the lover, and the poet" of Duke Theseus in
A Midsummer
Night's Dream.
According to him, these three groups are compact of
imagination, by which he means essentially seeing things that are not there.
In our present context this means that they are the obvious groups of people
who take metaphor, or identity-with, seriously. Let us start with the lover.
There is a common stock of metaphors connected with two bodies becoming
one flesh in sexual union, and the lover as poet revolves around these
metaphors, though in a somewhat elliptical way. The one-flesh metaphor is
biblical (Genesis 2:24), and of cour e the starting point of every human life is
the identity of one flesh resulting from the meeting of two bodies, which
makes the concern involved fairly immediate.
In Shakespeare's day it was generally assumed that the poet was a
lover, and that ifhe was not he was probably a rather poor creature, and
almost certainly a dull poet. That is, one of the chief sources for his inspiration
was what I have just called an existential metaphor, the union with his mis–
tress in which the experience of being one flesh, identical with someone else,
supplied the generative power for his poetry. This union was nearly always
"of imagination all compact": that is, it didn't happen. The great majority of
Elizabethan poetic mistresses were as unavailable as Elizabeth: they were
coy, proud, disdainful, "sworn to live chaste," like Romeo's Rosaline, married
to someone else like Sidney'S Stella, capricious or promiscuous. (The conven–
tion itself of course was centuries older.) Thus love poetry, and perhaps all
poetry, is the child of the fru tration of identity, a presence taking the place of
or substituting for an enforced absence. Here, of cour e, the lover is the poet,
not the reader, but the reader is usually assumed to be reading a a lover,
and to share something of the experience going on.
When the union in one flesh does take place, there is still frustration, this
time inherent in the brevity and the many accidents of the act, and above in
the inability to forget that two people never really become one per on. The
standard example in English literature is Donne's "The Extasie," where
some turns of phrase ("And yet the body is his book") indicate a connection in
Donne's mind between the sex act and the writing of poetry. The connection
is much strong in "The Canonization," where the two lovers:
die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
