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eBook details

• Title: Kindling and ASH: Radical Aestheticism in Keats and Shelley.
• Author : Studies in Romanticism
• Release Date : January 22, 2003
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 253 KB

Description

1. "Touch the very pulse of fire / With my bare unlidded eyes" I TAKE THE TITLE OF MY OPENING SECTION FROM KEATS'S "SONG OF FOUR Fairies," and specifically from its rhapsody on flame. While the spirits of air and water are left to their own delights, Dusketha, the spirit of the earth, promises to join Salamander, the spirit of fire, in congress, to be "bedded in tongued flames" (93): "Sprite of fire! I follow thee [and] / at thy supreme desire, / Touch the very pulse of fire / With my bare unlidded eyes" (80, 84-86). (1) In an otherwise unremarkable poem, these remarkable lines on the "supreme desire" of the spirits also propose an allegory of reading that at first sight can only appear to be an allegory of blindness: by the promise recorded in these lines to make the eyes into organs of touch, Dusketha guarantees in the process to deprive them of sight. But something is gained by such self-blinding; for it is only by the searing touch of the eyes that this encounter with "the very pulse of fire" can be consummated. What, moreover, is the "pulse of fire" other than its beat, its metrics? Thus, to press "bare unlidded eyes" to fire's pulse is to read the fire, a reading which blinds on contact. Once this reading is "bedded," it promises to give desire a voice, to become a speaking, a poetics of "tongued flames." The poem does not pursue further the ramifications of this conjunction. But since Keats often plays with fire in his poems, Dusketha's lines announce an incendiary poetics that I would like to explore in their more detailed and adventurous forms. This entails turning from the "very pulse of fire" to the figures that we might read without the same fear of blindness, figures that lend this lyric pulse the illusion of a history, figures that transform fire into a narrative of burning--namely, the figures of kindling and ash, fire's origin and outcome, cause and consequence. To be "bedded in tongued flames" is thus to point from the kindling of the spirit of fire to the ashes of its result.

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