A poem in this week's issue of the New Yorker speaks to this week's experience.
Seraphim, by Patricia Spears Jones
Once a beauty, full figured, beloved
And then a fever, sweats, water vomited
Until the body gave out. And then,
Wings and lyres and legion of other
Angels. Singing, dancing, flying about,
But once a beauty remembers
Physical love and then its loss
Eternal life seems mundane
No conflict or need or desire.
Thus, this seraphim held melancholy
Gentle as a lull in a long conversation
But heaven allows only jubilance.
Possibly the angel needed to return
Human: with feelings, tears and laughter
Or find a way to shape the sadness into
A moment of beauty when the angel's wings
Spread and flight moves to breathing
Full of vision. There an angel's tears bond
with the visitor's fear, awe. It could be
a filmmaker's perambulating Berlin,
in search of a reason to consider
the spirit, those angels set on top of monuments
across the handsome city.
And they love the lovers.
And one remains lovingly disinterested.
How dreams and death and a dearth
Of joy is visible. And wings spread
And wings fall. And the beloved becomes
A man who understands a woman's
Full figure. A man who fears fever.
A man who takes his lover in all
Her melancholy and lifts her up
And unto joy.
-------------------------------------
Much of the Sufi and pre-Islamic poetry we have looked at these weeks has shown the connection between divine and physical, human love. Our love, lust even, for another human is a yearning for the divine, from which we have been separated.
This poem gets at the same idea from another angle, it seems to me. The angel, granted paradise after a bout with fatal illness, yearns for the trials and tribulations of human love: the tears, the conflict, the desire. Life in paradise is Mundane without the elements of earthly love that the sufis write about, that painful ecstasy and intoxication that makes the sufi feel most alive, it seems.
Yesterday at the Met a few other scholars and I looked for a while at the Renaissance and classical Greek sculptures. We decided the women and men are sexualized to the same degree, but the men's sexuality (we were looking at Perseus) is glorified, while the woman's sexuality is used against her, as a tool to make her seem weak, or objectified.
I like that at the end of this poem, the man appreciates his lover's full figure, as if his eye encompasses all that she is, not just the sexualized nature, and exalts her whole being "unto joy".
Seraphim, by Patricia Spears Jones
Once a beauty, full figured, beloved
And then a fever, sweats, water vomited
Until the body gave out. And then,
Wings and lyres and legion of other
Angels. Singing, dancing, flying about,
But once a beauty remembers
Physical love and then its loss
Eternal life seems mundane
No conflict or need or desire.
Thus, this seraphim held melancholy
Gentle as a lull in a long conversation
But heaven allows only jubilance.
Possibly the angel needed to return
Human: with feelings, tears and laughter
Or find a way to shape the sadness into
A moment of beauty when the angel's wings
Spread and flight moves to breathing
Full of vision. There an angel's tears bond
with the visitor's fear, awe. It could be
a filmmaker's perambulating Berlin,
in search of a reason to consider
the spirit, those angels set on top of monuments
across the handsome city.
And they love the lovers.
And one remains lovingly disinterested.
How dreams and death and a dearth
Of joy is visible. And wings spread
And wings fall. And the beloved becomes
A man who understands a woman's
Full figure. A man who fears fever.
A man who takes his lover in all
Her melancholy and lifts her up
And unto joy.
-------------------------------------
Much of the Sufi and pre-Islamic poetry we have looked at these weeks has shown the connection between divine and physical, human love. Our love, lust even, for another human is a yearning for the divine, from which we have been separated.
This poem gets at the same idea from another angle, it seems to me. The angel, granted paradise after a bout with fatal illness, yearns for the trials and tribulations of human love: the tears, the conflict, the desire. Life in paradise is Mundane without the elements of earthly love that the sufis write about, that painful ecstasy and intoxication that makes the sufi feel most alive, it seems.
Yesterday at the Met a few other scholars and I looked for a while at the Renaissance and classical Greek sculptures. We decided the women and men are sexualized to the same degree, but the men's sexuality (we were looking at Perseus) is glorified, while the woman's sexuality is used against her, as a tool to make her seem weak, or objectified.
I like that at the end of this poem, the man appreciates his lover's full figure, as if his eye encompasses all that she is, not just the sexualized nature, and exalts her whole being "unto joy".
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