Page 12 - GALIET Memory and Poiesis: On Apollo's Wings IV

beauty, born of us” (Hyperion: 2:213-14) is fated to arise overcoming its past. This historic overcoming of romantic tensions, caused by the French Revolution, is embodied in the “shaded avenue” of truth that Oceanus treads whose path shall lead him to “receive the truth” that will be Titans’ ‘‘balm’’ (Hyperion: 3:243), which will heal just as poetry will “pour a balm on the world” (Fall of Hyperion: 1.202). Thus, poetry, truth and beauty wed in joy once Saturn and Hyperion’s sombre melodies are renewed by Apollo’s golden and blissful song.
When Clymene sings her loss and woes inside a seashell, its poetic echo transforms her sorrow into a blissful song of enchantment carried by the “shifting winds” (Hyperion: 2:276) from an opposing, antipodal realm: the marvelous Apollonian island of Delos (Hyperion: 2:275). The seashell becomes a spiral vessel for change and renewal, whose physical being captivates the sweet, eternal song of memory (Mnemosyne) and the breath of her prophetic sun-child, poesy (Apollo). Yet, once abandoned on the seashore, change and seashell are filled by the melody of the sea whose ebbs and tides pour Oceanus’ sublime truth not far from where brook meets sea (Hyperion: 2:286-89). In this sea of counter-currents and tragic romantic tensions between grief and joy, the ideal and the real, of fallen Titans and risen Olympians, the running water of time is overcome by the grand universal, followed by its reversal.
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