Page 15 - GALIET Memory and Poiesis: On Apollo's Wings IV

full motions of the mind. However, unlike the Titans, Apollo and the Poet, by sharing their paralysis before their rebirths, are liberated.
In Hyperion: A Fragment, failing to read has catastrophic consequences. Hyperion’s fall is anticipated by his inability to read the “hieroglyphics old,” the signs of the sun, “the glancing spheres, / Circles, and arcs, and broad-belting colure” (Hyperion: 1.273-77). These signs, devoid of all wisdom, become mere circles and semi-circles, empty, unreadable traces: a meaninglessness that recalls the unreadability of the wintry circle of Druid Stones (Hyperion: 2:35). As signification and meaning fails, proud Hyperion too fails. Doomed to fall, Hyperion is subjected, like Thea, to the trials of temporal existence. As the son of mysteries, he is “distinct” and “visible” and a divine symbol of beauty and splendor; however, his brilliance, upon entering the den of woe, “betrayed to the most hateful seeing of itself” (Hyperion: 2:370) in which “he became a vast shade in midst of his own brightness” (Hyperion: 2:372- 73). Because Hyperion freezes, he deconstructs himself. Disempowered to make the sun fly, his “operations of the dawn” (Hyperion: 1.294) are aborted into a stillbirth.
Similarly, a torn Saturn, unable to trace the riddle of his fall in the “legends of the first of days” (Hyperion: 2.132), once wisely
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