Page 17 - GALIET Memory and Poiesis: On Apollo's Wings IV

presumably an ancestral sacrificial ground,10 precedes the second poem’s sacrificial ring in Moneta’s temple: the first belonging to wintry November, the other to Springtime May- June, symbolizing that the thematic circularity of death and rebirth, from frozenness to jovial renewal, can only be reconciled by sacrifice. What’s more, only the poet-dreamer and Apollo, his father, after their own sacrificial deaths and rebirths, can make the prophetic leap and decipher the revolutions of the heavens.
These revolutions are indeed governed by memory. The intrigue of mourning, memory and forgetting appears in both poems. Unlike Hyperion and Saturn, Apollo earns his apotheosis by reading the unreadable: the mysteries of the silent, wan face of omniscient memory.11 Apollo, master of the Delphic Harp, Dorian Flute and the “Father of all verse” (Hyperion: 3.13), needs to be taught by Mnemosyne what he has forgotten as he perceives the altar’s incense, which has “spread around / Forgetfulness of everything, but bliss” (Fall of
10 Druid Stones are believed to surround a sacrificial site. Bierdermann, Hans. Dictionary of Symbolism. London, UK: A Meridian Book, 1994.
11 Memory is considered an awful goddess. Yet, Apollo, is able to read her looks. It suggests that poetry and prophecy are the only means of reading memory’s motions. Memory, too, is everywhere, she leaves no trace, for he is not certain how she is present and how did she arrive. “How did you come over the unfooted sea” or “did her robed form move invisibly?” Moreover, The garments of Memory, remembrance, sweeps over ‘fallen leaves’ and ‘grassy solitudes.’ Flowers too lift their heads. Memory is a passing whisper over nature’s autumn where decay, such as the Titan’s fall, begins. However, in Spring, when flowers bloom, nature looks upon memory for its renewal.
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