Page 18 - GALIET Memory and Poiesis: On Apollo's Wings IV

Hyperion: 1.104). However, before she appears, Apollo already feels some of Saturn and Hyperion’s gloom. Plagued by a “dark, dark, / And painful vile oblivion,” Apollo yearns to know the essence of things and mysteries of existence until “a melancholy numbs his [my] limbs; / And then upon the grass he [I] sits, and moans, / Like one who once had wings” (Hyperion: 3.86- 91). Yet, for memory to be restored, Mnemosyne must first mourn. By focusing on Mnemosyne’s harp that “waileth every morn and eventide” (Hyperion: 3.108-09), the poet “reads / A wondrous lesson in [her] silent face,” which will initiate Apollo to a vast body of knowledge and of events that will pour unto him from her unveiled gaze, a universe of “Knowledge [so] enormous [that] makes a God of him [me]” (Hyperion: 3.113) so potent as “as if some blithe wine / Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk” (Hyperion: 3.111-119). And what is this intoxication, but the very drunkenness the poet-dreamer experiences in Hyperion: A Dream before he journeys into Saturn’s temple. Hence, in hearing her harp, the poet encircles and embraces mourning with memory. Apollo must decipher memory's face to recall what he knew, just as Plato’s must face the shadows of the cavern to understand that “all memory and learning is but recollection.”12 In this remembering, in Hyperion: A Fragment, Apollo experiences a ‘pang of heat’ at
12 Plato. Complete Works. Meno.. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
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