Page 19 - GALIET Memory and Poiesis: On Apollo's Wings IV

rebirth rather than the poet’s ‘pang of chill,’ in Hyperion: A Dream symbolizing opposition. This hot-cold dying into life emblemizes not only Apollo’s rebirth, but also the poet’s, both reborn into memory’s misery, bliss. This resurrection into a higher poetics recalls Dante’s verse: “and here too, dead poetry shall rise again.”13 For it is Apollo, in A Fragment, who, after dreaming of memory, finds his golden lyre that will sing to the entire universe, in pain and pleasure, the birth of his new, beautiful song. For it is the Poet, too, in A Dream, who must lift memory’s veil of appearance and see the sufferings of the last of a golden race to earn his apotheosis. Hence, both, Apollo and the Poet-Dreamer, as a result of their metamorphoses, are given the precious gift of identity, the identity that Saturn loses when gazing at Thea’s face (Hyperion: 1.97) while mourning, “I have left /My strong identitity.../ Somewhere between the throne and where I sit.” (Hyperion: 1.116).
Saturn’s Sanctuary and Delos’ Island, antipodes, surrounded, the first, by the vault of heaven and, the second, by the ebbing sea of truth, dream and dance in poesy’s arms just as A Fragment and a A Dream at each other glance, just as the Titomachia and Psychomachia at each other romance, only to
13 Dante. The Divine Comedy. Purgatory. Canto I.7. Trans. Kirkpatrick. London, UK: Penguin Books, 2007. 3
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