Page 17 - GALIET EMBERS & SAPPHIRE: Milton IV

clearing, silvery, ungolden, reassures her. In Comus’ tangled- wood and labyrinth of being, the moon turns forth her silver lining (224). Chastity, beneath the moonlight of the clearing, is as visible as Comus is invisible beneath the half-light: a penumbra that does not reveal but conceals. There 3⁄4 singing she stills all things singing: forests and revelries, gestures and words. There 3⁄4 she becomes a forlorn symbol of an astral, airy archetype. There 3⁄4 she shows him bliss in what Orphean song sung in the drowsy and frightened night. There 3⁄4 his pang of ravishment and joy grasps Blake’s mist. He sees with his being “... a world in a grain of sand,/And a heaven in a wild flower” and “Hold[s] infinity in the palm of his [your] hand,/And eternity in an hour.”20 There 3⁄4 in the silent space 3⁄4 Poetry of poetry as pure poesy, airy, reveals the mytho-magic image of Echo that stirs what the impatient lunar ray Comus yearns and seeks.
Home-feltnessness as anamnesis, as recollection of something absolute within, once lost, now regained. This grasp is instinctive, yet sober, certain, yet obscure; it is felt not with reason’s solar threads, but tangibly, with the lunar sinews of his heart. Comus feels what Yeats, partly, feels upon seeing his “woman of so shining loveliness that men thresh corn at midnight by a tress, a little stolen tress.”21 No, it is not Yeats’
20 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. Blake. Auguries of Innocence.
21 Yeats. The Secret Rose. The Secret Rose. Ed. By Norman Jeffares. UK: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1998. 36
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