Page 19 - GALIET EMBERS & SAPPHIRE: Milton IV

mimetic speech, just as Plato’s artistic mimesis, expresses what it hears; it imitates another entity’s thing said; hence, it projects the entity of the other unto the other in speech and gesture: interjection as interjection, ecstasy as ecstasy, grief as grief. It is the mirror of becoming, mimetic, mythic, enduring the divine punishment of Hera, just as Narcissus, in self-adoration of his beautiful image in the waters, unknowingly endures his own self-oblivion and perishes. Echo’s last word is mythic rather than noetic; as oracular as the Pythia’s and the Cybil of Cumae’s. It is called upon to elucidate when lost in wooded forests. For Lady Chastity, Echo, and not Zeus, is the medium of revelation and the Form of redemption, one whose voice can “be translated into the skies,/and give resounding grace to all heav’n’s harmonies” (242-3). Echo, mythic and oracular, is also ‘daughter of the sphere’ (241). Myth thus ceases to be mimetic, becoming what feminine Platonic offspring of the sublime Ideas and Forms. It becomes an echo, a spiritual resonance of Plato’s vision of the Idea of Ideas, in bliss experienced. Hence, Echo of the Spheres echoes Lady Chastity’s own mythic echo. Nostalgic Song 3⁄4 that seeks to know, grasp, apprehend. Nostalgic Song 3⁄4 that beckons in Comus return and homecoming. Song of thought expressed into language, language responding to itself as oneness: sameness of the same.
Mytho-lingual turn.
• 19 •