Page 9 - GALIET EMBERS & SAPPHIRE: Milton IV

There are luminous moments in the language of Milton’s Lady Chastity as numinous as Plato’s: a crystallized verb that denies a fugue. Her round, circular, airy words endear the logos of prose; they aspire to say things of reason, of argument, of dialectic. Comus’ words are poetic, and as poetry 3⁄4 mythoi 3⁄4 they are spirals, vortexes, curvaceous lines and rituals that do not aspire to speak, but to be. Where? In presence and absence, in the spoken and unspoken,3 in the said and unsaid which is also silence. Comus confronts language as Heidegger’s ‘Aufriss’: he rips it open to reveal an experience, a clearing, a freeing,4 a spontaneity of being, as natural as Dylan’s ‘green fuse that drives the flower’5 and as primal as Wordsworth’s ‘hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.’6 Idyllic modes of being as incoherent and perplexing to Lady Virtue as to Plato, her eternal benefactor.
Plato, philosopher of epistemology and ontology, of appearances and Forms, of morals and politics, of noesis7 and
3 Language is close to the verb sprechen; the spoken and unspoken. Heidegger. On the Way to Language. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
4 Heidegger. On the Way to Language. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
5 Dylan Thomas. Quite Early One Morning. The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower. New York: New Directions Book, 1954.
6 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. Wordsworth. Ode: Intimations of Immortality. Line 179. 259
7 Noesis as a seeing that discerns, intelligible seeing, an intuition that is infallible, apprehending the thing just as it is: the thing in itself. Plato. Republic. Book VI. The Divided Line. This notion is similar to Parmenides’ in that his apprehension
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