From Parmenides
From Parmenides
A nest upturned, a swallow's egg falls, crashes.
Her shell survives. Her mother's call unheard
through white. Her cuticle contains the hatch
of its own cracking. Night falls without words,
her saw furious; python's eyes glint black;
its tongue soft shapes itself to name the bird.
My Zeno, words are eggs as Time does lay
that bear the cosmos out and Metis in.
We are such snakes that with tongues would uncase
Eros. How shall the fledgling live, poison
from fangs that pierce her skin? She cannot stay
behind our lips, but will her slick down sway
kind Nyx? By speech is wisdom blinded. When
words give she emerges from their casing.
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Posted Jul 6, 2016, 11:38 PM UTC
34
Ah, one of these T.S. Eliot-ish poems. Beautiful free verse, vague sinister atmosphere with the unshakable feeling that we are accountable somehow, lots of references (though here fortunately constrained to Greek mythology), and esoteric hard to access ideas. I love it. But, being not an English major, can you give me your most direct interpretation of the poem? It seems to me to be about the fall of innocence and self-sabotage, how as we grow up we use our social skills to manipulate others and make our own lives artificial. When we trust our deepest values and ideas we become free and able to perceive the world accurately. In this scenario, artificial social worlds are Parmenides' sensory inputs and a worldview shaped by our values is Parmenides' truth developed from thoughts.
T.S. Eliot is an interesting comparison, and you give good reasons for it. I actually took Shelley as my model, both in terms of his engagement with Greek philosophy and myth but also that "Lift not the painted veil" is a model for this piece.
I'm not an English person either. I got into this from the side of philosophy, which is why this is about Parmenides and about Homer. As a bit of context, this poem is in the process of a series of poems exploring Parmenides' relations to Zeno and the development of his thought up to the writing of his opus "On Nature". I am assuming Plato was correct that Parmenides was Zeno's teacher and lover (in actuality, this is probably not true). And by placing this before Parmenides had his philosophy well-defined, I'm fudging a bit with what he believed.
To start off with, I really like your interpretation. It latches onto the developmental aspects of the egg/hatching imagery and catches in some ways the distrust of communication. Certainly other poems in this series deal with Parmenides anxieties about other people (largely owing to how out there his beliefs are). I think something of those anxieties is definitely here, though they were not at the forefront of my mind.
The poem then, following the relation between Parmenides and Zeno by having a didactic and erotic side. As bluntly as possible, the simplest rendering of Parmenides intended communications is something like "Zeno, using words only gets us farther away from wisdom, so stop talking and have sex with me."