Auden's O by Hass Andrew

Author:Hass, Andrew.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Postscript

Ariel is Caliban’s ephemeral, insubstantial, “spiritual” Other. Thus, Ariel’s words are themselves ephemeral, borrowed from the natural realm with no substantiality of their own. He has, in fact, no self, and so cannot even voice the one word that announces selfhood—“I.” The “I,” the echo that follows each of three ten-line stanzas, must be said by the “Prompter,” he who stands in the wings and cues the speechless actors. As Echo, the forsaken lover of Narcissus, can only repeat the last lines she had just heard, so the Prompter repeats the last lines of Ariel as he stares into the reflecting pool and falls in love with what he sees—Caliban. The Prompter, like the Stage Manager at the outset, is not part of the play. His “I” is simply the framing end of the commentary’s script, thrown from the margins. Ariel’s “I” is not his own.

Ariel’s words are spoken directly to Caliban, and each begins with a command, as if Ariel now possessed the power to give out orders. But all of the commands are negative—“Weep no more …,” “Wish for nothing …,” “Never hope …”—as if in salute to the negative counterpart Caliban has played. Ariel speaks here not to the Caliban of The Sea and the Mirror, the “brilliant void” who has just spoken, but to the original Caliban of The Tempest. As the “Fleet persistent shadow cast” by this Caliban’s lameness, Ariel, in a strange reversal of The Tempest, becomes the darkness amid light, “cast” out from Caliban’s effulgence, but also “cast” in a role of a play from which he, unlike Caliban, cannot escape. He is “caught” by artifice, but also now caught “helplessly in love” with Caliban, “Fascinated by / Drab mortality.” He asks Caliban to be true to this mortality, to his “faults,” to his “official natural role,” and in that trueness voice the very word Ariel cannot—“I.” “I can sing as you reply … I,” “I will sing if you will cry … I.” The mirroring is still evident: the “I”s are reflected through the song, the first within artifice, the second without.

In the poem’s center, the middle of the second stanza, the mirror is at its most detailed: “only /As I am can I /Love you as you are.” Ariel’s “I am” is contingent on Caliban’s substantiality and flesh, and art seems to return us now to the human realm of passion and intimacy. But Ariel is still caught in the duality of the perfections of art and the messiness of life. “Wish for nothing lest you mar/ The perfection.” Caliban, The Tempest’s Caliban, seems to possess all the human qualities Ariel lacks, so that only after Caliban’s cry can Ariel be heard.36

This absolute reliance reaches its height in the third and final stanza (as if to echo the third section of Caliban’s speech). Both Ariel and Caliban boundary upon the region beyond art, beyond “Heaven’s kindness” and “earth’s frankly brutal drum.” And when their falsehoods (Ariel’s illusions, Caliban’s disillusions) are divided, they shall both become nothing.

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