An Inch or Two of Time by Jordan D. Finkin

Author:Jordan D. Finkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780271066417
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press

Purple Poetry

The Tantalean color for me in Fogel’s early poetry was argaman, which is a purple or reddish-purple color. The word is of biblical provenance, where it is used most often to indicate either the fine adornments for the tabernacle or temple, or the luxury commodity materials dyed with such a color. In both cases the image of refinement is dominant. Indeed, the traditional Western association of the color is that of royalty and so of wealth. As a result, it comes to take one a distinctly aesthetic cast. The rest of this discussion will look at the four poems from Before the Dark Gate in which the word argaman occurs.

Purple is in Georg Trakl’s poetry “associated . . . with the passion and suffering of human life.”114 The most common Traklish collocation is “purple sleep” or “purple dreams.” Casey dismisses the comment of another critic who notes of these collocations that “on the one side the eternal, timeless, clear, fogless; on the other the earthily foggy, the world of sorrows, surrender (‘sleep’) to the world of experience.”115 This purple sleep and these purple dreams expose, however, the suffering not of what is static but of liminal and therefore unstable realities. These borderland, transitional states have precisely those associations which Fogel links to “purple”; its emotional shades are variable.

Poem 70 is an almost elegiac account of a sunset as a kind of death. The vocabulary of the first stanza—“A lone and last wagon is already ready for the road, / Let us board and travel, / For it will not wait”—with its simple diction and open symbols interprets readily as such a metaphor.116 This introductory image is followed by

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