Lorca's Poet in New York by Craige Betty Jean;

Author:Craige, Betty Jean; [Craige, Betty Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

Poet in New York: The Vision

It is the blood that comes, that will come

over the sheds and rooftops, everywhere,

to burn the chlorophyll of the blond women,

to groan at the foot of the beds before the insomnia of the washbowls

and burst in a low yellow dawn of tobacco.

(p. 480)

“Ritual,” says Northrop Frye, “seems to be something of a voluntary effort . . . to recapture a lost rapport with the natural cycle.”1 And it is ritual that has somehow been eliminated from the New York world Lorca sees which no longer even puts forth the “effort . . . to recapture a lost rapport with the natural cycle,” to imitate the natural rhythms of the universe. As human vitality has vanished, so have real anguish, pain, and death disappeared from this unnatural world of “hollow men.” What is needed is a violent cataclysmic upheaval by which this civilization may confront the forces of life, destroy the cancer within, and begin again: death and resurrection. The cancer of materialism is eating away the vitality of the now dehumanized society of New York City, and it must be burned out before these people may once again know the forces of the blood and the moon, the wholeness of a community.

The movement from prophetic vision to action, from “spatial form” to “temporal form” both within individual poems and through the volume as a whole, reflects a movement from the “epiphanic moment, the flash of instantaneous comprehension with no direct reference to time,” toward ritual.2 The action the poet calls for (after his vision) is a purgation—a symbolic death—necessary to the accomplishment of a reestablished order and harmony with the cosmos; for the universe must expel the evil within in order to survive. In this cycle of tragedy the hero recognizes the necessity of death and fulfills his destiny, so that order may be reestablished.

At the heart of the tragic vision is the myth of the descent—into night, winter, dissolution, death.3 Poet in New York, in its demonic imagery as well as in its tragic rhythm, may be seen as an enactment of the myth of the descent by which the destiny of the disintegrating community is violently fulfilled in a dramatic purgation of the evil forces of chaos that have threatened the poet with his own extinction.4 The myth of the descent into hell corresponds symbolically to the myth of the Fall, with the latter being a metaphor for the state of modern civilization which the poet sees here, and the former being a metaphor for the means by which this civilization may actively participate in its own destruction and effect its own salvation. In Christian terms, the “fortunate fall” leads eventually to the necessary sacrifice of a god by which all mankind may be saved. Without the ritual sacrifice, there is no salvation.

The self-destructive cataclysmic upheaval which society must undergo for its salvation is made necessary by malignant forces at work within society that are silently bringing about the death of humanity.

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