The Near and Distant God by Cooper Ian

Author:Cooper, Ian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

[But who knows if, one day, when all the beauty of summer has faded, its tender spirit, drunk with your faint scent, will not encircle you in your bloom, quite unseen by me?]

Mörike speculates that the butterfly and the flower, spring and winter, will meet, and that, therefore, the epiphany that is the occasion for the poem can stand as its defining moment after all: that the words of the poem really are reflections of the Word. And this envisaged meeting takes place through Spirit ('Geist', mentioned here for the first and only time, and echoing assonantly throughout the strophe — 'dereinst', 'deinem leisen', 'umkreist'). The working of Spirit, by which the strictures of time are transgressed, is captured here in a restatement of midwinter spring: the scent of the flower will permeate the butterfly, and the two seasons intersect. The reciprocity of the subjective persona and its object is reiterated in the pronouns of the final line, which both opens up the visual field of the poem and eclipses it. The poem cannot describe this meeting taking place — cannot describe time being redeemed — because the meeting can only take place in a transcendent realm beyond the present ('dereinst'), and the poem is itself subject to time. However, it can hold out the possibility that it will take place, and that in Mörike's discovery of the Christmas rose that transcendent space is fleetingly reflected, and Spirit revealed in history. The concealment suggested by the last line ('Mir unsichtbar') would then in fact be part of the revelation evoked in the first strophe. And the poem in which that moment of vision is communicated must project beyond words, into a space it cannot represent except through the break on the page between two sections, and the quality of the silence that follows its final question. It trusts that this is not an empty space, and not silence at all, but rather filled with the eloquence of the Word. That is what Mörike, like Hölderlin, puts in the balance — belief in the revelatory possibility of poetry. In two further poems, we can see clearly how this belief is for him both a hermeneutic and a moral concern.

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