Dover Strait Doubts ; Samuel Palmer.

Bullion Dross

Since Death these days is on everyone’s lips,

we pledge ourselves to His buyers’ market;

a mortal spark will trade a loss, perhaps,

for the spoils of everlasting darkness.

                 

Samuel Palmer: 
The Lonely Tower, 
Etching, 1878-79.

You’ll see that, like Samuel Palmer, I’ve stolen a snippet of John Milton for my own ends . . . indeed, when isolated, it’s a powerful oxymoron. Since my schooldays, aged fourteen, the bullion dross of Paradise Lost has never ceased to exemplify a crisp declamatory end-stopped line, hammered into the mind like a coffin nail.

Palmer’s image of spiritual loneliness – fear of abandonment by a deity – was inspired by Milton’s lines in Il Penseroso :

Or let my lamp at midnight hour,
Be seen in some high lonely tow’r,

Palmer’s comments on the dark night of the soul summoned up by The Lonely Tower may be read in this fragment, tentatively identifying the source of his etching :

Here poetic loneliness has been attempted; not the loneliness of a desert, but a secluded spot in a genial, pastoral country, enriched also by antique relics, such as those so-called ‘Druidic stones’. The constellation of the ‘Bear’ may help to explain that the building is the tower of Il Penseroso. Two shepherds, watching their flocks, speak together of the mysterious light above them.

However, we can never be certain that Palmer was not also conversant with Matthew Arnold’s own long dark night of the soul, Dover Beach (1867), when published a decade earlier. (Dover Beach, of course, was published less than a decade after Origin of Species, 1859.)

The Monuments of Art are easily outdone by Spirits reprobate.                             To my mind, spiritual doubt is graphically symbolised by the ‘druidic stones’ distant on a ‘darkling plain’ bathed in a ‘mysterious light’ whose witnesses are ‘shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.’

Challenged in their lifetime by post-Darwinism’s retreating ‘Sea of Faith’, both Palmer-the-mystic and Arnold-the-doubter in these figurations attempted through their art each an allegorical exegesis of their Victorian generation’s conflicts of doubt as Science warred with Church for supremacy in the race to have the last word on defining the human condition . . . predestined versus evolved by natural selection.

Both worshippers at the altar of Milton (author of Eikonoklastes), they saw the contradictions thrown up by the Spirit of the Age resolved, I believe, by Milton’s own astonishing iconoclasm in characterising the sardonic Arch Fiend as altogether more appealing than the Great Architect. 

After all, to the true artist, the irresolution of a paradox is the power of its mystery. One never solves a mystery or it would no longer remain a mystery. One enters a mystery.

For Milton to challenge his faith by daring to banish Jove’s ‘Architect’ from Paradise – the fallen angel who had ‘built in Heaven high Towers’ – then send him ‘headlong’ to the mines of the Underworld to the dig out ‘ribs of gold’ and, with ‘his industrious crew’, to cast in foundries the ‘massy Ore’, scum the ‘bullion dross’, and thence to ‘build in Hell’ a palace of ‘fretted Gold’, as a tribute to the Great Adversary to outrival the Kingdom of the Creator, was beyond audacious.

For those of us whose creed is no more and no less than belief in the unbearable reality of being, which existentialists call enargeia, the contrarian impulse to ‘make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven’ is a casuistic paradox that, sophistry notwithstanding, endorses that more modest thing, the audacity of Art. 

See also

Miss Emily Dickinson Communes with the Great Dictator Mr John Milton . . . https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/10/miss-emily-dickinson-communes-with.html

That space the Evil One abstracted . . .
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/05/that-space-evil-one-abstracted-and.html

and
Ignoble Retreat at the Edge where Earth and Firmament meet . . . https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2020/02/ignoble-retreat-at-edge-where-earth-and.html

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html