[Previous: lines 189-253]
After spending their wedding night in separate rooms, Joseph rejoins Mary in the morning. Now read on!
“Iamque dies, pulsis tenebris, invecta rubebat,------------
et face sol rosea nigras disjecerat umbras. [255]
Corripio è stratis artus sponsamque reviso.
Vix thalami impuleram bipatentes cardine portas,
cum lux ecce oculis ingens offusa repente.
Collucent summi radiis laquearia tecti,
collucentque trabes, visumque ardere cubile. [260]
Ipsa autem thalami in medio sedet aurea virgo
attonitae similis: nec enim me multa rogantem
dignatur; nihil illa meo sermone movetur.
Tantùm fixa oculos cœlo palmasque tenebat,
aut stellae similis, aut puniceae aurorae. [265]
O illa à solita quantum mutata figura!
Quantus honos oculis, quantus decor additus ori!
Haud aliter, quàm cùm simulacrum excidit acernum
artificis manus è sylvis, in sede locandum
sacrata, quod plebs dehinc supplex omnis adoret, [270]
si, postquam effigiem poliens trunco extudit arte,
extremum superimposito decus induat auro.
Immotam penitus circumdat lucida nubes
solis inardescens radiis; stellaeque videntur
lucentes capiti circum aurea tempora pasci; [275]
sub pedibusque Deae lumen dare candida luna.
“Now day, pulsing the darkness back, glowed red------------
as the sun’s roseate torch banished black shadow. [255]
I rose from my bed and went through to my wife.
I had no sooner opened the doors to her room
than my eyes were blasted with a riot of light:
from floor to the fine-panelled ceiling—light
shining everywhere, blazing beams of light. [260]
The virgin sat, as if golden, in the midst
a woman amazed! She did not answer my
questions, or appeared at all moved by my words,
but fixed her eyes heavenward and raised her hands—
they looked like stars, or the scarlet of dawn. [265]
How changed she was from what she'd been before!
What noble eyes, what new beauty in her face!
She was like a statue carved from maple wood
shaped by the sculptor in woodland and brought
to the temple for ordinary folk to adore: [270]
once he has shaped it with skill and polished
it smooth he finishes by adorning it with gold.
She, motionless, was surrounded by a lucid
cloud of ardent sunlight; stars were visible
shining in gold and flocking around her head; [275]
her goddess feet stood on a bright white moon.
A few notes on the Latin here, followed by some brief thoughts on this—remarkable, I think—portrait of newly-married, still-virgin Mary as a goddess of light. So: line 268’s ‘she was like a statue carved from maple wood’ is from Vergil, who describes the Trojan horse as trabibus contextus acernis , ‘a structure compacted of maple wood’ [Aeneid 2:112].
Then there are the stars mentioned in lines 274-75: stellaeque videntur/lucentes capiti circum aurea tempora pasci, ‘stars of shining gold could be seen X-ing around her head’. What’s X? The Latin is pasci, and pasco means: ‘I feed, nourish, maintain, support. I pasture, feed, supply, cultivate (of animals).’ It also means ‘I tend to as a shepherd or pastor; cherish, nourish, care for, feed spiritually.’ pasco is the root behind the words pastor, pastoral and all that. The Vulgate version of Psalm 22:1 is Dominus pascit me et nihil mihi dēerit, ‘the Lord is my shepherd and nothing shall I want’ (literally, “The Lord tends me as a shepherd and nothing for me will be lacking.”) Knowing that, you can see why Gardner translates this phrase ‘blazing stars seemed to graze her temples’, but without the linguistic context I fear this makes it sound as though they’re scraping her head with their sharp points, raising blood. My translation goes a different way.
Finally there's line 259’s ‘laquearia’, which is (once again) Vergilian: Dido’s fancy palace has just such a fancy ceiling in Aeneid 1:726. It means, specifically, a coffered ceiling: and it has a special place in my heart because Eliot picked it up and used it in The Waste Land.
l word ‘laquearia’ in the description of the luxurious room at the start of ‘A Game of Chess’, Eliot in his note refers to Virgil's description of Dido's palace and her enraptured reception of Aeneas at the end of Book I: dependent lychni laquearibus aureis I incensi et noctem flammis funalia vincunt (I. 726). Eliot appears to have been preoccupied with the word ‘laquearia’, no doubt because of its musicality, its feeling of languorous suavity, for by the strictest standards the word is redundant: ‘her strange synthetic perfumes . . . Flung their smoke into the laquearia,/Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling’. ‘Laquearia’ is redundant because it means a coffered, or panelled, ceiling. … other parallels between 'A Game of Chess' and the ending of Aeneid I cannot be mere coincidence. The artificial light of Dido's palace, the lighted lamps and the gold and the flaming torches already quoted, gleams and glimmers in the atmosphere of the room occupied by the woman on her ‘burnished throne’: ‘doubled the flames’, ‘reflecting light’, ‘the glitter of her jewels’, ‘the prolonged candle-flames’, and further down the page ‘the firelight’ and the hair ‘spread out in fiery points’. [Gareth Reeves, ‘The Waste Land and the Aeneid’, Modern Language Review 82:3 (1987), 556]Not that Eliot had ever read Vida, of course. But if we set aside the improbability that this poor Gallilean Jew just happened to live in a house with a ceiling as fine as Dido’s Carthaginian palace, we’re left with a poet working-in words to stress Mary’s beauty, allure, royalty and, by the end, manifest divinity.
So far as that goes, this passage—well-written, I think, with sharply controlled vividness that moves from the mundanity of line 256 (‘I rose from my bed and went through to my wife’) into its kitsch dazzlefield of light and brightness at the end—is an example of what Protestants call ‘Mariolatry’. My understanding, though I’m no expert on Catholicism, is that Catholics tend to find that phrase, with its echoes of ‘idolatry’, offensive. Of course it's hard to deny that practices of Marian veneration and devotion are more prominent in Catholic than Protestant traditions. I’m not sure I understand why that should be (by which I mean: I can't see why Protestants shouldn't be drawn to more prominent veneration of Mary than seems to be the actual case). But here we are.
Mary’s importance grew steadily through the middles ages. The Festival of the Conception, first celebrated at Lyons in 1139, became an increasingly big deal, and by the early 16th-century her cultus was crucial for the church. All the details in Vida’s picture, here, relate to that. Take, for example the moon on which she is standing in the last line of this passage. Here is Father Johann Roten, S.M.:
The so called Luna, half moon, or sickle of the moon, also waning and waxing moon, is a sign of fertility, related to life and death, and thus a popular symbol in many religions. It pinpoints changing seasons, ebb and tide (and related inundations as harbingers of fertility), and the feminine menstrual cycle. The half moon was the attribute of Luna and more specifically of Selene. It was later transferred to Diana (Artemis), offspring of the earth mother, and known not only as virgin but also as protectress of the newborn and symbol of fertility in her own right. Biblical references use the moon symbol to highlight cosmic events, divine epiphanies and the ephemeral nature of human life and history (see, for example, Isaiah 30,26; 60,19; Revelations 21,23). Patristic times saw in the symbol of the moon, or the mysterium lunae, i.e. the three phases of the moon: dying (waning), generating (waxing) and giving birth (full moon) a valid representation of the Church (ecclesia). Ecclesia is virginal and "dying" in the encounter with Christ, the bridegroom; she is maternal and lifegiving in her spousal relation with the redeemer, and resplendent in her grace-filled existence.By the late middle ages, as Father Roten explains, this moon had acquired a whole patina of theological exegesis: the moon becomes ‘the waning Old Testament which is regarded, simultaneously, as a promise of the New Testament.’ There is also a connection made with the otherwise unnamed woman in Revelation 12 who is described as clothed with the sun and standing on a crescent moon:
There exists, beginning around 1348, a type of Marian sculpture called Madonna standing on the crescent moon (Mondsichel-Madonna) where the reference to the apocalyptic woman is largely dissociated from the use of the moon symbol (for example, wooden sculpture, Trier, 1480) … The crescent appears under Mary's feet in paintings of the Assumption (Meister of the Luzien-Legende, 1485) and signifies her glory and victory over time and space. The most important application of the moon symbol occurred in representations of the Immaculate Conception. The obvious significance of victory over sin is enriched with the ideas of beauty and purity (pulchra ut luna, Litanies of Loreto) (see for example, Francesco Vanni, Altar of the Immaculate Conception, Montalcino, 1588). During baroque times we can observe frequent combinations of the Immaculata motif with that of Our Lady of Victory. In some of these paintings or sculptures Mary stands on a globe combined with the crescent moon.All fascinating stuff. The image at the head of this post is a case in point: it's from Gradual made in Nuremberg, 1507-1510 (so, around the time Vida began working on his poem), presently in the Morgan Library and Museum. And here, to cap things off, is a rather handsome Murillo:
[Next: lines 277-396]
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