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 Last
week I had an e-mail from a friend in South Korea, who, after
discussing a totally different issue, said: “By the way, do you
know of any poems or quotations about a phoenix?”
The answer,
of course, is yes: in my article Are
You a Renaissance Man? which appeared a little while ago
in the History section of
The Mediadrome (yes, okay, the second part will appear soon!)
I quoted from Flight to Italy, by Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972):
Hurry!
We burn
For Rome’s so near us, for the phoenix moment
When we have thrown off this traveller’s trance
And mother-naked and ageless-ancient
Wake in her warm nest of renaissance.
But I thought
it would be interesting to find out if there were other places
where the idea of the phoenix had appeared, and the results of
my search form the basis of this week’s piece.
 In
a way, it’s a timely idea. Professor Dumbledore, the headmaster
of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, has a pet phoenix
called Fawkes, and in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
he plays a key role in saving Harry. Fawkes is described as “A
crimson bird the size of a swan . . . It had a glittering golden
tail as long as a peacock’s and gleaming golden talons . . . it
had a long, sharp golden beak and a beady black eye.” Later it
turns out that phoenix tears have healing powers. J. K Rowling’s
description of the phoenix probably comes from Herodotus (484
– 425 BCE: these dates are approximate) who was the first Greek
historian. He says, in Histories
vol 2, (page 73 in some versions):
“There
is another holy bird, called the Phoenix, which I have never
seen but in pictures. He rarely appears in Egypt - only once
in every 500 years, so they say, in Heliopolis- and he is supposed
to come when his (male) father dies. If the painter describes
him truly, his plumage is part golden and part red, and he is
very like an eagle in shape and size. They say that this bird
comes from Arabia, bringing the body of his father embalmed
in myrrh to the temple of the sun, and there he buries him.
First he molds an egg of myrrh; then he puts his father in the
middle of it. Lastly, he covers up the body with myrrh. This
is what they say this bird does. But I do not believe them.”
 I
first read a shortened form of this in Bulfinch’s
Mythology, written by Thomas Bulfinch (1796 - 1867), actually
in his spare time! He lived in Boston, Massachusetts, and graduated
from Harvard in 1814. He taught briefly at Boston Latin School,
and then began a business career, eventually becoming a clerk
at the Merchant’s Bank; his books were written in the evening,
and The Age of Fable appeared in 1855; it became known
as Bulfinch’s Mythology only in the 1880’s.
Bulfinch
quotes Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE – 17 AD)) for a further
account of the phoenix:
“Most beings
spring from other individuals; but there is a certain kind which
reproduces itself. The Assyrians call it the Phoenix. It does
not live on fruit or flowers, but on frankincense and odoriferous
gums. When it has lived five hundred years, it builds itself
a nest in the branches of an oak, or on the top of a palm tree.
In this it collects cinnamon, and spikenard, and myrrh, and
of these materials builds a pile on which it deposits itself,
and dying, breathes out its last breath amidst odors. From the
body of the parent bird a young Phoenix issues forth, destined
to live a life as long as its predecessor. When this has grown
up and gathered sufficient strength, it lifts its nest from
the tree (its own cradle and its parent’s sepulcher), and carries
it to the city of Heliopolis in Egypt, and deposits it in the
temple of the Sun.”
Tacitus (Publius
Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (56 – 120)) wrote a history of the period
14 – 68, called the Annals,
in which he reported that in 34, “The miraculous bird known to
the world by the name of the Phoenix, after disappearing for a
series of ages, revisited Egypt.” He goes on to describe the bird
depositing the body of its father on the altar of the Sun.
There is
only one phoenix. In conversation a little while ago, somebody
asked me what the plural of phoenix is, but in reality it is a
word without a plural!
From the
descriptions above, you will see that the ancients regarded the
phoenix as male, although again this would seem to be a distinction
that is meaningless!
Now, the
views of the poets! Bulfinch himself quotes John Dryden (1631
– 1700):
So when
the new-born Phśnix first is seen
Her feathered subjects all adore their queen,
And while she makes her progress through the East,
From every grove her numerous train's increased;
Each poet of the air her glory sings,
And round him the pleased audience clap their wings.
In fact I
haven’t been able to trace this quotation. I have searched the
web, but it leads me back to Bulfinch! Dryden was a Royalist poet,
and celebrated the return of Charles II, and the idea of the resurgent
phoenix would appear to be a good image. I have been able to find
two other Dryden poems that contain the image; this from Threnodia
Augustalis:
As when
the new-born phoenix takes his way,
His rich paternal regions to survey,
Of airy choristers a numerous train
Attend his wondrous progress o’er the plain;
So, rising from his father’s urn,
So glorious did our Charles return.
And, from
his Ode: To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady,
Mrs Anne Killigrew, Excellent in the Two Sister-arts of Poesy
and Painting:
Our phoenix
Queen was portrayed too so bright,
Beauty alone could beauty take so right:
Her dress, her shape, her matchless grace,
Were all observed, as well as heavenly face.
 I
didn’t rely entirely on the web: I have The Poetical Works
of John Dryden, but I still couldn’t find it. You notice that
he refers to the phoenix as being female, and so I thought that
I would find it in his poems directed towards women, but I failed.
If you can find it, I’d be delighted to hear from you!
Bulfinch
also quotes Milton, in Paradise
Lost, Book V, in which Satan has escaped from Hell, and
goes to Eden to tempt Adam and Eve:
he designs
In them at once to ruin all mankind.
So God asks
‘Raphaël, the sociable spirit’ to go down to talk to Adam.
And Raphaël flies down:
. . .
. . .Down thither prone in flight
He speeds, and through the vast Ethereal Sky
Sails between worlds and worlds, with steady wing
Now on the polar winds, then with quick Fan
Winnows the buxom Air; till within soar
Of Tow’ring Eagles, to all the Fowls he seems
A Phoenix, gaz’d by all; as that sole Bird
When to enshrine his relics in the Sun's
Bright Temple, to Egyptian Thebes he flies.
Milton also
uses the image of the phoenix in Samson
Agonistes, without explicitly using its name; the semichorus
says, immediately after his feat of pulling down the pillars of
the temple of Dagon (lines 1687 – 1707):
But he,
though blind of sight,
Despised, and though extinguished quite,
With inward eyes, illuminated
His fiery virtue roused
From under ashes into sudden flame,
And, as an evening dragon came,
Assailant to the perched roosts
And nests in order ranged
Of tame villatic fowl; but as an eagle
His cloudless thunder bolted on their heads.
So Virtue, given for lost,
Depressed and overthrown, as seemed,
Like that self-begotten bird,
in the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay erewhile a holocaust
From out her ashy womb now teemed,
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deemed;
And, though her body die, her fame survives,
a secular bird, ages of lives.
Here, the
word ‘secular’ derives from the Latin saecula, which means living
through the centuries.
 Interestingly,
the image of the phoenix appears also in The
Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321), in Cantica
I: L’Inferno (Hell). Hell is divided into a succession of
Circles, and the Eighth Circle is called Malbowges, and is divided
into ten trenches, called bowges. The phoenix image appears in
Canto XXIV, which concerns the Seventh Bowge, where the thieves
are located. The thieves are naked; their hands are tied behind
with snakes. The following is a translation by Dorothy L. Sayers
(1893 – 1957), using the terza rima form, which is that used by
Dante himself.
And lo!
as one came running near our coign
Of vantage on the bank, a snake in a flash
Leapt up and stung him where the neck and shoulder join.
Never did
writer with a single dash
Of the pen write “o” or “i” so swift as he
Took fire, and burned, and crumbled away to ash.
But as
he lay on the ground dispersedly,
All by itself the dust gathered and stirred
And grew to its former shape immediately.
So wise
men say the sole Arabian bird,
The phoenix, dies and is reborn from fire
When her five-hundredth year is near expired;
Living,
nor herb nor grain is food for her,
Only amonum and dropping incense-gums,
And her last swathings are of nard and myrrh.
William Shakespeare
(1564 – 1616), as you can imagine, makes use of the phoenix image:
in The Tempest, Act III, Scene III, Sebastian says:
.... Now
I will believe
That there are unicorns, that in Arabia
There is one tree, the phoenix' throne, one phoenix
At this hour reigning there.
However,
Shakespeare wrote a much longer poem, which will be our first
Poem of the Week, entitled The
Phoenix and the Turtle; here, the turtle is the European
turtle-dove; the name derives from the Latin turtur which
imitates the sound the dove makes. This is an odd poem; I wonder
what led him to write it!
George Gordon
Noel Byron, Lord Byron (1788 – 1824), became very annoyed with
some criticisms of his early work written by Scottish critics
(we described that incident in an earlier article in this series
devoted to Lord Byron). He wrote
a fairly lengthy poem lambasting these critics, English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers (1809); and this mentions the phoenix
twice!
First in
the ranks see Joan of Arc advance,
The scourge of England and the boast of France!
Though burnt by wicked Bedford for a witch,
Behold her statue plac'd in glory's niche;
Her fetters burst, and just releas'd from prison,
A virgin phoenix from her ashes risen.
And:
When fame's
loud trump hath blown its noblest blast,
Though long the sound, the echo sleeps at last;
And glory, like the phoenix midst her fires,
Exhales her odours, blazes, and expires.
 Arthur
Christopher Benson (1862-1925) was the eldest son of Edward White
Benson (1829-1896), who was Archbishop of Canterbury. His younger
brother, Edward Frederic Benson (1867 – 1940) was also a well-known
man of letters. Arthur was master at Eton (1885-1903) and at Magdalene
College, Cambridge (1915-25). He published studies of Archbishop
William Laud (1887), the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(1904), and the critic Walter Pater (1906), among others, as well
as several works of fiction and some poetry. He also wrote the
words of the patriotic song Land of Hope and Glory.
One of his
poems was The Phoenix,
and is our second poem of this week. I think it is also a rather
odd poem, and when I first saw it I didn’t think too highly of
it. However, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863 – 1944) thought well
enough of it to include it in his The Oxford Book of English
Verse 1250 – 1918; this was published in 1939, and was itself
a second updated edition of his first collection for Oxford which
was published in 1900. I would be interested in your views of
Benson’s poem! Q’s collection also contains the Shakespeare poem.
Our last
poem of this week is by William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939). It
is from his collection The
Wild Swans at Coole, which was published in 1917; the
poem is called His
Phoenix. Another odd one!
I suppose
it is scarcely surprising that the poems that use the phoenix
as an image tend to be on the strange side: the creature itself
is one of the oddest creations of the human brain, and it is fascinating
how it has stayed with us, virtually unchanged, for at least 2,500
years. If we can believe Tacitus (and why should we not?) the
last reincarnation of the phoenix would have taken place in 1534,
and the next will be due in 2034. If you buy your tickets for
Thebes now, you should get a pretty good deal!
Makes you
think of Dr.
Who, doesn’t it – although his recycles seem to come more
frequently!
Thanks, Jong,
for the question. I have had an interesting few days following
it up, and I hope you all find it interesting as well!
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