Welcome back to the site, and to class. I will pick up where I left off in writing week one's post, describing or explicating Melville Cane's poem "Snow Toward Evening," a short rhymed poem of varying meter and line lengths. The poem illustrates nicely the musical effects of sound devices such as end rhyme, internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, particularly in the last lines with the repetition of i and e vowel sounds, and l, t, and f consonants, which lend an airy crispness to the image of falling snowflakes. The poem describes an unexpected moment of grace which makes for an epiphany, for speaker and reader alike. The epiphany is a moment of insight or grace, when one becomes aware of something divine breaking through to consciousness. The late poet Czeslaw Milosz writes in A Book of Luminous Things that in ancient Greece (circa 5th century B.C.),
a polytheistic antiquity saw epiphanies at every step, for streams and woods were inhabited by dryads and nymphs, while the commanding gods looked and behaved like humans, were endowed with speech, could, though with difficulty, be distinguished from mortals, and often walked the earth. Not rarely they would visit households and were recognized by hosts. The Book of Genesis tells about a visit paid by God to Abraham, in the guise of three travellers. Later on, the epiphany as appearance, the arrival of Christ, occupies an important place in the New Testament. (4)
Indeed, the pantheon of ancient Greek gods and goddesses may be seen as personifications of the human psyche, and their storied endeavors and exploits among themselves and mortals reflect our own aspirations and temptations, our own light and the dark forces, conscious and unconscious realms of experience and imagination. As Arianna Huffington writes in The Gods of Greece,
[ . . . ] the classic conflict that has dominated Western literature and has even entered our everyday language is he conflict between Apollo and Dionysos–between the Apollonian and Dionysian powers in man, between the need for order, balance and clarity, and the instinct for freedom, ecstasy and exultation. (16)
Whether the god or goddess called Olympos home, or Hades, each represented something alive, real, and open to change. All could trace their origin to the Great Mother archetype, goddess, called Gaia. As Earth Mother, she represents the primordial feminine power of generation and renewal. The goddesses Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite, and others represent individual aspects of the totality of Gaia.
Speaking of symbols and stories, the myths and legends, whether of ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece, India or the Judeo-Christian world, Joseph Campbell wrote that they refer “primarily to our inner selves” and not to “outer historical events” (Thou Art That 28), that they are psychological archtypes known to all mythologies.” Beyond the necessities imposed by our animal nature, he writes, is “another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days” (29).
And so when we read “To see a World in a Grain of Sand,” by William Blake, we may sense the great mystery of the heavenly, infinite, eternal realms evoked by his words and images. By metaphor and symbol we bridge in language inner and outer worlds, subject and object, the personal and the cosmic.
The following URL provides a link to Joseph Campbell's description of the Hero's Journey: http: //www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/ref/summary.html
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