SOURCE: Garber, Marjorie. “Two Birds with One Stone: Lapidary Re-Inscription in The Phoenix and Turtle.” Upstart Crow 5 (fall 1984): 5-19.

[In the following essay, Garber offers a structural analysis of The Phoenix and Turtle, evaluating its fusion of two poetic genres—the elegy and the epithalamion—as well as its subversion of logic, grammar, and paradox.]

“What is lapis, William?”

—The Merry Wives of Windsor

In the introduction to an anthology of his favorite poems, Parnassus, published in 1874, Ralph Waldo Emerson identified The Phoenix and Turtle as that esthetic enigma, a poet's poem: “I consider this piece,” he wrote, “a good example of the rule, that there is a poetry for bards proper, as well as a poetry for the world of readers. This poem, if published for the first time, and without a known author's name, would find no general reception. Only the poets would save it.”¹ Emerson's admiration of and curiosity about Shakespeare's poem is unquestionably genuine; but while there is much truth in his comment, there is also, perhaps, an undertone of complacency. The poem is celebrated because it is difficult, a text to be decoded only by initiates—“only the poets [of whom I am one] would save it.” One hundred years later the Phoenix riddle, like that of the Sphinx, is all too often still answered in terms as gnomic and “metaphysical” as the poem itself.

Perhaps because of this self-privileging critical tendency, which obscures while purporting to clarify, certain basic elements in the poem have not received the attention they deserve. If we attempt to re-contextualize it, to place it back in the context of Renaissance non-dramatic verse, we can see almost at once that its genre has much in common with two forms highly favored by the English Renaissance. Shakespeare's single and singular lyric poem is, in fact, a witty juxtaposition of two favorite genres derived from the classics: the funerary inscription or elegy, and the epithalamion. The peculiar mythological requirements set by Robert Chester's Love's Martyr volume, for which the poem was written, make such a typically Shakespearean tour de force possible, since the marriage of the phoenix is in this case literally, as well as in the usual sexual innuendo of the period, its “death.” Love's Martyr, appearing in 1601, seems to have provided the opportunity for an idealized reworking of the cynical oxymorons of Claudius on the occasion of a very different nuptial: “With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage, / In equal scale weighing delight and dole” (Ham. I. ii. 12-13). In a similar way, the poem's curious diction—most opaque when least intellectually complex, sparely ratiocinative when propounding mysteries—underscores the paradox asserted by the union of inscription and wedding song; and the deceptively ordered structure, invocation-threnos-anthem, offers a limited terrestrial solution, that of Reason, but leads finally to the partially concealed “prayer” to be offered by the reader—an opening out of the poem into infinite time and space which is again characteristic of both Jonsonian elegy (“Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry”) and Shakespearean dramatic epitaph (“in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story” (Ham. V. ii. 350-51).² In such cases, the poem itself becomes iconic, a tangible refutation of time and death, and continuity is sought in an act of literary re-creation which links reader and poet; the reading of the poem revives the spirit of the dead child, the playing of the play recreates the meaning of Hamlet's life and death. If we examine The Phoenix and Turtle within this framework of Renaissance literary self-consciousness, we will, I think, find it a poem not only for “bards proper,” but for the “world of readers.”

We might begin with three assumptions which seem basic to the progress of the poem. The first is that as a literary structure it is continually undermining its own authority—that is, that it employs systems of thought and organization which, by use of their own methods, it proves false. Thus, for example, the poem, particularly the anthem section, is a vivid refutation of scholastic logic. By the very use of logical and quasi-logical forms, it demonstrates that Reason's basic tools are useless when they attempt to explain and appreciate the radical mysteries of love and death. The second introductory point is one of literary iconography: the recognition that the phoenix, for all its broad associations, is above all the symbol of temporal and atemporal worlds come together. The “intersection of the timeless with time” has been an area of deep concern to poets through and past Eliot, but to the Renaissance mind it had a particular interest. It is the subject of the Mutability Cantos; it provokes the Fowre Hymnes, and it appears prominently in Shakespeare's last plays, though it is present in all of them. In the very selection of the phoenix as central symbol, the poet made clear his intention to grapple with this essential Platonic paradox.

Finally we should bear in mind in reading the poem the fact that it is directly, and at the same time subversively, about the condition of poetry. Walter Ong, in an interesting article, argues that the phoenix and turtle expressed the binary condition of metaphor and its insistent attempt to fuse two terms into one. At its culmination, he observes, the theme of the poem “convers into a metaphor of metaphor itself.”³ There can be no doubt that the poem is crucially concerned with the operation of language, and particularly with the function of paradox; metaphor, clearly, is fundamental to paradox in operation. A broader but no less interesting relation to poetry is provided by the presence of the poem's “threnos” and its related form, the inscription. This connection is made more persuasive by the presence of the “urn” in the last stanzas, and the implicit suggestion that the entire trimeter section is lapidary in intent.

Formally the poem divides into three sections, of which the first two are composed in tetrameter quatrains and the third in trimeter tercets. The first section is an invocation in the hortatory mood, summoning members of the bird kingdom to attend at the funeral of the phoenix and turtle. The language is ceremonial, largely Romance-Latinate and periphrastic: formulas like “the bird of loudest lay,” “thou shrieking harbinger,” and “the priest in surplice white” are at considerable variance from the apparent “simplicity” of logical diction in the anthem section.

The identity of the speaker is unspecified; the reader hears and responds to his call to mourning as a part of the bereaved world of nature, allying himself with the elegiac tone. For plainly a company of mourners is being gathered, and only sympathetic presences are desired. Thus, the “bird of loudest lay,” designated as “herald” and “trumpet,” is the first bidden to the obsequies. There has been much critical debate about the identification of this bird; some readers have speculated that it is a new phoenix, perched on the Arabian tree, following Herodotus' injunction that the first duty of the young bird is to preside at the funeral of its parent. Others, like Fairchild and Feuillerat, have suggested the crane, mentioned by Chaucer in the Parliament of Fowls for his “trompes soun.” Yet the diction suggests that no particular species need be indicated. The “bird of loudest lay” is he whose voice is most easily heard, a mourner chosen by his attributes for the role of herald. And the “Arabian tree” upon which he sits, the phoenix' accustomed nest, is “sole” not only because it is unique—one phoenix, one perch—but also because it is suddenly alone, bereaved of its proper inmate.⁴ By selecting the tree as the locus for the call to mourning, the speaker thus underlines the pathos of the moment; the Arabian tree becomes a sacred place, the birds now votaries of the vanished pair.

The next two stanzas are occupied in keeping malevolent guests away. Again the birds are described in very indirect terms, yet the “shrieking harbinger” is readily identifiable as the owl, traditionally (as in the Parliament of Fowls and in Macbeth II. ii. 4) an augurer of death. That the owl, who announces death, should be forbidden from the funeral rites of the phoenix, which does not die, makes good sense. What these invocation stanzas are doing, then, is to make a list of the phoenix' and turtle's characteristics, at the same time that they describe the company. By inference, the phoenix and turtle are characterized as chaste (stanza 1) and immortal (stanza 2). Stanza 3 will add the character of royalty, stanza 4 that of foreknowledge of death, and stanza 5 those of longevity and chastity once again.

The interdiction of fowls of “tyrant wing” has ample precedent in Shakespeare's sources. In any case these birds would be antithetical to the nature of the phoenix-and-turtle bond, since they destroy life and do not dote but feed upon one another. The eagle, like the phoenix, is traditionally associated with royalty, and the precedent of the Eagle-Dove pair makes his presence even more appropriate. Again we may notice the ceremonial diction in the choice of “obsequy” for “funeral” or “rite.” “Obsequy” also connotes compliance, and thus adds to the ritual sense which the invocation has been developing. This formulaic tone, assisted by the periphrasis, is steadily developed throughout the whole of the first five stanzas. It finds a complement in the verse form employed, for the lag occasioned by the rhyming first and fourth lines permits some intricacy of construction: this is particularly apparent in the structure of the second and fifth stanzas, where the periphrastic noun and its appositives occupy the first three lines, and are closed off by the imperative verb in the fourth.

The presence of the swan as priest at the funeral rite is appropriate to this developing tone. The “defunctive music” which T.S. Eliot was to pick up in “Burbank with a Baedeker” is a curious form, which is reinforced in oddity by the archaizing “can,” meaning “to have knowledge of.” The fact that the swan is “death-divining” links it to the ancient idea that the phoenix exemplifies animal instinct, in foreknowing the date and place of its death. The swan thus echoes yet another aspect of the phoenix character. It is interesting that the swan is here to sing at someone else's funeral. His song is traditionally reserved for his own death, so that we are here given a renewed sense of the intimacy with which the bird kingdom participates in the life of phoenix and turtle. As the phoenix partakes of the defining qualities of all the funeral guests, so it seems to encompass them. The resultant Platonic unity bears directly upon the larger question of the phoenix' unique position at the crossroads of time and timelessness.

The last guest bidden to the rites is a further reinforcement of all that has been inferred. The crow's storied longevity, again presented in periphrastic and ceremonious language (“thou treble-dated crow”) is once more an image in little of the more fabulous immortality of the phoenix. Its supposed mating habits are attested to by Swan's Speculum Mundi (1635, p. 397): the crow, we read, is conceived not “by conjunction of male and female,” but by “a kind of billing at the mouth.” In the technical sense it was thus “chaste,” though not as absolutely pure as the nonpareil phoenix. We may note that this mating, like all the other significant gestures used in the invocation to define character (the “sound” of the “bird of loudest lay,” the “shrieking” owl, the swan, “that defunctive music can”) is an act which requires utterance, or at least a giving and taking of breath. While these gestures are entirely appropriate to the act of mourning or to the attribute being described, they are at the same time tropically related to poetry. In a sense each bird is a kind of poet, and they mourn, not merely as all nature mourns in an elegy, but instead through the act of verse. This self-conscious tendency, the drawing of attention to poems within the poem, will grow more evident as The Phoenix and Turtle proceeds.

As the invocation has developed, the elliptical heights of “shrieking harbinger” and “bird of loudest lay” have been replaced by a more straightforward identification of subject. The stanza on the swan does not mention that bird by name until two more indirect pieces of information have been introduced, but the fifth stanza introduces the crow forthrightly in the first line. This abatement of indirection is the sign of a progressive lowering of style; although the entire invocation is written in a much higher style than the remainder of the poem, language is becoming gradually simpler. The elevation of diction has also had a distancing effect, further heightened by the absence of personal pronouns, and this too is beginning to break down in the fifth stanza. With the final line,

'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go,

the speaker is identified in sympathy with the group of mourners, and the role of “mourners” itself is for the first time made explicit. The unravelling of this first “false” or merely verbal mystery, complicated still further by the smaller mysteries of bird identification, concludes the invocation and leads directly to the anthem.

The commencement of the anthem takes place within the plot-frame of the invocation, as Reason's threnos will later be contained in the anthem; thus, the sections are nested like Chinese boxes inside one another, reinforcing the sense of artifact. The word “anthem,” though in one sense merely a general term for “song,” is at the same time related to “antiphon” and may be defined as a hymn sung responsively. An antiphonal nature can readily be detected in the structure of the anthem stanzas here, for each contains a twinned set of propositions, putting forth the same or related propositions in the forms of paradox or conundrum:

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen.

The presence of these twinned sentiments, which do not so much advance the sense as pretend to do so, undercuts the appearance of strict logic produced by economy of language and syntax. The diction is in direct contrast to that of the preceding section: where the invocation contained relatively simple statements made complicated by ellipsis and Romance-Latinate language, the anthem is composed of puzzling and contradictory statements couched in misleadingly simple terms. Here, most strongly, the undermining of Reason through the use of her own tools is taking place. Scholastic terms more usually applied to the Trinity are applied to the perfect love of the phoenix and the turtle, with a result at once comic (because mock-heroic) and expressive. In effect the befuddlement of Reason in these stanzas is a triumph of imitative form.

The effect of the paradoxes in the anthem section does not develop from their originality; “Distance and no space was seen,” for example, was a Renaissance favorite, appearing notably in Marvell;⁵ “That the self was not the same” is one of many striking echoes of a poem by the third century Latin philosopher Lactantius, De Ave Phoenice, which seem to establish it as a likely source for Shakespeare's own phoenix poem.⁶ Rather, what makes these paradoxes particularly effective is their sheer number and the unrelieved way in which they follow one another in sequence. The phoenix and the turtle, it develops, are not so much examples of these remarkably contradictory conditions, as types of them. For this reason the paradoxical commonplaces become startlingly uncommonplace; the poet, we realize, is not talking in metaphor, but rather with a brilliantly assured literalness. When he writes that

Love and constancy is dead

the force of the singular verb is sharply and suddenly felt.

The extreme condensation of language gives rise to a few problems of interpretation which must be resolved in the direction of intended ambiguity. Thus the pun in

Either was the other's mine

implies both that “each was a treasure to the other” (cf. the turtle's “right / Flaming in the phoenix' sight”) and, more interestingly, that each could possessively call the other “mine.” This is the same paradox presented in a hidden way: if each is “mine” to the other, how can we distinguish between the possessed and the possessor? Effectively, the whole sense of the possessive is eliminated. This figure is even more interesting because it presents “mine” in its primary meaning of possessive adjective labelled as such; “mine” is made into a substantive, which it is not. Such a reflexive treatment of syntax as part of the poem's surface of literary self-consciousness is frequently encountered in twentieth century poetry, for example, in Robert Graves' poem, “Leaving The Rest Unsaid”, which ends

So now, my solemn ones, leaving the rest unsaid,
Rising in air as on a gander's wing
At a careless comma,

As with the word “mine” in The Phoenix and Turtle, the comma, normally only a linguistic tool, here usurps syntactical meaning and calls dual attention to itself. The Phoenix' assertion that “Either was the other's mine” is thus a further contributory factor toward the breakdown of logic and ordinary “reason.”

The treatment accorded the word “Property” is similarly multiple. Since “Property” is followed in the next stanza by a personified Reason, it is sensible to equate it with the allegorical representation of the power of ownership. Thus, after the play on “mine,” the entire concept of possession is brought in question. At the same time “property” has an Aristotelian connotation, familiar today in scientific language, and in Shakespeare's day connected with the scholastic philosophers: in this sense it connotes “that which distinguishes one thing or class from another.” Not only grammar (property-possession) but also matter itself is here denied. The extraordinary love of the pair, we are given to understand, has made chaos of all the rational systems through which man had previously approached his world.

The third possible meaning of “property” reinforces both of the others; it connects the term with its etymological ancestor, OF propriete, and thus associates it with “property,” which shares the same root and history. Here “property” connotes rules of decorum, particularly, perhaps, rules of language. The behavior of the pair is not fitting to the circumstance, which is that they are separate entities. It is inappropriate. And language must concede that it has no proper terms in which to explain their relationship.

The failure of language to compass this circumstance is made more apparent by the poet's insistent use of numerical terms. Numbers should be the most explicit, as they are the least adorned, of words. But a statement like

Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was called

effectively demonstrates that there are some conditions for which the very concept of number is useless. This is certainly the predicament into which Reason has fallen. When it finds itself confused and refuted by the spectacle of phoenix-and-turtle, it cries:

                    How true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!

After all the paradoxical statements which have gone before, this observation sounds perfectly consonant with the whole. Yet there could be no clearer evidence that Reason is confounded. For grammatically, logically, reasonably, it should have said

                    How true a one
Seemeth this concordant twain!

The concept of a “concordant one” is pleonastic, unless we read it, “this one (concordant of two).” Reason's actual statement means something like “How true (ie., faithful) a pair of lovers this concordant pair seems!”, something it is perhaps superfluous to observe at this point. But the statement reversed would mean “How truly (ie., completely) these two, who are concordant, appear to be one!” Both statements are, of course, implicit. But at the same time it seems evident that we are to perceive Reason as visibly confused.

I have stressed this point so strongly because it seems to me that an understanding of the persona of Reason is fundamental to a reading of the third section, the threnos. The assertion that

Love hath reason, Reason none

is the keynote to comprehension. Reason is the “chorus” to the tragic scene of phoenix and dove fled in mutual flame; it must thus supply the moralisé section, the section which tells listeners how to apply the tragedy to their own lives. Yet to call the scene “tragic” at all is to impose an external judgment: mutual immolation for love (if one is a phoenix or turtle) is not a good idea. Since this would seem to be denied by everything we know about the phoenix and the turtle, the tragedy must be for those who are left behind. It is tragic because we no longer have perfection among us, and because, were we to do the same, our plight would be tragic indeed. For the phoenix and the turtle, however, it is not an act to which any value judgment is appropriate. It is a custom of phoenixes, though not of others, to immolate themselves, as part of the process of rejuvenation. Reason's threnos, thus, is really the expression of ideas held by the choric figure of Reason itself. This is substantiated by the diction, as well as the form of its statements. Therefore, despite the confident epigrammatic tones of the trimeter tercets, it is important to consider carefully the statements in the threnos, in order to judge whether distinction is being made between Reason's views and those of the poet.

The change in level of diction from the invocation to the threnos is one of startling degree. The poet begins by describing, in a highly ornate and elliptical way, such ornithological specimens as the “death-divining swan” and the “treble-dated crow.” The first line of the poem introduces the “bird of loudest lay.” Yet by the last line the phoenix and turtle, who surely outshine all the mourners in brilliance, are reduced merely to “dead birds.”

The fact that they are considered dead accounts in part for this reductio: while living they were as distinctive as the birds of the invocation, but death has robbed them of all but the barest definition. After the hyperbole of the anthem, however, the severity of the reduction catches us by surprise. So, too, does the allegorizing tendency of the language. The turtle becomes a capitalized Truth, and the phoenix a capitalized Beauty, while the whole of their relationship is characterized as

Beauty, truth, and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,

at the same time that we are forcibly reminded of the “cinders” which alone remain. While in some senses a fair assessment of the “meaning” of phoenix and turtle, this is nonetheless a severely limited vision. The same can be said of the poem's most moralizing stanza, which asserts the Platonic truth that all things are but shadows of an unattainable absolute (here embodied in the vanished phoenix and turtle):

Truth may seem, but cannot be;
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she;
Truth and Beauty buried be.

This is very much the sort of thinking we should expect from the character of Reason. Reason examines the details of a past experience and draws a useful conclusion, but a conclusion which somehow stands apart from the main force of the experience itself. Its kinship to the reassuring homily of the gravestone inscription is marked.

That the threnos itself is patterned on the funerary inscription can hardly be doubted. The mention of “cinders” in the first stanza and the explicit presence of the “urn” in the last reinforce those conditions of style which point toward inscriptive moralizing. We have in addition the fact of the frequency with which phoenixes did actually appear on funeral urns. The presence of this concrete art object, the urn, at the close of a poem so highly conscious of its own shape and poetic identity, is a kind of concretion of artifice, the summing up of all poetic and aesthetic implications into a single appropriate symbol, much like the weeping statue of “The Nymph Complaining.” Cleanth Brooks usefully compares this urn with Donne's well-wrought one⁷, and the figure of the urn, grave, or tomb as a trope for the poem itself is one of the most common and characteristic conceits of Jonsonian poetry.⁸ What remains in doubt, however, is the degree to which Reason's reasoning in the threnos does in fact reflect a summing up of what has gone before.

The speaker of the threnos has an epigrammatic tendency which we have already noted. He also has a penchant for definition, and primarily for definition of a reductive kind. The most interesting example of this is the famous “puzzler” stanza in which phoenix and turtle are pictured as having passed irrevocably from life,

Leaving no posterity.

Things become even more puzzling when the speaker attempts to explain this lack of posterity. He emphasizes that

'Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.

Even to assume that the absence of progeny demands a physiological explanation is curious. By “infirmity” presumably is meant either impotence or sterility, while “married chastity” has been taken by critics to mean anything from abstinence to marital love without lust. So peculiar is this problem that M. C. Bradbrook once attempted to explain it by pointing out that the union of a phoenix and a turtle would be biologically sterile. But it seems unnecessary to go to such lengths. “Married chastity” is most probably an earthly love which places highest value on spiritual commerce, like that celebrated in a poem which has much in common with The Phoenix and Turtle—Lord Herbert of Cherbury's “Ode upon a Question Moved, Whether Love Should Continue for Ever?”⁹ But in any case it is a deliberately oxymoronic term which seems to be the crowning paradox in a poem of paradoxes. For the reason for its presence, and the explanation of its puzzling import, it may be helpful to go back once more to the question of persona.

The lines on “infirmity” and “married chastity” are Reason's explanation; they therefore lack omniscient authority. Compared to the poet-speaker who gives directions, invitations and descriptions, its credibility is circumscribed. The very syntactical form of the threnos section sets it off from the other two, in that its mood is copulative. Reason is defining things, sorting things out. And in its eagerness to do so, it speaks more to the terrestrial than to the celestial or poetic understanding. “No posterity,” because there is no progeny in the normal sense. “Married chastity,” because how else would the poet explain this fact.

In the text of Love's Martyr Robert Chester speaks of “another Princely Phoenix”; Donne, in his Valentine's Day epithalamion “On the Lady Elizabeth,” King James' eldest daughter, hints at the procreation of “Young Phoenixes.” In each case, though, the poet is manifestly aware that he is contradicting the essential fact of the phoenix legend—the uniqueness of the “sole Arabian bird”; this is, of course, the point of Donne's witty coinage.¹⁰ The fact of the phoenix's unique death and self-renewal (in some versions, death and new birth) is what makes it stand for the junction of temporal and atemporal, and thus what makes it so interesting to the Renaissance mind. The phoenix and the turtle left “no posterity” precisely because it is in the nature of phoenixes not to do so. Reason's investigatory mind, seeking the rational in all things, is what prompts the need for a further answer. And this imperfect understanding on Reason's part is yet another undermining of system, yet another proof that it is “in itself confounded.”

If we are willing to accept the evidence for a speaking persona of Reason as distinct from the authorial voice, we will find it much easier to coordinate the tone and data of the threnos with that of the rest of the poem. The bare, stripped “dead birds” at the close are another of these analytic reductions: true as far as they go, but not going far enough. The birds are dead, after all, only in a temporal and not in an atemporal sense; the phoenix itself seems to have been reborn (indeed, this is its definitional quality) and in any case the poem enshrines them in a perpetual being.¹¹ Likewise the “Truth and Beauty” lines which immediately follow the speculations on “married chastity” are inadequate to the poem's magnitude. A mind which sees the phoenix and the turtle described through invocation and anthem as merely a primer lesson on absolutes is distinctly circumscribed by its own limited purview. To put it another way, the tone of the threnos is a “pat” tone; what it presents as unmodified declarative statement is in fact only partial truth.

Repeated references to the “urn” and its explicit symbolism have made the third section of the poem at least as reflexively “self-conscious” as the previous two. The birds of the invocation were described in images of utterance; the center of the poem is called an “anthem” and we are told that it contains a “threnos”; the temporal-atemporal ambiguity of the phoenix' existence, so closely related to the mortality-immortality question, is a metaphor for the very condition of poetry itself, as the twoness-oneness figure is a metaphor of metaphor. Through the very last line, the poem retains this focus: the final instruction of the threnos returns to the hortatory mood, and bids us

For these dead birds sigh a prayer.

The implication is that a prayer on the part of the reader should follow the concluded threnos, perpetuating the Chinese box structure and making the progression invocation-anthem-threnos-prayer. In a sense, then, the expectation is infinite, a formal counterpart to the image of the immortal phoenix. At the same time that the movement is transcendent, however, it is also circular; the invocation to prayer brings us back to the poem's own beginning. And this too is consonant with the whole phoenix-figure, which renews itself in the first line with the “bird of loudest lay.” The poem itself is a highly self-conscious formal structure. Like the nuances of diction and the extended use of commonplace metaphysical paradox, it repeats the patterns set forth in the “plot.” The poem is made up of smaller poems and finds its resolution in the paradoxical permanence of flux, much in the manner of the Garden of Adonis and the Mutability Cantos.

This formal paradox returns us to the crucial question of genre with which we began, for the curious poetic form and equally curious diction of the poem are deliberately managed so as to mirror Shakespeare's witty, yet highly serious, elision of elegy and epithalamion. We noted above some of the contemporary inscription poems, by Jonson and others, to which The Phoenix and Turtle has significant parallels; these brief epitaphic verses have their origin, of course, in the Greek Anthology, much admired and imitated throughout the period. Another classical antecedent of interest, and one of equal significance for the period, is Ovid's Amores, specifically the description of a parrot's funeral in Amores II, vi. In this case the poem, like Shakespeare's, begins with a call to convocation spoken by the poet-elegist, and closes with a description of the parrot's tomb and its inscription which is explicitly lapidary, where Reason's is implicitly so. The parrot is celebrated for his ability to imitate human speech, and thus is a poet-figure; the “affable turtledove” (10) is described as his constant and devoted lover. Ovid's bird funeral, does not, however, contain any hint of paradox or playfulness, nor does it dwell for long upon the phoenix, the central figure of Shakespeare's poetic metamorphosis. In The Phoenix and Turtle Shakespeare, by dwelling on the phoenix' peculiar attributes, is able to transmute the metaphorical statement of classical elegy, including Ovid's, to literal fact: the mourned one is not dead but lives, the phoenix literally renews itself. Reason's short-sighted denial of this fact underscores the poet's witty inversion of elegiac form: most elegiac subjects are translated, like Lycidas, to the heavens; Reason, the pseudo-elegist of phoenix and turtle, reduces the immortal phoenix to a “dead bird,” setting the stage for the reader's own “prayer,” which is in fact a recognition of the immortal quality of both the birds and the poem which enshrines them.

As he did with the elegy, so in his metamorphosis of the epithalamion, Shakespeare draws upon poetic predecessors, perhaps most notably The Parliament of Fowls, which, like Donne's marriage song for the Lady Elizabeth, is a St. Valentine's Day poem. The Parliament presents an assemblage of ranked and ordered birds, including a constant turtle, and also makes reference to the semi-allegorized figure of Reason, cited by Nature as an ordering principle of terrestrial marriage. As in Shakespeare's poem, the meaning of marriage and the power of love are interpreted in widely differing ways, depending upon the perceiver. The epithalamic content of The Phoenix and Turtle is as evident as its elegiac elements: the transcendent love of the wedded pair is celebrated; as in Chaucer, the pair are birds; also as in Chaucer, their happiness, which is greater and more permanent than the rational mind can conceive, is celebrated in song. The poet's departure from the formal tradition is equally evident; for although much of the sentiment is nuptial in tone, or at least is commonly found in poems of marriage celebration, the actual event is funeral. Again it is the phoenix figure which holds the two together: Marriage in this poem is funeral, as funeral is marriage.

This is Shakespeare's triumph over the well-worn subject matter imposed upon him by Chester's Love's Martyr. He seizes in the obligatory figure of the phoenix an opportunity to fuse two genres usually considered opposite in every way. In the process he comments upon traditional systems of logic and grammar, only to undermine them; he examines the technique of metaphysical paradox and transcends it at the same time that he employs it; in the process he comments succinctly and trenchantly upon two significant traditions of Renaissance lyric poetry. In fact it would be difficult to find a more Shakespearean approach to the writing of the lyric: from the inventor—and amused observer—of the “historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited,” it is a use of source, genre, and tradition most appropriate to his art.

Notes

1. Parnassus, ed., R. W. Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1874), v-vi.

2. Cf. also the invitations to retell the tale in a number of the other plays, and notably the tragedies: e.g., Othello, V. ii. 339-40: “pray you in your letters, / When you shall these unlucky deeds relate …”; Antony and Cleopatra, V. ii. 358-62: “No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous. High events as these / Strike those that make them; and their story is / No less in pity, than his glory which / Brought them to be lamented.” This function of retelling, and its importance for the reflexive nature of final scenes in Shakespeare, is more fully discussed in my Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 86-87, 107-108, 156, 157, 187-90.

3. “Metaphor and the Twinned Vision,” Sewanee Review, 63 (1955), p. 200.

4. I am indebted to Professor Frederick Pottle for this suggestion.

5. The paradox of two-in-one is variously treated in Marvell. In “The Definition of Love” it appears as

                       the Love which us doth bind
   But Fate so enviously debars,
   Is the conjunction of the Mind,
   And opposition of the stars.

   29-32

   while in the “Horatian Ode” it draws its analogue from the laws of physics:

   Nature, that hateth emptiness,
   Allows of penetration less.

   41-42

6. Cf. in this instance Lactantius' “ipse quidem, sed non eadem est” (169). De Ave Phoenice, though it owes much to the pagan authors, contains at the same time strong elements of Christian symbolism, and this twinned content accounts in part for the poet's use of paradoxical language. In some passages words double back upon themselves with a virtuoso facility very like that of “The Phoenix and Turtle,” e.g.,

   ipsa sibi proles, suus est pater et suus heres,
             nutrix ipsa sui, semper alumna sibi.
   ipsa quidem, sed non eadem est, eademque nec ipsa est
             aeternam vitam mortis adepta bono.

   167-170

   (She is her own progeny, her own sire, and her own heir. She is her own nurse, ever foster child to herself. She is indeed herself, yet not the same; the same and not herself, having attained life everlasting through death's boon.)

   (trans. Mary Cletus Fitzpatrick, Lactanti De Ave Phoenice. [Phila., 1933])

   Details of plot, as well as language, seem to link De Ave Phoenice and The Phoenix and Turtle. The “sole Arabian tree” appears as “arboris altae / vertice, quae totum despicit una nemus” (39-40). Less conventionally associated with the phoenix is the power of song implied in “loudest lay.” Lactantius' bird, having attained her perch,

   incipit illa sacri modulamina fundere cantus
             et mira lucem voce ciere novam,
   quam nec aedoniae voces nec tibia possit
             musica Cirrhaeis adsimulare modis,
   sed neque olor moriens imitari posse putetur
             nec Cylleneae fila canora lyrae.

   45-50

   (begins to pour forth the notes of a holy chant and to summon the new day in a wondrous melody, which neither the voice of the nightingale nor the tuneful pipe with its Cirrhaean measures can match. But neither can the dying swan be deemed a rival, nor the melodious strings of the Cyllenean lyre.)

   The conjunction with the “olor moriens” is suggestive, and the account is one of the few which describes the voice of the phoenix at all. Shakespeare's phoenix is likewise recognizable in Lactantius' discussion of sex: “felix, quae Veneris foedera nulla collit” (164)—an easy anticipation of “married chastity.” And the occasion of her death is once again marked by an artifact and its inscription:

   protinus exculpunt sacrato in marmore formam
             et titulo signant remque diemque novo

   153-4

   (at once they carve her form on hallowed marble, and mark both day and event with a new title).

   Above all, however, it is the paradoxical tone, the praise of the bird who “perit, ut vivat”, that makes De Ave Phoenice a likely antecedent of Shakespeare's poem.

7. “The Language of Paradox,” The Well Wrought Urn (New York: 1947), p. 19.

8. E.g., chosen almost at random, urn, Herrick, “The Amber Bead”; grave, Jonson, “On My First Daughter”; tomb, Herrick, “The Funeral Rites of the Rose.”

9. Lord Herbert's “Ode” is written in the same stanza form as the first two sections of the Phoenix: tetrameter quatrains with a rhyme scheme of abba, the so-called “In Memoriam” stanza. The lovers in the “Ode”, in their discussion of the possibility of love surviving physical death, come very close to the Shakespearean paradox, that two, when the two are lovers, can be more of a unity than one:

   So when one wing can make no way,
             Two joined can themselves dilate,
             So can two persons propagate,
   When singly either would decay.

   125-28

   Thus, in a phrase very like Shakespeare's “Either was the other's mine,”

   As one another's mystery,
   Each shall be both, yet both be one

   131-32

   and “mystery” is exalted above reason. Lord Herbert's poem throughout demonstrates a verbal consciousness very like that of the Phoenix, using grammar and syntax as metaphors to support the philosophical content of the verse.

10.                               Two Phoenixes, whose joined breasts,
    Are unto one another mutual nests,
    Where motion kindles such fires as shall give
    Young Phoenixes, and yet the old shall live.

    23-26

    And by this act of these two Phoenixes
              Nature again restored is,
              For since these two are two no more,
    There's but one Phoenix still, as was before.

    99-102

    Here again is the two-in-one paradox presented as a mystery solved by love.

11. “The Phoenix and Turtle,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], 6 (1955), p. 357.