theoryofliteratu00inwell

212 Theory of Literature
they run counter to man's projection of himself into the nonhuman
world y they summon up the "other"—the impersonal
world of things, monumental art, physical law. Blake's "Tiger"
is a mystical metaphor ; God, or an aspect of God, is a Tiger
(less than man, more than man) ; the Tiger in turn (and through
the Tiger its Maker) is read in terms of metal forged in great
heat. The Tiger is no animal from the natural world of the zoo,
a tiger that Blake might have seen at the Tower of London,
but a visionary creature, symbol as well as thing.
The magical metaphor lacks this translucency. It is Medusa's
mask which turns the living into stone. Pongs cites Stefan George
as a representative of this magical attitude, this desire to petrify
the living: "It is not the natural drive of the human psyche to
project itself from which George's form-giving spiritualization
works, but, in its origin, a powerful destruction of biological life,
a willed 'estrangement' ('alienation') as the basis for the preparation
of the inner, magic world." 47
In English poetry, Dickinson and Yeats variously reach for
this de-animizing, this anti-mystic metaphor: Emily Dickinson
when she wants to render the sense of death as well as the ex-
perience of resurrection: she likes to invoke the experience of
dying, stiffening, petrifying. "It was not death," but it was
As if my life were shaven
And fitted to a frame y
And could not breathe without a key . . .
How many times these low feet staggered.
Only the soldered mouth can tell;
Try! can you stir the awful rivet?
Try I can you lift the hasfs of steel? 4S
Yeats reaches his ultimate of Poetry as Magic in "Byzantium"
(1930). In the 1927 "Sailing to Byzantium," he has already set
the opposition between the world of biological life: "The young
in one another's arms, . . . the mackerel-crowded seas," and
the world of Byzantine art, where all is fixed, rigid, unnatural,
the world of "gold mosaic" and "gold enameling." Biologically,
man is a "dying animal" j his hope for survival is through being
"gathered into the artifice of eternity," not again to take "bodily