Song of Songs 8, 13-14: A Commentary

Эта статья - развёрнутый комментарий к последним двум стихам Песни песней, которые рассматриваются здесь как отдельное стихотворение и как эпилог книги. Сначала приводится еврейский текст с переводом, затем - построчный комментарий, разбитый на две части: «Примечания к переводу» и «Аппарат и комментарий к тексту». Далее идёт глава «Стихотворная форма» и ряд глав, посвящённых центральным образам стихотворения, его жанру и композиционной роли в Песни песней: «Сад как место действия и как символ», «Серенада», «Серенада и молитва», «Прочь!», «Превращение в оленя», «Песн. 8, 13-14 как эпилог Песни песней». В «Заключении» подводятся итоги и формулируются вопросы для дальнейшей дискуссии. The two final verses of the Song of Songs are read here as a separate poem, which is shown to depend largely on the tradition of paraclausithyron (ancient serenade). The topoi of this oral genre help explain some features of the poem usually considered to be difficult: the solemn invocation of the girl as «living in the gardens», the presence of the «friends» and, above all, the fact that the girl (contrary to what is said in many commentaries) does not invite the boy, but rather sends him away. Another important aspect of the poem is that it serves as an epilogue to the lyric sequence of Song of Songs. Thus the farewell of the girl to the boy corresponds, on a metapoetic level, to the farewell of the poet to the book and to the audience.

Introduction

This chapter describes the afterlife and reception of Greville’s poetry from Coleridge and Charles Lamb to the American school of literary criticism around Yvor Winters, arguing how Greville’s reputation for obscurity has tended to circumscribe and limit his appreciation as a poet. In discussing the various genres that comprise Greville’s oeuvre; lyric sequence; political biography; letter of consolation; closet drama and philosophical poem, the editors propose to view Greville’s obscurity as an intellectual resource that arises from the close intersection between political and religious thought and poetic form, which enables a form of philosophical exploration that works through the examination of doubt, contradiction, and paradox, as much as assertion, and which involves the reader in an exercise in critical interpretation.

Politics, Imagination, and Desire in the Work of Fulke Greville

This article examines a number of the key political and philosophical questions in the poetry, drama, and philosophical treatises of Fulke Greville, first Lord Brooke (1554–1628), arguing that the philosophical complexity and linguistic obscurity for which Greville’s style is known offer an appropriate tool for the examination of some of his enduring intellectual preoccupations: the paradoxes of political power and the rise and fall of empires, examined in the choruses of his Ottoman closet drama Mustapha; and the examination of the mechanisms of idolatry and spiritual servitude that link the erotic poetry of the lyric sequence Caelica to the treatises on monarchy and religion. A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, Greville’s biography of his long-deceased friend, by contrast, offers a different perspective on political life and freedom, one that is constructed on Sidney’s exemplarity and modeled on the ethics of friendship.

Shakespearean Being

Victorian poetry took Shakespeare up as both a guide and a challenge. The example of his sonnets and soliloquies stood behind the era’s pre-eminent formal developments in, respectively, lyric sequence and dramatic monologue. Phrasal allusion to Shakespeare was ubiquitous, often ingenious; deeper down, poets invoked him when exploring, or just revering, mysteries of identity made unprecedentedly urgent by the Victorian association between lyrical poetry and individual subjectivity. To this article of literary faith the poetic impersonality underwriting Shakespeare’s dramatic versatility posed a stumbling block, eliciting from some Victorians heavy polemical leverage and from others a ritual genuflection. Representative sonnets on the Bard by Arnold, Swinburne, and Browning variously exalt and query the poetics of transcendent being that, in a secularizing epoch, gathered around his name.