Abstract
Aristotle describes the contest between density and rarity as a “battle” for the “possession” of a substratum. In two poems, by Eavan Boland and Alice Oswald, the substratum is marble and stone respectively, emblems of density that here allegorize the anonymous quality of suffering. The tentative, rare occasions when this density might nonetheless “give off” something of its hermetic quality are in both poems reached at moments offleeting poignancy and great vulnerability.
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Notes
Bertrand Vergely, La Souffrance: Recherche du sens perdu (Paris: Gallimard, 1997): “Souffrir, c’est toujours souffrir de trop” (62). See also Ophir, 267.
Joë Bousquet, Traduit du silence (Paris: Gallimard, 1968): “Je viens d’éprouver une grande douleur; et ce qui me frappe le plus, c’est que je ne suis pas à sa taille” (32).
Eavan Boland, “The Art of Grief” in New Collected Poems ( New York: Norton, 2008 ), 239–41.
John Rickard, “The Irish Patient: The Female Body, Nation, and Language in the Poetry of Eavan Boland and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill” in The Patient, ed. Kimberly Myers and Harold Schweizer (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010 ), 99.
Alice Oswald, Spacecraft Voyager 1: New and Selected Poems ( Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2007 ), 107.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution ( New York: Cosimo, 2005 ), 159.
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© 2016 Harold Schweizer
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Schweizer, H. (2016). The Density of Suffering. In: Rarity and the Poetic: The Gesture of Small Flowers. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-58929-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-58929-3_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-88778-1
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