Epilogue: Songs of Sixpence

Abstract

In ‘Of Mere Being’, ‘The bird sings’ in the palm, at once tree and symbol of the pilgrimage to ‘the edge of space’; listening to such ‘a foreign song’, ‘You know then that it is not the reason’, the causal quality of discourse, ‘That makes us happy or unhappy’. In ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, the Shrouds decree ‘all we do | All must together do’, and together sewing, ‘Now must we sing and sing the best we can’; by the end of the poem, ‘They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds’, singing without ‘such large discourse’ (Q 1604; Hamlet, IV. iv. 36) of cause and effect. As we saw in Chapter 3, Dante has another psychopomp, ‘l’uccel divino’ (Purgatorio, ii. 38), the divine bird, pilot his boat of singing souls to the shore of Purgatory: