Thomas Kinsella: Jousting with Evil
2005; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 35; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2222-4289
Autores Tópico(s)Modern American Literature Studies
ResumoAt the beginning of his literary career Thomas Kinsella wrote poems about the precariousness of life and poems about love, eventually creating a style that incorporated the connection between them in language that embodied the idea of pain within love, loss within endurance. The language in which he describes mutability, various losses, pain, illness, violence, mutilation, death--what he terms 'evil'--gives his early work its distinctive texture. At the heart of his entire work, as he explores the presence of evil in increasingly more complex and more balanced poems, is the belief that art itself is the true answer to the power of evil. Through their creative energies, artists such as Sean O'Riada, Gustav Mahler, and Kinsella himself, provide a positive counter-force to its destructive activities. While in the first two collections, Poems (1956) and Another September (1958), he emerges as a poet concerned with fragility in the nature of things, it is the epigrammatic poems in Moralities (1960) that define his outlook explicitly. The speaker in 'An Old Atheist Pauses by the Sea' declares his shocked response to erosion: I choose at random, knowing less and less. The shambles of the seashore at my feet Yield a weathered spiral: I confess --Appalled at how the waves have polished it-- I know that shores are eaten, rocks are split, Shells ghosted. Something hates unevenness. The skin turns porcelain, the nerves retreat, And then the will, and then the consciousness. (1) 'Something hates unevenness'. The last three lines summarize a point of view that is fundamental. Like a gambler, the speaker chooses at random. Lacking certainty he must yield to signs of weathering, must recognize not that process makes something beautiful but how the shell has been affected and must see it, paradoxically, within a movement that changes skin, nerves, will, and consciousness, the entire self into oblivion. The frequency of oxymoron at this stage of Kinsella's development is worth noting. Even a random list from Downstream (1962) and Nightwalker (1968) shows its presence: 'with darkness for a nest'; 'a rack of leaves', 'a skull of light', 'both to horrify and instruct', 'crumbling place of growth', 'tender offals', 'the slithering pit', 'grim composure', 'a jewel made of pain'. These are signatures of Kinsella's imaginative faith, a linguistic mapping by which we trace the fundamentals of the work at this stage. The clearest and most complex definition of paradox comes in the Wormwood sequence (1966). The title refers to the 'great star' that 'fell on the third part of the rivers and upon the fountains of waters; [...] and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many died of the waters, because they were made bitter' (Revelations, 8. 10-11). In an address to the 'Beloved' Kinsella writes: It is certain that maturity and peace are to be sought through ordeal after ordeal, and it seems that the search continues until we fail. We reach out after each new beginning, penetrating our context to know ourselves, and our knowledge increases until we recognise again (more profoundly each time) our pain, indignity and triviality. This bitter cup is offered, heaped with curses, and we must drink or die. And even though we may drink we may also die, if every drop of bitterness--that rots the flesh--is not transmuted. (p. 62) All of this--the search, the ordeal, the cup of bitterness, the need to absorb, the possibility of transmuting bitterness, the inevitability of death, and the importance of love--is fundamental to his work. In a nightmare vision the 'I' figure strains after the echo of a blow that has left the trees 'stunned, minutely | Shuddering' and comes upon the symbolic tree. A black tree with a double trunk--two trees Grown into one--throws up its blurred branches. The two trunks in their infinitesimal dance of growth Have turned completely about one another, their join A slowly twisted scar, that I recognise. …
Referência(s)