William Gibson, U. S. N. |
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Riffs Augustus Ely Silliman |
SIBYLLA CUMANA. BY COMMANDER WILLIAM GIBSON, U. S. N.
An angry
Sun-god, nevermore my wooer,
First published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 49 (November
1874): 773-776. Commentary “Sibylla Cumana” dramatizes the ancient story of Apollo and the Sibyl. Adapted from Virgil and Ovid, the story also draws allusively on the well-known painting by Turner, “The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl.” The action takes place in the Italian Campania, the region of the Sibyl’s reputed abode near Cumae. The poetic treatment of the myth alludes to older conventions of Greek tragedy, introducing, for instance, the voice of the Greek Chorus, and employs dramatic monologues in the manner of the Brownings. More particularly, the dramatic intensity of the Sibyl’s monologues recalls the “lyrical emotion” projected by female speakers in the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, above all by Eve in Drama of Exile. Flower imagery and surprising, highly charged rose symbolism turns the piece into a full blown carpe diem poem in the tradition of Herrick and Marvell. Gibson’s poem begins, not with emotive lyrics of the Sibyl, but a long descriptive stanza, forty-five lines of almost blank-verse, casually describing the richly evocative scenery to the northwest of Naples. The smoldering setting of “Sibylla Cumana” embraces the Gulf of Pozzuoli, the volcanic region of the Phlegræan Fields, and the ancient towns of Baiae and Cumae. Seemingly indifferent to the romantic possibilities lurking in such locales, the first three lines of verse are strangely halting: MOON-CURVES of shore, and
promontories and isles. In each line, a period stops eleven syllables short. Without enjambment and without any active verb, the feeling is that of a journal entry, albeit poetically rendered. To similar effect, the next two lines supply journalistic comment, and now enjambment, but still no verb: A rubbish, half on land and
half in sea, After noting these first impressions—the graceful semicircle of coastline, regal coloring of the sea, crumbling, drowning ruins expressive of fallen grandeur—the speaker next records observations on the volcanic Phlegraean Fields and Lake Avernus. The “fair lake” called Avernus borders “a ghastly tunnel,” anciently fabled as the Cave of the Sibyl and gateway to the underworld. Gibson’s speaker seems to have explored this famous cavern, far enough at least to know the place is confining, dark, and humid: A narrow chamber of Cimmerian
gloom Allusions to “Cimmerian” darkness and Phlegethon, the burning river of Virgil’s Hades and Dante’s Inferno, underscore the conventional association of Avernus with Hell. Then amid remains of a hilltop acropolis the speaker espies one “lonely shaft” of a tower that Dædalus was said to have erected in honor of Apollo (lines 14-19). With Book 6 of Virgil’s Æneid in mind, the speaker envisions the “honey-combed” maze of hillside caves as “[t]he hundred mouths of Sibylline oracles” (lines 21-22). At line 23 the barest mention of “The Acherusian lake” bridges visions of Hell and Heaven. Images of blossoming and fragrant “Elysian fields” (23-27) then introduce a recollection of the so-called Temple of Venus in the vicinity of Baiae, “A round and vaulted ruin, temple or bath / In times imperial” (28-29). Here the speaker witnesses, or remembers having witnessed, two women dancing a “tantarella to a tambourine / That echo made orchestral” (30-31). One young, one old, the dancers suggest “Types of the Sibyl in her youth and age” (36). After thirty-six lines comes the first active verb, set, along with a welcome explication of the previous jottings as “reminiscences of a long day / By Baiæ’s and more ancient Cumæ’s shore.” Memories of Baiae and Cumae, we learn, then set the speaker “to dreaming” about a “mystic maid,” the Cumæan Sibyl who in Roman mythology sold King Tarquin three of nine original books of prophecy and thereby co-founded the Roman state. The remainder of the poem will unfold as a dream vision (or nightmare) in which the speaker is guided, not like Aeneas to the underworld, but rather to the discovery and experience of a love song, tragic and prophetic. Gibson’s love song of the Sibyl and Apollo plays out in two sets of lyrics, each performed by a different voice. The voice of the Sibyl as a beautiful maiden is heard in fifteen quartets (stanzas 4-18); that of the Sibyl as a turbaned crone takes over the final eleven stanzas (21-31), all tercets. Prefacing each lyrical group is a stanza of blank verse describing the youthful and aged figures of the Sibyl, followed by a transitional couplet in which the poet attunes his “dreaming ear” to the Sibyl’s voice. In the portrait of Sibyl Number One (lines 46-64), the dark “young contadina” who danced the tarantella by the baths of Venus metamorphoses into a fairer and more perfect neo-classical Venus. Gibson’s maiden Sibyl is the human divine personified, a statuesque embodiment of ideal feminine beauty, blessed by the personifications of Hellenic virtues traditionally associated with Venus: “Graces, the wise Hours, and Harmony.” To the tune of Apollo as god of sun, music, and poetry, the Sibyl sings first of the sun god’s physical beauty and descent to her by the seaside, “out of a shining haze.” Bent on seduction, Apollo asks lustfully, “is there any boon a god may give?” The Sibyl, already displaying the makings of a seeker and seer, confesses to “thoughts, far-darting” that would “[p]ierce the veiled ages” and, dissatisfied with her mortal lot, bargains for as many years as there are grains in a handful of sand. Rose symbolism flames out as the song of the young Sibyl progresses. The virginal Sibyl is a closed rosebud. Her wooer Apollo would ravish her “Flower to flower,” representing himself as the rose in the rosy glow of a setting sun. Herrick-like, in high carpe diem fashion, Apollo implores the maiden Sibyl to forgo a loveless immortality and follow the earthy example of the rose: Choosing the ephemeral
rapture of the roses, The Sibyl briefly yields for the duration of “one immortal moment / Folded in unconsuming might of fire,” just long enough perhaps to catch a spark of Apollo’s divinity: Ai! Ai! the sweetness of
it! No accession Having experienced the embrace of the deity and received the divine afflatus, the Sibyl spurns Apollo. Her fate, according to the oracle of Apollo, will be to live out century after century as a virgin priestess, figuratively imagined as a closed rosebud, or a rose made of stone, sculpted from cold marble. Flower symbols of the Sibyl’s eternal chastity are the “pure and pale” lily and “the rose-bud with its folded petal.” The rejected suitor departs, leaving the Sibyl alone on the shore to commune with shadows and voices. The stanza of blank verse introducing Sibyl Number Two betrays the poet himself as a philosophical fellow and no mean psychologist. Gibson’s argument for “that deep-dissolving power of dreams / To make the mutable seem natural / As are the unfluctuating forms of life” participates in a debate as old as Plato over the essential nature of reality. The “unfluctuating forms” inevitably recall Plato’s eternal forms, the ideas of things that exist above and beyond the plane of imperfect and subjective human perceptions. Recognizing the fact of flux, the governance of mutability in human affairs, Gibson approaches Jung in his understanding of a psychological process by which in dreams the jumbled experiences of daily life devolve into recognizable archetypes. His case in point is the sudden transformation of the Sibyl from maiden to hag in his own Neapolitan dream. In terms of physical appearance the contrast could hardly be stronger. The “peach bloom” of the young Sibyl’s face has aged into a faded “parchment scroll, / Wrinkled and written o’er with awful things.” However, the dream of the poet works to “fuse yet not confuse” the two personae. The old Sibyl looks different but the dreamer is nonetheless able to see in her timeworn face the essence of the young Sibyl: But yet her eyes were lustrous
as in youth, The old Sibyl has the last word. By her power of divination, the prophetess has seen past the garbled myths and squabbling gods of Rome and Greece to Isis, Egyptian mother of them all. Under many names and guises, Isis was venerated throughout the Greco-Roman world as the goddess of fertility, motherhood, and magic. Plutarch visited the temple of Isis at Sais in the first century A. D. and found powerful words that have been associated with Isis ever since: I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal hath ever removed. [as given in chapter 5 of John Bathearst Deane’s Worship of the Serpent (1833)] The veil of the goddess hides the divine nature from mortal sight. Thus the image of lifting or piercing the veil of Isis was in the nineteenth century widely understood and used as a metaphor for the discovery of ultimate truth, any revelation or penetration of the mystery of human existence. Gibson’s use of the “veiled Isis” image in 1874 roughly coincides with the revival of occult study in the theosophy movement (founded 1875) and Madame Blavatsky’s influential Isis Unveiled (1877). Blavatsky’s work was originally entitled Veil of Isis, but the title was revised when the publisher was made aware of another book with the same title, Veil of Isis by W. Winwood Reade (1861). Gibson’s Sibyl is no Blavatsky. Nor is she a clone of the wizard hero of Bulwer-Lytton’s eponymous novel Zanoni (1842). Far from encouraging esoteric inquiries and unveilings, the chastened priestess of “Sibylla Cumana” now defends the masking of divine truth as a providential blessing: Oh, wisely for the welfare of
mankind Numberless years of solitary seeking have taught only the insufficiency and unreliability of partial revelation. Since only the universal mother Isis is coeval with the world, “all that hath been, that shall be,” any acquired knowledge, however profound, necessarily must be limited by the conditions of human mortality. Therefore the Sibyl who scorned Apollo for the gift of divination now promulgates a new doctrine of Love, “Apollo’s golden rule” and “sweet scorn of self.” The Sibyl’s idea of self-sacrifice owes much to the gospel of seventeenth-century love poetry, little (except implicitly, by way of contrast) to the Christian doctrine of redemption through the cross of Jesus. Of course, this new doctrine is really the same old doctrine, that of the birds and bees. Apollo himself, the rake, gave it to the young object of his desire when he called her a Rose-bud and promised her heavenly joy if she would only open up and accept “the ephemeral rapture of the roses, / Fertile of other raptures.” Whereas the young Sibyl’s rejection of Apollo was approved by a visitation from on high, perceived in the whoosh of Juno’s “wide skirts” and swoop of Jove’s “mighty eagle,” the old Sibyl’s acceptance is sealed in a vision of less distant, more worldly and more humanly accessible deities. Wise now in the wisdom of Apollo, and with the enthusiasm of a fresh convert, the Sibyl summons the goddesses of the dawn and the rainbow to bless the earth and prepare the world for a new teaching: I, crowned by Sorrow, bid
Aurora sing Following this vision of Aurora and Iris as messengers of Love, the Sibyl separately addresses the sexes. The “fair Youth,” standing for all romantically-inclined young men, is incited to fearless action: O fair Youth, cull the
blossom in the prime! Virgins are advised to give in to their men: O Maiden, with the
May-bloom on thy cheek The final tercet conveys the same message, now addressed directly to the dreaming poet and the reader. Love is the thing. The only possible source of ultimate knowledge is the grave. The pursuit of things unknowable is vanity, best left to the divinities of another world.
Sibylla Melvilliana 1. "Sibylla Cumana" opens with diary-like reminiscences, pithy and punctuated, which verbally and thematically echo specific journal entries that Melville recorded in February 1857 while touring the Bay of Naples. The poet’s account of his “long day” at Baiae and Cumae conflates coastal scenes that Melville visited and revisited in two separate excursions westward from Naples along the Posilipo road. On Friday February 20th Melville saw Posilipo, the bay of Pozzuoli, Baia, and Solfatara; on the following Monday, February 23rd, Melville took the same route, revisiting Pozzuoli (“a great bay in bay”) and journeying on to Lake Avernus in the neighborhood of ancient Cumae, Lake Lucrinus, and Baia (NN Journals 104). Gibson’s semi-circular “MOON-CURVES of shore” in the first line replicate the “Windings broad sweeps & curves” of coastline which Melville noted February 22nd after a Sunday drive from Castellamare to Sorrento (NN Journals 103-104). In Section 5 of “Naples in the Time of Bomba,” the geology of the Phlegrean Fields inspires a similar comparison of the “curved volcanic shores” near Posilipo to a “Vined urn of ashes.” In Clarel, an image of the Dead Sea shoreline as “wavy curves of winding beach” (2.29.15) also echoes Gibson’s “curves of shore.” Gibson’s use of the word promontories makes a plural of Melville’s form of the same noun, witnessed in his February 20th entry on the approach to the Bay of Pozzuoli: “Posilipo—beautiful promontory of villas—along the sea” (NN Journals 102). The third line of “Sibylla Cumana” captures the phrasing and theme of Melville’s journal entry for February 23rd 1857: “monuments of the variety of old religions (Sybils cave) and yet the Romish superstition” (NN Journals 105). Gibson’s "elder myth" corresponds to Melville's notation on memorials of "old religions." Melville’s parenthetical instance of one such monument, “(Sibyls cave),” is strikingly replicated in Gibson's parenthetical mention at line 13 of “(the Sibyl’s grot).” Lines 4-5 of “Sibylla Cumana” portray coastal ruins in the vicinity of Naples as a mixed-up “rubbish” of formerly “sumptuous sea-side luxury,” a poetic snapshot that accords well with comments on Posilipo that Melville added as a postscript to his journal entry for February 23rd. Melville’s images of a “Sea-palace” amid intertwined architectural and geographic “snarls of beauty” approximate Gibson’s “rubbish” of “sea-side luxury.” In Jerusalem Melville had written about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in similar terms, as a “confused & half-ruinous pile” (NN Journals 87). Gibson’s word rubbish occurs repeatedly in Melville’s journal, also in connection with the landscape of Palestine. Meditating on the “Barrenness of Judea,” Melville had described the outskirts of Jerusalem as a wasteland littered with the “mere refuse & rubbish of creation” (NN Journals 83). Melville liked this word rubbish well enough to playfully elaborate on “accumulations of this rubbish” in a desert “[s]o rubbishy, that no chiffonier could find any thing all over it” (83). Also in Jerusalem, Melville noted the omnipresent “smell of burning rubbish” and found the “Pool of Bethesda full of rubbish” (NN Journals 91). Our turning back to the Judea and Palestine sections of Melville’s 1856-57 Mediterranean journal is warranted by Melville’s intention to make a “Comparison between Avernus & Hinnom” (NN Journals 104). Melville evidently meant at some future date to yoke two landscapes that are geographically separate but similarly productive of ideas about hell. In Italy, the volcanic region of Avernus included the “infernal” (Melville’s word) Cave of the Sibyl which the ancients regarded as the entrance to Hades; in Palestine, the “diabolical landscape” (Melville’s words) of Judea, including the valley of Gihon or Hinnom south and west of Jerusalem, influenced the Hebraic conception of Gehenna. In light of Melville’s stated project to relate Avernus and Hinnom, it may be pointed out that Melville’s description of Judean scenery employs specific words that Gibson also uses to particularize the region of Avernus in Italy. When Melville was at Lake Avernus he noticed “Many other caves to right & left” of the Sibyl’s cave and commented, “Infernal enough” (NN Journals 104). These are the same caves at Avernus which Gibson locates in “the hill honey-combed with labyrinths / Of caverns” (line 20). Gibson’s cave metaphors honey-combed and labyrinths are figures that also occur to Melville when writing of caves. In a discrete entry beginning “Caves,” Melville wrote, “Judea honey combed with them” (NN Journals 91). At the “confused & half ruinous pile” of the Church of the Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Melville observed “Laberithys [sic] & terraces of mouldy grottos, tombs, & shrines” (NN Journals 87). The adjective sumptuous in line 5 of “Sibylla Cumana” (“sumptuous sea-side luxury”) also occurs in the Naples section of Melville’s Journals, also with reference to architectural splendour. Melville thought “no palaces so sumptuous” as those overlooking the Bay of Naples, magnificent mansions which he viewed as emblems of the hedonistic, carefree Neapolitan spirit (NN Journals 105). As a poet, when pressed by the formal demands of “In a Garret” to economize in only four lines of verse, Melville chose to convey ancient opulence as a mound of treasure, “sumptuous as the Sophi.” Gibson’s view of the Sibyl’s cave as a “narrow chamber” (12) verbally echoes two references in Melville’s journal: at the entrance, alluding to the gate as the “Narrow one to hell”; and inside, finding the descent “very narrow” (NN Journals 104). The progression in Melville’s journal from Sibyl’s cave to evocative seaside ruins matches the transition in “Sibylla Cumana” from cave to ruins. Gibson’s “round and vaulted ruin, temple or bath” (28) describes the ruins near Baia that prompted Melville’s note, “Temple of Venus. Round. Summit wavy with verdure — corpses dressed for a ball” (NN Journals 104). Melville’s allusion to dead bodies in formal dress, ready for a dance, is obscure, though not incompatible with the poet’s fantasy of a “tarantella” danced by dual incarnations of the ancient Sibyl as maiden and hag. The poet’s description of tambourine music “that echo made orchestral” introduces another word that Melville used in the same journal passage, in association with the nearby temple of Mercury: “Echo. Where art thou, Mercury — Where?―” (NN Journals 104). In the opening lines of “Sibylla Cumana” the metaphorical “rubbish” of ancient haunts and resorts near Naples works as a metonymic device to more broadly suggest the fallen grandeur “of Rome.” Geographically, the “once sumptuous” buildings to which the poet refers belonged not to Rome itself but to the region of Pozzuoli that includes Posilipo, Baia, and Cumae. Even this metonymy has a graphic parallel in Melville’s 1857 Journals. Melville’s “P. S.” on the crumbling “sea palace” and tangled “snarls of beauty” at Posilipo visually fall on the manuscript page under the double-sized heading “Rome,” already written out by Melville in anticipation of his arrival there the next day: Rome. P. S. Wonderful old ruinous palace at Pausolippo. Sea-palace. — The road. Villas, grots, summer-houses — ravines — towers [or bowers] &c &c &c. Such a profusion & intricacy of grotto, grove, gorge villa hill, that it takes some time & patience to disentangle such snarls of beauty. (NN Journals 105)
2. Apollo = Nathaniel Hawthorne According to Douglas Robillard, Melville in Clarel (1876) gives "Apollonian qualities" to Vine, the character based on Nathaniel Hawthorne [see Melville and the Visual Arts (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997), 133]. Robillard observes: "Melville was no doubt well aware that his friend was often referred to as an "Apollo." The Hawthorne home in the Berkshires contained a bust of Apollo, and friends like William Ellery Channing wrote of Hawthorne as an Apollo figure. (134) As Robillard shows, Melville's "mythic iconography" in Clarel depicts Hawthorne-as-Vine in part by alluding to Virgil and Turner's painting The Golden Bough, where "the Apollonian Aeneas receives the sacred bough from the Cumaean Sibyl" (133). Published two years before Clarel, "Sibylla Cumana," evoked a related painting by Turner, “The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl” in depicting Hawthorne-as-Apollo. The symbol of the "live brand" in the fiery embrace between the Sibyl and her would-be lover Apollo alludes to Hawthorne's marble-hearted "Ethan Brand." Revealingly, Apollo's self-described "monuments" are constructed from the letters in "Nathaniel Hawthorne":
...Hyacinth
in flower,
[hawthorne]
...Hyacinth in flower,
3.
Apollo's "golden rule" versifies underlined passage in Melville's copy of Southey's Life of Nelson
Sir William Hamilton...thus, in a letter,
described his own philosophy:― "Sibylla Cumana" poetically recasts Hamilton's ideas in the following lines:
Isis is all that hath been, that shall be—
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