"Like a tower"

"Journey's End" with Tretower castle by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
You can find something I wrote about this piece here.

Poem as tower

Unterecker, A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats (p. 107):

By staring at any poem long enough, however, by searching for all possible correlations, we can begin to apprehend details of the internal organization of poetic art. Only if we learn to read Yeats in this way--which is, in fact, a kind of inverse process of composition--can we ever understand what Yeats is trying to make out of poetry. In one sense, each of his poems is no more than a statement architecturally conceived. It is a linguistic design (and so static) which says something (and so seems to be in action.) Like a tower which thrusts up and bears down, which falls in toward a center and which is pushed out by its weight, the poem achieves a repose assembled from precarious antithetical violences.                      

Oddly,

the paradoxes of action and repose above quote reminded me of Augustine's Confessions, where he says, "But you, O Lord, are eternally at work and eternally at rest. It is not in time that you see or in time that you move or in time that you rest: yet you make what we see in time; you make time itself and the repose which comes when time ceases." Later he says, "You are for ever at rest, because you are your own repose."

To be eternally at work and eternally at rest is to have reached perfection, completion, fullness: as is sought in the making of that framework of words called a poem.

Thoughts on a living art--

I'm reading Book XIII of Augustine's Confessions for a class tomorrow, and finding certain interesting correspondences between creation and the sub-creation that is art. Creation happens and subsists from the creator's abundance and fountaining-forth of light and goodness; so exuberance and abundance in the artist leads to living art.

A work must be alive not to vanish in the press of time--not to vanish almost immediately. It may be overlooked when new, yet still live and eventually make itself known. But something living must be snared in its bottle of words. To us, it often appears quite hard to detect what contemporary work has life in it, and what does not. But for sickle-handed Time, this work is easy.

Times alter. Realists may throw off the weight of Romanticism, or a group of artists flower in the sun of new ideas and common aspiration. An obsession with chasing the new in form may lead to diminishing returns, dwindled matter, and lifelessness. Artists may see the new glimmering in front of them because of some radical change in the conception of the universe (Earth orbits the Sun! Infinite universes may exist!), or because of something quite different--the constraints to free speech imposed by tyranny, say. Often the new opposes the just past. Sometimes to get to the new, artists must bushwhack back through the tradition.

Because there is no such thing as progress in the arts, even though no work can avoid being of its time.

Look at a circa 20,000-25,000 B. C. figurine like the so-called "Venus" of Dolní Věstonice, now on loan to the British Museum's "Ice Age" exhibition. It has a curiously Modernist look, its sexual features exaggerated and the whole body sleek and simplified.

Instead of progress in the arts, there is a continuous fountaining-forth of new work. Some of this work will manage to retain a sense of abundance and light, even as time passes. Some will not. But the artist's seeking is, in itself, a thing that partakes of light and participates in abundance.