Walter Pater

I knew of this poem before I finally found it. Or rather I had read it as prose as young person in the collection of essays by Pater, knowing that Yeats had turned into a poem and included it in this collection. And I have only just got the collection – many decades later.

The first Pater that I read was the novel Marius the Epicurean – because Yeats had written that in Pater’s Marius ‘the English language lies in state’, and from there had moved on to the essays.

On the 5^th April 2014 I wrote about Pater on this blog:

“Reading after a break of decades the essay on Dionysus in Greek Studies one finds long sentences, the pursuit of a single idea through sequences of these sentences, a single idea that throws off other ideas and even the occasional footnote, sentences that carry erudition lightly, and that teach.  One also finds poetry: “they are weavers or spinners, spinning or weaving with airiest fingers, and subtlest, many-coloured threads, the foliage of trees, the petals of flowers, the skins of the fruit, the long thin stalks on which the poplar leaves are set so lightly”.

“On which the poplar leaves are set so lightly”. It creeps into the subconscious and could be stolen. It happened to MacDiarmid with a description of a seagull or its egg (I forget which) , and he was accused of plagiarism.”

In these lines Pater interprets the enigma of the expression of the Mona Lisa as a summa of Greek and Christian and pagan cultural iconography. She is eternal and she is everywoman.

Walter Pater ‘Mona Lisa’ 1873

Mona Lisa

Walter Pater

 

She is older than the rocks among which she sits;

Like the Vampire,

She has been dead many times,

And learned the secrets of the grave;

And has been a diver in deep seas,

And keeps their fallen day about her;

And trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants;

And, as Leda,

Was the mother of Helen of Troy,

And, as St Anne,

Was the mother of Mary;

And all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and

         flutes,

And lives

Only in the delicacy

With which it has moulded the changing lineaments,

And tinged the eyelids and the hands.

 

From ‘The Renaissance’ (1873) put into poetry by W B Yeats and published in ‘The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935’ ed W B Yeats OUP (1936) p.1