Resumo de On An Engraving By Casserius

The engraving by Casserius is a work of art recording an act of skill, the product of intellect in the new age of science and the imagination in the ageless pursuit of unanswered mysteries. The metaphor that unites them, derived from an engraving in a Renaissance book, is startling in its originality and multiplicity, but unified in A. D. Hope?s fusion of science and art in harmony. For a meditative poem with metaphysical implications, the scene is grim. Giulio Casserius performs (and engraves) an autopsy on the abandoned body of a pregnant women, an axis of life and death, a potential source of epistemological certainty. She becomes in her potential for enlightenment, a symbol for generations, and the metaphor for one of Hope?s most courageous but unheralded poems.

Man?s incapacity to fathom the significance of what he seeks limits
his physical and metaphysical inquiries. Hope?s meditation, blocked out in fourteen rhymed stanzas of ten lines, furnishes a dignified format that encourages the sequential pursuit of profound questions. The woman?s humble death may be the mother of knowledge; the speaker imagines mother and child speaking across the four centuries since her sacrifice to this and coming ages.

The speaker counsels patience with ideas gestating in the womb of time, implying an intellectual fullness of term for unrealized concepts. Yet the dictum on perception holds: that yesterday?s truth will prove illusory and that tomorrow?s truth with prove today?s truth illusory suggests constant revision. Accepted universals truths have disappeared over the last four centuries, but the engraving of mother and child persist: ?There at the crux of time they stand and scan, / Past every scrutiny of prophet or sage, / Still unguessed prospects in the venture of Man? (Selected poems 106).

In the end, although the scientists probe for new physical truths, the mysteries of the dead woman and child remain impenetrable. They exist behind ?The mask beyond the mask beyond the mask? (Selected Poems 106), echoing Ahab?s notion of a reality behind the pasteboard masks of nature in Melville?s Moby Dick. Unlike Ahab?s monomaniacal quest for masked malice, the witnesses of ?Engraving? and the readers of the poem linger, Darling suggests, ?with silent awe before the incomprehensibility of the numinous? (85). Poets do not have to be omniscient, they just have to be poets, enlarging themselves and sharpening the blade of human consciousness. As the scientist adds to the multiplicity of hard knowledge, poets and other artists must remain devoted to goal of ?adding to being? (The New Cratylus 172).

The engraver?s art and the poet?s art, in keeping with Hope?s central tenet, ?add to being.? In Hope (and in Yeats) ?adding to being? is poetry?s function. The additions outlast tentative by scientific or speculative accretions. Anatomical or cosmological knowledge remains imperfect and incomplete, but poetry will advance, Hope contends in his essay ?The Burden of the Mystery? in The New Cratylus because: ?He who can add to his being, if he has not added to his knowledge, has added to his power to know, to his range of vision? (169).
The onlooker may have a clearer view of the dance as a whole, but the dancer, by entering in to it, comprehends it in quite another way; he has become the dance itself. He has not only added to his being, he has been translated to a being larger and other than himself.
(The New Cratylus 173)

Hope?s explanation echoes Yeats?s arresting assertion in a letter written two weeks before his death: ?Man can embody the truth but not know it? (Letters of W. B. Yeats, Jan. 4, 1939). The identity of the dancer with the dance remains Yeats?s consummate symbol of the idea. One aspect of ?adding to being? for the modern mind in a vast, more complex physical universe, Hope concludes, is that the mind of the scientific or artistic truth seeker: ?No longer asks for answers but to know: / What questions are there which we fail toask?? (Selected Poems 106). The question that Casserius fails to ask is whether the shared spirit of the quest between science and art in Sixteenth Century Padua would last indefinitely. C. P. Snow?s The Two Cultures (1993) demonstrates the breakdown of transmission between the arts and sciences, but the seeming collapse may not be complete or final, as Hope?s remarks about illusions suggest. The engraving, in the common Renaissance conceit, exemplifies the permanence of art and poetry in history?s mutability. It is a mystery, an ideal, and a reminder.

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