Volume 10 235
birth, and so it has remained one of the most fa-
mous and powerful stories of the ages. The story
of the phoenix so ingrained itself in European con-
sciousness that from the fifteenth to the seventeenth
centuries it appeared in bestiaries; religious leaders
declared it to be a real bird.
In Howard Nemerov and Objective Idealism,
Donna L. Potts writes, “Language is for Nemerov
what language once was for the alchemists—the
means for transforming the base elements of this
world into gold.” Nemerov’s assumption that lan-
guage could have magical qualities was partly in-
fluenced by the philosophy of objective idealism.
Language could be “magical” in the sense that it
serves as a mediator between us and the physical
world. This means that our imaginations participate
in how the world works. Based on this assumption,
myths are “real,” and the mythic images of Ne-
merov’s poems therefore have metaphoric power
for him. If in ancient Egypt the bennu was a heron,
then the actual bird and the imagined or magical
bird—The Phoenix—are both necessary for stories,
myths, and religions to exist. This may be one rea-
son why Nemerov so consistently uses words we
often associate with holiness and spiritual iconog-
raphy in “The Phoenix.” Each line carries some ref-
erence to the fundamental material of the world in
connection to a kind of scriptural belief.
Nemerov frequently turns to myth in his writ-
ing, even in his speeches, which are peppered with
references to past literatures, quotes in ancient lan-
guages, and applications of religion and belief to
methods of writing. As an objective idealist, one
who believes in the negotiation of imagination and
fact, Nemerov in his work often attempts to cope
with this negotiation, and his subject matter in
Guide to the Ruins —especially ancient myth and
war—give him the opportunity. Much of the col-
lection (an early work of the poet’s that comes be-
fore, in the view of many critics, his poetry fully
matured) is devoted to ancient myths, juxtaposed
with the experiences of war in the modern world
and the structures of poetry. Such character-based
poems as Nicodemus, “Virgin and Martyr,”
“Mars,” and “Antigone” give “The Phoenix” a con-
text necessary to our appreciation of its meanings.
In fact, the title of the collection implies that the
poet is taking us through the remnants of history,
whether the ruins of old myths (the last—or first—
of which in the book is “The Phoenix”), the ruins
of war, or the inscriptions of sonnets on pages. Ne-
merov is certainly a referential poet, to the extent
that some critics have accused him of being deriv-
ative.
The formal rhyme scheme (abab) also gives
the poem a kind of age; it reads like a nineteenth-
century elegy, an epitaph worn thin on a stone. It
is an explanation of the phoenix, a definition of it
that retells the myth through the poet’s characteri-
zation of the bird, rather than through a story form
or an encyclopedic account of what a phoenix is.
Nemerov chooses to focus on the character rather
than the narrative perhaps because, as in many
myths, the character is the narrative. The stories of
the phoenix that most remember in the modern era
focus primarily on what the creature is, rather than
on what it does. The flooding of the Nile, for in-
stance, and the beginning of a season in Egypt, is
hardly the resonant myth of the phoenix in the west-
ern world. A more general cyclical myth adheres;
there is birth and death, the rising and setting of the
sun, but we have many other myths that represent
such events. The individuality of the phoenix is in
the nature (or magical metaphor of nature) of its
rise and fall. It appears from its own ashes, and is
the icon of fire. This distinguishes it from other res-
urrection myths (such as Christ from the tomb) by
its elements, but, as we will see, the separation of
mythologies is seldom complete.
Nemerov has been called “unromantic” in his
treatment of nature, and frequently cited as em-
ploying “science” in his material. He is acutely ro-
mantic in many of his poems—practically an
anachronism in his view of science and spiritual-
ity, especially as they meet on fairly simple terms
in formalist poems. In a poem such as “The
Phoenix,” he joins the ranks of the seventeenth-
century bestiary writers. It doesn’t get much more
romantic and unscientific than to construct a
rhyming three-stanza poem to a mythic bird. WeThe PhoenixIf in ancient Egypt
the bennu was a heron,
then the actual bird and
the imagined or magical
bird—The Phoenix—are
both necessary for stories,
myths, and religions to
exist.”