Volume 10 231

liopolis and immolate itself in the altar fire, from
which the young phoenix then arose.”

As well as being associated with sun worship
(a cult that was very powerful in ancient Egypt as
well as in Greece, where it was associated with the
god Apollo), the phoenix was associated with im-
mortality. Romans and the Roman state religion
during the Imperial period compared the bird, aris-
ing from the ashes, to the myth of Rome’s found-
ing by Aeneas, who fled the ruin of Troy. The
phoenix’s immortality also appealed to Roman
mythmakers, and consequently the phoenix ap-
peared on Roman coins.

Nemerov’s poem recounts these traditional at-
tributes of the phoenix almost verbatim. The bird
“comes of flame and dust,” being born in a fire.
“He bundles up his sire [i.e., father] in myrrh,” the
narrator continues. “In the City of the Sun” the bird
“dies and rises all divine.” The bird has no other
parentage than himself: “himself his father, son and
bride.” In Nemerov’s version, the bird is purple,
not gold, however; the poet perhaps does this to
emphasize both the phoenix’s regalness (purple is

the traditional color of royalty) and bring it closer

to Christian color symbolism, in which purple is

one of the five colors prescribed by the early

church, used especially during Lent, Advent, and

at funerals.

Because of its connotations of immortality and

its presence in late Roman culture, the phoenix

came into the Christian iconological tradition. Like

Christ, the phoenix is reborn from an apparently ig-

nominious and irretrievable death. Also like Christ,

the phoenix partakes of the mystery of the Trinity,

for he is both the same as and different from his

Father. Where the Trinitarian doctrine holds that

Christ and God (and the Holy Spirit) are of one

substance and are separate, the phoenix both is and

is not constituted of his father—he is born from his

father’s ashes but is somehow separate from them.

The fact that the phoenix’s birth is accompanied by

myrrh, a fragrant tree resin used by ancient Mid-

dle Easterners to make perfume, also connects it

with the Christ narrative: at the Nativity, the Magi

brought the infant Jesus gold, frankincense, and

myrrh.

The Phoenix

What

Do I Read

Next?

• In the first century A.D., the great Roman poet
  Ovid compiled an anthology of retellings of
  myths that he entitled The Metamorphoses.This
  book contains renditions of almost every famous
  myth known to the classical world, and does in-
  clude, albeit in passing, a mention of the phoenix
  myth. Even though the book does not feature the
  phoenix prominently, it eminently merits reading.


• Nemerov discusses his own poetic practice and
  the ideas behind it in Figures of Thought: Spec-
  ulations on the Meaning of Poetry and Other
  Essays.In this collection, Nemerov discusses, in
  his characteristically prickly prose, the philo-
  sophical and conceptual bases of his poetry. Par-
  ticularly interesting in this anthology is the dom-
  ination of the figure of Wallace Stevens, a poet
  who, by the 1970s, had displaced Eliot and
  Pound as the most influential American poet of
  the twentieth century.
  
  
  • Nemerov won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1977
    Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov.The book
    brought together all of the major works of a poet
    who had, by that time, been practicing for thirty
    years, and forced many readers to confront this
    difficult-to-pigeonhole writer as a major force
    in postwar American poetry.
  
  
  • Nemerov is at times associated with a group of
    earlier poets known as the Objectivist school.
    Although he cannot be securely categorized as
    an Objectivist, he does share many of their con-
    cerns—most specifically, a belief that poetry
    must be grounded in the objective material re-
    ality of the real world and a concern with the
    complications inherent in sensory perception of
    the world. Other poets who are often called Ob-
    jectivist include William Carlos Williams (a
    good collection of his is the Selected Poems),
    George Oppen, and Louis Zukofsky.