234 Poetry for Students
more myrrh over the hole. The egg-shaped lump is
then just of the same weight as it was originally.
Finally it is carried by the bird to the temple of the
Sun in Egypt. Such, at least, is the story.”
As he often does, Herodotus honors the stories
of his ancestors and does his best simply to relay
information passed on to him from previous
sources. However, he cannot resist commenting on
the story’s credibility, and, though he refuses to say
that the bird is an imaginary being, he nevertheless
manages to reveal his doubts as to the reported ac-
tivities of the phoenix. Of course, what is most im-
portant for poets such as Nemerov is not whether
the bird ever existed but what it symbolizes. For
thousands of years, authors have written about this
mythical bird of Arabia that represents self-sacri-
fice, destruction, and renewal. The phoenix con-
sumes itself in flames, and then rises from its own
ashes. As Nemerov puts it, the bird “Makes a cra-
dle of his bier,” or creates from the place on which
his coffin lies (his “bier) a site for his birth (his
“cradle”). When he has come to life, the poet tells
us, echoing Herodotus, that the phoenix “bundles
up his sire in myrrh.” The bird anoints its father
with this fragrance and carries him to the “City of
the Sun,” or Heliopolis.
Nemerov’s treatment of this old myth is not
terribly original, but, in context, it is purposeful.
“The Phoenix” is the last poem in the collection
Guide to the Ruins,published in 1950. The volume
opens with the title poem in which Nemerov in-
troduces the idea of reconstructing myths which
have been “broken” and “dishonored” by time and
disuse. In this poem he suggests that in order to
make our way through the present, we should re-
visit the past. However, we can never return to a
previous time, and what comes to us as history is
always incomplete, corroded, and even corrupted.
Nemerov continues through other poems to inves-
tigate a variety of themes, but his interest lies pri-
marily in ancient stories and legendary figures, and
the issue of decay recurs, especially in so far as it
is brought about by conflict and war.
The backdrop of war is important, for when
Nemerov arrives at the end of his book, we are
thereby prepared for the renewal that the phoenix’s
self-sacrifice makes possible. The “solar and un-
holy lust” refers to the bird’s encounter with the
sun: in most versions of the phoenix myth, it kills
itself by flying too close to this solar orb, immo-
lating itself in the heat and flames. This deed is
“unholy” because it involves self-injury. But it is
also necessary, and from this act the phoenix “diesand rises all divine.” Nemerov adds that “There is
never more than one / Genuine,” which is to say
that the new bird is only born when its parent dies.
The bird is “Himself his father,” confirming a fun-
damental connection between disintegration and re-
generation: for it is only when one phoenix dies
that another can live. The promise of rebirth makes
death less fearsome, and, though Nemerov does not
emphasize this, the fact that the phoenix is reborn
renders it a symbol of immortality.
Though the traditional colors of the phoenix
are red and gold, Nemerov refers to the bird’s
plumage as “purple.” This is the color of royalty,
and, more importantly, it is the color of sacrifice.
Christian imagery seems to resonate in the final
stanza when Nemerov speaks of the phoenix as
“Himself his father, son and bride / And his own
Word.” However, Nemerov, who was Jewish, is
likely suggesting a more broad application of these
ideas. The phoenix is itself a pre-Christian figure,
and the “Word” may signify poetic language in
general. Furthermore, the bird “By incest, murder,
suicide / Survives.” In other words, there is no sin-
gle kind of suffering that it represents, and thus the
phoenix offers hope for recovery without limits
and, by extension, hope for discovery of the sort
made possible by poetry.
Source: Jeannine Johnson, in an essay for Poetry for Stu-
dents,Gale, 2001.Sean K. Robisch
Sean Robisch is an assistant professor of eco-
logical and American literature at Purdue Univer-
sity. In the following essay, he focuses on Ne-
merov’s use of the mythological in “The Phoenix.”Every five hundred years, according to the
myth, a great bird rises from the ashes of its dead
progenitor. Maybe the sire of the bird was its
mother or father; maybe the bird gives birth to it-
self; in some versions of the myth, both are true. It
was called semendain ancient India, bennuin an-
cient Egypt, and was represented by a great blue
heron. Its name means “purple” or “palm leaf ” in
the Greek, and so it may have been connected with
royalty (purple being a rare and difficult dye and
therefore worn largely by the wealthy in the West;
the palm frond holding a number of significant
symbolic values). In some myths its rise and fall is
associated with the rising and setting of the sun.
But in all of the myths, the ashes are important, be-
cause they represent the ruins out of which some-
thing new is built. The myth is of resurrection,
which means it is simultaneously about death andThe Phoenix