Dreams of Eden

In Robert Hass‘s essay, “On Teaching Poetry,” contained in What Light Can Do, he references W. H. Auden‘s book of essays, The Dyer’s Hand, named after a phrase from Shakespeare‘s Sonnet 111:

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:

In Shakespeare’s sonnet the dyer’s hand is stained and branded—shamefully in this case—by blood-guilt. In Auden says Hass, “it is connected to a notion of someone so immersed in their trade that they are permanently colored by it.”

The Dyer’s Hand is full of memorable Audenisms, and a feistiness is evident throughout (like the starting quote for his essay, “Reading” from C. G. Lichtenberg: “A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”)

Here is a passage that spoke directly to me when I was reading this morning:

Though the pleasure which works of art give us must not be confused with other pleasures that we enjoy, it is related to all of them simply by being our pleasure and not someone else’s. All the judgments, aesthetic or moral, that we pass, however objective we try to make them, are in part a rationalization and in part a corrective discipline of our subjective wishes. So long as a man writes poetry or fiction, his dream of Eden is his own business, but the moment he starts writing literary criticism, honesty demands that he describe it to his readers, so that they may be in the position to judge his judgments.

Our unavoidable proclivities to subjectivity. Each of us with our own dream of Eden. Possessing a hand that, with time, reveals itself through the work we do.

That’s an interwoven nest of wisdom for my day.