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• W242029689 abstract "Few would deny that Equilibrists is one of Ransom's major poems. (1) Critics have been far more ready, however, to assert its importance in the Ransom canon than to claim a confident understanding of the poem. Robert Buffington, for example, appropriates its title for book on Ransom's poetry but confesses, when he comes to discuss the poem itself, that the dramatic situation is unclear and proceeds to make interpretation in an atmosphere of caution (The Equilibrist: A Study of John Crowe Ransom's Poems, 1916-1963 [Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1967], pp. 49-51). The greatest stumbling-block to understanding the poem is the moral contradiction that holds Ransom's lovers in their state of equilibrium, the curious duality of their allegiance to both chastity and passion. It would be easy enough to explain their dedication to either state alone: puritan sexual would be sufficient to account for an excessive devotion to chastity; the cult of secular hedonism (in any of its time-honored versions) would explain their giving the priority to passion. But in the poem both passion and abstinence are said to be equally radiant: Their flames were not more radiant than their ice (stanza 13). The lovers are not caught in a struggle to resist a lesser for a higher good, whether that higher good be the things of the spirit or the pleasures of the flesh. Instead, they perform a delicate balancing act, maintaining a fine equipoise between two equally desirable but mutually exclusive values. What set of ethical attitudes would allow for the serving of such contrary masters? Most attempts to explain the poem founder on this problem. Mr. Buffington supposes that the lovers are husband and wife but that one of them has a former mate who is now dead. Passion is their right in that they are married, but the devotion of one to the memory of dead spouse makes abstinence equally appropriate. This supposition might explain how two lovers could be simultaneously torn between chastity and desire, but it is entirely too speculative. Nothing in the poem suggests that the lovers are husband and wife. Furthermore, the male lover speaks of their passion as (stanza 1), an assessment that would be possible only if the passion offended some ethical scruple. The dead may claim our exclusive emotional, even sexual, loyalties, but they have no moral right to them. In the of love, Dido alone has an uneasy conscience because her heart warms anew after the death of her poor Sychaeus. Bernard Bergonzi, in another important reading of the poem, acknowledges that both passion and abstinence are affirmed, but he divides the allegiances to each between the lovers and the poet (A Poem About the History of Love, Critical Quarterly, 4 [1962], 127-37). In attempt to explain the poem, Mr. Bergonzi invokes the medieval tradition of amor courtois, that secular rival to orthodox Christian which celebrated erotic love at the expense of the conventional ideal of chastity. The of Ransom's lovers, rather than being fornication or adultery, is a sin against this secular ideal of erotic love: By not consummating their love, or at least by allowing themselves to become separated, the two lovers had sinned against the religion of love itself, a concept familiar in medieval literature (Bergonzi, p. 130). The ironic Hell to which the lovers are relegated toward the end of the poem is their punishment for having succumbed to the temptation of honor (i.e., chastity) and having refused to love. The poet, while sympathizing with their ordeal, does not share the lovers' sensual loyalties: his own ethical position is that of a sad and resigned acceptance of the standards of conventional morality (Bergonzi, p. 134). Not only does this interpretation destroy the equipoise that is part and parcel of the lovers' moral attitude, passion here taking precedence over chastity, but it also misreads the poet's response to the lovers, which develops (as will presently be demonstrated) from anger at their strictness to an appreciation of their tortuous but beautiful equilibrium. …" @default.
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• W242029689 date "1977-03-22" @default.
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• W242029689 title "The Sword between Them: Love and Death in Ransom's The Equilibrists" @default.
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