tim,
   try as i might to use your reading, for each poem, it still seems more
than a little unconvincing.  So i guess i have to let it go for now.

thanks,
bob


----- Original Message -----
From: Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, February 02, 2001 7:45 AM
Subject: Re: cantico del sole


> Bob,
>
> IF, as you write
>
> > ... only the fool is unafraid; doesn't feel  the
> > impulsion to hysteria always hot on the neck...
>
> AND IF
>
> > Francis' canticle
> > addresses this binary bogey, but, unlike the hysterics ...
> > resolves it on an affirmative plane, an expression of faith ...
>
>
> THEN St Francis is a fool.
>
> Also, the cantico is NOT entirely an affirmation.  What about the "Woe to
> him who dies in a state of mortal sin".   "Sin" and menace for the saint
are
> associated with sex with a woman.  You're overlooking the saint's blatant
> hysteria in an attempt to cast the cantico as pure affirmation.
>
>
> Tim
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "bob scheetz" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 10:53 PM
> Subject: Re: cantico del sole
>
>
> > Tim,
> >      "sister death" is a euphemisizing form (like eumenides);
> > the anti-thesis of morbid sexuality.  Post-lapsarian existentiality was
> the
> > same for medieval as it is for post-freudian man (i.e., even outside the
> > thrall of a religion of a castrating father god); his abiding cardinal
> > dilemma is love & death.   Everyman leads a life of quiet desparation on
> > each of those heads.  And only the fool is unafraid; doesn't feel  the
> > impulsion to hysteria always hot on the neck.
> >
> > As was obligatory for all medieval christian teaching,  Francis'
canticle
> > addresses this binary bogey, but, unlike the hysterics (st paul or
> hamlet),
> > resolves it on an affirmative plane, an expression of faith in the
> ultimate
> > meaning of...moon, stars, earth, water, critters...life/death, an ode to
> > joy.
> >
> > bob
> >
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]>
> > To: <[log in to unmask]>
> > Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 7:50 AM
> > Subject: Re: cantico del sole
> >
> >
> > > Bob,
> > > As for the St Francis allusion: the latent fear expressed in the
cantico
> > > with respect to concupiscent appetite (evident in the emphasis on
female
> > > purity and in the metaphorical equation of death with a woman's
embrace)
> > > stands, I think, as an analogue to the neurotic puritanical psychology
> of
> > > the poem's speaker rather than as an expression of archetypal
grandness.
> > If
> > > the recognition of human mortality were driving the saint into a sea
of
> > > women I'd agree with your reading. But what we find in the cantico is
> > > asceticism, not the quenched brand of Meleager.
> > > Tim
> >
> >