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