Myopia in Rose and Blue
Owen, Louise
MYOPIA IN ROSE AND BLUE By LOUISE OWEN MAN loves to liken one thing to another. Thence come sublimity, irony and absurdity; for everything in the world can be compared to anything else, and the...
...they reveal the wanderer from the parallelogram, the soul that plays see-saw among the planes...
...He so sets the pace of a poem wherein he is found...
...The more extraordinary the simile, the more illuminating the light is likely to be...
...It is not that art will ever lose its ancient inevitability...
...the lover forgets rose-petals and alabaster, and remembers no more than flesh, bone and epidermis...
...Alfred Noyes, accurate if a trifle grewsome, speaks of "hair like moldy hay...
...They are like the splintered bits of a mirror, in each of which is reflected a tiny and perhaps distorted bit of the author's personality...
...another, as a huntress, chaste and fair...
...My love is ardent as forbidden rum...
...But religion in any of its multiple forms tends to make perverts of its followers—whether it be faith in a god, a muse or a natural phenomenon...
...Almost as roseate is Swinburne, who speaks of "Luminous lashes thick as dreams in sleep...
...This is curiously paralleled by Elinor Wylie, she who dwells in the bluest depths, at the very nadir of blue...
...Where he has once appeared in a volume, he is likely to recur in others of the same author...
...Sometimes it struts and holds its head up high, Like a knight templar or a meadow-lark, Or a dress-suited freshman at a hop...
...These today are proud in power, And lord it in their little hour: The immortal bones obey control Of dying flesh and dying soul...
...Vincent Millay gives us in Witch-Wife...
...She that knew not where to hide, Is gone again like a jeweled fish from the hand, Is lost on every side...
...From such regions come similes of dubitable and other-worldly inspiration...
...When shall this slough of sense be cast, This dust of thought be laid at last, The man of flesh and soul be slain, And the man of bone remain...
...a mind like a painting by Mattisse...
...for everything in the world can be compared to anything else, and the result, in simile or metaphor or merely in phrase, depends on the personality of the man or woman who makes the comparison...
...One poet will address the moon as a goddess...
...in ditch or bog Filmed brilliant with irregular rainbows Of rust and oil...
...Like the color of dawn on snow is the flashing of light that Edna St...
...They are persons whose minds are arranged, not in the parallel layers and horizontal planes that characterize the minds of most of the world, but in layers that are not quite parallel, along planes that tip a little, that form any angle but a right angle...
...of a conscience, or a bosom, or a fleece, as white as snow...
...Vincent Millay says: "Still will I harvest beauty where it grows...
...the circle must forever appear slightly elliptical, the right angle must seem a little acute or obtuse...
...Certainly this world that is not flat and green is interesting...
...All these various-colored phrases give rise to a question— not a question as to the complexion or eyes or conversation one would desire in one's friends, but whether one prefers myopia in rose or blue...
...Comparisons may or may not be odious, but undeniably they are indicative...
...Miss Millay has found him: "Gone, gone again is summer the lovely...
...now rhomboidically, now askance...
...One man's meat may be another man's poison...
...But there is still the parabolical point of view to consider, space beyond space, curve beyond curve...
...What an angular entanglement there must be in the mind that says: "My soul is like a wilderness, Where beasts of midnight prowl...
...Oliver Herford, in A Child's Primer of Natural History, says: "My child, observe the useful ant, How hard she works each day...
...the ground recovers from its superficial earthquake...
...Even the most crystalline realism is faintly permeated with azure or rosepink...
...No normal state of mind would allow a youth to see spun gold in his lady's hair, rose petals in her cheeks, alabaster in her throat...
...he is so coolly colored, so elusive and so mystical, that he offers an irreproachable example of atmosphere and suggestion...
...On the other hand, there are ultimate depths of the imagination that will tint the lens differently...
...eyes like poached eggs...
...No single splinter may betray much, but from an assembled half-dozen one may learn that he likes striped neckties, waxed moustaches—or rose-colored glasses...
...She has more hair than she needs...
...all look at life a little aslant, or at any rate step on an inclined plane while they regard their particular bit of it...
...And the artist is a dweller on an inclined plane, betrayed by the curve or the angle of his companion, the colors of his landscapes...
...and these ellipses, these angles, become constantly less round, less right, as they are incarnated in the artist's concept...
...The long sweep through distance wherein the eye is trapped by no angles, the mingled and indefinable colors of the sky at midnight and before dawn: here are colors beyond the prism—phrases of ultraviolet and infra-red, sombrely akin to the dull brown taste...
...But the tenets of this faith are briefer and more tenebrous than other tenets...
...So we have heard a million times of lips as red as cherries or pomegranates...
...She works as hard as adamant (That's very hard, they say...
...Sometimes my love is diffident and shy, Like a Ford car seeking a place to park, Or like a husband in a corset shop...
...Priests and Druids, poets and lovers...
...Blue-veined and yellowish, Ambiguous to clasp, And secret as a fish, And sudden as an asp...
...And definitely sapphirine is Edith Wharton in Ethan Frome, with "an orchard of starved i8 THE COMMONWEAL May 7, 1930 apple trees writhing over a hillside among outcroppings of slate that nuzzled up through the snow like animals pushing out their noses to breathe...
...There I walked, and there I raged...
...And a certain minor poet, whose obscurity is not incomprehensible, says: "Her eyes were like the underside of a cake of soap in a soap-dish...
...The mauve of Housman provides a change of color, perhaps a little eery, transforming as the light of a partially eclipsed moon...
...The more strangely hued the vista, the more tempting it is to the visual appetite...
...Not ordinarily would he consider it complimentary to say that her neck was like a swan's...
...Oscar Wilde packs a whole characterization into a phrase: "She was so dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymn-book...
...Here are divergent escapes from the rectangular point of view, offered by an identical and dubitable inspiration: religion...
...Huneker gives us a metaphor faintly azure when he says, "How many flies are embedded in the amber of Sainte-Beuve's style...
...One man may walk by the sea and remark: "It sounds like eternity...
...Stoddard King's Sonnet of Strange Similes— "My love is like a stick of spearmint gum— The flavor lasts—my love is like the tune My neighbor plays each morning until noon (That is, it haunts me always...
...It seems curious that this cool creature, the fish, has not appeared oftener in metaphor and simile...
...one man's eye sees beauty where another's can detect only desolation...
...To the lay mind, the microbe is a menace...
...Beethoven found a sonata in the light of the moon, where so many poets have found so many verses...
...If one looks at life through the medium of literature—that is, through the eyes of Edna Millay or of Shelley, of Oscar Wilde or Alfred Noyes, of the Bible or of that erstwhile artist, the lover—then one discards the clear lens that is reality, and sees through a glass darkly or brightly...
...The lady is no less charming, but her charms are viewed through a crystal lens, not through pink spectacles...
...Edna St...
...A kaleidoscopic shift of angles gives us the mind that says: "The mountains skip like rams, and the little hills like young sheep...
...In colored fungus orb the spotted fog Surprised on foods forgotten...
...to Paul de Kruif the same creature is an adventure...
...Yankee Doodle gives us: "Father and I went down to camp, Along with Captain Gooding, And there we saw the men and boys As thick as hasty pudding...
...one creator's literature is another creator's music...
...For such minds, comparison is not so much description as it is explanation: explaining the known in terms of the unknown, or the unknown in terms of the known...
...Shouldering the thoughts I loathed, In their corrupt disguises clothed, Mortality I could not tear From my ribs, to leave them bare Ivory in the silver air...
...Rupert Brooke has used him to advantage: "In a cool curving world he lies, And ripples with dark ecstasies...
...For no eye can see a thing as it actually and absolutely is...
...Wanderers eastward, wanderers west, Know you why you cannot rest...
...The spiritual savage caged Within my skeleton, raged afresh To feel, behind a carnal mesh, The clean bones crying in the flesh...
...But when someone comes along and says: "The silence was as thick as old-fashioned split-pea soup," then we jump, we ponder, we see a light glimmering over the landscape that never glimmered before...
...It seems that comparison is inevitably myopic...
...Tis that every mother's son Travails with a skeleton...
...of a fog thick enough to cut with a knife...
...It is rather that there are rebels, deviants from the Euclidian formula who discard the old-time "two plus two equals four," and replace it with "five less four plus three equals four...
...It is amusing to look at life, now pinkly, now bluely...
...She learned her hands in a fairy-tale, And her mouth on a valentine...
...But even more does it reveal the ulterior point of view of the person who makes the comparison, and it puts its revelations in terms of blueor rose-colored glasses...
...So does the curious religion called love tip the ground beneath the feet of its converts...
...She is neither pink nor pale, And she never will be all mine...
...Her own Self-Portrait is mathematically metaphorical...
...And her voice is a string of colored beads, Or steps leading into the sea...
...The pinkish or azurine landscapes thus displayed may be a relief to the eye jaded with umber, yellow and leaf-green...
...Comparison depends on personality...
...mute and dumb My love is, like a punctured kettle-drum...
...A second man says: "It sounds like coal going down a chute...
...In the sun 'tis a woe to me...
...another, as the mother of light or the queen of the sky...
...Tis brightest after sunset, like the moon, And, like the onion, strongest during June...
...Still fair in color, but shading away from pink, is Hardy's simile in The Return of the Native, in which he speaks of a road that goes through a wood, over a low hilltop, like a parting in a head of hair...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 1
