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in this case, the description of the hashish-eater’s visions and experiences.
In case the main title, together with the text, had not made the matrix sufficiently explicit, the poem also provides a subtitle. This subtitle, “The Apocalypse of Evil,”
has a number of possible meanings, all of which, however, reinforce the matrix of the text. The first meaning, “revelation” (etymologically, to “uncover” or “disclose”), and
110 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
specifically a religious revelation in the form of a vision, describes perfectly the content of The Hashish-Eater. The second meaning, a (written) description of such a vision, also fits the poem perfectly. The third meaning bears on the content of the vision, specifically of the Apocalypse of Saint John, or the Book of Revelations. This involves a battle, on a cosmic scale, between supernatural forces of good and evil. Such conflict pervades the text (Joshi 17), taking on the twin forms of tyranny and rebellion—
drawing heavily on the myths of Prometheus and Satan/Lucifer that formed com-
monplace topoi of the Romantic-Decadent-Symbolist trajectory from which Smith’s aesthetic derives. Well-known biblical intertexts such as the Garden of Eden and Tower of Babel stories provide further topoi. The subtitle’s modifier, “of evil,” establishes the conversion from positive to negative in the narrative’s progression, inverting the usual, implicit, “of good.” The conversion again involves an ambiguity, as it could modify either the revelation itself, as if to signal that the hashish-eater himself has an evil nature—supported by his attempts to seize power in the opening sections of the text (a Satanic, rebellious act in a Christian context), or it could modify the cosmic battle’s outcome, signaling that evil will win—as it does.
Properly understood, then, the title of the poem establishes the poem’s matrix
and the overdetermining motivation for many other elements of the text. The “Argument” provides a further clue explaining another of the text’s features. The text involves not only the positive-to-negative progression but also many small steps, each greater than the last, on a paradigm set of mystic states. The “Argument” exposes the intertext by its use of the term “Buddhic plane” which derives from Theosophy. Theosophy, in fact, posits a sort of stepladder or paradigm set of progressively greater mystic states. The Hashish-Eater more or less follows this sort of progression. Further, the poem takes each of these steps as itself a paradigm set, a number of separate visions in each of them, thus creating the work’s “kaleidoscopic” effect.
Before beginning the explication, the chief stylistic feature of the text, noticed by every reader: that of the high proportion of rare words, archaisms, terms from poetic diction, and so on. Michael Riffaterre has dealt with the polarizing, valorizing, hyperbolizing effect of such usages, formulating his rule of “lexical particularization”: Quite simply, then, any word with conspicuous formal features, such as a
technical term or an archaism, a foreign borrowing, a new coinage, any such word, regardless of its own specific meaning, serves as the hyperbole for its more frequent or less peculiar specialized synonym, partial or total. This is the phenome-non I should now like to rephrase as my rule of lexical particularization: In any lexical paradigm of synonyms (or antonyms), the word with the least collocability or the most morphologically peculiar confers the maximal emphasis upon its metaphorical or metonymic meaning in a given context. (Riffaterre 1979, 412; emphasis in original) Each of these categories makes frequent appearances in the poem. One class,
neologisms, appear especially in the form of novel compound words, and especially as hyphenated adjectives. Examples include: “million-colored” (2); “spaceward-
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111
flown” (6: a double example); “lava-langued” (12: incorporates a rare term as well);
“moonquake-throbbing” (another double example); “jewel-builded” (also an archaic form); “storm-possessèd” (also, poetic diction).
The justly famous opening lines establish at once the theme of tyranny and re-
bellion, introducing as well imagery typical of the poem:
Bow down, I am the emperor of dreams;
I crown me with the million-colored sun
Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,
Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume
The spaceward-flown horizons infinite. (1–6)
The term “emperor” comes from the top of a royalty paradigm, while the modifier “of dreams” establishes the nature of the mystic attainment indicated by the title—dreams represent one form of prophetic revelation or apocalypse, and the term also commonly serves to refer to other kinds of vision as well. In the second line the phrase “I crown me” deviates from the norm through its use of a reflexive form of
“to crown,” as normally another performs the act of crowning a king or emperor, and foregrounds the abnormal usage with the archaic or poetic “me” instead of “myself” as the reflexive object. The modifier “million-colored” applied to “sun” hyperbolizes its normal light-giving seme; “million” comes from the top of a number scale.
The term “vestment” has a specifically religious sense, reinforcing the poem’s matrix.
“Zenith,” through its odd shape and technical use, hyperbolizes its meaning as a highest point, further polarized with the apparently paradoxical modifier “mounting,” as this would seem to make an oxymoron when applied to a highest point. The infrequent “illume” hyperbolizes again, through the form’s rarity, the light-giving seme of “sun,” displaced now to the speaker, playing off the matrix as well by the related form “illumination,” which has its specifically spiritual-mystical sense ( cf. illuminatus,
“enlightened one”). Whereas the doubly compound neologism “spaceward-flown”
and the inverted position of “infinite” (after the modified noun) massively hyperbolize the destruction of normal limits, valorizing the transgressive nature of the rebellion.
The metaphors employed here are traditional; as Carl Jung says, the “crown
symbolizes his relation to the sun, sending forth its rays; his bejewelled mantle is the starry firmament; the orb is a replica of the world; the lofty throne exalts him above the crowd” (258).
The next section of the text tells of the attempts of various animated geologi-
cal features to follow or catch the narrator. “The fiery-crested oceans” (8) invert the usual water, liquid seme of the “ocean” sememe, while the “jealous moons” (9) that urge them to follow the narrator serve as the negative of the narrator’s own
“sun.” The “mountains horned / with peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed /
with sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued” (10–12) have acquired animal characteristics with their horns and maws; the “adamant” comes from the very top of a hard-
112 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
ness paradigm scale. They attempt to “Usurp the skies with thunder” (13) wherein
“usurp” directly reveals the political nature of the conflict as rebellion or tyranny; the “thunder” appears displaced from the skies, of which it would normally appear as attribute, and indirectly refers to the Romantic theme of the fall of Satan/Lucifer, in which it appears as attribute of both Satan and the tyrant God he rebels against. More Satanic imagery appears in the next line, as “serpent-shapen trees” (14) reflect the Garden of Eden story in which man, tempted by the serpent (Satan) eats of the forbidden tree of knowledge. The continents “Pursue my flight through ages spurned to fire / By that supreme ascendance” (16–17); “spurn” has particular reference to striking with the foot as well as its “reject with disdain”
meaning; the “ages” introduce a sequence of reified time periods that appear in the poem as parallels to spatial domains.
The sequence shifts to animate beings proper, as “sorcerors / And evil kings”
like runes of ever-twisting flame” (19–20). Two metonyms of the scrolls here involve the apocalypse and rebellion matrices: the “dragon” and the “worm,” both of which serve as alternative terms for “Satan,” the latter as a synonym of serpent or dragon. Next the “sirens of the stars” (21) appear with “star” as a negative sun, as
“moon” has already, with the hostility seme displaced to the sirens, and a fine use of synaesthetic imagery in the mention of their “foam-like songs of silver fragrance wrought” (22). Moons again appear as negative suns, with their hostility seme partially displaced to their inhabitants: “viper-eyed, senescent devils” (24) and “antic gnomes, abominably wise” (25); nevertheless, the moons carry out the rebellious action, as they “Heave up their icy horns across my way” (26) which may, as well, displace the horns of the “devils” already mentioned. (Horns appear frequently in metaphoric descriptions of crescent moons.)
The narrative continues:
But naught deters me from the goal ordained
By suns and eons and immortal wars,
And sung by moons and motes;
(27–29)
The passage underscores again the positive to negative conversion in this passage, as the “suns” find their negative in “moons” and “eons” intrudes a temporal term in an apparently reified, spatial, sense, while “immortal wars” makes explicit the conflict matrix, the modifier “immortal” creating an apparent oxymoron as war necessarily occurs in time, therefore making it finite or “mortal.” “Motes” has a number of possible meanings; here it occurs in the sense “stars” (cf., for example, Smith’s “The Motes” for this sense of the word). The next lines elaborate on the goal:
the
goal
whose
name
Is all the secret of forgotten glyphs
By sinful gods in torrid rubies writ
For ending of a brazen book; the goal
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113
Whereat my soaring ecstasy may stand
In amplest heavens multiplied to hold
My hordes of thunder-vested avatars,
And Promethèan armies of my thought
That brandish claspèd levins.
(29–37)
The secret nature of the goal’s name hyperbolizes the narrator’s transgression
in seeking it; the mysterious “sinful gods” again reiterate the transgression seme. The word “writ,” here an archaism for “written,” also occurs in the terms “holy writ”
and “sacred writ,” calling in the mystic attainment matrix; the “brazen” modifying the
“book” involves a similar polysemy, as it literally here means “made of bronze” or perhaps “bronze-hasped” or “bound,” but also calls in the “brash, outspoken,
over-bold” meaning, actualizing the poem’s conflict or rebellion semes. As a whole the book image recalls that of mediaeval grimoires and other “forbidden” tomes. Line 33’s “ecstasy” again makes explicit the mystic attainment matrix, as its etymological meaning specifically refers to a religious trance, with one “standing out” in an out-of-body experience. The next line’s “heavens” provides another dual sign, with its twin meanings of sky and religious otherworld—the appropriate regions for a religious rebel to usurp. “Hordes” and “armies” make explicit the military, combative nature of the narrator’s aspirations; the modifiers “thunder-vested” and “that
brandish claspèd levins” once again actualizes this seme shared by the rebel Satan and the tyrant God. The term “avatar” refers to an incarnation of a deity, explicitly showing the narrator’s pretensions; “Promethèan” refers directly to the myth of Prometheus, foreshadowing the positive to negative narrative conversion.
Having thus established his attainment of this unnamed goal, the narrator calls his memories, “intolerably clad / In light the peaks of paradise may wear” (38–39); emphasizing height with the term “peaks,” while the term “paradise,” a synonym for the Garden of Eden, again recalls the Biblical story of disobedience and subsequent fall. Having done this, he continues: “And lead the Armageddon of my dreams” (40) which provides a synonym of “apocalypse” in the sense of cosmic battle between
forces of good and evil, with the particular modifier “of my dreams” converting it to his own cosmic consciousness. There follows a simile in which we discover that the memories and/or dreams stretch back to “alien epochs” (44) and “their arms / Up-raised, are columns potent to exalt / with ease ineffable the countless thrones / of all the gods that are or gods to be, / And bear the seats of Asmodai and Set / Above the seventh paradise” (44–49). Here the narrator explicitly claims more power than
“all the gods that are or gods to be,” using again “throne” imagery to convey the point. The names “Asmodai” and “Set” both refer to demons in traditional infernal descriptions; the first occurs in the apocryphal Book of Tobit, and more commonly appears as Asmodeus or Chashmodai; the second comes from Egyptian mythology;
their odd shape serves to hyperbolize them as metonyms of Satan. “Above the seventh paradise” again explicitly raises the storming of heaven intertext and matrix. Thus concludes the poem’s first paragraph.
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The second paragraph introduces a series of the narrator’s visions thus:
Supreme
In culminant omniscience manifold,
And served by senses multitudinous,
Far-posted on the shifting walls of time,
With eyes that roam the star-unwinnowed fields
Of utter night and chaos, I convoke
The Babel of their visions, and attend
At once their myriad witness.
(49–51)
Here the hashish-eater usurps the terms “supreme” and “omniscience,” both
reserved for God in normal theological usage, and further heightens the sense of his power by referring to his “senses” as “serving” him. The phrase “utter night and chaos” invokes classical mythology, in which the personifications of this couple created the universe; “Babel” refers to the biblical myth of ill-fated religious rebellion—many works parallel it with both the Eden myth and the rebellion of
Satan; “visions,” here literally “sense of sight” (of his “eyes”) also involves the religious/spiritual sense of “revelation.”
Having established this, the narrator continues with descriptions of many varied scenes, all of which involve the mystic attainment or cosmic consciousness matrix (at least through the metonymic imageries drawn from “myth and fable” which occur frequently in apocalyptic literature) and the recurrent conflict theme. The first of these concerns the already “fallen Titans” (57) directly evoking the classical myth of tyranny and resultant rebellion; the poem provides them with another set of enemies, in a group of antonymic “dwarves” (59). (One may note that this form was considered
incorrect at the time, “dwarfs” serving as the plural until J. R. R. Tolkien popularized the form “dwarves.”) The scene shifts to “Some red Antarean garden-world” (66) introducing the poem’s first use of an actual star name; “Antares” etymologically means
“resembling or rival to” the red war-god Ares or Mars, thus actualizing the conflict theme; the garden imagery of course reintroduces the Eden myth, and indeed we find exactly such a religious rebellion here: the hashish-eater sees:
The sacred flower with lips of purple flesh,
And silver-lashed, vermilion lidded eyes
Of torpid azure; whom his furtive priests
At moonless eve in terror seek to slay
With bubbling grails of sacrificial blood
That hide a hueless poison.
(67–72)
The flower appears shot through with “animal” qualities that violate its normal
“plant” nature; the term
“grails,” with its reference to the Holy Grail, hyperbolizes the religious nature of the transgression.
In the next segment he declares that he reads:
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115
Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx,
The annulling word a spiteful demon wrote
In gall of slain chimeras;
(73–75)
He leaves the nature of this vision appropriately enigmatic, but one may note a pervasive “hostility” seme through the passage, together with its sequence of fantastic beasts.
The next vision, that of some wizards capturing a “gulf-returning roc” (77),
includes several aleatory details that further connect it to the “apocalypse” matrix: the wizards’ “pentacles” (76), typical sorcerors’ paraphernalia; the terms “gulf” (77) and “storm” (78), both of frequent occurrence in infernal contexts; the “webs of dragons’ gut” (80), dragon a common serpent synonym and Satan epithet; the “captive giant” (81) recalling the classical myth of the Giants’ rebellion against the gods and subsequent punishment; the “Uranian sapphires” (84) and “amethysts from
Mars” (85) both invoke planets named for gods heavily involved in war and rebellion—of the planets, the poem names only Mars, Saturn, and Uranus—the first the god of war, the other two both involved in generational revolutions.
In the next segment, he reads:
With slant-lipped mages, in an evil star,
The monstrous archives of a war that ran
Through wasted eons, and the prophecy
Of wars renewed, which shall commemorate
Some enmity of wivern-headed kings
Even to the brink of time.
(86–91)
The imagery could hardly emphasize the eternal nature of conflict and reli-
gious rebellion more clearly than this. Note the term “prophecy.” The “kings” ( royalty seme) have the modifier “wivern-headed,” i.e., “dragon-headed,” the head normally considered as the center of thought and emotion, and director of action.