The Essence of Art
Like the ebb and flow of the water on the beach and the constant marching of the ants on Lily’s plantains, time moves forward constantly and unceasingly. Sitting before her easel with her paintbrush, Lily is struck with a vision in which she realizes this. Upon this epiphany, she strikes the blurred and swirling canvas before her with a simple line—a focal point among the indistinct chaos and a symbol of permanence in a world of change. She therefore does the artist’s part in immortalizing a moment in time like other artists, authors, and musicians both before and after her. Some such artists include John Keats, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Thomas Hardy.
In “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats has a similar visionary experience. The nightingale pulls him from the normal procession of time with his evening song. In the world Keats leaves, “palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs” (26) and “youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” (27). In contrast to this sad mortal plain, the land of the trance Keats enters is timeless and formless; he imagines that the “embalmed darkness” (43) veils splendid scenery and pleasures. As long as the nightingale’s song is present, Keats remains bodiless in this ageless vision where it seems “rich to die” (55). Unfortunately, this strange and wonderful bird abandons his branch and flies away, thrusting Keats confused back into time’s rushing current. Like Lily’s vision, Keats’s removed him from space and time, allowing him to fly on the “viewless wings of Poesy” (33) and interact with a sort of eternal timelessness.
Hardy also acknowledges the importance of the present; though he does so out of fear of the future. While his vision does not remove him from time, “Channel Firing” itself preserves the anxiety of the pre-World War I zeitgeist. During this time period, the world tottered on the brink of worldwide war. The “great guns” (1) that “shake the coffins” (2) are literally able to wake the dead, who believe that judgment day has arrived. One skeleton wonders if the world “Will…ever saner be;” (26) the firing naval guns indicate to him a precarious future to come. Though the concept of impending war is ominous, the advancing time cannot be stopped. Instead, Hardy freezes the few months’ time before the war in his poem. His vision envelops and encapsulates the fears and disquietude of a whole world at the verge of war.
Can a place where time stands still actually exist? Ostensibly, only mythology can offer us such a location. In “The Lotos-Eaters,” Tennyson illustrates an island that possesses an intrinsic magical property that transforms it into a visionary dreamland. Time is frozen here; Odysseus lands on “which is always seemed afternoon” (4). While his men still remember their homes, this timeless island, inundated with the odors of windblown petals and succulent fruit, bids them to disregard their past and future lives. Outside this land, “time driveth onward fast,” (85) but here, Odysseus’ men exist without care of what was or what will be. Their “half-dream” (101) state removes them from time; without past or present, time has no context.
Like a branch to a man falling from a precipice, Lily’s line is something rare to hold on to in a life that constantly marches towards death. To consider the present as Lilly, Keats, Hardy, and Tennyson do is not meaningless or sentimental; nor is it pointless to cling to these significant moments long into the future. To find a lingering moment, no matter how seemingly insignificant, is both substantial and rare. It is the essence of vision—the essence of art. I have had my vision.
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