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Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

ARTEMIS, by                 Poet's Biography

Gerard de Nerval's "Artemis" is an exploration of dichotomies that intricately fold into one another, posing complex questions about love, mortality, divinity, and the nature of being. These questions converge in the imagery and allusions packed into this lyric. Nerval tackles temporal, spiritual, and earthly aspects of existence by focusing on two dominant themes: love and the tension between life and death.

The poem opens with a reflection on the cyclical nature of time, asking if the "Thirteenth" is the first or the last, and extending this question to love as well, asking if one is the "sole or the final lover?" This interplay of numbers hints at the cycles of the moon, further underscored by the invocation of Artemis, the moon goddess, and the themes of eternal recurrence. It reflects the poet's own turmoil of being stuck in a liminal space, oscillating between binaries-love and death, first and last, sole and many.

The line "Love her who loves you from the cradle to the grave" embodies the essence of this tension. It suggests a love that is eternal and yet marked by the boundary of mortality, a love both "delight" and "torment." The woman the speaker loves is equated to "Death she is, or the dead," implying that love, in its all-consuming nature, brings us face to face with the existential concerns of mortality and the afterlife.

The subsequent lines incorporate religious imagery, adding another layer of complexity to the poem. The "Holy Neapolitan with your hands full of fire," perhaps an allusion to a saint or martyr, extends the theme of duality into the realm of the divine. The references to a "rose with a violet heart" and "Saint Gudule's flower" serve to compare secular love with spiritual devotion. Here, again, Nerval is challenging traditional notions, posing the question of whether earthly love could indeed be a form of divine expression.

As the poem reaches its climax, it calls for the "white roses" to wither and the "white phantoms" to fall, asking them to relinquish their claim to divinity. The speaker seems to challenge traditional religious symbols that "insult our gods," instead finding something more sacred in "the saint of the abyss." It's a radical affirmation of the dark, the overlooked, and the underworldly as not just equal but possibly superior to the established religious and moral orders.

Nerval's personal history of mental health struggles and his complex relationship with love and death imbue this poem with a dark autobiographical sheen. His association with the French Romantic movement, with its emphasis on individual subjectivity and emotion, also makes this poem a significant cultural artifact. It shows a poet wrestling with the big questions of his time, yet doing so in a way that remains poignant and relevant today.

To sum up, "Artemis" by Gerard de Nerval is a tightly-woven tapestry of themes and questions that resonate far beyond its lines. Through a deft interplay of duality and ambiguity, it invites us to grapple with our own understandings of love, death, and the divine.


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