Essence Divided (WAS: Kreature/Snape)

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 83151

Re: In Essence Divided

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Sydney" <sydpad at y...> wrote:

> > The comment sounds very much like a reference to that strange 
> > mystical poem  of Shakespeare's "Let the bird of loudest lay" 
> > also known as "The Phoenix and the Turtle". The concepts of
> > essence and division are central to the poem as a  whole. One 
> > verse goes:
> > 
> > So they loved as love in twain,
> > Had the essence but in one,
> > Two distincts, division none:
> > Number there in love was slain.
> > 
> > Anybody interested?
> > 
> 
> Astrid, that is an AWESOME catch!  To really get into this 
> discussion, here is the full text of the mysterious poem with some 
> explanatory notes:  
> http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem1850.html

Thanks for the reference. I had never encountered that poem before.
(As a digression, I wonder if common readers in Shakespeare's day
could understand it better than I -- I mean, understand which words
are the verbs and whch are the nouns and which verbs go with which
nouns.) 

I'm also wondering why they're dead (especially as the phoenix is the
symbol of overcoming death). Maybe they're dead because of the
symbolism of dying to this temporal world by being born into eternal,
timeless, or archetypal life. Are the poets REALLY trying to say there
is no more Love, Loyalty, Truth, and Beauty in this temporal world?
(Temporal 'shadows' of the Platonic ideals of Love, Loyalty, Truth,
and Beauty.)

While JKR may have gotten the phrase "in essence divided?" from her
recollection of that poem, I think it unlikely that the poem sheds
light on the Potter oeuvre -- the poem is about being in love, and
Harry and LV are NOT in love. TMR and LV are NOT in love, either.

"Love has reason, reason none," --?> "The heart has its reasons, which
the reason does not know." Wasn't that Pascal urging people to
Christian faith in spite of logic? 

Anyway, the idea of two become one by love ("Hearts remote, yet not
asunder; Distance and no space was seen" in this poem, "two hearts
that beat as one" in old pop songs) is a thing that Joseph Campbell
went on and on about in THE MASKS OF GOD. He cited the story that 
some Greek (Plato?) told: originally humans were a being with two
heads, four arms, four legs, etc, but the gods thought they were too
powerful that way, so Zeus split each human into two, so since then we
have been one-headed, two-armed, two-legged, and searching for our
missing other half.