February 18, 2022
“St. Valentine’s Day is past,” as Duke Theseus says at the end of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so the present newsletter, dear readers, is a slightly belated Valentine. Yet, although it may seem minor enough at first, its subject, the symbolism of the Valentine colors red and white, is of abiding interest, beyond the marketing ploys of a thoroughly commercialized holiday, a boon to the shops selling red and white roses and red and white lingerie. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the Shakespearean play most overtly concerned with the theme of imagination, explicitly in an often-quoted speech on the subject by Duke Theseus. Because of that, it is a play about opposites, for the imagination thinks in terms of opposites, of what William Blake called Contraries. In the context of a love story, red and white are the colors of romantic and erotic opposites, whose difference from each other generates both conflict and desire. But imagination is the power of connection, and the symbolism of red (or sometimes purple) and white expands into other contexts so that red and white become emblematic of the whole mystery of the imagination as a sense of the interrelation of all things. Red and white may symbolize the opposites of passion and innocence, of body and spirit, of love and death. And they may symbolize how all these contexts—the physical, the romantic, the spiritual—are on the deepest level paradoxically identified.
With some misgivings, I have decided to risk appending to this newsletter the lyrics of a song I wrote on this theme some time ago. The newsletter may function as a kind of advance commentary on the song, which is called “Heart’s Desire,” and is about all the interconnected mysteries summed up in the imagery of red and white. Not the stuff of which Top 40 hits are made, which has always been my problem as a would-be folk singer-songwriter, but oh well. The song’s second section alludes to two personal epiphanies, one of the inexplicable appearance of a beautiful white flower on my walking path in the evening many years ago, the other of a whole series of dreams dominated by a red so brilliant it perhaps could really exist only in dream. In the third section, red and white appear in their negative forms as the regressive Freudian drives of lust and aggression; the fourth section is, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, about the madness of romantic love, and the fifth section defends the claims of the body and the senses against the spirit’s will to transcend the physical, body and spirit being symbolized by red and white respectively. What is implied though not stated is that on the deepest level all these seemingly disconnected mysteries are the same mystery. I’ve attached the lyrics at the end so that readers not interested in highly idiosyncratic folk songs may skip them but find something insightful (I hope) in the newsletter itself.
Let us start with the simple and obvious, with red and white as the colors of romantic and erotic love. Lovers say it with flowers, and the standard red and white flowers, the rose and the lily, appear in the Biblical Song of Songs: “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys” (2:1) says the female speaker of a love dialogue. Conventionally, the red rose stands for passion and the lily, or sometimes a white rose, for purity and innocence. The conventions have been in place for quite some time. One of the most popular poems of the Middle Ages is the thirteenth-century allegorical The Romance of the Rose, a primary influence on Chaucer, who translated a good chunk of it. In it, a young man repeatedly tries to gain a red rose sequestered within a walled garden, imagery that itself goes back to the Song of Songs, in which the woman is “a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed” (4:12). The Romance of the Rose’s allegory is overtly sexual, the rose including associations of the female genitalia. It could thus be described as the most prolonged foreplay in literary history: to its original 4000 octosyllabic couplets by Guillaume de Lorris another poet, Jean de Meun, added 17,000, including disquisitions on everything from predestination to premature hair loss, the latter a subject no doubt of serious concern to lovers.
Rose and Lily readily become women’s names, with Rose often being a kind of dark-lady figure, as in Bob Dylan’s cryptic “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.” Rosemary kills the villain Big Jim out of love for the trickster-outlaw the Jack of Hearts, going to the gallows while Lily, ahem, turns over a new leaf. In Blake’s lyric “The Sick Rose,” the titular subject is both a rose preyed upon by a phallic worm and a girl named Rose. But, as one struggles to teach students, no associations are fixed in poetic imagery, so in some contexts the red and the white may symbolize male and female respectively. In my winter-fantasia newsletter recently, I mentioned Keats’s narrative poem The Eve of St. Agnes, in which the male lover, whose name is Porphyro, meaning red, again gains access to another sequestered woman, this time within a walled castle, and elopes with her through the snow and cold, which is associated with the sterility and hostility of her family.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the color symbolism shows up in a curiously oblique passage in which Oberon, the king of the fairies, recounts the story of how Cupid once shot one of his arrows of desire, a “fiery shaft” at a virginal figure, only to have it “quenched in the chaste beams” of the white moon. However,
“It fell upon a little western flower, / Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound, / And maidens call it love-in-idleness” (2.1.166-68). Out of this purple flower is made the “love juice” that drives the plot by making those anointed with it fall into or out of love. Although he does not follow up upon it here, Shakespeare knew that the image of the white flower turned red is an image of the inescapable connection of love with death. He had recently written a narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, inspired by the tale in Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of how the goddess Venus mourned the death of her mortal lover Adonis in a hunting accident by turning his blood into a red flower, the anemone. which means “windflower” because its petals are shaken off “all too swift and soon” (Rolfe Humphries translation). Also in Book 10 is the tale of Apollo mourning his mortal lover Hyacinthus by turning his blood into another red or purple flower, the hyacinth. And in Book 4 Ovid tells a story apparently of his own invention of Pyramis and Thisbe, star-crossed lovers who die through a series of obstacles and errors, Thisbe’s blood staining the hitherto white mulberry red. I say “star-crossed” advisedly, for the tale is a source for Romeo and Juliet, which is a companion play to Midsummer Night’s Dream, composed in the same year and sharing some of its imagery. The play that the “rude mechanicals” put on before the court in Act 5 is in fact a hilariously butchered rendition of Ovid’s tragedy of Pyramis and Thisbe.
Shakespeare’s comedy gives us a happy ending and eventually, thanks to Mendelssohn, a wedding march, but there are some surprisingly dark moments in it, reminding us that there is also a tragic vision in which love is a wound, and the wound is always fatal. The old tragic ballads knew this. Bob Dylan, with his usual trickster’s delight in deliberately bewildering those who just don’t get it, once defended folk music on the grounds that, unlike commercial music, it goes so deep that it taps into the visionary:
I have to think of all this as traditional music. Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. There’s nobody that’s going to kill traditional music. All those songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels—they’re not going to die. It’s all those paranoid people who think that someone’s going to come and take away their toilet paper—they’re going to die.
(Quoted in Greil Marcus’s The Old, Weird America, 110)
You really have to give him credit for that prophetic remark about the toilet paper, years before pandemic hoarding. At any rate, the roses growing out of people’s brains are an allusion to one version (there are dozens, if not hundreds) of the ballad “Barbara Allen,” at the end of which a rose grows out of her lover’s grave and a briar out of Barbara Allen’s, entwining in a true-love’s knot. I have a hunch Dylan also has in mind Blake’s “The Human Abstract,” in which a Tree of Mystery grows in the human brain. The phrase “vegetables and death” suggests that he knows a thing or two about the so-called dying god figures studied by Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough. If he didn’t, earlier poets did. Before the white-stained-red or purple flower became an image of tragic love, it was an image of death and rebirth going back to ancient rituals revolving around the death and rebirth of vegetation, symbolized as a dying and reviving deity. Adonis was in fact one such fertility deity before he became an icon of romantic love. When the fertility religions modulated into the “mystery religions” of the later Classical era, the purple flower symbolizing the death of all things natural in time was joined with the image of a star representing the immortal aspect of every human being, the spiritual self that transcended the natural cycle. When Milton mourns the premature death of his schoolmate Edward King in his pastoral elegy Lycidas, the dying shepherd Lycidas is associated with a “sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe.” Northrop Frye notes that in his elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” Walt Whitman associated the death of Abraham Lincoln both with the star and with an American purple flower, the lilac.
Reference to Lincoln leads us to ironic versions of red and white symbolism, in which the colors signify the twin drives of the Freudian unconscious, Eros and Thanatos, sex and aggression, lust and rage, all the more pathological when they are twisted around each other. There is war, and there is the war of the sexes, and it did not take Freud to make the literary imagination aware that the latter often fuels the former, The Trojan War was fought because of rivalry over a woman. In the mythology of Blake’s poems, history forms what Northrop Frye called an “Orc cycle,” in which Orc, a fiery-haired figure of energy and desire, revolts against the frozen, white-haired Urizen, figure of law, order, and repression, red versus white. The victory of Orc is always ironically cyclical, as he is either conquered by Urizen, the original dead white male, or ages into him, symbolizing the ironic cycle of frustrated desire and imagination that is human history.
The medieval English Wars of the Roses pitted the white rose of the house of York against the red rose of the house of Lancaster. But the imagery is merely ironic: neither dynasty represented energy or desire, and neither represented law and order. It was a pure power struggle; however, its resolution did result in the creation of a new symbol, the Tudor Rose, which is really a mandala figure that does symbolize the birth of a new order, that of the Elizabethan golden age, out of a union of opposites. A rose of five red petals representing Lancashire enfolds the five-petaled white rose of York. Such a lovely symbol to arise from a nasty series of wars, chronicled in Shakespeare’s history plays and one of the inspirations for George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. In the first book of The Faerie Queene, Spenser idealizes this symbolism, having his hero, St. George, the Redcrosse Knight and patron saint of England, bear a red cross on his white shield. Since St. George in Spenser’s allegory is also the Knight of Holiness, the red and white of his shield stand as well for the body and blood of Christ.
In the context of war, red and white stand for the blood and flesh of the soldiers, who are really human sacrifices. Hence the emblem of the Red Cross agency, originally a wartime relief organization. Hence also the red poppies commemorating the dead soldiers of World War I. All of this imagery may be summed up by “The Rose Upon the Rood of Time,” the title of an early poem by Yeats, who went through a kind of rose period in which he wrote a whole series of poems about the rose of eternity crucified upon the cross of time, an image he derived from his involvement in a number of esoteric groups, including the Rosicrucians.
Among the esoteric traditions, alchemy symbolized the making of the lapis or Philosopher’s Stone through the union of a red king and a white queen, the union being a liebestod or love-death. A famous representation of this union is the Rosarium Philosophorum, a series of woodcuts published in 1550. C.G. Jung’s The Psychology of the Transference is a detailed commentary on the Rosarium from the point of view of depth psychology. One of the initial woodcuts in the series, Jung’s Figure 3, shows the king, standing on the sun, and the queen, standing on the moon, exchanging flowers, over which hover a star and a dove. By figure 5, the couple are locked in a love embrace, but underwater. Figure 5a shows
the same watery embrace, but here the couple have acquired wings, implying some spiritualizing transformation. The phase of the alchemical opus represented here is labeled “Fermentatio.” This figure became the cover of Leonard Cohen’s early album New Skin for the Old Ceremony, which just goes to show that these symbols get around. In the next few figures, the couple have died and are together, intertwined, in the tomb/womb of a water-filled coffin. By the 10th and final figure, the couple are resurrected as a single hermaphroditic figure, a union of opposites associated with the number 10, the number of renewal, one through nine and then begin again.
These are archetypal images, and, like the Major Arcana of the Tarot cards, cannot be pinned down to a single meaning. Like Scripture, or the hexagrams of the I Ching (another of Dylan’s in-group references), they are polysemous, meaning different things according to the motivation and psychological state of the interpreter, their total meaning remaining beyond human comprehension. On the material level, the alchemists were delving into the mystery of matter and energy, the conundrum we still have not solved, the red king and white queen standing for the elements of sulfur and mercury. On the psychological level, the king and queen stand for the mystery of “marriage,” which is always between opposites no matter what the gender or orientation of the lovers involved. On the social level, they stand for the phenomenon that depth psychology calls transference, the kind of mutual identification that makes all social bonding possible, whether between friends, between members of a community, or between analyst and analysand. On the highest, mystical, or what the Middle Ages would have called the anagogic level, this marriage of opposites signifies the goal of the process of individuation, which is a higher identity greater than the ego that Jung calls the Self, which is at once human and divine. transcendent and immanent. Dante’s symbol of this in the Paradiso is the heavenly rose, the collective form of all the souls in eternity.
Shakespeare usually stuck to the human level, but he has one extraordinary anagogic poem, “The Phoenix and Turtle,” which I used for years as the going-out piece in my Shakespeare class, and which I was taught by Frye himself in his graduate course in Literary Symbolism. The poem is a funeral service for two birds, the phoenix and the turtle: mystical Pixar. I remember the moment in Frye’s class in which he asked what color turtles were, and a woman innocently said “green.” I shrank down in my seat with such embarrassment for her sake that I remember it forty years later, for the “turtle” is in fact a turtledove, and therefore white to the phoenix’s fiery red. The two birds have “married,” but the consummation of their marriage is a love-death, the marriage bed a funeral pyre, death by fire being an opposite yet identical permutation of the alchemical death by water.
The burden of the poem is that what to the ordinary eye are “a couple of fried birds” (Frye’s phrase—I still remember that too) are the emblem of a mystery beyond the grasp of reason, the mystery of the unification of opposites: “Two distincts, division none; / Number there in love was slain.” Reason is “in itself confounded, / Saw division grow together, /To themselves yet either neither,” crying out in consternation that, “If what parts can so remain,” then “Love hath reason, reason none.” That is the great line. In the newsletter about winter, I mentioned Dylan Thomas’s poem “A Winter’s Tale,” clearly influenced by “The Phoenix and Turtle,” but with the colors reversed: a burning “she-bird” descends and unites amid the lonely snows with a man desperately praying for love.
It is a consummation devoutly to be wished, but the problem is that you have to die to get there. Human life transpires on the earthly plane of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which we are, like the lovers, lost in the woods at night. The famous speech by Theseus on the imagination says that “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.” By “lunatic” he means religious visionary, but he is essentially saying that all three types are lunatics. They live according to imagination and the imagination is a form of lunacy—it is not just unreality but madness. Most people are not religious visionaries or poets, so love is the way in which they experience this madness, which takes the form not of some transcendent union of opposites but of their constant metamorphosis, one thing turning unpredictably into another, and, worse, one feeling turning into its opposite. Love makes an ass of us, as it does to Bottom, giving him an ass’s head and an occasional craving for hay. It humiliates even the queen of the fairies, Titania, whom the “love juice” made from the purple flower afflicts with a shameless passion for an ignorant, braying mortal. As the love juice is repeatedly applied, the two main couples fall in and out of love, always with the wrong person, always suffering painful rejection and unrequited desire. The changes are so sudden and irrational that at more than one point they feel they may be going mad, and they are not far wrong. Yet we identify with the lovers, and this is something we want. As my song has it, “Love is a madness / But it’s madness we crave.” What is wrong with us?
If I had an answer to that question, my life would have been quite different. I can offer only one suggestion. As Freud showed us, the romantic is grounded in the erotic, and the erotic is grounded in the body and the senses, which traditionally have taken a lot of blame for afflicting us with “carnal” feelings and desires. A yearning to transcend the metamorphic play of opposites usually leads to a repudiation of the body and the senses in favor of some kind of disembodied consciousness. A secularized version of this repudiation is still going strong in the ideal, popular in the AI community, of escaping into some uploaded virtual state. But to repudiate the body and the senses is to repudiate what only they can give us, miracles we take for granted, as my song catalogues: morning light, stars at night, the red and white tastes of cinnamon and vanilla. Likewise, to escape the excruciating pain of love, including the loss of love, we must escape what only love can give us, the ecstatic joys, the quiet happiness.
Yeats has a great poem, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” in which the Self rejects this leap upward in favor of a descent back into this world of conflict, symbolized by an ancient sword and “Flowers from I know not what embroidery-- / Heart’s purple”—things “Emblematical of love and war.” But when he makes this choice, “So great a sweetness flows into the breast” that “We are blessed by everything, / Everything we look upon is blessed.” Elsewhere Yeats makes clear that, for him, the poet also chooses the descending path, down into the play of language and its metamorphic opposites rather than the ascent towards what is beyond language. And yet at the bottom of the descent there is some kind of blessing. If I understood this, I would be a wiser man, but I know somehow that it is true.
The realm of the imagination is a metamorphic realm akin to the shifting dream world of the unconscious: there is a reason that the title of Shakespeare’s play calls its action a "dream." At the other end of his career, in The Tempest, Shakespeare has his magician figure Prospero, who on one level is a figure of the artist, the creator of illusions, say that “We are such things as dreams are made on.” At the ending of The Tempest, the romantic leads Ferdinand and Miranda are “discovered" playing a game of chess. In the second Alice book, Lewis Carroll’s heroine goes Through the Looking-Glass into a world modeled upon a game of chess, in which the pieces are red and white rather than the more conventional black and white. There is a Red Queen and a White Knight—and there is a Red King, who lies dreaming. Do not disturb his sleep, warn the indistinguishable opposites Tweedledum and Tweedledee, for we are nothing but the Red King’s dream. The last line of Through the Looking-Glass is, “Life, what is it but a dream?” But the deeper question is, who is dreaming us? Who is dreaming this play of opposites? We will not know until we wake, but chances are the dreamer will have our face.
References
C.G. Jung, The Psychology of the Transference, translated by R.F.C. Hull. In The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, volume 16 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung.
Greil Marcus, The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Picador, 1997, 2011.
Here is the song, whose tune is a kind of folk-Baroque pastiche for acoustic fingerstyle guitar.
Heart’s Delight ___________________________ 1. Red and white Heart’s delight: These are the colors we wear to the dance: White and red Quick and dead: Spirit and flesh interchanged in a glance We who know nothing Yet somehow know these Contraries emblems Of heart’s mystery 2. Whitest flower Evening hour Dropped on my path so mysteriously Strange and lost Like a ghost Haunting me now for a half century Reddest red Tulip bed Only in sleep could such color exist Every day Weeks that way Dream after dream, still the red would persist We who know nothing Yet somehow know these Contraries emblems Of heart’s mystery 3. Red and white Lust and spite Add them together, they spell misery See them thrive See them drive The two-cycle engine we call history. You thought they symbolized All love and faith Yet sometimes twisted to To plunder and rape 4. Call her Rose Juxtapose Sister fair Lily, and now you must choose Take your chance Dare to dance Though whatever you gain is whatever you lose Love is a madness But it’s madness we crave Please be my heartbreak The love songs all say 5. Adam’s mud Flesh and blood Plato’s despair, the result of the Fall: But morning light Stars at night It’s only the body that knows these at all. Taste of red cinnamon Says “You are here” Sweet white vanilla The senses so dear Red and white Heart’s delight These are the colors we wear to the ball White and red Wine and bread This is my body, and so say we all.
June, 2013
Revised February 14, 2022