'An Attenuation, a Rehandling, an Echo'

Here is the first stanza of Anthony Hecht’s “Upon the Death of George Santayana” (The Hard Hours, 1967), his elegy for the Spanish-born philosopher: 

“Down every passage of the cloister hung

A dark wood cross on a white plaster wall;

But in the court were roses, not as tongue

Might have them, something of Christ’s blood grown small,

But just as roses, and at three o’clock

Their essences, inseparably bouqueted,

Seemed more than Christ’s last breath, and rose to mock

An elderly man for whom the Sisters prayed.”

In 1941 at age seventy-seven, Santayana entered the Clinica della Piccola Compagna di Maria in Rome, a hospital-clinic run by a Catholic order of nuns. He remained there until his death eleven years later. As a thinker, Santayana recognized Lucretius and Spinoza as precursors and praised “naturalistic piety.” Born and raised a Catholic, he was an atheist:

 

“What heart can know itself? The Sibyl speaks

Mirthless and unbedizened things, but who

Can fathom her intent? Loving the Greeks,

He whispered to a nun who strove to woo

His spirit unto God by prayer and fast,

‘Pray that I go to Limbo, if it please

Heaven to let my soul regard at last

Democritus, Plato and Socrates.’

 

Last week I quoted Guy Davenport recommending to Hugh Kenner the first chapter of Santayana’s Realm of Essence (1927), the first volume in his tetralogy Realms of Being (published in one volume in 1942). The work begins: “The modern or romantic man is an adventurer; he is less interested in what there may be to find than in the lure of the search and in his hopes, guesses, or experiences in searching. Essence is perfectly indifferent to being discovered and unaffected by the avenue through which any discoverer may approach it; and for that very reason, the explorer ignores it, and asks what it can possibly be.”    

 

“And so it was. The river, as foretold,

Ran darkly by; under his tongue he found

Coin for the passage; the ferry tossed and rolled;

The sages stood on their appointed ground,

Sighing, all as foretold. The mind was tasked;

He had not dreamed that so many had died.

‘But where is Alcibiades,” he asked,

‘The golden roisterer, the animal pride?’

 

Echoes here of Dante and Eliot. In his first published prose work, The Sense of Beauty (1896), while discussing Othello, Santayana writes: "Love makes us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers. When a man knows that his life is over, he can look back upon it from a universal standpoint. He has nothing more to live for, but if the energy of his mind remains unimpaired, he will still wish to live, and, being cut off from his personal ambitions, he will impute to himself a kind of vicarious immortality by identifying himself with what is eternal. He speaks of himself as he is, or rather as he was. He sums himself up, and points to his achievement. This I have been, says he, this I have done.”

 

“Those sages who had spoken of the love

And enmity of things, how all things flow,

Stood in the light no life is witness of,

And Socrates, whose wisdom was to know

He did not know, spoke with a solemn mien,

And all his wonderful ugliness was lit,

‘He whom I loved for what he might have been

Freezes with traitors in the ultimate pit.’”

 

Referring to Dante in Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (1910), Santayana tells us: “Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a vision of things at arm’s length. Language is made palpable and experience voluminous in poetry.”

 

George Santayana was born on this date, December 16, in 1863, and died on September 26, 1952.