Story’s End
O, I would tell soul’s story to the end,
Psyche on bruised feet walking the hard ways,
The knives, the mountain of ice,
Seeking her beloved through all the world,
Remembering – until at last she knows
Only that long ago she set out to find –
But whom or in what place
No longer has a name.
So through life’s long years she stumbles on
From habit enduring all. Clouds
Disintegrate in sky’s emptiness.
She who once loved remembers only that once she loved:
Is it I who wrote this?
****
Kathleen Raine quoted an important instruction of Carl Jung’s in her autobiographical volume, Farewell Happy Fields: “Find your myth and live it.” I neglected Raine’s work for years, being more interested in poetry as the engineering of words and worldliness, of personal idiom and specific observation. Myth, if any, had to be subject to rigorous updates, and there was obviously no god in the machine. Elizabeth Bishop, yes; Raine, sorry, no.
This reflected a widespread view, and was particularly related to ways in which mid-to-late 20th-century women poets reconfigured their roles. Nowadays, I think readers and poets are less tied to the snapping and mapping of the individual life, the “things” without which there could be no poetry. She died aged 95 in 2003, but Raine’s time may have dawned again – appropriately for a believer in reincarnation, It’s a good moment to pause and reconsider our myths.
Raine’s mythology was vaster than a single story, of course; her world of symbols was extensive, and what we might today call multicultural. One of the pleasures of the new edition of the Collected Poems is to watch a dual process: how she keeps faith with her spiritual predilections over a span of time and belief systems – Catholic, Neo-Platonic, Hindu, indefinably “mystical” – and how she develops them.
Story’s End is from the 1987 collection, The Presence. It shows Raine reviewing an aspect of the Jung-approved quest, that of Psyche, as told by Apuleius in The Golden Ass. In 13 freely structured lines, the allegorical journey is stripped down to its essence. What I like about the poem – and about much of the later work – is the minimalist candour of the speaker, the willingness, frankly, not to know. This amnesia is true to the sleep episode in the Psyche and Cupid story, but there’s surely a finite and personal note in its tone, a hint that Raine is also writing about old age.
The myth, in Jungian interpretation, is an allegory of the soul’s search for the beloved. It’s terrific soap opera. Psyche’s outstanding beauty makes her a serious threat to the cult of Aphrodite (Venus). When the latter’s son, Eros (Cupid) falls for her, hells of motherly jealousy break loose. Psyche’s sisters enter the plot, and Psyche is persuaded that her secret nocturnal lover is a winged serpent and she’d better destroy him. After the plan goes wrong (to put it mildly) she is set a series of killer tasks by the raging love goddess.
Raine radically abbreviates the story of the young woman’s tasks, only mentioning the third task, to obtain a vessel of black, icy, Styx-infected water. Indirectly, though, the poem takes us beyond the point where Psyche opens a forbidden beauty-box (you know what we girls are like) and passes out in well-deserved stupor. Cupid rescues her and Zeus helpfully transforms her into an immortal. Excluding this ultimate exaltation, Raine’s focus, set in lines five and six, is on puzzlement and forgetfulness.
No easy symbols fill the hesitations, the blanks indicated by Raine’s artless-seeming dashes. The diction shifts between simple directness and, I think, deliberately thumping ordinariness: “So through life’s long years she stumbles on.” It’s not the poem’s aim to invent reader-stopping images or metaphors and own the myth through verbal originality. Only readers are stopped, because Psyche-Raine is doing something new: she’s doubting her own narrative. The important metaphor is created by the cleverly lapsing grammar.
Psyche has forgotten her lover’s name, and she has even forgotten writing a poem for him. Is it the poem Story’s End that is questioned and almost erased when she asks “Is it I who wrote this?”
“This” might refer to the previous line, with its haunting, twisted echo of the refrain of the Pervigilium Veneris, (translated here): “She who once loved remembers only that once she loved”. It might imply an earlier poem of her own, perhaps The Marriage of Psyche. Or it could be a last thought added to the poem just written, suggesting a further, but not unwelcome, disintegration of clouds “in sky’s emptiness”.
Too little honoured in her own country and by her own gender, she might have spent her talents in later years on bitterness. She had more lasting things to console her. In the current poem, Psyche has survived much of her terrestrial myth. Forgetting is a natural part of it. The poem is not self-pitying or tragic: it’s simply the honest report of a particular late moment.
From the beginning – the first poem in this collection is Lyric, Stone and Flower (1943) – Kathleen Raine owned her voice. She continued to earn her archetypes and symbols to the story’s end.