"Three Descents" by Scott Cairns

I'm not much of a poetry reader but I've found this poem by Scott Cairns endlessly fascinating. It appeals to so many different interests of mine: theology, Eastern Orthodox thought, classical mythology.

Cairns' poem has three movements. The first two movements depict two pagan tales of journeys into the underworld: Aeneas and Orpheus. The third movement depicts the Eastern understanding of Christ's own descent into hell.

What follows is my own amateur commentary on the poem:

Three Descents

I. Aeneas

As the beloved Palinurus sank

more deeply beneath wave and memory,

as the remnant of his race descended

painted planks to step on foreign shore

and there spark fire, gather wood and water,

even as the god's red fist fell hard into the

sea,

Aeneas pressed through the tangled underbrush

to gain the door to hell. First, of course, he found

the temple of another petty god, graved

with images of all that lay ahead--

his fortune and fate of every soul

he'd implicated in his flight from Troy.

He barely looked, so used he had become

to how little pleasure Time could bring,

so engaged by the prospect of stepping

briefly out of it, if only to return

to Time's demands when he returned to light.

He hurried through the golden vault to find her

whose words would lead him throu

gh the awful gates.

And what would he remember years from now

of what he'd find? Little, save the wretched

figure of his own father coupling death,

nearly indistinguished amid

that mass of shades like dogs tied together

whining. And the figure of the Sybil

likewise bound, then tossed, a bent toy skipped across

a marble floor, moot refusal widening

her eyes, opening her throat as the god's thin voice

coughed out the infernal terms Aeneas

believed he sought, might welcome, until he heard them.

Commentary:

This first section of Cairn's poem tells the tale of Aeneas of the Aeneid. The hero, Aeneas, as he fled from the ruin of Troy in order to fulfill his destiny to be the founder of the Eternal City of Rome, seeks out the entrance to the Underworld in order to fulfill his duty to visit his dead father. In order to do this, as the priestess of Cumae warns him, he must be approved by the gods for if he is not he will be unable to leave the Underworld once he has arrived. The way for him to determine his divine approval is if he finds a golden bough which will grant his access. He does and so he enters Hades, guided by the Sibyl.

His journey among the dead is painful as he must confront the woman, Dido, who killed herself for love of him as well as the ghosts of fallen warriors and dead babies. It is not a pleasant journey. Close to the climax of his journey, meeting with his dead father Anchises, Aeneas witnesses the final purification that dead souls must undergo before beginning their new existence: drinking from the river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.

Cairns' commentary on Aeneas' journey is brief yet telling. In the

fifth and sixth stanzas, Cairns cites Aeneas' selfish desire to undergo the adventure to the underworld: to escape from Time. Even as he fulfills his duty to honor his father, Aeneas' journey out of Time causes his to turn a blind eye to "the fate of every soul he implicated in his flight from Troy". Consumed as he was with his desire to escape from Time, Aeneas was ignorant of his own guilt in their deaths, and especially in the death of Palinuris, the captain of his ship who he threw overboard to please the gods.

Another important characteristic is the state of the population of the underworld. The Shades- mere shadows of their living forms- are an indistinguishable mass "

like dogs tied together". Here there is no individuality, no self... only the huddled mass of humanity reduced to a pack of dogs. This is a tragic vision no doubt.

II: Orpheus

That his eyes positively shove with the image

he had shaped- of sweet reprieve, of his hand upon

the beloved, lifting her from the narrow crypt

caught floating on barren stillness, unaccustomed

silence-- could not be comprehended by those few

whose minds retained a trace of how the present gloom

was nothing of itself but served to amplify

the absence of the luminous occasions worked

above. That his lit gaze upon those shades who lined

the path could hurt them like a flame did not occur

to him, though he observed their trembling as he passed,

had puzzled as they shrank, slipped back into the Dis.

Her tender heel bitten to the bone, the woman

could barely walk the ruined path she followed down,

and as he pressed with greater speed to apprehend

her frail figure hobbled by its crumbling clay, she turned

to understand the source of sudden suffering,

as if a boy had held a surgeon's glass above

a shriveling midge now stricken by the sun's light drawn

and focused to a beam. As their eyes met, her loss

was total and immediate. When he returned

alone to the sunlit world of things, his life

became one long attempt at shaking free his culpability

in her undoing. And later, as his own flesh

was torn, his body sundered by the famished hands

of famished women, he breathed a last, a single note,

contrite at how his lesser love had hurt her.

Commentary:

Orpheus' quest to the underworld was spurred, not by a selfish desire for glory, but to pursue his wife Eurydice who had died after being bitten on the heel by a poisonous snake. The tale of his journey into the underworld is a tragic one. Granted the graces of the gods, Orpheus ventures into the underworld to reclaim his beloved from her crypt. Orpheus charmed Hades and Persephone with his music. These gods of the underworld then promised that Eurydice could return to the living world. But her rescue and resurrection would contingent on a terrible condition: When Orpheus and Eurydice climb the long stair out of the depths of Hades' realm, they could not look back. If one of them looks back, Eurydice will be lost forever. Such a condition will discern the quality of Orpheus' love for Eurydice: if his love is ruled by agape, a desire for her best interest, he will be able to deny his passion for her long enough to guarantee her resurrection. If, however, his love is selfish and under the control of his passions, he will not be able to resist turning back to her.

The tragedy of Orpheus' tale comes when, just upon reaching the living world, Orpheus' passions overwhelm him and he turns to watch Eurydice. As he turns, as her form fills his vision, he breaks the condition of her resurrection and she is snatched back into the underworld, lost to him forever. And, as if the loss of his beloved was not punishment enough, Orpheus was himself killed by being torn to bits by the impassioned Maenaids in the midst of a Bacchic orgy. And upon his death, his last thought was, as Cairns so carefully and precisely puts it, how his lesser love, his love driven by passion, had doomed Eurydice.

Like Aeneas, Orpheus passes the residents of the underworld in his quest. The Shades, in Cairns' recounting, are wounded by the life that Orpheus brings with him. Like the pain that occurs when a light is first turned on after being in the dark, Orpheus' life burns the Shades whose entire existence is shadowy, barely corporeal, all but annihilation. Orpheus' life hurts those who exist only in death.

III: Jesus

That his several wounds continued to express

a bright result, that still the sanguine flow

courses tincturing the creases of his cheek

and wended as he walked to bless the bleak,

plutonic path with crimson script declaring

just how grave the way that he had come,

that underfoot the very clay he traveled

sank beneath an unaccustomed weight

occurs as no surprise. That he was glad

is largely otherwise, as would be the news

that every sprawling figure found en route

acquired at his approach an aspect far

more limpid than the lot that lay ahead.

As if his passing gained for hell itself

a vivifying agency, each shade

along the way rose startled, blinking, at once

aware that each had been, until this moment,

languishing, until this moment, dead.

Thus, suddenly aware that each among

the withered crowd had by his presence met a sudden quickening, the multitude

made glad by his descent inclined to join

him on the path recovering each loss,

exulting in each past made newly present.

His etched face luminous and very flesh

mde brilliant by the unremitting pulse,

he gains the farthest reaches where the ache

of our most ancient absence lay. He lifts

our mother and our father from beneath

the mindless river, draws them to himself, and turns.

Commentary:

We come finally to the descent of Christ into the underworld. The richness of the symbolism that Cairns' invokes in this poem is extraordinary; the contrasts between Christ and both Aeneas and Orpheus are sharply drawn and exquisite.

First, the symbolism:

The first stanza depicts Christ's blood on his cheek as a "a sanguine flow coursed tincturing the creases of his cheek". The sanguine flow, of course, describes the redness of the blood of Christ. But the language of the sanguine is also an echo of the tradition of heraldry. Further, the language of "tincturing" is also reminiscent of the colors used to emblazon a heraldic shield. What emerges from this heraldic imagery is a picture of Christ, noble even in death: death was something that he chose, that he willed for our sake and so Christ-in-death is not made subject to the horrors of being dead but instead demonstrates his Lordship even in death.

In the second stanza, the "crimson script" is an image of the blood that marks the path that he walks into the underworld, a path "that sank beneath an unaccustomed weight". The unaccustomed weight is, as C.S. Lewis once wrote, the "weight of glory". Christ is a presence of substance in an unsubstantial place.

Second, the comparison:

When it comes to the population of hell, we saw in Aeneas that the Shades were a pack of dogs, no personality. In Orpheus, the Shades were burned by the life that Orpheus bore into the Underworld. With Christ, however, we see that the presence of Life itself, instead of hurting the Shades, brings life to them again. His presence is a "vivifying agency" that causes them to awake, creating in them a "sudden quickening". This language of "quickening" is an archaic way of speaking of living: "the quick and the dead". But there is more to this language than simply the image of life; it is the image of birth, the image of brand new life. The "quickening" is the name for the when a woman first feels her fetus move. Christ is the "firstborn from the dead" as Scripture calls him, yet the birth pangs of his glorious rebirth are felt, echoing, throughout the realm of the dead. At the presence of Life in the realm of Death, the quickening movement of new life, a vivifying of that which had previously been amorphous mass, is felt and all hell trembles.

Finally, Christ reaches the end of his journey into hell, and the resting place of Adam and Eve, our first father and first mother who sleep beneath the river of forgetfulness, the river Lethe. Christ pulls our parents from underneath the mindless river-- from out of forgetfulness into a new sort of knowing, an "un-forgetfulness", an a-lethe. Christ pulls Adam and Eve (and thus all of humanity) out from the river Lethe into his presence of Alethea, out of forgetfulness and ignorance and oblivion and into Truth, the Greek word for which is, of course, alethea. Christ "draws them to himself", to he who is Truth itself. Adam and Eve, who (according to Ireneaus), fell to temptation because of their ignorance, their forgetfulness and immaturity, are now bound together to He who is Truth, he who is Lord of the realm of the living and of the dead. And with our parents now nestled to his bosom, Christ turns and is raised from the dead and draws us out of death and into a glorious new life, a life that is nothing other than Himself.