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.In Epipsychidion,Shelley seeks a soul out of my soul, the one form resembling hers, / Inwhich she might have masked herself from me. A voice finally informs himthat the phantom he seeks is beside him.The ideal woman for Huxley syouth is formless still, without identity, / Not one she seemed, not clear, butmany and dim. Therefore, the poet calls her an Indifferent mystery & /Something still uncreated, incomplete. But her materialization will notbring the millennial satisfaction Shelley found.When Huxley s youthdiscovers his soul personified, he cannot unify the ideal and the profane, artand reality, as readily as Stephen Dedalus does upon encountering thewading girl.Thanks to the arousal of unexpectedly physical desires, the idealwithin the youth s mind and the person embodying it become counterpoints.An epiphanic experience, a spot in time, is gradually ruined by the girl sunwillingness to remain on a pedestal and the youth s growing desire to takeher from it.Huxley s sonnet sequence occasionally resembles a short story told inverse: some sonnets merely establish time and place. Under the Trees inthe long hot days of heavy summer, a little group is deep / In laughingtalk (II).The sestet s description of alternating shadow and sunlight, theinitial instance of Manichean chiaroscuro, suggests deeper divisions to come.The shadow as it flows not only dims the lustre of a rose ; it also Quenches the bright clear gold of hair & / & and life seems faint. Butwhen the light / Swings back, the rose takes fire and hair is aflame. 94JEROME MECKIERSimilarly, shadows of lust fall across romantic love.Unfortunately, there willbe no swing back.Sonnets III through V are emphatically antidualistic.Scoffing at theidea of life as counterpoint, they reject dualism as the human condition.InIII the youth catches first sight of the girl who becomes the catalyst for allhis troubles; immediately, he falls in love.Her turning toward him is like adoor / Suddenly opened on some desolate place / With a burst of light andmusic. This explosion of beauty occurs in the third of twenty-two sonnets,too early to be conclusive.Sonnet IV is strongly Wordsworthian in content.The poetconsciously overdoes it so that one suspects him of describing the youth sfeelings without sharing his euphoria.Romantic poets perceive the ideal inthe real, divine in mortal.This sonnet acknowledges that Men see theirgod & / Smile through the curve of flesh or moulded clay, / In bare ploughedlands that go sloping away / To meet the sky in one clean exquisite line. Butthe poet implies that this is folly.The verb Smile seems chosen for its lackof high seriousness. Out of the short-seen dawns of ecstasy, the sonnetcontinues, now Shelleyan in manner, men draw new beauty, whence newthoughts are born. How far the short-seen differs from the short-sightedremains an open question.The sonnet recognizes no counterpoint of bodyand mind or beauty and ugliness.It expresses the youth s naive state of mindwhen it contends that Out of earthly seeds / Springs the aerial flower. The fourth sonnet sags beneath the weight of its facile optimism.Itsconclusion blends Wordsworthian spirituality with belief in inevitableprogress:One spirit proceedsThrough change, the same in body and in soulThe spirit of life and love that triumphs stillIn its slow struggle towards some far-off goalThrough lust and death and the bitterness of will.This echoes the resolution of In Memoriam and Tennyson s belief in OneGod, one law, one element, / And one far-off divine event, / To which thewhole creation moves. Positive conclusions romantic and Victorian poetsstruggled toward, Huxley suggests, were more satisfying than real, applicablesolely within the poems themselves.These poets began in uncertainty andself-doubt, then pushed through to a more sanguine outlook that met thedemands of the moment.Subsequent poets, however, cannot safely beginwhere they left off, as though their resolutions were scientifically verified.To 95Aldous Huxley, Satiric Sonneteer: The Defeat of Youthadopt so affirmative a stance in the third poem of a sequence, as Huxley sprotagonist does, is sheer bravado.The youth does not prove to be the same in body and in soul. Thecontrapuntal halves of his being clash violently when obstacles sonnet IVblithely dismisses return to torment him. Lust, bitterness of will, andfinally death turn out to be stages in the youth s defeat.Huxley s poembegins with resolution, then problems start.Affirmations of previous poetscrumble when subjected to new tests. One spirit or One God, one law,one element the youth who brings such precepts to the modern worldfinds no corroborative unity.The struggle from uncertainty to qualifiedoptimism and sometimes faith itself can be called the archetypal pattern innineteenth-century poetry. The Defeat of Youth reverses and parodies it.A hymn to harmony, sonnet V is more extravagant than itspredecessors.Continuing the One spirit theme, it finds it stirring allminds, shaking all trees, singing in all music.The mind-body dichotomypassion against reason quickly vanishes.The youth decides that thespiritual and the physical, often synonymous in Huxley with ideals versusreality, are providentially unified: the soul is wrought / Of one stuff with thebody matter and mind / Woven together in so close a mesh. The realmesh is the one Huxley weaves for readers who mistake parody for imitation.No matter how drugged by the complacency of the Georgians, some readersmust have suspected the sincerity of flesh / May strangely teach the loveliestholiest things. Back-to-back superlatives and the conjunction of flesh andholiness, one feels, are not permissible exaggerations, even for a lover.Sonneteers traditionally claim that love ennobles.The youth hintsthat it can actually sanctify.Keats s Ode on a Grecian Urn probablyinspired the inept declaration that concludes this sonnet and the first sectionof Huxley s sequence: Truth is brought to birth / Not in some vacantheaven: its beauty springs / From the dear bosom of material earth. Thealleged partnership of truth and beauty is tempered by the realization thatbosoms do not produce offspring.The next pair of sonnets, section two, take place In the Hay-loft andbuild to comic anticlimax.Glaring sunlight from Under the Trees yields inVI to darkness in the loft. The counterpoint of light and darkness, runningthroughout the poem, creates a world of opposing forces which the gushingyouth at first cannot perceive, much less explain
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