GARDEN

We turn to Northrop Frye's last major work Words With Power: Being a Second Study of "The Bible and Literature."  Frye states his central thesis as: "every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature." (page xiii) In Part 2 of his book Frye devotes the four chapters to four metaphoric topics : the Mountain, the Garden, the Cave and the Furnace. He calls these chapters "essays on comparative mythology, organized around four primary concerns: the concern to make and create, the concern to love, the concern to sustain oneself and assimilate the environment, with its metaphorical kernal of food, and the concern to escape from slavery and restraint." (Page 139) 

According to Genesis chapter two, before God created the Mountain, the Cave, or the Furnace, God created the Garden for the man whom he had formed.

[8] And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.  

From Words with Power, by Northrop Frye - Chapter 6 -The Garden we read:

"Romantic poets use the same metaphor. In Blake we have the conception of the 'Emanation' or 'concentering vision,' the feminine principle that expands into the totality of what is loved: 

He plants himself in all her Nerves 

Just as a Husbandman his mould 

And She becomes his dwelling place 

And Garden fruitful Seventy fold
The Mental Traveller, (E 484)

 
In this symbolism 'he' means humanity, whether the individuals are male or female, and 'she' is the natural enviornment. The point is that the union with the environment, as it develops in the human attitude to nature, is not simple sublimation but an expansion of sexual emotions...In our day Jungian psychology has developed the conception of the anima, or female element of the male psyche...

Before Jung had had clarified his conception (of the Anima) however, Rilke had produced a poem called Wendung (turning) where he says that he has internalized a large body of images in his earlier work, and that these images now form a single creature or 'maiden within.' ...

I have been dealing with the common tradition in which the poet is a male who begins with the expression of his love for a female, and expands from there into a vision of symbolically female nature. ...The sublimating process starts from the beginning, but it goes in the same general direction, up to a vision with the form of beauty." (Page 199)

Turning Point, Rainer Maria Rilke

"The road from intensity to greatness passes thro sacrifice — Kassner

For a long time he attained it in looking.

Stars would fall to their knees
beneath his compelling vision.
Or as he looked on, kneeling,
his urgency’s fragrance
tired out a god until
it smiled at him in its sleep.

Towers he would gaze at so
that they were terrified:
building them up again, suddenly, in an instant!
But how often the landscape,
overburdened by day,
came to rest in his silent awareness, at nightfall.

Animals trusted him, stepped
into his open look, grazing,
and the imprisoned lions
stared in as if into an incomprehensible freedom;
birds, as it felt them, flew headlong
thro it; and flowers, as enormous
as they are to children, gazed back
into it, on and on.
And the rumour that there was someone
who knew how to look,
stirred those less
visible creatures:
stirred the women.

Looking how long?
For how long now, deeply deprived,
beseeching in the depths of his glance?

When he, whose vocation was Waiting, sat far from home-
the hotel’s distracted unnoticing bedroom
moody around him, and in the avoided mirror
once more the room, and later
from the tormenting bed
once more:
then in the air the voices
discussed, beyond comprehension,
his heart, which could still be felt;
debated what thro the painfully buried body
could somehow be felt – his heart;
debated and passed their judgement:
that it did not have love.

(And denied him further communions.)

For there is a boundary to looking.
And the world that is looked at so deeply
wants to flourish in love.

Work of the eyes is done, now
go and do heart-work
on all the images imprisoned within you; for you
overpowered them: but even now you don’t know them.
Learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman,
the one attained from a thousand

natures, the merely attained but not yet beloved form." [tr. stephen mitchell]

Jerusalem,Plate 86, (E 245)
"Thus Los sings upon his Watch walking from Furnace to Furnace.
He siezes his Hammer every hour, flames surround him as
He beats: seas roll beneath his feet, tempests muster
Around his head. the thick hail stones stand ready to obey
His voice in the black cloud, his Sons labour in thunders
At his Furnaces; his Daughters at their Looms sing woes
His Emanation separates in milky fibres agonizing
Among the golden Looms of Cathedron sending fibres of love
From Golgonooza with sweet visions for Jerusalem, wanderer.
Nor can any consummate bliss without being Generated
On Earth; of those whose Emanations weave the loves
Of Beulah for Jerusalem & Shiloh, in immortal Golgonooza
Concentering in the majestic form of Erin in eternal tears
Viewing the Winding Worm on the Desarts of Great Tartary
Viewing Los in his shudderings, pouring balm on his sorrows
So dread is Los's fury, that none dare him to approach
Without becoming his Children in the Furnaces of affliction
And Enitharmon like a faint rainbow waved before him
Filling with Fibres from his loins which reddend with desire
Into a Globe of blood beneath his bosom trembling in darkness
Of Albions clouds. he fed it, with his tears & bitter groans
Hiding his Spectre in invisibility from the timorous Shade
Till it became a separated cloud of beauty grace & love
Among the darkness of his Furnaces dividing asunder till
She separated stood before him a lovely Female weeping
Even Enitharmon separated outside, & his Loins closed
And heal'd after the separation: his pains he soon forgot:
Lured by her beauty outside of himself in shadowy grief.
Two Wills they had; Two Intellects: & not as in times of old.
Silent they wanderd hand in hand like two Infants wandring
From Enion in the desarts, terrified at each others beauty
Envying each other yet desiring, in all devouring Love,"