3 - Embodying the sacred and ineffable: poetic forms of transcendence and paradise

Summary

This chapter will explore how Scève creates the aesthetics of transcendence and paradise. It will be concerned with how the poet acquires knowledge of Délie, with the external forms and portrayals of the love object in which Scève captures both the body and the soul, the matter and the spirit, of poetic contemplation, both Délie's “forme elegante” and her “vertu” (D165). There awaits the reader in the Délie not only striking epiphoric portrayals of Délie achieved through lexical embellishment and imagistic intensification, but even more powerful diaphoric portrayals of her through the highly developed aesthetic techniques of transfiguration and transillumination. It is especially in these intense creations where the reader can best see the poet's imagination combining the ideal of love with the concrete image to reveal the true and full essence of Délie's “haulte value” (D275), her transcendent worth. All of Scève's poetic ways of seeing and portraying Délie are for the purpose of glorifying her, of aggrandizing and ennobling her, truly for the purpose of deifying or sacralizing Délie as the sensuous object and form of a higher love. These portrayals are the poet's way of participating in “un tout autre monde,” of constructing Délie's “Parolle saincte en toute esiouissance” (D278) which offers the reader marvelous poetic creations combining sensuous form and spiritual idea. These extremely seductive portrayals will support Valéry's notions on poetic art which we have been applying to Scève throughout this book. They will highlight the imaginatively creative and form-giving function of emotion regarded not as a feeling merely, but as process of investigation and revelation, an adventure by our poet in the diaphoric malleability of transcendent art.