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I superimposed the famous 1869 Walter Pater quote about da Vinci's 1506 "Mona Lisa" over the painting, so I could try to see what he meant:
Yeats used the quote-- controversially-- as the first 'poem' in his 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse. WBY's linebreaks:
She is older than the rocks among which she sits;
Like the Vampire,
She has been dead many times,
And learned the secrets of the grave;
And has been a diver in deep seas,
And keeps their fallen day about her;
And trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants;
And, as Leda,
Was the mother of Helen of Troy,
And, as St Anne,
Was the mother of Mary;
And all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes,
And lives
Only in the delicacy
With which it has moulded the changing lineaments,
And tinged the eyelids and the hands.
And I'm reading Denis Donoghue's Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls which almost (p7) claims Pater as the 'onlie begetter' of modernity. [review]
The quote in context: [later version, 350k]
The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.
Scholes and Kain [page images] see this passage of Pater's as the inspiration for Joyce's "Vilanelle of the Temptress" [PoA5]
Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.Your eyes have set man's heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim,
Tell no more of enchanted days.And still you hold our longing gaze
With languorous look and lavish limb!
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Related pages: timeline, ditto; origins, bk rev; Tennessee; Donoghue; Allegheny; Brown; Knitting; SimonFraser
![[Pater]](img/pater4.jpg)
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