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

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This chapter will explore how Sceve creates the aesthetics of transcendence and paradise. It will be concerned with how the poet acquires knowledge of Delie, with the external forms and portrayals of the love object in which Sceve captures both the body and the soul, the matter and the spirit, of poetic contemplation, both Delie's “forme elegante” and her “vertu” (D165). There awaits the reader in the Delie not only striking epiphoric portrayals of Delie 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 Delie's “haulte value” (D275), her transcendent worth. All of Sceve's poetic ways of seeing and portraying Delie are for the purpose of glorifying her, of aggrandizing and ennobling her, truly for the purpose of deifying or sacralizing Delie 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 Delie '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 Valery's notions on poetic art which we have been applying to Sceve 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.