Angels and Insects

She sat beside him on the bench, and her presence troubled him. He was inside the atmosphere, or light, or scent she spread, as a boat is inside the drag of a whirlpool, as a bee is caught in the lasso of perfume from the throat of a flower.

The hands were ivory-coloured, the skin finely wrinkled everywhere, like the crust on a pool of wax, and under it appreared livid bruises, arthritic nodes, irregular tea-brown stains. ...The flesh under the horny nails was candlvwax-coloured, and bloodless.

You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased.

You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.

On the first occasion Mrs Papagay had met her, there had been a discussion of the process of grief, and Mrs Jesse had nodded sagely, "I know that. I have felt that,' like a kind of tragic chorus. 'I have felt everything; I know everything. I don’t want any new emotion. I know what it is to feel like a stoan.

And Swedenborg himself saw birds during his sojourns in the Spirit World and it was revealed to him that — in the Grand Man — rational concepts are seen as birds. Because the head corresponds to the heavens and the air. He actually experienced in his body the fall of certain angels who had formed wrong opinions in their community about thoughts and influx — he felt a terrible tremor in his sinews and bones — and saw one dark and ugly bird and two fine and beautiful. And these solid birds were the thoughts of the angels, as he saw them in the world of his senses, beautiful reasonings and ugly falses. For at every level everything corresponds, from the most purely material to the most purely divine in the Divine Human.

ls the Conjugial Angel stone That here he stands with heavy head The backward-looking pillared dead Inert, moss-covered, aIl alone? The Holy Ghost trawls ln the Void, With fleshly Sophy on His Hook The Sons of God crowd round to look At plumpy limbs to be enjoyed The Greater Man casts out the line With dangling Sophy as the lure Who howls around the Heavens' colure To clasp the Human Form Divine Rose-petals fall from fallen hair That in the clay is redolent Of liquid oozings and the scent Of the dark Pit, the Beastly lair And is my Love become the beast That was, and is not, and yet is, Who stretches scarlet holes to kiss And clasps with claws the fleshly feast Sweet Rosamund, adult'rous Rose May lie inside her urn and stink Whlle Alfred's tears tum into ink And drop into her quelque-chose The Angel spreads his golden wings And raises high his golden cock And man and wife together lock Into one corpse that moans and sings