Draft of ‘The Unicorn: a consideration of adolescence’

1

Through the dim sea-blown wood
The alien unicorn
Walks steadfast and alone
The herds return to fold as tame beasts would,
But unassailable, misunderstood,
He moves beside the grey and twilight sea
As figure of heraldic blazonry.

The crags blow trumpets round:
Over and through the wind
Sea-music moves his mind
To reverie on an enchanted ground.
Hearing afar the bay of hunting hound
Across the deep ravines, white and forlorn,
Passes the swift, the phantom unicorn.

Perchance the Archer sees
Him silent move among
The trees that burst in song,
The dryad-cloaked, the dream-enamoured trees;
And as he wheels through the far wood and flees,
The musing Archer bends his bow again –
Behold! The fabulous unicorn is slain.

O death of the unborn!
Spirits that like to thee
Unborn shall ever be
Wail endless over the buried unicorn.
Behold the adamant and fragile horn
That conquers death of venom, death i’ the tomb,
Is deeper death – return beyond the womb.

O perilous unicorn!
Death slays thee not; but see
From the cold surf ’s futurity
Aphrodite Andymone
Arise in birth thou wouldst extinction deem:
Arise and bind thee to an iron dream. (CP 10)

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2.	This poem was written by a precocious boy of sixteen. A quiet lad, who lived too much in his own head; a constant beach-walker and word-builder, with the makings of a drunkard or intelligent schizophrene. The torments of the adolescent furnace are threefold: unnatural solitude, ignorance of life, and sexuality without love. Like a million others he did his time there, and passed through singed, by virtue of a patience hidden from himself, like those children in the other furnace of the Assyrian king. The poem is essentially a prophetic meditation.
3.	The unicorn and the boy are distinguishable, though not wholly separate. The unicorn is a hybrid, beast and spirit, inhabiting the universe of the adolescent mind. Since poetry belongs to the order of natural contemplation, it requires solitude as its element. But the unicorn exists in a double solitude – a natural contemplative solitude, where it can experience in joy the correspondences of nature, and the terrible solitude of the boy. Sexuality and spirituality combine in the powerful and mysterious horn: a phallic emblem, like the basalt one that confronts the sea in a cell at Mahabalipuram, and equally an emblem of the wild living intellect, which Newman so wisely rebukes as the chief enemy of obedience.
4.	The unicorn is alien to the bourgeois prudence which opposes contemplation on the grounds that it is useless, and equally despises the adolescent for his awkward suffering and his grandiose dreams. The herds who return to fold at the coming of evening are bourgeois in their consciousness. Puberty fractures the wholeness of childhood, giving birth to flesh and spirit simultaneously; but the ambiguous purity of adolescence can be destroyed only by true sexual initiation when a woman introduces the adolescent to the iron dream of the adult carnal universe, and sets his feet on the road to the grave. Till then the unicorn keeps his anomalous freedom.
4A.	The unicorn has no voice. Nature and the angelic order pour song into his ears, and he struggles to understand it; but he has no song of his own, since the secret of his being is hidden from him. Again and again he has gazed into the black crystal of self, the pool at the centre of the forest, and seen only a monstrous image, a white zebra with a useless horn. If he were to find speech what would he say, except – I suffer, therefore I am. The dryads of the trees, who waken his concupiscence, are creatures of delusion. They evade his approach, and lead him to bruise himself on the hard stones. Yet he dreams of a perfect mate, who will understand the necessity of his being. In the legend, she is a virgin, but he imagines her as a wise harlot. He knows she will conquer him and deliver him, sleeping, to the hunters. He fears and longs for that deliverance.page 254
4B.	Though the unicorn cannot speak he is able to weep. The tears of the unicorn are poems and proverbs. They glitter among the rocks on the forest floor. Sometimes a hunter discovers the tears of the unicorn and stands wondering at the sight of those amazing jewels.
4C.	The adolescent does not form that view without the fruits of doom and all in solitude. He imagines an adult empire of the wise and joyful from which he is excluded by some unique fatality.
4D.	The spirituality of the unicorn is vertiginous. It demands an issue in ritual violence, love or self murder. One day the boy entered his father’s coalhouse and took down from a beam the sawn-off rifle he had hidden there. Almost without thought he placed the muzzle in his mouth, having nothing to lose. Then an idea occurred to him – ‘You have never yet loved a woman. Wait till then, and see if the world changes.’ So he replaced the gun in its hiding place.
5.	Perhaps it is the breeze of Divine love that moves the branches, infusing supernatural light into natural contemplation. And the sea may represent the unlimited all-suffering mercy of God, sustaining and healing the living and the dead. But the unicorn knows it only as the source of visions. He is a figure in a tapestry, or an image on a shield, for the will to love is petrified in the adolescent furnace, and only the intellect can move. God he knows as the Archer, an analogue of time, who kills from a distance, without knowledge of the victim or participation in its suffering. Yet hound and Archer are secretly welcome to the unicorn, who knows that he must die for the adolescent to become a man. In earlier poems the boy had developed two figures of self, the salamander which lives in flame, and the Titan Prometheus, from whose wound the iceflowers of art can grow. But the third figure, that of the unicorn, is perhaps less delusive, and certainly projects more exactly the adolescent dilemma.
6.	Those spirits who surround the grave of the dead unicorn are the potential powers that sleep in the heart of the adolescent. They know that with his death their Eden is destroyed: a change from infinite potentiality to the limited actual labour of the adult will. The interior precipices among which the unicorn enjoyed his freedom are full of the music of the angelic intellect; the trees bear song instead of fruit. But the touch of a woman’s hand can level and extinguish them.
7.	One could of course interpret the whole poem in Freudian terms. The father-archer (the boy’s father was called Archie and was born under the sign of Sagittarius) kills or castrates the unicorn-child whose auto-erotic rebellion involves a return into his mother’s womb. It fits nicely. But the boy has read page 255 Freud, and these implications were fully in his mind. He was not wholly devoid of iconoclastic humour.
8.	It was a prophetic intuition that enabled the boy to see beyond the furnace an image of cold waves breaking and the figure of the sea-born Venus. In the third poem of this chosen cycle she appears and clasps the chains of manhood on his limbs, which is perhaps the true death of the unicorn, by the attachments that remove solitude, give human knowledge, and mercifully crucify our passions. . . .

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