Chapter 10: Selection
Come, now, let us see whether we have the other faculty capable of making speeches and writings sublime. Now, then, since in all things there are certain parts which are by nature fundamentally in session together with their material, we must come to be capable over and over again (and this capacity is responsible for sublimity) [ l] of selecting from all that brings itself out to our attention what is just right and [2] of setting it together so as to make a unity, a kind of body. You see, the one drives on the audience by the selection of the points to be taken up, the other by the densification of what has been selected. Sappho, for example, on each occasion takes from the attendant circumstances of life and from truth itself the emotional experiences which accompany erotically passionate mad ness. And where does she show her excellence? Where she is powerful at selecting the high points of these emotional experiences and their hypertensed moments and binds them with and to each other.
2. Seems to me that man to the gods is equal
Who sits across from you near and hears
Your sweet voice,
Laughter of love. ‘Tis a cause to flutter
Heart within ribcage; should I merely
Behold you, the voice within me sounds
No longer.
Yet, the tongue is broken; a gentle fire
Runs beneath my flesh in a rush; seeing
Leaves my eyes, my ears echo in a boom
Of humming.
Sweat upon me pours, as a tremble seizes me
All over; I seem wanner than the pale green grass,
To be near dying, lost in
A weakness.
All must be endured, since as a wretch…
3. Don’t you wonder at how, under the same emotional experience, she seeks out soul and body, hearing and tongue, sight and color, all departing as if they were someone else’s, and throughout the contrasts she simultaneously burns with cold and speaks irrational sense (you see, she is either frightened of death or within a little of being dead), so that in her appears not one kind but an intersection of emotions? Though all such things come to lovers, her taking the high points and putting them together into the same emotional experience have worked up the conspicuous quality of the poem, And this, I take it, is the same way in which tl1e poet [Homer] chooses the most difficult moments of winter storms, 4, Though the poet of the Arimaspeia takes it that these lines are powerful:
This is a great and wondrous thing to our minds:
Men who dwell upon the watery ocean, away from dry land.
Wretched, they have onerous duties;
Holding their eyes towards the stars, they bend their hands to the ocean;
Holding their hands to the gods very often,
Making invocations as their minds are thrown to misery.
I take it as clear to everybody that what is said has more of the Howery than of the fearful. 5. How does Homer do it? One passage, you see, out of many, may be chosen:
He fell upon them just as a wave falls down on a swift ship,
Fierce, wind-nursed by masses of air, and the vessel is
Hidden in ocean’s froth as an awful blast of a windstorm
Roars on her high mast, and all her sailors quaking in spirit,
Desperate; out-of-under death they are barely carried.
Aratus also tried his hand at transferring this same thing:
Barely he wards off death with a plank.
Notwithstanding this, he has made it petty and smooth rather than frightening; he has gone e beyond the limit of the danger by saying, “A plank wards off Hades.” Now, then, it does “ward off.” But the poet [Homer] never goes beyond the limit of what is powerful, but he gives a likeness of men just barely not killed by every wave. And in fact he made it necessary for prepositions which should not be set together to be set together, against nature, and he forced together with each other the words “out-of-under death,” torturing the verse into being similar to the emotion which befell the men; and by the constriction of the verse he has molded the emotion to a high pitch and has almost stamped his own idiom for danger into a form for his style: “they are brought out-of-under death.” 7. Not otherwise has Archilochus written about a shipwreck and Demosthenes in the announcement [to the Athenians of their defeat], where he says: “It was, you know, evening… “They purified, one might say, the best pieces and set them one on another according to their excellence, arranging throughout in the middle nothing bombastic or frigid or collegian. For these defects spoil the . whole structure, just as the arrangement of great objects forms gaps or spaces when the parts are joined and loosely attached to each other.
