Eye beam
In the physics inherited from Aristotle an eye beam generated in the eye was thought to be responsible for the sense of sight. The eye-beam darted by the imagined basilisk was the agent of its lethal power. The concept found expression in poetry into the 17th century, most famously in John Donne's poem. Later in the century Newtonian optics and increased understanding of the structure of the eye rendered the old concept invalid, but it was revived as an aspect of monstrous superhuman capabilities in popular culture of the 20th century.
The emission theory of sight seemed to be corroborated by geometry was was reionforced by Robert Grosseteste.[1]
Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis", read in the light of contemporary conceptions of vision, founds a rhetoric of like kindnesses and loving mutuality is predicates loving mutuality upon a conceit of visual reciprocation achieved in the exchange of eyebeams.[2]
In Algernon Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon" the conception is revived for poetic purposes, enriching the poem's pagan context in the Huntsman's invocation of Artemis:
Hear now and help, and lift no violent hand,
But favourable and fair as thine eye's beam,
Hidden and shown in heaven".
In T.S. Eliot's rose garden episode that introduces "Burnt Norton" eyebeams persis in the fusion of possible pasts and presents like unheard music:
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses</br? Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
The New Zealand poet Edward Tregear instanced "the lurid eye-beam of the angry Bull"— Taurus of the zodiac— among the familiar stars above the alien wilderness of New Zealand.[3]
Notes
- ^ B.S. Eastwood, "Mediaeval Empiricism: The Case of Grosseteste's Optics" Speculum: A Journal of Mediaeval Studies, 1968.
- ^ Eric Langley , "'And Died to Kiss his Shadow': The Narcissistic Gaze in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis", Forum for Modern Language Studies 44.1 (2008:12-26
- ^ Quoted in K. R. Howe, "The Dating of Edward Tregear's 'Te Whetu Plains', and an Unpublished Companion Poem" Journal of New Zealand Literature 5 (1987:55-60) p. 58.