"Married Chastity": The Language of Paradox in Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle"

"결혼한 순결"-「불사조와 산비둘기」와 역설의 언어

William Shakespeare's dirge, "The Phoenix and the Turtle," is still a crux in the Shakespearean canon and interpretation. The poem is still believed a dark allegory dealing with some arcane and obscure courtly matters and politics. However, we cannot recover its allegorical significance. This interpretive situation enforces us to read the poem as a self-conscious artwork in terms of its paradoxical language and meta-poetic metaphors. Paradox, as a subspecies of metaphor, challenges categorical and judgmental absolutes, and produces a sense of wonder in reconciling the logically contradictory opposites. In this poem the urn containing the ashes of the phoenix and the turtle is the icon of the mysterious unity of art, born of the wonderful marriage of male and female. Shakespeare's poem demonstrates in itself the magical power of poetic language in transforming an elegy into an epithalamion. The union of the phoenix and the turtle defies the singularity of their respective entity, and at the same time it retains their distinctive particularity of the two-ness. This neo-Platonic mystery of the "married chastity" is a paradox which confounds reason and verifies the poetic truth of imaginative intellect. The marriage of Christian perichoresis is crystallized in the artwork of the urn, which is admired at by posterity, though the marriage was issueless, due to its passing virtue. "The Phoenix and the Turtle" depicts the metaphor-making process and its effect, the poem.