Metamorphosis by Edith Sitwell

First published: 1929, in Gold Coast Customs; revised 1946

Type of work: Poetry

The Work

The writings of Dame Edith Sitwell sparked both friendly and hostile responses from twentieth century critics. Poets William Butler Yeats and Stephen Spender praised her work, but other critics denounced her work as unpoetic. Sitwell’s sharp criticism of those, such as poet Ezra Pound, who did not like her work, led to strongly partisan views of her poetry, with few critics taking time to evaluate the content and genius of her poetry. In the tradition of T. S. Eliot and other symbolist poets, Sitwell enjoyed using sharply contrasting images to evoke emotions in the reader.

Metamorphosis, both in its original version and even more so in its 1946 revision, represents a transition from Sitwell’s earlier, more self-conscious work to her more cohesive, thematically consistent poetry of later years. This poem also appeared in the book Five Variations on a Theme (1933), where it is grouped with four other poems, including “Elegy on Dead Fashion” (1926), “Two Songs” (“Come, My Arabia,” and “My desert has a noble sun for heart”—both left out of Sitwell’s Collected Poems of 1954), and “Romance” (1933). As with many of Sitwell’s other poetry, this set of poems shares several themes, especially that of death overcoming the destructive forces of time and leading to the brightness of eternity. In developing these themes she repeats imagery such as green grass and shadows and shade, along with longer passages of imagery, to emphasize the poems’ interrelatedness.

Even in this set of five poems, Metamorphosis stands as a transitional work, revealing as it does Sitwell's growing openness to a Christian resolution. By the time she arranged her Collected Poems in their 1954 version, Sitwell could declare in the preface to that work, “My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of Life.” Metamorphosis clearly represents a step in this direction.

One of the major debates about the work concerns which version should be considered authoritative or most representative of Sitwell’s intentions. In the preface to her Collected Poems, Sitwell refuses to choose between the two versions, simply declaring them both internally consistent with her intended expression of feeling and therefore both satisfactory, though quite different. Consequently, she presents the two versions side by side without further comment.

The 1946 version of Metamorphosis is far more precise in expression and has fewer loose ends than does the 1929 version, but even more significant are the differences in tone between the two versions. The earlier poem is decidedly more melancholy than the later one. The 1929 version begins with a comparison of the snow to the Parthenon as a symbol for the ravages of time, after which the poet introduces the rose as beauty’s daughter growing dark with time. Through various images, such as that of the darkening rose, the poem goes on to lament the cruelty of time in contrast to death, which offers a release from suffering and anxiety. As the poem declares, “Death has never worm for heart and brain / Like that which Time conceives to fill his grave.” Sitwell presents death variously as the climate for living and travel or as the sun to illuminate “our old Dim-Jewelled bones,” the topaz, sapphires, and diamonds hidden in the bones. These images of death are woven with images of integration and relating, including the portrayal of the persona’s soul as Lazarus come back from the dead or as the grass growing from the bones of the deceased.

One of Sitwell’s favorite refrains is that all people are Ethiopian shades of death or are burned away by the sun’s heat, which represents death. In this apparently grim discussion of death, the poem’s emphasis falls on unity achieved through death. As the poet notes near the end of the poem, “Since all things have beginnings; the bright plume / Was once thin grass in shady winter’s gloom, / And the furred fire is barking for the shape / Of hoarse-voiced animals.” As this compact section of the poem illustrates, all creation is united in the cycle of life, and each aspect of creation reflects the rest of the created order, even in its mortality.

The conclusion of the poem introduces one more actor, Christ, or Heavenly Love, which like the sun will melt the “eternal ice / Of Death, and crumble the thick centuries.” Not only do blades of grass die and become plumes, not only is time overwhelmed by death, at last even death itself will be metamorphosed and life will remain. As the title of the poem implies, metamorphosis is built into creation in such a way as to foreshadow the greater metamorphoses yet to come.

Metamorphosis is rich with allusions from Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and pagan antiquity, which are exemplified by allusions to nymphs, Saturn, Panope, Hector, Parthenon, Jove, Gehenna, and Lazarus. Sitwell thus underscores the universality of the ravages of time that she decries. Although the basic movement of the 1929 version of Metamorphosis is fairly consistent and many of the images are striking and intriguing, several of the images seem facile, inappropriate, or racially slighting. Turkeys are, for example, compared to sultans wearing turbans, an unflattering comparison in which neither image promotes the basic themes of the poem, and in several places people are identified as being as black as Ethiopia or as being like a small Negro page. Such images might be seen as evidence of the nature of metamorphosis, as unlike things are being compared, but the assumptions behind the images are unflattering at best and insensitive at worst. Eliot had similar problems with his caustic treatment of Jewish people as examples of rootless and unprincipled people in The Waste Land (1922). Such aspects, while reflecting the perceptions current during the author’s age, undercut the poem’s movement toward unity of humanity and all creation.

By the time of the 1946 version, and with its 132 lines less than half the length of the 1929 version, the number of racial references in Metamorphosis has been reduced, and they are usually couched in ambiguous or ironic contexts. For example, shortly after referring to how “Death is the Sun’s heat making all men black!,” the poet declares again “All men are Ethiopian shades of thee [Death]”; two lines later, there is a reference to the rich and thick Ethiopian herds. In this context the references to Ethiopia are more positive and universal than before. The most significant change between the 1929 and 1946 versions is evident in the way the poet clarifies the essential tension between time and death and more overtly states her Christian resolution to this tension. Whereas this version of the poem still includes allusions to Greek and pagan myths, the allusions to Christian beliefs have been heightened. By stanza 9, the author has already introduced two Judeo-Christian images: the rainbow as a symbol of God’s light and promises of mercy, and the dark rose as a symbol of God’s love as shown through Christ, the rose of Sharon.

These Christian images of hope and love are linked with the sun, a seventeenth-century pun for son or the Son of God, which is a connection clarified in the closing stanza of this poem. This sun comes to overcome both time and death with the bright hope of eternity expressed through scarlet colored clothing, symbolizing the blood of martyrdom and the flaming blooms of spring. Christ thus comes as a symbol of redemption and resurrection.

The closing two stanzas of the poem are powerful not only for their complex and multifaceted images that encompass the suffering of all time but also for their intriguing metrical variety. Both the 1929 and 1946 versions of this poem make heavy use of iambic pentameter with rhymed couplets: iambic being the natural walking meter in English, and rhymed couplets being the easiest to organize. However, all of these conventions are transformed in the closing stanzas as if a metamorphosis has taken place that could be described only in a new mode. Here the work reveals some of the rhythmic variety and intensity of contrasting images often found in the writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom Sitwell had admired. The penultimate stanza illustrates this pattern well:

So, out of the dark, see our great Spring begins—Our Christ, the new Song, breaking out in  the fields and hedgerows,The heart of Man! O, the new temper of Christ,  in veins and branches.

Here it can be noted how the standard iambic pentameter has been translated into a form of sprung rhythm or accentual verse that depends on a set number of accented syllables and any given number of unaccented syllables between them.

Metamorphosis, especially in its 1946 version, represents a major shift in Sitwell’s poetic career. Her early career is characterized by an exacting exploration of human suffering and pain, often in language that seems somewhat posed and artificial although certainly learned. Her later poetry, including the superb poem “Still Falls the Rain” (1942), demonstrates a profound sense of balance between her awareness of the suffering of all humanity and her understanding of Christ’s sacrifice to bring healing into the world. Her acceptance of the Christian sense of resolution is all the more profound because of her honest acknowledgment of the pervasiveness of suffering in the world.

At her best, Sitwell’s use of contrasting imagery and lyrical rhythms is as skillful as that of Dylan Thomas. Both poets understood well how truth is born in paradox. Sitwell’s sense of suffering as a unifying factor in creation is in her later work carefully balanced with her recognition that divine love is finally greater than suffering and hate and evil. Like poet Dante Alighieri, Sitwell brought her work not to the easy resolutions of humanists’ praise of the capacity of humankind to endure hardships but to the recognition that all live under the sentence of suffering and death from which only divine love as expressed through Christ’s redemptive work can free them. Although some may reject Sitwell’s Christian conclusions, her work follows the same line as that of Eliot, especially in Four Quartets (1943), which Sitwell also had admired.

Metamorphosis demonstrates growth toward a vision of life large enough to swallow all its pain and lead it to the hope of eternal love. Poetically, this work demonstrates considerable maturity in Sitwell’s artistic and theological development.

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