mortality/heaviness/clarity in "Marbles"

The first line ending—“mortality”—is the only incomplete rhyme in the poem—it looks like “sky” or “die,” it sounds more like “sleep” and “steep”---but it doesn’t fit completely with either, which feels odd since the rest of the poem follows the rhyme scheme for a Petrarchan sonnet. The “ee” sound the first line ends on, though, doesn’t feel out of place; it is in “spirit,” “weak,” and “heavily” before we get to the “sleep” at the end of the second line. Thus the not-quite rhyme between “mortality” and “sleep” is evident immediately, drawing a clear distinction between what mortality implies (death) and sleep—which is interesting because the speaker is at the same time trying to compare mortality to an “unwilling sleep” (2). This is really odd, too—first is the idea (and maybe this is because I’m tired, but.) that any sleep would be “unwilling”—usually we sleep because we are tired, and thus want to sleep. Also, waking up often implies a kind of epiphany, and you would think that mortality would be the epiphany—it seems that way for the speaker, at least. Still, he says that mortality is the sleep—could one wake up and out of mortality, then?

The marble and the weak spirit create an immediate contrast between heaviness and lightness. The weight of the mortality aligns with the weight of the the marble. At first this feels a bit odd, because mortality implies death while marble seems more permanent, but the image of the marble wasting away is revealed at the end of the poem. This vision of mortality suggests that the speaker sees himself as something that was once great but will now die—it fits well with the image of the “sick eagle,” an animal that was perhaps once as majestic as marble but, now sick, cannot fly. However, it is the “imagined pinnacle and steep/Of godlike hardship” that “tells me I must die”---perhaps the fact that it is “imagined” suggests that it is not mortality itself, rather the speaker’s realization of his mortality that makes his spirit weak, makes the sick eagle only look at the sky and not attempt to fly.

(a line from Keats’s final letter feels like it ties in: “I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence” (p. 980)

I also remember him maybe comparing himself to an eagle at one point in a letter? or maybe just mentioning an eagle? not sure)

The suggestion that the “glories of the brain” are “dim-conceived” feels odd in a poem whose title has a focus on sight (“On Seeing…”) and when the line before bears the image of “the opening of the morning’s eye” (8). While the first eight lines focus on clarity and sight, the dimness introduced in the second part creates greater uncertainty that continues in the heart’s “undescribable feud”—and it is also in the final image of the sun on the “billowy” ocean (13). The sun’s shadow is not only it’s opposite in its lack of light---because it is reflected on the ocean it loses another kind of clarity, that of shape, and becomes even more indistinct. The syntax of the poem gets confusing for me here, too, and I think it fits well with the blurring of the shadow. I’m still not sure if I completely understand the last sentence of the poem, actually---the hyphens are hard to follow. I didn’t connect it there at first, but is the last hyphen supposed to also call us back to the beginning of the poem?--- “My spirit is too weak—…—a shadow of a magnitude.” The speaker’s spirit is then the shadow of the marble. Marble is (supposed to be, at least) distinct and clear cut—with “pinnacles” and steeps, it represents an ideal, like the sun—unreacheable but that which we use to model our world upon. The spirit, however, is something the speaker understands less; he can’t make it as godlike or ideal as marble. Still, even the marble participates in the “rude/Wasting of old time” (12-3), and it seems this loss/death of the speaker’s ideal is what makes him lose hope for his own spirit. Or maybe the loss is the fact that the ideal can only be represented by/in humans, and therefore cannot last, or translate into anything that lasts, as even the sun becomes an unclear shadow when it gets closer.