Wednesday 6 May 2015

Stephen Blackwood: Memory and Meditation: Poetic Metre and Boethius' Consolation

This paper argues that the poetic metres of Boethius' Consolation are an embodied means of Philosophy's therapy, which therapy is above all the work of recollection. The poetic metres are arranged so as to give the prisoner's memory a coherent structure, and, by stabilizing the prisoner's present in the eternal now, mediate between time and eternity. The Consolation's rhythmic-acoustic system, which is comprehensive of every line of its poetry, enacts the theological principles that govern the text as a whole, and give to it the character of a repeated liturgical act.

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