SOURCE: Garber, Marjorie. “Two Birds with One Stone: Lapidary Re-Inscription in The Phoenix and Turtle.” Upstart Crow 5 (fall 1984): 5-19.

In the following essay, Garber offers a structural analysis of The Phoenix and Turtle, evaluating its fusion of two poetic genres—the elegy and the epithalamion—as well as its subversion of logic, grammar, and paradox.

“What is lapis, William?” 

—The Merry Wives of Windsor

In the introduction to an anthology of his favorite poems, Parnassus, published in 1874, Ralph Waldo Emerson identified The Phoenix and Turtle as that esthetic enigma, a poet's poem: “I consider this piece,” he wrote, “a good example of the rule, that there is a poetry for bards proper, as well as a poetry for the world of readers. This poem, if published for the first time, and without a known author's name, would find no general reception. Only the poets would save it.”¹ Emerson's...