LAUSR

Abstract:To describe Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 and Seamus Heaney's "The Nod"—poems about a look and a nod—is to see literary form as an act of perception, one that is always historical and meaningful, a movement back and forth between perceiver and perceived. Even so conspicuous a form as the sonnet is never empty and only provisionally subject to measure or analysis. To read these works is to recognize what Merleau-Ponty calls the "chiasm"—to see the work of art as an enactment of "mediation through reversal" and to see being in its primordial standing as appearing, enduring, and apprehending.