In Praise of Rereading: Iterative Inhabitations and Sheltering the Paradise of Words

Georgia Rose Phillips

Sometimes, the line of a poem leaps out unexpectedly from the well of my consciousness when I encounter something close to what it resembles in the real world. On an unseasonably cold November day in Semaphore, South Australia late last year, I heard a line from Ashbery’s “Syringa” as I walked up the beach. I had been pressing through the afternoon’s sharp sandy gusts and feeling the overhang of winter in the cold sting of the breeze. As I moved towards the grey surface of water, dotted with white foamy caps, I had been starting to doubt whether the warmth we’d grown to expect with the arrival of summer would ever appear. Or, whether the devastatingly tight grasp the Algal Bloom held on the ocean since early 2025 might ever loosen.

It was then, as I watched torrents of sand lifted and tossed about by the invisible fingers of the breeze, that I heard Ashbery’s line from “Syringa”, “The seasons are no longer what they once were”, echo through my mind. The heightened inconsistencies we had been experiencing—the weather’s refusal to adhere to seasonal patterns—now had an attendant line that epitomised its repudiation against predictability. The line encompassed the irregularity of climatic patterns, an increasingly salient characteristic of our turbulent present.

My unconscious retrieval of Ashbery’s words imbued them with a revised significance and meaning. I had unconsciously lodged them within my own personal lexicon for quantifying the fleeting and unpredictable nature of the present. I had forged a new association between the lines of “Syringa” and the unfolding climate emergency at hand—for Ashbery’s already assembled words aptly characterised and eulogised the unstable nature of the present.

Hearing this line from “Syringa” forced me to question whether I subconsciously reached for the work’s lamentation for a world less besieged by human activity. Or, perhaps, I’d strove to invoke the poem’s inchoate longing to retreat to a mythic and thus imagined world, populated by Orpheus and Eurydice.

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For a long time, I’ve kept returning to John Ashbery’s poem, “Syringa”, for the hypnotic pull it has on me. I’ve sought refuge in the echo of what Harold Bloom has dubbed a “major Orphic elegy” (14) with the insistence of someone with debilitated spirits rediscovering an abandoned faith.

The poem has become a sanctuary of sorts to retreat into, its lucidity and precision ceaselessly expanding my understanding of the relationship between language and perception. Every return to “Syringa” feels like a form of intellectual and emotional enlargement derived from trusting the poem’s capacity to perpetually instruct and guide. With each reread something previously unnoticed is revealed to me.

“Syringa” highlights how human perception is underpinned by this same fleeting sense of instability. Ashbery presents moments as elusive and always in a state of flux. He locates, for example, the impossibility of capturing isolated instances. He writes, “one cannot guard treasure / That stalled moment”. Then, towards the end of the poem, this concern for evanescence culminates in the epiphanic realisation, “meaning, good or other, can never / Become known”.

*

My iterative returns to “Syringa” have made me sceptical of theses from the large body of apologia on rereading that justify returns to works as satisfying a yearning for comfort or familiarity (Spacks 2). I believe these arguments overlook what can be discovered when treating a poem as a site of openness and mediation of meaning making. Afterall, Nathaniel Stein has argued that “Few would question looking at a great painting twice”. Perhaps, even fewer would deign to label the impulse to do so as nostalgic.

*

Jon Thiem has written on reading and rereading’s capacity to leave its mark on us in uncanny ways. In “Reading and Rereading: A Twenty-first Century Perspective”, he recalls noticing a woman on a plane reading Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther when enroute to the Modern Language Association conference. Her weeping over the final pages reminds him of the early fervent readers of Goethe’s work in the late eighteenth century. Specifically, those who were so afflicted by their encounter with Goethe’s writings they went on to imitate Werther—donning blue coats and yellow vests—and in more extreme cases, committing imitative suicides (164).

This phenomenon came to be known as “Werther fever” across Europe and led to a banning of the work in Italy and Denmark (Kardas). Thiem’s discussion of “Werther fever” exemplifies how something seemingly immaterial, such as the voice of a work of literature, can pass through us and impinge upon our sense of perception and self.

The Belgian literary critic and philosopher Georges Poulet has developed a similar concern for how reading erodes distinctions between the ‘self’ and ‘reading material’ in “Phenomenology of Reading”. He presents the idea that a book possesses a certain openness that invites you to “exist in it” (54). Poulet insists that when we read, we become “aware of a rational being, of a consciousness; the consciousness of another” that welcomes us to “think what it thinks and feel what it feels” (54). He describes how the work passes through and inhabits our “innermost self” (54). It is here, he outlines, where “images and ideas disport themselves, these mental entities, in order to exist” (54). Our minds, in turn, become a shelter for the text.

It is these ideas of inhabitation and sheltering that I return to as I reread “Syringa”. Picking up the print version from my writing desk whose edges are worn by overuse, I realise I’ve annotated the work so heavily, the superimposed scribbles seem to visually outweigh the poem itself and make it look like marginalia. Then, I think of the version of “Syringa” that takes refuge in the shelter of my mind. A version which reminds me of a line from Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, where he writes, “Language reconstructs itself elsewhere under the teeming flux of every kind of linguistic pleasure” (8). He playfully queries: “Where is the elsewhere?” before offering the syllogism: “In the paradise of words” (8).

 

References

Ashbery, John. Houseboat Days. Viking Press, 1977.

Ashbery, John. “Syringa.” Poetry, vol. 130, no. 1, April 1977, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/33626/syringa.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, 1975.

Bloom, Harold. John Ashbery. Chelsea House, 1985.

Călinescu, Matei. Rereading. Yale University Press, 1993.

Kardas, Nicholas. “How Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther Led to a Rare Suicide Cluster.” Literary Hub, September 15, 2022, https://lithub.com/how-goethes-sorrows-of-young-werther-led-to-a-rare-suicide-cluster/.

Poulet, Georges. “Phenomenology of Reading.” New Literary History, vol. 1, no. 1, October 1969, pp. 53–68, https://doi.org/10.2307/468372.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. On Rereading. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

Stein, Nathaniel. “Are Rereadings Better Readings?”. The New Yorker, November 1, 2011, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/are-rereadings-better-readings

Thiem, Jon. “Reading and Rereading: A Twenty-First Century Perspective.” The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, vol. 59, 2013, p. 163-193. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/615136.

 

The series

Blog 1: https://southerlylitmag.com.au/in-praise-of-rereading/

Blog 2: https://southerlylitmag.com.au/enter-the-ghost-exit-the-ghost/

Blog 3: https://southerlylitmag.com.au/luminous-with-manifold-illusion/

 

About the author

Georgia is an award-winning writer who publishes fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, literary criticism and academic scholarship. She is the author of The Bearcat (Picador, 2025) and is a Lecturer, Creative Writing at Adelaide University. She holds a PhD from the University of New South Wales and is currently working on her second novel and a book-length collection of poems.

 

About the image

A photograph taken by Katia Nazarenko and uploaded as a free-to-use image to Pexels. It is available here (https://www.pexels.com/photo/33451284) and used with thanks.