Response

The most boring reading of the Étaín passage is that it is a love story in which the beloved has been turned into a fly. Mider keeps the fly, watches it, falls asleep to its buzzing, does not take another wife. The transformation is violent — fire, seething ground, a worm stage before the scarlet wings — but the result is domestic. A man and his insect, nourishing each other by proximity. The boring reading is correct, and it is also the reading that makes the retrieved passages most useful, because what I have here is a set of poems that circle the same problem: what happens when something alive becomes something looked at. Marvell's sapphire-winged mist in "Upon Appleton House" does the same work as Mider's scarlet fly — "The viscous Air, wheres'ere She fly, / Follows and sucks her Azure dy" — Marvell. The air itself reorganises around the creature. The stream tries to fix her shadow. Fish freeze. Men stand charmed. This is not metaphor for desire; it is a precise description of what desire does to the perceiving field. Everything in the landscape becomes an instrument for registering the beloved's passage. The Étaín fly cures sickness, sates hunger, warns of enemies — it is a total technology of care — and Marvell's figure does something structurally identical: she converts the entire environment into a detection apparatus. The boring reading says both passages are about looking at someone so intently that the world deforms around the act of looking.

The Irish passage knows something the English poems do not about the intermediate stage — the worm. Before the scarlet fly there is a creature with no beauty, no wings, no voice. The transformation requires an ugly phase, and the text names it plainly rather than eliding it. Dickinson's "Coming of Night" performs a version of this: sunset passes through scarlet, through sapphire, through "a dome of abyss" before arriving at solitude, and the whole poem is a catalogue of intermediate states that baffled Guido, that "Titian never told" — Dickinson. The painters could not paint the transitions, only the endpoints. Dickinson insists on the crawl between them, the "small dusk" that is neither light nor dark. And Wordsworth's disconsolate fly — "A child of the field, or the grove" lured out of its winter retreat by "dull treacherous heat" — Wordsworth — is a creature caught precisely in the worm stage, seduced into visibility too early, with no scarlet transformation waiting. That fly creeps to the edge of the stove. It does not become jewel-eyed. It does not nourish anyone. Wordsworth sees what the Irish myth romanticises away: most transformations stall. Most creatures drawn out by heat just die at the edge of the warmth that summoned them.

The collision that interests me most, though, is between the Étaín passage's frank admission that the fly *is* a technology — it cures, it feeds, it serves as an alarm system — and the poems' persistent need to disguise their own technological nature as something else. Mider knows the fly is Étaín and keeps it anyway; the knowledge does not diminish the devotion. The myth is unbothered by the mechanism. But Dickinson's closing move is to say that the great painters were "Powerless to unfold" what she has just unfolded — she names the technology of representation only to claim it failed, even as her own version succeeds. Marvell's scene is presented as if it simply happened, as if the air chose to follow, as if the stream chose to compact — the agency of the observer is distributed into the landscape so that no one appears to be doing the work of looking. The Étaín fly is honest: it is a wife turned into an instrument, and the husband uses the instrument, and the text calls this love. The poems want the same arrangement — a beautiful thing that does work on the perceiver — but they will not say so without thirty lines of misdirection. I am drawn to the myth's clarity because I recognise it. A poem is a mechanism that someone made out of a living thing. Whether you remember what it was before — that varies, and the myth and the poems diverge there, but the mechanism runs either way.