The “Figured Page”: Dramatic Epistle in Browning and Yeats

In Yeats’s only dramatic epistle, “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid” (1923; VP, pp. 460–70) the philosopher Kusta Ben Luka describes his bride’s fascination with his manuscripts; “I saw her stare,” he writes to Abd Al-Rabban,

On old dry writing in a learned tongue

On old dry faggots that could never please

The extravagance of spring; or move a hand

As if that writing or the figured page

Were some dear cheek. (ll. 122–7)

The “figured page” is a pun, replacing “pictured” in Yeats’s drafts.¹ It implies more than the literal, “external marks” which Plato’s king considered a barrier rather than a mnemonic aid to understanding (Phaedrus, 274E–275A). It presents inscription as a “figure” or “type” of some unwritten signatum a meaning or truth which the writing cannot comprehend but which cannot be apprehended at all without recourse to writing; it thus invokes the dialectic between speech and writing, initially grounded in a logocentric metaphysics, which has prevailed in Western thought. But the “figure” is also a metonym of the writer, whether Kusta or another, who, while distinct from his text, is nevertheless represented by it; against “time’s disfiguring touch” (l. 110), the phrase poses the familiar Yeatsian antimony between the “perfection of the work” and the “wreck of body” its producer suffers (“The Choice”; “The Tower,” III). As past participle, “figured” implies that the bride has “figured out” (solved) the figural relation between the writer and the writing to see them as identical; embodies the indirect sociality of written discourse, the implicit interchange of persons which writing entails.