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The case of William Wordsworth, for instance, is instructive on this
point. His poetry would not appear to promise many examples of the language
of paradox. He usually prefers the direct attack. He insists on simplicity;
he distrusts whatever seems sophistical. And yet the typical Wordsworth
poem is based upon a paradoxical situation. Consider his celebrated
It is a beauteous
evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration ....
The poet is filled with worship, but the girl who walks beside him is
not worshiping. The implication is that she should respond to the holy
time, and become like the evening itself, nunlike; but she seems less
worshipful than inanimate nature itself. Yet
It thou appear
untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year;
And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.
The underlying
paradox (of which the enthusiastic reader may well be unconscious) is
nevertheless thoroughly necessary, even for that reader. Why does the
innocent girl worship more deeply than the self-conscious poet who walks
beside her? Because she is filled with an unconscious sympathy for all
of nature, not merely the grandiose and solemn. One remembers the lines
from Wordsworth's friend, Coleridge:
He prayeth best,
who loveth best
All things both great and small.
Her unconscious
sympathy is the unconscious worship. She is in communion with nature
"all the year," and her devotion is continual whereas that
of the poet is sporadic and momentary. But we have not done with the
paradox yet. It not only underlies the poem, but something of the paradox
informs the poem, though, since this is Wordsworth, rather timidly.
The comparison of the evening to the nun actually has more than one
dimension. The calm of the evening obviously means "worship,"
even to the dull-witted and insensitive. It corresponds to the trappings
of the nun, visible to everyone. Thus, it suggests not merely holiness,
but, in the total poem, even a hint of Pharisaical holiness, with which
the girl's careless innocence, itself a symbol of her continual secret
worship, stands in contrast.
Or consider Wordsworth's sonnet, "Composed upon Westminster Bridge."
I believe that most readers will agree that it is one of Wordsworth's
most successful poems; yet most students have the greatest difficulty
in accounting for its goodness. The attempt to account for it on the
grounds of nobility of sentiment soon breaks down. On this level, the
poem merely says: that the city in the morning light presents a picture
which is majestic and touching to all but the most dull of soul; but
the poem says very little more about the sight: the city is beautiful
in the morning light and "it is awfully still. The attempt to make
a case for the poem in terms of the brilliance of its images also quickly
breaks down: the student searches for graphic details in vain; there
are next to no realistic touches. In fact, the poet simply huddles the
details together:
silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields ....
We get a blurred
impression--points of tools and pinnacles along the skyline, all twinkling
in the morning light. More than that, the sonnet as a whole contains
some very flat writing and some well-worn comparisons.
The reader may ask: Where, then, does the poem get its power? It gets
it, it seems to me, from the paradoxical situation out of which the
poem arises. The' speaker is honestly surprised, and he manages to get
some sense of awed surprise into the poem. It is odd to the poet that
the city should be able to "wear the beauty of the morning"
at all. Mount Snowden, Skiddaw, Mont Blanc--these wear it by natural
right, but surely not grimy, feverish London. This is the point of the
almost shocked exclamation:
Never did sun
more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill . . .
The "smokeless
air" reveals a city which the poet did not know existed: man-made
London is a part of nature too, is lighted by the sun of nature, and
lighted to as beautiful effect.
The river glideth
at his own sweet will ...
A river is the
most "natural" thing that one can imagine; it has the elasticity,
the curved line of nature itself. The poet had never been able to regard
this one as a real river--now, uncluttered by barges, the river reveals
itself as a natural thing, not at all disciplined into a rigid and mechanical
pattern: it is like the daffodils, or the mountain brooks, artless,
and whimsical, and "natural" as they. The poem closes, you
will remember, as follows:
Dear God! the
very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
The city, in the
poet's insight of the morning, has earned its right to be considered
organic, not merely mechanical. That is why the stale metaphor of the
sleeping houses is strangely renewed. The most exciting thing that the
poet can say about the houses is that they are asleep. He has been in
the habit of counting them dead--as just mechanical and inanimate; to
say they are "asleep" is to say that they are alive, that
they participate in the life of nature. In the same way, the tired old
metaphor which sees a great city as a pulsating heart of empire becomes
revivified.' It is only when the poet sees the city under the semblance
of death that he can see it as actually alive--quick with the only life
which he can accept, the organic life of "nature."
It is not my intention to exaggerate Wordsworth's own consciousness
of the paradox involved. In this poem, he prefers, as is usual with
him, the frontal attack. But the situation is paradoxical here as in
so many d his poems. In his preface to the second edition d the Lyrical
Ballads Wordsworth stated that his general purpose was "to choose
incidents and situations from common life" but so to treat them
that "ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual
aspect." Coleridge was to state the purpose for him later, in terms
which make even more evident Wordsworth's exploitation of the paradoxical:
"Mr. Wordsworth . . . was to propose to himself as his object,
to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a
feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention
from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and
the wonder of the world before us..." Wordsworth, in short, was
consciously attempting to show his audience that the common was really
uncommon, the prosaic was really poetic.
Coleridge's terms, "the charm of novelty to things of every day,
.... awakening the mind," suggest the Romantic preoccupation with
wonder--the surprise, the revelation which puts the tarnished familiar
world in a new light. This may well be the raison d'etre of most Romantic
paradoxes; and yet the neo-classic poets use paradox for much the same
reason. Consider Pope's lines from "The Essay on Man":
In doubt his Mind
or Body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reining but to
Alike in ignorance, his Reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much · · ·
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a Prey to all;
Sole Judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl'd;
The Glory, Jest, and Riddle of the world!
Here, it is true,
the paradoxes insist on the irony, rather than the wonder- But Pope
too might have claimed that he was treating the things of everyday,
man himself, and awakening his mind so that he would view himself in
a new and blinding light. Thus, there is a certain awed wonder in Pope
just as there is a certain trace of irony implicit in the Wordsworth
sonnets. There is, of court, no reason why they should not occur together,
and they do. Wonder and irony merge in many of the lyrics of Blake;
they merge in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. The variations in emphasis
are numerous. Gray's "Elegy" uses a typically Wordsworthian
'situation" with the rural scene and with "peasants' contemplated
in the light of their "betters." But in the "Elegy"
the balance is heavily tilted in the direction of irony, the revelation
an ironic rather than a startling one:
Can storied urn
or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust?
Or Flattery sooth the dull cold ear of Death?
But I am not here
interested in enumerating the
possible variations; I am interested rather in our seeing that the paradoxes
spring from the very nature of the poet's language: it is a language
in which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations. And
I do not mean that the connotations are important as supplying some
sort of frill or trimming, something external to the real matter in
hand. I mean that the poet does not use a notation at all--as the scientist
may properly be said to do so. The poet, within limits, has to make
up his language as he goes.
T. S. Eliot has
commented upon "that perpetual slight alteration of language, words
perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations," which occurs
in poetry. It is perpetual; it cannot be kept out of the
poem; it can only be directed and controlled. The tendency of science
is necessarily to stabilize terms to freeze them into strict denotations;
the poet's tendency is by contrast disruptive. The terms are continually
modifying each other, and thus violating their dictionary meanings.
To take a very simple example, consider the adjectives in the first
lines of Wordsworth's evening sonnet: beauteous, calm, free, holy, quiet,
breathless. The juxtapositions are hardly startling; and yet notice
'this: the evening is like a nun breathless with adoration. The adjective
"breathless" suggests tremendous excitement; and yet the evening
is not only quiet but calm. There is no final contradiction, to be sure:
it is that kind of calm and that kind of excitement, and the two states
may well occur together. But the poet has no one term. Even if he had
a polysyllabic technical term, the term would not Provide the solution
for his problem. He must work by contradiction and
qualification.
We may approach the problem in this way: the poet has to work by analogies.
All of the subtler states of emotion, as I. A. Richards has pointed
out, necessarily demand metaphor for their expression. The poet must
wort by analogies, but the metaphors do not lie in the same plane or
fit neatly edge to edge. There is a continual tilting of the planes;
necessary overlappings, discrepancies, contradictions. Even the most
direct and simple poet is forced into paradoxes far more often than
we think, if we are sufficiently alive to what he is doing.
But in dilating on the difficulties of the poet's task, I do not want
to leave the impression that it is a task which necessarily defeats
him, or even that with his method he may not win to a fine precision.
To use Shakespeare's figure, he can
with assays of
bias
By indirections find directions out.
Shakespeare had
in mind the game of lawnbowls in which the bowl is distorted, a distortion
which allows the skillful player to bowl a curve. To elaborate the figure,
science makes use of the perfect sphere and its attack can be direct.
The method of art can, I believe, never be direct--is always indirect.
But that does not mean that the master of the game cannot place the
bowl where he wants it. The serious difficulties will only occur when
he confuses his game with that of science and mistakes the nature of
his appropriate instrument. Mr. Stuart Chase a few years ago, with a
touching naivete, urged us to take the distortion out of the bowl--to
treat language like notation.
I have said that even the apparently simple and straightforward poet
is forced into paradoxes by the nature of his instrument. Seeing this,
we should not be surprised to find poets who consciously employ it to
gain a compression and precision otherwise unobtainable. Such a method,
like any other, carries with it its own perils. But the dangers are
not overpowering; the poem is not predetermined to a shallow and glittering
sophistry. The method is an extension of the normal language of poetry,
not a perversion of it.
I should like to refer the reader to a concrete case. Donne's "Canonization"
ought to provide a sufficiently extreme instance. The basic metaphor
which underlies the poem (and which is reflected in the title) involves
a sort of paradox. For the poet daringly treats profane love as if it
were divine love. The canonization is not that of a' pair of holy anchorites
who have renounced the world and the flesh. The hermitage each is the
other's body; but they do renounce the world, and so their title to
sainthood is cunningly argued. The poem then is a parody of Christian
sainthood; but it is an intensely serious parody of a sort that modern
man, habituated as he is to an easy yes or no, can hardly understand.
He refuses to accept the paradox as a serious rhetorical device; and
since he is able to accept it only as a cheap trick, he is forced into
this dilemma. Either: Donne does not take love seriously; here he is
merely sharpening his wit as a sort of mechanical exercise. Or: Donne
does not take sainthood seriously; here he is merely indulging in a
cynical and bawdy parody.
Neither account is true; a reading of the poem will show that Donne
takes both love and religion seriously; it will show, further, that
the paradox is here his inevitable instrument. But to see this plainly
will require a closer reading than most of us give to poetry.
The poem opens dramatically on a note of exasperation. The "you"
whom the speaker addresses is not identified. We can imagine that it
is a person, perhaps a friend, who is objecting to the speaker's love
affair. At any rate, the person represents the practical world which
regards love as a silly affectation. To use the metaphor on which the
poem is built, the friend represents the secular world which the lovers
have renounced.
Donne begins to suggest this metaphor in the first stanza by the contemptuous
alternatives which he suggests to the friend:
· . . chide
my palsie, or my gout,
My five gray haires, or ruin'd fortune flout ....
The implications
are: (1) All right, consider my love as an infirmity, as a disease,
if you will, but confine yourself to my other infirmities, my palsy,
my approaching old age, my ruined fortune· You stand a better
chance of curing those; in chiding me for this one, you are simply wasting
your time as well as mine. (2) Why don't you pay attention to your own
welfare--go on and get wealth and honor for yourself. What should you
care if I do give these up in pursuing my love?
The two main categories of secular success are neatly, and contemptuously
epitomized in the line
Or the Kings reall,
or his stamped face . . .
Cultivate the court
and gaze at the king's face there, or, if you prefer, get into business
and look at his face stamped on coins. But let me alone.
This conflict between the "real" world and the lover absorbed
in the world of love runs through the poem; it dominates the second
stanza in which the torments of love, so vivid to the lover, affect
the real world not at all--
What merchants
ships have my sighs drown'd?
It is touched on
in the fourth stanza in the contrast between the word "Chronicle"
which suggests secular history with its pomp and magnificence, the history
of kings and princes, and the word "sonnets" with its suggestions
of trivial and precious intricacy. The conflict appears again in the
last stanza, only to be resolved when the unworldly lovers, love's saints
who have given up the world, paradoxically achieve a more intense world.
But here the paradox is still contained in and supported by, the dominant
metaphor: so does the holy anchorite win a better world by giving up
this one.
But before going on to discuss this development of the theme, it is
important to see what else the second stanza does. For it is in this
second stanza and the third, that the poet shifts the tone of the poem
modulating from the note of irritation with which the poem opens into
the quite different tone with which it closes. Donne accomplishes the
modulation of tone by what may be called an analysis of love-metaphor.
Here, as in many of his poems, he shows that he is thoroughly self-conscious
about what he is doing. This second stanza, he fills with the conventionalized
figures of the Petrarchan tradition; the wind of lovers' sights, the
floods of lovers' tears, etc.--extravagant figures with which the contemptuous
secular friend might be expected to tease the lover. The implication
is that the poet himself recognizes the absurdity of the Petrarchan
love metaphors. But what of it? The very absurdity of the jargon which
lovers are expected to talk makes for his argument: their love, however
absurd it may appear to the world, does no ham to the world. The practical
friend need have no fears: there will still be wars to fight and lawsuits
to argue.
The opening of the third stanza suggests that this vein of irony is
to be maintained- The poet points out to his friend the infinite fund
of such absurdities which can be applied to lovers:
Call her one,
mee another flye·
We'are Tapers too, and at our owne cost die ....
For that matter,
the lovers can conjure up for themselves plenty of such fantastic comparisons:
they know what the world thinks of them. But these figures of the third
stanza are no longer the threadbare Petrarchan conventionalities; they
have sharpness and bite. The last one, the likening of the lovers to
the phoenix, is · fully serious, and with it, the tone has shifted
from ironic banter into a defiant but controlled tenderness.
The effect of the poet's implied awareness of the lovers' apparent madness
is to cleanse and revivify metaphor; to indicate the sense in which
the poet accepts it, and thus to prepare us for accepting seriously
the fine and seriously intended metaphors which dominate the last two
stanzas of the poem.
The opening line of the fourth stanza,
Wee can dye by
it, if not live by love,
achieves an effect
of tenderness and deliberate resolution. The lovers are ready to die
to the world; they are committed; they are not callow but confident.
(The basic metaphor of the saint, one notices, is being carried on;
the lovers in their renunciation of the world, have something of the
confident resolution of the saint. By the bye, the word "legend"--
. . if unfit for
tombes and hearse
Our legend bee--
in Donne's time
meant "the life of a saint.") The lovers are willing to forego
the ponderous and stately chronicle and to accept the trifling and insubstantial
"sonnet" instead; but then if the urn be well wrought, it
provides a finer memorial for one's ashes than does the pompous and
grotesque monument. With the finely contemptuous, yet quiet phrase,
"halfe-acre tombes," the world which the lovers reject' expands
into something gross and vulgar. But the figure works further; the pretty
sonnets will not merely hold their ashes as a decent earthly memorial.
Their legend, their story, will gain them canonization; and approved
as love's saints, other lovers will invoke them.
In this last stanza, the theme receives a final complication. The lovers
in rejecting life actually win to the most intense life. This paradox
has been hinted at earlier in the phoenix metaphor. Here it receives
a powerful dramatization. The lovers in becoming hermits, find that
they have not lost the world, but have gained the world in each other,
now a more intense, more meaningful world. Donne is not content to treat
the lovers' discovery as something which comes to them passively, but
rather as something which they actively achieve. They are like the saint,
God's athlete:
Who did the whole
worlds soule contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes ....
The image is that
of a violent squeezing as of a powerful hand. And what do the lovers
"drive" into each other's eyes? The "Countries, Townes,"
and "Countries," which they renounced in the first stanza
of the poem. The unworldly lovers thus become the most "worldly"
of all.
The tone with which the poem closes is one of triumphant achievement,
but the tone is a development contributed to by various earlier elements.
One of the more important elements which works toward our acceptance
of the final paradox is the figure of the phoenix, which will bear a
little further analysis.
The comparison of the lovers to the phoenix is very skillfully related
to the two earlier comparisons, that in which the lovers are like burning
tapers, and that in which they are like the eagle and the dove. The
phoenix comparison gathers up both: the phoenix is a bird, and like
the tapers, it burns. We have a selected series of items: the phoenix
figure seems to come in a natural stream of association. "Call
us what you will," the lover says, and rattles off in his desperation
the first comparisons that occur to him. The comparison to the phoenix
seems thus merely another outlandish one, the most outrageous of all.
But it is this most fantastic one, stumbled over apparently in his haste,
that the poet goes on to develop. It really describes the lovers best
and justifies their renunciation. For the phoenix is not two but one,
"we two being one, are it"; and it burns, not like the taper
at its own cost, but to live again. Its death is life: "Wee dye
and rise the same . . ." The poet literally justifies the fantastic
assertion. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to "die"
means to experience the consummation of the act of love. The lovers
after the act are the same. Their love is not exhausted in mere lust.
This is their title to canonization. Their love is like the phoenix.
I hope that I do not seem to juggle "the meaning of die. The meaning
that I have cited can be abundantly justified in the literature of the
period; Shakespeare uses "die" in this sense; so does Dryden.
Moreover, I do not think that I give it undue emphasis. The word is
in a crucial position. On it is pivoted the transition to the next stanza,
Wee can dye by
it, if not live by love,
And it unfit for tombes . . .
Most important
of all, the sexual submeaning of "die" does not contradict
the other meanings: the poet is saying: "Our death is really a
more intense life"; we can afford to trade life (the world) for
death (love), for that death is the consummation of life; "After
all, one does not expect to live by love one expects, and wants, to
die by it." But in the total passage he is also saying: "Because
our love is not mundane, we can give up the world"; "Because
our love is not merely lust, we can give up the other lusts, the lust
for wealth and power"; "because," and this is said with
an inflection of irony as by one who knows the world too well, "because
our love can outlast its consummation, we are a minor miracle, we are
love's saints." This passage with its ironical tenderness and its
realism feeds and supports the brilliant paradox with which the poem
closes.
There is one more factor in developing and sustaining the final effect.
The poem is an instance of the doctrine which it asserts; it is both
the assertion and the realization of the assertion. The poet has actually
before our eyes built within the song the "pretty room" with
which he says the lovers can be content. The poem itself is the well-wrought
urn which can hold the lovers' ashes and which will not suffer in comparison
with the prince's "halfe-acre tomb."
And how necessary are the paradoxes? Donne might have said directly,
"Love in a cottage is enough." "The Canonization"
contains this admirable thesis, but it contains a great deal more. He
might have been as forthright as a later lyricist who wrote, "We'll
build a sweet little nest,/Somewhere out in the West,/And let the rest
of the world go by." He might even have imitated that more metaphysical
lyric, which maintains, "You're the cream in my coffee." "The
Canonization" touches on all these observations, but it goes beyond
them, not merely in dignity, but in precision.
I submit that the only way by which the poet could say what "The
Canonization" says is by paradox. More direct methods may be tempting,
but all of them enfeeble and distort what is to be said. This statement
may seem the less surprising when we reflect on how many of the important
things which the poet has to say have to be said by means of paradox:
most of the language of lovers is such--"The Canonization"
is a good example; so is most of the language of religion--
He who would save
his life, must lose it"; "The last shall be first." Indeed,
almost any insight important enough to warrant a great poem apparently
has to be stated in such terms. Deprived of the character of paradox
with its twin concomitants of irony and wonder, the matter of Donne's
poem unravels into "facts," biological, sociological, and
economic. What happens to Donne's lovers if we consider them "scientifically,"
without benefit of the supernaturalism which the poet confers upon them?
Well, what happens to Shakespeare's lovers, for Shakespeare uses the
basic metaphor of "The Canonization" in his Romeo and Juliet?
In their first conversation, the lovers play with the analogy between
the lover and the pilgrim to the Holy Land. Juliet says:
For saints have
hands that pilgrims' hands do touch
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
Considered scientifically,
the lovers become Mr. Aldous Huxley's animals, "quietly sweating,
palm to palm."
For us today, Donne's imagination seems obsessed with the problem of
unity; the sense in which the lovers become one---the sense in which
the soul is united with God. Frequently, as we have seen, one type of
union becomes a metaphor for the other. It may not be too farfetched
to see both as instances of, and metaphors for, the union which the
creative imagination itself effects. For that fusion is not logical;
it apparently violates science and common sense; it welds together the
discordant and the contradictory. Coleridge has of course given us the
classic description of its nature and power. It "reveals itself
in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities:
of saneness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the
idea, with the image; the individual, with 'the representative; the
sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more
than usual state of emotion with more than usual order .... "It
is a great and illuminating statement but is a series of paradoxes.
Apparently Coleridge could describe the effect of the imagination in
no other way.
Shakespeare. in one of his poems. has given a description that oddly
parallels that of Coleridge.
Reason in it selfe
confounded,
Saw Division grow together,
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded.
I do not know what
his "The Phoenix and the Turtle" celebrates. Perhaps it was
written to honor the marriage of Sir John Salisbury and Ursula Stanley;
or perhaps the Phoenix is Lucy, Countess of Bedford; or perhaps the
poem is merely an essay on Platonic love. But the scholars themselves
are so uncertain, that I think we will do little violence to established
habits of thinking if we boldly pre-empt the poem for our own purposes.
Certainly the poem is an instance of that magic power which Coleridge
sought to describe. I propose that we take it for a moment as a poem
about that power;
So they loved
as love in twaine,
Had the essence but in one,
Two distincts, Division none,
Number there in love was slaine.
Hearts remote,
yet not asunder;
Distance and no space was seene
Twixt this Turtle and his Queene;
But in them it were a wonder ....
Propertie was
thus appalled,
That the seife was not the same;
Single Natures double name,
Neither two nor one was called.
Precisely! The nature is single, one, unified. But the name is double,
and today with our multiplication of sciences, it is multiple. H the
poet is to be true to his poetry, he must call it neither two nor one:
the paradox is his only solution. The difficulty has intensified since
Shakespeare's day: the timid poet, when confronted with the problem
of "Single Natures double name," has too often funked it.
A history of poetry from Dryden's time to our own might bear as its
suittitle "The Half-Hearted Phoenix."
In Shakespeare's poem, Reason is "in it selte confounded"
at the union of the Phoenix and the Turtle; but it recovers to admit
its own bankruptcy:
Love hath Reason,
Reason none,
If what parts, can so remaine ....
and it is Reason
which goes on to utter the beautiful threnos with which the poem concludes:
Beautie, Truth,
and Raritie,
Grace in all simplicitie,
Here enclosde, in cinders lie.
Death is now the Phoenix nest,
And the Turtles loyall brest,
To eternitie doth rest ....
Truth may seeme,
but cannot be,
Beautie bragge, but tis not she,
Truth and Beautie buried be.
To this urne let
those repaire,
That are either true or faire,
For these dead Birds, sigh a prayer.
Having pre-empted
the poem for our own purposes, it may not be too outrageous to go on
to make one further observation. The urn to which we are summoned, the
urn which holds the ashes of the phoenix, is like the well-wrought urn
of Donne's "Canonization" which holds the phoenix-lovers'
ashes: it is the poem itself. One is reminded of still another urn,
Keats's Grecian urn, which contained for Keats, Truth and Beauty, as
Shakespeare's urn encloses "Beautie, Truth, and Raritie."
But there is a sense in which all such well-wrought urns contain the
ashes of a Phoenix. The urns are not meant for memorial purposes only,
though that often seems to be their chief significance to the professors
of literature. The phoenix rises from its ashes; or ought to rise; but
it will not arise for all our mere sifting and measuring the ashes,
or testing them for their chemical content. We must be prepared to accept
the paradox of the imagination itself; else "Beautie, Truth, and
Raritie" remain enclosed in their cinders and we shall end with
essential cinders, for all our pains.
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