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The tragic element in the aesthetic experience resides, not in the transience, but in the enigmatic quality of the object: “Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu.” Is it a truthful object that is always reminding the lover of the transience, or a tantalizing one, like La Belle Dame? The aesthetic conflict is different from the romantic agony in this respect: that its central experience of pain resides in uncertainty, tending towards distrust, verging on suspicion. The lover is naked as Othello to the whisperings of Iago but is rescued by the quest for knowledge, the K-link, the desire to know rather than possess the object of desire. The K-link points to the value of the desire as itself the stimulus to knowledge, not merely as a yearning for gratification and control over the object. Desire makes it possible, even essential, to give the object its freedom.
The genesis of the Romantic poets' view of the aesthetic object—the Muse with her storehouse of poetic images—lay in Satan's description of Eve in Paradise Lost:
She fair, divinely fair, fit love for gods,Not terrible, though terror be in lovePage 27And beauty, not approached by stronger hate,Hate stronger … 2
Satan discovered, through tentative unfolding steps—ungrammatical in prose but eloquent in poetry—how the aesthetic object is defined by the contraries of love and hate, beauty and terror, inherent in the relation between the object and the poet-adventurer. These comprise the “hateful siege of contraries” that were to become Blake's philosophy of the “marriage of contraries” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the concept of “fearful symmetry” in The Tyger:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,In the forests of the night;What immortal hand or eye,