Sunlight

Meaning

Sunlight describes the shining of pure wisdom in the emblem poem. The speaker reads the winged helmet and cock as signs of love for the noble art and for wisdom that shines like the sun. The immediate relation is one of illumination and splendour.

The English preserves the simile rather than identifying wisdom with physical solar radiation. This occurrence is therefore different from a passage assigning the Sun a nourishing role in the work or using Sol as a metallic name. It belongs to the poem’s interpretation of a displayed figure, whose features represent the close relation between true alchemy and right theosophy.