Romanticism

NOTES ON ENGLISH AND EUROPEAN ROMANTICISM

William Blake's "The Tyger" ( Vol. E, 339)

The tyger looks almost tame in most plates, and its appearance varies from one copy to the next. So perhaps Blake doesn't want to pin himself down on its meaning. Geoffrey Keynes says the poem's question is no less than the reconcilement of good with evil. The Tyger is not a natural being, or if it is, it is given a spiritual interpretation. Is it something created altogether by the human imagination? Did God make the Tyger? The poem's answer would be "yes."  The poem is about fallen nature, but this isn't really a nature poem because "forest of the night" is not the description we would give to indicate a natural forest. Blake's forest here is symbolic, and I believe the poem is at base about the terrors of the human imagination. We create something charged with symbolic power, and then shrink back from it in dread. It assumes fetishistic power over us, and renders us helpless. The things of the natural world have often been interpreted in this manner -- that is, as something threatening and alien to human beings. At the same time, a real tiger might be said to possess "fearful symmetry" in terms of its beautiful appearance and elegant movements.  As such, its existence is a challenge to our faith in the simple binary opposition good/evil. But a real tiger simply is and lives; it is neither good nor evil but a creature possessed of copious energy and impossible grace. How does one reconcile its beauty with its violence, its affinity with the lamb it would devour?

William Blake's "London" (340)

The poem "London" evokes a city trapped in a cycle of wretchedness. London here is a real city filled with material oppression and suffering, but at the same time it represents a spiritual state of enslavement brought about by the repression of healthy desires and impulses and the systemic encouragement of unhealthy and selfish ones.  What Blake puts on display is a cannibalistic universe ruled by necessity and ruthless economy: one person's poverty is another's wealth, and one person's sexual desperation is another's livelihood. This is a world made by humans that has become inhuman, inhumane. The poem echoes with sounds of despair -- sighs, cries and curses testify against the mute, sullen, inscrutable architecture of the great City, and in the final stanza, the "youthful harlot's curse" strikes the newborn child and the carriage of the newlywed alike, dooming them to perpetuate the spectacle around them for yet another generation. All is marked, hemmed in ("chartered"), enchained as if by fiendish design.

William Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" (351-54)

 

This meditative poem traces, in brief, the stages of development in the poet's relationship with his natural surroundings, with the aim of recovering a sense of purpose and vocation.  The speaker's affinity with the natural world grounds his very being, so in a sense, the poem is also about the recovery of the poet's capacity for intelligible self-representation.  First and foremost, how does he understand himself?  Nature plays many roles in romantic poetry -- as one of my UC Irvine professors (Al Wlecke) summed up those roles, nature serves as 1) the antithesis of traditional institutions and thought; 2) a substitute religion: 3) a vehicle for self-consciousness; 4) a source of healthy sensations; 5) a provocation to a state of imagination.  Wordsworth makes the environs of Tintern Abbey serve all of those purposes.

Lines 1-22.  This part of the poem is what Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuit founder and author of the meditation guide Spiritual Exercises, might call the "composition of place."  The meditator or "exercitant" thinks about some personally or theologically significant place, with the goal of achieving the calm necessary to focus the mind on some spiritual problem that needs resolution.  That is what "Tintern's" speaker is doing -- he has been here before as a younger and more carefree man, and, as we later hear, the mere recollection of this spot above the crumbling, picturesque abbey has sustained him in difficult, city-bound times.  What sustaining power will it have for him now that he has actually returned?  Will it revive his flagging spirits and diminished sense of imaginative capacity?

The landscape and the cliffs, earthly things, point to the heavenly realm of spirit; these natural images represent the poet's state of mind and his aspirations: the scene is mimetic (imitative, representational) in that it describes the natural scene, but also expressive in that it is charged with emotional and moral significance.  The speaker is rather like the contemplative hermit he mentions in these first lines -- isolated, but intently focused on his spiritual condition or, more broadly, his present psychic health and prospects for the future.

Lines 23-111.  The natural scenes that the speaker recollects have helped him in past times to purge himself of civilization's corrupting, diminishing effects.  It is not only the scenes in nature, the so-called "beauteous forms," that the speaker remembers; these archetypal, eternal forms cause him to recollect past sensations and feelings that made him feel fully alive and creative.  Meditation in nature's presence helps him attain tranquility, and as we may recall from Wordsworth's "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," such tranquility is the precondition for successful poetic composition.  In a state of calm, the poet recalls prior sensations and feelings, this recollection gives rise to new, equally significant feelings in the present, and then the right words begin to course through the poet's mind.  While the romantics are of course attracted to theories of inspiration, the process Wordsworth favors seems more a matter of cultivating in a disciplined way the temperament conducive to the making of poetry -- deep feeling and a healthy excess of imagination are important, but these are fed by affective memory and sustained by habit.

Around line 40, the speaker describes an experience similar to a religious epiphany, a moment of deep spiritual insight in which we are purified and renewed.  He is in a state of "wise passiveness," to borrow a phrase from another of his poems ("Expostulation and Reply").  What does religion provide if not moral intelligibility?  It is clear that much sad experience has come the speaker's way in the five years between the present and his last visit to the environs of Tintern Abbey: "the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world" lies upon him.

Around line 50, the speaker voices his anxiety that his trust in recollections of his relationship with nature may be only "a vain belief."  What if the link between mind and nature is irrevocably broken?  What if such claims about strong affinities between humanity and nature are abstractions, mere products of rhetoric?  It may be that the speaker cannot re-experience the feelings he once had.  If so, he will be cut off from the vital source of his own being.  Still, as his prayer to the river shows, nature is a shepherd, so to speak.  So the speaker will not give in to fear but will instead take comfort in what remains to him.  In the rest of the poem, he will assert the capacity to be sustained by the memory of nature's forms and to respond to his natural surroundings.

The Miltonic diction of line 66 helps provide some contemplative distance for readers.  The precisely delineated moments or stages in the poet's relationship with nature over time now become the recollected past.  The present is linked to this sustainable past, providing hope for the future.

Around line 75, the speaker admits "I cannot paint what then I was."  He has no words to represent how he felt accurately when his love for nature, long after the "glad animal sensations" of childhood, haunted him and had all the intensity of an erotic passion.  This inability to describe a former stage in his relationship with nature is painful to him -- what he cannot describe, he cannot recover in actual experience.

Around line 85, the speaker refers to the "abundant recompence" he has been given for the loss sustained.  As in Jeremy Taylor's book Holy Living and Holy Dying, a Christian must not indulge in despair, and hope comes partly from the reckoning up of one's blessings.  In our poet's case, there is compensation for the loss that comes with maturity.  What is this compensation?  The speaker describes it as a pantheistic "sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns…."  The word "therefore" soon signals that the poem's mimetic language has given way to sublime abstractions that assert the speaker's higher, more philosophical understanding of the continuity between mind and nature.  This moves us towards the end of the "analysis" to which Meyer Abrams refers in writing about the Greater Romantic Lyric, which begins with meditative description, proceeds to the articulation and analysis of a spiritual problem, and concludes with a solution linked to the poet's capacity for healthy emotion and passionate connection to others.

Around line 105, the speaker describes nature as a source of healthy feelings and as the "anchor" of his moral being.  The anchor, of course, is a Christian symbol of hope.

Lines 111-end, Affective Resolution.  Dorothy is nature's equivalent in this final section of the poem.  The poem turns intersubjective at this point, so it's hardly an example of what Keats calls Wordsworth's "egotistical sublime." (The phrase refers to a romantic tendency to plumb the depths of the inner self until nothing else matters -- to use a modern quip, "it's all about me.")  The speaker's retrieval of his connection to nature leads him back to the human world, and he takes pleasure in the hope that his sister will remain after he is gone, still to experience some of the phases of her relationship with nature that the speaker has described.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (379).

What is the source of poetry?  How is poetry composed?  What is the value of expressive acts such as poetry?  One of the two impossible dreams in "Kubla Khan" is to make the inner workings of one's mind available to the waking self and to other people.  To borrow a term from the Twentieth Century, can the Unconscious become available to the conscious mind?  Freud would say we can only make inferences based on certain screening, masking, and distorting devices that keep unpleasant emotional events hidden from us.  We are always "translators" when it comes to understanding the mind, and what we must work with is always fragmentary or somehow distorted. 

In Coleridge's context, the Man from Porlock represents the world noisily breaking in and preventing us from accessing the Imagination (in the form of Kubla Khan the poet-emperor.)  Kubla seems to be a god-figure who simply speaks, and the thing is done; he decrees that a Pleasure-Dome be built, and it is built.  Kubla is close to the source of unconscious creation, which, I believe, is figured by the sacred river Alph.  (The Norton Anthology of English Literature notes suggest that the word comes from the Greek river-god Alpheus, but I can't see why it shouldn't be the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, "Aleph.")  Coleridge treats the Man from Porlock as an external nuisance, but his arrival just in time to shatter the poet's attempt to write down his vision intact points rather to a need that he should show up.  Perhaps, then, the Man is an internal mechanism that maintains the barrier between the dream world and waking consciousness.  To break down that barrier permanently or entirely would almost certainly result in madness.  In the prose preface affixed to his poem, Coleridge indicates a perfect kind of poetic composition: images rise up as things, and the right words ("correspondent expressions") come just as automatically to the dreamer.  There seems to be no need here for what Coleridge describes in his Biographia Literaria as the secondary (or poetic) imagination's coexistence with the "conscious will."  In other words, we are dealing with automatic writing from a source deeper than any that could coexist with ordinary consciousness and will.

But this perfect way of composing cannot be realized -- the hope that it could is the poem's second impossible dream; namely a language that not only names and describes reality but creates it -- so the composition we see consists of written fragments on the printed page.  In this sense, perhaps the Man from Porlock is ultimately the act of writing.  A dream vision, to be communicated as a poem, will have to be written down, and thereby comes a second and irretrievable loss.

Well, what does the written fragment dwell upon?  Mostly it dwells on the river Alph, the chasm, and the fountain.  Kubla is mentioned twice -- first when he decrees the Pleasure-Dome and then when he hears "ancestral voices prophesying war."  The miraculous Dome itself can't be fully represented by Coleridge the poet, it seems.  Well, what would the result be if the poet could build the Dome in writing?  We would, he suggests, have to build barriers around him and treat him as an object of holy dread: he would be co-emperor of Kubla's Empire of Imagination: "weave a circle round him thrice."  But given what we actually, have, it appears that poetry's chief power lies not in delivering such magical realities, but rather in suggesting them.  That is what Mary Robinson's "To the Poet Coleridge" identifies as the chief value of "Kubla Khan."

Charles Baudelaire's selections from The Flowers of Evil (466-80).

"To the Reader"

There's much in this proem of the luxury of self-reproach, homage to the search for novelty, anything, anything at all, to break out of the unbearable stupidity of everyday life and conventional morality.  But the worst "sin" of all, it would appear, is boredom, which in French is ennui (from Old French enuier, modern French ennuyer, to annoy), which involves both boredom and depression, apathy, listlessness.  It's similar to the spiritual sin of acedia (akedía, Greek, spiritual sloth).  So what does this ennui make possible?  I think it's vital to recognize that the state of soul or mind here is as much an opportunity as a curse, at least for Baudelaire and the décadents who followed him.  There's a constant movement towards the voluptuous and the sensuous in Baudelaire, but also a reflux of disgust upon giving in to such states or objects.  I don't think a philosophy like Baudelaire's, which is more or less the basis of the Decadent Movement, can be adopted straight-up, I mean without some irony and a sense of humor: it's morbid, obsessed with the seamy side of things and with strange novelties.  Well, the author's theoretical writings openly reject merely natural things and effects as too limited, too base: as he writes in The Painter of Modern Life, "nature counsels nothing but crime."  The glib way of putting this is of course Oscar Wilde's wonderful judgment on natural sunsets: all we get from mother nature, said Oscar, is second-rate copies of Turner's magnificent painted sunsets.  Nature has no imagination, it seems.

"Correspondances"

The poem "Correspondances" gives us a respectful view of nature's value to us: "nature is a temple" and we wander in its symbolic power and evocations.  It's as if our gaze is met by nature's towards us.  The editors mention Baudelaire's interest in synesthesia, or the blending of the senses as though they all harmonize, all come together to give us a unified experience of some "mystic unity" (the Norton editors mention this aptly on 1383).  This is an odd relationship with nature, isn't it?  It's hardly the one you'd get from, say, Wordsworth, where the natural world is said to be the source of our moral being, of healthy and universal sensations that connect each person to all others, at least potentially.

One could say that to call nature a temple is to transform it into something that signifies in the human realm.  But then, the obverse is also true: it's to suggest that the human realm of language and symbol and image corresponds to nature.  This is how Baudelaire offers a sense of idealism, of the possibility of transcendence.  This poem is vital to the Symbolistes in that language itself takes center stage along with the mind's power.  The point here isn't to imitate an objective, unchanging external reality, it's to assert a mystical correspondence between spiritual or mental states and the realm of external nature.  There's a tendency in modern times to replace any notion of objective reality with an emphasis on the power of language as a realm in its own right, one that shapes and perhaps even constitutes our sense of reality, and later symbolist poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé will take this idea about as far as it can go.

"Her Hair"

For me, the key to this poem is its sensual intensity, which is almost like that of John Donne, he of the "she is all states, all princes I" rhetoric that we can find in "The Sunne Rising" and other poems.  But aside from the gesture towards annihilating time and space, what about the speaker's wish to know "a measure / Of fertile idleness and fragrant leisure"?  As so often, Baudelaire explores the strange delights of indolence, of ennui.

"A Carcass"

This poem follows the ideational structure of a Shakespearean sonnet: "If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved."  That is, the poem's conclusion reasserts the same ideal that the rest of it tore down, with all those images of decay and references to the ugliness and stench of death: putrefaction, morbidity, horror.  Consider, too, Hamlet's mocking muse while beholding the skull of Yorick in 5.1: "Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let / her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must / come; make her laugh at that."  This is the embrace of opposites that the Norton editors mention in connection with Baudelaire's poetics: life and death, beauty and decay, the material and the ideal.  His poetry has something of William Blake's intensity in this regard.

"Invitation to the Voyage" (51^st poem of les Fleurs du Mal)

Is the speaker in fact offering us an idealistic, otherworldly vision?  Maybe, maybe not – the poem revels in eroticism, which isn't the same thing as emphasizing or gesturing towards some grand abstract ideal realm.  Will the lover accept the invitation?  That's not so certain: the poet says her eyes (windows to the soul) are treacherous, not to be trusted, though by no means to be left behind or rejected and despised.  And of course consider the poem "Voyage," where the passage seems to be anything but towards an otherworldly ideal.