IAA FO3 Romantisme
Keats « Ode on a Grecian Urn ».
In this ode the poet persona first addresses an ancient urn, then turns to address the pastoral
characters and paraphernalia depicted on the urn: the soft pipes, the fair youth, the bold lover, the happy
boughs, the happy melodist, the mysterious priest, the little town, and then again in stanza 5, the “silent
form” of the urn itself. The urn embodies silence and “slow time” or timelessness and is an apparently
neo-classical subject for a poem, which nevertheless turns out to be a Romantic one with its emotion, its
praise for the imagination and its hints of the sublime. The ode is composed of five ten-line stanzas in
iambic pentameters with the first four lines in alternate rhyme, the rest a more variable rhyme scheme.
An ode is an elaborate lyric poem on a lofty subject, often to celebrate someone or something. Here we
may wonder what exactly is being celebrated: the beauty of the urn itself, or rather through it, beauty as
the ultimate value, or perhaps the power of the imagination, which produces sweeter music than real
instruments can.
1) Beauty
a. The urn is first compared with a common image of beauty, a virgin, in an apostrophising
metaphor of which the “ground” is wholeness, the state of being intact. “Still” means
motionless and also has a temporal meaning, and the urn’s beauty draws on the situation
of being destined for life’s passions but immobilised before experiencing them. This is
pursued in the ensuing stanzas: the youth will not stop singing, the leaves will not fall
from the trees, the lover will not embrace his loved one, the emptied town will remain
empty, and so on. This tension between before and after runs through the poem, but the
dominant image conveyed is one of a lost world of unsullied innocence and joy, a lost
paradise before the corruption of the ensuing ages of man. This portrayal of a state of
innocence is corroborated by the Classical references to Tempe or Arcady, both beautiful
valleys presented by the Ancients as being inhabited by happy shepherds and
shepherdesses delighting in music and dance: the home of the pastoral genre.
b. Throughout the second and third stanzas, indeed, a case is made for the superiority of art
over life: better to be a carved lover who will never experience satiety or disappointment,
pain or old age, than a human one. Art is seen as offering eternal joy, aesthetic pleasure
and youth: “For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”, and: “For ever piping songs for
ever new;” “For ever warm and still to be enjoyed”, and: “For ever panting, and for ever
young:/All breathing human passion far above”. Meanwhile the inferiority of human life
is portrayed in terms of bare trees, faded female beauty, weary musicians playing the
same old tunes, cooled and sated passions, sickness and fever: “That leaves a heart highsorrowful and cloyed,/A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”
c. The last lines of the poem seem to bear this reading out, although the lines have been the
object of much discussion and disagreement: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”, in a
harmonious chiasmic formula which reflects the formal perfection, the sense of intact
closure and immobility of the Grecian urn. The poem thus seems to bear out some of
Keats’s statements on aesthetic theory, such as: “The excellence of every art is its
intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close
relationship with Beauty and Truth.”
However, this rather neo-classical, conventional apology for aesthetic beauty does not take
into account another voice in the poem, which seems to undermine it; for the spectator’s gaze
does not simply observe and take note, it gives rise to the life of the imagination.
2) Imagination
a. The poem is not univocal but based on a series of paradoxes, starting with the word
“still”, whose importance is foregrounded by the alliterative web on /s/ (silence, slow
time (note the mimetic spondee), Sylvan…), which contains the temporal paradox
between present/past continuity and future interruption, and indeed the poet persona
could be said to ravish the bride of quietness and, through imagination, penetrate her
secrets. There is, for instance, a paradox between the sweetness of the “flowery tale”
expressed by the urn, and the wild sexuality portrayed in lines 8-10. These three lines are
divided into half-lines, composed of six questions, depicting fast frenetic movement,
which contrasts with the immobility of the urn, while revealing the excitement and
emotion of the poet persona as he enters the world depicted by the urn and his
imagination begins to work. Rather than classical beauty, this links up with the emphasis
laid by Wordsworth and Coleridge and in Romanticism more generally, on an emotional
response to the world for poetry.
b. The second stanza opens with a third paradox, reinforced by the opening spondee and the
oppositional epanalepsis (heard/unheard) and violently united in the oxymoron “those
unheard”, according to which the unheard music of the imagination is superior to real
music. Aligning poetry with music is a commonplace, and the poem has already
compared poetry and the urn (“more sweetly than our rhyme”), indeed Keats cristallises
in this poem the paradoxes of poetry which is static and formally rigid, composed of
printed words “dead” on the page, yet potentially alive: the life of the mind and life to the
mind.
c. Beauty then is redefined here in terms of conflicting notions; the urn is not praised for its
classical lines and proportion, its unmoving perfection, but for its capacity to inspire the
life of the mind, to stimulate the imaginative faculties and the emotions, as is conveyed
by the excited questions, the repeated negations and obsessive repetition of the word
“happy”. Moreover, these repetitions seem excessive, hyperbolic, and, as when in
Shakespeare we read “Methinks the lady doth protest too much”, they suggest the
opposite of what they purport to mean. Thus the repeated negatives in stanza two give a
melancholic overtone, as if to suggest nostalgia for the everyday world; the repetitions of
“happy” are perhaps ironic, given after all that desire remains unfulfilled, and the
repeated phrase “for ever” likewise conveys a sense of the weariness at the thought of
eternity. The poem may therefore be seen both to celebrate aesthetic joy while expressing
an awareness of its deceptiveness, its deathly temptations.
d. The last stanza seems to corroborate this dual approach to aesthetic beauty. The first half
focuses on the intricate interwoven pastoral design on the urn, which “dost tease us out of
thought/As doth eternity”. This seems to mean the urn tempts us away from everyday
thoughts, thus everyday life, thus away from life into death – from eros to thanatos –, as
is suggested by the capitalised Cold Pastoral. The second half then tries to re-establish
and reassert the value of the urn to humankind, but in rather unconvincing terms, such
that one wonders if this elegant rhetorical formula in inverted commas is perhaps ironic.
On the other hand, the phrase in lines 44/45 also suggests the sublime, which is the
feeling of something which lies beyond representation or understanding, beyond the
feeling of form, in contrast therefore with this pure “Attic shape”, and in keeping with the
paradoxical “silent form” (silence is by definition formless). In which case the poem
offers an aesthetic theory closer to that of his fellow Romantics and based on paradox and
the reconciliation of opposites as theorised by Coleridge.
IAA FO1 Romantisme : TD Mme Greaves
Notes on the Romantic Sublime
Milton
Milton was hailed as the paragon of the sublime in poetry, because of the vastness and
magnitude of his great epic poem, Paradise Lost. In the eighteenth century the sublime was
defined as the evocation of infinity or great power through a single image, such as through
Satan. On the formal level, Satan is a highly concrete, physical image, used to suggest vast
spiritual power. Also, Satan epitomizes the notion of sublime freedom, in that he chooses to
fall, he knows he cannot win the battle with God.
The Sublime and the Beautiful
The beautiful was the experience of order, proportion, appropriateness, and according
to Edmund Burke (1729-1797, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and the Beautiful) is a matter of smallness and smoothness: “beautiful objects are
small”; “I can recollect nothing beautiful that is not smooth…”.
In contrast to this, the sublime is related to infinity; it is the feeling of something
which goes beyond representation and understanding, something which cannot be put into
form, which goes beyond form or boundaries. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804, Critique of
Judgment) distinguishes between experience and ideas. Ideas are evidence that we can think
beyond experience. Thus we can have an idea of an origin or first cause, but no experience of
it; we can have an idea of infinity, but cannot know it exists. Likewise we can have an idea of
ourselves as free, and it is this idea which is elevating and sublime, in contrast with the
knowable, causal world of experience. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound asserted the pain and
value of freedom:
…torture and solitude,
Scorn and despair, - these are mine empire: More glorious far than that which thou surveyest
From thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God!
Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame
Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here
Nailed to his wall of eagle-baffling mountain… (ll.14-20).
The sublime, then, leads the imagination beyond experience to a formlessness beyond the self
which makes the subject aware of his/her limits and of the desire to reach beyond them. The
sublime extends the imagination beyond what can be comprehended, either through an image
of nature so overpowering that we feel fear or awe (Burke placed terror at the heart of the
sublime), or through the sense that the imagination is striving and straining to encompass
some great magnitude, and failing. Essential for Kant and for modern aesthetics, was the
notion of reflection, or self-awareness. With beauty, we experience the world as if it were
formed for our understanding; with the sublime, we experience the desire to strive for the
infinite, which makes us aware of the limits of the imagination and of the ways in which we
aim beyond sensible experiences. Here is an extract from Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”:
Dizzy Ravine! And when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness, and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
In the still cave of the witch Poesy,
Seeking among the shadows that pass by
Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast
From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!
The Postmodern Sublime
Jean-François Lyotard sees postmodern art as sublime because it works with the limits
of representation: “The art-object no longer bends itself to models, but tries to present the fact
that there is an unpresentable…”
Notes inspired by English
http://www.englit.ed.ac.uk
Literature
2:
Romanticism
and
the
Sublime,
IAA FO3 Poésie Romantique
Mme Greaves
« Christabel », S.T. Coleridge.
Introduction
Coleridge began this poem in 1798 and wrote the conclusion to Part II in 1801. It was
originally intended for the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, but remained unpublished until
1816. It is a long narrative poem in a medieval style and setting, in which the supernatural
plays a major role. The poem creates a sense of deep unease or “raw agitation” as one critic
puts it, and lends itself to numerous interpretations (feminist, psychoanalytical and so on), and
is all the more perplexing as it remains unfinished. One moonlit night, Christabel has left the
castle she lives in to go and pray in the wood nearby. She encounters a beautiful lady who
claims to have been abducted and mistreated by five men, and invites her into the castle out of
pity. Numerous thresholds are crossed before they reach Christabel’s bedroom, where
Geraldine, as the lady is called, undresses, revealing something inspiring horror in Christabel
and which she refers to as “This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow”. She puts a spell
on Christabel and violates her. The spell prevents Christabel from telling her father, in his role
as figure of authority, what has happened, and neither she nor Bracy the bard can make him
attend to their attempted warnings about the dangerous Geraldine. The principal question
raised by the poem concerns Geraldine and is directly asked by Christabel when she meets
her: “And who art thou?” The answer may lie in the way the character is presented and
portrayed in the narrative; in the role played by the Gothic setting, or in a reflection on the
theme of the Double.
Narrative strategies.
The narrative has the lively orality of medieval narratives (cf. Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales). The narrator is neither “objective” nor discreet but emotionally involved, clearly
taking sides with the heroine (“The lovely lady, Christabel”), going so far as to intervene in
the narrative and to try and influence the course of events by imploring Christ and Mary
(“Jesu, Maria, shield her well!”), or the baron, Christabel’s father, to protect and save her (ll.
621-636). To draw the reader/listener into the story (the phatic function) the simple but
effective device of the question and answer is frequently used, which helps to dramatise the
narrative: “Is the night chilly and dark?/The night is chilly but not dark.” (ll.13-14), “What
makes her in the wood so late,/A furlong from the castle gate?” (ll25-26). Nostalgic archaisms
of medieval diction (“Right glad they were” (l.136), “So let it be” l.235), of epithets derived
from the oral tradition (“the lofty lady…” (l.226)) are also used, and there are frequent
repetitions and interjections (“Hush, beating heart of Christabel!”). All these characteristically
oral rhetorical devices contribute to the lively animated style and a strong textual dynamic
carrying the reading forward – a phenomenon reflected in the poem by the inexorability of the
descent from innocence into sin and guilt, of the thresholds crossed, one after the other. The
passionate tone is also aided by the rhythm and rhyme; the ever-present rhyme (either in
couplets, alternate rhyme or enclosing rhyme) and the lively iambic tetrameters give a musical
tension to the poem, as do the highly expressive metrics, referred to by Coleridge in his note
to the poem, and which expand to reflect the increase in momentum, in emotion, at crucial
points in the poem (see for instance ll.126-7, ll.269-270). Also, the melancholy whine of the
sound “ine” resounds throughout the poem, notably in Geraldine, Leoline and Peak and pine,
echoing the misery of Christabel. In fact it is the emotionality and passionate involvement of
the story-telling, as much as of the interest of the story itself, that commands the reader’s
attention and produces the necessary “willing suspension of disbelief” (See Coleridge’s
Biographia Literaria). As readers we are more emotionally involved than rationally.
The narrator adopts various stances as the poem unfolds. With respect to Geraldine,
the position of the narrative is ambiguous and the power of the tale lies in the narrator’s
ignorance – sometimes feigned, sometimes real – of Geraldine. The narrator is indeed a
paradoxical construct, whose omniscience touches on external details while reaching within
the mind of Christabel (“She had dreams all yesternight/Of her own betrothed knight” ll.278), and at times adopts her point of view, as in: “So free from danger, free from fear,/They
crossed the court” (l.135), although this light-heartedness is ironic (lines 143-4 introduce a
still more sinister note of foreboding). Elsewhere, the narrator takes on the role of interpreter,
elaborating hypotheses: “And thus it chanced, as I divine,/With Roland and Sir Leoline”
(l.414). The narrator offers no such explanations for Geraldine, on the contrary, where
Geraldine is concerned, s/he ironically purports to be ignorant, thus contributing to the
character’s mysteriousness: “Alas! What ails poor Geraldine?/Why stares she with unsettled
eye?”…etc. (ll. 206-208.); and at the crucial moment refuses to relate the event, hiding behind
the rhetorical device of praeteritio : “Behold! Her bosom and half her side – /A sight to dream
of, not to tell!” (ll.252-3).
Another factor contributing to the ambiguous presentation of Geraldine is the use of
interpolated stories and multiple narrators, including Geraldine herself. There is the story of
the baron’s thwarted – possibly homosexual – friendship with Geraldine’s father, Roland of
Tryermaine (ll.408-426), and Bracy the bard relates his allegorical dream. The story of the
baron’s youthful friendship helps explain the power Geraldine exerts over him, while also
functioning suggestively as a mise-en-abyme of the Christabel-Geraldine couple. The bard’s
dream is misinterpreted by Sir Leoline (ll.569-571), but the poem invites us to read it as a
mise-en-abyme with its suggestions of dovelike qualities in Christabel, snakelike
characteristics (“those shrunken serpent eyes”, etc. (l.602)) in Geraldine.
We have, then, an emotionally involved narrator, a mysterious presentation and the
symbols of a dream allegory, all suggestive of something unsayable, some source of shame.
As in other Gothic narratives, here the Gothic elements may serve this presentation of sexual
fears and fantasies which cannot be directly expressed.
Gothic elements
The poem abounds in the trappings of Gothic fiction, and there is an effect of
exaggeration and excess in the use of clichés, which could be comical. There is a medieval
castle and it is midnight, there are owls, a clouded sky and an eery moon; there is the sleeping
nobleman’s household, the fire in the grate, and the baron’s shield “in a murky old niche in
the wall”. The Gothic setting is distant in time and space, and also socially, since the
characters are noblemen and women (cf. Geraldine’s “blue-blooded feet”), and is thus ideally
suited for tackling what is in fact too close for comfort, that is, shameful, deep-seated desires.
This theme is suggested from the beginning of the poem when Christabel mysteriously leaves
the safety of the castle at night and slips off to the woods, to “pray/For the weal of her lover
that’s far away.” No explanation is given for why she needs to go to the woods to do this, and
despite the narrator’s presentation of Christabel as an innocent victim, who acts out of
generosity, stretching out her hand to Geraldine out of pity, we might be inclined to think that
she has in a sense conjured up the creature Geraldine – just as, in the Christian tradition, the
sinner is not straightforwardly a victim of evil, but can only fall prey to it if he invites it into
his heart. Christabel is initiated by Geraldine – into “sorrow and shame”, into sin or guilt –
and this is symbolized by the crossing of a number of typically Gothic thresholds (“they
crossed the moat”, “over the threshold of the gate”, “they crossed the court”, “they passed the
hall”). Once again an effect of hyperbole is produced, as if the poet needed to distance himself
from his theme, whether fuelled by illicit sexual fantasies, or by memories of visiting brothels,
as some critics have suggested.
Gothic literature was often written and read by women, and this poem likewise is
dominated by women – who socially, of course, in medieval times and also to a great extent in
Coleridge’s day, were subjected to the male and had no more civil power than children. As
well as the two young women, there is Christabel’s mother who plays a considerable if
ambiguous role in the poem: is she a “wandering mother” (l.205) because her ghost is
condemned to wander, as if in purgatory, or because she is a guardian spirit? If the latter, she
nevertheless proves powerless to protect her daughter, and this theme of female power and
powerlessness is a recurrent one in Gothic literature. This theme is also suggested by the
promise on her deathbed to be present at midnight the day of her daughter’s wedding, which
is sinister and ironic in the light of this rape which takes place at midnight in the castle
bedroom. As well as Christabel’s mother, there is also the mother of Christ, who is called
upon several times (medieval England was Catholic), and Geraldine’s inability to join
Christabel in praising the Virgin Mary helps point to her association with evil (ll.139-142).
Geraldine is also compared with a mother: “And lo! The worker of these harms,/That holds
the maiden in her arms,/Seems to slumber still and mild,/As a mother with her child” (ll.298301), thus emphasising the “educational” role of Geraldine the initiator, the power
relationship within this couple and, ironically, the powerlessness of mothers in patriarchy.
Indeed, the couple formed by Christabel and Geraldine constitutes a pair of opposites, with
extreme submission and vulnerability on the one hand, extreme power and manipulativeness
on the other – in keeping with certain male fantasies. Meanwhile the men in the story are
either dangerous (the five warriors), absent (the lover), morally blind and thus a prey to
manipulation (the father) or ineffectual through social inferiority (the bard).
The function of the Gothic elements and themes may thus be said both to conceal and
reveal the character of Geraldine as a construct cristallising a range of sexual and social fears,
frustrations and fantasies, and which may helpfully be seen as Christabel’s Doppelgänger or
Double.
The Double.
Geraldine may be viewed as the Other-within-the-self rather than simply an Other, that
is to say, to put it simply, the repressed, unacknowledged fears and desires (drives) of the
unconscious, or the id (le ça). Indeed, Geraldine unites the contradictory forces of strangeness
and familiarity; when Christabel encounters her she is a familiar enough figure but in an
unexpected setting, and looks strange while speaking decorously: “The lady strange made
answers meet” (l.71). She could thus be considered as a figure of the uncanny, as theorized by
Freud (das Unheimlich, l’inquiétante étrangeté). If Geraldine is not so much a witch (despite
her links with Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth: “Off, wandering mother! Peak and pine!”)
as a figure of unconscious desires, then the use of space in the poem, and the spatial dynamics
(outside/inside, the gradual progress over the thresholds…), should be considered
symbolically as a mental landscape (or “mindscape”) – as with Coleridge’s The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and other Romantic poems. As I said above,
the poem is all the more disturbing for its lack of an ending; Coleridge constantly promised an
ending, but could never come up with one, and the reason for this may lie in the fact that the
poem tells the tale of a shipwrecked personality, of an ego losing ground to the id – as is
forcefully suggested by the almost total loss of the power of speech, given that the rational
self is also the language-using one: “By my mother’s soul do I entreat/That thou this woman
send away!”/She said: and more she could not say:/For what she knew she could not
tell,/O’er-mastered by the mighty spell.” This shift in the balance of power within the self is
also indicated through imagery: “A star hath set, a star hath risen.” (l.302). The daughter’s
desire for the father, her wish to replace her (dead but still present) mother in his affections,
can thus be realized through the bewitching powers of Geraldine. Indeed, the baron casts
aside his dovelike daughter and falls in love with Geraldine: “Then turned to Lady
Geraldine,/His eyes made up of wonder and love;/And said in courtly accents fine,/’Sweet
maid, Lord Roland’s beauteous dove,/With arms more strong than harp or song,/ Thy sire and
I will crush the snake!” (ll. 566-571).
The poem works towards this reading of a Doubling on numerous levels. The young
women’s names contain the same vowels, but reversed as if in a mirror: I, A, E and E, A, I,
although the final vowel in Geraldine is a long one. Both have feminized masculine names,
which is suggestive of sexual ambiguity, a theme also suggested by the presence of the carved
angel (l.183) in the bedroom, and the mother’s “wine of virtuous powers”, where the
etymology of “vir” brings in a note of masculinity. They resemble each other through their
youth, their beauty and their noble rank, each is or has been a victim, and as the two women
advance towards Christabel’s bedroom, their union is foreshadowed by the repeated and
ostentatious use of the plural pronoun: “right glad they were”, as if constituting them as a
single entity, parts of a single whole. This identification or Doubling of the two women is also
suggested by the momentary metamorphosis of Christabel, who is physically transformed by
her subjection to Geraldine’s magic and takes on the characteristics that the other woman
displays: “So deeply had she drunken in/That look, those shrunken serpent eyes,/That all her
features were resigned/To this sole image in her mind;/And passively did imitate/That look of
dull and treacherous hate/And thus she stood, in dizzy trance,/Still picturing that look
askance/With forced unconscious sympathy…” (ll. 601-609). In this light, Geraldine
represents a terrifying and disempowering encounter with a fearful other self.
Although the poem remains unfinished, and does not in fact answer the question it
raises concerning the identity or nature of Geraldine, whether incarnation of evil or projection
of a repressed self, it exerts a spell-like influence while working powerfully on the reader’s
imagination. Like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, it is a poem about guilt and the burden of
sin, a poem which is Romantic in its emphasis on powerful feelings, and its passionate
exploration of the “Mind of Man”, as Wordsworth puts it in The Recluse.
Shelley : Ode to the West Wind
This poem, written in “Shelley’s revolutionary Year”, 1819, is dedicated to the West wind and
presents the wind naturalistically, while lending itself to a metaphorical reading, whereby the
wind, and all of nature, are seen to mirror society and are recruited into the revolutionary
cause. In stanza 4 the poet persona identifies with the wind, but the comparison only serves to
emphasize his earthbound state. The poem culminates in the image of the poet as a lyre,
played by the west wind, and in the final stanza all the metaphorical overtones are clearly
brought into focus, with the wind seen as sharing in the poet’s prophetic function. How does
the poem achieve the marriage of naturalism and prophecy, and what attitude to nature is
conveyed?
1) A naturalistic presentation.
The wind is presented performing a number of natural functions: clearing away the dead
leaves, conveying seeds, which in Spring will grow into flowers, and vapours, which are the
harbingers of a storm, disturbing the sea’s surface and making troughs and waves, thus
bringing the cycle of the seasons to the vegetation on the seabed. A note underlines the poet’s
concern for naturalistic observation. All these functions of the wind are related to the seasons,
indeed it is personified in the first line as “thou breath of Autumn’s being,” thus anchoring the
wind in the natural cycle of death and rebirth. However the West wind alliterates with “wild”,
and this wildness seems a dissonance with respect to the orderliness of the ever-returning
seasons.
The poem does not stop at naturalism, of course, and immediately lends itself to a
metaphorical reading.
2) Metaphorical suggestiveness
The incongruity in the first line between wildness and the regularity of the seasons can be
read as a dialectics, so as to give a view of nature in which wildness and orderliness are both
present, both dissonance and harmony. Likewise, the phrase “pestilence-stricken multitudes”
jars with a pretty-pretty, harmonious presentation and reads moreover as an urban metaphor,
evoking an image of populous city streets laid low by the plague and poverty. This, plus the
numerous refs to death and the grave lead to a reading of the first stanza which brackets the
natural cycle and human society, to suggest – given the wintry widespread misery – that a
springlike rebirth must inevitably be close at hand. At the end of the stanza the wind is
addressed as “wild spirit”, “which art moving everywhere”, and the animate, active wind is
pictured spreading its influence throughout nature and society. The abstract nouns “destroyer
and preserver” pursue the paradoxical dialectics contained within the wind, which comes to
seem a symbol of positive destructiveness, as the wild force which preserves the natural cycle.
It thus lends itself to an interpretation as the spirit of rebellion and daring which can overturn
and thereby renew and revitalise society.
In the second stanza the literal image of the forest becomes a metaphor for Heaven and
Ocean, and the proleptic function of the wind as conveyor of seeds is underscored by its role
in presaging the “approaching storm”. The term “congregated might” suggests the power of
the people, once united around a common aim – that of burying the old order –, but it is this
anticipatory role that especially rings metaphorically as an image of revolution. The Maenads
were wild rebellious women, the followers of Dionysos, the god of passionate, inspired poets
writing in a state of trance. The wind-driven sky thus contains that rebellious wildness.
After the earth and the air, the third stanza alludes to the element of fire, with the
reference to Stromboli, and the buried city of Pompeii, and also shows the effect of the wind
on water, illustrating how it “moves everywhere” – in each of the four natural elements – and
influences everything. An influence, moreover, which is seen to result in effects: “And
tremble and despoil themselves”.
In the fourth stanza the poem recapitulates the three elements previously dealt with
(leaf, cloud, wave), to express the poet’s desire to be like the wind and share in its power and
speed. This stanza shows the discrepancy between the poet’s unbounded, far-reaching desire
and the constraints of human existence. But in the final stanza, this dialectical opposition will
be resolved through the musical images of the lyre and the trumpet, both reminiscent of
Coleridge’s eolian harp.
3) The language of prophecy
With these musical images the poem comes full circle, since it was established in the first line
that the wind was a “breath”, and now everything the poem has taught us about Autumn as a
the sepulchre of the year and the harbinger of death and rebirth, is brought into play. The wind
plays the strings or blows into the trumpet, giving material voice to the poet’s words which lie
dead on the page, so that the power of nature is seen to lend its power to man and renew
society even as nature is renewed.
The image of the dead leaf has recurred as a leitmotiv three times, and appears again in
the final stanza as a simile for the poet’s “dead thoughts”, which, true to the paradox of the
natural cycle running through the poem, will “quicken a new birth!” “An unextinguished
hearth” is set in parallel to “unawakened earth”, and the last stanza draws the metaphorical
threads running through the poem in a vibrant conclusion: the wind is called upon to spread
the poet’s words and bring them to fruition, bringing life out of death, and the proleptic
function of the wind becomes meaningful in the context of a prophecy of social and spiritual
revolution.
We expect a language of prophecy to be both solemn and dramatic, and indeed here
we have the emotion of the exclamations as the poet persona addresses and exhorts the wind,
and the solemn, ritualized, incantatory or religious-sounding phrase: “oh, hear!”.
This poem has none of the casual musing of Coleridge’s conversational poems, for
instance, on the contrary it argues a case and is a tightly structured piece of rhetoric, such that
the conclusion seems to derive naturally from what precedes: if society is deathlike to so
many people, does that not mean that a rebirth due to social revolution is close at hand? The
formula seeks to convince, while being tinged with melancholy, as if the poet above all seeks
to convince himself.
The attitude to nature offered by the poem is of nature as a great power combining the
contradictory forces of orderliness and wildness, conformism and rebellion, which are
reconciled by the harnessing of the wind as a musician. This image also focuses the
partnership between nature and culture, with nature enrolled in the cause of revolution,
through the demonstration that revolution (destruction and preservation) exists in nature, and,
although perhaps this was secondary to Shelley, with nature’s perfections sung and praised by
man through the poem, since even if it is instrumentalized, nature is nevertheless observed
and reflected upon “scientifically”, not fantasized or idealized.
IAA FO3 Romantic poetry: William Blake
The Tyger
William Blake has been described by Peter Ackroyd as England’s “last great religious
poet” and by Terry Eagleton as our “greatest revolutionary artist”: two contrary notions
ideally suited to this poet whose work everywhere displays oppositions. ‘The Tyger’ is the
most published poem in English according to a computer analysis of hundreds of anthologies
(see Nelson Hilton A Companion to Romanticism, Wu, 1994). It is frequently given to
children to learn at school and is often quoted as an example of a poem written in trochaic
metre, along with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. It is one of the poems of Songs of
Experience, and it has its counterpart in Songs of Innocence, ‘The Lamb’. It was first
published in 1794, four years before Lyrical Ballads.
The poem is an enquiry into the origin of the tiger and the nature of its creator, where
the tiger is the wild animal and “burning bright” metaphorical language describing the orange
and black flames of its coat, and a symbol of, among other interpretations, poetic inspiration
or poetic genius – particularly appropriate to Blake’s art which involved using a naked flame
on hot metal. Blake’s creator figure, Los, from The Book of Urizen, creates a celestial body in
similar terms: “he uses a ‘vast Hammer’ on ‘the Anvil’ to beat ‘Roaring… bright sparks’ until
‘An immense Orb of fire he fram’d’.
There are six quatrains of tetrameters in rhyming couplets, except for the problematic
asymmetrical eye-rhyme that closes the first and last stanzas. The poem is made up of a
number of questions addressed to the tiger concerning the tiger’s awe-inspiring nature and
focusing on its creator. The stanzas proceed through the act of creation from materials (the
“fire of thine eyes”) to the tools used, and finally focuses on the psychology of the maker
(“Did he smile…”, “Dare frame…”). The language is simple, not erudite, it has a nursery–
rhyme like simplicity while drawing on Biblical and mythological imagery reminiscent of
Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Running commentary:
The first stanza provides the only description of the tiger itself; it plays on the contrast
of light and darkness, and posits an imaginary primeval place beyond the limits of the human
(forests of the night) which could be seen in terms of the sublime. See E. Burke: The sublime,
then, leads the imagination beyond experience to a formlessness beyond the self which makes
the subject aware of his/her limits and of the desire to reach beyond them. The sublime
extends the imagination beyond what can be comprehended, either through an image of
nature so overpowering that we feel fear or awe, or through the sense that the imagination is
striving and straining to encompass some great magnitude, and failing...
The first stanza thus consists of an utterance of which the ensuing stanzas are an
expansion. The poem presents the tiger indirectly (poetry is oblique language…), by focusing
on its maker rather than on the tiger itself. Paradoxically the divine maker, which on one level
of reading is a Christian - albeit a highly idiosyncratic - God, is presented in the limited terms
of humanity; it is a meditation in fiery passionate tones upon the nature of the divine and
creative power, but in human terms (hand, eye…). In other words, human attributes are the
vehicle and throughout the poem the poem focuses on the creator (“What dread hand…”), that
is, a metonymy of the created which is the main object of wonder (the poem is entitled ‘The
Tyger’)
Nelson Hilton compares these Songs to the 18th century popular songs called glees,
which contained three melodies intertwined, rather than the more limited rhetoric of irony,
which excludes the meaning it purports to hold in favour of an unspoken one. Here, different
meanings are present simultaneously, for instance the term “symmetry” jars with “immortal”,
which suggests unlimited shapelessness. If we stress the line “fearful” there is admiration for
the tiger’s form generally, but the term “symmetry” is not what springs to mind and brings in
connotations of drawing or mathematics, thus representation and symbolic systems, thereby
language. Indeed the term works metatextually, bringing in the poem itself with its
symmetrical first and last stanzas and repetitions (ferocity/beauty, stripes, deadly terrors and
divinity, deeps/skies), and the two books of Songs with their corresponding pairs engraved on
either side of the same piece of metal (‘The Lamb’).
The second quatrain uses natural imagery to consider the origin of the tiger’s bright
fire, captured and used to make the tiger, suggesting the divine fire of poetic inspiration. The
word “dare” appears, emphasized by its position on a promoted beat and repeated in the last
line, suggesting the daring of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and who is a favourite
figure of the poet among the Romantics (see esp. Shelley in Prometheus Unbound.), who saw
him as the archetypal overreacher claiming back man’s share of divinity. For Blake, the idea
that the divine creative fire is man’s by right, that it had been lost through the agency of the
forces of oppression and experience and that it is up to the poet to steal it back and make it
available to men is deeply significant.
The third quatrain contains anatomical imagery and is somehow reminiscent
of the late Romantic novel, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, also an allegory of the poet as
creator. The fourth uses the familiar imagery of the forge and we are reminded of Hephaïstos,
Vulcan, among gods what Dedalus was among men, an inventor for whom no technical feat is
impossible and frequently taken as a figure of the artist that combines divine power and
mastery of technique – very appropriate for Blake.
The poem pursues its questions, indeed it displays an ostentatious rhetoric of insistent
questioning, leading the reader to take this ostentatious rhetoric as serving to foreground
language, as a parable of language learning (see Nelson Hilton: “dramatic stagings of
language in action”) in which the learner is brought to perceive language as a prison which
the poet has the greatest diffculty freeing himself from (“Dare frame..”). Indeed, the questions
by their very number seem to want to pin the tiger down, to dissect it scientifically and reduce
it to a rational explanation, while making the tiger’s power seem all the greater.
The fifth quatrain expands onto the cosmic level with images of the stars and
heaven, in which the stars are personified as a sort of army that renounces war in terror of the
powerful tiger. The text ponders the morality of the creator and the nature of a creator capable
of making the symbol of innocence, joy, good and gentleness, the lamb (also Christ but not
only) as well as terror and misery, evil, and malevolent strength. This connects with Blake’s
mythopoetics and his ‘Proverbs of Hell’, his rehabilitation of Satan as a source of necessary
creative energy if human life is to be regenerated. Elsewhere Blake equates Christ with the
imagination, here it is the tiger that is the imagination conceived of as a creative power
drawing on opposing forces (see Coleridge’s theory of the imagination in Ch. 14 of
Biographia Literaria, Kubla Khan…)
The sixth and final quatrain brings the poem full circle but for the substitution of
“Dare” for “Could”, thus making the poem slightly asymmetrical, not symmetrical. It seems
to close the poem off neatly thus staging the way language acts as a “prison-house” (see
London) enclosing the speaker. At the same time the spondaic “Dare frame” emphasizes the
Promethean aspirations of the poet and is a challenge (note the move to the present tense) to
the reader to allow his perception to be altered. The discomfort of the non-rhyme of the final
couplet prevents any easy reading.
This song of experience, with its tone of religious enthusiasm, illustrates that
particularly 18th c evangelical sense of ‘experience’ as the inner history of one’s religious
emotion (“hymn of experience’ appears throughout accounts of Methodism). This poem can
be seen in terms of Blake’s religion or mythopoetics; it displays the experience of evil and
malevolent power which transports the individual away from the innocence and visionary
quality of youth (Blake thinks “every Thing to be Evident to the Child”, cf. Wordsworth’s
children especially ‘We are Seven’ and Intimations of Immortality), while at the same time
illustrating the way for the visionary poet (who can see in the forests of the night) to renew
our perceptive powers and return us to the state of childhood.
•
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, O.U.P., 1986.
IAA F03 Romantic Poetry : William Blake
The Sick Rose
This poem is one of the Songs of Experience, published in 1794. Composed of two
quatrains of dimeters, of which the second and fourth lines rhyme, it is simple and brief
while having a deep symbolic resonance, and its dominant tone is one of bitter
disenchantment and regret. It combines movement and flow with the delicate
distinctness and constraint of the rhythm and rhyme. The poem tells a short story, but
unlike the Roman de la Rose (1230-1275, written by Guillaume de Lorris and finished
by Jean de Meun), which is one of the literary works it recalls (although Blake probably
was not familiar with it) and in which the rose is the lady in a courtly courtship, this is
not allegory, but wide-ranging symbolism. The subject of the poem seems to be the
corrupt state of human life, and like all these poems it aims to bring about a shift in
perception in the reader, who should then feel inspired to throw off the chains of
conventional codes and thought. First I will focus on the presentation of sickness in the
poem, then on auto- and intertextual resonances which allow us a glimpse of Blake’s
mythopoetic remedy.
1)
Presentation of the sickness
Although the poem feels very simple, it is more complex than it seems and contains
an imbalance due to the imperfectly matching syntax and prosody. The poem contains
two stanzas and two sentences, but the first sentence lasts one line, the second seven,
thus foregrounding that first statement and the capitalised “Rose”, “O Rose thou art
sick”. This sense of imbalance creates the feeling in the reader – as opposed to simply
the intellectual idea – of the rose’s imbalance or sickness (at the time of the Renaissance
and for a long while afterwards sickness was thought to be caused among other things
by an imbalance of the bodily humours), and this is compounded by the contrast
between on the one hand, the slow solemnity of the first line, with its opening spondee
and monosyllabics and its tone as of a peremptory diagnosis, on the other hand, the
rushing flow of the polysyllabic “invisible” and the run-on lines in anapaestic meter,
reinforcing the sense of threat and danger of this flight through the stormy night of the
invisible worm, more like a terrifying monster, hellbent on destruction.
The second sentence thus seems to upset or undermine the poem it belongs to,
belying its apparent neat compactness, its sharp outlines of rhyme and meter. Also, it
doesn’t deliver on its promise to provide an explanation of the rose’s state, since it in
fact raises some bewildering questions: what is this invisible worm that flies etc, what is
this bed of crimson joy, and above all, what is this love that destroys life? But the rose is
of course itself a mystery. It is a symbol of love and beauty, indeed roses are also
associated with transience, particularly the ephemeral nature of female beauty, and is
also of course a girl’s name (bed can be read as a flowerbed or the virgin’s bed). It is
also perhaps a symbol of England (a young woman may be described as “an English
rose” because of her fair complexion, or as in the Wars of the Roses; above all we are
reminded of Blake’s engraving entitled “Albion Rose”, where Albion is an ancient name
for Britain or England, and also the name he chose for his mythic “Eternal Man”, to
which we will return). The poem is polarised around a gender opposition and conflict
and the rape evoked in the poem is symbolic of a corrupt sexuality, itself symbolic of
human nature more generally, insofar as it concerns one of the most intimate areas of
human experience and interaction (along with spirituality).
The perplexity we feel in the face of these images (which, as I said above do not
stand in the simple one-to-one relation of allegory) is due to the fact that the metaphors
are in absentia, that is, we have only the natural and botanic vehicles (rose, worm,
storm, bed, dark (earth), life), suggestive of a garden (roses are cultivated flowers),
while the tenor is absent. This perplexity produced by the poem contrasts with the
definite article of the title, which is a way for the poet to insinuate to the reader that he
already knows about this problem, this state of decline and corruption: it exists. The
poem simply observes the fact and offers an interpretation, leaving the reader to imagine
a remedy.
In this he his helped by a Christian framework woven into the poem, and/or by
Blake’s own mythopoetics.
2) Remedy through revolution
I said that the second sentence seems to contradict or jar with the stanzaic form of
the poem, in a way attacking it from within, just as the “invisible worm”’s love is “dark
and secret”, surreptitiously undermining the rose. There is much in the poem to invite us
to see in this wily, underhand mode of attack an intertextual rewrite of certain passages
of Milton’s Paradise Lost Book 9 relating Satan’s seduction of Eve. Blake was to start
work on his Milton, one of his major prophetic works, in 1808 (not writing it, Peter
Ackroyd specifies, but creating it “with quill and graver on the copper plate itself”
(Blake, 311)). According to this prophecy, derived from Blake’s intensely vivid visions,
Albion “will arise from his couch of death” (Ackroyd). Here are the relevant passages
from Milton, in which we see Eve surrounded by roses and described as the most
beautiful rose among them; Satan as shunning daylight and advancing on the Garden of
Eden at night; his choice of the wormlike snake as a way of becoming “invisible” and
the word “storm” already used ambiguously in Milton with its double meaning,
meteorological and military (Norton, 1569); and lastly the use of the same rhyme, “joy”
and “destroy” to foreground the perversity of Satan’s diabolical design:
The Sun was sunk, and after him the Star
Of Hesperus, whose Office is to bring
Twilight upon the Earth, short Arbiter
Twixt Day and Night, and now from end to end
Night’s Hemisphere had veiled the Horizon round:
When Satan who late fled before the threats
Of Gabriel out of Eden, now improved
In meditated fraud and malice, bent
On man’s destruction, maugre what might hap
Of heavier on himself, fearless returned.
By Night he fled, and at Midnight returned.
From compassing the Earth, cautious of day […]
[…]thence, full of anguish, driven,
The space of seven continued Nights he rode
With darkness, thrice the Equinoctial Line
He circled, four times crossed the Car of Night
From Pole to Pole, traversing each Colure […]
(ll 48-67)
[…] thus the Orb he roamed
With narrow search; and with inspection deep
Considered every Creature, which of all
Most opportune might serve his Wiles, and found
The Serpent subtlest Beast of all the Field […]
(ll 82-86)
[…] He sought them both, but wished his hap might find
Eve separate, he wished, but not with hope
Of what so seldom chanced, when to his wish,
Beyond his hope, Eve separate he spies,
Veiled in a Cloud of Fragrance, where she stood,
Half spied, so thick the Roses bushing round
About her glowed, oft stooping to support
Each Flower of slender stalk, whose head though gay
Carnation, Purple, Azure, or specked with Gold,
Hung drooping unsustaind, them she upstays
Gently with Myrtle band, mindless the while,
Her self, though fairest unsupported Flower,
From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh […]
(ll 421-433)
Thoughts, whither have ye led me, with what sweet
Compulsion thus transported to forget
What hither brought us, hate, not love, nor hope
Of Paradise for Hell, hope here to taste
Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy,
Save what is in destroying, other joy
To me is lost. […]
(ll 473-477)
Paradise Lost, John Milton, 1667, 1674.
The Miltonic hypotext allows the reader to understand how a worm can be said to
fly…, and provides a Christian framework while lending the poem its typically Miltonic
mythic dimension. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) Blake wrote in a note:
“The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty
when of Devil and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without
knowing it.” Thus the poem is not simply about rape, nor even about the Fall of Man,
but about human corruption and decline far more broadly.
The term “rose” also has an autotextual resonance in the engraving mentioned
above and created in 1780, the same year as the Gordon Riots (in which Blake himself
was involved) and the ensuing repression and hangings (Blake may easily have got
arrested himself, writes Ackroyd…), entitled “Albion Rose”. The design shows a joyful
young man with raised arms, an exalted look upon his face, and it is an engraving Blake
later reworked to enhance its aura of spiritual revelation. The attitude of the young man
Blake later described as that of the “Divine Human”, sometimes associated with Christ.
Ackroyd writes of this engraving that, along with one or two others, it was “clearly
designed to attack the authoritarianism of state and religious power, while ‘Albion’
himself rises from the nets of traditional perception as if he were indeed some free spirit
of energy and revolt.” (174). So there seems to be a pun here; clearly “rose” in “Albion
Rose” is verbal, what has risen, and “the sick rose” (where “sick” is an adjective) also
reads “the sick rose” (where “sick” is a collective noun), which amounts to a sort of
hidden counter-discourse at the threshold of the poem, as if the remedy to the sickness
were there, in the very perception of it.
There is a similar paradox in the combination of love and destruction. On the
one hand, along with the other pairs of opposites running through the poem (life/love,
joy/destroy, rose/worm, crimson/dark), it suggests a negative sexuality, on the other a
regenerating force suggested by the sound echoes in flies/life/love, and the sense of
energy created by the long second sentence with its run-on lines and anapaests. This
energy, it is to be noted, is carefully constrained by rhythm and rhyme to produce a
clearly delimited poetic space in which the oppositions in the poem are held alongside
each other harmoniously without uniting – in keeping with the bi-polar world of Blake’s
poetic vision and inherent in his revised title for these two books of poems: Songs of
Innocence and Experience Shewing the two Contrary States of the Human Soul. We may
also recall his well-known statement: “Without Contraries no Progression is”.
“The Sick Rose”, then, like “London”, warns against the life-destroying “nets
of traditional perception” and incites the downcast rose (see Blake’s design
accompanying the poem) to “arise from its couch of death”.