Literary Romanticism
“To place a single work seriously or definitively in a category is, critically speaking, to dismiss it as an individual work .... The main critical use of general categories is quite different in function and aim: we make a tentative classification as accurately as possible so that we may see the individual work for what it is by seeing what by a hair’s breadth it is not.”
“I had some hopes for her at first,” Dr. Johnson said of Poll Carmichael, “but she was wiggle-waggle, and I could never persuade her to be categorical.” I too have difficulty in being categorical – at least in being categorical about romanticism. I am prepared to accept for convenience the proposition that there are certain artists and groups of artists who lived and worked in the late 18th century and in the 19th century, and even later, who share enough interests and technical preoccupations to entitle them to an approximate label. I am prepared – though for years I have carefully tried to avoid this – to refer to certain persons for convenience of reference as “romantic poets” or simply as “romantics,” in spite of the fact that such names were usually in the first place applied by enemies. But I am not sure that we do well, no matter how strong the impulse, to go beyond such an admission to infer that because there are two or more persons who may for convenience be called “romantics” that there is something called “romanticism.” It is as though we might argue that because we can show that there are two or more elephant-foot tables there must be not only elephants but also elephant-footedness; and could we then infer a theory of the design of tables from our knowledge of elephant-footedness? You cannot make a pig’s nose out of a sow’s ear; and Aristotle could easily show us (as Philip Wheelwright has said) that “the laws of whatness are one thing, the laws of knowing what’s what are another.” Literary criticism is the art of knowing what’s what. My difficulty with the term “romanticism,” is that it doesn’t help me much in my criticism.
Romanticism is very much an historian’s term: it has been used most effectively in trying to trace the history of ideas, the history of changes in artistic sensibility, the history of changes in taste; it has even been used in the attempt to trace the history of change in art-forms. In such cases it applies first of all to an attitude of mind, a way of seeing things, a habit of thinking. There is however great difficulty in defining or demonstrating a specific attitude of mind, a way of seeing, except through the “expression” of that attitude in writing, music, painting. Inferences of that sort depend upon theories of how attitude and expression are related and can be related; they also depend upon the kind and extent of biographical materials that can give unimpeachable evidence of the inner life. What exact defining controls lapse or dissolve, the term romanticism comes to represent a quality of works of art or even artists – not always an admirable quality. Hans Eichner’s account of the romantic episode that crystallized around the Schlegels is a brilliant example of the critical limits to which such an inquiry can be carried: critical acumen clarifies the values and leads to a clear and profound historical analysis of what happened. But even if we are given so scrupulously sensitive an account as Dr. Eichner’s for a starting point we too easily begin to drift towards formulating a category out of events: a category of sensibility, intention, style, procedure.
René Wellek, at the close of his most recent paper on German and English romanticism (he must by now have written several hundred of them), states with an Eliotish gesture of urbane fatigue that “The literary historian and the comparatist has done what he can do if he has accurately described, analyzed, characterized, and compared what he has seen and read.” Even though we assume that a category may, by historical analysis, be correctly established, it is clear that the historian’s use of that category will be different from the use a critic may legitimately make of it; for the historian’s emphasis will tend to fall upon the accuracy of description and the integrity of the general category, the critic’s emphasis will fall upon the integrity and uniqueness of the individual that has been referred to the category. To place a single work seriously or definitively in a category is, critically speaking, to dismiss it as an individual work: it has become easier to manipulate because it has lost its identity. The main critical use of generic categories is quite different in function and aim: we make a tentative classification as accurately as possible so that we may see the individual work for what it is by seeing what by a hair’s breadth it is not. The classification is for criticism the beginning, not the end, of an operation. Literary history is of course a legitimate activity; surely no critic could advance far in his work without an acute literary historical sense. But if one’s primary concern is that of a literary critic, even such an important concern as literary history becomes ancillary. As a critic, my prime and continuous concern is with poems rather than with poetry, with poems one by one, author by author with luck; but very gently as the scale broadens, because the distinctive individuality of single and unique things falls too comfortably – in the cartography of ambitious literary history – within the limits of plottable error. I want to discern, experience, and savour with the most astute accuracy precisely what the works are, to discover and enter into their existences, to allow them to call forth as best they can from the ragged regiment of my own mental and emotional volunteers (caps askew and muskets rusty) the intricate and unassertive company of human relations and connexions that are woven into the fibre of the poems.
The beginning, root, and source of all literary criticism is “getting to know”; after that, or with that, we may “get to judge.” Perhaps we need to speak or write in order to clarify and secure our commerce with a poem, because our thoughts and feelings may not unfold well in the chaos of the mind’s velleities. Perhaps for temperamental or professional reasons, we need to say or write things about poems and direct them – for the good of their souls – towards some audience (whether or not captive). Here certain dangerous deflections occur: at one extreme, we may treat a poem as a text to expatiate upon, in terms of semantics, morals, technique, philosophy, and the like; at the other extreme, we may simply treat the poem as a single instance of a general group of poetic phenomena and begin to generalize upon such a group as part of a discussion of history, philosophy, psychological theory, and the like. These extremes are in their way legitimate, but they are not (in my view) criticism. The duty of the critic is to get to know his poems (novels, plays, pictures) so well and vividly that he is capable of judging them; not grading them (as though he were a stern by celestial essay-marker with the detached facility of an experienced horse-trader) so much as detecting the order and importance of their affirmations and being appropriately hospitable. It is also the duty of a critic in writing or speaking to provide the means – always oblique and sometimes also mystifyingly direct and simple, such are the hazards of criticism – for another person to perceive with simple and single directness what that poem is, as an existence, and to make that life and mode of existence accessible. Categorizing cannot do the work of judging.
The term romanticism is a late arrival: it was not used by the early romantics to refer to themselves or to their own work, and the definition of the term has been an occupation for historians of literature rather than for author-critics: a pity, since an early definition from inside might have helped later to select the materials for analysis and generalization. Definition of any kind may be attempted in one of two ways. One way is to provide a verbal equivalent for the term that is to be defined, saying “romanticism is a and b and c and so on”; the logical positivist’s manoeuvre of reiterating the question “What do you mean by x?” assumes (among other things) that such definitions are precisely possible. Another way of defining – as the word itself suggests – is to draw a bounding line around the thing or things to be defined, to corral them if they are mobile, to put a tight fence around them so that we can be sure that what we are defining is here and not somewhere else. It should be noticed that although some kinds of defining generalization depend for their validity upon the number of examples included, the starting point for a literary or artistic definition wants to be as little general as possible since works of art exist and function within a context of exact particularity. The question in any case is What is being defined? what – of what kind, of what substance – are the data upon which a definition may rest?
Definitions of romanticism have generally proceeded along two lines. One way, represented by Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony, is to treat romanticism as a group of literary-historical phenomena which may be interpreted as a current – or tidal wave – that sets itself going at a certain time in certain places and continues to agitate these and other places for a certain time, effecting certain changes. The other way is to consider romanticism as a quality that writing, painting, music, and the like, may exhibit or assume, particularly in certain places and after certain dates. The quality is not easy to describe; the attempt to define the quality often leads into a discussion of the genesis and development of romanticism and so leads back in the direction of the historical inquiry, in the same way that the historical inquiry in its need for some qualitative basis for selecting its material tends to drift out of the purely descriptive and analytical area it seems to have drawn for itself. One way of trying to keep the definition in the qualitative area is to make the definition depend upon the distinction between romantic and classic (or classical); this method has been so persistent as almost to constitute a third separate attempt at definition.
From the point of view of literary criticism, all these methods fail. The account of romanticism as historical phenomenon if it is to establish any stable literary category has to rely heavily upon the criteria of poetic sensibility and the content of the works of art. The difficulty is to find a proper starting point and stopping point; and as romanticism assumes in the historian’s mind a more portentous (or repulsive) aspect, the time limits tend to evaporate at both ends. In order to trace a development, recognizable detail, content, and tone must emerge from the material; the specific symptoms of the emerging category seem always to be most pronounced in the minor figures. Certainly histories of early romanticism give the impression (by omission) that the major English writers were at best on the fringes of what was happening; and when, in Praz’s minute and industrious book, we come to all that intriguing matter to do with the Divine Marquis, the best the English can muster – Lord Byron, for example – looks by comparison provincial and unaccomplished. I know only one historical account of romanticism that avoids these objections – the account Dr. Eichner has given of the Schlegels. The virtues of that account arise not only from his acute knowledge of the facts but also from his clearly conceived purpose and his deft limitation of the field of inquiry.
When it comes to defining the quality called romanticism, there is difficulty at once because of the thoughtless and even intransigent variety of the writers who may be called romantic. One has seen the lists of distinguishing characteristics gravely set down with the true fustian air of authority over and over again in literary histories and encyclopedias: love of nature, interest in the past, mediaevalism (usually ill-informed), mysticism (ill-defined), love of mystery, love of distant things and of whatever is too vast to be anything but vague, such as infinity, faeryland and the fantastic; love of the Gothic (and particularly flute tunes among ruins in moonlight); a rejection of the classical virtues of restraint, form, and reason; a preoccupation with horror, love, and blank verse; an interest in Spenser (though regretably often at second hand through Thomson’s Castle of Indolence with its footnote on the Eolian Harp), interest in Milton (Paradise Lost Books I and II, but sometimes bits of Samson Agonistes); the cultivation of “subjectivity” particularly in the themes of imagination, nature, and children; the sonnet, nostalgia, the agreeable sensation of tears, love, simple people, downtrodden people, complex people, a love of wild scenery with a tendency to introduce an emblematic meteorological system whereby the weather expresses the moods and passions of the central characters; an interest in love, the love of love; a tentative interest in mountains (short of climbing them), an interest in primitive and uncultivated people and in landscapes untouched by human hand; blank verse, ruins, love, a piercing eye combined with an interesting suggestion of unspecified guilt and a compulsive way of talking at cross-purposes but with overmastering force to wedding guests and other guileless persons who happen to fall within earshot.
In all this, I am troubled by the emphasis on content, on the apurtenances and stage equipment, on the external and superficial aspects of an art that is nothing if not internal and at best profound. We overhear too often in these analyses the machinery of a simple but crude psychology of art. And when, credulous or incredulous, we try to apply these and other such criteria to the major figures of English romantic poetry, we get rather strange results. The outstanding romantic behaviourist, Lord Byron, is the only major poet of his generation who seriously and continuously sought to cultivate the Augustan manner of Dryden and Pope. Shelley, who loved Gothic romances and tales of horror and (in at least one of his frames of mind) would have liked to go up Parnassus hand in hand with Monk Lewis, provides some choice examples of romantic extremity – the fascination of incest, the beauty of horror, a taste for deliquescent and obscene abnormality – yet founds his major work on other values and is a zealous reader of Plato in the original. Coleridge in a few poems uses, as few others have ever done, the standard romantic equipment of Gothic horror, magnetic eyeballs, the haunting sense of guilty, a few well-chosen charnel delights, and some fake mediaevalism by way of Percy’s Reliques; yet as perhaps nobody else had done before or has done since he transfigured these materials into at least two symbolic poems of inexhaustible implication: the point being not the materials but, as is always the case in symbolic procedure, the transfiguration. Much of the evidence for phenomenal romanticism, whether historical or qualitative seems substantially below any level of literary excellence, its interest symptomatic rather than poetic.
The attempt to define “romantic” by distinguishing it from “classical” fails in the same way that the attempt to define symbol in terms of allegory fails, even in the hands of Coleridge or Yeats, and for much the same reason. The claim is for two polar qualities of mind and art between which all art may be seen to lie. To assume, as this definition tacitly does, that we know more about the classic than we do about the romantic, is however a questionable beginning when – in English literature at least – the differences between classical and neo-classical are as wide and ambiguous as they are, and when the classical virtues are claimed for a wholly Latinistic neoclassicism by those who have (like Shakespeare, not unlike Schlegel, Shelley, or Coleridge) less than a smattering of Greek. The notion that romantic and classical represent the two dominant moments in the rhythmic compass of the human imagination is attractive, not least because it leads one to think in terms of reactions and so to come back again to the historical field. But this kind of argument has in this century been more polemical than illuminating. Looking again through that celebrated and influential essay of T. E. Hulme’s – “Romanticism and Classicism” – which heaps upon the heads of all romantics at once the punitive coals of contempt and the ashes of contrition, I am pleased (though not altogether surprised) to find that all the classical virtues he sets down to the dismay of romantics are the outstanding virtues of that arch-romantic Wordsworth as detected and set down by that other arch-romantic Coleridge. As long as the romantic-classical distinction implies that one or the other is good and the other bad, the distinction is of little use except as a meretricious instrument of invective.
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In all literary criticism, even in the journalism that may at first sight look like criticism, the laws of hospitality obtain because our concern is to enter an unknown country on the inhabitants’ terms, and to seem to belong so happily that we never suffer the humiliation of being taken for tourists. Even when it is a matter of gastronomy, the critic must behave like a well-mannered guest: he must take the dinner that is offered to him, and – short of Arab expressions of approval – he must be seen to enjoy it; certainly he must not compare with his fellow-guests his views on the processes of digestion, and above all he must not stand by his host’s door with an advance copy of the menu and with an ancient mariner’s fixedness of purpose counsel his fellow-guests as they arrive that it would be safer to go on to the Chinese restaurant and order bacon and eggs. In the case of romanticism, the critic must begin by putting up with what he’s got. Instead of taking a number of works or people alleged to be “romantic” and evolving from these a term “romanticism” which would make it possible to detect or assess other works or people that I did not yet know to be “romantic,” I propose to look at some poems that are widely accepted as “romantic” and see what these can tell us about poetry altogether.
I hold, with Coleridge, that poetry is one and not many, that “all men are poets, though most of them are damned bad ones,” and that imagination is the state or act in which “the whole soul of man” is brought into activity. If this seems too “romantic” a position, I should add that the superlative romantic poem would be indistinguishable from the superlative classical poem (if that generic distinction can indeed be maintained), and that what matters is not the category into which a poem falls but the excellence of the poem in terms of poetry.
I therefore tend to see the romantic poets as special instances of poets rather than as an exclusive breed. I read their work with deep interest and reflect as best I can upon it, because it seems to me to discover, or rediscover, and bring forth into the steady light of consciousness, certain central axioms of literary art, all or most of which fall under the single term “symbol.” Some poets are better able through their work to do this; the fact that their work clearly demonstrates symbolic procedure without intending to do so might even provide the basis for another definition of “romantics,” though I am not prepared at present to attempt it. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot – these are foremost among those that in this respect I would read and revere and call forth in evidence. But now only two – Wordsworth and Yeats; and those two because they are so much unlike each other; and from all their work only a very small quantity of verse. I wish to draw out three or four activities or processes which, though no doubt active in the work of outstanding earlier writers, become dominant – even determinant in the best writers called romantic, processes and activities of mind that become matter of such interest to the poets themselves that they reflected upon them sustainedly and deeply.
Here are three aspects of poetry which are made most clear by the best poetry of the romantics: the “symbolic ring,” the process of dream, and organic form. (a) Poetry as a cognitive (or knowing) activity in which the internal and external, the subject and object of common sense, the rational and non-rational, the conscious and subconscious, are held in a luminous relation or ring in which vividness of perception, heightened feeling, and a strong conviction of value are all facets of the experience of knowing. The activity of such a “symbolic ring” makes it possible for any distinguishable item in the physical or imaginal world to become symbolic, so that it ceases to be either neutral or alien, but rises luminous from its setting to share in a symbolic cluster wherein the single elements are “harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors.” If poetry has a problem, it is how to body forth, how to become and to be an occasion of value; how to become an existence rather than a statement about; how to be incandescent, single, self-contained, self-explanatory, self-generating, self-shaping – even though the poem will be nothing if not made by the poet. It is as though a good poem were a do-it-yourself who-done-it with yourself as author, hero, puzzle, and solution. All this is the one problem: and this one problem, with its infinite number of facets, is solved in the delicate complexity of the “symbolic ring.”
(b) Most general notes on romanticism say something or other about dreams, visions, fantasies, the desire to escape, an interest in the supernatural, and so on: but this is not at all what I mean by “dream.” Rather, I think of dreaming, the way of dreaming, the way dreams put together impossible combinations of images – and put them together with such flawless exactness that even when (as sometimes happens in a dream) we know that the images belong in quite different contexts we accept the dream-complex as completely plausible. Since poetry arises (I believe) from our knowledge “that every Thing has a Life of it’s own, & that we are all one Life,” and from our sense that in this one life anything can become identical with anything else, it would be a great advantage to be able to call upon the craftsmanship of dreaming. This is not a new idea, nor a new resource for poetry: it has always been available and the greatest poets have had access to it – as witness the painting of Hieronymus Bosch – but some of the romantics recognized the process, brought it out into the daylight for scrutiny as well as wonder, and even sought means to secure its services deliberately and continuously.
(c) Organic form, in some theories is the one indispensable symptom of romantic art. Organic form is the form anything assumes under the shaping control of its own specific nature and circumstances. An acorn or turtle’s egg assumes in the end quite an interesting organic form, a jellyfish when removed from water a rather less interesting one. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson shows how fishes change configuration with changes in environment. Organic form is not necessarily “free form,” nor is organic verse “free verse.” It is true that as the 20th century approaches, a verse written sometimes (if possible) in prose rhythms or in unpredictable and unrimed forms becomes increasingly common. But such “forms” are now new, in the early 20th century, and were not new in the early 19th. In any case, strong organic form can occur – and perhaps occurs best – within established and traditional modes. (The polemical advocates of romanticism-in-practice however usually mean “free” form when they say “organic” form.) Certainly Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Shakespeare’s mature blank verse, and the extravagances of 18th century Pindar ode-making provide enough examples of freedom to show that the early English romantics at least seem to have been drawn towards more strict, rather than less strict, metrical forms. Yet their sense of form is an organic sense. For the complex dynamic relation that shapes verse is the total context for the self-evolution of any organic form – the relation including the taste, memory, and instinct of the poet himself, who is always inheritor of certain tastes, dislikes, prejudices, tunes.
These three considerations are (at present, at least) my favourite axioms of poetic making as clarified and made conscious and deliberate by the romantic poets: poetry as knowing, the joinery of dreaming, the poem as organic form. But I shall try to exhibit them only in a few works of two poets: Wordsworth, who never regarded himself as a romantic at all, but took the word to mean barbaric, gothical, grotesque, and Yeats who, a hundred years later, called himself one of the “last romantics,” yet sought safety in irony and admired even above Maud Gonne’s beauty the fierce power of Swift’s intelligence and the saeva indignatio that his epitaph acknowledges. I want my critical starting-point to be, not subject, content, genre, history, biography, theory, but the poem itself as a poem. If we can grasp these axioms it will help us to keep our feet on the table, and see under what conditions words and syllables are brought to the substance of water-washed pebbles, or the savour of water-washed stones, or grained wood gnarled in the sand, or inscrutable profound objects discovered in the sea’s way on a beach. All life, and all manner of life, and love, and death – this is the subject of poetry, beside which any special subject matter is trifling and trivial. Perhaps it is not the subjects that differ, being more or less apt for romantic or other uses; perhaps it is the way anything is taken up into the mind and held in the cruel exactitude of an affection that seeks utterance. For sentimentality is imprecision of feeling – it is the poet, not the subject, that is guilty of imprecision – and for sentimentality there is no pardon, poetry being in this respect inflexible. Certainly romanticism, if it contains the possibility of good poetry, is not sentimentality, even though historically romanticism arises out of the cult of sensibility, the fashion of sentimentality.
Let me begin with William Wordsworth, that hard, self-absorbed man, as unattractive as his master Milton and not so rational. His famous Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, if we had time to read it all through, is a complex example of a poem that not merely discloses in the poet a progressively deepening knowledge but involves the poet in an increasingly profound and desolating self-knowledge. Despite its title (which was expanded from its original simple title Ode), the poem has an impetus the threat of poetic inanition. Wordsworth discovers that he is losing or has lost the fertilizing and informing relation with the outside world that has been the headspring and resource of his poetry. As he reflects upon his unresponsive frame of mind, and seeks to lift himself to poetic responsiveness, the verse repeatedly rises with a deliberate effort of will, sustains itself for a little, then collapses in desolation. After the poem has twice mounted and subsided, it makes an even more powerful effort to rise up, recalling how the “timely utterance” of a poem had recently brought an access of strength and vision: the lines are some of his most memorable.
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of Sleep,
And all the earth is gay; ...
Yet even though the winds of inspiration have come to him again from the sacred and mysterious “fields of sleep,” the dark and fertile places of memory beyond the reach of deliberate recall, the verse ebbs out in a repetition of the sense of loss. The poem had to be put aside for a couple of years. When it was resumed, it reopened with a statement about the pre-existence of the soul. Here at last is the theme of the title – the immortality of the soul; but the childhood recollections give intimations not of life after death but of life before birth. And the poem proceeds to rationalize into a bleak and noble despair the fact of the poet’s decaying sensibility, coming in the end to “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” As the poem approaches its final climax, there is an important passage of joy, the fullness of life that – even in memory – can remind us of the indomitable life in us. Notice how in this long and difficult passage Wordsworth gives thanks for what we least expect – not for the delight of childhood, but for its alienations and desolate places. Notice too how the sentence – enormously long and complex – is put together so that it finds its shape as it goes, never incoherent, dreaming its way (though with the tone of harsh argument and strident honesty) towards a desired conclusion, a conclusion which – no matter how passionately it is deserved – is even itself a fantasy and must in the order of the poem, despite the dignified thanksgiving and austere confidence of its assertion of faith, dwindle in the bitter light of a real loss and a real grief. This is what I mean by organic form – the self-finding, self-shaping principle according to which a poet, driving with a light hand, discovers what he is saying and does not merely turn into verse what he already knows. Only a resolute poetic process of self-knowing could have faced and weathered the intermediate conclusions that are needed here to bring him to the final conclusion.
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast: –
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never:
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy.
Again, one of Wordsworth’s best and best-known poems, The Solitary Reaper, by the trajectory of its imagery – an imagery partly taken incandescent from the actual world of his experience and partly transferred from a not very distinguished topographical book he happened to have read – traces the path by which he discovers, almost to his horror, the profound import (unstated) of what he has casually seen. Notice, if you will, how the movement of his mind outward in search of understanding is traced through the psychic space of exotic reference – strange bird in an Arabian desert, a domestic bird (cuckoo) crying out over the unseasonable calm of the unbridled sea off the Hebrides (with an echo of Milton’s elegy); then, leaving the topographical reference, the reference to exotic song – the ballad, with its clear romantic overtones; and how the mind, finding no suitable resting place abroad among the exotic images that the impetus of thought has demanded, returns home in the workaday rhythms of a plain and forthright language, the strong emphasis falling on the plainest and toughest language and imagery, the prototypally romantic imagery and literary language pale and weak by contrast in the same way that black is typographically stronger than any colour we put beside it. So the girl – unintelligible in the strange language of her Erse song – is in a glimpse, in the one figure, the young girl and the old woman bent to the sickling of time. No wonder the speaker in the poem listened, turned to salt in his tracks, and withdrew knowing that he would never quite recover from what he had seen.
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Will no one tell me what she sings? –
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?
Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o’er the sickle bending; –
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
Two poems out of so large a canon as Wordsworth’s can scarcely – except for their excellence – be taken as representative. A more minute exposition (for those who might want it) would be needed to demonstrate in how many ways the elements of cognition, dreamcraft, and organic form are to be seen here. In the Immortality Ode we are struck most perhaps by the fervent eloquence of what on analysis would seem a forthright discourse in abstract vocabulary; here surely we see the transfiguration of a language taken from real (though highly cultivated) life. And in The Solitary Reaper an exceptional sweep of mind and symbolic concentration have occurred and they have occurred around an accidental and random encounter of little intrinsic importance.
The case of Yeats is rather different. Separated by a century, his self-preoccupation in its symbolic embodiments projected outward rather than, as with Wordsworth, inward. His language is on the face of it less abstract, his imagery more evidently symbolic. Not only is he less deliberately “natural” and ordinary than Wordsworth, but his main imagery may often come from the imagination itself rather than directly from the physical world, and that imagery may be more substantial even than the imagery which is already accommodated by custom and authority into the world accessible to all of us. Yeats’s imagery, we might say, comes from life rather than merely from the world. He cultivated dreams and visionary experience and learned to discover symbolic luminosity in the images presented freely to his mind as much as in the shapes and images given from the world; found too (as Coleridge did) how to make a myth of his own inner world and to order into a firm and illuminating sequence (Wordsworth did this too) the various poems of each volume he published to bring the groups of poems as it were into a single great poem of mutually illuminating elements. In a poem called Coole Park and Ballylee 1931 Yeats thinks of the stream that joins his land and his rebuilt tower to the land and Georgian house – later to be demolished – that belonged to Lady Gregory, the house where his early poetry had been fostered and his existence as a young poet for a time secured. Here the accident of setting and event releases his reflection. The actual swan becomes symbolic, the actual house and its way of life becomes an emblem for the aristocratic ceremoniousness that he prized and that as romantics he and his friends sought. But in the way that Coleridge set down for the nature of poetry, the poetic symbols are substantial, not abstractions; they partake of the reality they represent and draw from him not only the plangent and contemptuous note of regret and temporal loss, but a dignified recognition of absolute loss, of irreversible time, of an advancing new order of the world that – even though it may be inevitable – is no improvement upon the old. The swan, canonized in his memory by the ravishing wild beauty of the swans seen year by year at Coole, is for Yeats a recurrent symbol. Here the swan, pure imagination, pure soul, pure delight, releases him from regret only to recall the more vividly what is most precious to him and how it and all things drift upon a darkening flood.
At sudden thunder of the mountain swan
I turned about and looked where branches break
The glittering reaches of the flooded lake.
Another emblem there! That stormy white
But seems a concentration of the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight
And in the morning’s gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,
So arrogantly pure, a child might think
It can be murdered with a spot of ink.
Sound of a stick upon the floor, a sound
From somebody that toils from chair to chair;
Beloved books that famous hands have bound,
Old marble heads, old pictures everywhere;
Great rooms where travelled men and children found
Content or joy; a last inheritor
Where none has reigned that lacked a name and fame
Or out of folly into folly came.
A spot whereon the founders lived and died
Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees,
Or gardens rich in memory glorified
Marriages, alliances and families,
And every bride’s ambition satisfied.
Where fashion or mere fantasy decrees
Man shifts about – all that great glory spent –
Like some poor Arab tribesman and his tent.
We were the last romantics – chose for theme
Traditional sanctity and loveliness;
Whatever’s written in what poets name
The book of the people; whatever most can bless
The mind of man or elevate a rhyme:
But all is changed, that high horse riderless,
Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode
Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.
Finally, let me read part of a poem written less than three years before Yeats’s death – Lapis Lazuli. In this poem Yeats cheerfully dismisses the notion that ennui and tedium vitae are inevitable in face of the threat of war and annihilation: the tragic heroes have always gone to their death knowingly in the face of the hopeless odds, with a “gaiety transfiguring all [their] dread.”
All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay.
Then (by implication, for there is no explicit transition in the text of the poem) he takes up the carved lapis lazuli and contemplates the figures in it; and the stone, very ancient, and quite small too no doubt, takes on life so that (as occurs in the desolation of the little village in Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn) the figures are no longer representations and the scene is in a real world of the imagination.
Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in lapis Lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-men,
Carries a musical instrument.
Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
In one of Yeats’s most famous and disturbing poems The Second Coming the central images present themselves in a vision, and the poem in horrified indignation at the decay of the times weighs the certainty of redemptive revelation, a second coming. But the vision of the Second Coming has no comfort in it, being cruel and mystifying; and the poem, discovering the horrible logic of its own revelation, closes on a question at once blasphemous and desperate. First the vision out of the ancient memory of the world; then the darkness drops, and Yeats says, “And now I know –” yet the poem ends on a question.
... somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
The question is no mark of uncertainty but the gage of a profound knowledge: for the question induces in the mind a specific mode of vision – an active and urgent clarity, not doubt. There is a knowing that is not the same as having knowledge; so much poetry, especially romantic, has commerce with this knowing that one wonders whether poetry exists in order to secure for us that mode of knowing. In this knowing, which occurs through symbolic structures, the form of knowing is itself the act of coming to know. Neither Wordsworth nor Yeats assumes or neglects a world: each comes to discover and know his own manifold world of values and concerns. Each traces, in greater or less compass in any single poem, the forward sane movement of life itself; and each poet turns his poignant regard with what courage he may find upon that other forward rhythm which impels us towards our death.
In the self-shaping and self-declarative symbolism of these poems we see, I think, special instances of what, one way and another, all poets do. Milton in Lycidas writes sentences as organically broken by indignation and passion as anything Yeats ever wrote; the pastoral elegy in its strictness may well be an organic expression of the necessary resolution of grief in the face of death; Kubla Khan is a visionary Pindaric ode, evolving through extreme obliquity the way of creativity; Thomas Gray wrote The Bard as well as the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, was a good Plato scholar and brought the Icelandic sagas into English poetry; Pope’s great moment of tenderness in The Rape of the Lock is a feat of conscious technical virtuosity. In the few poems before us I have pointed to a particular mode of knowing, a process like dreaming, a self-forming activity. The poems were all admittedly romantic; but these three elements are not the specific characteristics of romantic poetry. If we took from good romantic poetry these resources, it would be impossible to make any poetry out of what was left. What is of first importance about good romantic poetry is not that it is “romantic” but that it is in its own right poetry. Without any blurring of kinds, intentions, or tastes I should claim that the poetry of the early 19th century in England and the later poetry that draws upon the central virtues of that art is especially apt to disclose the nature and dynamic of poetry altogether. That may explain the importance of what I have agreed without definition, to call conventionally and loosely “romanticism.”