The Columbia History of British Poetry (73 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 309
powerfully feminized night is admittedly given many negative attributes, and the stoppage of day's activities prefigures not only personal death but the annihilation of the world. Yet Young is urged to pursue the images of silence and death because he is in mourningor rather, Young's personal mourning for his wife ostensibly contributes to the tone of mourning of the speaker of the poem. To pursue the Night world is to find not leaden cessation, but the possibility of a refreshment of spiritual power, and the power of thought.
Silence 
and 
Darkness
! solemn Sisters! Twins
From ancient 
Night
, who nurse the tender Thought
To 
Reason
, and on 
Reason 
build 
Resolve
(That column of true Majesty in man).
                                                       (
Night 
I.2831)
Night in its night world of dark and quiet, in a reversal of Pope's image of Dulness nursing Cibber, assists and nourishes reason.
Young hastens to rectify the balance; after the infantile pleasures of being nursed, of acquiring a feminized receptivity, the mind acquiring reason must assert its masculinitym"
Resolve
" is masculine, a male "column." Authority, hierarchy, control are reassumed. The poem is full of such slippages and compromises (one of the reasons why Barbara Pym finds it so apt for fun in her novels). But we may be struck by the recurrent theme in
Night Thoughts
of the spiritual nourishing power of Night and the night world. In the eighteenth century, there are memorable moments when it is not the Sun that is the Platonic illuminator, but the Night. This exchange can be seen developing in Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," although denied in
Comus
and
Paradise Lost
. "L'Allegro'' and "Il Penseroso" were of great importance to poets near the mid-century, and were to be set to music by Handel. The Sun during the century is increasingly felt to be utilitarian. It becomes associated with the regulating and controlling eye that ensures the social control of others. Night is the time for inner communing, for spiritual apprehension and development for growth, change, and inspiration. It is also a time for understanding death and overcoming the fear of death that the day world too much encourages.
In endeavoring to represent the heroic effort to become attuned to the inward self and to the life beyond the social and intellectual, Young chooses to employ blank verse. The influence of Miltonthe Milton of
Paradise Lost
is most apparent. Milton had made blank verse the
 
Page 310
suitable verse of high, solemn, spiritual subjects. The practice of Pope primarily had made the heroic coupletthe use of an iambic pentameter line in paragraphs of rhyming paired linesseem a poetic form almost inevitably social, practical (in the sense of moral), and satiric. It can be argued that no such clear division is to be felt in the poems of Dryden or other poets of the Restoration.
It is perhaps a peculiarity of Restoration imagination that on all sides (not just that of the King-and-Church men) deep personal experience could be associated with institutions imaginatively conceived. Young is an Anglican churchman, but his meditations cannot point at last triumphantly to a Church Triumphant (as Dryden wanted to do); what happens, the event of the poem, must be personal meditation, zigzags of thought, and the endeavor in the darkness to convert his friend Lorenzo, a private turning along a personal thought line.
The poets of the early mid-centurythe era roughly from the first publication of Young's satires in 1725 to the death of William Collins in 1759turned back to the Jacobeans for poetic forms, images, and turns of language. We have had some trouble in focusing on this relationship of the "Augustans" to the "Jacobeans" because our histories of "the Gothic" have really been dealing with developments of the novel toward the end of the century. There is a tendency to think of graves, ghosts, darkness, etc. as the accessories and prerequisites of the Gothic novelists, and with them of Romantic poets. A group of poets, including Gray and Collins, used to be referred to as "Pre-Romantic"a nicely question-begging term that tended to confuse students about chronology. It was hard to remember that Thomson wrote in the 1730s and Blair in the 1740s, or that Gray wrote most of his work in the 1740s and Collins likewise.
We had wanted so much to say that there was a neoclassical period which lasted right up to the midpoint of the century, and that the other interests, wet and sloppy as they appeared to some historians and teachers, had come along later, with the dissolution of everything dry and manly and the outbursting of "the Gothic" and the French Revolution. But that is not at all the picture. In the first half of the century writers who had learned from the Restoration writers that there are no set models for literature were busy altering the inheritance from the Restoration writers themselves, and looking over the heads, as it were, of the Restoration crowd to other English poets. It is certainly true that the Metaphysical strain did not die out, but was transformed. It is also
 
Page 311
true that the strains so specific to the "Jacobean" writersthe characteristic morbid taste for bones conveyed in deliberately strained connections and jarring similitudes that leave a shudder in their wakehad never disappeared, especially in drama.
We find a new desire on the part of many eighteenth-century poets, especially those writing in the 1740s and early 1750s, to dwell on death, to speak in accents mimicking the Jacobean of worms and graves and epitaphs. We are to be startled and amazed within the night world that withdraws us from the public world of society, reason, and social order. We are to meditate on death, and to see even our social connections in another aspect. "From human Mould we reap our daily Bread./ . . . O'er devastation we blind Revels keep; / While bury'd Towns support the Dancer's Heel" (
Night
IX). This is a thought about death we are urged to feel imaginativelywhat the eighteenth century called a "sentiment," meaning a thought that can be felt, or a feeling that can be articulated.
We don't hear anything like it again until Edward FitzGerald translated the
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
; there are some similarities in Hopkins's "Margaret are you grieving?" We cannot avoid loss, we are surrounded by loss and decay; indeed, we live upon them. Gruesomely, not just the rose (as in Omar) but our daily bread is derived from the mouldering dead. That which is gone, past, dead is in fact very immediately present. The dead do not seem to be quiet in their graves here, as the dead are at least quiet in Thomas Gray's
Elegy in a Country Churchyard
(1750). Their hollow ceiling, our earthen floor, seems to shake at their subdued activity. Throughout the passage, Young recreates the return of the repressed. The night world will not allow us to contemplate only the clean, dry, tidy world of order and action and the rules, for the "night thoughts" bring in the ideas that the day tries earnestly to forget.
So fascinated did the poets of the 1740s become with death and the grave that recent criticism posited a "Graveyard School" of poets. Robert Blair, a Scotsman and the Anglican clergyman of a parish in East Lothian, achieved fame with one signal poem,
The Grave
(1743). Like others of this kind (including Gray's
Elegy
)
The Grave
exhibits a referential fondness for
Hamlet
: "Where are the Jesters now? the men of Health / Complexionally pleasant?" The rapid development of
Hamlet
's popularity in this period may perhaps be explained in part by the poetic preference for what might be called "works of the Night World,"
 
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works that question reason, order, life's shallower cheer (Polonius), institutional confidence (the King), and the quick patter of rational wit (Yorick). Here in Blair's poem we catch flickers of the Metaphysical wit, tamed a little, but turned again to Jacobean purposes, marveling at disintegration: "Sorry Pre-eminence of high Descent, / Above the vulgar born, to rot in State!" (154155); "Tis but a Night, a long and moonless Night; / We make the
Grave
our Bed, and then are gone" (762763).
The characteristics of such contemporary poetry did not go unremarked or uncriticized at the time. William Whitehead made fun of Young's poem in "New Night Thoughts on Death: A Parody" (1747):
O Night! dark Night! wrapt round with
Stygian
gloom!
Thy
riding-hood
opaque, wrought by the hands
Of
Clotho
and of
Atropos
. . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Death's a dark lanthorn, life a candle's end
Stuck on a save-all, soon to end in stink.
The grave's a privy; life the alley green
Directing therewhere 'chance on either side
A sweet-briar hedge, or shrubs of brighter hue,
Amuse us, and their treach'rous sweets dispense.
Whitehead captures the tinny grandeur of the flourishes inherited from the baroque, including the large personifications, but he also sees that these can become extremely awkward when combined with the revived taste for the Metaphysical homely image in an unexpected context. Comparisons are ridden out beyond the bounds of suitability and interest, as in the dogged determination to compare life to a journey to the outhouse every step of the way. The private world of night and self-communing is jocularly turned by Whitehead's daylight satire into the
privy
world. The parodic attack on poetic meditations on the grave was certainly timely. The neo-Jacobean touches that Whitehead picks on and comically imitates can be found in poets other than Young.
A marked difference between poems of this period and the nondramatic lyric or meditative poems of the seventeenth century is the strong, new respect for copiousness. A Jacobean or Metaphysical poet would not
go on
the way poets do in the 1720s1740s. In many cases, there seems no particular reason ever to stop. It is noticeable that when the most eminent poets of the periodincluding not only Thomson,

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