The Columbia History of British Poetry (86 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 355
     Amang the springs,
Awa ye squatter'd like a 
drake
,
     On whistling wings.
From Blake back to Burns; and from Burns on to Wordsworth, who learns to take spiritual instruction from the quotidian orders of nature out of texts like Burns's:
O'er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
And whistles in the wind.
                            ("Lucy Gray," 1800)
XX. Where did Keats take his lessons, from Burns or from Wordsworth?
Mortal, that thou may'st understand aright,
I humanize my sayings to thine ear,
Making comparisons of earthly things;
Or thou might'st better listen to the wind,
Whose language is to thee a barren noise,
Though it blows legend-laden through the trees.
           ("The Fall of Hyperion," written in 1819)
"legend laden": Keats here touches on the strong ethno-mythological impulse apparent throughout Romantic art. The ballad revival fed into Romantic primitivism; early cultural documents were recovered and imitated because they were read as "legend laden." Romantic art made one of its objects the recovery of unconscious, innocent, and naive powers.
AA. From both and from neither. What we see here is a way of writing, a way of imagining the world, that was characteristic of Romanticism. The sensibility is broadly dispersed, translated, transmuted. A legend-laden wind blows across the whole stretch of these everlasting hills. Although it has no beginning, we will not encounter it in the nearby range of the Augustans.
XX. I'm not so sure about that. James Macpherson's Ossianic texts often exhibit the same kind of weather. In the first of his
Fragments of Ancient Poetry
(1760), for instance, the warrior Shilric returns to his home in the Scottish highlands to discover that his beloved Vinvela has died in his absence. The fragment records a conversation between the parted lovers, but Macpherson's text makes it clear that
 
Page 356
we are not overhearing a human conversation, we are observing a sensibility conversant with legend-laden winds.
By the mossy fountain I will sit; on the top of the hill of winds. When midday is silent around, converse, O my love, with me! come on the wings of the gale! on the blast of the mountain, come! Let me hear thy voice, as thou passest, when mid-day is silent around. (I.ii)
The superstitions of Burns, the local tales memorialized by Wordsworth, the mythologies of Keatsall follow the same structural pattern we see here in Macpherson.
Note the date of this, 1760.
AA. And we can find similar things even earlierfor example, in the work of Gray and Collins from the 1740s and 1750s. The cultural fault lines along which the geography of Romanticism was formed will not be mapped on the grids of Cartesian geometrieswhat Blake called "the mill [of] Aristotle's Analytics." We need topological measures for discontinuous phenomena of these kinds, non-Euclidean mathematics of the type first pursued (for example, by Gauss and Bolyai) inthe Romantic Period itself! What we've been looking at here, in this view across the range that includes Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Ossian . . .
XX. . . . and they don't exhaust this landscape by any means.
AA. . . . no, of course not; but what we've been looking at is a kind of topological basin where sets of "attractors" (as the mathematicians say) hold dispersing phenomena in random patterns. Patterns, because the phenomena exhibit recursive forms (a few of which we have noticed); random, because the possibilities for other patternings are endless. We may come at these scenes and experiences from many directions. Patterning dissolves and other patterning appears; some of these patternings will recur in mutated forms, some will not. The locale is (like its own natural light) "incoherent"; but it is also a dynamic and self-integrated whole.
How do we get to know it, then? people sometimes ask. And I want to say, simply by looking at it. "If the doors of perception were cleansed . . ."you know the rest. Even when we think we're following that great romantic star, the imagination, we often close ourselves up and see only through the narrow chinks of our caverned brains. Take Blake and his
Songs
and "The Tyger," for instance. Turn your view away from Burns for a moment and observe the
Songs
from

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