The Columbia History of British Poetry (90 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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a far more wildered mental landscape. The self-consciousness of Smith's arther "
nice felicities
"produce the poem's final, disastrous revelation: that the delicate workings of the sonnet execute an awareness of the "giant horrors" one constructs by raising illusory (i.e., rational) defenses against them.
There is an imagination in Smith's sonnet at war with its cursed artifice and its limited, shrinking consciousness. Warned (reasonably) against a direct encounter with the lunatic, Smith goes to meet him in imagination because her own "moody sadness"her feelingspossess a deeper knowledge than her defensive, civilized understanding. In 1812 Byron would make the drama of "Consciousness awaking to her woes" world-famous in the story of Childe Harold (Canto I, stanza 92). This story, however, began to be told in the late eighteenth century's literature of sensibility, as Smith's sonnet shows. It is the story of the sleep of reason, its illusory dreams, and its "awaking" to that complex Romantic understanding that ''Sorrow is knowledge" (
Manfred
I.1).
A crucial feature of Smith's sonnet is its style of sinceritya style that would come to characterize so much Romantic poetry. The purpose of the style is to make the immediate experience of "the poet" the dramatic focus of the textas if "the poet" were herself the poem's central subject, as if she were subject to the revelatory power of the poem she herself decides to write. Romantic melancholy is one affective consequence of the deployment of such a style:
mon coeur mis à nu
, and at one's own hand.
"style of sincerity": Although Romantic art tends to represent itself as spontaneous and unstudied, these qualities are aesthetic effects of rhetorical strategies. Two key devices are (1) a detailed presentation of a concrete immediate context for the poetical text (epitomized in the famous subtitle of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"); (2) the construction of a poetic revery, as if the reader were "overhearing" the poet musingin several sensesaloud.
Much Romantic poetry will devote itself to a search for ways to defend itself against the dangerous self-divisions fostered by this style of sincerity. The most famous of these defenses was raised by Wordsworth, whose journeys into his
selva oscura
brought, his poetry argued, an "abundant recompense" for psychic wounding and suffered loss.
                                     For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
 
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Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.
                                  ("Tintern Abbey," 1798)
That lesson would guide and trouble a great deal of subsequent poetry. Acceptingindeed, undergoingsuch loss, Wordsworth discovered "That in this moment there is life and food / For future years," discovered (literally) a new spiritual life:
                                  a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
                                     ("Tintern Abbey")
Smith's sonnet does not romanticize her suffering in this way. For Smith, the recompense lies simply in the text's having broken through the curse and sleep of reason to discover the holiness of the heart's affections, however disordered. Indeed, the unstable character of feeling generated by her sonnet is the exact sign that a breakthrough has occurred.
AA. But Romanticism had other ways for exploring unknown worlds. The impersonal character of Blake's
Songs
would succeed to the age's greatest representation of psychic and social derangement in that epic of "the torments of love and jealousy,"
The Four Zoas
. Madness in this work, however, appears an objective state of general spiritual existence rather than the subjective experience of a particular person. Consequently, the poem creates a textual environment where readers are thrown back wholly on their own resources. To read
The Four Zoas
is extremely disorienting because one must traverse the work with no guidance or protectionas if Dante were to have made his journey to hell without Virgil.
In the Romantic poetry of sincerity readers are spectators of the worlds and experiences that appear to be undergone by the poets. In this respect the Romantic poet serves at once as topic and guide for the reader, whose function is to observe and learn lessons of sympathyto "overhear" the poetry, as J. S. Mill later said. Blake's poetry, by contrast, calls the reader to acts of final (self-)judgment. The great question posed by all of Blake's poetry is simple but devastating: How much reality can you bear to know? "If the doors of perception
 
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were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite" (
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
, plate 14): but the world of the infinite will not be reconnoitered as if one were going a casual journey. It is a world of ultimate things, a world where one may expect only to be weighed and found wanting.
XX. Blake was interested in the poetry of Ossian and the ballad revival because such work appeared to deliver one into completely alien worlds: not the worlds of dreaming or the dreamer, but the worlds of dreams-as-suchthose orders existing independently of the (un)conscious mechanisms that can sometimes establish contact with them.
Some of Coleridge's greatest poetry is essentially an argument that such ideal orders do in fact exist, "Kubla Khan" being the most famous and perhaps successful of these works. When he finally published the poem, Coleridge cased it in an elaborate prose framework that called attention to the dreamed character of the text and experience. Paradoxically, this personal rhetoric heightens the impersonal quality of the vision, as if the poetical text were the residue of a concrete world subsisting beyond mortal ken, a prelapsarian world where words rise up as things, a world occasionally glimpsed (perhaps in dream) by time-and space-bound creatures.
In "Kubla Khan" the act of dreaming is a trivial event when set beside the ideal world that appears to have suddenly and transiently arisen to view. It is as if the appearance were recorded to measure the distance between mortal dreamer and immortal dream. We observe the same kind of rhetoric in, for example, a poem like Byron's "Darkness." Beginning with a perfunctory gesture from the dreamer ("I had a dream, which was not all a dream"), the poem unfolds a detailed catalogue of Armageddon, which assumes an independent substantiality like Coleridge's vision of the world of Kubla Khan.
Byron's rhetorical procedure is put into relief when we set it beside the literary example that spurred him to his poemThomas Campbell's "Last Man." Although most of Campbell's poem is a first person report of a dream of apocalypse, the dreamer is carefully defined at the outset as an imaginary "last man." Consequently, the fictional status of the poem is always clear. Coleridge and Byron, on the other hand, represent their texts through a rhetoric of immediacy. As a result, when their texts discard the psychological supports for their

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