-
Theories of language are at their best when describing simple
communications ("John and Mary went to the opera") but show a
strain when confronting complex expressions ("bright effluence
of bright essence increate"). The phrase "wrestling with God,"
which is in the title of this volume, requires one to wrestle
with words, perhaps even with the Word; and the presupposition
of metaphysical conditions merely compounds the problem of
making the vehicle of language carry a burden appropriate to
the tenor of thought intermixed with it. In this essay, we
shall consider poets wrestling, if not explicitly with a
deity, at least with those predecessors of greatest and most
urgent significance. The language and forms our poets must
devise for transforming allusions to their predecessors into
complex interactions as copresences in their works also make
possible wrestling with any problems of ultimate value. Our
attention will be directed to the differences between
metaphorical and metaphysical wit, to the equivalent
distinction between a conventional literary allusion and the
creation of a copresence, and to the nature of mathematical
reality and its Platonic presences as an analogue to the
symbolic forms evoked by poets wrestling with a metaphysical
sense of presence.
-
As an approach to the metaphysical possibilities of
poetic allusions, let us consider how allusions consisting of
emblematic and symbolic forms, above and beyond verbal
references, tend to suggest or evoke a sense of presence that
goes beyond conventional notions of how allusions work. In
this respect, P.G. Stanwood and I, drawing upon A. J. Smith's
distinction between "metaphorical" and "metaphysical" wit,
have argued that "metaphysical wit may in part be induced
through structural mediation."[1] Whereas metaphorical wit is
essentially verbal in nature, relying on linguistic and
rhetorical ingenuity, its courtly art can trivialize or ignore
the inner life which, in Smith's words, emerges from "the
intricate interrelation of divine being with human nature,
timeless events with history."[2] Set against the flux of
language is the pattern of form which is often preeminent in
metaphysical verse. In Herbert's "The Altar" and "Easter-wings," of course, the patterns are obvious representations of
their respective objects of perception and mimic their
physical presence. More interesting for our purposes, though,
is the evocation of conceptual order at the other end of The
Temple in such poems as "Love (III)," set after physical time
and space have ceased. Here, three tri-partite stanzas, each
featuring three lines of iambic trimeter, unite the Eucharist,
the server, and the communicant. The ubiquitous threeness of
forms in "Love (III)" attempts to represent a metaphysical
reality in a way that mere words cannot. The explanation for
the distinction between symbolic forms and words appears to
reflect the incarnational nature of the forms. Words,
according to some notions, may be merely self-referential or,
at best, attempt to refer outwards, as it were, to an external
world. Symbolic forms, by contrast, refer inwards, incarnating
a posited external world in the mystery of pattern. Hence, the
distinction between metaphysical and metaphorical wit seems to
require an account of incarnational poetics and the implied
ontological presuppositions associated with the most
challenging examples of metaphysical verse.
-
As a special case, Henry Vaughan's achievement provides
further support for the view that incarnational strategies are
associated with a sense of presence. Silex Scintillans (1650)
exists, of course, because of Herbert's Temple, and Vaughan's
poems are replete with verbal echoes of Herbert's. When the
evocation of Herbert's presence is most acute, however,
symbolic form becomes more important than mere verbal
allusion. In "The Match," for example, Vaughan begins by
addressing his predecessor directly in stanzas that recall
Herbert's interest in the mirror-patterns of bilateral
symmetry: a5b2b4/a5c2c4//d5e2e4/d5f2f4 (in the notation,
letters refer to rhymes and numbers to the total of iambic
feet in each line: thus, the first three lines rhyme abb and
consist of a pentameter, a dimeter, and a tetrameter). In
Vaughan's poem, the Herbertian stanzas bring the two poets
together and anticipate the second and longer part of the
poem, now addressed to the Lord and punning wittily on the
poet's two lives in further examples of the bilateral symmetry
of his stanzas. Metaphysically, Vaughan is ultimately
concerned with the alignment of two worlds, one temporal and
the other eternal, which the alternating odd and even numbers
of his lines reflect and resolve through the threeness which,
as has been indicated schematically, builds up the twoness of
his stanzas. At its best, the language of the poem reaches out
to its metaphysical form, which, in turn, moves among the
symbolic forms of Herbert's verse in what, for some readers,
must seem more an act of co-creation rather than a mere
imitation of, or tribute to, a predecessor, so strong is the
sense of presence.
-
Unfortunately, there is no standard work on the nature of
literary allusions which could account for the type of
copresence attempted by Vaughan, despite a recent upsurge of
interest in allusive functions.[3] To the contrary, the current
temper of the times encourages discussions of
"intertextuality" which homogenize distinctions involving
influence and referentiality, perhaps to the denigration of
the urgent human impulses that lead writers to interact with
one another in the first place. In that sense, the
presuppositions and vocabulary of much recent literary theory
have diminished the author, the reader, and the world
reflected in the work in favor of critical and metacritical
self-scrutiny. Let us consider the advantages of standing back
from any theory which does not address the issue of presence
and of looking anew at the nature of literary influences. In
particular, let us consider what happens when an allusion is
more than a mere allusion: when it attempts to recreate a
tradition or, most strikingly, a sense of individual presence
emanating from some familiar ghost of the past. Such a complex
and ambitious interaction, as we have seen with Vaughan and
Herbert, may be termed a deep allusion that evokes a
copresence. Our remaining examples will consider how some
Romantic poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth rely on works by
their Renaissance predecessor Milton; but the argument will
engage general implications about presence which entail
metaphysical and theological complications that may highlight
aspects of how poetic language and form relate to ontological
principles.
-
The issue of presence, both immediately and finally, may
well constitute, for many people, the defining problem of
life. It is an issue of such scope that it requires some
attention before we turn to our examples from Renaissance and
Romantic poetry. Fundamentally, presences emerge from the
civilized and conscious appearance or construction we make of
the largely incomprehensible reality in which we live. They
are the goal of each "raid on the inarticulate," as "East
Coker" (179) phrases it, and pose apparently insoluble
difficulties for our linguistic and symbolic descriptions of
them.[4] It is possible to argue, after all, that our empirical
experience is meaningful only as an activity of language and
that language refers only to itself and not to any presences
outside itself which would merely conjure up a referential
illusion or fallacy. At the other extreme is the sense that
the world is haunted by presences, whether or not we have any
linguistic or symbolic means to express them. To the mystic,
such presences could have a divine origin; to the mentally
unstable, they would be most unwelcome invasions of the
psyche.
-
So far as many poets are concerned, the problem of
presences hinges on the relationship of human languages to the
"languages" in the otherwise inarticulate universe. In The
Fall of Hyperion, Keats' Moneta makes a telling observation
to the soul-making narrator:
. . . thou might'st better listen to the wind,
Whose language is to thee a barren noise,
Though it blows legend-laden through the trees --
In melancholy realms big tears are shed,
More sorrow like to this, and suchlike woe,
Too huge for mortal tongue, or pen of scribe.[5]
The Fall of Hyperion, Canto 2: 4-9
Even though the language of the legend-laden world is but a
barren noise to human ears, Keats nevertheless has faith that
such a world can be accommodated, in part, to human
comprehension. In a related act of faith, Wordsworth had
earlier recalled contemplative rustics who did not have the
benefit of linguistic training and sophistication:
Theirs is the language of the heavens, the power,
The thought, the image, and the silent joy:
Words are but under-agents in their Souls;
When they are grasping with their greatest strength,
They do not breathe among them; this I speak
In gratitude to God, who feeds our hearts
For his own service; knoweth, loveth us,
When we are unregarded by the world.[6]
The Prelude, XIII: 270-77
The "language of the heavens" lies, of course, beyond any
human words; and it is a measure of Wordsworth's philosophical
sensibility that such a "language" presupposes a divine
source. But what if Keats and Wordsworth are wrong: what if
there are no languages other than those which human beings
have devised?
-
In an apparent answer to such a question, Wordsworth
invoked the nature of mathematical reality as a realm that
ontologically lies beyond the symbols used to describe it. He
"recognized," in the world of geometry,
A type, for finite natures, of the one
Supreme Existence, the surpassing life
Which, to the boundaries of space and time,
Of melancholy space and doleful time,
Superior, and incapable of change,
Nor touched by welterings of passion -- is,
And hath the name of God.
The Prelude, VI: 133-39
As an analogy, the nature of mathematical reality raises
questions similar to those posed by the use of form and
language to evoke the presence of another being, human or
divine; and a brief consideration of mathematical presences
should indicate the ubiquity of the problem.
-
To Wordsworth,
Plato's eternal realm houses geometric forms, which have, for
the English poet, a mysterious relationship to the temporal
forms of nature. Wordsworth is haunted by presences from both
worlds. Mathematicians, from Plato onwards, have remained
divided about the Platonic basis of mathematics and are often
much farther away than Wordsworth from sensing any presences
in their discipline. H. E. Huntley, for example, contrasts
Morris Kline's anti-Platonist views with those of G. H. Hardy:
"It would appear as though mathematics is the creation of
human fallible minds rather than a fixed, externally existing
body of knowledge. The subject seems very much dependent on
the creator" (Kline 154); "I believe that mathematical
reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or
observe it, and that theorems which we prove, and which we
describe grandiloquently as our 'creations,' are simply notes
of our observations. This view has been held, in one form or
another, from Plato onwards . . . " (Hardy 38).[7] More recent
anti-Platonist stances from Reuben Hersh (What is Mathematics
Really?) and Gregory
Chaitlin (The Limits of Mathematics) clash with the mathematical Platonism of Roger Penrose:
". . . its existence rests on the profound, timeless, and
universal nature of these concepts, and on the fact that their
laws are independent of those who discover them" (413).[8]
Penrose is Wordsworthian in his sense of mathematical
presences: ". . . the reality of mathematical concepts is a
much more natural idea for mathematicians than it is for those
who have not had the fortune to spend time exploring the
wonders and mysteriousness of that world" (413). Finally, in
thinking of relationships among physical, mental, and Platonic
worlds, Penrose asserts: "To me the world of perfect forms is
primary (as was Plato's own belief) -- its existence being
almost a logical necessity -- and both the other two worlds are
its shadows" (417). Is mathematical reality discovered or
invented? A persuasive answer would simultaneously solve most
of the major issues in metaphysics and religion, rule on the
referentiality of language, and, on a much smaller scale, even
determine the fate of cultural post-modernism! In short, the
problem of presence would be solved.
-
It is the sort of problem that engaged the far-ranging
mind of Coleridge, and his approaches to it suggest creative
complexities at their finest. Whereas the relationship of
Vaughan to Herbert is, on the face of it, notable for showing
some simplicity and clarity, the relationship of Coleridge to
his predecessors and to the poetic tradition presents a
complex range of possibilities. Perhaps nowhere is the
complexity of Coleridge's attitudes revealed more poignantly
than in Dejection: An Ode. The basic circumstances of the
ode's composition are well known: apparently after having
heard the first four stanzas of Wordsworth's Immortality Ode
in 1802, Coleridge, responding to his friend's expression of a
loss of "vision" and "glory," poured out his own sense of a
loss of imaginative power in a long and often self-pitying
verse epistle to Wordsworth's sister-in-law. That epistle, "A
Letter to Sara Hutchinson," was dated April 4, 1802. On
October 4, 1802, the date of Wordsworth's wedding anniversary,
which, coincidentally, was also the anniversary of Coleridge's
unhappy marriage to Sara Fricker, Coleridge's verse letter was
revised and published as "Dejection: An Ode, Written April 4,
1802." The anguished love for Sara Hutchinson was now hidden
under references to Wordsworth as "Edmund," but the date of
publication must have called attention to the contrast between
Wordsworth's growing poetic strength and domestic happiness in
relation to Coleridge's sense of failure and misery. The final
version, addressed simply to a "Lady," completed the miracle
of poetic transformation: a great irregular Pindaric ode
arising from the poet's claim of poetic impotence and from the
often embarrassing verse letter at its origin.
-
The relationship of Dejection: An Ode to Wordsworth's
great Ode has been a source of perennial speculation and
confusion, but Coleridge's attitudes towards his contemporary
are similar to those he entertained towards Milton, whose poem
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity has a striking role to
play in Coleridge's work and perhaps helps to clarify
Coleridge's assessment of poetic power in general. References
to Milton's poem occur climactically at the end of each main
section of Coleridge's ode and lead to a recovery of strength
that marks the beginning of each new section. The ode falls
into three parts: stanzas I-III, IV-VI, and VII-VIII. At lines 46,
47, and 46, respectively, the stanzas divide the poem
into almost perfect thirds. Let us proceed by considering how
Miltonic patterns affect the first third of the poem. The
opening two stanzas document the gap between the perceiving
subject and the objects of perception which are here located
in images of evening twilight. Artistically, the stanzas
display an unpredictable succession of rhymes but no rhyming
pattern. In stanza III, the ode rises to a generalized
statement of the problem; and the stanza attains the
rhetorical heightening of a formal close by embodying a set
pattern of complex order:
My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are
within.[9]
Schematically, the stanza divides into three sections: a3a3b5 / c3c3b5 /
d5d6. The first sections show in miniature the
design of the stanza overall: the same line-lengths and
sequences that had hitherto been unique to "The Hymn" of On
the Morning of Christ's Nativity and its repeated ode form
based on an AA'B ("a," "a prime," "b") pattern:
Ring out ye Crystal spheres,
Once bless our human ears,
(If ye have power to touch our senses so)
And let your silver chime
Move in melodious time;
And let the Bass of Heav'n's deep Organ blow,
And with your ninefold harmony
Make up full consort to th' Angelic symphony.[10]
With the exception of the seventh line, which, in Coleridge's
poem is a pentameter rather than a tetrameter, Coleridge has
duplicated Milton's distinctive stanza, a remarkable pattern
that takes the regular Pindaric AA'B sequence of strophe -- antistrophe -- epode from the larger arena of interstanzaic
arrangement to the smaller scale of design within the stanza
itself.
-
Is Coleridge's adoption of Milton's stanza merely a
generic way of indicating that the requirements of an ode are
being met? Or is the stanza an imaginative copresence, a deep
allusion, that, like a muse, inspires the later poet's
confidence in the power of his calling? Superficially,
Coleridge's language appears to be at odds with the poetic
form he has called up from Milton, whose hymn celebrates two
interrelated manifestations of imaginative power: the
Incarnation as divine love and energy and the poet's
creativity of having come of age at twenty-one with a great
work of his own. The two birthdays at the heart of Milton's
poem proclaim spiritual strength; by stark contrast,
Coleridge's poem laments its loss. Yet, by incorporating
Milton's work into his own as a presence of strength, could
not Coleridge be drawing upon it as a mainstay against his
misery? It is true that the next section of the ode, stanzas
IV-VI, immediately recovers by identifying that strength as "A
light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud" (54) and even more
closely as "This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist" (62) which is "this strong music in the soul"
(60).
As such, the Miltonic presence in Coleridge's poem is an
affirmation of poetry's prophetic identity, the copartner of
"wedding Nature" and source of a "new Earth and new Heaven" (68, 69). Thanks to Bloom, Bate, and others, an entire
generation of literary scholars has become acutely sensitive
to "the anxiety of influence," the "burden of the past," and
other indications of creative distress in literary
relationships.[11] Blake's problems with Milton are a striking
case in point. Is it not also possible, however, for a poet in
uttermost anxiety to reach out to a predecessor in a desperate
act of faith?
-
To Coleridge, Milton was a preeminent symbol of
imaginative power. The famous definitions of the primary and
secondary imaginations conclude Chapter XIII of Biographia
Literaria, but Milton's lines on discursive and intuitive
reason from Book V of Paradise Lost provide that chapter's
main epigraph. Admittedly, discussions of the "poetical
character" featured Milton throughout the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries; Collins, Gray, Hazlitt,
Wordsworth, and Keats were among those who saw him as the type
of prophetic and meditative power. Of course, the Romantic
poets were the first who, individually and collectively,
looked to their English predecessors first rather than to
Continental or Classical models for their immediate and
ultimate standards, even though the sense of English poetry as
its own great tradition had been growing since the time of
Spenser. Even in such a literary climate, Coleridge's
evocation of Milton is distinctive. In stanza VI of Dejection:
An Ode, afflictions have compromised the "shaping spirit of
Imagination" (86), and the counterbalancing example of
Milton becomes evident again:
For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man --
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul. (87-93)
The irregular rhyming in stanzas IV-VI attains a set and
formal close in the preceding lines, a rhyme royal stanza
which concludes with an Alexandrine, a Spenserian touch which
Milton uses at the end of all four introductory stanzas of his
Nativity Ode. Most appropriately, the next use of this
Miltonically modified rhyme royal stanza is in Wordsworth's
Resolution and Independence, which treats afflictions related
to those raised by Coleridge in his ode. The effect of the
Miltonic pattern of rhyme royal in Coleridge's poem once again
results in an improvement: stanza VII, which opens the final
section of the ode, is full of energy arising from the
"outward forms" deplored at the poem's outset. Even more
telling is the fact that its final lines (118-25) are
another instance of the Nativity Ode's hymn stanza. In this
case, the cries of the child to her mother have a structural
parallel in Coleridge's relationship to Milton. The hymn
stanza's AA'B pattern of two trimeters followed by a
pentameter is heard even in the final lines of stanza VIII (132-34), as the poet wishes the joy and power of the
imagination for his lady. In sum, the only set rhyming
patterns in the whole of Dejection: An Ode are the hymn stanza
and the modified rhyme royal of Milton's Nativity Ode; and each
time the Miltonic form is incarnated in Coleridge's poem, the
power of the imagination revives.
-
That a sense of presence was crucial to Coleridge is
clear in many other works; sometimes, as in The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner or Christabel, presences could be negative,
even malevolent. As a poet, however, Coleridge treats presence
as the beneficial heart of a literary relationship. In "To
William Wordsworth," Coleridge honors the presence of his
friend by writing in Wordsworthian blank verse paragraphs and
by recounting the main features of The Prelude and its
restorative effect on him until, at the end, he evokes the
most significant presence of all: "And when I rose, I found
myself in prayer" (112).[12] Again, when considering
Coleridge's evocations of Wordsworth or Milton, we need to
look at the poetic forms and patterns that embody a particular
poetical character and spirit and give a sense of personality
in a way that a merely verbal allusion could never do.
-
Less personal as a form of presence but nevertheless of
importance in going beyond verbal allusions is the attempt to
recreate a mode or tradition. In Coleridge's "Ne Plus Ultra,"
it is as if a typical 17th-century metaphysical lyric has come
to life again in the Romantic period. The poem explores the
paradox of negation, not as nothingness or absence of being,
but as a palpable presence: "Sole Positive of Night" and "The
one permitted opposite of God" (1, 4).[13] Although the
poem's line-lengths vary from iambic dimeter to pentameter,
they are generally arranged in a ring structure, as examples
of bilateral symmetry encircling the poem's midpoint, which is
the central line of the following extract:
The Intercepter --
The Substance that still casts the shadow Death! --
The Dragon foul and fell --
The unrevealable,
And hidden one, whose breath
Gives wind and fuel to the fires of Hell!
Ah! sole despair . . . . (8-14)
At the center of the poem's twenty-one lines is "the
unrevealable," a trimeter which is surrounded by trimeter,
pentameter, and dimeter lines that radiate away from it in
opposite directions. Perhaps Coleridge is calling attention to
the problematical nature of a geometric point, which, at the
center of a circle, is both nothing as well as the basis on
which everything is erected. The traditional symbolism of a
circle as a never-ending line and form of perfection is here
inverted, much as "darkness visible" in Milton's Hell is an
inversion or parody of the light invisible of his Heaven. The
form of Coleridge's lyric is emblematic of his theme: the
antithesis of God is not nothing but something, a negative
presence. Evil, having no authentic expression of its own,
parasitically adopts forms of the good (in this case, the
circle) which nevertheless call attention to its dependent
nature in relation to the pre-existing good. So, in
Coleridge's poem, "The unrevealable" is "Reveal'd to none of
all th' Angelic State / Save to the Lampads Seven, / That
watch the throne of Heaven!" (19-21), whose final two
trimeters recall both the evil at the midpoint of the poem and
the theme announced in its opening two trimeter lines but with
the metrical form now associated with its heavenly source.
Coleridge's sensitivity to metrical and stanzaic symbolism
may, for some readers, recall the tradition of the
metaphysical lyric; but it is a tradition, rather than a
personal presence, as in Dejection: An Ode, that is being
recalled. The very impersonality with which "Ne Plus Ultra"
treats the paradox of a negative presence is nevertheless
impressive and categorical in its demonstration of how
metrical and formal symbolism may compensate for the
limitations of language.
-
Coleridge's complex attitudes towards Wordsworth and
towards their Renaissance predecessors have a parallel in
Wordsworth's, as well, especially with respect to the figure
of Milton, who benevolently haunted Wordsworth throughout his
career. The Miltonic haunting took its definitive and
characteristic form in May, 1802, when, after listening to
Dorothy read Milton's sonnets, William "took fire" from their
character, began composing his first indisputably great
sonnets, and ultimately became the most productive sonneteer
of all the major English poets.[14] What happened to Wordsworth
on that occasion was probably something akin to a conversion-experience based, in this case, on the intuiting of the
presence of Milton's sensibility in the very form of his
sonnets. Among the first fruits of Wordsworth's taking fire was "London, 1802": "Milton! thou shouldst be
living at this hour"; and Milton's poetical character
inspirits, in general, his successor's deep affinity for the
form. So profound was Wordsworth's Miltonic theory and
practice of the sonnet that he was the first to appreciate, as
he put it to Crabb Robinson, "a perfect sonnet without rhyme"
in Paradise Lost.[15] Like their rhymed counterparts, the
unrhymed sonnets tend to reconcile characters in accordance
with the theme of love, "By name to come call'd Charity, the
soul / Of all the rest" (PL. XII, 584-85), and to
harmonize earth and heaven in accordance with prophetic
language.[16] Milton's use of the blank verse sonnet at crucial
points in the epic is an outstanding expression of his
symbolic art, and it is as a copresence that Wordsworth places
one prominently at the beginning of the final verse paragraph
of The Prelude:
Oh! yet a few short years of useful life,
And all will be complete, thy race be run,
Thy monument of glory will be raised;
Then, though, too weak to tread the ways of truth,
This Age fall back to old idolatry,
Though Man return to servitude as fast
As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame
By Nations sink together, we shall still
Find solace -- knowing what we have learnt to know,
Rich in true happiness if allowed to be
Faithful alike in forwarding a day
Of firmer trust, joint laborers in the Work
(Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe)
Of their deliverance, surely yet to come.
The Prelude, XIV: 432-45
-
Addressed to Coleridge, these lines exemplify Wordsworth's
understanding of the nature and role of Milton's blank verse
sonnets. The octave and sestet are run together in the
Miltonic manner, the break being signaled by the dash in the
ninth line. Furthermore, the octave concerns earthly matters
whereas the sestet turns to things in an eternal context,
again, as in the precedents from Milton. Wordsworth's lines
echo phrases and themes from the final speeches of Adam,
Michael, and Eve at the epic's conclusion. Michael's (574-87) and Eve's (610-23) are unrhymed sonnets on
knowledge in relation to wisdom and on prophetic fulfillment.
What Adam and Eve know enables them to go into the world of
their future, just as Coleridge and Wordsworth undertake their
prophetic task in the fallen world with Providence as their
guide. The verbal and thematic parallels are striking, but the
prophetic interchange between The Prelude and Paradise Lost
achieves formal incarnation in the shared symbolic functions
of the blank verse sonnets, as if the hand of Milton were
deftly guiding Wordsworth's in the assertion and attainment of
prophecy at the end of The Prelude.
-
However important blank verse sonnets may have been to
Wordsworth, it is not clear that they could be part of a
reader's literary experience until they have been identified
and their significance discussed. Their function as an
allusion -- in this case, by The Prelude to Paradise Lost -- is
otherwise outside most readers' understanding and expectation
of metrical verse. That is one reason why, for our purposes,
it may be more helpful to approach the problem, not so much as
an allusion, but as the embodiment of a presence of an earlier
work in a later one. Nowhere is this problem more mysterious
and perplexing, however, than in circumstances such as the
following: the echoing of key sounds and forms from Vergil's Eclogue IV in Milton's Lycidas and Wordsworth's Immortality
Ode. The facts of the matter have been set out elsewhere and
hence are reviewed only briefly in relation to their service
in the present context.[17] "Paulo maiora canamus," from the
opening line of the Fourth or Messianic Eclogue, was the
working epigraph of Wordsworth's ode throughout its
composition. Thematically, the allusion is apt: the golden
child of Vergil's poem has its counterpart in the Wordsworthian
child as "best Philosopher." The redemption of the natural
world, its bounty in the new golden age described by Vergil,
is related to Wordsworth's eventual use of natural imagery to
embody symbolic and supernatural conditions, as in the
seascape at the end of stanza IX or the flower that blows
("The Child is father of the Man") at the end of stanza XI. In
Lycidas, too, nature that caused the shipwreck becomes,
"through the dear might of him that walked the waves," an
image of a pastoral heaven presided over by the Good Shepherd.
That very figure as the infant Christ, of course, is what made
Vergil's prophecy of a golden child so vital to the Christian
era. The figure of Christ, the golden and Wordsworthian
children, and the transformation of nature from a realm of
mutability and melancholy into a vehicle for the tenor of
spiritual perfection are all "intertextual" aspects of these
three great poems and, as such, illustrate strikingly how
literary allusions move from verbal to thematic parallels.
-
What part of one's literary experience, though, is
touched by the auditory and formal parallels among the three
works? Consider how a mere sound, the syllable or, appears to
resonate with symbolic purpose both within and between all
three. With respect to Eclogue IV, H. G. Edinger has made a
persuasive argument for just such an evocative use of sound:
It is immediately apparent that this syllable is involved
in words that are properly called key words in the poem.
Maiora announces the higher concern of the poem that
segregates it from the surrounding Eclogues; it also
sets the tone of the poem. Saeclorum . . . ordo is a
phrase that represents a pair of homodyned or's [that is,
doubly accented, both metrically and rhetorically]
in a verse quite central to the poem's theme, the return
of the golden age . . . In summary, the sound or in the
Fourth Eclogue has been avoided by the poet to such an
extent that its few occurrences stand out
prominently to color a small number of majestic and
important verses, and to underline by emphatic, echoing
sound a key train of thought in the poem, maior,
saeclorum, ordo, fatorum, concors, honor, Orpheus.[18]
With respect to Lycidas, the rhymes on the syllable or sum up
key phases of the poem's argument and its depiction of the
fates of poet and priest: "Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and
once more" (1), "Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian
shore" (63), "Stands ready to smite once, and smite no
more" (131), "Weep no more, woeful Shepherds, weep no
more" (165), and "Henceforth thou art the Genius of the
shore" (183).[19] In the Immortality Ode, the contrast
between the mutable and eternal worlds is perfectly expressed
in the Alexandrines which conclude stanzas I and IX: "The
things which I have seen I now can see no more" (9)
versus "And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore" (168; PW IV: 279, 284). In all three poems, the sound of the
syllable or encircles or symbolically encloses a thematic
progression to an ultimate resolution. The repeated sound is
thus spread over so many lines that it cannot so much be
identified by an auditory memory of something heard by the
physical ear as by the mind's contemplation of a formal
concept. By this paradoxical means, a sound, which, like
music, is a phenomenon experienced in time, serves an
architectural purpose, which originates in space. In this
respect, the abstract forms of each poem rely, at their
highest degree of symbolism, on the geometry of the divine
proportion or golden section; detailed discussions of such
formal sophistications have appeared at length and are not
needed here except to emphasize that the placement and use of
the syllable or is synchronized with the placement and use of
such abstract forms.[20]
-
The aim of much traditional scholarship is to attain a
definitive treatment of a subject, but such an attainment is
unlikely on the question of formal interrelationships among
the Fourth Eclogue, Lycidas, and the Immortality Ode. Is the
significant appearance of the syllable or a mere coincidence,
for example, or is it deliberate? If one concedes that it may
be deliberate, in what sense does it constitute an allusion by
Wordsworth to Milton and Vergil in the way that the repetition
of a key image or phrase constitutes an allusion? There is no
way to answer the question conclusively, but one might suspect
that, in the Immortality Ode, the formal use of the syllable
or is not so much an allusion to, but an incarnation of,
Lycidas and the Fourth Eclogue in Wordsworth's great Ode. That
is to say, when Wordsworth uses "paulo maiora canamus" as his
working epigraph, the verbal allusion reaches out to Vergil's
poem; but when the syllable or becomes a small yet formal
mainspring of Wordsworth's poem, the very nature of Vergil's
Eclogue and, of course, of Milton's elegy, as well, is
embodied as a presence in the very texture of Wordsworth's
ode. The syllable or, being linked to words of prophetic and
redemptive signification, becomes a way in which Wordsworth
can bring into his ode, even on the smallest scale, the
conceptual and visionary ontology of his precursors. Again,
whereas language looks outwards to find significance, symbolic
pattern, working inwards, incarnates the significance that has
already been posited from without. The Immortality Ode, in
this sense, does not merely allude to but embodies Vergilian
and Miltonic presences. As such, the ode's generic and
archetypal expression, which has bewildered so many
Wordsworthians who are accustomed to detailed and specific
descriptions of nature, is "timeless" in its ability to
integrate the themes and artistry of three great and widely
separated works into one. In this way, the great Ode allows us
to glimpse into the heart of the creative process as it has
inspirited three of the most complex and gifted of poets.
-
Our final example, the sonnet "Mutability," furnishes a
parallel to Coleridge's "Ne Plus Ultra" in its evocation of a
tradition rather than an individual sensibility. Despite being
a sonnet, "Mutability" no more displays the presence of Milton
than that of Spenser, Sidney, or any other Renaissance figure
who has dealt with the theme of mutability or with the sonnet-form
itself. Instead, Wordsworth individualizes a tradition by
creating an unusual emblematic lyric that might appear to us
as a Romantic metaphysical poem. The rising and falling of the
musical scale is associated with the dynamics of mutability.
The fixed, symbolic form of the poem, as defined by its
rhymes, circumscribes that negative dynamism. Any structural
distinction, for example, between octave and sestet, is
secondary to the rhymes that encircle the sonnet and call
attention to the middle of the symbolic circle thus created,
which resides in the seventh and eighth lines: "Truth fails
not; but her outward forms that bear / The longest date do
melt like frosty rime" (PW III: 401). Here, in brief, is the
Platonic heart of the poem and the middle of the sonnet's
encircling rhymes that show how even mutability conforms to
order. Generically similar in its emblematic form to the ring
structure of Coleridge's "Ne Plus Ultra," the midpoint of
"Mutability" relies on the idea of a positive rather than a
negative presence, one that emanates from a higher plane than
that represented by mutability or any other agent whose being
is dependent on a pre-existing good. The main allusion in
Wordsworth's poem is a self-quotation; the wonderful line "The
unimaginable touch of Time" is recalled verbatim from the
juvenile work "Fragment of a 'Gothic' Tale" (PW I: 288). To
Wordsworth, the self-quotation may have additionally
represented a touch of permanence running through more than
three decades of change between his earlier and later life in
the kind of assertion of continuing presence that is so
familiar from his works in blank verse.
-
We began by observing that there is no standard work on
the nature of literary allusion, and our examples may indicate
why it is such a vexed and complex issue. In some instances,
there is a case to be made for replacing the idea of an
allusion with the idea of a copresence, especially if, instead
of a verbal reference to an earlier work, the formal
properties of the earlier work are incorporated into the form
of the later one. The resulting effect is a sense of
incarnational presence, whether of an individual or a
tradition. In Real Presences, George Steiner has called upon
the nature of music as a way of challenging the philosophical
nihilism and solipsism of much modern literary theory,
especially in its deconstructionist aspects: "It is in and
through music that we are most immediately in the presence of
the logically, of the verbally inexpressible but wholly
palpable energy in being that communicates to our senses and
to our reflection what little we can grasp of the naked wonder
of life."[21] What Steiner has intuited about the relationship
of music to the rich possibilities of being is another and
specific instance of our larger attention to the nature of
mathematical pattern in relation to mathematical reality and
to the nature of symbolic metrical form in its embodiment of
poetic realities and presences beyond those named by words. In
our examples from Dejection: An Ode and the Immortality Ode,
we have seen how the evocation of presence indicates even
their subtlest differences as Coleridge dramatically draws
upon the Nativity Ode for a renewal of imaginative energy and
as Wordsworth integrates the Fourth Eclogue and Lycidas into
his ode and its vision of the prophetic and ontological
contexts of our very being. All these measures have a
metaphysical and spiritual character, of course, and, as such,
are an inherent part of the human psyche. It is no surprise,
then, that, even in the 20th century, poetic copresences are
essential to verse of major proportions. In the second part of
"Little Gidding," for example, Eliot's "familiar compound
ghost" (95) is incarnated in an adaptation of Dante's
terza rima.[22] Throughout his career, Eliot had alluded to
Dante; here, however, Dante is directly incorporated into
Eliot's poem as one whose art is immediately relevant to the
figure of "some dead master" (92), the presence who
embodies the timeless and metaphysical dimension of reality.
Although proficient in many forms of free or non-metrical
verse, Eliot resorts to metrical pattern when language must
transcend its limitations and the poem must attempt a non-verbal incarnation of presence. In "Little Gidding," as in our
Romantic examples, Steiner's conclusion is justified: "I have,
before, cited some of those who know best: the poets, the
artists. I have found no deconstructionist among them. I have
found none who can, in conscience, accept the constraints on
permissible discourse prescribed by logical atomism, logical
positivism, scientific proof-values or, in a far more
pervasive sense, by liberal scepticism" (Steiner 227). Let us
qualify Steiner's views by observing that even a scientist
must have faith that the universe existed long before we
emerged to describe it, that it will continue to exist if we,
as a species, pass away, and that its existence is, in short,
not contingent on our equations and observations which
nevertheless capture, in some fashion, its nature, its
presence. In a more complex way that involves metaphysical
referentiality, that is what, as we have seen, poetic
copresences evoke from the "legend-laden" world.
-
A final assessment of the nature of interactions in a
copresence is probably too complex ever to be definitive.
Although unavoidably speculative, any conclusion, such as the
one we may now consider, needs to distinguish between a
contemporary's use of a predecessor and their participation in
a conceptual and symbolic field that transcends them both. If
the terms in which the predecessor is recreated by the
contemporary are simply assertions of the latter's control and
power, the encounter is a mere act of psychic
cannibalism -- nothing more. It seems clear, however, that the
copresence of Herbert in Vaughan's poetry is not that of an
individual but the form of a soul contemplated, as it were,
under the eye of eternity. What is being appropriated is not
something Vaughan as an individual can possess. Although an
element of psychic cannibalism may at first seem to be present
in Coleridge's evocations of Milton, the emphasis is not on
Milton but on the figure of the prophetic poet and the
symbolic forms of that poetry which, when recreated, may
inspire a similar transcendence of individual circumstance in
the later poet. Historically, Coleridge's treatment of Milton
(and even Wordsworth) as a poetic symbol of the prophetic
figure is the most advanced instance of identifying the ideal
"poetical character" that appears repeatedly in the verse and
critical prose of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Accordingly, in his great Ode, Wordsworth goes beyond his
immediate circumstances to occupy a symbolic literary space
with Milton and Vergil who appear not so much as individual
poets but as the highest representatives of poetry's timeless
task of gauging things temporal in relation to things eternal.
In a similar way, Eliot's Dante merges into the "familiar
compound ghost" that lies beyond individual desire or control.
-
The idea that the initiator of a copresence is creating
something beyond the initiator's final control may seem
perplexing but is clarified by the analogy of mathematical
concepts. From Plato to Penrose, there is a sense that, in
some respects, we discover and participate in a pre-existent
mathematical reality that is therefore not entirely of our own
making. Its status as an independent world parallels the
symbolic field that ultimately supports the metaphysical
nature of a literary copresence. It is a parallel that was so
well understood by Wordsworth, whose Wanderer, in wrestling
with his deity, asserts that moral law and mathematical truth
("Whose kingdom is, where time and space are not" [PW V: 76])
are transcendent hallmarks of the divine nature itself:
For adoration thou endur'st; endure
For consciousness the motions of thy will;
For apprehension those transcendent truths
Of the pure intellect, that stand as laws
(Submission constituting strength and power)
Even to thy Being's infinite majesty!
The Excursion, IV: 94-99
-
Contemplation of the divine nature as a copresence evokes laws
that lie at the antipodes from mutable, temporal conditions.
For the most part, those conditions account for our verbal
languages, which, by definition, cannot forge names for the
unnameable. The symbolic languages of mathematics and, by
analogy, of incarnational forms in literary copresences have
been employed as ways of extending a sense of the ontological
richness of reality. They constitute an archetypal language
and a set of symbolic forms that seem to lie at the heart of,
or are at least consistent with, the intense literary
relationships that transform conventional allusions into
symbolic copresences and take both poet and reader beyond the
limitations of language and self.
1. See Stanwood and Johnson (“The Structure of Wit” 23).
2. See Smith (135).
3. Two notable instances of the revival of interest in literary allusions
are Pasco, Allusion: The Literary Graft in the series Text/Culture, and
Pucci, The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in
the Western Literary Tradition.
4. See Eliot ("Easter Coker" 31).
5. See Keats ("The Fall of Hyperion" 521).
6. See Wordsworth ("The Fourteen-Book Prelude.” 252-53).
Subsequent citations of The Prelude are from this edition and are
indicated in the text by book and line numbers.
7. As quoted in Huntley [The Divine Proportion: A Study in
Mathematical Beauty, 154 (Kline) and 38 (Hardy)].
8. See Penrose (Shadows of the Mind 413). Subsequent citations
from Penrose are indicated in the text by page numbers.
9. See Coleridge ("Dejection: An Ode"
1.365). Subsequent
citations of the ode are from this edition and are indicated in the text by
line numbers
10. See Milton’s ("On the Morning of Christ's Nativity” 46).
11. See Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, and Bate’s The
Burden of the Past and the English Poet.
12. See Coleridge ("To
William Wordsworth" 1.408).
13. See Coleridge
("Ne Plus Ultra" 1.431). Subsequent citations of this poem
are from this edition and are indicated in the text by line numbers.
14. See Wordsworth
("Notes" 3.417). All subsequent citations of Wordsworth's poems
are from this edition and are indicated in the text by the abbreviation PW,
volume number, and line numbers.
15. See Robinson (484).
16. See Milton (“Paradise Lost” 467). For a consideration of Milton's
use of unrhymed sonnets in the verse paragraphs of his major poems, see
Johnson ("Milton's Blank
Verse Sonnets" 5.129-53).
17. See Johnson
("Virgil, Wordsworth, and the Power of Sound” 93-109).
18. See Edinger (31).
19. See Milton ("Lycidas" 120, 122, 124, 125). A discussion of
the continuous rhyming of the poem is in Wittreich, Jr. ("Milton's `Destin'd
Urn': The Art of Lycidas" 60-70). An evaluation of the rhymes is
in Oras ("Milton's Early Rhyme Schemes and the Structure of Lycidas"
20).
20. See Johnson (Wordsworth's Metaphysical Verse 202-211), and,
for "Lycidas," the same author's "Milton's Mathematical
Symbol of Theodicy" (25-26)
21. See Steiner (216-17).
22. See Eliot ("Little Gidding" 53).
