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Content T H E M A R R IA G E M E T A P H O R A N D T H E R O M A N T IC P R O P H E C Y : i i . A S T U D Y O P T H E U S E S O P T H E E P IT H A L A M IU M IN T H E P O E T R Y O P B L A K E , W O R D S W O R T H , A N D C O L E R ID G E Michael Joseph Daly /n A Dissertation Presented to the F A C U L T Y O P T H E G R A D U A T E S C H O O L U N IV E R SIT Y O P S O U T H E R N C A L IF O R N IA In P artial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree D O C T O R O F P H IL O S O P H Y (English) June 1968 UMI Number: DP23034 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. D issertation Publishing UMI DP23034 Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 1 © Copyright by Michael Joseph. Daly [ 1969 l 5 U N I V E R S IT Y O F S O U T H E R N C A L I F O R N I A T H E G R A D U A T E S C H O O L U N IV E R S IT Y PA R K L O S A N G E L E S . C A L IF O R N IA 9 0 0 0 7 PA,2 ), £ 2>/S3 This dissertation, written by under the direction of h.X.B... Dissertation Com mittee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by the Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y O pea n Date 1968 DISSERTATION COMMITTEE Ch/arman a i I 1 i i i T A B L E O P C O N T E N T S Chapter Page I. IN T R O D U C T IO N ............................................................................... 1 II. T H E G R E A T D IV O R C E A N D T H E ■ F O U R F O L D V ISIO N . .................................................. 10 | III. EPIC M A R R IA G E .................................................................. 82 IV. T H E N IG H T M A R E A N D T H E D R E A M ............................. 161 V. CONCLUSION.............................................................................. 2 if.8 B IB L IO G R A P H Y . .................................................................................... 2£6 t i i i C H A P T E R I IN T R O D U C T IO N | N o w on the principle that the goddess of f e r tility I must herself be f e rtile , it behoved Diana to have a male | partner. Her mate, if the testimony of Servius may be i trusted, was that Virbius w ho had his representative, or | perhaps rather his embodiment, in the King of the M ood at i Nemi. The aim of th eir union would be to promote the f fruitfulness of the earth, of animals, and of mankind; | and it might naturally be thought that this object would I be more surely attained if the sacred nuptials were eele- i brated every year, the parts of the divine bride and | bridegroom being played either by th eir images or by | living persons. 1 i Since primitive times, if the testimony of Frazer may be trusted, the fact and the idea of marriage have played upon man's imagination like the breeze on the wind-harp, evoking speculation on the nature of a ll life , natural and supernatural, and on the relationship between mankind and ! his phenomenal and noumenal worlds. A s Frazer implies, I (belief in magic and prayer quite naturally ensured that the i sacred nuptials at the heart of the great myths of creation, i destruction, and redemption would become associated with i actual marriages between human beings, particularly weddings i i i ' Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Abridged Edition (London, 1923), pp . lJ+ 1 - 1^2 . 1 between persons of royal blood, upon w hom the welfare of 2 society depended. In the sophisticated lite ra ry traditions of ancient and modern Europe, the magic of the curse becomes the power of jrefined and polished satire, and the propitiatory rite s I 'celebrating the union of man and the universe become the iformal marriage hymn or epithalamium. 3 Typically, Spenser's i Epithalamion and Prothal amion focus in itia lly upon a p a rti cularized marriage, an individual set of circumstances, i iwhich nevertheless extend outward in implication, so that I sthe poet's prayer for the success and fruitfulness of the i s [specific marriage relationship becomes also a prayer for ! ithe general fruitfulness and prosperity of the earth and human society. The conventional features of Classical and Hebrew epithalamia were easily assimilated by the English Christian poetie tradition, In which marriage on earth coulc be thought of as a microeosraic celebration of the principle [ Virginia J. Tufte points out in The Poetry of Mar- ;riage: A C ritical History of the Epithalamium (Los Angeles, ■ 1 9 6 o), p. 'if., that the form came to be explicitly used for Ithe celebration of royal weddings as early at A . D. 300. 1 o -'Mrs. Tufte deals at length with the cosmic implica tio n s of the epithalamium*s celebration of a specific ;marriage; the comparison I make with the tradition of satire seems apt, since both satire and the epithalamium were so cially oriented genres, serving as group expressions of [censure and of hope respectively. 3 of order and harmony in the divine plan. A s Virginia J. Tufte has shown, "the notion of a human marriage allegorized as a spiritual marriage" characterizes Christian poetry of the Middle Ages and draws support from the medieval reading of the Canticle of Solomon and the forty-fourth Psalm as I divine allegory.**" | B y the seventeenth century, the Canticle had become I the prototype or model for countless poetic imitations or iparaphrases in English devotional poetry, thus reaffirming the interpretation of the Biblical poem as an allegory des cribing the mystical or sacred marriage between Christ and the Church, and its numerous extensions.^ The figure of the enclosed garden, to which the bride in the Song of Songs is compared, especially influenced the use of the garden as a metaphor for perfect harmony and complete happiness and thus recurs frequently in English poetry before Dryden.^ Yet in the la te r seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, jthe popularity of the epithalamium diminished considerably, I i * * -The P o etry o f M arriage, p . 99. i '■ % ! -'The most thoroughgoing account o f the v a rio u s a l l e g o r ic a l in te r p r e ta tio n s o f the Song o f Songs i s S ta n le y 'S tew art’ s The E n closed Garden ; th e T r a d itio n and th e Image |in S ev en teen th C entury P o etry (M adison, M ilwaukee, and London, 1 9 6 6 ). | ^Stewart, in The Enclosed Garden, deals specifically 'with the garden image in seventeenth-century English poetry culminating in Marvell’s The Garden; the image would la te r be used sim ilarly by the f ir s t Romantics, and particularly by Coleridge, as I shall show. k- judging from the comparatively small number written. Mrs. Tufte points out that the vogue of the epithalamium during f !the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries dissipated by j ;the la tte r part of the seventeenth century, relatively few ! [being written by the poets of the Restoration and Augustan 1 ‘ age.? It was not u n til the la tte r part of the eighteenth i |century, for example, that a new enthusiasm for the Song of i Songs is evidenced in a proliferation of new translations jand commentary.® In his study of the importance of the I |01d Testament for the Sensibility Poets, Murray Roston con- i tends that the "prophetic quality" of .Romantic poetry re sults largely from the Romantics’ rediscovery of Biblical jmodels, including especially such apparently "pagan" lyrics as the Song of Solomon.^ Moreover, as Roston points out, such translators as Bishop Percy tended to emphasize the sensuous delight and pastoral quality of the Song rather ' than its allegorical meaningsit is interesting to note i [that Blake, the f ir s t great English Romantic, combines the prophetic voice with a doctrine of sensuality as dual means to the discovery of truth. I t might, however, be more apt I i ; 7 , "High Wedlock then be Honored--Rhetoric and the Epi thalamium, " Pacific Coast Philology, I (April 1966), 32-41. Q i °Murray Roston, Prophet and Poet (Evanston, Illin o is, 1 9 6 5 ), p. 49 f f . | ^Prophet and Poet, p. 13. ! 10Prophet and Poet, p. 49. 5 not to say that the Romantics re-discovered the Bible but that they re-interpreted i t along the lines of other poetic trends and tastes which arose after 1 7 6 0 , particularly the new medievalism which manifested its e lf in the revival of $ {the ballad tradition. For the Romantics, the epithalamium j {would have seemed an especially Elizabethan ly rical genre, I jand with the rising interest in Spenser one would expect as \ {well a rising interest in the poetic genres Spenser cu lti- ! jvated and excelled in. J W hat I am suggesting, then, is that the changing po- | jetic taste from rational, clear, simple, and witty genres {such as satire to sublime genres such as the ode, the epic, s I and (potentially) the epithalamium, naturally led the Rom an tic s to established earlie r forms in the English tradition. There is a clear reason for the especial appeal of the marriage hymn for the Romantics—the sensuous or t,pagan’1 quality deriving from the Song of Songs and long a part of the epithalamic tradition could serve them in their expres- :sion of revolt against the oppression of the orthodox res trictions which had characterized the eighteenth century. , 0 f this I shall have much more to say in connection with Blake in Chapter II , but it might be stated at the outset •that each of the f ir s t three great English Romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge—looked beyond the eighteenth century to the ea rlie r lite ra ry forms by which they could reply to an unsatisfactory explanation of the nature of 6 truth and man’s relationship to the universe held by the Augustan age by reasserting and redefining, at least poeti cally, qualities which they fe lt to be medieval and Eliza bethan. A s I shall propose in Chapter II, the eighteenth icentury, for a ll three poets, was the age of a great divorce I •in terms of man’s sense of his ow n integrity and place in a i jharmonious universe, an age during which man somehow lost jhis vision of an orderly world. The new Romantic philosophy land transcendental epistemology could be given expression in Ivarious poetic forms, but perhaps none seemed as obvious or i |as appealing as the epithalamium, with its traditional i jcelebration of the marriage union as a microcosmic expres sion of a vision of the whole world as man would idealize it, with a ll creatures bound together in a chain of love ibased on universal benevolence. A m ong the second generation! i of English Romantics, Shelley most apparently u tilized the marriage metaphor as a means of visualizing the apocalypse ! jof love in Prometheus Unbound. But i t is in the f ir s t three ipoets of the age that the epistemologieal revolution is at ;its height and the reaction against the rational tradition j most essential. i i Blake, in opposing a kind of paganism or sensualism '(which, as I shall clarify , is a heavily qualified sensual ism) to narrowly "religious" and "moral" restrictio n s, 'argues for a freedom or liberation from the eighteenth-cen- jtury conception of life regulated by the reason and largely 7 determined by knowledge of the senses; i t is, paradoxically, the heightened sensualism portrayed in the marriage hymn— Blake’s improvement of sensual enjoyuent, which leads to Ifreedom from the bondage of the senses. Prom th is basic jidea would develop Blake’s concept of Beulah, based also on its Biblical counterpart in Isaiah, and la te r in Jerusa- i jlem Blake’s vision of man’s apocalyptic return to his whole \ ;or unfallen state as a great marriage. i i ! For Wordsworth, too, the sensationalist doctrine that I jail knowledge derives from the concrete world and impresses jthe mind through the senses represented an attempt by the < eighteenth-century philosophers to re s tric t or narrow the potential for vision inherent in every man. A s the poet of an autobiographical epic, then, Wordsworth turns to the c ritic a l issue of the nature of perception and the mystery of the visionary moment, or spot of time. Indefinable as such moments are, Wordsworth expresses th eir effect poeti ca lly , largely througjh metaphors of mutual interchange, of jconsuming, of possessing, and, as I shall suggest, envisions man’s perfect integration within his natural environment as i a marriage which it is the poet's function to celebrate in < !a vast "spousal verse.” In Wordsworth w e see much of the magical associations of the idea of marriage of the sort ■that Prazer discusses in The Golden Bough beneath the sur face of The Prelude. The effect of, say, a poem like Hutting depends considerably upon our response to primitive associations connected with nature, such as the genius loci |concept whieh Geoffrey Hartman considers in his discussion I |of Wordsworth and which I shall regard as a modern use of i f |a fundamentally primitive idea. i The third of the f ir s t three Romantic visionaries is Iperhaps the one w ho profited most from the tradition of the | |epithalamium. For Coleridge, the specifically Christian idoctrine of the Fall of M an is the event which led to the I jnightmare of existence, out of whieh the only possible redemption is that which would restore the dream-reality of Coleridge’s garden poems, which draw heavily for their imagery and ideas upon the Canticle and the epithalamium generally, with a ll its Christian overtones. Coleridge’s i persistent hope in human life and thought is for a dynamie order or harmony of balance--precisely the state of exis tence idealized in the marriage hymn. Coleridge explicitly regards actual marriage as magically symbolic, capable of i affording the participants the highest possible joy on t earth and of thus reflecting the joy of the entire universe. For him, as for Blake and Wordsworth, the idealized state jis the same as that idealized in the epithalamium. All i jthree poets faced the same c risis in experience: the frag- t mentation of man’s state in perceptual terras by the trad i tio n of Locke and eighteenth-century philosophy. All three sought sim ilar means to establish the contrast between an ideal state in man's apocalyptic future and his present fallen state and to argue for a new world-view based in Ipart upon the world-view of the epithalamium. C H A P T E R II T H E G R E A T D IV O R C E A N D T H E F O U R F O L D VISION The decline of the epithalamium in English poetry i jfrom the second half of the seventeenth century onward | may at f ir s t seem to parallel the case of Elizabethan tragedy. With the possible uses of stock conventions vir- i tually depleted, the drama fe ll into a period of decadence jfrom which only a radical departure from earlier practices ! T jor extinction could resu lt.^ The Puritans assured the la tte r course, but the closing of the theaters obviously did not abruptly end a flourishing trad itio n . Like the drama, the epithalamium followed more or less rigid formal jre s tric t ions, so that one might well expect an eventual jexhaustion of its conventions and the consequent abandon- I merit of the genre. The comparison breaks down, however, when one considers i •the scope of the marriage hymn’s tradition. Extending over l a number of cultures— particularly the Greek and Roman, t i I j ^M . C. Bradbrook, in Themes and Conventions of Eliza bethan Tragedy, traces the stages in the development and decline of the genre; see especially her chapter on “The Decadence,” pp. 2i).0-267. I 10 11 Judaic, and Christian—the epithalamium has been adapted continually to meet diverse specific purposes, from the jcelebration of an actual marriage, as in Spenser's two marriage hymns, to the impassioned tributes to the Virgin i land the saints in Dante and other Christian medieval poets. 1 ilts folkloric origins, as I have suggested in Chapter I, I S jtestify to its importance as more than simply a formal jliterary genre. Its v ersa tility , like that of the sonnet, jis evident in its successful incorporation into the drama, notably by Shakespeare in R om eo and Ju lie t, A s You Like I t , | jand The Tempest, and into the two greatest English epic ■ 2 -poems. ^ i | I t is surprising that a form of such universal appeal should fa ll into relative neglect by the poets of the Restoration and the eighteenth century, especially in the light of their high esteem for the established genres and •their concomitant acceptance of mimetic theories of a rt. i jPurther, the almost obsessive preoccupation with social I and universal harmony that appears in the poetry of Dryden \ and Pope would seem to find a most fittin g objective correlative in the vision of cosmic order which constitutes I an essential part of the marriage hymn. Dryden in p a rti- ^Mrs. Tufte, in "High Wedlock Then B e Honored—Rhetoric and the Epithalamium," discusses the epithalamium1 s versa t i l i t y and incorporation into larger lite ra ry forms. 'cular realized the potential of the Bible for contemporary |satire and p o litic a l allegory, yet remained apparently [■unaffected by the Song of Songs, the model for so much ;medieval and Renaissance poetry. At least, he saw in the Canticle nothing relevant to his own poetic prac tices. The conclusions of any attempt to account for changes in lite ra ry taste and the resurgence of particular genres must be largely tentative. M y purpose is not so much to offer a solution to the question of why the epithalamium declined at the hands of Dryden and Pope to be revitalized at the hands of Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, as it is to outline the general situation in English thought and poetry which seems to correspond to that decline and re vitalizatio n . Underlying much of the poetry of the age of Dryden and Pope are c ritic a l dicta, and -underlying c ritic a l dicta is the new philosophy that traces its origin to Bacon. I t is to the new empirical basis of English thought in the seventeenth century and to the profound shift in the English consciousness which attended i t that I now turn. B y the beginning of the seventeenth century, a new prose style embodying the values of clarity , sim plicity, and the studious avoidance of needless embellishment, paralleled the rise of the new inductive method of science, the fount of the tradition of Bacon, Hewton, and Locke which Blake was to denounce with prophetic rage. C. S. Lewis*s assessment of Bacon at his best as primarily "an o exposer of fallacies" rather than "a discoverer of truths" points to the whole analytical trend of B ritish empiricism which would culminate in Hum e’s philosophy of negation, j Even before Locke, the skeptical trad itio n was firmly established in English thought and was certainly not un known in English poetry. In his "Treatise" entitled Of ; H um ane Learning, Fulke Greville, anticipating Dryden and jpope both in method and in ideas, scrutinized man’s fallib le jpower of "Reason" and argued for a religion based on faith.^ jDryden employed similar argumentative tactics in his re- i jfutation of the Deists in Religio Laici. In the English jphilosophical tradition its e lf, however, the analytical approach to the human mind and the process whereby it acquires knowledge was not always tempered by arguments for Christian faith . Indeed, religion is hardly the sub ject under discussion in Locke’s Essay on the H um an Under standing, in whieh Baeon's inductive method gives rise to i ja psychology based on empiricism, restricted to the belief t ;that perception is founded on sensation alone, and u tterly k [divorced from theological or metaphysical concerns. With i * I 1 3 I English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford, 195U* P* 357. | ^Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, F irst Lord Brooke, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (Edinburgh, 1938), Vol. I, pp. I5ij-l91. Locke's doctrine that the individual mind begins its exis tence as a tabula rasa and formulates ideas only through memory, which owes its ow n existence to sensation, the I 'philosophy of materialism is bom. In attempting to refute Locke' s m aterialist view by demonstrating that the mind has no perception of matter but only of sensation, Bishop Berkeley ironically re inforces the doctrine of sensationalism and unwittingly exalts memory to an even higher position. H e also pre pares the way for the next logical step in empirical argument, Hume's denial of the existence of both matter and mind. ''Mind* 1 for H u m © is merely an abstract term for the bundle of sensations which w e perceive. M e can have no assurance of the existence of either material or sp iritu al reality , since only mathematical formula® are necessarily "true." B y turning the mind in upon Its e lf, to us© a Blakean expression, and by abstracting "reason” as a separate faculty to be scrutinized and evaluated, Locke thus set in motion a process which m ay be likened to Blake's Image of the serpent devouring its e lf —the symbol of the zodiacal sun of the natural cycle of Genera tion and of the chaos that opposes the creative imaginatioi ^Northrop Frye, in Fearful Symmetry: a Study of William Blake (Princeton, 19^.7)> considers Blake's serpent imagery at som e length (pp. 1 3 6 -lij.3 ). j Along with th© chaos of sens© experience which Locke 1 s conception of the passive or receptive mind implies comes an even more direct challenge to the poet--the notion of utilitarianism . It is evident in Newton, w ho regarded poetry as "a kind of ingenious nonsens©."® It reaches a culmination of expression in Bentham, w ho would "reform’ * the English language by reducing i t , like Newton*s rainbow, to its elements of objective truth by taking away its "fictitio u s entitles.The coupling of "truth" or know ledge with usefulness is based, at least in theory, on th© empirical tradition. Certainly Locke set the example in his contemptuous dismissal of th© poetic function and the poetie mind as useless.® Thus, while the eighteenth-century view of art as i mimesis had ample precedent in the Classics and in the i Renaissance humanists, i t also drew heavily upon the new philosophy for its support and acceptance. H u m e objected' to th© us© of the supernatural in poetry on the basis that i t violates the tru th of observable nature, and "the mind Is displeased to find a picture, which bears no resemblance ^Quoted by M. H . Abrams in The M irror and th e Lamp: Romantic Theory and, th e C r it ic a l T r a d itio n (ilew Y ork, 1 9 5 3 ), 7 ‘Quoted by Abrams, p. 300. ®Abrams, p . 2 6 8 . 16 to any original.Dr. Johnson's notorious attack against Lycidas is sim ilarly grounded in the em piricist's in sis tence that there exists a tangible, “real" world of true emotion and an artificial* fancied world of sham emotion expressed in poetic "fiction."*^ H e dismisses the "long train of mythological imagery" in Milton's poem as some thing "such as a College easily supplies, n l 1 Since a ll knowledge, according to eighteenth-century empiricism, derives from the five senses and impresses its e lf upon the I receiving mind, then knowledge or truth should be funda- I mentally the same for a ll persons in the same environment. Thus the poet, in Dr, Johnson's conception of him as a jrepresentative man, must imitate general nature and ". . . exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features, as recal [sic] the original to every |mind . . . . " 1 2 ! I t is Dr. Johnson again w ho in 1769 (the same year i jthat Blake began his Poetical Sketches) reflected in | j Rasselas the impact of David Hartley's mechanistic faculty i ! I 9 j Quoted by Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 268. ! 1 0 I Samuel Johnson: Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ' ^Samuel Johnson, p. lj.51. I ^ Samuel Johnson, pp. 527-528. 17 psychology upon c ritic a l theory. 1 1 ’To indulge the power o f* fictio n , and send imagination out upon the wing, *" Imlac j explains, " ’is often the sport of those w ho delight too much in silent speculation.' ttl^ "Fancy," "fiction," "ima gination," and "luscious falsehood" constitute a dangerous prevalence of imagination or fancy--which is the worst of a ll possible "disorders of in te lle c t." "Visionary schemes," because they are im plicitly opposed to a com m on sense empi rical "reality ," must necessarily be classed as "folly. Dr. Johnson draws the battle lines between the "ordered" in tellect and the mind possessed by its own deluding fan cies, just as Dryden had earlier maintained the authority of the status quo against the inherently evil forces of dissent in Absalom and Achitophel. The mind is divided against its e lf with the rational faculty acting as a kind of monitor for the whole mechanism. In a ll fairness, i t must be remarked that Dr, Johnson criticized "the desire inherent in mathematicians to reduce every thing to mathematical images,Soame Jenyns* fa cile rationalization of the existence of evil in the world 1^Samuel Johnson, p. 596. ^ Samuel Johnson, p. 597. 15 ^Samuel Johnson, p. 198. Dr. Johnson’s emphasis upon com m on sense as a guide t© tru th of course opposes the ex treme ratiocination which so,often characterized empirical argumentation. offended a principle which both Dr. Johnson and the empiri-j | |cal tradition in general (at least theoretically) held even' j 1 more essential in the search for truth than the power of 1 reason--common sense. A s a kind of catalyst i t is the principle which runs throughout the heroic couplets of the ■ Essay on M an. reconciling, or at least balancing, th© oppo sing faculties of the mind. Yet the precarious balance of the Augustan ideal of harmony is evident in the ominous ending of The Duneiad, in which the world sinks back into the universal darkness of chaos as the light of order and reason flickers out. Ironically, it is the reason its e lf, or rather the perversion of reason, that puts out its own light in the Inverted cosmos of the poem. The consolation j ©f com m on sense as a yardstick of sanity is slight in com parison to the great negation resulting from man’s hopeless alienation from both his ’ ’ passions” and his "reason.” The fracturing of man’s integrity of mind is perhaps even clearer in the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels, where, as Kathleen Williams points out, the Deistie utopia of the Houyhnhnras is in no way an acceptable alternative to the disgusting spectacle of irrational Yahoo b e s tia lity .1^ In the context of the book, the two halves of man’s nature Jonathan Swift and the A ge of Compromise (Lawrence, K ansas, 1 9 5 8 ), especially pp. 187-193* remain separated? i t is only through inference (or perhaps ! intellectual dexterity) that © ne is able to supply a third 'philosophical alternative—as Miss Williams would have i t , reason guided by com m on sense and a realization of man’s lim itations. Yet a rtistic a lly , one may counter, Gulliver1s travels, like The Dunoiad, ends in a vacuum which no amount of c ritic a l and scholarly diligence can f i l l . The two works are indicative of the c risis into which the B ritish (not to mention Continental) philosophical tradition had least the English mind. But empiricism was not the only force of division at work. By the time Dryden wrote The Bind and the Panther the sectarian controversies which had been raging throughout England seemed t© have reached a new intensity of divisive ness, with new sects rapidly emerging to fragment any unity of religious fa ith which yet remained in England. Assaulted by the chaos of religious differences and disputes, Dryden ultim ately assumed the position of the skeptic and embraced the traditional surety of R om an Catholicism. Similarly, and consistently, Dryden*s apology for royalism in Absalom and Achitophel not only followed a long period of p o litical in stab ility but was published in part to counteract the outbreak of new social turmoil,The Restoration and -^Bernard N . Schilling, in Dryden and the Conservative Myth: a Reading of Absalom and Achitopliel (N ew Haven. IQ Alt j considers this situation at som e, ,lengtJa_(p*p.,__1 9 -9 5 ). jAugustan tributes to peace and unity exist not as reflec- jtions of re a lity but rather as hopeful statements fo r the ; jre-establishment of a world already shattered, burst, like s jthe bubble-world of The Rape of the hock, by the impact of !the new philosophy and science, and by religious and p o litic cal fragmentation. The English eighteenth century may be seen, then, as the period of a great divorce in many respects. W hy the poets did not exploit the metaphor of a symbolic marriage to a much greater extent in th eir efforts to envision a universal harmony is a d iffic u lt question to answer. Dry den read Spenser, but' seems to have taken from him the idea of a m ulti-levelled p o litic a l and religious allegory, not the mythopoetic vision of the Bpithalamion and the Protha- lamion.^ -® H e certainly read the Song of Solomon, but he re s tric ts his comments on married love in Absalom and Ach.1- tophel to a flippant dismissal of David/Charles *s notorious promiscuity. The opening lines are indeed characteristic of the Restoration’s lite ra ry attitudes toward marriage: In pious times, ere p riestcraft did begin, Before polygamy was made a sinj 18 Dryden alludes to Spenser’s Mother Hubbard’s Tale in The Hind and the Panther, 1 . 1302. All citations from the works of Dryden in m y text are to Selected W orks of John Dryden. ed. William Frost (H ew York, 1953). j W hen man © n many multiplied his kind, Ere © ne to one was cursedly confin’d; W hen nature prompted, and no law denied i Promiscuous use of concubine and bride; l Then Isra e l's monarch after Heaven's ow n heart, His vigorous warmth did variously impart To wives and slaves; and, wide as his command, Scatter'd his Maker's image thro* the land. (Absalom and Achitophel, 11. 1-10) Of course, one must bear in mind that the leading Restoration and Augustan poets were primarily s a tiris ts . In the lines quoted above, Dryden's flippancy is rhetorical; he seeks to gloss over Charles's outrageous promiscuity through deft irony and the humor of the heroic couplet. Significantly, however, i t remains true that there was no thriving tradition of love poetry during the Restoration and eighteenth century as there had been during the years between Wyatt and Donne. And, although the epithalaraium certainly had not passed into disuse, neither was i t a widely cultivated genre. The s ty lis tic innovations and practices most typical of the poetry of Dryden and P op© are perhaps themselves unsuitable to love poetry. W . K . Wimsatt has noted even of Pope's experiments in “the pathe tic mode" that Bloisa to Abelard is characteristic of its author's style in "the casuistries of its rationale," and that in the Elegy to an Unfortunate Lady "the sharp face of the s a tiris t is d istin ctly visible.*11^ ! I l O ne might add that the heroic couplet acts as a con- j tro llin g device, constantly preventing the expression of :passion from overflowing the bounds of rational re stra in t. But even in Bryden’s blank verse, the notion of rational control over the fancy, along with the new prosaic diction jWhich placed no value upon the rich evocative imagery of the Song of Songs, necessitated a kind of tragic drama very different from the Elizabethan. In Bryden's All for Love, for example, any grandeur that Antony may be assumed to have once had is u tte rly dissipated; he is nothing more than a fool w ho has abandoned his rational constraints, just as Cleopatra is nothing more than a strumpet w ho deceives and enchants no one but Antony, w ho is a man without judgment. * Where Shakespeare maintained maintained an ambivalent ten sion in both characters, Bryden reduces them to c la ritie s . Moreover, the idea of marriage in the la te r play has nothing to do with the establishment of order or peace. In Antony and Cleopatra a marriage in death, a harmony in the eternal union of the lovers transcending earthly existence, sets the tone of Cleopatra’s la s t scene: ■^Introduction to Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry & Prose, ed. W . K , W imsattTj J r. (N ew York, 1 9 5 1 ), p . x xxv. Give m e m y robe, put on m y crown, I have Immortal longings in me. low no more The juice © f Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip . Tare, yare, good Iras; quick: m e thinks I hear Antony c a ll. I see him rouse himself To praise m y noble act. I hear him mock The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men To excuse th eir after wrath. Husband, I come: low to that name, m y courage prove m y t it l e I I am fire , and air; m y other elements I give to baser life,H i Shakespeare, i t need hardly be added, did not concern him self over keeping the "master passion0 under restrain t in his presentation of Cleopatra* If reason was regarded by the poets of the Enlighten ment as fa llib le and imperfect, i t was at least considered inherently more noble and trustworthy than the passions, iwith which i t remained hopelessly at odds. The empiricists insisted upon the division of the human mind into compart ments and assumed the mutual exclusiveness of the perceiving (or rather reacting) mind and the material objects of its perception. The tendency of the em piricists to divorce G od from the world was supported by the rise of English Deism, which took in fin itely more interest In the divine clock than in the clockmaker. Religious and p o litica l turmoil further divided man from himself in endless quibbling, and the tra ditional dualisms of body and mind, soul and foody, matter ^ Antony and Cleopatra, V, i i , 279-288, in The Arden Shakespeare (Cambridge, 19524.). and sp irit which seemed inherent in Christianity continued j ! ito " b e assumed. At the same time, the infernal duo © f ! |reason and com m on sense (at odds with each other at times) posed a particular threat to the poetic imagination. B y the time Blake conceived of writing a H Bible of H ell,” the great divorce of his age must have seemed to him t© have I already approached a consolidation of error, a general and thoroughgoing collapse in which a ll p artial truths and specious arguments revealed themselves to be falsehoods. The time was right for another Isaiah. A s early as 1769, Blake began to make it clear that he did not read the same Bible that Kryden read. Margaret B. Lowery has suggested that Blake’s "most interesting and surely . . . most significant reminiscence of Spenser” is found in the poem To Morning in the Poetical Sketches, in which the young poet confronts marriage as ”© ne of the age-old problems of existence.” The impact of "the jubilant music, the joyousness of s p irit, and the exuberance © f personal emotion” of the Epithalamion and Prothalamion on his developing consciousness as a poet must have been deci- pi sive. x Certainly the influence of Spenser was strong at this time; the Sketches as a whole have even been called ^•W indows of the Morning; A C ritical Study of William Blake’s Poetical Sketches, 1783. Yale Studies in English XCIII (N ew Haven, 191^.0), p. 98. 25 "songs in the Elizabethan manner. " 2 2 Yet there is a caram on influence on both Spenser and Blake—the Song of Solomon jand the Psalms. Harold Bloom notes the sim ilarity between i „ [Blake's image of the morning sun "Rouz'd like a huntsman to {the ehace [sic]” in To Morning and the description of the i sirn "as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber” w ho "re- joiceth as a strong man to run a race" in the nineteenth Psalm .^ A nd in To Spring. Bloom remarks, "the tone of the Song of Songs is heard.Il2 ^ The land in Blake's poem, like the bride of the Canticle, is love-sick and mourns for the ! i return of her absent lover. But the poem is no more about the subject of marriage than is the song T o Morning. Blake read the Bible allegori- cally--more exactly, anagogically--and he must have been aware of the trad itio n al allegorical readings of the Song of Songs. In his own marriage imagery in the two Sketches, he exploits the metaphorical meaning of marriage. Behind him and around him in the cultural tradition are evidences Lf the great divorce. Like the bride of Solomon, England has been mourning for her absent bridegroom, or, in poetic i {terms, Albion, now fallen , has been suffering from the ! t ! 22 Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company; A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Garden City. N ew York. 1961)7 t>. 13. t 2 3Bloom, p. 12. j 2 i^Bloom, p. 11. I absence of his soul. With the Poetical Sketches, he begins i to rise from the m ill of oppression b u ilt by Bacon, Newton, I and Locke and fed by his ow n w ilful restra in t of energy, j I The greatest single influence on B lais’s engraved canon is unquestionably the Bible, which he regarded as “the Great Code of A rt.1 * 2^ But Blake’s Bible is much less the h isto rical account of a race than i t is the prophetic ivision of the imaginative life ; much less the history of the secular Jerusalem than the apocalyptic vision of the p/ new sp iritu al Jerusalem. ° In the Poetical Sketches Blake establishes himself as a visionary whose poetic output would be, in Bloom's phrase, tta commentary upon Scripture„*,27 His assertion of the primacy of Imaginative vision gathers much of its force from his renewal of the neglected epitha lamic tradition. Consequently, symbolic marriage came to occupy a central position in his poetry, especially In rela tion to his solution to man’s f a ll or fragmented condition— the fourfold vision of complete imaginative unity. The unity of Blake’s canon accepted by most Blakeans is much like the Bible’s unity. The symbol of the N ew 2^Quoted by Northrop Frye in Fearful Symmetry, p. 1^5. 26Frye makes this distinction between the historical and imaginative readings of the Bible, Fearful Svmmetrv. p. 1 0 8 f f , a 2?The Visionary Company, p. 12l|.. Jerusalem, adopted by Blake, recurs throughout the Old and N ew Testaments, culminating in the climactic vision of the City of Cod in Revelation. In the Song of Songs, Blake’s [probable starting point in Poetical Sketches, Solomon’s ! i bride is likened in her beauty to Tirzah and to Jerusalem, iwith the "daughters of Jerusalem" meanwhile forming a kind of choric background to the mutual protestations of the jlovers. All three figures--Tirzah, Jerusalem, and the daughters of Jerusalem--become essential figures in Blake’s prophecies, reaching a high point in Jerusalem, which I shall consider in some detail la te r in th is chapter. Despite his reading of the Bible "in its infernal or i . . ! diabolical sense," Blake obviously knew the orthodox asso ciations of marriage in the Song of Songs. In the song in the Sketches which opens "Love and harmony combine," he expands the comparison of the bride to a garden in the Can tic le to a representation of the lovers as two trees whose branches Intermingle and whose "roots together join.®28 The figure of the two trees with interwoven branches is a com m on one in the epithalamium’s conventions through the eighteenth century, so that Blake’s renewed use of it once again emphasizes his awareness and use of the poetic tradiw 28 The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes "(London, 1966), p. 7 . All citations from Blake in m y text are to this edition and refer to page numbers, since Blake’s line numbers are not standardized. tions preceding him* The perfumed a ir and the dove«s music jonce more echo the identical images of renewed lif e and j j ! beauty in the Biblical song* In To Autumn and in the Song, ! . i :"H ow sweet I roam'd from field to fie ld ,1 1 both of which are immersed in the sensual imagery © f th e ir prototype, the garden motif its e lf becomes an essential figure. I t Is primarily the sensual Innocence of the Canticle, reinforced by the pictures of unfallen Eden In Genesis and Paradise Lost, which underlies the state of being that Blake calls ! "Beulah," the word for ''married" in the book of Isaiah. iBlake's proposal that the state of Beulah makes possible the further cleansing of the doors of perception and shows I the way to Eden through "an improvement of sensual enjoy ment" certainly owes more to the C anticle's magnificent elevation of sensuality than to the view of innocence pre sented either in Genesis or In Milton. The concept of Beulah encompasses both the fact of lite ra l married love—especially as i t aids the poet or imaginative man in his attempt to realize the ultimate joy of a rtis tic creation—and the metaphor of the threefold vision, the state of mind in which, through an improvement of sensual enjoyment, man rises from the tyranny of the senses. For the term "Beulah" applies properly only to an idealized married love relationship by which the mind or soul, through the conscious and perceptual act of love, frees itse lf from the empirical world of Generation or natural cycle and denies the passive role in cognition which the j (tradition of Locke had assigned i t . Bloom is surely mis- j 'taken in regarding the tipper lim it of Beulah as equivanent I I to Spenser*s Garden of Adonis.^ The la tte r symbolizes I creation, but creation in the sense of Ovidian fecundity i rather than the product of the sensual joy of the Song of Songs which leads the individual to increased perceptual awareness. The reproductive cycle of Generation does not I constitute marriage. Moreover, the enslavement to the five senses to which the sexual bond can lead means the f a ll from Generation to tflro, which is Blake's h e ll. Blake dramatizes this descent in The Crystal Cabinet, showing the perversion of the state of Beulah through the speaker’s victimization by a fem m e fatale elsewhere identi fied as Tirzah. A s Hazard A dam s persuasively argues, a ll of Blake's speakers are forms of Albion himself, so that the poem may be read as a version of his f a ll in m iniature.3° The threefold vision of Beulah is essential to the man w ho would rise to the fu lly human and Christian vision of Eden. A dam s assumes, however, that the poem is s tric tly about the state of Beulah, specifically the seductive dangers of ^% ?he Visionary Company, p. 20. 3°William Blake; a Reading of the Shorter Poems (Seattle, 1963), p. 121. the married state which lead one to abstract his threefold jvision from himself and to allow himself to be encompassed | i ,by the female w ill rather than encompass i t . A dam s ex plains the poem’s predominating note of treachery by seeing Beulah as part of the fallen world,let the problem may > also be approached in terms of the four states of being. The description of Beulah in The Four Zoas assumes the context of a fallen world: There is from Great Eternity a mild & pleasant rest N am ’d Beulah, a soft M oony Universe, feminine, lovely, Pure, mild & Gentle, given in Mercy to those w ho sleep, Eternally created by the L am b of G od around, O n a ll sides, within & without the Universal M an, (Zoas, p. 266) In Eternity, man’s unfallen state, there is simply Eden, which encompasses and contains the other three states, be cause In Eternity there is no division. Beulah is given M t© those w ho sleep**—that is, to fallen man—in an act of mercy, just as C hrist’s assurance of redemption is given to A dam in Paradise Lost. The chief characteristic of Beulah is mercy or selfless giving, its main purpose being the intimation of apocalyptic return to eternal unity or re demption. It is , as Robert P. Gleckner has pointed out, ’ ’the realm of the highest union on earth, the union which 31 William Blake: a Reading of the Shorter Poems, P• 123• |approaches in a ll respects a fin al re-integration with 'eternity and the human form divine.”32 Blake surely plays i upon the dual sense of the word ”consummation,” implying the triumph of the apocalyptic fire s of Bden which consume the vegetative and corporeal existence of the world of Gen eration. A s he la te r reveals in Jerusalem, marriage and apocalypse are one. Beulah, then, is an approximation of the divine vision of Eden, s t i l l a part of the fallen world, since man in Eden is man resurrected, restored to his unfallen integrity. Pounded upon love and existing for the purpose of giving joy, Beulah is the state described by the ’ ’l i t t l e Clod of Clay0 in The Clod & the Pebble: ’ ’Love seeketh not Its e lf to please, ”Hor for its e lf hath any care, ’ ’But for another gives its ease, ’ ’A nd builds a Heaven in Hell * s despair.” (p* 2 1 1 ) The opposing view presented by the Pebble, then, is essen tia lly the perversion of Beulah in the world of experience, or the descent from ideal married love to the bondage of Generation—the fearful Circle of Destiny outlined in The Mental Traveller. The Pebble argues that 3% > he Piper and the Bard: a Study of William Blake {Detroit, 1959), pp. 50-51. "Love seeketh only Self to please, "To bind another to Its delight, "Joys in another*s loss of ease, "And builds a Hell in Heaven*s despite.'1 1 <p. 211) I t is the same view of love debased which torments the "Divine Voice" heard in the Songs of Beulah in Milton; "W hen I f ir s t Married you, I gave you a ll m y whole Soul. 1 1 1 thought that you would love m y loves & joy in m y delights, "Seeking for pleasures in m y pleasures, 0 Daughter of Babylon. "Then thou wast lovely, mild & gentle j now thou art terrib le "In jealousy & unlovely in m y sight . . . (Milton. II, p. 522) The "Daughter of Babylon" Is the separate female will w hom Blake addresses In the song To Tirzah as "Mother of m y Mortal p art," w ho With cruelty didst mould m y Heart, A nd with false self-decieving sic tears Didst bind m y N ostrils, Eyes, & Bars; Didst close m y Tongue In senseless clay, A nd m e t© Mortal Life betray. (p. 220) The same Tirzah is the beautiful w om an to w hom the bride of the Canticle is compared, one of the five "daughters of Zelopehad" w ho seek a separate female inheritance elsewhere in the Old Testament, and also the Isra elite city which stood in opposition to Jerusalem. The five daughters with Tirzah at th e ir head, Frye proposes, represent for Blake ; ttt h e f i v e s e n s e s a n d im p ly t h e p a s s iv e d e p e n d e n c e o n s e n s e 'experience which is symbolized in our being born from a The Maiden in The Crystal Cabinet, then, is a dweller in Generation, a part of the rational twofold vision whose i ' high p riests are Bacon, Hewton, and Locke: there is cer tainly an intended touch of irony in the third and fourth lin es—"She put m e into her Cabinet/ and Lock1 d m e up with ,a golden Key.” The cabinet, bounded on a ll sides, is the world of Urizen’s Corporeal Understanding, of which Locke with his golden key to knowledge is one of the foremost exponents. Gold, of course, is the color Blake associates with the fallen rational faculty, whose M keyB can only j close, not open, the doors of perception. A s Tirzah, the Malden also suggests the even more sin iste r onefold vision of the five senses alone, to which Generation easily sinks. Judging from the various c ritic a l accounts which have been given of Beulah, one must agree with Bloom that i t constitutes Blake *s most ambiguous state.3i|- Bloom himself follows Frye in stressing the precariousness of Beulah, its nearness to the ignorance and terror of the world of Genera tion just below lt.35> Bloom regards i t as identical to -^Fearful Symmetry, p. 127. 3^-T he Visionary Company, p. 16. 3^The Visionary Company, p. 16. mother. **33 Blake1 s state of '’innocence,'' so that the Songs of Inno- i 1 cence, The Crystal Cabinet, The Book of Thel, Visions of i the Daughters of Albion, and most of Milton are a ll to be ^ Iread as "Beulah poems,"36 Gleckner, on the other hand, distinguishes the simple "innocence" of the child1s percep tion (which may indeed include ignorance) from a higher or , "organized" innocence attainable only by passing through the state of Generation ©r experience and thereby acquiring wisdom. The la tte r type of innocence is Beulah, the state ! in which male and female contraries join together in a harmonious union, ^be dialectical pattern which G-leckner sees in Blakefs e a rlie r poetry seems at f ir s t to deny the relevance of Blake’s doctrine of the fourfold vision and j certainly to refute Frye*s contention that the number three , and its multiples unequivocally stand for evil or e rro r,^7 Even with the fourfold vision in mind, nevertheless, i t is entirely possible to present a convincing case for three essential states throughout Blake’s poetry, with Ulro ^^The Visionary Company, p, 16. 37Tha Piper and the Bard, pp. I 4. 5 -I1J . Frye, in stre s sing the symbolic value of the number three and its m ulti ples in representing perceptual error or delusion, goes so far as to suggest that the unpurified "virgin" Ololon in Milton is an unfit bride for the poet because her age is twelve, a multiple of three. W e can only wonder if her age instantly jumps from twelve to sixteen when she becomes Milton’s true bride but, in Byron’s phrase, one cannot help but think that "puberty assisted" in her transformation. r ' " " ’ " ~ " ~ ~ ’ ' ~ ~ " " 35; las the vacuum created by the f a ll of Urizen, Generation as | the physical world created by Los in order to set lim its to! i : | the f a ll, and both Beulah and Eden as together constituting! paradise as i t exists potentially for the fallen and u n fa l-1 len worlds respectively. Bloom1s notion of Beulah as “the j emanation of Bden—that is, its outer and feminine form,** is akin to the conception of Beulah as a lower form or \ extension of Eden, given in mercy to those lo st and asleep ! in Biro and Generation to enable them to rise through the senses (but not from them) to the Gates of Paradise, where the flowers of Beulah imperceptibly become the flames of Eden* 3 ® The “conYusion” of Beulah and Eden is deliberate, for reasons which w ill become clearer in the la te r prophetic books, especially Jerusalem, in which a grand epithalamium celebrates the concord of the redintegrated man which is Eden. Of Blake's gradually expanding realization of the poetic p o ssib ilities in his concept of M emanation” and ”spectre” I shall have more to say presently. For the m o ment, however, I should like to return to the lesson of The Crystal Cabinet. The world or perceptual state embodied in that poem is characterized above a ll by deception and betrayal. Since for Blake a ll truth is the individual truth of the O A ^ Bloom discusses th is flower symbolism on page 22 of The Visionary Company, summarizing M . 0. Percival's exten sive treatment ©f the subject in William Blake's Circle of Destiny (H ew York, 1938). ! ------------- perceiving mind, point of view is crucial. The speaker in j th is case exists in and perceives Generation, always a j Receiving state, and believes he sees Bemlah--tta l i t t l e i lovely M oony Hight* (p. ij.29). But the overriding irony of the poem is that he fa ils to recognize the significance of his entrapment by his own Corporeal Understanding, Tirzah*s trap, and allows himself to be deceived into mistaking mere natural cycle and the Urizenic understanding for the vision of a threefold paradise. The Crystal Cabinet is not about the dangers or precarious balance of Beulah as an objective state in Blake*s cosmology or psychology, for there are no purely objective states. I t is rather about the mind‘s ow n self-deception in accepting the slavery of the five senses and the eorporeal world as the only truth. The shattering of the cabinet is inevitable, not because the speaker seeks an impossibly complete vision in Beulah instead of Eden, but because the Corporeal Understanding is incapable of vision, only of self-deception. Like the other states of consciousness, Beulah has no meaning except insofar as i t applies to the re a lity of the individual mind. A nd i t Is to the mind whose perceptive powers have been distorted by the usurping rational compo nent that re a lity must appear distorted, Generation mis taken for Beulah, just as Hell is mistaken for Heaven and Heaven for Hell by the orthodox angels of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The f a ll of the reason, then, becomes Blake1 s fundamental concern in the so-called "minor pro- | phecies,” a ll of which deal in some way with the philosophy! j i of the five senses and the corresponding epistemological j idivorce which Blake resolved poetically through metaphors of marriage. A s a denial of the dualisms and negations of orthodox C hristianity which spring ultim ately from the m aterialist tyranny of Urizen, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell serves as a preludium to the drama of the f a ll of reason from Eternity. Its effect depends heavily upon the ironies of the contrasting pairs of ideas with which i t deals, and perhaps nowhere else does Blake show himself more a master of the sa tiric mode. B e rejects, through “the voice of the ©evil," both the m aterialist proposition that a ll truth is knowledge acquired through the senses and the orthodox Christian doctrine that man’s constitution is divided be tween the body and the soul. Both views are Urizenic delusions formulated by the Corporeal Understanding and propagated by the misreading of Bibles and sacred codes. To the visionary who recognizes the oneness of a ll truth and the sp iritu al source of the material world, “M an has no Body d istin ct from his Soul; for that c a ll’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in th is age® (Marriage, p. 2l{.9)* “Energy,® Blake’s Devil continues, ”is the only lif e , and is from the Body; and Beason Is the bound or outward circumference of j Energy (p. 149). But the energy which is ’ ’ Eternal Delight” ; i | {p. 149) is called corporeal and evil by the orthodox, ! i ' !Including Swedenborg, w ho has become an “angel,” or apolo- ■ g ist for hypocritical state religions in which “the sneak ing serpent walks/ In mild humility" (p. 149). For Blake, the orthodox distinction between Heaven and Hell, vividly contrasted in Paradise host, is delusory, because the imagi nation knows that "Heaven" is really Ulro, the state of 1 absolute inactivity and negation, like the bottom of Dante's ilnferno, and that "Hell" is really Eden, the supreme eleva tion of creative energy which is manifested also in Beulah. In calling Satan the hero of Paradise Lost, Blake must have seen his f a ll from Eternity as analogous to the f a ll of Albion; but he was to remain orthodox enough to embody in Satan the fallen Selfhood or Spectre of “the cavem'd M an" (Europe, p. 237) that continually opposes Albion's marriage in Eternity. The Marriage, then, is important as a denial of the necessity © f man's fallen or fragmented condition and as a positive assertion of the p o ssib ility of his re-integration through the marriage ©r acceptance of the “Contraries" of “Attraction and Repulsion,Season and Energy, Love and Hate" (Marriage, p. 149). A s Blake makes clear In the prophecies to follow, Urizen is reprehensible only because he divorces himself from Eternity, not because he represents the reason. H e becotnes a tyrant only when he fa lls to the perceptual level of Generation and manifests himself in the Natural Religion and Morality personified by Blake as the false female, Tirzah, Rahab, or Vala. The connection between the i i Urizenie tyranny of sensationalism, the female w ill, and the worship of a nature-goddess runs throughout Blake*s poetry and is often called Bruldism, since the worship of the generative world implies the loss of Eden and hence the sacrifice of imaginative lif e . The Deists, believing the ,physical world to be the only real one that man on earth is ] capable of knowing, were for Blake the Druids of the eight eenth century.-^ B y the time he wrote Jerusalem he was to characterize the nature-goddess as a false bride, evil because she represents a consolidation of error, contending for Albion’s soul. Her contrary, the true bride of Albion, ! would be Jerusalem, who stands for Christ as Vala stands for Satan/Urizen. Long before Blake’s fu ll development of the character of Jerusalem, however, he pictured an alternative to the female w ill whieh serves the Urizenie tyranny. Oothoon, the heroine of Visions of the Daughters of Albion, refutes the gospel of re stric tio n made up of Reason, Selfhood, and Morality— what Blake derides as ,lReligion.,, In the very openness of her love for Theotormon, she denies the world 39pearful Symmetry, p. 5^. j of Generation and accepts the higher innocence of Beulah, i She plucks the flower of Beulah as an expectant "bride, but ] before the consummation of her marriage with Theotormon she! ! is raped and then called harlot by Urizen in the person of Bromion (Visions, p. 190). In his m oralistic reaction against her, Theotormon reveals himself to be a slave of | Urizen, sending his eagles to rend her flesh while he “ severely smiles*1 on the scene and yet weeps at Oothoon’s unjust punishment. Theotormon has been victimized by the false moral law of Bromion*s cave and, as Frye points out, the cave has been a symbol of selfhood since Plato.As the accuser, Bromion is also Satan (Urizen*s Identity within the Christian context), whose purpose i t is to keep man in his fallen sta te . Theotormon is tormented by God, but his G od is of his own making, Enslaving himself in Generation, he is unable to reach Beulah, lik e the speaker in one of Blake’s note book poems w ho complains: M y Spectre around m e night & day Like a Wild beast guards m y .way. M y Emanation far within Weeps incessantly for m y Sin. (p. 415) Theotormon is a version of Albion or universal humanity, Fearful Symmetry, p. 2 4 1 . ^Bromion a fona of Satan/TJrizen, the tyrant G od of his own perceptual creation and the selfhood that Blake calls ! | "Spectre," Qothoon, like Jerusalem, is the Bride of Christ in the analogical interpretation of the Song of Songs, the "Emanation,” divorced from man in Generation, of the Christ within him. She is , to use Frye*s remark on Blake1 s emana tions generally, "the aggregate of a ll that a poet loves visualized as a bride , . . .*1 ^1 Like the true Christ in The Marriage of Heaven and H ell, she acts "from impulse, not from rules” (Marriage, p. 158). A s his emanation, she reflects ” fThe image of Theotormon1 " (Visions, p, 190), that is , the image of the H um an Form Divine in Theotormon which has been stifle d by the perversions of moral law and religious hypocrisy. She laments for her "absent” lover like the bride of the Song of Solomon, while the Daughters of Albion, like the daughters of Jerusalem in the Biblical song, form a chorus to her lament, Blake parodies the gentle sleep of the bridegroom in the house of the brid e1 s mother, from which the bride cautions the daughters of Jerusalem not to waken him "Until he please” (ch. 8:4). Theotormon, ironically, sleeps not in Beulah but in Genera tio n . In marked contrast to the bridegroom sun of the nineteenth Psalm, he Is likened to n,The sun that sleeps ^ F e arfu l Symmetry, p, 352. too long . . . * tt (Visions, p. 191). Oothoon is unable to ! iwaken him from Newton*s sleep as she cries out: S i “ . . . Arise, m y Theotormon, I am pure, “Because the night is gone that clos*d m e in its deadly black, H They told m e th at the night & day were a ll that I could see; “They told m e that I had five senses to inclose m e up . . . (Visions, p, 191) i She recognizes and avoids his error but, like Albion in Jerusalem, Theotormon refuses to enter Beulah through a union with Oothoon, his emanation, and the consequent denial of Urizen1 s moral law. In epitomizing the values of Beulah—especially those of Christian forgiveness and universal love, Oothoon is an early version of Jerusalem, just as Thel is an early ver sion of Vala, the mistress of Satan, Oothoon, called “h arlo t” by Bromion, has the virginal purity of a dweller in the higher innocence of Beulah; Thel, repeatedly ealled “v irg in ,” is close to Blake*s notion of ihe W hore of Baby lon as the restric tiv e and Druidical female w ill. Bloom suggests that The Book of Thel begins in a garden of Beulah, which he equates with the state of innocence in the early set of songs But Blake makes i t clear that the poem is, as Gleckner argues, neither a song of innocence nor a song ^2The Visionary Company, p, 45* of Beulah.. In Gleckner’s reading of Blake’s earlier poetry j as d ialectical, Thel is guilty of turning her back upon | experience and thus losing the chance to pass through i t land on into higher innocence. Instead, she remains in the unsatisfactory limbo of childish innocence which she has outworn, accepting “the shadows of eternal delight in a mundane ’paradise. ’ ! In terms of the fourfold vision, however, Blake gives clear indications that Thel inhabits neither Beulah nor the innocence of the ch ild ’s perception. A s Karl U ra lis reminds us, one must consider the state in which a Blakean figure exists as the context in which to evaluate his or her statem ents.^- The world Thel inhabits Is a “paradise” only from her lim ited point of view, which Blake is careful to distinguish from his own vision from the a r t i s t ’s Eden. The “river of Adona” (Thel, p. 127) and the images of natural renewal and dissipation identify the world Thel v isits as Generation—Spenser’s Garden of Adonis. Ironi cally, Thel herself, though she may not think of herself as accepting at a ll, is its prime exemplar in the poem. ' Her name in Greek means ”wish“ or “w ill,” and her motto points ^ The Piper and the Bard, p . 163 * )l | i A Guide to the Intellectual Symbolism of William Blake’s Later Prophetic W ritings,” Criticism, I (Summer 1959), 193. . , M r to her service to the Urizenie world of sensation and ! ra tio n a listic tyranny. The "golden howl*1 stands for the frozen virginity that Blake calls "pale religious le t- chery" (America, p. 199); the "silver rod*1 is the tra d i tional symbol of earthly power and ru le .^ 5 The questions "Can W isdom be put in a silver rod?/ Or Love in a golden bowl?" are Ironic, since Thel1 s actions a ll show her to be I .bound to the mind-forged manacles of the restrictiv e se lf hood which prohibit the entry into Beulah. Thel's failure of perception results because she sees with the eye, not imaginatively through i t . Thus she fa ils to see through the opaque natural world of Generation to Beulah, the world of self-sacrificing love represented by the Cloud w ho describes to her the passage from mutable nature to Beulah in appropriate m arital terms. W hen he passes out of m ateriality, he te lls her, i t w ill be " . . . to tenfold lif e , to love, to peace and raptures holy: “Unseen descending, weigh m y light wings upon balmy flowers, “A nd court the fair-eyed dew to take m e to her shining te n t: "The weeping virgin, trembling kneels before the risen sun, ^ Bloom identifies the golden bowl with virginity (The Visionary Company, p. 1|.5); Frye connects i t with the female w ill (Fearful Symmetry, p. 303)* Gleckner discusses the trad itio n al associations of the silver rod with earthly power (The Piper and the Bard, pp, 166-167). KS\ I ! “T ill w e arise lin k ’d in a golden band I and never p art, | ( “But walk united, bearing rood to a ll 1 i our tender flowers.® (Thel, p. 1 2 8 ) I (W hat Thel fa ils to comprehend is the lesson of the Clod of Clay that nw e live not fo r ourselves® (Thel, p. 129), and she thus cannot see the difference between love in Genera tion and love in Beulah which Blake draws in a note-book poem called Several Questions Answered: Be w ho binds to himself a joy Doth the winged life destroy; But he w ho kisses the joy as i t f lie s Lives in E ternity’s sun rise . ( p . 181*.) The sexual cycle of Generation is the earthly bondage of Tirzah or Vala; the self-effacing and freeing love of Beulah is the freedom of Jerusalem, the entry into Eternity. Thel’s “white veil® (Thel, p. 130) is the veil (or ® Vala® ) of self-imposed selfhood or virginity and thus of the mundane shell that hides Eternity from her. A s the poem ends, she flees from the threshold of possible consummation, potentially a bride to a ll appearances, but necessarily a false bride, since the female w ill can never enter Beulah* In The Book of Urizen Blake is explicit in linking the creation of the female w ill (here called “Enitharmon®) with the separation of the rational faculty from Eternity and the consequent f a ll to corporeality. A s “the Eternal W Prophet” (TJrizen. p. 230), Los represents Albion in E ter n ity , but lie is called Los only in the fallen world of : | | ; Generation, the world of the separate sexes; before the I division of the f a ll, he is TJrthona and dwells in Eden. His own ’ ’ marriage” to his ’ ’divided image” (Uri2 en, p. 232), then, can mean only his bondage to the Circle of Destiny and therefore a parody of the true Beulah state which reflects Eden. In Blake’s more lengthy presentation of 'the marriage feast of Los and Enitharmon in the F irst Sight of The Four Zoas, Generation is clearly a parody of Beulah* | The marriage assembly is trad itio n al in the conventions of the epithalamium: The Nuptial Song arose from a ll the thousand thousand sp irits Over the joyful Earth & Sea & ascended into the Heavens; For Elemental Gods th eir thunderous Organs blew, creating Delicious ¥lands. Dem ons of W aves th eir wat’ry Echoes woke. Bright Souls of vegetative life budding and blossoming Stretch th eir immortal hands to smite the gold & silver Wires, A nd with immortal Voice soft warbling, f i l l a ll Earth & Heaven. With doubling voices, & loud Horns wound round, sounding, Cavernous dwellers f i l l ’d the enormous Revelry, Responding, A nd S pirits of Flaming fire on high govern’d the mighty Song. (Zoas, p. 2 7 1 ;.) The word 1 1 joy” is the keynote of Spenser's Epithalamion, a poetic vision of Beni ah in which marriage is properly asso- I elated with abundance and fru itfu ln ess. The bridegroom calls for wine to be poured out “without restrain t or stay ]1 "not by cups, but by the belly f u l l . " ^ The "Delicious Viands" of Los's wedding are ironic, the bridal flowers cruelly delusive in the world of "vegetative life* " The bride and bridegroom s it not in rapturous anticipation but "in discontent & scorn" (Zoas, p* 2 7 k )* marriage hymn its e lf is a song of TJrizen, celebrating the Bruidical "harvest" of "the blood of M en" (Zoas, p. 275); i t en visions desolation and s te rility , a time when "M an shall be no more'." (Zoas, p. 275) rather than the abundance and harvest of the true marriage hymn. The parodie marriage in The Four Zoas resu lts, of course, because of TJrizen's attempts to build a new world composed of fin ite m atter. Blake's basic parody of the book of Genesis in Urizen is reinforced by his parody of the book of Isaiah, in which marriage metaphors figure prominently and which, as a prophetic book, was of especial interest to Blake. The self-destruction of TJrizen's world ^ Epithalamion, 11. 250-251. All citations from Spenser in m y text are to The Works of Edmund Spenser, a Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw and others (Baltimore, 1932-1957). I ............." ' “ 46] |Is b itte rly ironic in the lig h t of God's words in Isaiah ! 'describing the H ew Jerusalem of the apocalypse: l i For, behold, I create new heavens 1 A nd a new earth: A nd the former shall not be remembered, Nor com e Into mind. But be ye glad and rejoice for ever In that which I create: For, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, A nd her people a joy, <65: 17-19) There Is no rejoicing over Urizen's creation, which is negation, Isaiah's mention of “an infant of days® (65: 20) recalls Blake's depiction of TJrizen as the “Ancient of Bays,” A nd i t is Isaiah 's conception of Beulah that Blake tre a ts ironically in The Four Zoas. To a poet constantly aware of the gap between fallen and unfallen man, Genera tio n and E ternity, the parodie a rt Is an essential means of contrast, TJrizen's perversion of creation is repeated in the b irth of Ore as a parody of the b irth of Christ: A shriek ran thro' Eternity, A nd a paralytic stroke, At the b irth of the H um an shadow. (TJrizen, p. 232) In The Book of Ahania Blake turns from the effects of TJrizen's f a ll to the suggestion of his possible redemption, and he does so largely through a further development of the parodie a rt. For the f ir s t time in the prophecies Blake considers marriage as a symbolic representation„of . Eden_ _ j its e lf, the state of ultimate joy. The connection between i marriage and Eden may well have prompted him to abandon the cosmological scheme of the Pour Zoas when he turned to t iMilton and Jerusalem, the la tte r of which recapitulates material from The Book of Ahania. i Having shown TJrizen divorced from E ternity and Eni- tharmon, the archetypal woman, assuming a separate being, Blake could now dramatize TJrizen*s isolation in human terms. In the jealousy of his selfhood, TJrizen divorces himself from “his parted soul1 1 (Ahania, p. 2lj.9), his emanation Ahania. H e repeats Theotormon* s condemnation of Oothoon, calling Ahania “Sin** and weeping over her (Ahania, p. 25> Q ). Separated from him, she sees him only in his unfallen glory land laments his rejection of her. Like Theotormon, he sleeps in Generation, having been saved from Giro by Los, and Ahania attempts in vain “To awake bright TJrizen, m y king, “To arise to the mountain sport, “To the b liss of eternal valleys; “To awake m y king in the morn, “To embrace Ahania*s joy . . . (Ahania, p. 2f2|.) In underlining the contrast between Beulah, the true union of man with his emanation expressed in the Song of Songs, Blake echoes the Biblical song in Ahania*s lament, ironically a potential love song. The Image of the garden which informs the Song as its controlling metaphor is also j i ; !a v ita l part of Blake’s visualization of Beulah. In com- ! , i paring herself to a garden at harvest, Ahania follows the I Biblical metaphor. But her song is ironic because the j 'Urizenic man/god of jealousy and selfhood is a false hus- | | band. Solomon calls his bride “A garden inclosed , 1 1 whose ' “plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits** (£ f.: 1 2 -1 3 ) 5 the lines of his song, significantly, alternate between himself and his bride or emanation* TJrizen, by contrast, sleeps while Ahania laments, sadly referring to an ea rlie r existence in E ternity when she was tru ly TJrizen’s bride and therefore his garden of joy. There was a time when she was TJrizen’s beloved, “Swell’d with ripeness & fa t with fatness, ^Bursting on winds, m y odors, “M y ripe figs and rich pomegranates *?In infant joy at thy fe e t, “0 TJrizen, sported and sang.“ (Ahania. p. 2 $ $ ) TJrizen, asleep in the forests of Generation's night, pre figures Albion's perverse refusal in Jerusalem to rise from the bondage of his fallen condition by recognizing i t through a cleansing of the doors of perception. Blake’s use of marriage symbolism in the ea rlie r poem b rillia n tly avoids the necessity either of having TJrizen lament (and therefore recognize) his fallen state, or of introducing Los, w ho has already done his work in fixing the lim its of opacity. Ahania’s lament involves marriage in both the fallen i and the unfallen worlds, Generation and Beni ah/Eden • In Eden, of course, man and his emanation are one, just as the body and the soul are one if accurately perceived, Tech nically there can be no separate emanation in Eden, since emanation is essence divorced from its e lf in the f a ll. Poetically, however, Ahania must use the garden Imagery of Beulah to express an Edenic vision of the re-integration of TJrizen into E ternity, There is no essential contradiction or confusion of the states, since both Beulah and Eden demand a disintegration of the selfhood, and since Beulah I® Its e lf the emanation of Eden into the fallen world to aid man in his escape from Generation, Ahania’s desire is i to be reborn within TJrizen who, divorced from his soul, is merely the spectre of his unfallen self $ she wishes to become his bride again in Eden, even though marriage means the loss of the selfhood’s identity which Thel feared so terrib ly . In the Christian context, Beulah thus means the sacrifice of the independent selfhood which must precede salvation in Eden, A s K iralis points out, “death” for Blake often means not complete extinction of the individual but rather “a change from one state to another, as from innocence to experience”; “Eternal Death” means man’s temporary separa- tion from E ternity*^ In The Book of Ahania Blake makes clear his equation of death with banishment, an idea which , he may well have found in Shakespeare's R om eo and J u lie t. The play, like Blake's poem, relies for its effect upon the continual juxtaposition of the opposing states of Beulah and Generation. The strife-ridden world of the Capulets and the Montagues is dominated by TJrizenic tyrants w ho turn, marriage hymns into dirges and wedding feasts into funerals, a world of fragmentation and conflicting w ills, with neither love nor joy. It is essentially a world of daylight, how- i ever perfidious, as opposed to the moonlit nights of Beulah during which the lovers most often meet. Shakespeare's Beulah is the world of Solomon's garden, where the nightingale sings nightly on the pomegranate tree beneath J u lie t's window.^® Its ,fexchange of joy** (II, vi, k.) is echoed by Ahania's “ 'In interchange sweet of th eir joys I'* * (Ahania, p. 255), and R om eo refers to Ju liet as his “soul" (II, l i , 1614.), since, as his emanation, she Is neces sary to h is continued life , just as Ahania is necessary to TJrizen *s imaginative lif e . The fragmented state of Genera tion Is true death; what Generation calls death is, in It? 1 1 A Guide to the Intellectual Symbolism of William Blake’s Later Prophetic Writings," 193* ^Romeo and J u lie t, III, v, 2-If. All citations from Rom eo and Ju liei are to the M e w Yariorum Edition, ed. Horace Howard Furness (M ew York, 19&3). . £3 i Beulah, marriage in Eternity. Shakespeare calls Generation| j | “h e ll” and Beulah “heaven1 * in Borneo’s reaction to the void I of banishment to which he has been sentenced after his ! i k illin g of Tybalt: There is no world without Yerona walls, But purgatory, torture, h e ll its e lf . Hence banished is banish*d from the world, And world*s exile is death: then “banished® Is death mis-term’d .... ( I ll, i i i , 17-21) B orneo *s heaven is Yerona metamorphosed into Beulah, “Where Ju liet lives** (III, i i i , 30), and can be reached only by dying to the world of Generation, by sacrificing the indi vidual w ill of the selfhood which underlies the social turmoil of Yerona. Rom eo and J u lie t, as Blake must have read i t , is about the fric tio n between Generation and Beulah, with marriage in the lower state grimly parodying true marriage in the upper which the tyrannical world of the senses can under stand only as death. But the poison B orneo takes Is “quick** (Y, i i i , 120), with the pun on “life-enhancing®; to Juliet i t would be a “restorative® (Y, i i i , 166). The inversion of values is a fau lt of the lower world, not the upper world of the lovers* paradise into which Antony and Cleo patra also pass. The marriage metaphor in Shakespeare’s hands thus has a double edge as a comment upon both states of being. J u lie t’s marriage to B orneo is liberating and jennoblingj her arranged marriage to Paris would bind her to 'the world of Generation. Blake exploits th is la tte r use of the marriage meta phor as representative of the bondage of man in the natural sta te . Mercutio's "A plague ©' both your houses J” (III, 1, 9 9 ) as the supreme condemnation of the generative world underlies the culminating outcry of the ly ric en titled London, in which Vala appears as the harlot-queen of her world “A nd blights with plagues the Marriage hearse” (p. 216). Ore * s marriage to a shadowy “nameless female” in the Preludium to America symbolizes his subjugation to the cycle of nature and Lockean psychology. His bride is Tirzah, w ho binds him to the decaying vegetative world in The Mental Traveller and who, after the consummation of th eir marriage ^ America, rises before Ore as the female w ill and claims him: “ * 1 know thee, I have found thee, & I w ill not le t thee go,1” “ 'And thou art f a ll'n to give m e life in regions of dark death'" (America, p. 196). Her archetype is Eni- tharmon, the eternal female and mother of Ore, w ho in the prophecy Europe supports TJrizen's false moral code, calling for a prophet w ho w ill persuade man “ 'th at Woman's love is Sin,*1 * to “'Forbid a ll Joy, & from her childhood shall the l i t t l e female/ “Spread nets in every secret path'" (Europe, p. 2lf.O). The female w ill, glutting its e lf on religions of mystery and sin which demand Druidical sacrifice of the imaginative man, thus appears in the courtly love code. As the ultimate perversion of woman’s proper relationship ! to man, the code seeks to keep fallen man and his emanation forever divorced, " ’For stolen joys are sweet & bread eaten in secret pleasant’’ ’ (Europe, p. 237) • Thus, in Europe, "the night of Enitharmon• s joy" which should be the passage into Beulah of her wedding night, is instead a celebration of the apparent triumph of Generation and woman’s dominion over man (Europe, p. 2i4.0). Enitharmon*s son Bintrah, also bound to the Circle of Destiny, furtively hides his bride, "the lovely jealous Ocalythron," who weeps "in desart shades" at the cruel but se lf-in flic te d distortions of the state of Beulah in Generation, which appear in human history as courtly love (Europe, p. 2I 4.O). History—the descent of Albion or eternal man into corporeality and the division into the separate sexes—is therefore Enitharmon* s dream and Albion’s nightmare. In the early prophecies, then, Blake explored the various p o ssib ilities of the idea of marriage as a poetic metaphor, drawing frequently on the trad itio n al character istic s of the epithalamium, sometimes parodying them and always using the marriage metaphor In conjunction with the fourfold vision. I t is not so much that the state of Beulah is ambiguous as that wom an herself is ambiguous in her relationship to man, potentially life-giving, like Ahania, and potentially life-destroying, like Tirzah. Both aspects of her nature coexist ^n Enitharmon, the archetypal woman. I A s the destroyer of Imagination, she is the female w ill; j as the inspiration of Beulah, she is man's soul or emana tion. In either case, she is the embodiment of each man’s 1 perception of the world and thus a symbol of both the fallen and unfallen states, particularly of Generation and of Eden where i t merges into Beulah and the noumenal and phenomenal become one in a flash of insight. Blake’s decision to represent the fracturing of man's being in terms of divorce from his emanation in Milton and Jerusalem indicates that marriage had become for him a symbol for Eden. A s Prye points out, Blake intends the ambiguity expressed by the term w consuramationK as K the two chief aspects of the hast Judgment, the burning world and the sacred m a r r ia g e .* * ^ jn other words, marriage and apocalypse are identical; Beulah becomes Eden in Blake’s penultimate vision. A s I have proposed e a rlie r, Blake's increasing in terest in symbolic marriage may have led to his abandoning of the cosmology of the Zoas as a means of dramatizing the f a ll of man. At the same time, i t must be remembered that Milton and Jerusalem deal with man's redemp tio n rather than his f a ll, thereby comprising Blake's N ew Testament in contrast to the Old Testament of the earlie r prophecies* Aware of the vision of joy inherent in the epithalamic trad itio n even as he was writing the Poetlnni ^Fearful Symmetry, p. 3 5 1. Sketches, Blake must have recognized its p o ssib ilities for j use in an epic which was to culminate in man»s joyous re- j I entry into Eternity. H e must have been aware at the same j ! time of the marriage imagery of the books of Isaiah and Revelation, the la tte r of which rises to a vision of the N ew Jerusalem expressed in terms of marriage: A nd I saw a new heaven and a new earth .... A nd I John saw the holy city , new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. A nd I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, , Behold, the tabernacle of G od is with men, and he w ill dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and G od himself shall be with them, and be th eir God. (21: 1-3) ! Whet her or not Blake knew that the wedding song developed h isto rically into ly ric and "epic” types, his own most ambitious and comprehensive poem would take the form of a vast epithalamium, celebrating the same apocalyptic marriage between Albion and Jerusalem proclaimed in Revelation.^® In the unfinished Vala and its revised version. The Four Zoas. Blake presents a more complex vision of the f a ll than that encompassed in the e a rlie r prophecies, but one which is s t i l l founded on the poetic myth of the “Four Mighty Ones . . . in every M an" w ho ideally make up “the -*°See the extract from Van Winkle in the Variorum Spenser dealing with the h isto ric al development of the epithalamium (Vol. II, p. 652). 'Universal Brotherhood of Eden” (Zoas, p. 2 6 k ) • Unfallen I (Eternity and the state of Eden are identical. The Zoas (exist both in the unfalien state of Blake*s Golden Age and 'in the fallen condition of man which prevails as long as he refuses to perceive to his utmost capacity and thereby enter Eden. Yet Eden, as A dam s has shown, absorbs rather than precludes the other states, so that the fa ll entails a perversion not only of the function of Urizen, but those t of the other Eternals as well, and consequently of the states of being which they represent. According to A dam s * s argument, unfalien Albion is composed of the four Zoas or living creatures **in dynamic contrariety,* * and is pictured right side up. W hen Albion fe ll victim to the m aterialist .delusion which came t© predominate in eighteenth-century B ritish philosophy, the Zoas f e ll and reversed th eir normal positions. Urizen then gave up his prime position at Albion's head, causing Los to f i l l the void by leaving the caves of imagination (unfalien Ulro) at Albion's le g s .^ Urizen's usurpation of Urthona/Los »s realm thus brings about the le tte r 's usurpation of Urizen*s realm, according to Adams's framework. In The Four Zoas. then, the fallen Urthona (now called Los) is not yet the savior and redeemer illjam Blake: a Beading of the Shorter Poems, PP• 38-IjJU In other interpretations, however, Urthona originally occupies the head, and is displaced by Urizen in the le tte r 's usurpation of the supreme power. o f Albion which he becomes in Jerusalem* but is as culpable ' ..... as Urizen. Los (with the possible pun on “lo ss”) is a |parody or fallen im itation of the Eternal Urthona, a re vengeful demon w ho turns Urthona*s hammer of imagination :into an instrument of perversion. A s Urthona is a force of liberation, so Los becomes his opposite, a Urizenic tyrant in ¥ala and The Pour Zoas. After the mock-ep ithalamium celebrating his marriage to Enitharmon (actually a cosmic divorce), he takes sadistic delight in binding her. She wails loudly, . . . for as Los beat The anvils of Urthona, link by link the chains of sorrow, Warping upon the winds & whirling round in the dark deep, .. Lash*d on the limbs of Enitharmon, & the sulphur fire s, Belch*d from the furnaces, wreath’d round her, chain’d in ceaseless fire , (Vala, p. 3 0 2 ) Similarly, Luvah fa lls and becomes Ore, his opposite. H e remarks upon the alteration of his condition and of Urizen*s in The Four Zoas: I suffer a fflic tio n 1 1 B e cause I love, for I was love, but hatred awakes in me, “And Urizen, w ho was Faith St certainty, is chang’d to Doubt . . . . “ (Zoas, p. 282) r ° ■ jTharmas “ becomes the Spectre of Tharmas, the Covering Cherub I i w ho blocks the way to Eden in Jerusalem, in which the fa l- I len Urizen is called Satan. Each of the fallen Zoas thus j becomes a parody of his former identity, a spectral se lf, | land 1 1 ’The Spectre is in every man insane & most/ “Deform’d i . . . (Zoas, p. 267), The creation or emergence of the Spectre in the case of each of the Zoas involves the f a ll into the m aterialist delusion and hence the twofold vision of Generation. To link the f a ll •'to corporeality with the female w ill, Blake again exploits the notion of the emana- ; tion, on the one hand man's best or sp iritu al se lf, like Ahania, on the other hand a representation of man's fallen , condition because separate and d istin ct from man. In ¥ala ; ; and The Four Zoas Blake shows that each of man's faculties ,is fallen by showing each divorced from its emanation— Urizen from Ahania, Luvah from Vala, Urthona from Enithar mon, and Tharmas from Enion. Frye underestimates the importance of the emanations when he states that they “are not very clearly distinguished ' ” i in The Four Zoas, being shadowy creatures w ho do practically nothing but wail, and seem to have chiefly a symmetrical function*8^ O n the contrary, Blake's notion of Albion's f a ll as the separation of the Eternals from Eternity is ^Fearful Symmetry, p. 277. I complemented and reinforced by the imagery of divorce by i i 1 I which each faculty or Zoa becomes only a portion and a : I i i parodie form of its previous ideal nature. Ahania, in ! The Four Zoas, continues her function of urging tfrizen to ^ s - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - i abandon his code of repression and yield to the open cele bration of love, thereby entering Beulah and approaching Eden. Enitharmon, Vala, and Enion, by contrast, become the fa ta lis tic siste rs w ho bind th eir husbands to the loom of Generation and so encourage th eir spectral existences. The nGardens of Tala” into which Luvah sinks (Zoas, p. 272) i are a travesty of the Garden of Beulah; to the fallen Los, soon to be Enitharmon’s bridegroom, Luvah* s f a ll (which is the corruption of sexual love and thus a reduction of sen- i sual enjoyment) is the whole f a ll of man. But Tharmas, who stands for the higher married love of Beulah, has already fallen at the beginning of The Four Zoas. his Spectre having been drawn forth by Enion 1 1 in her shining loom/ Of Vegeta tion . . . ” (Zoas, p. 267). The parodie marriage of Los and Enitharmon has been well prepared fo r. Insofar as Enitharmon is Los’s emanation, she should be imagination’s soul or essence. Her exultation in the power of the female w ill therefore marks the completed circle of the f a ll, the low point being the failure of the imaginative faculty divorced from reason and feeling. Appropriately, each of the Zoas fa lls into the state of Generation, since Vala and The Four Zoas are about Albion’s f a ll from fourfold vision j to the ra tio n a lis t’s twofold vision, or "Jfewton’s sleep.** ;Thus each of his faculties is divorced not only from each of the others but from its own unfallen condition as well. i I Frye, in commenting on The Four Zoas, states that the ! fa ll of Albion begins in Beulah and that the world of time or Circle of Destiny is a direct resu lt of Tharmas‘s f a ll, which establishes the b arrier between ’ ’the two great divi sions of human imagination, a rt and love," which w ill keep ;them separate u n til the a p o c a ly p s e .- ^ In Blake’s cosmology,' however, only Eden is the s tric tly unf alien state, and it is therefore only in Eden or ’ ’ Eternity" that the f a ll can begin. The f a ll from Beulah into Generation or from Gen eration into T O .ro can only follow the primal f a ll from i Eden. Frye’s stress upon the dangers of Beulah certainly has influenced other c ritic s , including Bloom and Adams, the resu lt being, as I have suggested ea rlie r, that Beulah is generally held in suspicion and often confused with the lower state of Generation, which i t resembles just as i t also resembles Eden. Once more, the primary characteristic of Beulah and the Daughters of Beulah is p ity . The reason why the Daugh ters of Beulah create the Circle of Destiny (Vala, p. 26?) is to protect man (already fallen) from his ow n Spectre; ^Fearful Symmetry, p. 281. th e ir creation is a repetition of Los’s setting of the lim its of opacity, an act of mercy intended to prevent I | Albion's complete disintegration. Eden, of course, always remains an unfallen state; Beulah, as the emanation of Eden, has no existence u n til the fa ll has begun. Blake begins his epic with the f a ll of Tharmas, but he does not suggest that the f a ll originated in Beulah. His purpose in Vala and The Four Zoas is to render a vision of Albion's f a ll into Generation more complex and thoroughgoing than he had done in the e a rlie r prophecies, and one in which each of the faculties or Zoas has become a spectre of i t se lf. To do so, he made more extensive use of symbolic marriage, in assigning each of the Zoas an emanation, than he had ever done before, expanding considerably the poetic device which had been so effective in The Book of Ahania But the two versions of the epic on the Zoas point forward as well as backward, as Blake' s imagination turns gradually from the theme of man's f a ll to that of his re demption. In creating the character of "Jerusalem the holy" (Vala, p. 3l|-6), a less important emanation in the Zoa scheme w ho does not even appear u n til the eighth night, he turns directly t© the Old Testament Prophets and to the book of Revelation for the image of a new sp iritu al city in the person of a woman. The bride of the Song of Songs had been compared in her beauty to Jerusalem and to Tirzah, two figures w hom Blake would la te r Identify with the true and false brides of Albion. Isaiah* s tone in describing the ! j - 1 [wedding of redeemed mankind and Jerusalem, w ho is also the I I I Ibride of Christ and hence of the Christ in every man for i [Blake, approximates the tone of the Song of Songs: i “Rejoice ye with Jerusalem, and be glad with her, All ye that love her: Rejoice for joy with her, All ye that mourn for her » . . , n ( 6 6 : 1 0- 1 2 ) Blake*s tone in Milton is also that of the Song of Songs—Bloom goes so far as to call i t basically one of the “Beulah poems.**^ As a preludium to Jerusalem, he contends, It deals with the recovery of innocence, which is identical to the state of Beulah, but not with the ultimate redemption of Eden, which is le f t for Blake*s fin al prophecy.^ A d mittedly, Blake s t i l l maintains his distinction between the "sexual," which is threefold and can also be twofold, and the fu lly human, or poetic and imaginative, which is four- ■ fol£i (Milton, p. lj.83). What Bloom fa ils to recognize is that Blake*s idea of symbolic marriage continued to expand and must have been heavily influenced by Isaiah, w ho drew heavily upon the poetic imagery of the Song of Songs. A s a poetic metaphor, marriage may have nothing whatever to do ^ fh e Visionary Company, p. 16. ^ %he Visionary Company, p. 101. with the fact of marriage in Generation, the ordinary world of men, so that the equation of symbolic marriage with the |Beulah state Is invalid. I Milton in a sense marks the tran sitio n from Blake’s ; Old Testament to his H ew Testament, with a new emphasis on i the Christian doctrine of in fin ite forgiveness. Blake, in abandoning the cosmology of the Zoas, seems to see man’s complete redemption almost entirely as the Prophets had, in terns ©f sp iritu al marriage between G od and man in the H ew Jerusalem. Allegorical Interpretation of the Canticle ■ had, of course, Justified the Song as an analogue of the marriage between Christ and the Church and between Christ and the individual soul. The book of Revelation confirms the identity of marriage and apocalypse, the “Great Consum mation1 1 which Blake mentions in Milton (p. 5> 02) and la te r dramatizes In Jerusalem. The subject matter of Milton Is really that of Vala and The Four Zoas. In the second plate of the f ir s t book, Blake refers to Albion’s descent to Generation and b riefly mentions “Jerusalem his Emanation** (Milton, p. ij.8l). The poem then expands into an account of Albion’s salvation, portrayed as sp iritu al marriage, under the guise of saving the h isto rical John Milton from his own misconception of heaven and failu re to appreciate Beulah. Surely Blake is Ironical in re-justifying the ways of G od to men and in presenting the three-personed poet—the trin ity of Los- Milton-Blake--'who emerges to recreate Urizen/Jehovah, in ! i I ,human form by encasing him in clay, thus parodying the : |creation of A dam out of red clay in Genesis. The notoriety of the h isto rical Milton1 s actual relations with his six fold emanation— part wife and part daughter— makes him a comic as well as an ideal subject for an epic which works itoward resolution in sp iritu al marriage and the epithalamic vision, but Blake's real subject is , as always, fallen man. , In Milton, Blake directly identifies the fallen "Rea- ; soning Power in M a n * 1 with the Spectre of selfhood, or Satan (Milton, p. £33). Ololon, as Milton's emanation, embodies his Ideal, fu lly perceptive character as the archetypal poet. She opposes '‘Rational Demonstration,1 1 "the rotten rags of Memory," “Bacon, Locke & Mewton," and the state of Generation (Milton, p. £33), with the offering of the a lte r natives of “Faith in the Saviour,*1 "Imagination," and "Re generation" (Milton, p. £33)• I t is Milton, or fallen man, w ho had created his emanation as the female w ill, the Tirzah w ho draws man into Generation as Eve in Paradise Lost. The Milton w ho is a ll imagination, free of the spectral reason which he overcomes in his wrestling match with TJrizen/Satan, comes to recognize his emanation as his true bride. H e sees her purified of her "Virgin Babylon" (p. £23) or Vala aspect at the end of the poem when her "Double Six-fold Wonder" (p. $3k) or false "virginity" flees from her, leaving her f i t to become the sp iritu al bride of the poet, w ho has fin ally attained fullness of perception. The marriage 1 |feast of Milton and Ololon w ill not occur, however, u n til | I I Blake’s la s t prophecy, in which Milton becomes Albion and iOlolon becomes Jerusalem. The earlier poem ends on the ! traditional anticipatory note of the epithalamium, with an assembly of Blake’s tita n ic figures viewing “the H um an Har vest beneath" (p. 535) and looking forward "to the Great Harvest & Vintage of the Hat ions1 1 yet to come (p. 535)* j Jerusalem is Blake’s great poetic harvest in several isenses. Characters and themes from the preceding works reappear and, despite the new Christian emphasis in Blake’s idea of salvation, he has by no means finished with or re solved the c risis of the great divorce in eighteenth-century i B ritish thought. His interest has, however, turned even more toward a poetic resolution of contraries in terms of symbolic marriage* "The essential theme of Blake’s Jeru- salem,1 1 writes Joseph Wicksteed, "is the contrast between the fleeting and the abiding.”^ Geoffrey Keynes is more specific in calling Jerusalem M an effo rt to reconcile the imperfections of the vegetative mortal life with the eternal truths of the sp iritu al lif e . . . . " The attempt is certainly not new in Blake's poetry, but neither is i t a ^ W illia m B la k e ’ s Jeru salem (London, 1 9 5 3 ), P . 1* 5?The Complete W r itin g s . K eynes’ s n o te , p. 918. departure from the basic concerns of orthodox C h ristian ity ,! i Blake merely takes up once again his one predominating i • ' theme, yet with a greater recognition of or perhaps greater interest in the eongruity of his ideas with those of the H ew Testament, 1 Again, Albion is the hero of the poem, but instead of appearing as the Pour Zoas, each with an emanation, he acts as a single character in his own rig h t, separated from Los i and also from his emanation, w ho is both Vala and Jerusalem, Vala, the "wife*1 of Luvah in The Four Zoas, becomes the dominating symbol for the m aterialist delusion, much like Spenser's False Florimell, and repeatedly calls herself Albion's bride. But man's true "bride** is his imaginative soul, his fourfold humanity which transcends Ulro, Genera tion, and even Beulah, William Gaunt sees Jerusalem as an expression of man's "search for sp iritu al completeness" through "self-annihilation" or the in fin ite forgiveness of Christian love by which "the human soul at la st becomes identified with G od , , . Blake depicts Albion's sp iritu al divorce at the beginning of the poem in one of his characteristic parodies of the state of Beulah and of the epithalamic vision of joy and harmony, as the Eternal M an in his jealousy hides his emanation "Upon the Thames and ^Arrows of Desire: A Study of William Blake and Bis BomanticT World (London, 1956). p. Ilk . M edway, rivers o f Beulah, dissembling/ His jealousy before the throne divine, darkening, coldi'* (Jerusalem, p. 622). jThe clouded banks of the Thames recall the contrasting scene of calmness and peace in Spenser’s Prothalamion and the joyous marriage of the Thames and M edw ay waters in The Paerie Queene, Book I I I . Albion is "dead,0 as Los says, as long as his emanation remains divided from him (p. 631), as long, that is, as he in sists that there is no Jerusalem by perceiving only Vala, w ho is corporeality and the female w ill. Just as Jerusalem Is a forsaken bride throughout t most of the poem, so Albion Is a bridegroom, but one w ho would sleep through his wedding night. i A s Albion’s bride, Jerusalem is a much richer charac te r than Ahania had been as TJrizen’s wife. Both p o rtraits are based largely on the Song of Songs, but the la te r one is founded more closely on the Song's Christian allegorical reading. Despite Blake's dislike for Solomon as a king in Generation, he must have shared the traditional reading of the Canticle as a symbolic wedding of Christ and the Church and Christ and man. In the H ew Testament, Jesus himself employed the metaphor which had been used so extensively by the Prophets when he compared the sp iritu al joy of his followers to the joy of a wedding party (Matthew, 9: lit)* In making Jerusalem man's divine essence or soul, Blake easily identified her with Jesus, who also symbolizes the Hum an Form Divine, the union of G od and man which is Blake's !fourfold vision of imaginative unity. Since Jesus dwells ! in unfallen man, Jerusalem is also the emanation or essence !© f God; hence Blake*s frequent allusions to her as the Bride of the Lamb. In her long lament, she weeps for her state of separation from Albion in weeping for the death of Jesus, the divine Imagination in man. Similarly, in lament ing over the scattering of her children, the Nations (like the B iblical Bachel, with w hom she Is also identified), she really laments Albion* s fractured mind and his descent to corporeality. But, as the emanation of fallen man, Jeru salem is Vala, the corporeal veil of the material world which Jesus must rend at the apocalypse to purify Albion’s i vision and enable him t© perceive Eternity. There can be no doubt that Blake, w ho placed such a high aesthetic value on c la rity and distinctness in painting, fully-intended that ambiguity would be Jerusalem’s chief characteristic. She is both a city and a woman, both man’s salvation and his destruction, both sacrificing and devour ing- “depending upon her relationship to Albion. A s his emanation, she Is his creation. In his perversity, fallen man creates her as Vala, the goddess of external nature and thus the symbol of Druidism and natural religion. Blake shows clearly that man chooses or creates his religion just as he chooses everything he perceives; i t Is Los w ho identi fies Albion’s error: “There Is a Throne in every M an, i t is the Throne of Godj "This, W om an has claim'd as her own, & M an is no more i "Albion is the Tabernacle of Vala & her Temple, "And not the Tabernacle & Temple of the Most High. "0 Albion, why w ilt thou Create a Female Will?" (Jerusalem, p • 661) Like Tirzah, Vala claims t© have created Albion, w ho must consequently obey her. She in sists that she is Albion's bride, or true nature, and ironically places herself in the position of the bride of the Song of Songs as well as of th© sp iritu a l Jerusalem, as she embraces Albion's garment: "I was a City & a Temple b u ilt by Albion's Children, "I was a Garden planted with beauty. I allured on h ill & valley "The River of Life to flo w against m y walls & among m y tre e s, "Vala was Albion's Bride & Wife in great Eternity . . . (Jerusalem, pp. 659-660) Vala calls herself "Love" (p. 660), but her binding w ill negates her claim. She is sincere in her b itte r grief at being separated from Albion, yet reprehensible in her jea lous claim on his imagination, her chief enemy, since fu ll Imaginative perception would threaten to destroy her. Later in the poem Blake directly reveals her error when he again uses the images of the garment (this time a garment of light) and the Tabernacle in describing the true Jerusalem ias the liberating emanation: ! In Great Eternity every particular Fora I gives forth, or Emanates 1 Its own peculiar Light, & the Form Is the Divine Vision A nd the Light is his Garment. This is Jerusalem in every M an, A Tent & Tabernacle of Mutual Forgiveness, Male & Female Clothings. A nd Jerusalem Is called Liberty among the Children of Albion. (Jerusalem, p. 6%) I t is th is unfallen Jerusalem w ho te lls Albion that she cannot be his wife (Jerusalem, p. 657)$ since he p ersists in the twofold vision of the Corporeal Understanding. Throughout most of the poem, then, Blake portrays Al bion as a bridegroom faced with two contraries--Jerusalem his true emanation and Vala his false emanation— us his potential brides. Yet Vala is not, like the la te r Satan, a negation^ she is the apparent opposite and "shadow” of Jerusalem, and Is thus Jerusalem in the world of Generation. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake had declared that "Without Contraries is no progression. A ttraction and Re pulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence" (p. lij.9), and that "M an has no Body distinct from his Soulj for that c a ll’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses . . (p. U 4. 9 ). And, as Gle ckner has shown, the Songs of Xnnocende and of Experience present the state of "Experience" or Generation as essential to the attainment of higher innocence. The state of Beulah was always characterized by ambiguity. Similarly, Genera- j |tio n is ambiguous in Blake's e a rlie r poetry, “newton1s | •sleep1 1 is to be condemned as an inferior sta te, yet i t is 1 | essential as a step in the progression to Eden. Generation, like Beulah, was created in mercy to save man from the even lower state of Ulro and complete fragmentation. Urizen necessitated the creation of the mundane shell, but Los, the redeeming imagination, carried out its creation. Wicksteed and Keynes agree that Jerusalem is Blake's supreme attempt to com e to terras with the ephemeral and mutable world of Generation. The chief contrary of the incessant creative energy of Eden is the center of paralysis which Blake calls Ulro, and i t is to combat the "perverted & single vision** of Ulro (Jerusalem, p. 6 8 1 j.) that Los must build Golgonooza, the city of a rt, '’beneath Beulah/ In the midst © f the rocks of the Altars of Albion1 * (Jerusalem, p. 68it.)—that Is, in the Druid world of natural cycle. According to Bloom, Golgonooza is identical to the H ew Jerusalem, the city of Eden and thus the symbol of man's redemption, like Spenser's C le o p o lls .^ Golgonooza is certainly b u ilt by imagination and resembles the H ew Jeru salem of the B iblical apocalypse, but, as Wicksteed points out, it is b u ilt of Druid Dolmens.^® Blake is careful to 5%he Visionary Company, p. 107. ^O william Blake's Jerusalem, p. 137. 7k show that the vision of Eden from Generation must proceed jfrom Generation its e lf , that the building blocks of the ( apocalyptic “S piritual Fourfold London" (Jerusalem, p. 68i|.) i . . . . . . . must be hewn from the quarry of the twofold earthly city over which Vala reigns as queen. In Jerusalem, where even Bacon, Newton, and Locke are admitted to Eden in the sp irit of in fin ite forgiveness, a ll contraries must be accepted rather than condemned. In the book of Revelation, "The Harvest of the World" is an apoca-: lyptic vision in which "the tabernacle of G od is with men, and he w ill dwell with them" (21: 3) In the new identity of G od and man, A primary symbol of the coming of the N ew Jerusalem Is the burning of the fallen city of Jerusalem, or Babylon, in the person of the Great Whore--Blake*s Vala. 'For Blake, however, the fire s of Eden burn not to destroy the physical universe but to assimilate i t , to draw i t into Eternity--thus the double meaning of "consummation." In the purifying flames of the apocalypse, the doors of percep tion are thoroughly cleansed, not so that they no longer perceive the temporal but so that they see beyond i t to the eternal, Swedenborg’s error was the separation of the body from the spirit* for Blake the Idea of a disembodied soul is as ghastly as that of a sp iritle ss body, since the body is the fallen portion of the soul and the world is the fallen portion of E ternity. The apocalypse is not, th e re fore, a destruction but a harvest, as the ending of Milton 75] i premised i t would be* ! The marriage metaphor comes t© have special meaning ! |for Blake, then, as a symbol for the apocalypse, and is entirely consistent with its trad itio n al associations with I cosmic order and harmony* But the ultimate marriage is in Eden, not "on earth ,“ insofar as that expression refers to Generation, In Blake»s apocalyptic harvest there is no dragon and no Great Whore to be destroyed in flames. The Covering Cherub and the fallen serpent Ore again become Tharmas and Luvah in the redemption of Generation. The restric tin g natural cycle of fallen Generation becomes, like Spenser*s Garden of Adonis, a garden of regeneration. The ’ ’Religion of Generation” which was intended ’ ’for the destruction/ Of Jerusalem” (Jerusalem, p. 626) becomes, through pity, “holy Generation, Image of regeneration!" (p. 626) in the purified vision of Eos, The contraries of Jerusalem and Vala, then, are re solved in Blake*s vision of the would-be earth goddess as the “shadow” or spectral fallen self of man*s true emana tion. Jerusalem speaks of “a time of love” (p. 6l|_3) when she and Vala were united with Albion in Eden. If, then, the apocalypse is Albion's sp iritu al completion through union with Jerusalem, i t is also Jerusalem’s sp iritu al com pletion through recovery of her own lo st spectre. Together, Jerusalem and Vala become Albion1 s real bride, England, who i emanates int© Albion’s bosom and becomes one with him ' j (Jerusalem, p. 71|3). In her the contraries of Eden (Jem - | j salem) and Generation (Yala) combine —in other terms, the j 1 contraries of innocence and experience or, as Wicksteed j puts i t , rtthe bodily and the sp iritu al aspects of married 1 love—so holy when reconciled, so disruptive when opposed,1 1 6 t _ com e together. She state in which the great marriage occurs is not Beulah, the lovers' sleep created in mercy around Eternity, but Eden its e lf, where holiness and crea- | tive disruption are one in the furnaces of imaginative energy. W hen Albion fin a lly awakens to become Jerusalem's true bridegroom, he awakens to the fourfold vision which is Eternity (Jerusalem, p. 7 M * -)* Ihe reversal by which Jeru salem becomes the sleeping bride and Albion the impatient bridegroom anticipating his wedding recalls the situation of the bride and groom in Spenser's Epithalamlon; Blake no longer parodies the epithalamic vision but follows i t , in order to express Albion's true marriage in trad itio n al terms, Albion's marriage, or recovery of his imaginative essence, both immediately precedes and symbolizes his per ception of Jesus, and thus of divine forgiveness in himself. Since imagination makes perception an act of creation, the ^ •William Blake's Jerusalem, p. 26. Eternal M an becomes what he perceives— not the Christ on :the Cross of Generation, but the risen Christ of regenera tio n , the Albion of the “Glad Day1 * etching* In his sleep of Generation, Albion lo st his imaginative hold of rea lity ; the marriage which is also his apocalypse represents his regaining of i t . Jesus, in one sense, is Albion as the completely imaginative man, w ho is also G od* In accepting Jesus, Albion rises above the fallen twofold perception of his reasoning Spectre, Satan/Urizen. A s a slave of Urizen, Albion had taken on his identity. His triumph in marriage is to be contrasted with Urizen* s failure to recover his emanation in The Book of Ahania. A s Gleckner has observed, I ” an effo rt of w ill cannot unite Urizen again; with the human form divine; only a denial of self and the concomitant self less, creative union with his emanation can accomplish th is In his perception of Christ, that is precisely what the Albion of Jerusalem accomplishes* For Gleckner, who considers the fallen Urizen "Reason incarnate" and Blake*s emanations in general "feeling or emotion,1 1 at odds with one another for the domination of man, the reunion of emanation and spectre "can only be con summated by an imaginative act, a creation, which involves at once the denial of reason and emotion individually and ^The Piper and the Bard, p. 3 7 , | 78 1 the acceptance of both.** The Book of Ahania certainly points to some such dialectical solution. In Jerusalem, spectre and emanation are not so clearly defined and con summation is more than the re-integration of reason and passion. Nevertheless, Gleckner seems to suggest one of the predominating patterns in Blake's thought In considering the ’ "contrary sta te s” as d ialectical. Tbs ultimate vision in Blake, theoretically fourfold, often appears to be three fold because i t is expressed in terms of marriage. Blake seems inconsistent in denigrating 1 1 the threefold sexual** and extolling the fourfold imaginative. The resolution of the problem, however, is not d iffic u lt if one considers the distinction between marriage in Beulah and marriage in Eden. At its low point, the former state verges on Genera tion, to which i t can easily drop—the twofold sexual. At its high point i t becomes indistinguishable from Eden, which is supreme imaginative perception through man's whole being. Once spectre and emanation unite, the selfhood dissolves and Beulah changes Into Eden. Moreover, marriage in Eden Is metaphorical in the same way that marriage in Isaiah and Revelation is metaphorical in symbolizing the apocalypse. Marriage in Beulah is based upon the fallen condition of Generation, offering an escape 6%he Piper and the Bard, p. 3 8 . from the tyranny of absolute corporeality upheld by the j I i empirical philosophers. Marriage in Eden is marriage in . symbolic fire , and loses its corporeal associations and i basis. I t is not the marriage of two individual selfhoods, but rather the successful recovery of a single selfhood1 s i lost divinity or unfalien essence* Jerusalem can thus be both Albion* s bride and his daughter as his emanation; she can appear as Vala or as the M e w Jerusalem w ho is the Bride of Christ, She can be both the sp iritu al mother of the children of Albi©n--the Mations--and the Bride of Mat ions at the resurrection. The literal-m inded distinctions that hold true in Generation no longer apply in Blake’s vision of marriage as apocalypse. In terms of Blake’s canon, the marriage In Jerusalem marks a culmination in the poet’s efforts to resolve the great empirical divorce. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was Blake’s reply to the forces which worked to rend Al bion’s mind, either by denying his flesh or by denying his s p irit—the trad itio n of orthodox C hristianity and the trad itio n of B ritish philosophy. The minor prophecies a t tributed Albion’s consequent fa ll or loss of the insight of perception to the usurpation of Giro by Urizen; they pic tured Albion as Urizen, the unworthy bridegroom w ho chooses to remain divorced from his emanation by clinging blindly to the Circle of Destiny. Vala and The Four Zoas showed him deep in his sleep, or spectral selfhood, with each of his I aspects or Zoas separated from its emanation or essential ' !unfalien characteristics. ; Milton and Jerusalem epitomize Blake's tendency to I ■ 11 visualize Albion's ultimate regeneration as consummation, the recovery of his unfallen wholeness in marriage* The introduction of Jesus into the la st prophecy reinforces and dramatizes Blake's e a rlie r doctrine that real love is a liberating energy—the lesson of the Olod of Clay in Experience, R estriction, the great antagonist to imagina- , tive energy, takes its penultimate and consolidated form a s 1 accusation in Jerusalem, and Satan therefore becomes Blake's supreme v illa in . The Clod and the Pebble appear again as Jesus, w ho embodies in fin ite forgiveness, and Satan, w ho ! embodies Infinite denial in the cave of the selfhood. In admitting Bacon, Locke, and Bewton to Eden, though, Blake himself enters a new s p irit of complete forgiveness. H e also shows that he has come to terms with the corporeal world, which e a rlie r seemed to him fundamentally evil, in spite of its ambiguity and the suggestion, as in The Book of Thel, that one must necessarily pass through i t in order to a ttain a higher innocence. In Jerusalem, the furnace out of which Los builds Golgonooza, the city of a rt rising out of Generation, is the body or corporeality of the f a l len Albion himself, ^England** is a character compounded of matter and s p irit; the earth of Generation and the heaven of Eden; Vala and Jerusalem. In her marriage to Albion, the fragments of humanity are gathered Into the “Furnaces of a fflictio n 1 1 (Jerusalem, p. Into which. Albion casts himself to emerge in Eden. Blake*s greatest poetical har vest is an acceptance of a ll things in the a rtific e of eternity. C H A P T E R III EPIC M A R R IA G E In comparing the poetry of Blake to that of Wordsworth, Harold Bloom calls the former ”a commentary upon Scripture,” 'the la tte r ”a commentary upon Nature, 1 ,1 In his reaction t© f the epistemological divorce of the eighteenth century, Blake naturally turned to the epithalamic imagination of the Bible which identified marriage and apocalypse, envi sioning the imaginative unity of the N ew Jerusalem as a nuptial consummation. At the same time, the Bible provided Blake with a model against which he could sa tirize man’s fa ll into Generation through parodic epithalamia, such as the grotesque marriage hymn of Los and Bnitharmon in The Pour Zoas—actually an ironic celebration of man’s perverse wish to persist in his divorce from the eternity of Eden. For Wordsworth, too, man has fallen from eternity. Like Blake, he conceives of that eternity as the fu lle st possible imaginative activ ity . For both poets, the f a ll is thus epistemological, resulting from the eighteenth-century philosophers’ inadequate conception of the relationship of the perceiving mind to the universe. Redemption for Blake ■ * - The Visionary Company, p. 1 2 i+ .. 82 and Wordsworth consequently is epistemological as well as !religious and means a return to fu ll perception, in which |the mind does more than merely react mechanically to sense ^data. The task of the poet is didactic in the profoundest sense, which is to say prophetic: to show man the way back to eternity; to show, in Robert Langbaum's phrase, "the sp iritu al significance of th is world" which is alien to the P corporeal understanding. But whereas Blake’s solution to | . :the great divorce is a religion of imaginative perception based upon Christian vision, Wordsworth's is a religion of sp iritu al or imaginative power based only in part upon the Christian tradition. For Blake the imagination is the active mind of fu lly realized humanity, which draws a ll things into its e lf and of which the corporeal is an incidental p art. Marriage is thus the re-integration of humanity's fallen aspects. For Wordsworth, by contrast, the imagination—which is both the source and the embodiment of sp iritu al energy—is as much outside the mind as within i t . Wordsworth, in evolving his own religion, expands and transforms rather than rejects the tradition of Locke. His most important modification of that trad itio n is the assertion of the mind as an active principle, that is, as imaginative. His ultimate vision is, O "The Evolution of Soul in Wordsworth's Poetry." P M L A . LX X X II (M ay 1967), 26^. - - - - - - - - -- — in a sense, the converse of Blake's, for the perceiving mind in Wordsworth's poetry becomes a part of the "nature1 1 j |which i t perceives, even though Wordsworth paradoxically I [describes the mind as consuming its environment or percep tual images. ^ I t is , then, the union of the mind and what Wordsworth calls "Uature" that constitutes "joy," the word which above a ll describes the feeling of epithalamic poetry and sets the keynote of the Song of SongsIt is not surprising, therefore, that Wordsworth, like Blake, should draw upon the long trad itio n of the epithalamium for metaphors of visionary marriage. In the "Prospectus" to The Recluse, his intended opus magnus, he announces that his poem w ill be I "the spousal verse" of a "great consummation"—a marriage between the individual mind and the creation.-’ I t is, ^Langbaum, in "The Evolution of Soul," 265> discusses the imagery of feeding which runs throughout The Prelude, especially in connection with the child’s mental ^consuming" of his natural world and thus merging with i t . ^■Solomon's vision of union with bride in the Canticle is one of joy in beauty; for the Christian allegorical tr a dition, the joy results from the union of man and God, w ho are pictured in the Song of Songs as bride and bridegroom. The word "joy" epitomizes Spenser's rapturous tone in the Epithalamion and Prothalamion, in both of which i t recurs frequently. £"Prospectus" to The Recluse. 57-58. All line citations from Wordsworth in m y text are to The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selineourt and H. Darbishire (5 vols., Oxford, 19if.0-191j.9), and to The Prelude, ed. E. Je g® lln c°urt, 2nd ed* revised by H. Darbishire (Oxford, 1959). I refer in a ll cases to the 1805 Prelude. moreover, broadly true that a ll the poetry of Wordsworth's Great Decade is , as Bloom argues, erotic, i in a trad itio n going back to the Song of Solomon, with Wordsworth as the Bridegroom, Nature as the Bride, and the Great Marriage between the two as something evermore about to be, a possible sublimity never altogether con summated. 6 The term "spousal verse" comes, of course, from the subtitle of Spenser's Prothalamion, a poem whose significant sty lis tic and imaginative sim ilarities with Wordsworth*s poetry are discussed at som e length by Geoffrey Hartman in Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-l8lJi«^ Although Wordsworth does not base his own poetry so closely on Biblical models as Blake does, he is no less influenced by the trad itio n of i the Song of Songs. Although there has been no extensive account of Words worth's specific uses of the marriage metaphor, the fact that he does use i t has been noted by more than one c ritic . M . H. Abrams, In his discussion of Homantic analogues of art and the mind in The Mirror and the Lamp, cites the "conjugal metaphors" in the well-known "Prospectus" passage: / °The Visionary Company, p. l8if. Like other c ritic s , Bloom sees the marriage metaphor of the "Prospectus" as central to an understanding of Wordsworth's poetry, yet fa ils to explain Wordsworth's actual uses of the metaphor. * ^(N ew Haven and London, 1961^.}, especially the section on Spenser's "Prothalamic Imagination," p. 267 ff« Paradise, and groves i Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old j i Sought in the Atlantic Main— why should they be | A history only of departed things, | Or a mere fictio n of what never was? ! For the discerning in tellect of M an, ; W hen wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion, shall find these A simple produce of the com m on day* —I, long before the b lissfu l hour arrives, Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse Of th is great consummations--and, by words Which speak of nothing more than what w e are, Would I arouse the sensual from th eir sleep Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain To noble raptures; while m y voice proclaims H o w exquisitely the individual M ind (And the progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external World Is f itte d ;—and how exquisitely, too— Them e th is but l i t t l e heard of among men— The external World is fitte d to the Mind; A nd the creation (by no lower name Can It be called) which they with blended might Accomplish: —this is our high argument. ('’Prospectus,'* 47-71) The creation resulting from the consummation of the marriage between mind and nature, says Abrams, is "of a living per- O ceptual world.” Abrams does not, however, elaborate on the importance or function of the metaphor in Wordsworth*s poetry generally; nor does 6. Wilson Knight, w ho turns to the fragment as a starting point in his approach to the poet but, after remarking that "marriage metaphors are powerful" in the lin es, does not pursue the matter further.^ 8 The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Cri tic a l Tradition (Oxford, 1953), p. % *he S ta rlit D om e (London, 19^1), p. 1. _ _ _ _ _ _ _____, 87~ Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom both apply the | S j metaphor of the "Prospectus" to Wordsworth’s overall poetic i I |achievement, however b riefly . For Hartman, marriage has a : dual significance, its meaning extending both to a marriage ; ©f imagination and nature and a marriage of heaven and earth, toward which "the poet proceeds despite apocalypse," i ;himself "the matchmaker, his song the spousal verse. What Wordsworth calls "Imagination," Hartman believes, is in fact the separate consciousness or self-awareness which , is fundamentally opposed to external nature as a riv al force, and thus basically apocalyptic, even though the poet refuses to recognize this fa c t. Against the apocalyptic imagination, or "desire to cast out nature and to achieve an unmediated contact with the principle of things," Hartman |sets the opposing notion of what he calls akedah, "or the marriage of imagination with natureAgain and again, Hartman contends, Wordsworth confronts and shrinks from "the terro r of discontinuity," the separation of man and nature, as in the fearful dreara-vision of the deluge and destruction of nature in the fifth book of The Prelude. According to the Wordsworthian d ialectic, the soul may find peace only "W hen wedded to this goodly universe/ In love and holy passion . . ." ("Prospectus," 53-54). The c risis underlying 10Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787-1814. pp. 75, 69. ^ Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787-l8llt, pp. x, 225. 'Wordsworth*s greatest poetry then, argues Hartman, is his . I i I in ab ility to recognize that imagination is a free power, , i i iindependent of nature. In reference to the dream-vision of the fifth book, he proposes that the dream is sent by Imagination to lead the poet to recognize its power, and that what the dreamer desires and fears is a direct encounter with I m a g i n a t i o n . 12 If by ’ ’apocalypse” Hartman means a separation and g lo rifi cation of the selfhood or individual identity apart from nature or outside forces and phenomena, then his argument is indeed convincing. But, as I have argued in Chapter II, apocalypse need not imply the destruction of material na ture; nor does i t in Blake, the great spokesman for a universal and individual apocalypse, for w hom the creation ,© f the N ew Jerusalem in the book of Revalation represents a marriage of heaven and earth, a union of the corporeal and the sp iritu a l. In th is sense, the term is in complete harmony with Wordsworth's prophetic b elief in the one world, or what Newton P. Stallkneeht calls ’ ’ Wordsworth's awareness of the unity of the world, and of the living forces which constitute the world . . . ."13 Wordsworth’s apocalypse, like Blake's, is a consummation--what he frequently calls a 12Wordsworth» s Poetry 1787-l8llt. p. 229. ^ strange Seas of Thought; Studies in William Words worth's Philosophy of M an and Nature (Durham, North Carolina, 1911-5), p. 21. "blending*’ © f the mind’s power with the power of nature. ! I lit is this apocalypse which Wordsworth envisions through ! 1 ! the recurrent marriage metaphors of The Prelude, his chief work and the towering poetic cathedral to which his other poems are "the l i t t l e Cells, Oratories, and sepulchral Becesses. Bloom, basing his reading of Wordsworth on the apparent assumption that the imagination must be apocalyptic in the disruptive sense, is in essential agreement with Hartman. Poetry is the creation of the human imagination, and must therefore rise above external nature and demonstrate its freedom from i t . Wordsworth’s very insistence upon the exquisite fittin g of inner and outer, upon the reciprocal and equal relationship between man’s mind and nature, not only kept him from a wholeness of vision, but prevented him also from becoming a national epic poet of Milton’s sta ture.Bloom seems to disparage the fact that Wordsworth made no attempt to reveal anything like Blake's fourfold vision of sp iritu al truth, yet overlooks an important point ■^Wordsworth makes the analogy of the cathedral in his Preface to the ldU). edition of The Excursion: I quote from The Poetical Works, Vol. V, p. 2. All quotations from the "Prospectus" are also from th is Preface, not from the Recluse fragment Its e lf, which differs In some d etails. ^The Visionary Company, p . llj.1. of sim ilarity between the tw © poets. Just as the fourfold i i imaginative vision in Jerusalem depends upon the successful l ; !assim ilation of the corporeal world, so do Wordsworth’s moments of visionary insight depend upon the foundation of J the physical, natural world. The difference, of course, is one of emphasis. I t is a too heavy reliance of the mind upon nature that led Blake to distinguish tw © Wordsworths-- the natural (and hence misguided) man w ho gave himself over to the “Heathen Mythology” of nature worship or Druid ism, and the imaginative man w ho continually sought to assert himself with apocalyptic force as the true poet. 0 It is the “natural" basis of Wordsworth’s poetry to whieh both Blake and Blakeans object. But again, both Hartman and Bloom stress too heavily the disruptive implications of apocalypse, the b elief that physical nature must be destroyed in order for a new heaven and earth to take shape, or that the poet must u tte rly dis sociate himself from the phenomenal world if he is to fu lly realize his imaginative powers. Even for Blake, not to mention Revelation, apocalypse is the marriage of the exist ing heaven and earth, out of which the new united creation is made. Nothing could be more trad itio n al, or more Blakean, than Wordsworth’s equation of apocalypse and marriage. The 1A M Blake’s annotations to Wordsworth, including this distinction, may be found in the Keynes edition, pp. 7 8 2 - 78lj., primary difference between the two poets* use of the mar riage metaphor is that Blake saw the H ew Jerusalem as the i 'human mind wedded to its own true essence or emanation, I while Wordsworth saw i t as a cooperative union of sp iritu al • powers within and without the mind its e lf . For both poets, man is divorced from that which would give -wholeness and fulfillm ent to his life and thereby redeem him from his fallen condition. For both poets, the marriage metaphor dramatizes that fulfillm ent by relating new Romantic values to the trad itio n al vision of the epithalamium and its Bib lic a l model, the Song of Songs, M o w the estimate that Wordsworth somehow f e ll short of 'the achievement of a true epic poet is shared by a number of c ritic s , staunch Wordsworthians am ong them. I t is a paradox of Wordsworth criticism that the poet w ho so fe r vently wished to become the Milton of his age, and therefore an integral part of the sublime tradition of Classical and modem poetry, came to be looked upon primarily as a great innovator, breaking from the poetic conventions which he seemed to adopt for the epic framework of The Prelude, A s Bloom would have i t , Wordsworth's autobiographical poem stands “as an internalized epic w ritten in creative compe titio n to Milton , . . .**17 The Recluse fragment, with its • * - 7 The Visionary Company, p. 120. ! I |almost disdainful tone towards the heaven of Paradise lo st i ■ an d its concurrent elevation of the emotions of fear and i I : awe which " fa ll upon us often when w e look/ Into our Minds, j into the Mind of M an" ("Prospectus," 39-ij.O), certainly supports the usual contention that Wordsworth stressed his fundamental departure from the accepted matter of the epic in English established by Spenser and Milton. I t would be more accurate, however, to view the passage as a deliberate ■ contrast between two kinds of sublimity. The Miltonic sub lime, with its rieh images of colossal power--"Jehovah-- with his thunder, and the eh o ir/ Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones" ("Prospectus," 33-3U-)— had been too highly praised (and often imitated) to need the poet's commendation or approval. But the Wordsworthian sublime, dependent upon the new Romantic emphasis on the individual mind, demanded ju stificatio n as equally elevated and appropriate to the highest form of poetic expression. In thus arguing for the dignity of his subject, Wordsworth sought to join, not to disengage himself from, the visionary company of the great Christian epic poets. I t was, a fte r a ll, Milton w ho had previously spoken of the mind in spatial metaphors.-*-® A nd g See, for example, Satan's "The mind is its own place, and in its e lf / Can make a heaven of h e ll, a h ell of heav'n," in Paradise Lost, I, 25^-255* Citations from Milton in m y text are to The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston, 1965). |again, the M Prospectus” line " fit audience le t m e find jthough few!" (23) echoes Milton’s " fit audience, though i few" in the bardic voice of Paradise Lost (VII, 31)• | To understand and appreciate fu lly the achievement of The Prelude, one must consider it in the lig h t of its tra dition, a tradition which the poet invites us to keep in mind as w e read The Prelude, and in whieh the idea of marriage occupied a position of supreme importance beeause of its religious, cosmological, and social implications. Its fountaihhead is the Song of Songs, its ly ric al expres- l sion the Christian epithalamium. But to see th at trad itio n as s tric tly erotic, as Bloom does, is to misrepresent i t . Allegorical interpretation in the Middle Ages and the Renais sance elevated Solomon’s Song and ju stified its inclusion among the Scriptures by regarding i t as a symbolic poem Representing various sp iritu al marriages and thus emblematic of cosmic harmony. Medieval and Elizabethan epithalamia had of course emphasized th is aspect of the Song of Songs; so had the seventeenth-century genre of English meditative poetry. B y Shakespeare's time, the association of marriage with social harmony had become commonplace, making possible the typical structure of the Elizabethan romantic comedy in whieh marriage (often m ultiple) symbolizes the resolution of dramatic tensions and the consequent restoration of order. The epithalamium, as I mentioned earlier in connection with Blake, developed into an epic as well as a lyric form. IThe former is narrative, with a mythological background of I | j ;appropriate Classical d eities. The Christian epic, with ' f j jits characteristic syncretism or fusion of Classical and ! Christian m aterials, certainly owes much to the form of the 1 i 1 epic epithalamium. I t also follows the epithalamium in its typical use of marriage as a visionary symbol of the m ysti-■ cal union of man and God, and as a device of poetic unity and climactic development. Structurally, the Divina C om m e- dia is representative of the Christian epic, building up gradually toward the climactic Beatific Vision, character istic a lly expressed as a marriage at the end of the Faradiso. Dante envisions the perfect unity of G od and man in the City of G od in the image of the white rose of the mystical mar riage : In forma dunque di Candida rosa mi si mostrava la m ilizia santa, che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa .... (Faradiso, X X X I, 1-3)19 In the same canto, the ideal peace which results from divine contemplation is revealed in the figure of S t. Bernard, whose prayer is a typical medieval epithalamium, celebrating the union of Christ and the Virgin* 1 9 Citations from Dante in m y text are to La Divina Commedia, ed. H. Oelsner (London and Toronto, 1933). 95 I The penultimate Beatific Vision is one of harmony, j jpeaee, and unity. The tone of joy in the Song of Songs is 1 !' ■ I I raised to a high pitch of sp iritu al rapture, its sensual ecstaey transformed by the new context for its emotion. Through God’s grace, Dante’s narrator says, he was enabled ,to fix his eyes upon the nluee sterna," or eternal lig h t of Heaven, which he describes metaphorically as a book ’ ’legato con amore in un volum e,/cio che per 1 * universe s i squa- dema” (Paradise, XXXIII, 86-87). The gathering of the scattered fragments of the world into a single flame of I love, ”un semplice lume," must have particularly struck Blake in his conception of the unifying flames of apocalypse. In a lite r a l and metaphorical ’ ’flash ” of insight—a word that Wordsworth uses repeatedly in conjunction with the experience of the union of mind and nature and which also characterizes the mystical sense that he was to designate ’ ’spots of time”— Dante’s trav eller finds that his desire {’ ’d isiro ”) and his w ill ("velle”), like the spheres them selves, revolve in harmony with one another, "si come rota ch' egualmente e mossa, / l ’ amor che m ove i l sole e 1 ’ a ltre stelle" (Paradiso, XXXIII, lijij-2lf.5) • Here the figure joins the previous one of marriage, and the two combined express the poet’s ecstatic state of mind in which a ll tensions, a ll conflicts of desire and w ill, of man’s w ill and God’s w ill, become resolved. Prom the fracturing and disharmony of the Inferno, Dante has moved upward to a vision of sp iritu al ■union as marriage. H e makes no less significant use of the j jmetaphor in the course of the journey its e lf . i I In Ganto XXVIII of the Purgatorio, Dante directly echoes the Song of Songs in his portrayal of the Garden of Eden, using a combination of metaphors which Wordsworth was la te r to employ in a sim ilar fashion for similar purposes. Walking through the garden, Dante’s narrator encounters "una donna so letta, che si g ia / eantando ed iscegliendo fio r da fiore" (Purgatorio, XXVIII, J 4.O -I 4.I). Matilda, the embodiment of innocence and guardian of the Earthly Para dise, gathers the flowers that surround her feet like the flowers strewn In the bride’s path in epithalamie convention, for she too is a bride in Dante’s divine vision. Matilda explains that the gentle breeze blowing in the garden is caused by the revolutions of the heavens, which make the breeze too revolve "in circuito * . . con la prima volta” (Paradiso, XXVIII, 103-lOij.). In the opening book of The Prelude i t Is the "Wisdom and S pirit of the universe” which brings creative energy to the poet, reviving him from his lu ll of creative inactivity and passivity of mind. A s in Dante, the relationship is one of sympathetic response—It is through the "correspondent breeze" (Prelude, I, 35) that the poet is able to respond to the breeze that comes from heaven. The union of the breeze or power within the mind with the breeze without produces the music of imagination, as the image of the eolian harp la te r makes clear. The harmony which the united breezes create is the harmony of i the mind in communion with a natural force outside itself* ! i ! f i | The music image is thus v ita l for both poets. Matil- ,da's song, coupled with the heavenly music of the Earthly r Paradise, becomes the song of the Solitary Reaper for Wordsworth, w ho also recognized that "The mind of man is • * • I fram'd even like the breath/ A nd harmony of music” (Prelude, I, 351-352), and that There is a dark Invisible workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, and makes them m ove In one society .... (Prelude, I, 352-355) The music in man's imaginative soul for Wordsworth is akin to the heavenly music of the breeze and Matilda's song. But Wordsworth's ’ ’Mature" shares, with the mind of man, an active principle, in marked contrast to the inanimate back- 20 ground of the Purgatorio. For Dante, nature in the Earthly Paradise is divinely ordered and hence reflects divinity. For Wordsworth, the natural world its e lf manifests creative power, the precise source of which remains a poetic mystery which cannot be solved by the ratiocinative mind. The significance of Wordsworth's Mature is sp iritu al, In The Excursion the Wanderer defines the "active Principle" which ” . 7 ". s u b s is ts /in a ll things, in a ll natures ..." (IX, 3-5). | its function tutelary, particularly for the developing i l ! 1 i consciousness of the child. Its closest approximation in j ! ■! Dante is the figure of Beatrice, w ho appears almost as a | I ! goddess in Canto X X X of the Purgatorio when she resolutely demands Dante’s contrition and purgation, thereby preparing him for sp iritu al marriage in paradise, or the knowledge of God. The deliberate confusion of her dual roles of mistress and goddess--nicely suggested by the Italia n M donna'* --is an important feature in Wordsworth’s poetic figure of Nature, adding a further dimension to traditional views of marriage. I shall return to the problem of the exact meaning of Words worth’s Nature and the great marriage proclaimed in the ”Prospectus1 1 shortly. For the moment, however, I wish to stress the continuity of the marriage metaphor in the trad itio n of the Christian epic, of which Wordsworth is a p a rt. Of the second major poet in that trad itio n , something has already been said in earlier chapters. Spenser’s Epi- thalamion and Prothalamion remain the most b rillia n t examples of the formal marriage poem in English. But his vision of harmony and order— both in the macrocosm of the creation and in the microcosm of the individual man--finds its most ambitious vehicle in The Faerie Queene. The vision of Spenser’s epic is essentially the vision of his marriage hymns, the vision of Sir Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy, when he espies the Circle of the Graces in the pastoral . . . - - 99 world of the sixth book. A s a symbol for man's attainment I of the perfect internal concord and grace necessary to the ! iidealized Renaissance gentleman, they stand for a state of 1 f mind which Spenser elsewhere in the poem objectifies in symbolic marriages. In the f ir s t book of The Faerie Quoene, the Red Cross Knight’s achievement of the primary virtue of holiness is imaginatively presented as his triumphal wedding of Una— allegorically, religious tru th —after his successful emer gence from a series of epic tr ia ls . In k illin g the dragon (a traditional cultural symbol for chaos and error), he conquers the principle of error in himself, and thereby becomes worthy of the symbolic marriage to sp iritu a l tru th . His marriage, which provides also a conventional ending to a tale of romance, prefigures what was to be the most impor tant marriage in the poem—that between Gloriana herself (allegorically, the English throne) and Prince Arthur, the prime exemplar of m ilitant Protestantism and representative 21 of Christ on earth. The design of the whole work was to progress toward a fin a l and complete epithalamic vision of individual and social perfection. Other marriages, both projected and consummated, abound in the poem, marking the 2i_ Spenser1s intention is stated in the Letter to Ra legh, Vol. I of the Works, pp. 167-170. imoral victories and rewards of individual knights as well • i as preparing for the marriage that was the guiding principle ; ' l 'underlying the entire Faerie Queene. The context of Elizabethan lite ra tu re , one must always ! remember, was one of very real p o litic a l anxiety over the impending c risis of the succession. Exhortations for the queen to marry took the form of allegory, and the level of p o litical meaning demands attention even in the greatest lite ra ry works of the age. Like the mystical marriage in the Divina Commedia, the Elizabethan celebration of marriage had more than aesthetic significance. Both Dante and Spen ser, viewing themselves as religious, moral, and p o litica l spokesmen for th eir times, conceived of th e ir highest ideals for man in society and man in the divinely ordered universe largely in terns of the marriage metaphor. The poet of The Prelude was to share that sense of mission, as the p atrio tic sonnets make abundantly clear. Wordsworth’s closest a ffin itie s , however, are not so much with Dante and Spenser as with the third major poet of the trad itio n —the author of Paradise Lost. Milton’s use of the marriage metaphor in conjunction with nature and in intimate association with his presentation of the F all, is easily of greater importance for Wordsworth than either the Miltonic diction or the Miltonic sublime, both of which he drew upon but also departed from in his own epic. Rather perversely, criticism has tended to deny Wordsworth, as well as other Romantics, any insight into the Christian doctrine |of the Pall of M an. Douglas Bush’s quip that "A romantic I has been succinctly defined as a person w ho does not believe P2 in the f a ll of man" typifies the usual view of Wordsworth. Hoxie Pairchild asserts th at, since the poet could not see himself as a sinner at a ll, he had no sense of the need for Atonement.^ Harold Bloom, as usual contrasting Words worth with Blake, argues that Wordsworth entirely rejected "the metaphor of the F a ll" ^ which had been so essential to the e a rlie r poet. Nevertheless, Geoffrey Hartman can say of The Prelude that "Books YII-IX, in particular, mark a period in Wordsworth’s life that parallels the time between the Pall and fin al loss of Paradise.Hartman does not, however, proceed to show any presentation of the Pall in Wordsworth’s poetry. A s I shall argue, the subject of The Prelude is indeed the mind of a poet; its theme, however, is the f a ll and redemption of man. 22Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1937), p. 155. ^ Religious Trends in English Poetry. Volume III: 1780-1830. Romantic Faith (N ew York, 19lj.9), p. 21l±. ^•The Visionary Company, p. 123. W ordsworth’s Poetry 1787-l8lli. p. 235. Hartman uses the metaphor of the Christian Pall to discuss Wordsworth’s life in a general manner; he does not show the significance of the doctrine for the structure of meaning of The Prelude. j 1 ; The double fa ll which Milton portrays in Paradise Lost j i tmay be contrasted profitably to the ideal of sp iritu al j i harmony in his early ode, O n the Morning of C hrist's Natl- ! i v ity . 2^ The personification of fallen Nature in the hymn, f though i t can be called poetic hyperbole, nevertheless produces an effect strikingly like that of the animistic view that Wordsworth was to take of nature. Milton fuses I the two images of nature as landscape and nature as woman, describing her responsive hope at the prospect of the im pending marriage of heaven and earth presaged by C hrist's b irth . "To wanton with the sun, her lusty paramour” (C hrist's N ativity, 36) would now be Inappropriate, as she woos the gentle air To hide her guilty front with innocent snow, A nd on her naked shame, Pollute with sinful blame, The saintly v eil of maiden white to throw, Confounded that her Maker's eyes Should look so near upon her foul deformities. (C hrist's N ativity, 38 To quiet her fears, G od sends down the dove of Peace, w ho waves her myrtle wand and “strikes a universal peace through sea and land” (52). A s the implements of war are set aside 26 The ideal is, of course, trad itio n ally conceived and traditionally handled by Milton; s t i l l , its expression by Milton is of special importance for Wordsworth because Mil ton remains the poet w ho most influenced him. I t might be noted also that the young Milton's vision of sp iritu al order in this poem is paralleled by the epithalamium's vision, as In St. Bernard's prayer in Canto X X X I of the Purgatorio. jand the Prince of Light begins his reign on earth, the ishepherds hear a sound which engages th eir souls "in bliss-^ ful rapture” (97)—T ,such music sweet” (93) as no man could ! produce. The continuation of such harmony of the “crystal < spheres” ’ ’Could hold a ll heav’n and earth in happier union" (108). Just as Dante had done, Milton fuses the images of music and marriage, to suggest the restoration of the union of heaven and earth, the vision of the Christian millennium. Perfect b liss, though, is not possible u n til the apocalypse, which w ill shake the Earth "from the surface to the center” (162) and destroy the discord of the present world e te r nally. Of particular interest here is the necessary identity between apocalypse and sp iritu al marriage, an identity which Wordsworth also proposes. In the ninth book of Paradise Lost, Milton looks back to a sim ilar period of concord between G od and man as he announces the imminent division of heaven and earth: N o more talk where G od or angel guest With man, as with his friend, fam iliar used To s it indulgent, and with him partake Rural repast .... (Paradise Lost, IX, 1-4) Milton reinforces the idea of division--what C. S. Lewis has called the "Great Divorce"— with images of p o litic a l fragmentation. M an’s new condition or fallen state is to be characterized by "foul d istru st," "breach/D isloyal," j"revolt,” "disobedience," "distance" {IX, 6-9). In the I ■ ■ jfirst two books of the epic, Milton had contrasted the i division of w ill and discord of the council in Hell with the perfect unity and singleness of purpose of the council in Heaven. H ow , as the poet’s attention turns entirely to man, the contrast takes on a new aspect: the dramatic juxtaposition of man’s state before and after his f a ll. In his description of the enclosed garden of Eden, Milton alludes directly to Solomon’s garden, "where the sapient king/H eld dalliance with his fa ir Egyptian spouse" {IX, ))J |?-)])(3). The tran q u ility and equilibrium of the scene comes partly from its being modelled on the B iblical garden of Solomon, interpreted by the Christian trad itio n as the Bride of Christ and therefore symbolic of the union of G od and man. The harmony of the scene soon begins to dissolve with the approach of the Serpent, the archetypal dragon of chaos, whose business It Is to divorce man from divinity. In the passage describing Eve’s f a ll, Nature is again personified as a presiding sp irit or goddess: "Earth f e lt the wound, and Nature from her seat/Sighing through a ll her works gave signs of woe,/That a ll was lost" (IX, 782- 784). The image is strengthened in the natural reaction to A dam ’s completion of the Fall of M an; Barth, trembled from her en tra ils, as again In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan; Sky loured and, muttering thunder, some sad drops W ept at completing of the mortal sin Original .... (IX, 1 0 0 0 - 1 0 0 4 ) i In various ways the f a ll is a divorce--the separation of Eve from A dam , of both of them from G od and Paradise, and of Earth from Heaven. B y personifying the elements of |nature, Milton heightens the effect of physical violation. 'But the ambiguity of the lines paradoxically suggests the p o ssib ility of b irth as well as of rape. The implication of creation or b irth which accompanies the f a ll reinforces the Christian doctrine of the "fortunate fa ll" by balancing the opposite image of destruction. I t Is the same ambiguity embodied in Blake’s Tyger, at whose terrib le b irth "The stars threw down th e ir spears/ A nd water’d heaven with their tears" (The Tyger, p. 214). ^ is also the ambiguity which is inherent in Wordsworth’s passionate attempts to cope with the f a ll as he understood i t . For Wordsworth, as for Milton, the f a ll is a divorce. But whereas Milton had assumed the union of man and "Na ture," portraying them as fallin g together, Wordsworth could not. A s Hartman has said, the continuity between human and divine fo r Wordsworth is too tenuous, too precarious, to be simply stated and accepted. ^ Yet Hartman’s belief that ^ Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787-l8l4» p. 190. f " ' '................" " ~ " 1 0 6 ' I the apocalyptic imagination is fundamentally opposed to thej i marriage of man and nature must be based upon the assumption! ! i that nature consists of l i t t l e more than an aggregate of physical objects or forms to which the imagination imparts a dubious " life ." In the early books of The Prelude, Wordsworth, stressing the tutelary function of the external forms of nature on the child’s developing consciousness, i 'seems to support the contention that he is a sensatlonist in the trad itio n of Locke. I t is "the visible scene" "With |a ll its solemn imagery" which impresses the mind'of the Boy of Winander (Prelude, V, Lj.09-lj.ll). Yet w e must keep in mind the context of the episode: the view of nature as merely external and concrete is its e lf the child*s view, if the child could articulate his view in ratio n alistic terms. The true relationship between the individual mind and nature can be recognized only by the adult poetic mind, whatever its kinship to the mind of the child. The real key to the meaning of Wordsworth's poetry, then, lie s in the exact meaning of "Nature" and consequently of its marriage to man’s mind. If Nature Is indeed the composite of the phenomenal world, and nothing more, then one must take seriously Blake’s charge that the sp iritu al man in Wordsworth Is con stantly opposed and threatened by the natural man, "& then he is no poet but a heathen philosopher at Enmity agst. a ll 107 ! true poetry or Inspiration."^® O ne may even have to admit l - 1 some truth to Bernard Blackstone’s judgment that i i ! I i ' | Wordsworth*s mind was from the beginning the battleground! ' of two opposed facu lties: the power of intense visuali- ' sation with the bodily eye, and the g ift of mystical vision.29 A nd so Wordsworth becomes, for the Blakean, a kind of cari- icature w ho "fixed his affections on rocks and stones and trees and wanted man to become as like them as possible . . . ."30 For Blake, of course, corporeality had been the great enemy of imagination, and it was not u n til his last prophecy that he fin a lly resolved the antagonism between Vala and Jerusalem. The denunciation of pure corporeality, or nature, is essential to the Blakean myth of the f a ll, iand so equally essential to Blake’s poetry. Prom the Blake c ritic s w ho approach Wordsworth, however, one expects a greater understanding. A s Frye has said, "the perceived forms of the eternal world," for Wordsworth, "are those which are constantly perceived in th is one .... Blake is merely extending this principle . . . ."3^- O ne need only compare Blake’s 26The Complete Writings of William Blake, p. 762. 2% ngllsh Blake (Cambridge, 19i|.9), p. 183 •^English Blake, p. 183. 3^Fearful Symmetry, p. £ { .£ . symbol of Golgonooza, the furnace of m ateriality through ! which one must pass in order to realize perception of the , ! sp iritu al, with Wordsworth’s belief that imaginative vision I is grounded in the sensual vision of the corporeal eye. Moreover, Wordsworth’s figure of Nature is more like Blake’s Jerusalem than Vala, the binding goddess of Generation. For Wordsworth, it is the mature poet w ho fin ally comes to i recognize a kind of divinity in nature which goes beyond |the phenomenal world. H e sees i t as the overflowing foun- tairihead of sp iritu al power which can be sensed and known only by the correspondent power of the human imagination, or active mind. To express the union of the two poetically, Wordsworth adopted the marriage metaphor. His ’ ’spousal verse” celebrates a consummation not between the abstract mind of man and the -universe of concrete forms, but rather of the two sympathetic forces--within and without--in a \ relationship of mutual giving and gratitude. Separation from the sp iritu al power of nature—the loss of the "vi sionary gleam" without which the mind becomes a vacuum-- means for Wordsworth the daily enactment of the Fall of M an. For Locke, the very fact that the mind is the recipient of knowledge through the senses from the natural world meant that the mind must be passive or reflective rather than active or projective. The reason why Wordsworth could be a sensationist and a transcendental1st at the same time is not only that he attributed an active principle to the mind, (but that he attributed a corresponding principle to "Nature’ ^ I I I as well. Paradoxically, i t is the power of Mature which, | ; :by stirrin g the mind to activity, ensures that the mind will indeed be active in perception. The whole meaning of the recurrent word ’ ’ power" which Wordsworth repeats so frequently in The Prelude and in the shorter poems lie s in the metaphorical marriage of the ac tive principles which exist inside and outside the mind through the act of imaginative perception. In this lig h t, the figure of the Solitary Reaper (who reappears under many names in Wordsworth1s poetry) becomes clear. Just as Dante’s Matilda stands for an intermediate stage between heaven and earth, preparing the poet for his vision of paradise, the Solitary Reaper Is an intermediary figure, a ' priestess of Mature through w hom the poet has glimpses of eternity. Matilda draws her power from God, strengthening the poet for his meeting with Beatrice which Immediately follows. Similarly, the g irl in Wordsworth’s poem draws upon som e source of sp iritu al power, transferring i t to the poet’s mind through her strange song, the words of which, like the words of the leech gatherer, affect the liste n er as being unearthly or supernatural. Her song, like the vibrations of the aeolian lyre, touch a responsive chord in the poet’s mind and the fusion of powers Is complete and permanently assured through the agency of memory. She is ! the embodiment of the phenomenal world at the point or : ! •verge of sp iritu al vision, the intermediary who, like the i i | j prophetess of antiquity, admits the poet to a knowledge of |the invisible world. I t is precisely because imaginative or fu ll perception means a penetration beyond the lim its of f sensational knowledge that Wordsworth, like Blake, easily Identifies wisdom (or fu ll perceptual awareness) with r e l i gious tru th . The f a ll is a fallin g away or narrowing of perception for Blake, a loss of sp iritu al power for Words- , worth. For both poets the Fall of M an is fundamentally an epistemological one. The Immortality O de may be read, in th is respect, as i a dialectic which traces the development of the Wordsworth-; ian man through the successive sp iritu a l stages of primal innocence, f a ll, and redemption through the acquisition of wisdom, with the concurrent assertion of something very like the Christian idea of the fortunate f a ll. The child in the Ode, like the Boy of Winander and Wordsworth himself as the child of The Prelude, is a fu ll participant in the power of sp iritu al unity. To the child’s mind, heaven and earth are one, so that ’ ’every com m on sight” appears to him "Apparelled in celestial light" (Immortality Ode, 2-lj.). The lig h t imagery, used in a sim ilar manner by Dante and Milton, pervades the poem, suggesting the child’s visionary power--that is, his sense of the absolute unity of a ll things and his consequent lack of individual consciousness lor selfhood, The youth, s t i l l attended by the visionary j 'glean, is "Mature*s P riest” (73), a metaphor which comes 1 to have expanded significance for the poet of The Prelude. Wordsworth clearly distinguishes "Earth” from "Mature”: 1 the former, with its tutelary concrete forms and images, is man's "homely Nurse" (82), w ho only inadequately takes the place of the mother w ho becomes more and more remote from the adult man. In saying that the visionary gleam "is the glory which the child brings to th is world from a higher realm" rather than "a possession of nature,Fairchild seems to discount the distinction between Earth (which is s tric tly phenomenal) and Mature (potentially noumenal), and to minimize Wordsworth's own indication that the central metaphor of a great marriage was to give form to his poetic vision. The gleam is to be found neither in nature alone nor in the mind alone, w hat/its source, but rather in a relationship of interaction and mutual responsiveness. I have suggested that the fin al stage portrayed in the O de represents Wordsworth's version of the fortunate f a ll. Its tone is conciliatory, the poet having reached the in sight that memory and the power of the poetic imagination in the man can "breed/ Perpetual benediction" (Immortality Ode, 134-135). H e has lo st forever the state of primal ^Religious Trends in English Poetry. Vol. m . p. 201. 112 ; innocence or ‘ 'sympathy" (a relationship of two partners), i but the "shadowy recollections" of that state "Are yet the | fountain lig h t of a ll our day, / Are yet a master lig h t of a ll our seeing" (152-153). A Wordsworthian version of the ! ! , i music of the spheres—an apostrophe to the birds to "sing a, joyous song" (169)— marks the change in m ood* Only in the "years that bring the philosophic mind" (1 8 7 ) can the sym pathetic imagination or power to realize joy even in the condition of human suffering manifest its e lf, compensating for the loss of primal innocence under nature’s "more habi tual sway" (192). The tone is very much like that of the last book of Paradise Lost, when A dam , having realized man’s fu ll potential for abjectness and despair, rises to a new i 1 vision of joy at Michael’s revelation of the triumphant t ifuture of mankind. For both poets, human suffering which results from original sin is ironically the wellspring of joy, a key word in The Prelude. If, as Bloom suggests, the child of the O de is the "Natural M an" and the adult poet, "whose eye alters nature," is the "Imaginative Man," then one may view the f a ll as a tran sitio n from the one state of consciousness (or rather unconsciousness in the f ir s t case) to the o th e r.^ I t is, in any ease, the breaking of a bond, like Adam ’s breaking The Visionary Company, p. 170• of the covenant with God, the Old Testament divorce which dissolves only with the book of Revelation*s vision of G od ! i and man reunited in sp iritu al marriage. Wordsworth is I nowhere more trad itio n al as a Christian epic poet than in proposing visionary marriage as a solution to the f a ll, since the la tte r had always been regarded in terms of man's separation or divorce from God. In the B iblical trad itio n , i t is this divorce which makes the syufcolie marriage or reunion of man and G od in the Song of Solomon so ecstatic, the joyous meeting of the bride and bridegroom intensified ,by contrast with the bride’s e a rlie r tears at her failure i to find her absent husband. For dramatization of the fa ll, and of the conscious ! act of original sin in Wordsworth’s poetry, one must turn from the O de to other works, such as Hutting, in itia lly designated for a place in The Prelude but in fact published separately.^- A s one of "the l i t t l e Cells, Oratories, and sepulchral Recesses" of the "main W ork" which was to be The Recluse and which is more properly The Prelude, the poem may help to illuminate Wordsworth’s central concern as an epic poet. 3k -^ I follow the generally reliable dating of Words worth’s poems in F. W . Bateson’s Wordsworth; a Re-Interpre tation (London, H ew York, Toronto~ 195k5, Appendix 11. Opening with the n atu ralistic and commonplace details , of a ch ild 's expedition in the woods, the usual rustic j I | ( setting for Wordsworth and the world of Generation for Blake, the poem gradually penetrates beyond the descriptive level and the interest in the phenomenal world, fusing lite r a l description with mythic ritual* A s Wordsworth te lls us in The Prelude, "Our simple childhood s its upon a throne^ (V, 532); the poet's recollection, then, is of "One of those heavenly days that cannot die" (Nutting, 3). The 'child is at one with the universe as he approaches the "virgin scene" of the hazel grove (21). Bloom has remarked on the undertone of ravishment in the language describing the boy's breathless joy at his discovery of the "banquet" (25). The boy violates nature, Bloom says, in his attempt to possess i t rather than delight in it "with wise re- strain t" (23). His m utilation of the bower is a ll the more abrupt and disquieting, one may add, because Wordsworth pictures the sin as a sudden and irratio n ally destructive act within the otherwise peaceful and Edenic setting: Then up I rose, A nd dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash A nd merciless ravage: and the shady nook Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower, Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up Their quiet being .... (Nutting, 1 4.3 -4 8 ) 35 ^The Visionary Company, p. 125 jlhe "sense of pain" (52) which, he subsequently feels is for; ! j ;Wordsworth the primary c risis in a ll human experience: the i ! I moment of divorce from the sp iritu a l power of nature and a 1 i ! ;corresponding heightening of the consciousness of se lf. ■ The passage recalls the betrayal of Earth and Nature in the double climax of Paradise Lost, the sim ilar c ritic a l moments in the relationship between man and eternity during which a violent divorce occurs. Both Milton and Wordsworth iden t if y sp iritu al divorce and rape, and in Paradise Lost rape lis a parody of the tender and joyful union of the bride and bridegroom in the Song of Solomon, even though Milton shows ;it to lead to man’s ultimate good. In following Milton, “ Wordsworth reveals that he is very much aware that he is ,a "sinner," contrary to Bush’s suggestion. ; M uch of the impact of the boy’s betrayal of nature in Nutting results from Wordsworth’s use of the concept of animism, a problem which a number of c ritic s have discussed for its relevance to an understanding of his poetry and religion. Joseph Warren Beach traces the idea of Weltseele, or "world-soul," or "active principle," as the notion of a universal s p irit of nature has variously been called, to its philosophical sources, stressing the connection between ^ Mythology and the Romantic Tradition, p. 155. |animism and pantheism. The “sp irit of the woods” which the! ! .. I |hoy has violated may be simply a fic titio u s tutelary ^ I divinity such as peopled the world of Greek mythology,” conjured up by Wordsworth’s "fancy.Ultimately, Beach i concludes, it is impossible to te ll whether the poet really believed in the lite r a l existence of animating sp irits which inhabit the creatures and objects of the natural world.Baymond Dexter Havens takes a comparable view in asserting that Wordsworth took over the idea of l the anima mundi of Greek philosophy . . . as a kind of inferior goddess w ho did the actual work of exerting force in every part of the world under the direction of the Deity. ^ Moreover, Havens con tinues, Wordsworth “frequently thought of nature as a Spirit endowed with personality . . . w ho animates and guides the external world. Most b rillia n tly argued, perhaps, is Hartman’s discus sion of the genius lo c i, or “sp irit of place," which was V7 ■ 'The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (N ew York, 1936), p. 105. 3% *he Concept of Nature, p• 106. ^% *he M ind of a Poet: a Study of Wordsworth’s Thought with Particular Reference to The Prelude (Baltimore, 19lj.l), p. 191. fy-°The Mind of a Poet, p. 192. I 117j considered "a guardian as well as indwelling sp irit of his j (abode," and was to be essential in Wordsworth's formulation! ! i jof the notion of spots of tirae.^1 The genius lo c i, Hartmans i i explains, renews the poet through the forms of external nature, enabling him, after dejection, to confront the world anew "with a sensitive, creative s o u l." ^ Furthermore, one of the traditional "tutelary"functions of the genius loci was the prevention or revenge of the "desecration of its abode ."^-3 The genius loci belongs, of course, to the s p irit world, not to the phenomenal world which i t inhabits. Like Coleridge's albatross, i t shares in mysterious sp iritu al poxirer in which man may also share. The desecration of the hazel grove, then, is a sin against a source or zone of intensified sp iritu al power, with the consequent diminishing of that power in the boy. Yet, at the moment of c ris is , the sense of Nature's independent life seems keenest. There is s t i l l no actual separation from nature, no realization of the fu ll ambivalent impact of the f a ll, which only the ma ture poet of the Immortality O de or Tintern Abbey is capable of understanding. For the man, having lost the "aching joys" ^ Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814, p. 212. ^ Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-l8lij., p. 213., ^Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1811}., p. 213. 118^ and ’ ’dizzy raptures” that characterize the ch ild 's relation- ‘ship with nature, has yet received ’ ’other g if ts ,” ’ ’Abundant’ Recompense,” having learned ”To look on nature, not as in ;the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentim es/ The s t i l l , sad musie of humanity” (Tintern Abbey, 89-91), I Rhe song of the Solitary Reaper in which man and Nature are wedded in harmony. Reconciliation comes with a reaching outward of the sympathetic imagination, by which the mind is able to continually renew its kinship with the power that [the child had always known. The difference is that the married state can be envisioned only in flashes, or spots of time; i t can no longer be maintained without disruption. Without the active mind or imagination, it could not be maintained at a ll, | I have dwelt at some length upon Wordsworth's typical presentation of nature in Nutting not simply because the relationship between man and nature so preoccupied the poet, but also because i t is crucial to an understanding of the mythic quality of the epic marriage in The Prelude. Aes th etically , i t seems unimportant whether or not Wordsworth believed in a lite ra l sp irit of nature in any traditional sense. What matters very much is the immense importance of the ’ ’ powers” or "presences” outside himself which the poet lite ra lly fee ls, sometimes with extraordinary vividness, as in the episode of the stolen boat in The Prelude where the natural world appears to com e to life and bear down on the iboy: j i ! ' i . . . a huge C liff, ! I A s if with voluntary power in stin ct, I Uprear*d its head. I struck, and struck again, > And, growing s t i l l in stature, the huge C liff Rose up between m e and the stars, and s t i ll , With measur'd motion, like a living thing, Strode afte r me. , (Prelude, I, ^06-412) Underlying the scene is the la te r eighteenth-century con ception of nature as the animating principle of the universe t which had a place in English poetry even as early as the "General Prologue" to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with its picture of nature being reborn and stirrin g every creature to lif e . Wordsworth shares his age’s belief in an active universe in which even the most insignificant creatures and objects participate in a vast principle of creative energy. A nd i t is to the active universe, the imagination in nature, so to speak, that the active power of the poetic mind or human imagination responds. The breeze which tunes the poet’s mind in the opening of The Prelude is for Wordsworth the breath of God. Without i t , there could be no partner ship, no coalescence of powers which results in poetic creation. In the new epistemology, the mind half creates what i t perceives, at the same time that i t becomes fille d with sp iritu a l power from what i t perceives. This is what makes Wordsworth’s psychology simultaneously sensational and transcendental, part of the Lockean trad itio n and a I 12 0 | ; itransformation of that trad itio n as well. I t is the very ^perception of the interchange between man and nature, the ! | i connection between the two which, as Langbaum has remarked, gives the feeling of .joy to the poet in contemplation.^- In attempting to account for his philosophical and religious ideas in terms of precise in tellectu al systems and cate gories of b elief, w e ourselves commit the fundamental Wordsworthian sin of murdering to dissect and scrutinizing ithe visionary gleam in the light of com m on day. Further, iin concluding that his animistic portrayal of nature neces- ; sarily implies a pantheism which he was la te r to recant as an Anglican, w e separate the ’ ‘ poet1 1 from the religious seer or prophet and in sist upon the efficacy of an exact language of scienbe where only a language of poetic expressiveness w ill d o .^ Wordsworth's concept and figure of “Nature” in particular, I believe, is best discussed and understood in the language of poetic myth, not of rational system. “The function of poetry,” according to Robert Graves, "is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the ex perience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence ^"The Evolution of Soul in Wordsworth’s Poetry,” 266. hti A m ong others, Philip Wheelwright makes the contrast between the precise language of science and the ambiguous “expressive” language of poetic art; see The Burning Foun tain (Bloomington, Ind., 19£i}.). jexcites.”^ - ® The Muse, for Graves, is the White Goddess; |for Wordsworth she is Nature. In The Prelude he invokes I , I not Calliope, the usual M use of the epic poet, but Urania, •the ’ ’ heavenly” M use of Paradise Lost, the M use of astronomy w ho in the Renaissance was ex p licitly associated with r e l i gious in sp ira tio n .^ In the ’ ’Prospectus” lines, not wholly satisfied with the Classical Urania, he even allows for the p o ssib ility of ”a greater Muse" (26) w ho transcends any categorical function. Like Milton, Wordsworth fervently prays for the Muse’s inspiration in its most lite r a l sense. Various c ritic s have, heedless to say, commented upon the breeze to which the poet responds at the opening of The Prelude. Herbert Lindenberger notes Wordsworth’s tendency to create a "rhetorical bridge from the observable world of Ithe reader to the new world to be uncovered” through the use of poetic "images of interaction.”^ - ® The outstanding White Goddess: a H istorical Grammar of Poetic Myth ( n.p. 19if-8), Foreword, p. x ii. I understand Graves' s White Goddess to be a deity of the poetic imagination rather than a h isto rical riv al to the ”patriarchal” Hebrew Jehovah or the Christian God. A s such, she provides the poet with a kind of objective correlative toward which to direct his emotion. ^Bouglas Bush's note in his Glossary to The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton, p. 568. Won Wordsworth's Prelude (Princeton, 1 9 6 3 ), pp. 58, 69. ~ feature of the poem’s images, argues Lindenberger, is th eir shifting function from lite r a l setting to metaphorical sug- j gestiveness. The breeze, one of the "dominating.images” o f 1 [ The Prelude, is connected both to "higher powers" and to the creative p ro cess.^ Like the water image, the breeze, because of its flowing, transforming quality, its "ab ility : I r ' to interact with other natural elements," acts as a kind of intermediary between the "two worlds."£Q This, as I have proposed earlier, is precisely the position of the Solitary Reaper and other hermit figures in Wordsworth, with w hom the poet frequently associates such "interaction" images as breeze, water, and music. John Jones connects "the wind that searches the Prelude landscape" with the central metaphor of marriage and the aeolian harp image. The ebb and flow of the breeze, he maintains, "demonstrates the fittin g of mind and external things" in "a partnership of harmony."^1 Passing constantly between inward and outward, the breeze "manifests universal coherence," representing "the idea of a world bound together ^ O n Wordsworth’s Prelude, p. 70. ^ 0n Wordsworth’s Prelude, p. 71 • ^•The E gotistical Sublime: a History of Wordsworth’s Imagination (London. 195Ll ). p . 97. ~ |in discourse with i t s e l f ." ^ A nd traditionally, as Jones i ; I reminds us, ’ ’breath is also closely associated with urgent jspiritual presence,a point which M . H. Abrams discusses; at some length in his essay on the breeze metaphor in Eng- ' ilish Romantic p o e try .^ The partnership or interchange, however, has to do with more than a union of mind and "ex ternal things." I t depends chiefly upon Wordsworth's notion of the correspondent powers which make up active or imagina- l tive perception, and so is basic to the informing myth of 1 The Prelude with which the epic begins. The breeze is both material (that is , functional as a tangible image and part of the natural world) and sp iritu a l in that i t is an objective correlative for the "power" or "presence" or "sp irit" of Mature which Wordsworth tends to call by such abstract names when he attempts to identify i t . A s a partner in the marriage of perception, the breeze is, in n atu ralistic form, the M use w ho breathes lif e —creativity or imagination—into the poet; the goddess w ho "creates" him by stirrin g his imaginative powers through her corresponding power and w ho is in turn served by him. I t is the M use of ^2The E gotistical Sublime, pp. 9 8 , 101. ^ The E gotistical Sublime, p. 99. ^■"The Correspondent Breeze," in English Romantic Poets, Modern Essays in Criticism (N ew York, I960), pp. 37-51}.. jthe active universe to w hom the poet pays tribute at the i i beginning of the poem: I i . . . this hour j Hath brought a g ift that consecrates m y joyj For I, methought, while the sweet breath of Heaven W as blowing on m y body, fe lt within A corresponding mild creative breeze, A v ita l breeze which tra v e ll’d gently on O'er things which i t had made, and is become A tempest, a redundant energy Vexing its own creation. | (Prelude, I , 39-47) A s M aud Bodkin says of Milton’s invocations in Paradise Lost, inspiration is conceived as the power informing the poet’s song. Every poet, she maintains, is the archetypal Orpheus (with w hom , one might add, Wordsworth overtly identifies himself on several occasions), his M use being his goddess- mother w ho breathes the music and life of eternity through him. Inspiration is an "access of power" which is in ti mately connected to the mystery of cosmic creation, and in which the poet’s "thoughts seem to move of th eir ow n v o li tion." I t is this creative experience, says Miss Bodkin, which "seems to be the central fact that has taken shape in the tradition of the poet's companionship with the M use and ^Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination (London, N ew York, Toronto, 193k), especially PP. 153-162. 125; | dependence upon her. 1 1 i For Wordsworth, too, the role of the poet, or his relationship to the goddess-Muse, is one of the fundamentalj i themes as well as the basis for epic poetry. I t becomes a recurrent theme in The Frelude, from the poet's dejected failure to serve the M use in the opening passage to the series of visions culminating in the Mount Snowdon experi- Sence. A closer examination of Wordsworth's conception of himself as an epic poet in the trad itio n of Orpheus, then, w ill reveal the fu ll significance of sp iritu a l marriage as i t informs the poet's visionary function. The poem Hutting once again offers a starting point or , entrance into The Prelude. Discussing the golden bough of The Aeneld, Miss Bodkin remarks that the magical branch represents . . . the tre e -s p irit, or, more generally* the power of renewal in vegetation and in other forms of lif e . The single branch chosen in the spring festiv a l to be set up before one's door brings the sp irit and power that is stirrin g in every branch within the woods, to bless and ^ strengthen the householder shut away within his dwellingr' For Wordsworth, w ho believed in a living universe, the bough must have particularly symbolized the power within Haturej Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, pp. l55» 15^-. ^ Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, p. 130. the desecration of the hazel bough is a ll the more affecting when seen against the trad itio n of veneration with which i t ; I jhad been regarded. In Celtic mythology the nut symbolized concentrated wisdom. The hazel in particular was associated with poetic i ' a rt, producing flowers (beauty) and fru it (wisdom) at the same time. Furthermore, as Robert Graves remarks, “a ll the jknowledge of the arts and sciences was bound up with the eating of these n u ts.”-’® In Keating*s History of Ireland the god M ac Cool, whose name means "son of the Hazel" cele brated with his two brothers a multiple marriage to the Triple Goddess of Ireland, w hom they also worshipped.-^ In Wordsworth’s poem, the boy's sin or violation consists in his attempting to tear away from Nature the symbol of her "wisdom" or sp iritu al power, thus asserting his own supposed j I ; pre-eminence. Like Eve, he is guilty of a selfish pride, rashly believing in his own divinity, rather like Blake's TJrizen, w ho would tear away the power of eternity and con fine i t within his own corporeal world; in both cases the attempt is to separate or divide, to divorce the power from its source and thus to fa ll from spiritual wholeness. The - * ® The White Goddess, p. 1 5 > 1 . ^C ited by Graves in The White Goddess, p. l£ l. jUltimate resu lt, for Wordsworth, is not joy hut recognition; !of a crisis in man’s emotional life "too deep for tears" j l ' | which he would try to resolve in his autobiographical epic, : i ! 'portraying his ow n mind as representative of the imaginative mind in general. His great poetic task was again to con front the mystery of Nature's power and its meaning for the individual mind which would wed i t "In love and holy pas sion." In speaking'of The Prelude, Hartman comments that "poet, hero, and visionary are obviously of the same company, three manifestations of heroic temper," but that there is Z . Q nevertheless no com m on myth to guide either poet or reader. Certainly Hartman is right in asserting that Wordsworth ju stifie s his calling as springing from nature; but one must not forget his constant echoes of and themes in com m on with , the long trad itio n of Christian religious epic poetry as well. Furthermore, the poet firmly aligns himself with a trad itio n older and more primary s t i l l when he relates him self to England’s Celtic past. H e is to be the Druid or "oak-seer," the true poet w hom the ancient Celts regarded as sancrosanct and distinguished from the mere gleeman as 6°Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787-18IZ l. pp. 209, 208. Again, the bias of modern criticism is that Wordsworth (as well as other Romantics) departed radically from a ll tradition and made l i t t l e effo rt to use ea rlier poetic conventions with the intention of becoming part of the lite ra ry trad itio n . 128 , ibeing a p riest and judge as well. I Wordsworth’s conception of the sacred office of the jpoet as Druid, or ’ ’Nature’s p r ie s t,” is fundamental to The i jPrelude. In Book II he speaks of "That s p irit of religious ilove in which / 1 walked with Nature” (II, 376-377)* which leads him to a view of unity in diversity: ”... for in , a ll things / I saw one lif e , and fe lt that i t was joy” (II, i l 4 . 2 9 -i4. 3 O), the joy, again of the Song of Songs and of the epithalamium, the vision of perfect union and the restora- ; ition of man’s unfallen state. In Book IV he describes his dedication to poetry and the bond of religious love which mysteriously controls him: I made no vows, but vows W ere then made for me; bond unknown to m e W as given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, A dedicated S p irit. O n I walk’d In blessedness, which even yet remains. (IV, 3l4l-3i4.5) After his hope in the French Revolution had been be trayed, following his long detainment by "Man’s unhappiness and g u ilt” (Preludet XI, 1), his sp irit (that is , his capa- °-L The White Goddess, p. 7. Graves, it should be noted, perversely excludes the Romantics from the category of true poets, curiously neglecting Wordsworth's form of goddess worship. city for participation in sp iritu al power or energy) is restored by Nature's sympathetic power as the marriage bond! is re-established. The lines have a tone of tenderness, | idealizing a harmony of balance which recalls once more th e , garden of Solomon and the covenant between man and heaven: . . . in Nature s t i l l Glorying, I found a counterpoise in her, Which, when the sp irit of evil was at height Maintain'd for m e a secret happiness; Her I resorted to, and lov'd so much .... (XI, 31-35) ! Nature comforts and strengthens the sorrowing poet, just as Thetis, the goddess-mother of Achilles, f i ll s her son with a new surge of energy through communion with him during his low point of sorrow and depression, making him overcome his wrath of the selfhood and thereby rescuing him from u tte r to discouragement , c- The imagery of the poet as Nature's p riest and son in The Prelude culminates in the Druid vision on Salisbury Plain near the end of the poem. After expressing his re a li zation that both passionate emotion and calmness "equally are nature's g ift" (XII, 1-3), Wordsworth goes on to explain ^Maud Bodkin, in Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, dis cusses the poet's projection of himself as warrior in heroic poetry, as Homer does in The IIia d ; see especially p. 160 ff. where Miss Bodkin considers the importance of the mother- goddess as a source of power to the hero, and the correspon dence between th is relationship and that of the poet and his Muse. 1 1301 'that "Nature through a ll conditions hath a power/To conse- ! | i jcrate, if w e have eyes to see (XII, 282-283). And in the •vision its e lf, he sees himself as part of a sacred tradition! I ,T he light of the senses goes out; "A midnight darkness \ seem’d to com e and ta k e / All objects from m y sight" (XII, 328-329). H e "sees" the company of poet/priests with th eir long beards and white wands (very likely the magic hazel wands of power in Celtic folklore), "... while b rea th / Of I music seem’d to guide them" (XII, 35>l-35>2). Wordsworth again fuses the images of Nature’s breath and the heavenly song which connects the two worlds, the powers of Nature and the poet’s mind. For Wordsworth, as for Dante in the Earth ly Paradise, the dual images of music and breeze (the song and breath of the Muse, respectively) indicate moments of heightened visionary powers--what Graves designates as the presence of the M use or White Goddess. Appropriately, the dual images recur often in the spots of time passages. The importance of the vision in the Druid passage is that i t further c la rifie s the poet’s recognition of his purpose in relation to other men; he recalls, immediately after the "sight" of the Druids, That in l if e 's every-day appearances I seem'd about th is period to have sight Of a new world, a world, too, that was f i t To be transmuted and made visible To other eyes .... (XII, 369-373) iwhat the poet perceives in the objects, the forms, the ! ! I images of external nature on Salisbury Plain is the sp irit , I i idisguised in them but paradoxically visible only through them. Stonehenge is, like the hermit figure, an intermedi ary through which one must pass to reach a vision of the invisible world, and whieh must serve the a r tis t as a means by which to objectify his vision in poetry. Blake*s Golgon- ooza, the city of art b u ilt out of Generation, is sim ilar in function; in its furnace a kind of alchemy by which the phenomenal collapses into the noumenal takes plaee. For the poet on Salisbury Plain, the source of sp iritu al power has been "transmuted'* so that he can perceive i t and as an a r tis t in turn transmute it through the imagination in order to make it perceptible to others. Like Blake, he i icomes to stress the power of the transforming mind. H e fin ally sees the wedding of mind and universe as A balance, an ennobling interchange O f action from within and from without, The excellence, pure s p irit, and best power Both of the object seen, and eye that sees. (Prelude, XII, 376-379) Unlike Blake, Wordsworth sees the Druids not as Urizenic p riests w ho demand sacrifices for the natural world, but as the prime exponents of imaginative power or vision. In becoming a Druid, the poet engages in a sp iritu a l sacrifice of self whereby he surrenders to the greater power of Nature and is subsequently permitted to become her bridegroom. iThe only obstacle to the marriage is the assertive selfhood iwhich, like the wrath of Achilles, recognizes its own power: alone and is hence incapable of vision in a marriage of i powers. In that state of mind, man is a plunderer in the world and a ravisher of Nature, like the boy in Nutting. With th is self-conception of the poet as the priest and bridegroom of Nature in mind, Wordsworth’s position in the tradition of religious/mythic (sometimes but not neces- -sarily epic) poetry begins to emerge more clearly. Hartman has said that no com m on myth informs The Prelude. I pro pose, rather, that the most fundamental cultural myth--the "monomyth," as it has been called—the myth of the archetypal adventure or epic journey, is basic to the poem. In its iusual form, the mythological adventure demands that the hero pass through three principal stages—separation, in itia tio n , and return—according to Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. ^3 Havens believes that "the one interior life that lives in a ll things and the hiding places of power" (N ew York, 1949), p. 30. M y application of the idea of the "monomyth" is based upon Campbell's presentation of mythic patterns in psychology and folklore; he does not sug gest lite ra ry adaptations of the epic journey, however, as M aud Bodkin does in Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. Campbell is in fundamental agreement with Jungians in his presentation of myths if not in th eir meanings. ! ' " 1 3 3 ; i i comprise Wordsworth's most basic preoccupations as a poet, j |Por Havens, external nature is important to Wordsworth only; jby virtue of its ’ ’being a chief means of entering into com- ,raunion with the O ne and of discovering and drawing upon the . isources of power.That communion, like the archetypal relationship between the mythic hero and his goddess-mother,, is sp iritu a l marriage, possible, however, only under certain conditions and through certain ritu a ls . A s Campbell points out, the trad itio n al separation of the hero from the ordinary world is necessary to make pos sible "a penetration to some source of power, and a lif e - enhancing return.The tran sitio n is always “from the world of com m on day into a region of supernatural wonder,” and back again to the commonplace.^ The very reason that Wordsworth dwells on the commonplace events of his life in The Prelude is to make more vivid by contrast the moments of supreme vision which continually break through the shell of the mundane world as spots of time; he elevates ’ ’l i f e 's every-day appearances” because i t is only through th eir intermediary function that he may enter ”a new world.” The poet's sp iritu al quest, always half-hidden by the persistence ^The Mind of a Poet, p. 4 . k - ^The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 35. ^ The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 30 j " " ' ' " ' " . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ~ - - - - - - - 13k, jof the concrete world of objects, runs throughout The Pre- ! i 1 lude. But in the climactic spots of time, Wordsworth’s I ivisions take form within and through those objects, as the i i phenomenal and the noumenal are fused by metaphor in order - to symbolize the fusion in the perceiving mind. Through an abstractness and ambiguity of poetic diction, he dissolves our sense of the lite r a l as lite r a l and thus manages to ^travel” in the region of the mind away from the commonplace without ever abandoning the concrete landscape, i The hero's usual separation, then, as Campbell sketches i t , may be broken down into (1) the call to adventure, (2) the refusal of the c a ll, or failure to answer i t , (3) super natural aid, and (if.) the crossing of the f ir s t threshold f and entrance into a ’ ’zone of magnified power,” beyond which lie unknown dangers. ^ At the threshold of adventure, the hero generally confronts a guardian which he must either conciliate or defeat in order to proceed, alive, to the in itia tio n stage; if he is k illed by the guardian, he is taken dead beyond the threshold, from which he must U lti- Aft mately emerge in resurrection. In Jungian terms, the hero ^Summarized from The Hero with a Thousand Faees. d o . *1-9-77. ----------------------------------------------------- - ^ forh e H e ro w i t h a T h o u s a n d F a c e s , p . 2Lj.5>. jbegins the night sea journey or passage from the conscious to the unconscious mind. The guardian at the threshold of the unconscious is generally represented as a whale-dragon monster that devours the hero and carries him to the East, where he w ill emerge with a new life-resto rin g k n o w le d g e .^ Rebirth requires a "death" of some sort* the sacrifice of existence or knowledge on one level is necessary for the b irth of a new improved consciousness.7^ In the spots of time passages, the poet’s vision de pends upon the in itia l Isolating influence of darkness and physical solitude, which makes possible a heightened con sciousness, The guardians which would prevent his passage into the realm of visionary perception are, like Blake’s Covering Cherub, his own restrictin g senses, whose light must go out in flashes even at the moment "... that they have shewn to us / The invisible world" (Prelude, VI, 5 3 5 - 536). That world, as I shall demonstrate presently, is the archetypal underworld of the unconscious mind, in which the great marriage of powers takes place, and from which the poet emerges with new wisdom of imaginative perception—a Druid, ^Jolande Jacobi, Complex / Archetype / Symbol in the Psychology of C. G. Jung, tran s. Ralph Manheim (N ew York, 1959), p. 179 f f . 7°Complex/ Archetype / Symbol, p. 1 7 6 f f . Structurally, of course, The Prelude follows rather ! I closely the biographical pattern of its author*s life ; s till, I _ j there are important factual changes, omissions, and dramatic Iheightenings. Within such a framework, Wordsworth weaves the pattern of the epic hero’s quest. Although the vision on Mount Snowdon can be considered the great climax in the development of the poetic mind, each of the spots of time is a minor climax. For Wordsworth, as for Jung, the mind passes continuously between the poles of intense imaginative activ ity —Jiang’s "libido” or psychic energy—and passivity i i or re s t. The poet’s failure to respond to the call to epic adventure, the sum m ons from the M use to participate in the infinitude which is "Our destiny, our nature, and our home" (Prelude, VI, 538), is no indication of absolute failu re, but rather suggests the continual flux of the mental cycle. During his childhood, Wordsworth’s mythical golden age, he had "... held unconscious intercourse / With the eternal Beauty, drinking in / A pure organic pleasure ..." from nature (Prelude, I , 589-591), and so in his "dawn of being" had known the continual "bond of union betwixt lif e and 3°yl f (Prelude, I, 585)* In adulthood, he finds a resurgence of sp iritu a l energy in the spots of time, induced by memory, which are scattered throughout lif e . Whereas Dante had b u ilt his Commedia continually upward, spiralling toward ultimate and complete vision in the sacred marriage between man and God, Wordsworth, because of his view of the mind and the nature of perception, must portray the quest of the j epic hero as the repeated descent and return from the under-! i world of unconscious imaginative power. There can be no absolute "victory" for the mind in the sense that i t can enter a state of Imaginative energy in which i t may dwell eternally; the energy of imaginative activ ity brings about its neeessary opposite—the dejection state of imaginative inactivity. The mind is Wordsworth's subject; the quest pattern, with essential alterations, is the vehicle by which its character is expressed. Spiritual marriage is the perceptual renewing of the bond with Nature and is an everyday occurrence. The various metaphors of marriage which recur often in The Prelude—"bond of union,1 1 "communion,1 1 "ennobling inter-i I - * change," "unconscious intercourse," and so on, are almost commonplace in th eir frequency, but Wordsworth's choice of diction is nonetheless significant. Such terms constitute at the same time the poet's vision and his a rtis tic means of presenting that vision. The sp iritu al marriage of powers becomes his symbol for the one world, the sp iritu al state of ideal perception, in which the primal joy of unity which the child of the Immortality O de knows is recovered in a trans muted form. This is the resurrection of the mind to which Wordsworth refers in the eleventh book of The Prelude. Fol lowing the long imaginative drought of the previous books, [With the b itte r disappointments of the sojourn in France, |the correspondent breeze returns again as "The breath of ^Paradise" to the "recesses” of the poet’s soul (XI, 11-12). 'Like Beatrice with Dante, Nature is the poet’s comforter after his long absence from her: I saw the Spring return, when I was dead To deeper hope, yet had I joy for her, And welcomed her benevolenee .... (XI, 24-26) Shortly thereafter comes one of his most passionate invo cations to the "soul of Nature" w ho had been his bride and rejoiced with him before he betrayed her for Cambridge and London (XI, 138 ff.). In the archetypal myth of the quest or epic journey, as Campbell outlines i t , sp iritu al marriage is central to the period of in itia tio n . The hero, having crossed the threshold, finds himself in "a dream landscape of curiously flu id , ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession 71 of tria ls ." In the f i r s t book of The Faerie Queene, Spenser allegorizes as mythical giants and monsters the undesirable mental tr a its whieh the hero must overcome. In The Prelude, the poet is beset by his own doubts in his ^1The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 9 7. search Tor the "hiding places of power,” She London book, I .1 |In particular, illu stra te s the great obstacle to communion : •with the in fin ite . Although the "motley imagery" (Prelude, ; ¥11, 150) of the city is pleasurable, the fragmentary mas querade composed of "all specimens of man" (¥11, 236) is a pleasure which reinforces the tyranny of the senses by its i . constant surface appeal to them. The "Residence in London" detains the poet/hero from his quest, just as Spenser’s jPhaedria detains Guyon on the Idle Lake in the second book of The Faerie Queene, The world is indeed too much with the poet in the city; i t s tifle s the energy of creativ ity Which, in the myth, comes only from "some sort of dying to the world,"^^ The magical transfer of power or wisdom from the omphalos—the center of the earth and source of a ll ^spiritual power—to the hero, can take place only during a phase of personal non-entity, which Wordsworth was to call a "wise passiveness" in the presence of Nature. In th is stage of in itiatio n --fo r Wordsworth the wedding of the mind’s power and Nature’s in the perceptive act of recognition—the epic hero, says Campbell, "discovers and assim ilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing i t or by being swallowed," finding at la st 7^The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p, 35, 3 lf.O i I jthat "he and his opposite are not of differing species, but jone flesh ."73 i n The Prelude, the two great apparent oppo- ; i . i |sites are the mind of man (specifically the poet*s mind) and the phenomenal world of external nature. At moments of i heightened imaginative perception, the poet sees that divine, 'power resides in both and that they are thus in fact wedded , to each other. The mind, like the dejected Achilles or the ; narrator of the Commedla, draws its energy from the goddess- mother which is also its inspiring Muse. Marriage, then, » is perceptual blending and fusion which is a consummation and also a consuming. The child of The Prelude mentally devours his natural environment, and even the mature wor shipper and lover of Nature invokes her thus: i 0 Nature i Thou hast fed M y lofty speculations; and in thee, For th is uneasy heart of ours X find A never-failing principle of joy, A nd purest passion .... (Prelude. I I , lt.62-^66) The association between eating imagery and passionate love is a commonplace one, having been used by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra and by Fielding in T om Jones, among the outstanding examples. To consume Nature, paradoxically, 7^The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 108. is to become a part of i t , to share in its power and its essence. O ne is reminded again of the Celtic belief that | Ipower is gained by eating hazel nuts* ! throughout the Prelude, Wordsworth wavers in his at- I “ — — — — —— tempts to identify the primary source of Nature's sp iritu al power; the very term ’ ’Nature," with its shifting meanings and great range of connotation, reflects his indecision. Yet the mind of the poet is in continual flux. The view of the mature poet is not that of the child; nor is the view of the mind in activ ity that of the mind in passivity or dejection. In the Simplon Pass vision, the human "Imagina tio n ” seems to rise in assertion of its own autonomy {¥1, £25>-fl>36). Wordsworth's attention, at le a st, seems to focus more upon the mind than upon external nature. Certainly he moves more and more toward the Kantian affirmation of the active mind and away from a completely associationist view which seemed to elevate the senses unduly. But Wordsworth never was an unqualified associationist, nor did he ever abandon his belief that Nature has her own power and adopt the Blakean view that the mind creates its own "nature." The spots of time— Wordsworth's plummetings into Nature's underworld—are not simply creations of the human imagina tion, deliberate transmutations of the natural phenomena which inspire them, but instances of the union of opposites, the wedding of powers. Wordsworth again adopts the eating 114-2 j metaphor when, in the eleventh book, he alludes to the spots i of time as recollections by which ". . . our m inds/ Are ! i ' 1 nourished and invisibly repair'd" (XI, 26Zj.-26f?). The power of Nature, once again, is that of the comforter, the poet's i . ' M use or goddess-mother, communion with w hom results in a j profound resurgence of energy within himself. Wordsworth is unwavering in insisting throughout his poetry on the bond with nature. By the la s t three books of the poem, Wordsworth seems to have confirmed his notion that power resides equally in nature and in the mind. The important shift in the eleventh; book may be seen as the poet' s further acceptance of Kantian philosophy and the importance of the active mind. H e comes to see the la tte r much more as an active partner in the relationship with Nature, not simply the recipient but the giver as well: Ohi mystery of M an, from what a depth Proceed thy honours! I am lo st, but see In simple childhood something of the base O n which thy greatness stands, but th is I feel, That from thyself i t is that thou must give, Else never canst receive. (Prelude, XI, 329-334) The power of the mind, whatever its source', Wordsworth calls "Imagination," and the revelation of the Simplon Pass con s is ts primarily in his recognizing i t as such. The "depth" from which man's power rises remains a mystery. The mature li+3' i poet does not depart so fa r from the in itia tio n myth, or ’ from his fid e lity to his Muse, that he slights Mature, w hom jhe has, as an adult, com e to see as essentially noumenal : rather than phenomenal. A s he says to Coleridge in Book XI,1 "This History, m y Friend, hath chiefly to ld / Of intellectual power . . ." (XI, i{.2-l4.3). Mature, "... excellent and fa ir, / That didst rejoice with m e . . . ” (XI, 138-139), clearly has her own v ita lity apart from the individual mind* The joy resulting from the blending of the powers is called "wisdom,” the deeper knowledge which contrasts to the Loc kean "knowledge” of the senses only. In the-Mount Snowdon scene, Mature emerges as the positive center of power, from which the mind breathes its 'inspiration. Poetic or imaginative minds, continually engaged in creation, are able To hold communion with the invisible world. Such minds are truly from the Deity, For they are Powers;—and hence the highest b liss That can be known is th eirs .... (Prelude. XIII, 105-108) Wordsworth uses the term "communion" largely in its Christian sense—the marriage of G od and man which is also bound up with "consuming” the deity and hence taking on the power of knowledge. The image here works to show the identity of powers. In portraying Mature as analogous to mind, Words worth seeks to show the marriage whereby the individual* [Identity of each, dissolves* Once again* Mature in the sense jof the phenomenal world (the mountain scene) is merely the ; i I mask of ’ ’the invisible world” of sp iritu al power, ’ ’The | i I . i Deity” is perhaps best interpreted as the power which Mature embodies, the power of the invisible world, but which can never be precisely understood. That power, in terms of the monomyth, is the omphalos, or center of creative energy; in Jungian terms, i t is the libido which is the foundation of a ll psychic existence.*^ For Wordsworth, as for Jung, the ! lite r a l ’ ’existence” of the libido is unimportant; as a metaphor for psychic processes, i t is crucial. The Snowdon vision, then, is essentially a recognition > of identity. The feeding metaphor reaches its aggregate force in the poet’s ’ ’ perfect image of a mighty Mind” which ”feeds upon infinity" (Prelude, XIII, 68-69), as the mind realizes that external and internal are one and that its own power participates in the power of divinity. Thus, the ’ ’ waters, torrents, streams” of sublimity roar ’ ’ with one voice” in symbolic proclamation of this vision of unity (XIII, 58-59). The fallen man w ho had reached a succession of low points in his deepening divorce from the sources of power in the Cambridge, London, and France books, has finally ^Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G -. Jung: an Introduction with Illu stra tio n s, trans. K. W . Bash (M ew Haven, 1951) rev. ed. , p. 7 7 . jrecaptured the child*s sense of primal unity and, unlike i ! • i jthe child, is conscious of that unity. Metaphorically, the , 'active mind is a mountain of rising mists; in dejection i t I . becomes its opposite, the passive Lockean mind, absorbing surface sensations, and may be likened to a fla t plain. ’ ’The ultimate adventure” of the in itia tio n , as Campbell explains, ”. . . i s commonly represented as a mystical mar riage . . . of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World.The marriage ”. .. represents - the heroT s to ta l mastery of lif e ; for the woman is lif e , the hero its knower and master.She is, for Graves, the White Goddess, the figure of Beatrice who, as Miss Bodkin shows, appears to her lover in divine form and transforms him by transferring her power to him, strengthening him for his sp iritu al journey and making him capable of judgment. For Wordsworth, she is the ’ ’ never-failing principle of joy,” the bride and mother of the Druid-poet. But again, the ritu a l of in itia tio n in The Prelude is repetitive; to be functional i t must be constantly renewed, for the fluctuating psyche persists in fallin g away from fu ll imaginative energy 7%jg_ Hero with a Thousand Faces, p, 109. 7forhe Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 120. ^Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, p. I7I 4. ff. in communion with its essence. Throughout the poem, there fore, there are the constant minor victories--the glimpses • j of unity in nature—which also characterize the quest myth. i t I t is essential to the Wordsworthian apocalypse, the great i consummation which would include a ll men, and of which his poetry is a spousal verse or herald, that the visionary unity is perpetually shattered and restored. Both the ac tiv e universe and the active mind are in everlasting flux, I so that the fin a l victory which would be a permanent state 'of marriage and a guarantee that joy w ill never turn to dejection, must remain always in the future. At the same time, the creative mind of the poet is continually developing, strengthening and becoming re v ita l ized through its ever-increasing awareness of and sharing in the power of the universe. Eaeh of the spots of time is such an in itia tio n rite ; the poet’s memory is the mythic helper, like Spenser’s dwarf and palmer in The Faerie Queene From each such ^descent” into an imaginative region of power, the poet returns with new strength which manifests its e lf in poetry. Wordsworth’s poetic achievement fa lls off with his corresponding failure to propitiate the guardian of Nature’s underworld and to reach the imaginative power of his own mind in the recollections of the spots of time, whose loss in The Excursion Is replaced by overt philosophi cal statement. lWi | Art1st1cally, the climactic spot of time in The Pre- i ! ! lude is the vision on Mount Snowdon, which dramatizes the i highest point which the poet’s perception was able to 1 attain . S till, Wordsworth is always aware not only that the goddess is capable of betraying him, but that betrayal > ! is indeed essential to her character. The fa u lt, though, remains with him, since Mature never betrays the wise—the man capable of imaginative perception, but seems to betray the man w ho perceives only p a rtia lly . Graves stresses the goddess’s dual nature— her propensities for both good and ev il, creation and destruction at a whim. M uch of her fearful aspect seems to under the Prelude ch ild ’s education by Mature through the "ministry of fear" which, as Havens remarks, is akin "to aw e and a sense of the sublime, a rre s -< ting, often frightening, and yet stimulating, as danger 78 commonly is, and somehow exalting."' M ot so exalting, however, is the fear attending the worship of Mature, the need for repeated visionary experience which may drive the poet to despondency: Nature's betrayal of man by apparently spuming him—that is , by entering his perception as no more than a life le ss aggregate of external objects. This is the c risis of the Immortality O de and Tintern Abbey, at its worst, the "corporeal" understanding of the parodic ?®The Mind of a Poet, p. 39 "natural" man, Peter Bell: ! A primrose by a riv e r’s brim A yellow primrose was-to him, A nd i t was nothing more. (Peter B ell, 22j.8-250) Without the visionary gleam, there is no "Nature" but simply the world, of objects, and the gleam is kindled only by the marriage of the mind to its correspondent power in acts of perception. Nature seems to betray man in keeping from him her hiding places of power, but i t is with man himself that the responsibility of the betrayal re sts. It is the failure of the human imagination to connect its e lf with the imagination in Nature which is , for Wordsworth, the Pall of M an. Nature’s chief g ift to man is, as Bloom puts i t , a "renovating virtue" to which he need only return in a wise passiveness, a suppression of ego, or a dying to the world, without which imaginative activ ity is abortive.?^ In fact, man betrays himself in restrictin g himself to the knowledge of the senses, whose light must go out if fu ll imaginative perception is to take place. The poet’s g ift to man—the g ift of the poem, which is the incarnation of the blended imaginative powers--corres- ponds to the fin al stage of the monomyth, the triumphant ^The Visionary Company, P. 139. jreturn of the hero.80 Through his visionary participation jin infinitude at moments of heightened perceptive intensity, I the hero/poet of The Fre lude has been fille d with the un usual creative power of the archetypal underworld, and has experienced the rebirth of his creative mind or soul. His Ipower w ill overflow into the poem its e lf, the e lix ir or boon which restores the world. X n the sonnets on England, he is pre-eminently conscious of his heroic role as bard or Druid, constantly reminding his countrymen of their former glory and invoking the tradition of sp iritu al strength which Milton's name suggests. Par from ”shrinking from visionary subjects," as Hartman charges, Wordsworth’s very role as hero/poet depends upon his acceptance of the great traditional myth of the epic journey. "Nature," in the largest sense, does not lead man to transcend i t , because Nature its e lf is transcendental. There is no unresolved opposition between Nature and Imagination, because, as the Snowdon episode illu stra te s, they are "one voice," one wedded power. M ore than other visionary poets, Wordsworth tends to keep both worlds always in view, u n til the mist of imagina tion blurs th e ir boundaries and eradicates th eir separate ness. Whereas Dante and Milton had plunged directly into a The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 9 7. |visionary cosmos, representing the ordinary world only all©4 Igorically or through allusion, Wordsworth never completely t i loses sight of one world at the moment of his entrance into another. Perhaps, as Hartman argues, he is deliberately 1 i avoiding apocalypse in the sense of a violent disruption, a breaking of the bond between man and nature. Whatever the reason, he maintains a vision of paradise or heaven as united with earth, and accessible only through the in te r mediary function of the phenomenal world. i Yet the world of natural objects impresses the mind o f 1 the man much less than i t does that of the child, so that .Wordsworth often has recourse to other intermediaries w ho make the passage easier. These are the so lita rie s, like the; 'highland reaper, who, at the brink of the two worlds, are Nature’s p riests. In The Golden Bough, as I have summarized in Chapter I, Frazer describes the primeval conception of continuity and fruitfulness in the natural world dependent upon the holy marriage of the goddess of the sacred grove and the king/priest of the wood. Hartman regards the typical hermit figure of Tintern Abbey as a prophet, "an image of transcendence," who is already in possession of the vision of which the poet is in search.The real meaning of the natural man for Wordsworth, I suggest, has ^ •The Unmediated Vision: an Interpretation of Words worth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valery (N ew Haven, 1954)» P* 34• 151; to do with, the transference of power, and thus Is very close1 I 1 to the myth of Nurmi which Frazer outlines. ' 1 The Wanderer of The Excursion is the archetype of the figure in Wordsworth’s poetry--'1 . . . o'erpowered/By Nature” (I, 281-282), ”. . . by mystery and hope,/And the f i r s t virgin passion of a soul / Com m uning with the glorious universe” (I,' 28Ij.-286). Wordsworth shows the consummation of the Wanderer’s marriage to his goddess Nature in terns reminiscent of the ch ild ’s experience of "primal sympathy.” H e has an "appetite” for natural objects; the ocean and the earth ”. . . in gladness lay/Beneath him" (I, 202-203); . . . his sp irit drank The spectacle: sensation, soul, and form, All melted into him; they swallowed up His animal being; in them did he live, A nd by them did he liv e; they were his lif e . In such access of mind, in such high hour Of v isitatio n from the living God. (Excursion, I, 206-212) Not only does the Wanderer consume Nature, but Nature "swal lows" him as well in a relationship of reciprocity. Unlike the poet, he dwells eternally in the life-giving depths of power and the eternal presence of God. The speaker of the f ir s t book of The Recluse, the work which was to fu lly express Wordsworth’s epithalamic vision, enjoys a sim ilar relationship with Nature, w hom he addresses as Dante’s narrator addresses the smiling and protective Beatrice, or as Solomon addresses his bride in the garden: "Embrace m e then, ye H ills, and close m e in, H ow in the clear and open day I feel Your guardianship; I take i t to m y heart; I 'Tis like the solemn shelter of the night, j But I would ca ll thee beautiful, for mild A nd soft, and gay, and beautiful thou art, Bear Valley, having in thy face a smile Though peaceful, fu ll of gladness." (Recluse, Part F irst, I, 110-117) Nowhere does Wordsworth's tone more closely approach that I of the Song of Songs; nowhere does he describe the intimate relationship which should exist between man and Nature with more tenderness and love. This is the joy of sp iritu al harmony and completeness expressed in the Canticle, the priceless possession of Nature's p riests for w hom the poet seeks. The man wedded to rural nature and in fu ll communion with its power throughout his life is a figure w ho recurs frequently— Michael, the Old Cumberland Beggar, the old leech-gatherer, the discharged soldier and the shepherd in the fog in The Prelude are a ll solitary reapers of Nature's sp iritu al harvest; a ll are pictured with an aura of super natural power. Their function for the poet's in itia tio n is evident in the example of Resolution and Independence, in which the old leech-gatherer, through his own retention of sp iritu al power in adversity, unknowingly admits the poet past the threshold. The suggestion of supernatural power which surrounds the old m an is , paradoxically, natural power | 153; raised to its highest pitch. In the Wordsworthian vision l of the one world, the phenomenal is revealed as identical , iwith the noumenal at the pitch of perception. The leech- 1 'gatherer, like the trad itio n al helper of the epic journey, 1 lends aid to the poet in search of the e lix ir; and the e lix ir, in the poem and in the myth, is an illumination which brings freedom, an expansion and a deepening of consciousness which is fu ll perception. The complete in te gration of the leech-gatherer into his surroundings--witbout Hature he would have no existence—symbolically represents i an essential part of the poet*s vision of -unity; i t is Nature w ho teaches him love of man, and the p riest of nature who, by his very presence and example, stimulates the sympa thetic imagination. The shepherd with his dog in the eighth book of The Prelude has precisely th is importance. The poet l recalls him in a visionary flash, or spot of time, "A solitary object and sublime" (VIII, ij.07); his presence seemed ". . . a Power/Or Genius, under Nature, under God,/ Presiding . . ." (VIII, 393-395). H e is partly to be feared because of his possession of mysterious power. The transference of that power from the p riests of nature to the poet is a recurrent event in Wordsworth*s poetry, necessitating a perceptive act of mind or imagina tion which, like the child1s engulfing of his world, is a seizure of power. The purpose of memory is to evoke the image of a past moment of sp iritu al intensity, which the imagination consumes and transforms to make a part of i t - ! i jself. The resultant harmony is generally attended by music,! I i 'like the song of the highland g ir l. In Resolution and I Independence the sky-lark's warbling portends the appearance i jof the old man whose voice seems to com e from another world. i i Similarly, the Solitary Reaper's song Is like that of an Arabian Nightingale, mysterious and Incomprehensible to the poet who, nevertheless, takes on its power, hike the mythic usurper w ho must k ill the reigning King of the W ood to take , his place as the bridegroom of the goddess, the poet must usurp the place of the p riest of Nature when he encounters l him, becoming himself the poet/priest/hero w ho becomes simultaneously Nature's child, worshipper, lover, and hus band. A s Nature's oracle, the traditional Orpheus, he teaches mankind that her mystery must remain inviolable: ’ 'Our meddling In tellect /Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things" as " W e murder to dissect" ("The Tables Turned," 26- 27, 28). Poetically, if not rationally, Wordsworth’s religion is coherent and ultim ately trad itio n al. To understand his poetry, one must understand that he is, as Havens has ob served, "fundamentally religious."®2 But to ca ll him a pantheist, a believer in animism, or a follower of any other ®2The Mind of a Poet, p. 179 1 ss s p e c i f i c d o c t r i n e d o e s l i t t l e t o a i d o n r u n d e r s t a n d i n g . A s I a poet, his chief task is that of prophet or teacher: to i ! ! present an objective correlative for what he feels to be a , power in the imaginative mind and in the universe, the i ' blending or marriage of which produces the sensation of joy, and the epithalamic vision of fru itfu ln ess. H e does so, with b rillia n t success, by poetically deifying and worship ping the White Goddess or M use w hom he addresses "Nature.*1 I iHis poetic religion necessarily implies som e denial of I 'Anglican dogma, a problem which seems to have disturbed him in his la te r lif e . S till, as Mary E. Burton shows, Words- i iworth by no means underwent a "conversion" from youthful pantheistic beliefs to an arch-conservative c r e e d . Like the Milton of Paradise Lost, he could see that . .prim al truth/Glimmers through many a superstitious form" (Eccle sia stic a l Sonnets, IV, 12-13). Moreover, a more orthodox Christian notion of the Deity seems to underlie the alleged nature-worship of The Prelude, At one instance the poet invokes the . . • Great God! W h o send’st thyself into this breathing world Through Nature and through every kind of life , And mak'st M an what he is, Creature divine. (X, 386-393) Nature is the partly concrete partly abstract embodiment of power; the ultimate source of that power is the mystery i ! which Wordsworth calls “God.” i I Bloom aptly points out that both Blake said Wordsworth ' i I jare preoccupied with religious tru th , but that Blake’s | I preoccupation was with the Bible and Wordsworth’s with i - t Nature. The great divorce of the eighteenth century which brought about a narrowing of the doors of perception meant, moreover, that both poets would consider religious tru th as perceptual truth, an epistemological marriage which would renew the broken covenant between man and G od* The same ; - i empirical trad itio n to which Blake reacted so violently also forms the background to Wordsworth’s attempt to restore life to a falsely conceived universe which, as a giant ^machine, had neither 1 1 splendour,” “function, ” nor “glory.” In the tenth book of The Prelude he deliberately opposes an animistic view of the sun’s glorious b irth to the D eists’ mechanistic invention of the sun as "a gewgaw, a machine,” which “Sets like an opera phantom" in a world no more real than a stage set (X, 9li-0-9ill). Just as a Deist like Newton could believe in the Christian G od while extolling the workings of the universe in terms of mathematical laws, so could a Romantic like Wordsworth assume the religious foun dation of his Anglican childhood while attempting to reveal poetically his sense of the mysterious life or power in the universe by means of poetic myth. The eighteenth-century philosophical trad itio n , with its high values on sense- perception and the reasoning mind, brought with it a i______________ . . . , [derogation of the emotive language of poetry. Wordsworth J j i lUsed every means at his disposal to restore the imagination! ! i and the sp irit of myth-making to English poetry. i i | Despite differences in religious doctrines, then, Wordsworth* s Interpretation of the mythic journey as the sp iritu al and perceptual experience of each individual mind en titles him to a position among the great poets of the tradition of the Christian epic stemming from Dante. For the Italian poet, the perfect vision is epitomized in the marriage of Christ and the Church (both as In stitu tio n and as the company of faith fu l humanity), the epithalamic vision of the Song of Solomon. For Wordsworth, with his Romantic emphasis upon the individual, the perfect vision is revealed through the marriage of God's power (manifested in Nature) and the power of the individual mind, with an equal p a rti cipation on the part of each. The epic myth of separation, in itia tio n , and return encompasses the whole tradition, and its e lf centers on sp iritu al marriage as a metaphorical expression of triumph, reward, and mastery over life , which is the story of The Prelude. What determines the structure of Wordsworth's epic is his conception of the active mind and its relationship with an active, animated universe. Since the mind is in continual flux, moving constantly towards and away from the poles of supreme imaginative ac tiv ity and the u tte r dejection of imaginative in ertia, the Jepic journey must reflect that movement. There can be no |final victory, as there is in the Commedia or in the f i r s t |book of The Faerie Queene; neither can there be any fin al dejection. In adopting the traditional devices and themes of the epic, Wordsworth assim ilates them completely and makes each of them function in his representation of the mind’s journey through lif e . In the foregoing discussion of Wordsworth as an epic poet, I have relied partly upon poetry outside of The Pre lude, since the poet himself asks us to regard his poetic work as one vast Gothic church with various entrances and sections. Furthermore, as Carl Woodring observes, the poem, l despite its organic unity, n. . . is a patchwork of pieces 1 ft * 3 old and new, variously intended at th eir inception.” ^ iMaterial designed for The Prelude was sometimes published separately, then re-incorporated in revised form into the epic; m aterial for The Recluse sometimes found its way Into The Prelude.% James E. M iller’s contention that Whitman's heaves of Grass, despite its patchwork quality, has a just , claim to be regarded as the M e w World epic, provides a useful criterio n by which to consider The Prelude: ^Wordsworth In Riverside Studies in Literature ser ies (Boston, 1965)* p. 97. ’ ^Wordsworth. p. 97. For the hero of his epic, Whitman created the arche typal personality for the N ew World . . . a man both individual and of the mass. This hero, unlike the hero of past epics, discovers his heroic qualities not in superman characteristics but in the selfhood com m on to every man. Every man . . . is potentially an epic hero, if he is sufficiently aware of the p o ten tiality of his selfhood, if he celebrates his v ita l procreative role, and if he is capable of depth of feeling in sp iritu ally complex attachments,°5 Wordsworth is as much aware as Whitman of his national role as poet. Like the N ew World epic hero, the poet/hero of The Prelude sings the song of himself, for it is the mind :he sets about to explore and his own mind that he knows best. The ”1" of The Prelude, like the "I" of Leaves of Grass, refers, on the one hand, to the special sen sib ility of the poet, w ho has access to a sp iritu al world undreamt of by the mass of men. Yet the individual mind of the poem, notwithstanding its exceptional q u alities, implies a poten tia lity for man’s mind universally. In separating himself from other men, the poet takes on the responsibility of the epic hero, whose task it is to penetrate to the source of ultimate truth and offer his discovery to the world of men as a redemptive boon. It is also the poet’s task as teacher to make i t possible for a ll men to make a sim ilar journey to the hiding places of power. A nd so Wordsworth foresees, ® ^ A C ritical Guide to Leaves of Grass (Chicago, 1957). P. 259. hopefully, the apocalypse in which a ll men w ill be enabled | i I to see, with visionary power, beyond the surfaces of things,j I I and w ill perceive the interconnection of a ll beings: fl—I long before the b lissfu l hour arrives, / Mould chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse / Of th is great consumma tion” (“Prospectus,” 56-58)• A s for Blake, marriage and apocalypse are the same in Wordsworth1s divine comedy* | C H A P T E R IV I i i T H E N IG H T M A R E A N D T H E D R E A M i f The attraction which the Song of Solomon held for i Coleridge is well-substantiated by a number of notebook entries. While he accepted and expanded the traditional reading of the Song as allegory, he also shared the stress upon the sensual and lite ra l which the eighteenth-century sen sib ility poets placed on the poem.1 His own poetry was ( to reflect both attitudes and in fact to reconcile them in an epithalamie vision of paradise. J. B. Beer sees a direct correspondence between the language in which the bridegroom of the Song describes his bride and the imagery of Kubla Q Khan. Whatever the actual degree of influence the Cantiele had on Coleridge’s poetry, there is a sense in which Cole ridge, to a much greater extent than either Blake or Words worth, is a direct h eir to the tradition of the epithalamium. For Blake, the epistemological c risis of the eighteenth century could be resolved poetically and perceptually in 1J. B. Beer, Coleridge the Visionary (London, 1959), p. 269. 2Coleridge the Visionary, p. 270. 1 6 1 ! 162 | j I terms of marriage symbolism. Thus he repeatedly contrasts i i ; true psychological and sp iritu al integrity and wholeness i ■ i with the eighteenth century's false or Satanic ratioeinativej “unity” by representing the two views as contrasting mar- ! riages—the f ir s t as the true marriage between man and his emanation, the second as parodic marriage ironically cele brated in mock-epithalamia. Blake's theme is psychological and individual, yet expressed in cosmological symbolism and distanced through dramatization. Wordsworth established a 1 1 sim ilar distance in singing the 3pousal verse-of the coming apocalyptic marriage of man's mind and nature. But whereas Blake's distancing results primarily from his personal mythology, Wordsworth's is necessitated by his view of himself as a participant in the great trad itio n of Christian epic poetry. The great marriage heralded in The Recluse fragment is certainly a matter of individual perception, but is nevertheless distinguished as the perception of the epic poet in his trad itio n ally public role. A nd in his true epic, The Prelude, Wordsworth deliberately cultivates a sublimity of diction which at times approaches the lofty remoteness of the narrator of Paradise host. In both Blake and Wordsworth the sublime tenor of the Old Testament Pro phets contributes much to the essentially B iblical vision of apocalypse as marriage. Yet in neither poet is there anything like the intensely personal but also fam iliar note of the Song of Solomon. 163 i There is perhaps no greater contrast or complement to : !the oracular voice of The Prelude than the extraordinarily ! i jprivate and intimate voice of Coleridge’s most eharacter- jistie poetry. Although the love theme is certainly v ita l in such Blake poems as "The Garden of Love" and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Blake’s main concern is always with bondage, psychological and public. Again, Wordsworth in The Prelude studiously avoids the whole subject of roman tic love, with the exception of the M Vaudracour and Julia" I episode, which is significantly fictionalized and set in a social and p o litic a l context, and which can hardly be called a central incident in the development of the poet’s mind. Of the f ir s t three great English Romantics, it is Coleridge alone w ho can be called a love poet and Coleridge alone w ho approximates the personal and tenderly impassioned tone of the Song of Songs. Despite the suspicion with which modem lite ra ry c r i ticism regards the relationship between biography and poetry, it seems almost impossible to separate Coleridge the m an from Coleridge the poet, especially in the case of the Asra poems resulting from his desperate and prolonged love for Sara Hutchinson. Like Donne's love poetry, Coleridge's led him to reflections on the most fundamental problems of existence and perception. The epithalamium had traditionally projected a vision of cosmic order and harmony reflected in !idealized marriage, the bridal bower thus symbolizing much ! im ore than simply the consummation of a particular union. j i A s George Whalley suggests, the image of the bower becomes ! i i particularly frequent and important in Coleridge’s poetry after his in itia l meeting with Sara Hutchinson, taking on w . . . a n especial m arital warmth u n til it becomes his most persistent emblem of the ecstasy of secluded peaceful love."3 The very fact of Coleridge’s pathetically unsuccessful marriage with Sara Pricker makes the marriage vision of his love poems a ll the more compelling an alternative, even if only attainable through the exercise of the secondary imagi nation in the writing of poetry. The epithalamic vision of a perfectly b lissfu l state of existence based on the ideal union of the lover and hi3 beloved repeatedly gives Coleridge metaphors for poetry and the means through which to construct an orderly psychic world in the faee of the chaos of the phenomenal world that incessantly oppresses him. That Coleridge saw the state of married love as charged with metaphysical and epistemologi- cal significance as well as the usual sp iritu al significance which allegorical readings of the Song of Songs had empha sized is abundantly illu stra te d in the notebooks. At the very outset of Anlma Poetae, he makes clear his preoceupation 3 Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson and the Asra Poems (London, 1955), P. 113. n " ~ i6s~ ) jwith the Plotinian concept of the ideal love which "trans- I j , i forms the soul into a conformity with the object loved,1 1 i i I I and the subject of love recurs again and again in the course! 'of the notebook.^- T w o further passages from Anima Poetae i ! I are worth quoting at length for the lig h t which they cast on the significance of the issue of love in Coleridge's thought. In the f i r s t , he clearly merges earthly and spi ritu a l love: The best, the truly lovely in each and a ll, is God. Therefore the truly beloved is the symbol of God to w hom ever i t is truly beloved by, but it may become perfect 1 and maintained love by the function of the two. The lover| worships in his beloved that fin al consummation of its e lf whieh is produced in his own soul by the action of the soul of the beloved upon i t , and that fin al perception of ; the soul of the beloved which is in part the consequence of the reaction of his . . . soul upon the soul of his beloved, t i l l each contemplates the soul of the other as involving his own, both in its givings and its receivings, and thus, s t i l l keeping alive its outness, its self- oblivion united with self-warmth, s t i l l approximates to G od 1 5 Beminiscent of Donne's love poetry, the Neo-Platonic imagery of the passage nevertheless stresses the reciprocity of the love relationship in contrast to Donne's usual con centration upon the emotional state of the lover alone, ^•A nim a Poetae (Boston and N ew York, 1895), p. 2. 5Anima Poetae, pp. 112-113. 166 j i however mutual the love. The shift is an important one ; ;because i t extends beyond the love poetry to the very basis! i 1 'of Coleridge's philosophy of perception. This metaphor of 1 jmutual joy in marriage is , of course, Coleridge's chief 'means of describing the actions of the perceiving mind in two b rillia n t poetic achievements, This Lime-Tree Bower m y 1 Prison and the Dejection ode. Of this I shall have much more to say presently. The second notebook passage which serves to cla rify Coleridge's understanding of love as a mutual giving and receiving is equally applicable to his psychology of per ception as i t appears in the conversation poems and, cer tainly not fortuitously, is cast in part as a love-dialogue ; ; I between lover and beloved: To find our happiness incomplete without the happiness of som e other given person or persons is the definition of affection in general, and applies equally to friendship, to the parental and to the conjugal relations. But what is love?—love as i t may subsist between two persons of different senses? This--and what more than this? The mutual dependence of th eir happiness, each on that of the other, each being at once cause and effect. You, there fore I —I, therefore you. The sense of this reciprocity of well-being is that which f ir s t stamps and legitimates the name of happiness in a ll other advantages and favorable accidents of nature or fortune . . . .6 A nd a few lines further in the passage, Coleridge finds occasion for the love-duet in the manner of the bride and ^Anima Poetae. p. 197 167 i bridegroom interchange of the Song of Songs: 1 i i Suppose a wide and delightful landscape, and what the ' ! eye is to the lig h t, and the light to the eye, that ! interchangeably is the lover to the beloved. "0 best , belovedl w ho lovest ra e ^ the bestl" In s tric te s t propriety of application might he thus address her, if only she i with equal tru th could echo the same sense in the same feeling. ‘ ’Light of mine eye I by which alone I not only see a ll I see, but which makes up more than half the loveliness of the objects seen, yet, s t i l l , like the rising sun in the morning, like the moon at night, remain - est thyself and for thyself, the dearest, fa ire st form o f , a ll the thousand forms that derive from thee a ll th eir v isib ility , and borrow from thy presence th eir chiefest beautyI”7 Once again Coleridge conceives of marriage in perceptual terms as the ideal mutual interchange of vision or under standing between the lover and his beloved. Conversely, in the poems dealing with the problem of perception Coleridge represents the active and v ita l relationship between outward nature and the perceiving mind through the marriage meta phor. In his analysis of Dejection in The Mirror and the Lamp, M . H. Abrams mentions the “m arital” or "conjugal” metaphor of the poem, but does not distinguish i t am ong other Romantic metaphors for the mind in the poem.® Yet the marriage metaphor is a crucial one for, as Abrams notes, the f ifth stanza of the poem proposes joy “as the indispensable ?Anima Poetae, p. 198. ® The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 67. : 168| inner condition" of the mind;^ and .joy, of course, is the | I I keynote of the epithalamium and its projected vision of an ; •idealized world whieh underlies a ll of Coleridge’s poetry ' and prose* Coleridge himself remarks that St. Paul chose marriage ". . . a s the symbol of the union of the church with Christ: that is, of the souls of a ll good men with God.""^ A nd in the passages quoted above from Anima Poetae, Coleridge goes further in suggesting that the marriage vision of the garden of Solomon--quite traditionally--extends also to the bond of social friendship which for Plato constituted the basis jof the ideal commonwealth, to the bond between the percei ving mind and the world which i t half-creates, and u l t i mately to the bond whieh unites man and G od in apocalyptic perception. Love, then, was an idea which necessarily informed a ll of Coleridge’s thought as the foundation of his intensely personal philosophy of psychological, social, and metaphysical order in the universe. In employing the marriage metaphor to express his revelation of the workings of the mind in an organic world in which i t is fully inte grated, Coleridge is drawing on the same Biblical trad itio n ^The Mirror and the Lamp. p « 6?. ■^Notes, Theological, P o litical, and Miscellaneous (London, 18535, p. 2?2. jas Dante had in presenting the beatific vision of oneness jwith exultant epithalamia sung in Heaven. Even before he met Sara Hutchinson in 1799--indeed, in | ihis earliest poems—Coleridge’s view of marriage as the means of solving or escaping a ll the d iffic u ltie s of life finds expression. In the early C hrist’s Hospital poem en titled Nil Pejus est Caelibe V ita, Coleridge proposes married love as the greatest attainable earthly good: What pleasures shall he ever find? What joys shall ever glad his heart? Or w ho shall heal his wounded mind, If to rtu r'd by Misfortune’s smart? W ho Hymeneal b liss w ill never prove, That more than friendship, friendship mix'd with love. (1-6 ) 11 The basis of love is friendship in the Platonic sense of the union of two complementary souls--the marriage union celebrated in the Song of Songs. To realize the enormous implications which Coleridge’s ow n impending marriage to Sara Pricker held for him, one need only peruse the le tte rs of September and October, 1794, which are fille d with the ecstatic enthusiasm for Pantisocracy, his own projected scheme for the establishment of an ideal Platonic society ^ “ All line citations from Coleridge's poetry in m y text are to The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (2 vols., Oxford, 1 9 1 2). 170 based upon love. The opening of the le tte r to Southey- dated 18 September, 179i|., Is representative in its unboun ded optimism for the new scheme, of whieh Sara was an essential part: Well, m y dear Southeyi I am at la s t arrived at Jesus. M y G -o d ! how tumultuous are the movements of m y Heart-r Since I quitted th is room what and how important Events have been evolved1 America I Southey1 Miss PrickerI — Yes— Southey—you are rig h t— Even hove is the creature of strong Motive—I certainly love her. I think of her in cessantly & with unspeakable tenderness— with that inward | melting away of Soul that symptomatizes i t . 12 i t jit was, of course, his idealized Sara w ho would share with !him his dream of Pantisocracy w hom Coleridge speaks of here. | (A nd in the poetry of the early 1790’s i t is essentially * jthis vision of the possibility of establishing a community of enlightened souls which constitutes Coleridge’s exultant answer to the harsh re a litie s of the mundane world, and ;whieh quite naturally finds its expression in epithalamic imagery reminiscent of the Song of Songs. Their subject is generally married love and happiness which, based on the ideal union of the lovers, extends by implication to the i social community based upon the friendship that also informs married love. 12 ! Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (J j. vols., Oxford, 1956-1959), I, 5 9 . In an ode dated 1792, Coleridge establishes the link [ between marriage and harmony, the traditional association j in the epithalamium. The Rose introduces the garden as the i : r ;setting for the love song, and ends on the significant word ! joy. In A n Effusion at Evening, w ritten in 1792 and reeast j in 1793 as Lines on an Autumnal Evening, Coleridge echoes the Biblical song even more closely. In the f ir s t version, he personifies spring as a bride, awakened by the gentle rain from her "primrose Bower” (11). In a poet*s reverie, ! Coleridge envisions his own love arising "with soul-entran- ; eing Mien" (17), fillin g him with "The th r ill of Joy extatic sic yet serene" (18), the very tenor of Spenser*s Epitha- lamion. In the second version, he personifies Love as wearing "a crown of thornless Roses" (89), the ring of flowers symbolizing the marriage union of idealized perfec tion, and the symbol of concord in Milton*s image of the garland which A dam weaves for Eve before he learns of her lo temptation. That Coleridge believed such a state of being immanently possible in the actual world is reinforced by the 1795 poem Pant iso cracy. In the midst of his love poems, Coleridge speaks of the future joys which w ill be the habi ta t of his "visionary soul" (1), the new world where "The wizard Passions weave an holy spell" (8) and "the evil 13Paradise Lost. IX, 838-8^2. I day” (3) can be ignored. | 1 To the Nightingale, Lines in the Manner of Spenser. i ■ The Hour W hen W e Shall Meet Again, The Eolian Harp, and [ Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement are a ll essentially love poems to Sara Pricker, yet a ll deal in some way with the social, philosophical» and metaphysical extensions of love. A s George Watson points out, Coleridge in 1795 was at the height of his in terest in Pantisoeracy;1^ " i t was also the year of his marriage, so that one is not surprised at the highly personal tone of the ending to the love poem To the Nightingale, actually a poem to Sara* The ;night ingale ’ s song, he argues, is easily surpassed by the l harmonic notes "That vibrate from a white-arm'd Lady’s 1 . . . harp” (20). Sara’s very voice inspires him like the voice I of the Muse, as the poet ends the hymn celebrating his ow n marriage with praise of his bride: M y Sara--best beloved of human kind! W hen breathing the pure soul of tenderness, She th r ills m e with the Husband’s promis'd name! ( 2ij.~2 6 ) Coleridge employs sim ilar bridal imagery in his idealized vision of Sara in Lines in the Manner of Spenser* and again the imagined world is one of peace and harmony. The contrast ^Coleridge the Poet (Hew York, 1966), p. 62. 173; with the actual world is im plicit in the poem, as in the j lin e: " ’M y sad heart w ill expand, when I the Maid survey1"' I(l8), but the contrast its e lf is s t i l l not a structural j 'principle. The Hour W hen W e Shall Meet Again, expressing 1 the rapturous joy of the lovers* meeting in the future, likewise depends for its effect upon the i l l i c i t dejection of the present—the temporary separation of the lovers of |which the bride complains in the Song of Solomon. The Eollan Harp and Reflections both project a ru ral— -broadly “pastoral”— paradise, with the lovers united in the I tranquility of a flower-covered cottage. M ax P. Schulz has noted the s ty lis tic sim ilarity between Coleridge’s presenta tion of the lovers* paradise and Milton’s portrayal of A dam and Eve in Eden before the f a l l . 1^ The Eolian Harp, though, represents more than simply the culmination of epithalamic imagery from the e a rlie r love poems. I t is the f ir s t of the conversation poems, the only poetic genre of Coleridge’s own invention, and the f ir s t poem in what Schulz has called Coleridge’s most mature poetic voice, generically derived from the descriptive-meditative poems of the la te r eighteenth 16 century. Watson has commented on the "passionate and 15 "Coleridge, Milton, and Lost Paradise," Notes and Queries, C C IV (April 1959), llj.3-1^.. - ------------------- egotistical tone" of the conversation poems, in which the poet addresses his wife, a loved one, or a friend ”in a shifting but shapely pattern of expostulation and private 1 reflec tio n .”1? Ultimately, Watson proposes, the poet’s !in itia l egotism "is the outgoing, solicitous concern of th e : friend. It is a deeply commonplace, everyday experience” which the conversation poems are designed to convey.1® sAgain, one should hardly be surprised that in 1795* the ! ! year of his marriage and of his greatest rapture in the thought of Pantisocracy, Coleridge would concentrate upon jintensely personal themes arising directly from what would become the two related crises of his lif e at th is time. In his ea rlier love poems, Coleridge had established his view of marriage as a state akin to an earthly paradise; his i reading of the Old Testament and the Elizabethan poets cer tainly reinforced that view. Thus, in The Eolian Harp the epithalamic imagery of the ea rlier poetry culminates in a new highly subjective intensity. The setting is the tra d i tional garden, with its profusion of flowers and richness of scents, and with its pervasive motif of celestial music, but the situation which makes the idyll possible is the lite r a l ^Coleridge the Poet. p . 6l • ^Coleridge the Poet, p. 6l, and particular marriage of Coleridge and Sara, as the re- I ipeated apostrophes to the beloved make clear. A s in the Song of Songs and in the epithalamium generally, i t is the p articu lar marriage celebrated in the poem which comprises a microcosm reflecting a universal principle of order, the p articular marriage leading the poet to an expanded vision of an organic and harmonious universe in the case of Cole ridge : 01 the one Life within us and abroad, Which meets a ll motion and becomes its soul, A light in sound, a sound-like power in lig h t, Rhythm in a ll thought, and joyance every where — H e thinks, i t should have been impossible Not to love a ll things in a world so f i l l ’d; Where the breeze warbles, and the mute s t i l l a ir Is Music slumbering on her instrument. {The Eolian Harp, 26-33)^ The garden of The Eolian Harp is the garden of the Song of Solomon, the microcosm of heaven or the model of the organic universe. I t is a Pantisocracy of the mind in which the a rtific ia l barriers of the phenomenal world dissolve into synaesthetic -union. Drawing upon the trad itio n al ideas and images of the epithalamium, the poem becomes ultim ately a poem about the act of cognition—specifically, the mind’s ■^Lines 26-33 were not a part of the original version but added in 1828; th eir inclusion nevertheless te s tifie s to Coleridge’s b elief that the perfect realization of ideal marriage on earth mirrors the divine order and the future of a ll mankind as the poet envisions i t . perceptual realization of an ideal re a lity of its ow n creation, beyond the appearances of the everyday re a lity (which, according to Watson, is the usual substance of the I conversation poems, i I Thematically, then, The Eolian Harp departs l i t t l e from the traditional marriage hymn. Structurally, however, it marks the beginning of a new poetic form in which Cole ridge was to excel. Schulz has pointed out that the basic istructural pattern of the conversation poem is the inner- louter or centrifugal-centripetal movement of the mind in on perception. Theme and poetic form are inseparably united in the genre, Schulz argues, for "At the very core of the conversation poem is the b elief that one foree breathes through a ll, animate and inanimate alike"; although man is d istin ct from nature, and hence ego-centric, he nevertheless 21 "co-exists with and is a part of its to ta lity ," This is the outward movement of the mind which Wordsworth in The Prelude frequently depicts as metaphorically devouring the worldis also the kind of creative mind which Geoffrey on The Poetic Voices of Coleridge, p. %. ^The Poetic Voices of Coleridge, p. 86. pp ^See, for example, the Wanderer*s description of his childhood experience in which his sp irit consumed the sense impressions of the natural world (Excursion, I, 206-212) or the boy’s devouring of the power within nature, discussed at length in Chapter III. 177 j Hartman identifies in both Spenser and Wordsworth as the nPro thalamic Imagination,The metaphor is especially ;appropriate to Coleridge, w ho found the poetic usefulness | of the marriage image in the la te r conversation poems and in the great Defection ode, ! Even in terms of structure, however, Coleridge is perhaps not so u tte rly original as he may at f ir s t seem to be in the conversation poems. A s Watson has remarked, they have no generic precedents in English poetry;^* and as ! Schulz has shown, they represent a transformation of earlier poetic forms.I would suggest, however, that Coleridge must have realized the sim ilarities between the new form he W as evolving and a very important poetic model outside the English trad itio n —the Song of Solomon. Watson has amply | demonstrated that Coleridge, despite the striking origina lity of such poems as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Chri3tabel, and Kubla Khan, worked largely on the basis of poetic im itation, using a great diversity of s ty lis tic models in much the sam e way that Shakespeare did.2^ Just 2^Wordsworthls Poetry 1787-l8llj., p. 267 t f , ^ •Coleridge the Poet, p. 61. * ^The Poetic Voices of Coleridge, p. 73. 2^Coleridge the Poet, p. 17. as he "imitated" the traditional devices of the folk-ballad i I !in The Ancient Mariner and the Gothic framework in Chris- I T | | j itabel, Coleridge could hardly eseape noticing the personal | i ^expression of passion and joy in the Song of Songs resulting from its being east as a love-duet or dialogue—actually I more of a monologue, like the conversation poems, in that each speaker addresses the other in turn without really responding to the words of the other in conversational ; inter change * The Song of Songs is really a collection of lepithalamia linked through the garden imagery and the fact that they all celebrate the same marriage. There is no necessity for one speaker to answer the other, only for both to express the joy of the epithalamic vision of paradise. 1 Moreover, the tone of the Song of Songs—joy resulting ifrom the attitude of a radically devoted tenderness toward the beloved—is the precise tone of the conversation poems, beginning with The Eolian Harp. I t is a tone, furthermore, whieh can be presented best in dialogue, thus giving the impression of a special and private audience--beloved, friend, or child—rather than the public audience of, say, the Augustan s a tir is ts . Unlike the epic and hence public narrative voice of The Prelude. Coleridge's speaker is the private man, the poet as friend, not as bard. Indeed, a ll the conversation poems, with th eir Meo-Platonic vision of a harmonious universe, have to do chiefly with friendship in the sense of tenderness and love for another human being; ' 179! Jthe allegorical readings of the Song of Solomon likewise j depend on the poet’s beginning with a particular and highlyj I personal love relationship. Schulz has drawn attention to the spontaneity and naturalness of the conversation poems which stem ultim ately from Coleridge’s ow n a b ilitie s as a talk e r. ^ In avoiding actual dramatic interchange—and one has only to think of the failure of Coleridge’s attempts at ! - : drama--he followed the most effective possible poetic stra tegy, concentrating on his primary talen t. Coleridge deftly alternates between reflective op descriptive passages and actual dialogue, as for example in the quiet and tender lin es, precisely set between narrative sections, in Reflections on having le ft a Place of Retire- ment: . . . Oft with patient ear Long-listening to the viewless sky-lark’s note (Viewless, or haply for a moment seen Gleaming on sunny wings) in whisper’d tones I ’ve said to m y Beloved, M Such, sweet G irli The inobtrusive song of Happiness, Unearthly minstrelsyI then only heard W hen the Soul seeks to hear* when a ll is hush’d, A nd the Heart listen s I" (1 8 - 2 6 ) The happiness or joy is, of course, mutual, reflecting the mutual interchange between the poet’s mind and outward 27The Poetic Voices of Coleridge, p. 71 I 1 8 0 1 I •nature. The cottage of the lovers is H a Blessed Place" j j(17), and the lovers are blessed beeause th e ir love is 1 emblematic of the principle of love or friendship on which 1 the Neo-Platonie and Romantic universe is b u ilt. In the mood of mutual love, then, Coleridge relates how he climbed a h ill from which he had a view of the surrounding country side and the Channel and in a "Blest hour" (if.2) envisioned i t as a model for the entire universe: . . .God, m e thought Had b u ilt him there a Temple: the whole World Seem’d imag’d in its vast circumference: N © wish profan'd m y overwhelmed heart. Blest hour! It was a luxury,—to be i (38-i}.2) The dream atmosphere of th is "Valley of Seclusion" (9) in which the lovers are u tte rly untouched by the actual world around them again suggests the secluded and isolated garden of Solomon, which also is nevertheless a model for an ideal universe. I t comes close to Blake’s state of Beulah, which is also the experience of mutual love, but with the implica tion of languor or the abandoning of responsibility in the world. Neither is Coleridge unaware of the responsibility of man in the world, however, for Reflections also carries forward the theme of social progress toward an idealized society; having had a glimpse of paradise in personal terms, the poet then has the duty to join in man’s efforts toward achieving a universal apocalypse. T o a greater degree than l8l | The Eolian Harp, the poem depends on the contrast between ! an idealized world and an actual mundane one which must be I reb u ilt. I t ends, appropriately, not only in a Coleridgean' fusion or reconciliation of opposites, but in a B iblical { vision of apocalypse, in which the whole world becomes a garden of jasmine, roses, and myrtles: . . . A nd that a ll had such I I t might be so— but the time is not yet. Speed i t , 0 Father! Let thy Kingdom come! J (69-71) 1 In more Coleridgean terms, i t is the natura naturans— the dynamic principle working both in the external world and in man’s mind— which is revealed to Coleridge through the natura naturata, or phenomenal world of the countryside ~ 1 ~ n r r " ' | " ■ ■ 1 ' and Channel. So far in Coleridge’s poetry, however, the emphasis is almost entirely upon the idyll its e lf, with l i t t l e indication that the actual state of married life may be characterized by a speciousness, a precariousness, which make i t quite different from the poetic world of Solomon’s garden. In This Lime-Tree Bower M y Prison, regarded by one c ritic as the f ir s t unqualified success among the conversa- 28 tion poems, a tone which was to become much more typical A m ong other c ritic s , Watson takes this view; see Coleridge the Poet, p. 6?* I 182 ! iof Coleridge than, the e a rlie r enthusiasm becomes evident. i i ! jA n irony underlies the whole poem because of the discre- | pancy between setting and theme. A s in the e a rlie r love ; i poems, the setting is a garden, and specifically a bower, j the focal point of the marriage hymn. In The Eolian Harp and Reflections, however, Coleridge had assumed an in te r dependence between the joy of union in marriage, religious understanding, and visionary perception of the external world. N o w i t is this fullness or wholeness of perception, , represented in the image of the poet*s friends 1 1 In gladness | all" (27) in communion with nature, which he can no longer assume as the natural state of a ffa irs. For nature, if the mind fa ils to respond imaginatively to i t , is essen tial ly fixed and dead; its lif e depends upon its transformation by the esemplastic power which is set in motion by the human w ill. I t is the seeming passivity of the mind which actually proves the active role of the mind in perception, for i t ultim ately leads the poet back into the marriage vision and the conscious exercise of the imagination mani fested in the power of empathy (Wordsworth*s “sympathetic imagination'1), by which he rejoins his company of friends: . . . A delight C om es sudden on m y heart, and I am glad A s I myself were there I Nor in this bower, This l i t t l e lime-tree bower, have I not mark’d M uch that has sooth'd me. (14.3-47) The irony of the setting thus turns upon its e lf as the ■friends joy in the natural world becomes the poet’s and a perceptual marriage is consummated and celebrated in the ! lime-tree bower. Coleridge discovers that Nature is the bride w ho "ne’er deserts the wise and pure" (60) but awakent the receptive soul "to hove and Beauty" (6ij.). O ne is again reminded of the epithalamic device stemming from the Song of Solomon: the exhortation for the lover to awake. For i Blake, Albion’s sleep and refusal to awaken for his bride j i Jerusalem symbolized man’s fallen sta te . In This lime-Tree , Bower there is a h in t, however slight, of man’s fa ll or failu re in perception, his ab ility to see the natura natu- rata but not the essential natura naturans in existence. A s yet, however, the theme of the f a ll whieh Coleridge, like Blake and Wordsworth, was to conceive of as an epistemologi- cal failu re, had not entered his poetry with the urgency whieh i t would have in la te r poems. What Coleridge has established in the f ir s t three conversation poems is the poetic realization of his c ritic a l doctrine that a ll know ledge consists in the coalescence of subject and object in a dialectical union. The bower image in This Lime-Tree Bower is a traditional device by which Coleridge reinforces and provides an objective correlative for the idea which would become the structural principle of the Dejection ode. In the conversation poems of the following year—Frost at Midnight, Fears in Solitude, and The Nightingale, he evolves the form further, both in theme and in style, yet j retains its fundamental characteristics. In Frost at Mid- i * I |night, Coleridge again assumes the tender attitude of the i j Song of Songs, but this time he addresses not his wife but his child. Neither are there any explicit marriage meta phors. Yet the poet’s vision of the one world united by God's presence, as well as his erapathetic merging with the projected mind of his infant son, depend largely for th eir I effect upon our understanding the relationship between the mind and the external universe as an epistemological union or marriage, In which each partner gives and each receives* In comparing This Lime-Tree Bower with Frost at Midnight. Schulz concludes that the la tte r poem . . . most completely realizes a fusion of form and con tent in a complex, but controlled, statement about the act of cognition. In the course of the poem the project ing mind of the poet engages with objects external to i t , returning after each expansion of thought with more Intense awareness of the processes of life and its relationship to them than i t had when the poem began.^9 Coleridge’s doctrine of the expanding mind is akin to Blake’s tenet that the doors of perception must be cleansed —for Blake, through an increase of sensual enjoyment; for Coleridge, through a marriage or recognition on the part of the active mind of its identity with the natura naturans or 2 % h e P o e t i c V o ic e s o f C o l e r id g e , p . 9 2 . I 185 i iactive universe. A s Schulz points out, Coleridge’s thoughts i ! ichange in the course of the poemj by the conclusion, i 1 [ : ! . . . the poet has progressed from an unhappy rejection ' of the "deep calm" of midnight, in which the "goings-on of life " remain as imperceptible to him as the slow accu mulation of fro st, to an imaginative communion with "the lovely shapes and sounds in tellig ib le" of the "eternal language" of nature with which G od speaks to man.30 The fin a l image of the poem, then, is epithalamie in impli cation, despite the absence of the actual love dialogue and i marriage imagery of the earlier poems. The fin al lines of Frost at Midnight, as Schulz has said, beautifully evoke the feeling of "the eternal oneness of being and in fin ite variety of becoming which comprise nature . . . . The absolute conviction of tone with which the poem ends nearly obscures the fact that its imagined world is the idealized re a lity of Heo-Platonic and Romantic philosophy, not the phenomenal world which was constantly oppressing Coleridge more and more from this time onward. In Fears in Solitude, Coleridge’s attention sh ifts to the strife-ridden world of which he was very much a part, despite his attempts to transform it through transcendental philosophy and the exercise of the imagination in poetry. 3°The Poetic Voices of Coleridge, pp. 93-91*.. ^ The Poetic Voices of Coleridge, p. 96. 'Once more, he opens with, the physical description of a i ! natural paradise—"A green and silen t spot, amid the h ills" , i i j(l), like Solomon*s garden. A m id the natural furze garden j I t and the song of the lark, man’s thoughts naturally lead him to "a meditative joy" (23) in the discovery of "Religious meanings in the forms of Nature" (21^.). But the man "... w ho would fu ll fain preserve /H is soul in calmness . . ." (30-31) cannot escape the heavy and pensive consciousness of man’s suffering in the world. From this point on, the poet is concerned chiefly with his vision of this world as a kind of nightmare existence, in which "The sweet words / Of Christian promise" (63-64) become mere platitudinous mutterings to obscure or distort man’s destructive impulses and actions in society. Again, it is empathy which leads Coleridge to meditate upon man’s actual condition in an imperfect world, but this time his empathetic response threatens to shatter his vision of the idealized one world. S till, his hopes are for England’s future as his thoughts at the end of the poem turn once more to G od and to love for humanity. Although Coleridge was keenly aware of the dis crepancy between the world as i t is and the world as he would remake i t , he nevertheless could s t i l l find consolation in his conviction in a Christian apocalypse in which the whole universe w ill be remade into a vast garden. 187 I M uch the same tone informs The Nightingale, founded on| |Coleridge * s friendship for the Wordsworths but extending a s , jwell to the question of perceptual awareness, like the ear-i j i jlie r poems. Beginning with the traditional image of the nightingale as a melancholy bird and hence the voice of suffering humanity, Coleridge then inverts that image to (express his joy in the natura naturans which here manifests its e lf as a grove of nightingales engaged in what almost seems to be a parody of human conversation. Coleridge is able to maintain his vision of the epistemological marriage in “the one Life within us and abroad” through his fa ith in ;the ministry of nature. A s Marshall Suther has argued, Coleridge, like the other Romantics, . . . rediscovered the poetic experience of nature, or at least they had achieved a new awareness of i t . They be came conscious of that experience as a thing in its e lf , independent of its subsequent elaboration in a work . . • . . . . they came to see th is experience as a means of knowledge, immediate, experienced knowledge as opposed to discursive, abstract, scien tific knowledge. Such im m e diate knowledge by experience of the thing known . . . is very close to the mystical experience, and easily confused with i t , with a direct knowledge by experience of the Absolute.32 Whatever mystical and anagogical implications have been seen in the Song of Songs by its interpreters para- 32The Bark jfight of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (N ew York. I960), pp. 141-11*2. r ~ ■ ~ " " i88 ' * < doxieally have th eir source in two primary facts: F irst, i ' |in celebrating the physical union of Solomon and his b rid e ,! i I the Song is based upon a particular h isto rical event; and ( i second, the imagery of the Song is vividly sensual. As 1 Stanley Stewart has pointed out, th is second feature under-; standably perturbed the Biblical interpreters u n til, by means of the fourfold method, they could read the Song allegorically. Yet the allegorical reading could hardly escape the elevation of marriage to a new dignity and sig nificance : The consecrated love of married couples could be seen as a hieroglyphic shadowing forth the Form of its heavenly counterpart. Because of this comparison, Robert Crofte could argue that any denigration of earthly love, per se, was tantamount to blasphemy. Love is a creation of God; it mirrors his magnificence, his productive powers. A nd if properly employed, even the love of the world is a i means of sp iritu al ascent . . . .33 Like Wordsworth—and especially during the Nether Stowey period--Coleridge could envision a marriage between man's mind and nature, and describe nature as a bride in terms at once sensual and sp iritu a l. Although the multiple meanings of the marriage metaphor are not fu lly realized u n til the De.jection ode, Coleridge sees nature in much th is way in The Nightingale. The grove of birds, pristine in its 33|Ehe Enclosed Garden, p. 23. 1891 deserted location, is another of Coleridge’s natural gar- ! t i jdens, whose harmony is symbolized by the perpetual celestial ! I jmusic of the nightingales, with its magical power over the j i • jpoet's mind. The birds converse harmoniously: In wood and thicket, over the wide grove, They answer and provoke each other’s song, With skirmish and capricious passagings, And murmurs musical and swift jug jug, A nd one low piping sound more sweet than a ll— Stirring the a ir with such a harmony, That should you elose your eyes, you might almost Forget i t was not dayI (57-%) The nightingales occupy a world outside and above the mundane one; ’ ‘th eir eyes both bright and fu ll" (67), like the g litterin g eyes of the Ancient Mariner and Geraldine, suggest that they belong to a preternatural existence which is strangely but necessarily linked to the world of nature. Despite the natural setting, the garden of the nightingales is a dream-world in the same way that the garden of Kubla Khan is a dream-world. In both cases the intensity of sen sual perception leads the poet to super-sensual perception. The actual subject of the poem, which does not become clear u n til the la st stanza, is the poet’s wish or prayer that Hartley w ill someday be able to dwell in such a company in the universal garden of a perceptual apocalypse founded on man’s acceptance of the s p irit world in nature, hike those of the birds, the l i t t l e boy's eyes " g litte r in the yellow moon-beam" (105), implying the connection which the poet 190 foresees not only for Hartley but for a ll men in the vi- i sionary future. H e concludes in the conversational tone: j I i I t is a fath er’s ta le : But if that Heaven ; Should give m e lif e , his childhood shall grow up ! Familiar with these songs, that with the night 1 H e may associate joy. ' (106-109) I 1 i With The Nightingale w e com e to the end of the series of conversation poems w ritten before Coleridge met Sara Hutchinson and indeed to the end of the period in the poet’s life characterized by his greatest hopes for the future of mankind and for his ow n successful integration into an ideal family, social, natural, and metaphysical milieu. Cole ridge’s real and supposed failure as a husband and as a father, as well as Southey’s seemingly abject behavior in irejecting the Pantisocracy scheme, were largely compensated for by his closeness to the Wordsworths and his enthusiasm for the joint project which would culminate in the Lyrical Ballads. H e had not yet suffered the most severe effects of his opium addiction and he could s t i l l maintain a vision of order by which he could hold at bay the nightmare world which always threatened to invade his consciousness. This fearful vision of life as potential nightmare, painfully documented in his le tte rs , always looms at the edge of Cole ridge’s visionary paradise, like Satan at the brink of Eden. Edward E. Bostetter has argued that the subconscious fears of the nightmare are the real basis of the grotesque world | 191 iof The Ancient Mariner.^* i t is tempting, moreover, to I 1 |think of the poetic dream-world which Coleridge constructs I : |—not only in Khbla Khan, but in the early love poetry as i [well—as a psychologically necessary alternative to the acceptance of a passive and stultifying re a lity which he knew only too well and which always seemed to him to ap proach the verge of an actual nightmare existence. A s that condition became more and more a personal rea lity for him, one might well expect Coleridge's need for a viable a lte r native to become correspondingly more compelling. But in 1797* at Nether Stowey with the Wordsworths and fu ll of the excitement of the Lyrical Ballads proposal, the nightmare world of disappointment, irra tio n a lity , suffering, and sp iritu a l doubt seemed remote indeed. In his three great poetic experiments of that year--The Ancient Mariner, the f ir s t part of Christabel, and Kubla Khan^--Coleridge at f ir s t seems to diverge furthest from his usual poetic statement, especially from the intensely personal and ego centric quality of his e a rlie r work, and even the love relationship, with a ll its Neo-Platonic overtones, whieh had ^•"The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner, ” Studies in Romanticism. I (Summer 1 Q 6?)7~~?J|i -Pffy ~ ^Although there s t i l l exists som e doubt as to the exact date of Kubla Khan, I have tentatively accepted the 1797 dating; for the purposes of m y argument, the precise date of composition makes l i t t l e difference. I i jformed the chief basis of his poetry. "U p o n closer inspec- ] Jtion, however, the three poems reveal no essential departure; from the main concerns of Coleridge's poetry either before [or after 1797• Taken as a group, they may be understood as I constituting an attempt by Coleridge to reconcile the two primary opposites in his ow n lif e —the view of life as nightmare with the view of life as dream, the la tte r in terms which had always been integral to the epithalamic tradition. 1 In his highly Influential essay, Robert Penn Warren has placed The Ancient Mariner in the philosophical and epistemological context of Coleridge's poetry by reading the poem as an expression of the ’ ’O ne Life1 1 celebrated in The Eolian Harp.3& Through the agony of his experience, the Mariner is granted a "sacramental vision" of the divine unity *rhich binds together a ll living things; in feeling "a gush of love" for the sea-snakes, he . . . is able to pray; is returned miraculously to his hom e port, where he discovers the joy of human communion in God, and u tters the moral, "H e prayeth best w ho loveth best, e tc ." 37 Thus, for Warren, the dramatized world of the poem is some- 3^The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with an Essay by Robert Penn Warren (N ew York, 19ij-6), p. 78. 3?Warren, p. 78. how analogous to Coleridge’s moral, philosophical, re li- j gious, and metaphysical thought, which is founded on the j necessity of the principle of love. Yet, as Bostetter has : pointed out in his refutation of this traditional position, the universe of The Ancient Mariner is one which could only; he u tte rly repugnant to the mind of its author, whose whole: intellectual effort was directed towards achieving an ideal, of order in lif e . Bostetter interprets the "moral” as being ironic in the "lurid light" of the Mariner’s ta le — ian exemplum of unwarranted suffering and merciless cruelty sin a world without either reason or emotion: Instead of the "One Life" w e are confronted at the end of the poem by the.eternally alienated Mariner alienating in his turn the Wedding-Guest, for the Guest is robbed of his happiness and the spontaneous participation in the mar- j riage feast (which is really the "one life ") and forced to share the disillusioned wisdom and guilt of the Mari ner. 39 I t is the fear that irratio n al and vindictive forces really dominate the actual world, Bostetter argues, which • • • The Rime reflects and plays upon. I t presents i t self as the parable of the man w ho refuses to believe in the traditional cosmos and expresses his contempt and disbelief by an act that provokes the cosmos into reaffirm ing its e lf in its most outrageous and arbitrary forra.^O 38 "The Nightmare World," p. 251. 39”The Nightmare World," pp. 2I 4. 6 - 2 I 4.7 ^°"The Nightmare World," p. 253. ! 191]. I i jsince "the poem is molded and shaped by Coleridge’s fe a rs ,” \ lit need have nothing whatever to do with any of his con- i (sciously held beliefs or attitudes.^-1 The usual ideas about (Christian fa ith which both the Wedding-Guest and the reader ! presumably accept, are the very ideas which the irratio n al I nightmare world calls into suspicion, so that the Mariner’s ta le gives Coleridge the opportunity to indulge his own superstitious fears to the f u l l e s t .^ Whatever impulse led to its creation, the nightmare i [World of the Ancient Mariner vividly dramatizes the funda mental dualism with which Coleridge responded to experience, even during the period of his greatest happiness. If, as Whalley states, The Nightingale is about the triumph of Pantisocracy in limited terms,^3 then The Ancient Mariner i n 1 1 1 1 r ' ■" “ r ' — - n r - n r " i m is about the failure of the rational mind to cope with its universe. The world of the Mariner is one which is radi cally opposed to the Neo-Platonic principle of an a ll-in fo r ming love and a benevolent God. Furthermore, if one reads the poem in the context of Coleridge’s e a rlie r and la te r epithalamie poetry, the role of the Wedding-Guest may be seen to hold much greater symbolic implications than the c ritic s have recognized. ^"The Nightmare World," p. 252. ^-2"The Nightmare World," p. 2 2 j _ 9. ^Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson, p. 1 1 1 ].. 1 9 ^ 1 j i A s Bostetter has remarked, it is the vision of the "O ne1 Life" which the Mariner himself threatens to shatter within; society; the keynote of the Wedding-Guest1s reaction to him |is epitomized in the word "fear." It is not simply the world of everyday commonplace re a lity which the Guest rep resents, however, but rather the dream-world which Coleridge1 had incessantly attempted to construct out of the chaos of experience. Thus the interm ittent sh ifts of scene from the ■Mariner*s tale to the current situation of the wedding .ceremony, although they serve to make credible the grotesque i story and act as a fo il, function chiefly to superimpose the dream upon the nightmare. All of the references to the , nuptial feast draw directly upon the tradition of the epi- thalamium; a ll suggest the world of ideal order and harmony ! which dissolves under the scrutiny of the Mariner*s g lit tering eye. The Irony, then, is not only in the Christian moral which the Mariner utters at the end of the poem, but also in the juxtaposition of traditional epithalamic imagery against the chaos of the nightmare. The contrast is estab lished early in the poem, as "the loud bassoon" announces the entrance of the bride into the procession; The bride hath paced into the h all, Bed as a rose is she; Nodding their heads before her goes The merry minstrelsy. (33-36) JThe description is deliberately conventional--even to the ; l ' •stock comparison of the bride to a rose and the facile !a llite ra tio n of the la st two words—"merry m instrelsy.” i : Immediately after th is picture, Coleridge turns to the Mari ner’s account of "the Storm-blast" (1|1) in the land of ice and snow. The contrast is direct and ironical, especially ,if one remembers that for Coleridge as for Wordsworth the wind image is ambiguous, suggesting both creation and des- truetion. The bassoon, like the wind-harp, gives forth a kind of celestial music in asserting the universal harmony imaged in the marriage feast. Later, Coleridge would use the image of a "Wind, that ra v 'st without” and, like the tempest in King Lear, mocks the ee lestial music by re asserting the forces of chaos and dissolution.W- The Wedding-Guest> s fear at the beginning of Part IT is specifically the fear that the rea lity of the Mariner's tale w ill destroy the re a lity of the ordered universe which is im plicit in the wedding feast. A s the Mariner te lls him, the tale has particular relevance for him: I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the m an that must hear me: To him m y tale I teach. (586-590) ^J-The line, of course, is from Dejection, which I shall discuss at length la te r In this chapter. 197~j A nd again Coleridge juxtaposes the Mariner's nightmare world1 i i with the Wedding-Guest's dream-world, as the next stanza rises to an ironic pitch of intensity with the image of the Ibride in the garden-bower, the traditional focal point of jthe marriage hymn: I ! What loud uproar bursts from that door! The wedding-guests are there: | But in the garden-bower the bride i A nd bride-maids singing are: A nd hark the l i t t l e vesper b ell, i Which biddeth m e to prayer! j (591-595) I t is the Mariner's vision of sp iritu al and social isolation! Which so profoundly undermines the pantisocratic vision of i unity symbolized by the bower. W hen the Wedding-Guest consequently turns away from the bridegroom's door "A sadder and a wiser man" (62if), he finds himself separated from everything of value in lif e . I t is th is separation of the individual consciousness from any sense of community, in both social and cosmological terms, which is for Coleridge the equivalent of the Pall of Man. A s J. B. Beer has shown, Coleridge read the Weo-Plato- nic writings of Thomas Taylor with great avidity, especially Taylor's translation of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, which was published in 1795 "... with a trea tise interpreting jit as the search of the soul for its lo st lover."^5 Cole- jridge must have seen the sim ilarity between Taylor1s alle- j igorical interpretation of the myth and the allegorical or anagogical reading of the Song of Songs according to which ; 'the bride is the soul of m an longing for divine union with ; God. Perhaps even more important an influence on the poet’s thought at this time, though, was the cabbalistic doctrine of the ”Shechinah,” references to which appear several times ,in his notebooks.^-6 A s Beer summarizes i t , the primary distinguishing feature of cabbalistic belief over other ,doctrines with which Coleridge was fam iliar t . . . is its greater emphasis on the relationship between the sexual and the divine. In other words, the divine creative activ ity , like that of human beings in procre ation, is thought of as a joyful dialectic between male and female elements. Their coming together, known as the marriage of the King and the Matrona, irradiates a divine lig h t, called the ”Shechinah." Wherever the divine cre ative forces are at work, there also is the Shechinah.V? In cabbalistic terms, the Pall is the separation of the male and female principles, the division from one body to two. The lost Shechinah can be regained by man, but only ”... rare moments of exaltation— — one of them being when com — l i t Coleridge the Visionary, p. 58. ^ Coleridge the Visionary, p. 59. ^ Coleridge the Visionary, p. 59. 199 * plete love and harmony exist between a man and a woman. The recovery of the Sheehinah--the renewal of the magic | circle of unity symbolized, for example, by A dam and Eve ! !again joining hands afte r being turned out of Eden at the ! end of Paradise Lost—is precisely the event which is cele- J i brated in the epithalamiumj not a denial of the F all, but a continual reassertion of man’s a b ility to regain the state 1 ' I of paradise. Further, Coleridge was well aware of the Egyptian myth of the mystical marriage of Isis and O siris, yet another example of man’s conviction in the possibility of his redemption from a fallen world, and one expressed as a great cultural or epic epithalamium. Like Milton, Cole ridge could interpret the Egyptian myth as a corrupt version o f Biblical tru th —the cabbalistic "... idea of a S piri tual Redeemer, and a mystic reconciliation and remarriage of the repudiated Spouse to her celestial Lover. ”^-9 In his interpretation of The Ancient Mariner, Beer stresses Coleridge’s . . . interest in the ’lo st Shechinah’ as a way of expressing the discrepancy between the world of mankind and the ideal order.”'* ® According to Beer, he does ^ Coleridge the Visionary, p. 59. ^Coleridge the Visionary, p. 6 0 . ^ Coleridge the Visionary, p. IH4.. so by adapting the myth of Is is , O siris, and Typhon the jdestroyer. After Typhon has torn the body of Osiris asun der, ”... Isis is constantly and patiently seeking to ,find the pieces and restore her lo st husband."^- In The l " Wanderings of Cain, which evidently led Coleridge directly to the composition of The Ancient Mariner, Cain was to represent what Beer terms the "Typhonian principle” or destroyer, Enos the complementary redemptive principle. I Eoth Abel, the "God-loving principle," and Cain, the "self- loving p rin cip le,” are aspects of the individual soul in the mystical lite ra tu re (including Boehme) which dealt with the story of Cain and Abel and which Coleridge read. A s Beer implies throughout his discussion, Coleridge accepted the basic contrast between man’s unfallen state symbolized by marriage, with a ll its Weo-Platonic and mystical associ ations, and his fallen state symbolized by the loss of the Shechinah or great divorce of the selfhood from the human and sp iritu al community. W o w the idea of the Shechinah in the Cabbala is founded upon the harmonious and idealized universe before man’s fa ll and the discordant, fractured universe after his f a ll. In ^Coleridge the Visionary, p. 115. ^Coleridge the Visionary, p. 123. s 201 ! his presentation of Eden in Paradise Lost, Milton makes a i Isimilar contrast. To show Eden as paradise he not only j i • i jfollows the trad itio n of picturing it as a garden planted j [by God, but underlines the idealized marriage union of A dam and Eve conflating prayer and epithalamium: A dam ’s experi ence of joy in the creation of the world is epitomized in the joy which takes in Eve; thus his thankful prayers to i { jG o d often become specific statements of his rapture in Eve, God’s greatest g ift to him and hence the supreme testament to the splendor of the creation. I t is, logically, this epithalamic imagery which informs the vision of restored unity in the second great symbolic garden in the Old Testa- j ment—the garden of Solomon which is also, metaphorically, his bride. Like Bostetter, Beer recognizes that the world of the Mariner seems to be one of excessive cruelty and endless punishment, but Beer explains such a world by assigning it to the Mariner’s vision, not to Coleridge’s. In a rather Blakean manner, Beer suggests that there are two suns in the poem--the sun which symbolizes G od as the source of a ll light and goodness in the universe (Coleridge’s Christian God), and the sun which, through the Mariner’s fallen and thus distorted vision, can ohly appear as the ”angry ’Ty phonian’ sun,1 1 the Old Testament G od of vengeance whose 202 ■worship can only be an tith etical to a ll of Coleridge1s con-; sciously held religious b e liefs. ^ Since "w e receive but jwhat w e give," each individual perceptually creates his ow n j"sunM or conception of God; the Mariner, having broken the circle of harmony by k illin g the albatross, brings about his ow n punishment in the world which he perceives. W hat he does perceive is indeed a nightmare world, and as such lis a direct inversion of the dream-world of the epithala- mium, the realm of the Wedding-Guest. i The dreamlike quality of Coleridge's epithalaraic vision is perhaps most evident in the poem which he called "a vision in a dream"—Kubla Khan. In many ways the obverse side of the Mariner's perceptual world, Kubla Khan might even be said to express the epithalamic vision of the W ed ding-Guest. The subject of the poem, like that of Blake's The Tyger, is creation on different levels. Kubla Khan decrees the building of a pleasure-dome within the confines of an enclosed garden; the poet, under certain conditions, imagines that he could "build that dom e in air" (ij.6). The secret of the creation its e lf, Beer has argued, is suggested in the occult associations of "Alph, the sacred riv er." In Neo-Platonic w ritings, the river and the cavern symbolized, respectively, the male and female principles, the union of ^ Coleridge the Visionary, pp. 161-162. 203 ! iwhich dramatizes the primal creation. Moreover, Beer adds, I ! | Coleridge would have regarded the symbol "Alph" in the an- ; cient Ethiopie language as the f ir s t le tte r of the alphabet j ;and hence the beginning of language. In the Zohars the "birth of language" is discussed in terms of the male and female principles, and even as resulting in the creation of heaven and earth.The d ifficu lty with Beer's interpre ta tio n of the cavern image, however, is that he fa ils to consider that Coleridge seems to be departing from Neo-Pla- tonie tradition for the purposes of the poem. The cavern is fille d with the ice and is the scene of the riv e r's demise. Coleridge does, nevertheless, convey the tone of ! j joy in the creation, and the joy of creation, once again, is the ultimate subject of the Song of Solomon and its trad itio n in European and English poetry. The Mariner, by contrast, embodies a destructive principle directly opposed to such a vision of order; for the vision of chaos, the epithalaznium can be only ironical or parodic. Against the nightmare-world of The Ancient Mariner, then, Coleridge sets the dream-world of Kubla Khan, balan cing his fear of a universal destructive principle in the earlier poem with his fa ith in the universal creative prin ciple most vividly suggested to him by the Cabbala. For ^•Coleridge the Visionary, p. 209. [Beer, Kubla Khan is the Coleridgean ”. . . man of commanding ! genius, the fallen but daemonic man,” w ho ”. . . strives to ! ■ i jrebuild the lost paradise in a a-rorld which is , like himself,! fa lle n .”^ Traditionally, the Biblical paradise, as well as other conceptions of paradise in the ancient world, was pianifested as a garden. A s a Christian allegorizer, Cole ridge had, moreover, drawn heavily on the vision and poetic jimagery of the Song of Songs in his early love poetry. N o w in Kubla Khan the garden image, with its powerful under lying metaphor of a momentous wedding, takes on a new sense of urgency as the poet’s e a rlie r conception of an idealized life has threatened to dissolve under the assaults of a [hostile and chaotic universe. Beer’s suggestion that ,r. . .; it might be possible to interpret Kubla Khan in terms of the human body— particularly in view of a la te r attempt by Cole^ ridge to explain his dream-symbolism in this way,while i t would be d iffic u lt to argue conclusively, at least points to the striking parallels between the imagery of the two poems. Kubla’s gardens were ”. . . bright with sinuous r i l l s , /Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tre e ” (8-9); and the fe rtile land is protected on a ll sides by rising "walls and towers” (7)—the sentral image of Solomon’s ^Coleridge the Visionary, p. 266. ^ Coleridge the Visionary, footnote 165, p. 3 i| .2 . I 205 'garden. If, as Beer persuasively argues, the river and the 'cavern are male and female principles, like Osiris and Is is , ithen the garden its e lf may be taken to figure both as the Getting and as the fru it of the creative act, 1 ' Of course, Kubla Khan is not ex p licitly a love poem in the sense that the earlier poems to Sara Pricker or the la te r ones to "Asra" are love poems, Coleridge never overt ly identifies the garden with the beloved as the bridegroom pf the Song of Songs does. H e does, however, make it clear [that the garden has to do with the passion of romantic love in the image of the "w om an wailing for her demon-1 over" (16). For Beer, Kubla Khan is fallen man attempting to impose the rational order of civ ilizatio n upon the natural world, sym bolized by the fountain of unbounded energy, so that c iv ili zation its e lf its e lf is a great attempt to regain the lost paradise or S h e c h in a h .^ 7 The wailing woman, then, is w om an after the f a ll; her tears are the tears of Isis, searching for her missing lover and the lo st Shechinah.^® The second stanza turns abruptly to the "deep romantic chasm," the "savage place” from which the fountain springs. Beer has remarked on the ambiguity of the fountain image, which can represent both universal harmony (as in Plotinus’s • ■ ^Coleridge the Visionary, p . 209, ^Coleridge the Visionary, pp. 23^-235. favorite metaphor of the overflowing fountain of light) and ! i j"the spirit of ruin."^9 if* one considers the overall tone , Jof the stanza, one cannot help but see the chasm as an in- i jverse or parodic form of the garden in the f i r s t stanza. The chasm is dominated by "tumultM and wild disorder; the "Ancestral voices prophesying war" are again the forces of chaos which threaten to destroy the ordered garden of ! ; ! jeivilized lif e . Even the w om an wailing for her demon-lover j I ' must ultim ately be seen as a parodic figure, since she desires not the harmonious marriage union of the epithala- raium but marriage to a demonic principle in the universe. The woman's separation from her demon-lover thus parodies ; - | the bride's disconsolate search for her absent husband in the Song of Songs, If Kubla is, as Beer holds, the demon- lover himself, then he resembles, parodieally, the groom of the Biblical song w ho has also gone to his garden and has elieited his bride's distress at his disappearance: the bride answers her "daughters" or friends w ho offer to help her find her husband: M y beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilie s . I am m y beloved's, & m y beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilie s , - (6 :2) According to Beer, Coleridge' s image of the "cedarn 59 ;_______Coleridge the Visionary, pp. 237-239_»___ ___ | 207 cover" In stanza two suggests man’s fallen state by alluding I . i |to the lines in Paradise Lost describing Satan’s stalking ofj Eve—"Neerer he drew, and many a walk trav ers’d /O f state- i lie s t Covert, Cedar, Pine, or Palme”—and to the mention of ; the cedars as covering in Adam's subsequent lament after the f a l l : 60 . . . Cover me, ye Pines, Y e Cedars, with innumerable boughs, Hide me, where I may never see them morel (IX, 1088-1090) Yet Coleridge was surely aware of the significance of the "cedarn cover" In the Song of Songs as well. Early in the Biblical poem, the bride describes herself as sun-burned: "I am black, but comely, (0 ye daughters of Jerusalem) as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon" (1 :5 ). A nd la te r, praising his beloved, the bridegroom too uses the image of the eedarn cover: Behold, thou art fa ir, m y love: behold, thou art fa ir, thou hast dove’s eyes. Behold, thou art fa ir, m y beloved; yea pleasant: also our bed Is green. The beams of our house are Cedar, and our rafters of f i r . (l: 15-17) A s Stewart has commented, tradition has interpreted the bride's complaint of blackness as an allegory of "man's 6°Coleridge the Visionary, p, 23i | - . 2 0 8 : 1 61 j desolate sta te 1 ’ following the f a ll. The sun, of course, ; jhad long been considered a symbol for God; one is reminded j | of the scorching sun of The Ancient Mariner. Beer’s th e s is j jthat the Coleridgean fallen man is the archetypal Cain- ,figure, always vainly attempting to escape from the true ^vision of the sun which he can see only as fiery and venge- jful, seems applicable to Kubla Khan. The cedarn cover [denotes a hiding place from G od and the dream-rvision of universal order, an indulgence of the chaotic and destruc- ; i itive principle in man. Paradoxically, however, it is the bridegroom in the Song of Songs (allegorically, G od himself) w ho provides the ’ ’house of Cedar” to protect his bride from the sun. In Coleridge’s poem, the image is partly tra d i tional, suggesting man’s fallen state in the second stanza, and partly parodic, alluding ironically to the tranquil atmosphere of the lovers’ garden. The ’ ’ mighty fountain” its e lf, bursting violently through the earth from the chasm, signals a direct antithe sis to the peaceful garden of order whieh Kubla would main tain . The figure of the contained fountain in the Song of Songs is the basis of the im plicit contrast, as the groom identifies his bride with the garden: ”A garden inclosed is m y sis te r, m y spouse: a spring shut up, a fountain sealed” {\\.%12), ^The Enclosed Garden, p. 60. The raging fountain of the chasm, then, is yet another! j I I inversion of the epithalamic ideal. Coleridge's strategy i ■in the f ir s t two stanzas, therefore, has been to set up the ideal of the ordered world pictured as a garden (as in the earlier Reflections on having le ft a Place of Retirement) , and then to undermine it through parody. Kubla Khan's failure is the failure of the public man, the man active in society, and in his threatened downfall Coleridge must have fe lt also the failure of his ow n plans for Pantisoeracy and the breakdown of his fa ith in the actual p ossibility of mankind's p erfe ctib ility . The wailing of the w om an in the second stanza suggests not the return of the Shechinah through the marriage vision, but rather the reinforcement of the Mariner's nightmare vision of chaos through an ironic inversion of the trad itio n al values of the epithalamium. A s I have proposed ea rlie r, however, Kubla Khan may be read as the obverse side of the Mariner's distorted percep tion of the universe, and thus as the uncorrupted vision of the Wedding-Guest before the betrayal of his dream by the Mariner. The wedding implies the unfallen state and a wholeness of visionary power; the Guest, representing man before his f a ll, or at least fallen man about to recover something like primordial innocence, stands between the nightmare and the dream. Yet the f ir s t two stanzas of KuMa Khan seem to deny any chance of regaining a lost paradise, 210 j I |just as the Mariner*s tale does. In the la st stanza, how- jever, Coleridge's dialectic fin ally coalesces as he turns 1 * ■ I jonee again on the marriage theme introduced in the f ir s t j jStanza and parodied in the second. The contrasts developed .between the second and third stanzas are specific, as the poet’s dream moves from Kubla Khan, the public man of power in civilized life and hence the embodiment of the godlike ■ rational faculty in the actual world, to the visionary poet himself. Opposed to the w om an wailing for her demon-lover |in stanza two Is the Abysinnian maid, playing harmoniously ;on her dulcimer. It is this music, the celestial music of the epithalamium, which could stimulate the poet’s secondary imagination to the poetic re-creation of the garden-vision. N o w the fu ll significance of the paradoxical "sunny pleasurer- dom e with caves of ice" (36) becomes more apparent. In the : very fam iliar passage from Blographia b ite ra ria , Coleridge offers to define the poetic creation by defining the ideal poetic genius: The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activ ity , with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their re la tive worth and dignity. H e diffuses a tone and sp irit of unity, that blends, and (as i t were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which w e have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power . . . reveals its e lf in the balance or recon c ilia tio n of opposites or discordant qualities . . . .62 Z p Biographia L iteraria (Oxford, 1907), Vol. II, p. 12. L .. - ______ . _________________________________ _____________ _ 2 1 1 i 1 The creation of perfection which the idealized poet attains |is akin to the building of a tangible paradise in the phe- i jnomenal world by the public man; but the poet’s creation, 'existing in an idealized Heo-Platonie realm, escapes the . threat of destruction which endangers its counterpart and i knows only the harmony of "music loud and long" (45) • A s Coleridge turns, then, from the irony of Kubla's bubble-paradise in stanza two to the positive assertion of the poet’s ab ility to actually realize the state of para dise (if only momentarily) in stanza three, he returns to the epithalamic imagery of Solomon’s garden, where the bridegroom has been comparing his bride to the intoxicating scents of the flowering trees and shrubs: Thy lip s, 0 m y spouse I drop as the honey comb: honey and milk are under thy tongue, and the smell of thy gar ments is like the smell of Lebanon. (4:11) The poet in Kubla Khan, possessed of the "magical power" of imagination, is feared because of his mysterious powers of creation, "For he on honey-dew hath fed, / A nd drunk the milk of Paradise" (5 3 -5 4 )• A s Bloom has noted, Abyssinia had long been regarded as the possible setting of the earthly paradiseMilton considered i t so in his description of k-^The Visionary Company, p. 214. Eden, the perfect state of being, pictured chiefly as a perfect marriage relationship, in which prayer and epitha- jlaraium are fused in praise of the in fin ite variety of the lone w o rid . The double image of honey-dew and milk iden t if ie s Coleridge’s inspired poet as one w ho has experienced the joy of the epithalamic vision of Eden or Solomon’s garden; even if that anticipated joy in life has been be trayed by the actual circumstances of his unsuccessful Carriage, he can s t i l l find access to the visionary realm through the dual magic of the dream and the poetic iraagina- i tion. The divinely-inspired and godlike poet of Kubla Khan is the Wedding-Guest freed of the Mariner’s spell—the figure w ho achieves Coleridge’s own lifelong dream. Cole ridge himself at this time, one recalls, had shifted his attention p artially from his obsessive feelings of having failed as a husband and father and his crushing disappoint ment at the collapse of Pantisocracy to a new intensity of enthusiasm for the creative act. A s Richard Harter Pogle ha s remarke d, . . . Coleridge im plicitly conceives of himself and Words worth together as opposites whose union would form the ^S ee, for example, the opening passage of Book ¥, and lines 660-775 of Book !¥, in Paradise Lost. i ideal poet. H e would be the c ritic a l counterpart to I Wordsworth's creativity, the conscious supplement of his unconscious, the judgment to his genius.65 I I i Fogle's use of the marriage metaphor to describe the re la tionship is most appropriate, for during his stay at Nether Stowey Coleridge regained something close to the epithala- mic vision of completeness which informs the love poems to Sara Fricker. Yet, like the Wedding-Guest, Coleridge, in I ! | j the b rillia n t s ty lis tic departures from his usual poetic 1 i manner, hovers always between the Mariner's nightmare-vision of chaos and Kubla Khan's dream-vision of order. A s the poet inspired by imagination, not as the man of practical affa irs, he seems to have found new hope in regaining a j paradise of the mind, however intangible and subjective. In G, Wilson Knight's framework, Christabel, The An cient Mariner, and Kubla Khan taken together make up Cole ridge's ’ ’Divine Comedy,” exploring in turn h e ll, purgatory, and heaven.^6 According to Knight, Coleridge's nightmare poem is Christabel, which lacks u tterly the redemptive theme of The Ancient Mariner. S i n c e the poem remains a fragment, 6%he_ Idea of Coleridge's Criticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles,~ 1962), p. 108. ^ The S ta rlit D om e, p. 83. 6?The S ta rlit D om e, p. 8 3 f f . it would seem fatuous to make conclusive pronouncements as ! jto its theme or import, and any interpretation must be , Itentative. Perhaps the best starting point is Arthur H . j iNethercot's pioneering study of the work, in which he re- i minds us of the lifelong fascination which Christabel held i for its author and of the mystery which constantly surroun ded his supposed intentions of finishing it.^® In Table I Talk, Coleridge writes of those plans: | The reason of m y not finishing Christabel is not, that I don't know how to do i t — for I have, as I always had, the i whole plan entire from beginning to end in m y mind; but I fear I could not carry on with equal success the execution! i of the idea, an extremely subtle and d ifficu lt one.69 | The situation is further complicated, as Nethereot remarks, by the fact that various of Coleridge's friends claimed 1 knowledge of the plans. Such pieces of '’evidence” are con flic tin g and even contradictory. Perhaps the most detailed and interesting proposed conclusion to the poem is that of Dr. James Gillman, Coleridge's friend, physician, and bio grapher. Gillman's synopsis, which has been accepted as Coleridge's probable intention by som e recent c ritic s , is quoted as follows by Nethercot; 68 The Road to Tryermaine (Chicago, 1939), pp. 3, 19 f f . 69 Quoted by Nethereot in The Road to Tryermaine. p. 26. J Over the mountains, the Bard, as directed by Sir L eoline,, I ‘ ‘hastes'1 with his disciple; but in consequence of one of | those inundations supposed to be com m on to this country, I I the spot only where the castle once stood is discovered, i —the edifice its e lf being washed away. H e determines to j 1 return. Geraldine being acquainted with a ll that is , ' passing, like the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, vanishes. Re-appearing, however, she waits the return of the Bard, j exciting in the mean time, by her wily arts, a ll the anger she could rouse in the Baron’s breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is described to have been suscepti ble. The old Bard and the youth at length arrive, and therefore she can no longer personate the character of Geraldine, the daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, but chan ges her appearance to that of the accepted though absent lover of Christabel. Next ensues a courtship most dis tressing to Christabel, w ho feels--she knows not why— great disgust for her once favoured knight. This coldness is very painful to the Baron, w ho has no more conception than herself of the supernatural transformation. She at la st yields to her fath er’s entreaties, and consents to approach the a lta r with this hated suitor. The real lover returning, enters at this moment, and produces the ring which she had once given him in sign of her betrothment. Thus defeated, the supernatural being Geraldine disap pears. A s predicted, the castle bell to lls , the mother’s ! voice is heard, and to the exceeding joy of the parties, the rightful marriage takes place, after which follows a reconciliation and explanation between the father and daughter.70 In view of Coleridge’s earlie r use of the marriage hymn, it is tempting to accept Gillman's proposal that Christabel was to end on the exultant note of the epithala mium, signalling the exorcism of the powers of darkness which have possessed Christabel and the re-establishment of 70 The Road to Tryermaine. p. ^3. See also B. R. M c- Blderry, nColeridge‘s Plan for Completing Christabel," Studies in Philology. XXXIII (July 1936), Ij.37-^55, for a modern view which affirms Gillman’s proposal. (the harmonious order, which would be dramatized in a series ‘ of reconciliations and a restoration of the essential bond o f friendship, f i l i a l and romantic love. Underlying such a i rvision of complete harmony is the Neo-Platonic conception of the society b u ilt on the principle of universal love or friendship--and one must remember that Leoline’s crime, like the Mariner’s, was the breaking of such a bond. The human fra ilty of pride—Blake’s Satan or selfhood—conti nually besets men in the actual world, always threatening to engulf his highest ideals: i i A nd thus it chanced, as I divine, With Roland and Sir Leoline. Each spake words of high disdain A nd insult to his h eart’s best brother: They parted— ne’er to meet again’ . But never either found another To free the hollow heart from paining— They stood aloof, the scars remaining, Like c liffs which had been rent asunder; A dreary sea now flows between;— But neither heat, nor fro st, nor thunder Shall wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once hath been. (Christabel, Part II, i 4. 3 4 -l1. 2 6 ) The metaphor for the broken friendship is a tearing apart or a divorce, like the violent reaction of Nature to man’s fa ll in Paradise Lost. Leoline is of central importance insofar as he ironically becomes the unconscious perpetrator of a ll that happens In the fragment. Given the ideal state celebrated in the epithalamium--the society founded upon friendship or, to use Coleridge’s word, Pantisocracy—there 217 j i can be no greater crime than breaking the magic circle of ! i jSuch a dream-world; sim ilarly, there can be no more fittin g j symbol for the return of concord and the passage from a jrealm of being created by hatred and evil to one created by love and Christian values than the triumphant marriage of i Christabel and her true betrothed knight, i If this is the substance of Coleridge’s plan for the completion of Christabel, though, Coleridge’s remark that 'his idea was M an extremely subtle and d iffic u lt one" remains! puzzling, Gillman stresses plot and continues the obvious i trappings of the Gothic romance in the existing fragment, N o w the basis of the poem may well be, as Nethereot has called i t , "A ’Romance’ of the ’Preternatural,’ but its bhief in terest, most c ritic s w ill agree, lie s elsewhere than in the successful working out of plot or story, a minimal concern in Coleridge’s c ritic a l theory and in his Shakespearean criticism . Whatever plot resolution Coleridge had intended, and the point is not crucial here, I suggest that the trad itio n and demonstrated poetic usefulness of the epithalamium was most vivid in the poet’s mind in the con ception of Christabel and may, furthermore, account in part for the subtlety and d ifficu lty which he saw inherent in the poem. A s an enthusiastic reader of the Bible and Neo-Platonist ^The Hoad to Tryermaine, p. l8f>. IColeridge was naturally fam iliar with the fourfold method !of Scriptural interpretation; his notebooks te s tify to his ' i . 1 ^acceptance of the allegorical readings of the Song of Songs, I the ultimate inspiration of so much of his poetry. Like i other Romantics, Coleridge was also an avid admirer of the rich m ulti-levelled allegory of The Faerie Queene and cer tainly must have regarded Spenser as a worthy poetic model. In attempting to trace the source of the supernatural ele- i ments in Christabel, Fogle posits an interesting set of I ' correspondences between Cole ridge* s poem and Book I of The Faerie Qu e e n e Both works deal with ", . . the discre pancy between appearance and re a lity 1 *; both picture evil as resorting ”. . . for its weapons to confusion and dis guise.”^ Christabel and Geraldine correspond, respectively, to Una (Christian truth) and Duessa (deceptive falsehood masquerading as tru th ); and both poems Involve false dreams and spells which must be broken.7^ - Coleridge *s "poem of the supernatural," Fogle concludes, is designed for . . . the ultimate purpose of enlivening our perceptions, awakening our affections, and Increasing our ab ility to imagine re a lity . I t must defeat the prejudices and pre possessions of the understanding, which is bounded by the 7%he Idea of Coleridge*s Criticism , p. 133 f f . 7%he Idea of Coleridge’s Criticism, p. 133. 7 i j The Idea of Coleridge’s Criticism, p. 135. ! 219! 79 senses and the abstract logic derived from them. I I iPogle1s important point is that the supernatural for Cole- j Iridge Implies not lite r a l belief but metaphor: ; ! Ideas . . . are always indefinite, and can be comprehended only when embodied in symbols .... A supernatural character such as Geraldine is a symbol of sp iritu al con f lic t and evil, and in that sense she is real; but w e do not^earn of her real form, which remains ambiguous . . ;W hat Fogle seems to uphold, and quite rightly so, is an allegorical reading of the poem. Beer, too, stresses Cole rid g e^ tendency to regard actual characters as principles or ideas as well. The name * * Christabel*1 its e lf suggests an archetypal figure having the qualities of Christ (as savior) and of Abel (as victim of ev il). A s opposing principles, Christabel and Geraldine may, as Fogle remarks, represent different aspects of the same person. A s I have mentioned above, Beer contends that Hubla Khan may be read in terms of the human body; the Song of Songs, read either lite ra lly or allegorically, certainly provided Coleridge with a model for such an Identification of place and person. To reinforce i t , moreover, was the extended allegory of the body in the second book of The * ^The Idea of Coleridge»s Criticism , pp. 136-137 77 The Idea of Coleridge^ Criticism, p. 131. 220 ! Faerie Queene—the book of temperance or, in Coleridgean | i ' j terms, the harmonious balance or reconciliation of a ll j \opposites within the individual mind. In the ninth canto, Spenser allegorizes the body as a house or castle, presided| i over, ideally, by the lady Alm a (man's rational soul), and ■under constant siege by the forces or temptations that assault the senses.?® Later, as Guyon sails across the i perilous sea toward Acrasia's bower, five mermaids w ho jrepresent the temptations of the five senses attempt to lure him to his destruction.?^ Everything which occurs in the book may, of course, be interpreted as an allegorical visualization of the moral conflicts within the mind of the protagonist--the Christian man in quest of the virtue of temperance. Similarly, most of the action in Christabel has to do j ' ! chiefly with the two g irls w ho are opposites in every res pect. Yet i t is Leoline'a castle and its environs which is the scene of the action and Leoline himself w ho has attrac ted Geraldine to the castle. In adopting the medievalized Gothic material of the poem, Coleridge may have adopted as well the medieval attitude toward the house or castle as an 78 Canto IX, in nearly its entirety, deals with this extended allegory of the individual body. "^ S e e The F a e r ie Q u e e n e . C a n to X I I , x x x - x x x i i . 2 2 1 ! allegorical setting, just as Spenser had done. The opposing creative and destructive principles, shown in The Ancient ' ! i Mariner as the marriage dream versus the tale of chaos and j ■ in Kubla Khan as the garden of harmony versus the raging ! chasm, reappear as Christabel and Geraldine, the two con flic tin g aspects of Sir Leoline1 s mind. A s Leoline1s true daughter, Christabel is the Alma or rational soul of his i i castle. B y contrast, there is some indication that Geral dine is Leoline*s ‘ ’daughter1 * in a parodic sense. As she jtells Christabel at th e ir meeting: * * M y sire is of a noble lin e, /And m y name is Geraldine8 (Part I, 79-80), Coleridge may well be following the fam iliar device of the ironic pun typical of the ballad tradition in thus having Geraldine suggest that Leoline is , in som e sense, her father or her creator, as the 8noble lin e ” brings to mind nLeoline” the noble lion, whose name also rhymes with ’ ’Geraldine. 8 Like Christ and Abel, her namesakes, Christabel is capable of redeeming man through prayer and suffering. Like Cain, Geraldine (whose name etymologic ally means ’ ’the spear- thrower,” suggesting the violence of the destructive prin ciple) is capable of shattering his dream of a harmonious universe. Although the motif of the five warriors w ho supposedly have seized Geraldine is never fully developed, Coleridge may have had in mind Spenser*s five sirens w ho attempt to destroy Guyon; as the evil principle, Geraldine iwould naturally en list their service and com m and them. Her, words to Christabel are patently ironical in the lig h t of j her real character: “Five warriors seized m e yestemorn, / ! I M e, even me, a maid forlorn” (Part I, 81-82). Throughout the poem, there are signs of Geraldine’s ; : ' I ipower over Leoline. A s the two g irls pass by the h all of the castle, Geraldine’s presence makes the ashes in the fireplace flick er: A nd Christabel saw the lady’s eye, And nothing else saw she thereby, Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline ta ll Which hung in a murky old niche in the w all. (Part I, 160-163) The connection is made here between the knight and his false daughter, with perhaps a sin ister undertone in the word “boss.” Later, Geraldine’s spell becomes the “lord” of Christabel’s power of speech, thus allegorically binding the rational soul to the powers of darkness. The irony of Leoline’s self-deception intensifies as the fragment pro gresses u n til, by the end of Part II, he calls Geraldine “Lord Roland's beauteous dove” (569) and promises to “crush the snake” (571) of evil which, he believes, has threatened her honor. Momentarily, he sees his true daughter as a serpent: . . . Christabel in dizzy trance Stumbling on the unsteady ground Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound. i I (Part II, £8 9 -£9 1 ) IW hat has occurred fin ally is a seeming identity or confusion between the true and false daughters, whereby each appar ently takes on the character of the other, at the same time remaining the same. In Leoline*s mind, the two principles have become Intermixed, and something like a grotesque marriage of opposing forces has taken place. Even in the fragment as it stands, the allusions to marriage have greater sig n ifi cance than Coleridge immediately makes clear. For Spenser, too, the epithalamium was a means of celebrating the order and harmony of the perfectly balanced mind pictured in the House of Alma. Christabel, in marked contrast to the w om an wailing for her demon-lover in Kubla Khan, has gone to the woods to pray for the welfare * * 0 f her own betrothed knight1 1 (Part I, 28), of w hom she has dreamt the night before. The ritu a lis tic tone, on the one hand part of the appropriate language of the Gothic romance, also reinforces our impres sion of the sp iritu al import of her impending marriage. W hat actually does take place in the fragment, though, is a cruel betrayal of the marriage vision. A s Christabel te lls Geraldine, the castle-bell is to strike twelve on her wedding-day (Part I , 200-201). In this context, the opening 2 2 i|. line of the poem is charged with irony: ”*Tis the middle | • i of night by the castle clock.*’ A nd the irony is picked up by Geraldine, as she te lls her story of the five warriors: ”1 thought I heard, some minutes past,/Sounds as of a i icastle bell** (Part I, 100-101). The chamber to which Chris tabel leads Geraldine, beautifully carved and ornamented, is in fact a parody of the bridal bower. I t is here, appro priately, that Christabel te lls Geraldine of the prophecy concerning her wedding-day. Geraldine’s subsequent outcry against the s p irit of Christabel*s mother— ’ ’Off, woman, off! th is horn* is mine— Though thou her guardian s p irit be, Off, woman, off! 't i s given to me” (Part I, 211-213) — Ironically recalls the quiet tone of Spenser’s invocation to Phoebus in the Bpithalamion: I f ever I did honour thee aright, Or sing the thing that might thy mind delight, D o not thy servant’s simple boon refuse; But le t this day, le t this one day, be mine; Let a ll the rest be thine. (122-126) Following the convention of the epithalamiwm, Spenser prays that the marriage-vision of unity w ill be maintained against outside forces which might threaten i t, just as temptations of the five senses threaten the well-regulated House of Alma, and that the night w ill protect his bride 225 and himself ! From fear of p eril and foul horror .... Let no false treason seek us to entrap, I Nor any dread disquiet once annoy ! The safety of our joy But le t the night be calm and quietsome. ( 322- 3 2 6 ) IT he prayer for order soon becomes a ritu a l of exorcism: N e le t house fire s , nor lightning's helpless harms, N e le t the Pouke, nor other evil sprites, N e le t mischievous witches with th eir charms, N e le t hobgoblins, names whose sense w e see hot, Fray us with things that be not. (3kO-3kk) Ironically, it is th is very nightmare-world of superstition I and subconscious fear which Geraldine, as the embodiment of evil, carries with her into Leoline's castle and Christa bel 's bed-chamber. In her outcries against the guardian s p irit, Geraldine would seek to exorcise not the forces of evil but the forces of good in a reversal of the epithalamic prayer. The parody Is extended further In the Conclusion to Part I with Geraldine's magical embrace of Christabel, an anti-type of the nuptial embrace of the bride and bride groom, not the tender embrace of love, but an enclosing "prison1 1 (30l|.) out of which is born the knowledge of ev il. Against this inversion of the symbolism of the epitha- lamium by which Coleridge pictures the fallen human state on both microcosmic and macrocosraic levels, Christabel's | 226 | itrue wedding posited in Gillman's conclusion would Indeed | | - i ^constitute a fittin g means of dramatizing the restoration i j i !of the unfallen state and the reassert ion of the principle I ! I jof love. S till, the melodramatic series of events in the projected conclusion would not only hamper the logical continuation of such an allegory of the mind as I have proposed, focusing almost entirely on Christabel and Geral dine rather than Leoline, but would seem also to be entirely incongruous with Coleridge's c ritic a l and philosophical ibelief s . A s Fogle, among many c ritic s , has affirmed, Coleridge's ! lifelong struggle was . . t o synthesize oppositions into ! D / % organic unity . . . . ” Geraldine's fin al vanishing at the return of the true lover is allegorically unsatisfying if melodramatically appealing. Beer's contention that Christabel's ultimate role must be to prevail over the evil principle In such a way as to absorb it or return i t to its proper place in the scheme of being, is more satisfactory in terms of the balance and reconciliation of opposites. Coleridge's system is all-inclusive. Like Blake, he sought not to deny the re a lity of the world of the senses once he had become a Kantian, but to incorporate that re a lity into his larger and all-encompassing perception of the noumenal fin The Idea of Coleridge's Criticism, p. 131. re a lity . His motive, as Fairchild comments, is always i bound to the religious question of how to attain salvation : 1 through the world of sense experience and the temptations O - J Iof the senses. It is very largely such a world or view ;of the world which Geraldine represents, associated as she i i is with the allegorical five warriors. Her temptation of j Leoline in Part II is accomplished through the senses—and Geraldine is never what she appears to be to the senses. j It is not her exorcism, then, which Coleridge must accom plish, but her marriage with Christabel, the principle of ( i I love and innocence, and thus her merging with a greater 1 re a lity of which she must be a part. Confronted by the sam e crisis of reconciling the sensual world with a rea lity of the s p irit, Blake had shown the identity between the cor poreal Yala and the divine Jerusalem, the true emanation of Albion who, like Leoline, is fallen man faced with a choice between his true and false "daughters." A s the poem stands, the only marriage which takes place is the perverse one in which evil absorbs good and makes it resemble its e lf. Whatever Coleridge’s plans for the remain ing three parts, whether or not he intended to shift his attention to Leoline and to show by some means the reconsti tution of the chivalric world revolving on the axis of Neo-Platonic friendship, i t seems clear that the problem 8 1 ______ Religious Trends. Vol. Ill, p. 309. _ 228 ; of contInnation was insurmountable. Gillman’s conclusion ' f u lf ills the expectations of a Gothic romance, but not of j I |a moral, philosophical, or psychological allegory. Perhaps Geraldine remains so ambiguous a figure because of Cole ridge’s ow n inability to explain satisfacto rily to himself the place of evil In the world and to convince himself of the necessary relationship between the fallen phenomenal world and the noumenal perfection. But neither had any Christian poet before Coleridge expressed an entirely satis-* factory solution to the problem of evil in poetic terms. What w e do have in the Christabel fragment, however, is the image of a troubled consciousness hovering between the vision of chaos and the vision of order. The harmonious 1 f world-view of the epithalamium again establishes the basis i for the Idealized state, against which the fallen state appears a ll the more grotesque—evil as an inversion of good. A s in The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, Coleridge parodies the marriage hymn and Its idealization of rea lity in order to dramatize and comment upon man’s fallen state, just as Milton had parodied heaven in the council In h ell for similar purposes in Paradise Lost. In a ll three of his poetic experiments, Coleridge re tained the epithalamic vision of the love poet, however sublimated and objectified in exotic images and poetic forms. But, as Schulz holds, Coleridge's imagination seems to have failed him by the second part of Christabel, Despite his qualified successes in adapting the ballad form, Coleridge jmust have realized after 1797 that ". . . his most sponta neous, characteristic type would be in the naturalness of his ow n speaking voice."®^ After Kubla Khan, Coleridge ^turned chiefly to love poems (some of them in the conversa tion voice) resembling those in his ea rlie r manner and to ,dream poems; often, of course, the love theme takes the dream form, as in Kubla Khan. N o w Coleridge may well have realized that his essential genius had always been as a ! love poet u n til the Lyrical Ballads experiments. At the same time, however, the shift from the dramatized narrative of the ballad back to the intensely personal tone of the lover in his late r poetry is certainly due largely to the poet*s meeting Sara Hutchinson in 1799. Once again, at least for a short time, Coleridge, ha ving conceived of the fa ll as a breaking of the magic wed ding circle or loss of the Shechinah in the separation of A dam and Eve, could imagine a tangible relationship of perfect love as the solution to the fa ll in his own life . A s he wrote in 1803, by this time in despair at the fu tility of his love for Sara, "To be beloved is a ll I need, / A nd w hom I love, I love indeed" (The Fains of Sleep, 51-52). A s Schulz has stated, Coleridge "... never lost fa ith in his capacity to daydream" or ". . . i n the constancy and 2 3 0 : immediacy of his reveries."®3 ironically, the course of 1 |his relationship with Sara was to follow the a ll too farai- I lia r pattern of in itia l enthusiasm and eventual dejection of his earlier hopes for Pantisocracy, his friendships, and his marriage to Sara Pricker. Despite the actual mutual love between them, however, Coleridge must have realized even at the outset of the relationship that i t could lead only to his ultimate unhappiness, since he was inextricably committed to family responsibilities in his unfortunate marriage. Thus, even in the early Asra poem called ’ ’Love,” the element of the daydream is prevalent, as i t was not in the early poems to Sara Pricker, implying that the poet’s envisioned life with Asra could never be more than a m om en tary and perhaps after a ll delusory escape from the night mare re a lity which now, with the worsening symptoms of his opium addiction, increasingly threatened to engulf him. Nevertheless, the true love relationship remains sacred, and even more so for its contrast with a harsh and imperfect rea lity : All thoughts, a ll passions, a ll delights, Whatever s tirs th is mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, A nd feed his sacred flame. {"Love," 1— if.) Q ^ T he P o e t ic V o ic e s o f C o le r id g e , p p . 1 2 0 , 1 2 1 . But now such an idealized marriage of true minds is re a li sable only in the poet’s ’ ’ waking dreams” (5) in which he pictures a tender scene with his beloved in the romanticized I setting of a moonlit night near a ruined castle. The scene, iwith the melody of the poet’s harp and song, recalls the imagic grove of The Nightingale. Through a tale of love and; compassion in the chivalric world, Coleridge imagines that he wins his own lady, w hom he calls his "bright and beau- i teous Bride" (96). Sara Hutchinson (here disguised as "Genevieve") is the idealized w om an celebrated in the epi- ! jthalamium: She wept with pity and delight, She blushed with love, and virgin-sharae; A nd like the murmur of a dream, I heard her breathe m y name. (77-80) In Alcaeus to Sappho, To Asra. and The Second B irth, a ll written between 1800 and 1801, the Heo-Platonie id eali zation of love is evident, and with it the impassioned note of the Song of Solomon. The f ir s t poem is really an ela borate compliment to Sara, drawing upon th eir mutual profes- s ion of love: All Heaven is in a maiden's blush, In which the soul doth speak, That it was you w ho sent the flush Into the maiden’s cheek. (5-8) iln To Asra. Sara’s love for the poet makes his heart the i » "living fount1 1 of his love, which overflows and f i l l s him 'with joy, so that he wishes he could "... transmute the whole to one rich Dower/Of Happy Life . . ." (12-13) and give i t a ll to his beloved. The Donne-like imagery and sentiment occur again in The Second B irth; There are two birth s, the one when Light F irst strikes the new-awaken’d sense— The other when two souls unite, A nd w e must count our life from then. (1-k) The fin al couplet especially resembles Donne’s poetry in the colloquial or conversational tone and in the rhythm: "W hen you lov’d me, and I lov’d you, /Then both of us were bom anew." I t is th is tone, which Coleridge had long been perfec ting, that informs the great Dejection ode w ritten in 1802. A s Whalley notes, the poem in its original and more biogra phical form was called A Letter to Asra. ^ Once more, as in the e a rlie r conversation poems, Coleridge’s epistemologi- cal and metaphysical vision of the active universe, the union of natura naturata and natura naturans, stems from the personal emotion of romantic love in som e specific instance, such as the bride and groom express in the Song of Solomon. ^Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson, p. 101. B y this time, Coleridge had com e to the b itte r recognition j that even his love for Sara, which awakened in him an in- | ^tense longing to enter in fact the kind of world glorified ^ i i jby the epithalamium, must be doomed to failure in the actual world. Yet that failure in no way lessened Coleridge’s need for love or his experience of love for Sara. The nightmare and the dream thus fin ally cam e to coexist in a kind of equilibrium in his own mind. I t is this aspect of his personal life which, combined with his broader view of the workings of the active mind in relation to the universe, gives the De.lection ode its form. Coleridge’s conception of love, like Shelley’s, entails a going outside of one’s ow n nature or selfhood in an identification or coalescence ' j with the object or person beloved. A s a consequence, the mind is able to achieve escape, however momentary and tenu- ; 'ous, from the conscious and subconscious fears of the isola ted selfhood. The storm imagery of the f ir s t stanza establishes the poet’s vision of chaos impending in the natural world. The moonlit night at f ir s t suggests the contrasting tranquility and harmony of the garden of the nightingales. But this time the wind which in The Eolian Harp had symbolized the living sp irit of the universe drawing celestial music from the wind-harp, threatens to become a wild, raging b last, a . . . dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes Upon the strings of th is AEolian lute, Which b etter far were mute. ( 6- 8 ) Ironically, however, the great calm in nature images the drugged state of the poet's mind in passivity or dejection, from which the imagination can, it seems, be roused only i through apocalyptic tumult. The chaotic force its e lf, then, microcosmically the unbounded and even potentially destruc tive energy of the imagination, must somehow be harnessed and incorporated into Coleridge's vision of dynamic unity where a ll opposites coexist, as in Blake's Eden, in harmo- I nious balance. Against this ideal the sta tic , non-perceiving mind of the f ir s t three stanzas is particularly oppressive. The mind turned in upon its e lf, the non-creative "void" {Dejec tion, 21) of the selfhood, is the imagination's prison, making i t seemingly impossible for the esemplastic power to draw the mind into an active perceptual (hence creative) relationship of reciprocity with the universe. A nd yet it is the state of dejection which brings to the mind the re cognition of its own power and the knowledge that it ". . . m ay not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the lif e , whose fountains are within" }. At this point, however, the poem has shown, to quote Abrams, "... not merely an alienation but the u tte r loss of the reciprocating [power of the raind."®£ ! I i i The psychological crisis for the Romantic conscious- j jness, for Coleridge as for Blake and Wordsworth, lies in I ! i ;the relationship between the perceiving mind and its percep- i I tual universe. As Abrams reminds us, it is not the idea of ] : |the World-Soul or active principle in nature which is the distinctive mark of the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, but rather ”. . . the repeated formulation of this outer life as a contribution of, or else as in constant recipro- O / [cation with, the life and soul of man the observer."00 ; Coleridge addresses Sara Hutchinson at the beginning of the fourth stanza: "0 LadyI w e receive but what w e give, / A nd in our life alone does Nature live . . ." (Ij.7-lj.8). For the mind in dejection, the world must be "inanimate" and "cold" I (5l)» for the mind in that state cannot transform i t by giving i t lif e . B y the middle of the fourth stanza, Cole ridge's assertion of his fa ith in the power of the active mind in the mutual relationship or interchange between its e lf and nature begins to approach the ecstatic pitch of the epithalamium: A h I from the soul its e lf must issue forth A lig h t, a glory, a fa ir luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth— A nd from the soul its e lf must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own b irth , 8%ie Mirror and the Lamp, p. 67* The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 6 i j.. . . O f a ll sweet sounds the life and element! (5 3 -5 8 ) | The visionary quality is maintained and reinforced in ^he next stanza, in which Sara becomes an important part | and the marriage dream which had always characterized her relationship with Coleridge merges with the epithalamic vision of the marriage between mind and nature, noumenal and phenomenal, natura naturans and natura naturata. The stanza warrants quotation in its entirety: 0 pure of heart I thou need'st not ask of m e W hat this strong music in the soul may be I What, and wherein i t doth exist, This lig h t, th is glory, this fa ir luminous mist, This beautiful and beauty-making power. Joy, virtuous LadyI Joy that ne’er was given, Save to the pure, and in th eir purest hour, Life, and L ife's effluence, cloud at once and shower, Joy, Ladyi is the sp irit and the power, Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud— Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud— W e in ourselves rejoice! A nd thence flows a ll that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colours a suffusion from that lig h t. (5 9 -7 5 ) The climactic lin e—"W e in ourselves rejoice!" may of course be taken to mean that mankind in general rejoices at the discovery of "the sp irit and the power" within himself. But the overall tone of the stanza implies that such a rapturous vision is possible only under very special circumstances and 237 then only to the "pure of heart," The pronoun w e specifi- eally draws together the poet and the Lady, the lover and his beloved, suggesting that the purification of the mind !by which one is enabled to perceive "the one Life within us I - land abroad" is attainable only through the mutual giving and receiving of the ideal marriage union on both lite r a l and epistemologieal levels. Here the poet's mind actually participates in what i t argues for: escape from the prison of the isolated selfhood by a moving outward in the re a li zation of love for another being. Coleridge’s argument is really implicit in the whole idea of the epithalaraium, but in these lines he seems to go further in reconciling the ^particular joy of the personal love relationship with the universal joy born of the union of mind and nature by eonflating several Biblical marriage visions. The central |image of the two lovers w ho draw a ll things to themselves 'derives ultim ately from the Song of Songs; but the vision i jof apocalypse as a marriage eonsuramation recalls especially Ithe books of Isaiah and Revelation. John's words, which I have quoted ea rlier in connection with Blake, fuse microcosm land macrocosm to suggest the same outer-inner equivalence that Coleridge expresses in Dejection: i ' A nd I saw a new heaven and a new earth .... A nd I John* saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from G od out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. | A nd I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of G od is with men, and he w ill dwell with 2 38 them, and they shall he his people, and G od himself shall be with them, and be their God. (Isaiah, 21: 1-3) | |Like Blake1 s Los in Jerusalem and Wordsworth’s imagination I in The Prelude, the “shaping sp irit of Imagination” (8 6 ) in - t i — r ■niiiB— ■ n r • Dejection is apocalyptic in the sense that i t strives to |gather a ll things into the unity of "a new heaven and a new earth ,” founded on the principle of love which is, in its (largest implications, Pantisoeracy. j Beginning with the next stanza, however, the mind turns I Sin upon its e lf once again. The “viper thoughts” (9^) of the selfhood are "Reality’s dark dream!”--the nightmare rea lity of the isolated ego, the chaos of sense experience out of which, by way of escape, the poet’s fancy made him ”dreams of happiness" (79). In stanza seven the raging wind, which may be taken to symbolize both the “shaping sp irit of Imagination" in the poet’s ow n mind and the living sp irit of the universe, brings only agony to the unrespon sive mind. The imagery of s te rility culminates in an almost demonic parody of the epithalamium’s vision of abundance and mutual joy and of the figure of the enclosed garden in I (the Song of Songs. The wind, pictured as a frenzied poet, iis the M ad LutanistI w ho in th is month of showers, | Of dark-brown gardens, and of peeping flowers, I Mak’st Devils’ yule, with worse than wintry I song.. . | (IOI4.-IO6 ) 239 A s Schulz has shown, the failure of imagination finds its objective correlative in the weather imagery. The moon suggests a change of weather, but instead of the eagerly (anticipated April shower which would bring the earth to ! 8 7 [life, only the wild onslaught of the storm m aterializes. ! The April wind finds not a harvest but a wasteland. A nd yet i t is in the music of the wind that Coleridge envisions the ”. . . l i t t l e child / Upon a lonesome wild” ](1 2 1 - 1 2 2 ), as his thoughts consequently turn to gentleness | ;and to prayer for the welfare of the l i t t l e g irl who, in i 'her isolation and dejection, suggests the wandering lo st !soul of the poet, sim ilarly disengaged from its divine ! m ilieu. The transition back to Sara, then, is an easy one as she becomes the subject of his prayer. The actual work ings of the poet’s mind at the end of the poem contradict to som e extent his insistence on the failure of his own imagination, for it is through the efficacy of what Words- jworth calls the sympathetic imagination--the power of jimaginative empathy— that Coleridge is able to project him- jself once more into the joyful state of the marriage vision l |in the concluding stanza: < 1 ; Joy l i f t her s p irit, joy attune her voice; 1 To her may a ll things liv e, from pole to pole, : Their life the eddying of her living soul! i j I ^ The Poetic Voices of Coleridge, pp. 33-3ij.• 21+ 0 0 simple s p irit, guided from above, Dear LadyI friend devoutest of m y choice, j Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice. i | (134-139) | | Abrams has commented upon the cluster of “optical, acoustical, meteorological, and m arital’ 1 metaphors which Coleridge employs to reinforce the doctrine that "w e reeeive O Q but what w e give." For Abrams, the eddy of the la st stan za is "the crowning metaphor," implying . . . a ceaseless and circular interchange of life between soul and nature in which it is impossible to distinguish what is given from what received. . . .89 I I lit Is the marriage metaphor, sometimes overt, often sunken, which really determines the poem’s form and provides its visionary basis in the epithalamium. Moreover, the metaphor of the eddy is its e lf "marital" in figuring the coalescence of subject and object which, as Coleridge writes in Biogra- phia L iteraria, is the foundation of a ll knowledgeAs I. A. Richards has expressed i t , j Coleridge’s Subject is the Self or the Intelligence, the i ! 88 I The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 67. | 89The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 68. 90 | Of the many passages expressing this idea, Coleridge’s remarks beginning p. 174 of Volume I are typical. 2l | . l sentient knowing Hind; his Object is Nature, what is known by the mind in the act of knowing.91 [Perception is a wilful act of creation, not a reaction or } an absorption, and hence the joy which the perceiving mind !takes in its perceptual world is akin to the joy which G od | stakes in his creation. I t is th is epistemological marriage, i iexpressed in Biblical and epithalamic imagery, which the poet wishes for Sara. Throughout th eir ten-year relationship, as Suther jwrites, the "impossible mystical aspiration," which Cole- I - . iridge fe lt was so bound up In his love for Sara, clashed jincessantly with the actual circumstances of that lo v e .^ i i For this reason, perhaps, the dream of perfection as it conflicts with a mundane reality becomes a more prevalent pair of opposites in his poetry after 1800. The "love-lorn man" of The Picture, for example, Is the disillusioned i [Neo-Platonist w ho s t i l l "Worships the sp irit of unconscious 1 „ jlif e /I n tree or wild-flower ..." (20-21), yet is u tterly i .weary of the emotional turmoil of the actual state of love Ion earth. The poet’s vision of the ideal w om an in the j sforest pool now becomes delusory as i t exists in a "phantom- 1 world" (85), the fancied world of the daydream, from which I t I 91 Coleridge on Imagination (Bloomington, Indiana, I960), p. 51. ! ; ^ The Dark Night of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. i j . 8. 2i|.2 awakening is indeed b itte r: . . . Then a ll the charm Is broken--all that phantom world so fa ir Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread, 1 A nd each rais-shapes the other. | (91-91*) i . In his ”m ad love-yearning” (108), the lover’s senses are betrayed by the shadow-reality of the dream-world of his ow n making, b itte r because impossible to sustain, unlike jthe paradise of art in Kubla Khan. ! Yet, as other poems of the period show, Coleridge could s t i l l conceive of the ideal harmony of the mind and of the universe as imaged in the perfect marriage union. The lines from To Matilda Betham from a Stranger are typical: The Almighty, having f ir s t composed a M an, Set him to music, framing W om an for him, A nd fitte d each to each, and made them one! i (18- 2 0 ) i I I And in a fragment called The Happy Husband, the image of the i ”. . . eddy in the flow / Of smoothest song . . . ” (20-21) is Again specifically m arital. In the earthly love between man jand wife, Coleridge envisions ”A pledge of more than passing lif e , / Yea, in that very name of Wife!” (5-6). The tone of i the second stanza recalls once more the feeling of the over flowing love and gratitude in the Song of Solomon: 2k3 A pulse of love, that ne’er can sleep I A feeling that upbraids the heart With happiness beyond desert, That gladness half requests to weep 1 (The Happy Husband, 7-10) But the most characteristic tenor of Coleridge’s la te r poetry is the dual perception of the nightmare and the dream expressed in Dejection, In A Day-Dream, another of the love poems to Asra, the dream-world of the epithalamium which materializes in the poet’s reveries is qualified and given pathos by the sense of precariousness and delusion |that undercuts i t . The f ir s t stanza introduces the image jof the bower, but with the sadness that the willow (6) sug g ests, and the image is expanded in the following stanzas by the remembered wild-roses, ruined shed, and balmy moonlit summer night. Sara Hutchinson, of course, Is the central figure of the daydream: 0 ever—ever be thou blest! For dearly, Asra! love I thee! , This brooding warmth across m y breast, j This depth of tranquil bliss--ah, me! ! (19-21) i |In a sim ilar fashion, the feelings of tenderness and secu- i jrity in the Song of Songs results partly from the contrast i or opposition of the ideal world of the lovers and the barrenness of a world in which they have no part. The re union of the bride and groom in Solomon’s garden is a ll the 2l i 4 more affecting because of their previous separation, in which the bride wept at her husband’s absence and fe lt ”sick of love.” In both the Song of Songs and Coleridge’s S a Day-Dream, the fu ll impact of the epithalamic vision of [perfect mutual love thus depends upon its context in the harshness of the outside world. The step from idealization to dream is, of course, an easy one, and one must remember [that for Coleridge the daydream meant more than mere illu - i jsion. A s Schulz has remarked, Coleridge . . saw in the jdream a means of transcending the lim itations of the sen- I In the dream poem, he sometimes trie s to see his personal ! experiences as expressive of universal ideals .... At other times, he contrasts the emptiness or meaninglessness of the actual moment with the ideal world of Kubla and Boccaccio’s paradisal gardens.94 ' I t is the poet’s exhaustion at the frig id state of ,dejeetion, his failure to see the natura naturans within the > ' j natura naturata, which provides the context of the epitha- jlamie dream in the opening lines of Coleridge’s la st dream- i poem, The Garden of Boeeaceio: ■ ... II"" 1 r" " “ “ r 1 y ■ f I i | Of la te , in one of those most weary hours, I W hen life seems emptied of a ll genial powers, ' ^ The Poetic Voices of Coleridge, p. 128. 9^The Poetic Voices of Coleridge, p. 128. 245 A dreary mood, which he w ho ne’er has known M ay bless his happy lo t, I sate alone; And, from the numbing spell to win re lie f, Call’d on the Past for thought of glee or g rief. (1 - 6 ) iProm this passivity of the selfhood, the mind moves outward j in contemplation of ’ ’Boccaccio’s Garden and its faery, /The love, the joyaunce, and the gallantry!” (15-16) which forms a ’ ’ picture” to the poet’s ’ ’inward sight” (24). H e is ima ginatively transported to ”a new world” (29) of resplendent i - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . / ’wonder" (30), as he enters into the dream-world envisioned ! iby the poet of Kubla Khan: j r m — m m m j ! I see no longer! I myself am there, | Sit on the ground-sward, and the banquet share. ’Tis I, that sweep that lu te ’s love-echoing strings, A nd gaze upon the maid w ho gazing sings; Or pause and liste n to the tinkling bells Prom the high tower, and think that there she dwells. With old Boccaccio's soul I stand possest, A nd breathe an a ir like lif e , that swells m y chest. The brightness of the world, 0 thou once free, A nd always fa ir, rare land of courtesy! I (The Garden of Boccaccio, 65-74) ! Boccaccio's Florence becomes, in Coleridge's mind, a 'composite vision of the banquet of conversants in Pantiso- Icracy, the marriage feast of the Wedding-Guest, the unfallen i I |chivalrie world underlying Christabel, and the paradisal gardens of Kubla Khan and the Song of Solomon. It is now Coleridge himself w ho f u lfills his desire of the earlier | poem, as he sweeps the lute to accompany the song of the 2lj.6 Abyssinian maid, whose love-gaze he returns. Their mar riage, symbolically the restoration of the lost Shechinah, |is implied in the image of mutual song. The air which the |dreamer breathes is the unifying air of the One Life, the I jcoalescence of all subjects and objects by the esemplastic |power of the imagination, in a poetic land of Neo-Platonic [fountains of harmony and Edenic gardens, "where Love lies t (listening1 1 to the waterfalls (8f?) "And Nature makes her I - happy hom e with man ..." (87)* Boccaccio* s world of art is an elaborate poetie Circle of the Graces, with "... the embrace and intertwine / Of a ll with a ll in gay and t -twinkling dance!" (9lj.-95>)-“the magic circle of the marriage hymn. As in the earlier conversation poems, Coleridge progresses from the state of dejection to a state of euphoric I exultation, but now that exultation depends almost wholly upon the efficaey of the poetic dream-world. The maiden of The Garden of Boccaccio is an idealized Florentine lady of jthe Italian Renaissance, not Sara Hutchinson or any other real woman. It is perhaps paradoxical that, the more the nightmare-reality seemed about to prevail over him complete ly, and the more subjective and entirely individual his attempts to escape from it became, the more did Coleridge I conceive of the marriage-dream of mutual love as a personal i assertion of triumph, an insistence upon his faith in "the One Life within us and abroad" in the face of dissolution 2k7 and the broken circle whieh threatened a divorce of a ll things ♦ i 1 CHAPTER V I I 1 CONCLUSION I For each of the first three major English Romantic poets, the eighteenth century was, epistemologically, the era of a great divorce, in which the vision of man as an V integral part of an organic universe had become hopelessly i lost. The new Romantic view of the mind as active, dynamic, i or imaginative, may be regarded as a religion of perceptual awareness, as opposed to the eighteenth century’s religion of mechanism derived from Lockean empiricism. Blake’s risen Albion is man redeemed by the Christ within him, man rising perceptually from The Human Abstract (Lockean or twofold vision) to The Divine Image (the fourfold vision of complete spiritual integrity). Wordsworth’s idealized child of The Prelude and the recurring hermit figures are people whose awareness is heightened to an extraordinary pitch through recognition of the bond existing between man and some unseen yet perceived power which resides in nature. Even in Cole ridge’s most traditional Christian belief, the Fall of Man is basically an epistemological fall, a failure of the mind to respond actively to the active, living universe of its perception--the distorted and chaotic vision of the Ancient Mariner. Pantisoeracy--the assertion of the oneness of all 2kQ ! [beings on the social plane— is no less than a harmonious i i community of spirits which would transcend the fallen world, j It is natural that all three poets, in attempting to ! [replace the eighteenth-century view of the mind as mechanism and the universe as static with a new dynamic view of both mind and universe as organic and inextricably united, should strike upon the marriage metaphor as a poetic means of realizing the transition. Thus for Blake the Pall of Man is his refusal to perceive his own wholeness and divinity by the elevation of his rational faculty, or Urizen, beyond its normal sphere--and historically, the errors of mankind may be traced to a distortion of the balanced fourfold ivlsion of harmony by the failure of the corrupted reason to i see beyond and through the opacity of the corporeal world. Jerusalem, Albion chooses to perceive Vala, the sexual or lustful aspect of Jerusalem's love as separate from Jerusalem because he sees empirically with the limited sight of the reason alone. Vala, as the nature-goddess, serves Urizen; in Albion's perception, she is the mechanistic and inactive nature of eighteenth-century empiricism. Albion refuses to see nature as his own emanation, as part of him self, and so falls to perceive the true Jerusalem as his real bride and his divinity. The poetic resolution of Jeru salem is, of course, the apocalyptic marriage between Albion and Jerusalem which corresponds to the Christian resurrec tion and marriage of nations in the creation of a new heaven * and earth. I In The Prelude, once again, the crisis in the passage ! from childhood to adulthood is the loss of a power, an i access to a fount of spiritual energy, the source of which Wordsworth can never fully explain. What he does suggest, however— and largely through metaphors of sight or vision— is that the visionary gleam which once united the infant i and paradise can be regained through an apocalypse of per ception by which the individual acknowledges and feels a bond between himself and nature which transcends the pheno menal world. In the spots of time passages of The Prelude, the light of the senses must go out in order that the light of the imagination may illuminate the essential spiritual truth to the perceiving mind. Throughout the poem the traditional notion of spiritual marriage and assumption of supernatural power underlies Wordsworth's conception of redemption, the solution to the fall. Metaphorically, the poet's MNaturen is the queen-goddess of a magical underworld to which only the poet or visionary has access. The epic poet's sublime task, then, is to reveal the knowledge of the marriage-vision to humanity and thus to reassert his conviction in the possibility of man's redemption from a world of lifeless objects and the Lockean view of the mind as a reflecting mirror with no power of its own. Coleridge, too, turned in much of his most character istic poetry to the problem of perception as a relationship I of mutual interchange, a coalescence or marriage of subject I i land object, arguing for the necessity of seeing the mind ! not as a blank slate or mirror but as an active foree which responds to an apparently similar force in an organic or living universe. It is this sympathy of subject and object in epistemological terms which is the foundation of the individual’s recognition of the imaginative bond which unites all beings and levels of being in the one world of the Romantic perception— at least in the poetic vision of the ideal world which Coleridge attempted to uphold against the threat of chaos in personal disintegration. The fall, for Coleridge, is the loss of a sense of community or "friendship” in the Platonic sense, resulting necessarily from the mind’s retreat into the cave of the selfhood, its acceptance of a passive and isolated role in the experience of perception. Redemption is therefore a perceptual act of recognition and of sympathy, a resurgence of imaginative energy in the mind's assertion of its own integrity and active role in an organic universe. The Romantics did not, of course, discover the useful ness of the marriage metaphor to express a vision of order and harmony as opposed to the dominant view of the universe which seemed to them fragmentary and mistaken. Among the Old Testament Prophets, Isaiah most notably speaks of apoca lypse— the remaking of heaven and earth in union with one another— in terms of marriage, and the recurrent metaphor of cosmic marriage culminates in St. John’s ecstatic vision inj the book of Revelation. A s Murray Roston has shown, the j |01d Testament was, in a sense, rediscovered by the English I poets of the la tte r part of the eighteenth century and by the Romantics, w ho deliberately set about to write in the prophetic or visionary voice and so naturally turned to th eir most sublime precedents in the Biblical tradition. ! For Blake especially, whose poetry derives so heavily from the Scriptures, the prophetic strains of Isaiah and Revelation must have held particular power. S till, the incredibly rich implications of the marriage metaphor for the Romantics may be accounted for also in terns of an important tradition in English poetry—that of the formal marriage hymn or epithalamium, which originates in the Song of Songs. The garden imagery and tone of the Song is reflec ted In much English poetry before the Romantics, as Stanley Stewart shows in The Enclosed Garden. Blake and Coleridge sometimes drew directly upon the imagery of the Biblical song, sometimes on the established conventions of the epi thalamium in English, especially as they appear in Spenser. The exact source is not important, but the meaning and significance of epithalamie imagery and conventions is often essential to an understanding of Romantic poetry. The Song of Solomon its e lf must have had a special appeal for the f ir s t Romantics, as i t did for Bishop Perey and other la tte r eighteenth-century translators, for its jpastoral simplicity and sensuous beauty, and particularly jfor its rapturous tone of overflowing joy, beyond any (boundaries of rational restrain t or decorum. The large number of translations of the Song after 1760 te s tifie s to its increasing popularity. In the Poetical Sketches the | young Blake cries out in jubilant echoes of the Song of Solomon, establishing himself as the prophet, the new l i berator of the senses w ho w ill, by teaching "an improvement of sensual enjoyment," w ill reveal to fallen man the hidden passage to Eden. A nd in his la te r prophecies Blake was to draw again on the conventions of the formal marriage hymn, this time parodically, to comment with b itte r irony upon man!s insistence on maintaining his narrowed perception or fallen state of being. Blake then presents the triumphant marriage of Albion and Jerusalem, or man and his true four fold nature, in the traditional language of the epithalamium thereby invoking a ll the Ideas of order and harmony which had always been a part of the genre. Wordsworthfs proclamation of his intention to write a "spousal verse" of a great apocalyptic marriage directly echoes Spenser, the most accomplished Renaissance w riter of epithalamia in English. Although Wordsworth, in exploring the idea of epic marriage between himself as poet/priest and the goddess of the noumenal world, does l i t t l e with the conventional language and imagery of the epithalamium, his view of that symbolic marriage as representing consummate harmony in the union of man and nature nevertheless is ifounded solidly upon traditional ideas inherent in the marriage hymn. The recurrent and often sunken marriage i metaphors of The Prelude thus suggest their range of con notation through implication, breaking the surface of the poem only at critical moments, and then sometimes only partially, such as in the eating metaphors by which the child or priest of nature engulfs or is engulfed by the power of the natural world, suggesting a merging of powers. Coleridge, like Blake, explicitly adapts the images as well as the ideas of the epithalamium, and particularly the central image of the enclosed garden from the Song of Songs I have proposed, with other critics, that it is virtually impossible to discuss Coleridge*s poetry without reference to his life, and the most cursory glance at Coleridge’s biography shows his continual efforts to construct around himself a paradisal pleasure dome by realizing a perfect marriage relationship, a pantisocracy restricted to two people. The actual circumstances of life, for Coleridge as for Blake, led him to a painful awareness of the irony of the harmonious vision of the marriage hymn applied to his own life. They also led him, in poetry, to represent man’s fallen condition and vain attempts to build a paradise around himself through the traditional values of civilized life in terms which parody the epithalamium. Coleridge’s ecstatic if momentary vision of the whole world as a garden iof harmonious delight depends for its impact on the tradi- I 1 ! jtional associations of the garden in the Song of Songs and , jits poetic tradition— the perfect image of divine order and peace for which Coleridge sought incessantly in his personal, life and intellectual efforts. The first Romantics might all be called visionaries, poets of apocalypse like Isaiah and St, John, but they are a special sort of visionary in that each concerned himself most importantly with the individual mind and its capacities. Their prophetic voices are addressed to the individual mind i and seek to reveal to it its true power by exhorting it to recognize and glory in its imaginative energy. And the vision is specifically a marriage-vision, as it must be, for it is the epithalamic joy of union— the re-integration of the faculties of the mind for Blake, the marriage of mind and nature, individual and G-od, for Wordsworth and Coleridge--which is celebrated in the great spousal verse of the Romantic visionaries. BIBLIOGRAPHY ‘ Abrams, M . H. "The Correspondent Breeze," English Romantic | Poets, Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. M , H, Abrams, N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1966. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the C ritical Tradition, N ew York: W . W. Norton & j Company, Inc., 1953. lAdam s, Hazard. William Blake: a Reading of the Shorter j Poems. S eattle: University of Washington Press, 1963. t Bateson, P. W . Wordsworth: a Re-Interpret at ion. 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