by Harold Bloom
William Blake’s Milton
I CONTINUE WITH William Blake, and to the magnificent close of his poem Milton:
To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self-examination.
To bathe in the Waters of Life, to wash off the Not Human
I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration
To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour
To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration
To cast off Bacon, Locke, & Newton from Albions covering
To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination
To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration
That it no longer shall dare to mock with the aspersion of Madness
Cast on the Inspired, by the tame high finisher of paltry Blots,
Indefinite, or paltry Rhymes, or paltry Harmonies.
Who creeps into State Government like a caterpillar to destroy
To cast off the idiot Questioner who is always questioning,
But never capable of answering; who sits with a sly grin
Silent plotting when to question, like a thief in a cave;
Who publishes doubt and calls it knowledge; whose Science is Despair
Whose pretence to knowledge is Envy, whose whole Science is
To destroy the wisdom of ages to gratify ravenous Envy;
That rages round him like a Wolf day & night without rest
He smiles with condescension; he talks of Benevolence & Virtue
And those who act with Benevolence & Virtue, they murder time on time
These are the destroyers of Jerusalem, these are the murderers
Of Jesus, who deny the Faith & mock at Eternal Life:
Who pretend to Poetry that they may destroy Imagination;
By imitation of Nature’s Images drawn from Remembrance
These are the Sexual Garments, the Abomination of Desolation
Hiding the Human Lineaments, as with an Ark & Curtains
Which Jesus rent: and now shall wholly purge away with Fire
Till Generation is swallowd up in Regeneration.
Blake’s Milton makes his final descent from heaven to Blake’s Vale of Felpham. I know of few passages in the world’s poetry so exalted and sublime as Milton’s proclamation. Who would not wish to cleanse the face of their spirit by self-examination? Who would not hope that we could bathe in the waters of life, and wash off the not-human? Yet Blake’s Milton, like the actual John Milton, is far beyond us. I for one am not capable of self-annihilation, or the grandeur of inspiration. And, not being a poet, I cannot proclaim that all that is not inspiration should be cast aside from it. Blake, so frequently accused of madness, defends himself as truly inspired, against his enemies in both painting and poetry.
Most powerfully, he invents the great image of “the idiot Questioner”—the person who always questions but has no answers: the poseur to philosophy or insight of any kind, the hypocrite who talks of benevolence and virtue but who time and again spiritually murders those who indeed act with benevolence and virtue.
The poem Milton concludes with Blake’s own proclamation of his individual vision:
And I beheld the Twenty-four Cities of Albion
Arise upon their Thrones to Judge the Nations of the Earth
And the Immortal Four in whom the Twenty-four appear Four-fold
Arose around Albions body: Jesus wept & walked forth
From Felphams Vale clothed in Clouds of blood, to enter into
Albions Bosom, the bosom of death & the Four surrounded him
In the Column of Fire in Felphams Vale; then to their mouths the Four
Applied their Four Trumpets, & then sounded to the Four winds.
Terror struck in the Vale I stood at that immortal sound:
My bones trembled, I fell outstretch’d upon the path
A moment, & my Soul returned into its mortal state
To Resurrection & Judgment in the Vegetable Body
And my sweet Shadow of Delight stood trembling by my side
Immediately the Lark mounted with a loud trill from Felphams Vale
And the Wild Thyme from Wimbleton’s green & impurpled Hills
And Los & Enitharmon rose over the Hills of Surrey
Their clouds roll over London with a south wind, soft Oothoon
Pants in the Vales of Lambeth weeping oer her Human Harvest.
Los listens to the Cry of the Poor Man: his Cloud
Over London in volume terrific, low bended in anger.
Rintrah & Palamabron view the Human Harvest beneath.
Their Wine-presses & Barns stand open; the Ovens are prepar’d
The Waggons ready: terrific Lions & Tygers sport & play
All Animals upon the Earth, are prepard in all their strength
To go forth to the Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations
Here Blake comes back to himself, in a human triumph. The Four Zoas, or principal components of the unfallen human, sound their trumpets and impel Blake toward his own Last Judgment. Yet he grandly resurrects, to await his mortal destiny, following Milton in the belief that body and soul must die together, and be resurrected together. In the assured closing passages, Blake gathers together many of his poem’s emblems: the Lark and the Wild Thyme as messengers of Los; the rising of Los and Enitharmon as a wind of possible inspiration; the labors of Rintrah and Palamabron. To these he adds Oothoon of Visions of the Daughters of Albion, weeping with joy over the Human Harvest she was denied in that poem. Los is now altogether transformed from the erring creature of the early Nights of the Four Zoas. Like Amos among the prophets, he “listens to the Cry of the Poor Man,” and his prophetic anger is bent over London as a threatening cloud, a call for social justice that threatens destruction if denied. In the closing lines, the Mills of Satan have vanished, and the Apocalypse is imminent. I hear in the single line of the final plate a prophetic battle cry. It articulates challenge, with the confidence of the poet-prophet who has been tried severely, and has won a victory in those trials.
William Wordsworth,
“The Solitary Reaper”
WORDSWORTH’S “Intimations” ode, though it influenced Percy Bysshe Shelley, emerges from a different cosmos and will be considered here partly in its interlocking relationship with Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” and also as a crisis lyric. “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” was composed from 1802 to 1804. A year later gave Wordsworth a simpler masterpiece, “The Solitary Reaper”:
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Will no one tell me what she sings?—
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of today?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?
Whate’er the theme, the Mai
den sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o’er the sickle bending:—
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
An unpublished travel book by the poet’s friend Thomas Wilkinson contains a sentence Wordsworth appropriated: “Passed a female who was reaping alone: she sung in Erse as she bended over her sickle; the sweetest human voice I ever heard: her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more.” Wordsworth’s imagination is stimulated to a wild surmise because he does not know the language in which the Highland girl sings. I cannot recite “The Solitary Reaper” without recalling “The Idea of Order at Key West,” in which Wallace Stevens hears from a distance another singing girl, walking the beach at Key West. He knows neither the language nor the burden of her song, only that she was the maker and the sea and sky were subordinate. She strides purposefully and raises her voice to assert her own power over the universe of death.
The solitary reaper evidently sings a work song sometimes called “mouth music” among the Scots, and it seems to be cyclic and so never ending. What matters most is that Wordsworth possesses a music in his heart long after this exquisite moment has departed. Wallace Stevens, remembering this, concludes his Key West ode in that spirit:
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
The singing is past, but an aura descends on the harbor and converts it to an enchantment that endures though only waningly. Wordsworth’s myth of memory is stronger than Stevens finds to be possible. When I turn “The Idea of Order at Key West” over in my memory, I recall first what Stevens too insistently argues against: the inhuman voice of the sea. The extent to which the poetic mind is lord and master, with outward sense the servant of its will, is in Stevens far more questionable than it is in Wordsworth, at least during the earlier poet’s great decade, 1797–1807.
William Wordsworth,
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
WHEN I THINK ABOUT, recite, or teach Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” my mind turns first to his own commentary on the poem:
This was composed during my residence at Town-end, Grasmere. Two years at least passed between the writing of the four first stanzas and the remaining part. To the attentive and competent reader the whole sufficiently explains itself; but there may be no harm in adverting here to particular feelings or experiences of my own mind on which the structure of the poem partly rests. Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being. I have said elsewhere—
“A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death!”—
But it was not so much from feelings of animal vivacity that my difficulty came as from a sense of the indomitableness of the Spirit within me. I used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and almost to persuade myself that, whatever might become of others, I should be translated, in something of the same way, to heaven. With a feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality. At that time I was afraid of such processes. In later periods of life I have deplored, as we have all reason to do, a subjugation of an opposite character, and have rejoiced over the remembrances, as is expressed in the lines—
“Obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;” &c.
To that dream-like vividness and splendour which invest objects of sight in childhood, every one, I believe, if he would look back, could bear testimony, and I need not dwell upon it here: but having in the Poem regarded it as presumptive evidence of a prior state of existence, I think it right to protest against a conclusion, which has given pain to some good and pious persons, that I meant to inculcate such a belief. It is far too shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith, as more than an element in our instincts of immortality. But let us bear in mind that, though the idea is not advanced in revelation, there is nothing there to contradict it, and the fall of Man presents an analogy in its favour. Accordingly, a pre-existent state has entered into the popular creeds of many nations; and, among all persons acquainted with classic literature, is known as an ingredient in Platonic philosophy. Archimedes said that he could move the world if he had a point whereon to rest his machine. Who has not felt the same aspirations as regards the world of his own mind? Having to wield some of its elements when I was impelled to write this Poem on the “Immortality of the soul,” I took hold of the notion of pre-existence as having sufficient foundation in humanity for authorising me to make for my purpose the best use of it I could as a Poet.
After Milton’s Lycidas, the “Intimations” ode is the prime shorter poem in the English language. The Great Ode’s influence can be traced in Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, John Clare, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Arnold, Hopkins, Meredith, Swinburne, and Yeats, and in American poetry it vitalized a tradition that goes from Emerson through Whitman and Dickinson on to Frost, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, A. R. Ammons, and John Ashbery. “Intimations” is a poem of deeply painful loss and problematic gain. The title is a misnomer, since to me this is a poem concerning mortality and the necessity of making friends with it. Wordsworth refused all suggestions that the ode was Platonic, though its sole intimation of immortality is in the vision of lines 162–68:
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
Freud ironically named this longing for origins “the oceanic sense.” Wordsworth is anything but ironic as his epigraph to the ode quotes the last three lines of his brief lyric “My Heart Leaps Up”:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Directly after those lines in the epigraph he places:
PAULO MAJORA CANAMUS
This invocation of the Sicilian Muses who inspire Pastoral is the opening of Virgil’s “Fourth Eclogue”: “Let us sing of somewhat more exalted things.” Wordsworth wants us to recall Milton’s deliberate allusion to this phrase
in line 37 of Lycidas: “Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string.” Unlike Virgil and Milton, Wordsworth gives us the first of his eleven stanzas in a key of natural loss:
I
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
“Common” is for Wordsworth a term of honor. The garment of celestial light is no longer visible, and the poet struggles initially to reassure himself that his powers of perception are undiminished:
II
The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
The use of the present tense at last yields to the further realization of a departed splendor:
III
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;