by Harold Bloom
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;—
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy!
The “timely utterance” may have been “My Heart Leaps Up,” or even “Resolution and Independence”; the poet nevertheless protests too strongly his revived inspiration. The wonderful fourth stanza reminds him of his crisis:
IV
Ye blesséd Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm:—
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
—But there’s a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
The coronal, a pastoral garland, is prematurely claimed. The repetition of “feel” is a symptom of desperation and Wordsworth goes on to a sense of the Dantesan danger of being sullen in the sweet air. A mounting sorrow is heard in the triple repetition of “I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!” William Blake told Crabb Robinson how profoundly he was moved by the five lines beginning, “—But there’s a tree, of many, one….” Suddenly struck by the sight of a particular tree he had long admired, Wordsworth’s eye moves to a familiar single Field and then down to the Pansy and his feet. All of them testify to bereftness: “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”
There the ode was abandoned for more than two years. When he began again, Wordsworth presented alternative resolutions in stanzas V–VIII and then in IX–XI:
V
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
The “life’s Star” is not astrological but seems a recondite metaphor for the sun. This enigmatic strophe offers little hope, nor does the next:
VI
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother’s mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.
Contemplating Coleridge’s son Hartley, who came to rely on Wordsworth as a second father, the poet again laments the loss of a higher vocation to the sorrow of endless imitation, without which we cannot grow up. The culmination of this entropy attains a nadir in the closing image of stanza VIII:
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul’s immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed, without the sense of sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
Coleridge disapproved of the four remarkable lines starting with “To whom the grave,” and Wordsworth unfortunately deleted them in some of the published versions of the ode. They contrast forcefully with the heft of frost weighing down the child’s soul and the problematic “deep almost as life!” Suddenly the ninth strophe erupts:
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never:
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
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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.
The embers probably suggested to Shelley the extinguished hearth from which the ashes and sparks of his words scatter among mankind in his invocation of the West Wind. Wordsworth, his revolutionary phase gone by, raises a song of thanks and praise for the child’s resistance, both to the division of his senses each from each, and to an outwardness that marks his limits. Even as hearing and seeing separate and an external world imposes itself, the child turns to his first affections for parents, siblings, and friends. Far inland, if the season be calm, we see the ocean of immortality, rapidly go there, and see ourselves as children sporting upon the beach. Will this suffice:
X
Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
This persuades through its honest admission that nothing ever can bring back the visionary gleam. Recompense must be found in sympathy with the suffering of others and in the calm of mind that accepts yet somehow sees through death. Though I am moved, I doubt this resolution, and fortunately the final strophe is richer:
And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
I do not know that the contests of maturity award equal palms to those won in the agon of youth. Wordsworth greatly hoped, and who desires to quarrel with hope? Thoughts too deep for tears are beyond lamentation. The beautiful suggestion may be that joy finally is deeper than sorrow.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE’S “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was first published in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads: a leap from that ecstasy of an aged thrush to the grotesque image of a murdered albatross hung round a mariner’s neck. The poem was revised, with marginal glosses added, in 1816. The celebrated Bluestocking Mrs. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, now a feminist heroine, objected to Coleridge that his poem had no moral. He replied firmly that moral sentiment had no place in a work of pure imagination: “It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights’ tale of the merchant’s sitting down to eat dates by the side of the well and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie’s son.”
In the traditions of Cain and the Wandering Jew Ahasuerus, the Ancient Mariner is condemned to do penance eternally, passing like night from land to land. The epigraph to the “Rime” is from Thomas Burnet, a seventeenth-century English churchman, and is taken from his The Sacred Theory of the Earth. Burnet asks who will tell us the families of the invisible creatures who crowd the cosmos. Coleridge, who is haunted by the image of the daemon, invokes the invisible spirits of earth, both angelic and deathly, and in particular the daemon he calls the Polar Spirit, who loved the albatross.
The most beautiful of the marginal glosses accompanies a vision of moonrise:
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And no where did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside—
Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread;
But where the ship’s huge shadow lay,
The charmèd water burnt alway
A still and awful red.
Lines 263–71
The gloss transcends even this eloquent precision:
In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.
Coleridge stations this directly before the partial release of the Ancient Mariner from the curse in the eyes of his dead shipmates:
Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
Lines 272–91
The bodies of the dead men are inspirited, and the ship moves on. In the midst of the night, I am haunted too often by one stanza:
The body of my brother’s son
Stood by me, knee to knee:
The body and I pulled at one rope,
But he said nought to me.
Lines 341–44
The Polar Spirit, who loved the Albatross, sets a perpetual penance for the Mariner, who is caught in an endless cycle of journeying and telling over and over his own story:
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
Lines 582–90
Cain, the Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew experience unlimited movement to no coherent end. Is the Ancient Mariner also condemned to meaninglessness? The poem’s glory refutes that question. William Blake’s “The Mental Traveller,” despite its mordant intensities, is purely cyclic: “And all is done as I have told.” There is nothing acerbic in Coleridge’s temperament. A sweetness emanates, even when the poem verges upon the grisly:
Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a DEATH? and are there two?
Is DEATH that woman’s mate?
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.
The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
‘The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!’
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.
The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper, o’er the sea,
Off shot the spectre-bark.
Lines 185–202
After three nightmarish stanzas, horridly memorable, Coleridge recuperates by banishing the terror. William Wordsworth disliked and rather resented “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” probably because he was egocentric, yet more profoundly since it disturbed his sense of a sacramental covenant between nature and the poet. Coleridge possessed capacious intellect and maintained a subtle opening to daemonic powers that his theological orientation feared. The “Ancient Mariner” is not so much a poem of pure imagination as it is an extraordinary daemonic influx into Coleridge’s Shaping Spirit.
Percy Bysshe Shelley,