Читать книгу The English Poetic Mind - Charles Williams - Страница 10

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Through sad incompetence of human speech,

That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss

Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,

At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;

Halted without an effort to break through;

But to my conscious soul I now can say—‘I

recognise thy glory:’ in such strength

Of usurpation, when the light of sense

Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed

The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,

There harbours; whether we be young or old,

Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,

Is with infinitude, and only there;

With hope it is, hope that can never die,

Effort, and expectation, and desire,

And something evermore about to be.

Under such banners militant, the soul

Seeks for no trophies, struggles for no spoils

That may attest her prowess, blest in thoughts

That are their own perfection and reward,

Strong in herself and in beatitude

That hides her.

Any one who has ever written verse, will recognise the justice of

hope that can never die,

Effort, and expectation, and desire,

And something evermore about to be.

The difference between the satisfactory and the unsatisfactory poet is in the last line. The good poet has patience and power to wait till that ‘something 21 about to be’ has been brought about, however many minutes, hours, or years he may spend in effort and expectation and desire. Unsatisfactory poetry happens when, through incapacity or ignorance or impatience or poverty or kindness to others, the poet is content to write something down before the extreme moment of expectation has been reached, before the line has formed itself. That formation comes in a state in which the thought of spoils and prowess, of reward or fame, is equally blotted out, for nothing but poetry matters. In the great poets it is probably true—for Wordsworth said so—that the coming of the ‘perfection and reward’ is beatitude.

But also this passage is significant of the difference between the false imagination of the monotonous nightly visits of the widow to the yew, and the true imagination of sorrow, the difference between ‘all the sad etcetera of the wrong’ and the knowledge of the

impersonated thought,

The idea, or abstraction of this kind.

This consciousness of poetry—of imagination—breaks out again later, as he enters London on the top of a stage-coach. ‘A weight of ages’ descends on him—‘weight and power’—‘power growing under weight’. He spoke of Imagination as ‘the Power so-called’, and in London he continues to feel it thus. London provides him with ‘strong sensations’ of past and present; and he is craving for the power which such sensations provide. ‘Influxes of power’ come to him.

At the conclusion of the first part of the Prelude then we have the poet intensely aware of the presence of this power. The unknown modes of being—of which he had been aware years before—are beginning to shape themselves. All that he saw while he was in London moved him passionately, but not beyond the suburbs of the mind; the distinction is Wordsworth’s, and he goes on to compare this movement with the movement of which he was conscious after he had been reading Shakespeare (VII. 477-85).

realities of act and mien,

The incarnation of the spirits that move

In harmony amid the Poet’s world,

Rose to ideal grandeur, or, called forth

By power of contrast, made me recognise,

As at a glance, the things which I had shaped,

And yet not shaped, had seen and scarcely seen,

When, having closed the mighty Shakspeare’s page,

I mused, and thought, and felt, in solitude.

It seems that Shakespeare’s poetry was still affecting him rather as that mountain of his youth had done; he was left with ‘an undetermined sense’, and yet sufficiently determined to enable him to recognise ‘realities of act and mien’, the ‘incarnation of the spirits that’ moved, necessarily, in his own world of poetry. His genius was recognising its own power. He gives one example—that of a blind beggar wearing a placard describing his story; Wordsworth saw it as if that scrawled label was all that we could know of ourselves and the universe—the beggar loomed on him, a supernatural apparition, one of those mysterious solitaries who crossed and recrossed his own solitary and awful path.

Poetry is on the very verge of greatness. The poet is aware both of the diversity and unity of things. He feels, and he knows he feels, the power of Imagination moving within him.

This is the end of the Seventh Book; the Eighth is Retrospect. The Ninth opens with quite a different note, and so far as poets in general are concerned, the rest of the tale is short—‘Oh, how much unlike the past!’

Every one knows it. The Revolution broke out and all emotions and thoughts were swept into a unity of delight and wonder. The unknown modes of being were taking on the shape of a renewed world. Wordsworth himself did not much feel this new world in the abstract idea of freedom—he tells us how he picked up a stone from the ruins of the Bastille, ‘affecting more emotion than I felt’. But this was a part of a danger he notes several times, the tendency to provoke the false emotion instead of the real, the lingering habit of encouraging the widow to come every night. The poet experiences ‘real fervour’, but also that ‘less genuine and wrought up within myself’. It is when he sees men and women—the ‘hunger-bitten girl’, Beaupuy, and the people,

from the depth

Of shameful imbecility uprisen,

that his spirit is really stirred.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven.

Power from the mountains and lakes of Westmorland, from London strangers, from Shakespeare; 24 power from the Revolution, from the work of honour France was doing—

from all doubt

Or trepidation for the end of things

Far was I, far as angels are from guilt.

There was no doubt; there might be distress, but the great movement accordant with all his past prophesied its august end. And then the English Government declared war on the Revolution.

Wordsworth, in his account of the matter, has been blamed for admitting, in the later version of the Prelude, a little gush of patriotism just previous to his account of this crisis. It is not very good poetry certainly, but Wordsworth may have had a reason for letting it in. He may have wished to accentuate the fact that he had a quick sense of England as well as of France. He did feel that the ‘sacred ground’ of ‘Albion’ had given way under him; the mountains of England were at war with the plains of France, and he was ravaged by the fact of that conflict. Change, injustice, evil, could then be.

Not in my single self alone I found,

But in the minds of all ingenuous youth,

Change and subversion from that hour. No shock

Given to my moral nature had I known

Down to that very moment; neither lapse

Nor turn of sentiment that might be named

A revolution, save at this one time;

All else was progress on the self-same path

On which, with a diversity of pace,

I had been travelling: this a stride at once

Into another region.

There fell upon him ‘a conflict of sensations without name’. Things were changed ‘into their contraries’. In the poets, the poetic mind is the most intense and enduring thing for good or evil, and they must feel such a conflict, such a revolution and subversion, in their genius. That genius is their soul; the wound is dealt to their soul. Wordsworth was wounded there, and never recovered. It is not the smallest count against the government of England of that day. ‘Power’ had been within him; it was changed into its contrary. There was with him in his dreams

a sense

Death-like, of treacherous desertion, felt

In the last place of refuge—my own soul.

From the point of view of poetry there are no more important lines in the Prelude, and few as important. For the result of that desertion is given later:

The days gone by

Return upon me almost from the dawn

Of life; the hiding-places of man’s power

Open; I would approach them, but they close.

In those lines Wordsworth, ostensibly looking back towards his childhood and seeking to recall the moments by which his mind had been ‘nourished and invisibly repaired’, did more than that. He recalls—to the submissive reader, if not to himself—the ‘unknown modes of being’; he asserts what his genius meant, and was meant, to do; he declares the failure of his genius to do it. Wordsworth is our third greatest poet, but even Wordsworth was never the poet he should have been. It is with a sense of 26 profound irony that the reader finds him speaking of the dream which

entangled me

In long orations, which I strove to plead

Before unjust tribunals.

The dream did but prophesy his doom; from then till now much of Wordsworth’s verse has been regarded precisely as his genius entangled in long orations before our unjust tribunals. Unjust, at least, if there is the smallest kind of patronage. It is not merely iniquitous, it is imbecile, to patronize Wordsworth—only a little more iniquitous and imbecile than to patronize Coleridge; it is cutting our initials in Westminster Abbey or the Parthenon. It will be time enough to patronize or pardon the great ones when we can also do things that are ‘felt in the blood and felt along the heart’.

This was Wordsworth’s personal experience. But that is not the immediate point. An experience of that kind is here the subject of the poetry—it happens to be his own, which is interesting to the biographer but unimportant for poetry. His poetry is here concerned to discover, to express, to define, a particular state of being. We are no longer in the presence of low breathings and silent steps; nor even of some huge and mighty form that is a trouble to our dreams. On the contrary we are shown a form which is a trouble not to its own or our dreams, but to its own and our life. Poetry is here awakening in us our sense of our capacity for ‘change and subversion’—for ‘a conflict of sensations without name’. Wordsworth happens to be the writer of the verse, but the Wordsworth who is the subject is that almost 27 mythical figure who sits in the village church, silent, revengeful, solitary; the figure whose soul is only aware of a mystical desertion, the figure thrown ‘out of the pale of love’.

The Prelude is an account of Wordsworth’s mind up to the writing of Lyrical Ballads. But it is something else too; it is an account of the developing powers of poetry up to the time when poetry imagines to itself a crisis of utter overthrow and desolation. At the beginning of the work of all the poets is an undetermined sense of unknown modes of being; the aim of all poets is to approach the hiding-places of man’s power, to discover the impersonated thought. Even of the poets there have not been many who do this; Wordsworth himself did so only in a limited sense. The remainder of the Prelude does not carry the history of the poetic mind in general much farther, though it is full of illuminating phrases on poetry, and though it tells us of the immediate future of Wordsworth’s own mind. But in doing so it continually looks back; it recovers sight of its awful sources but hardly contact with them. The close of the Prelude is one of the noblest passages in English verse. But the subject of that close is the poet doing something; it awakens our capacity to learn, to believe, to know. Wordsworth promises to indoctrinate us; his poetry, rising to a marvellous lucidity, flashes on us the consciousness of the mind of man

above this frame of things...

In beauty exalted, as it is itself

Of quality and fabric more divine.

‘Clear as crystal... descending out of heaven’, wrote another poet. It is poetry declaring its own salvation. 28 But Wordsworth’s personal intention was to instruct man; he is concerned more with our belief than with that divine fabric.

But before considering Wordsworth’s own achievement it will be more convenient to see what other parallels to that ‘change and subversion’ exist in English verse.