The Columbia History of British Poetry (91 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 366
visionary representations, we appear to have entered worlds of dream rather than the dreaming experiences of particular persons.
The uncanny effect of Byron's poem is most disorienting not because the apocalypse we enter is a negative one, but because the otherworld of the text appears an independently authorized existence. As in the texts of the evangelists, the mediator of such an existence is not the focus of attention. (Because Byron was so famous, perhaps especially at the moment of this poem1816the subjection of dreamer to dream is all the more arresting.)
Keats's dream poetry is quite different, as one can see by looking at his great sonnet "A Dream, after Reading Dante's Episode of Paolo and Francesca" (1820):
As Hermes once took to his feathers light,
   When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon'd and slept,
So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright
   So play'd, so charm'd, so conquer'd, so bereft
The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes;
   And, seeing it asleep, so fled away
Not unto Ida with its snow-cold skies,
   Nor unto Tempe, where Jove griev'd a day,
But to that second circle of sad hell,
   Where 'mid the gust, the world-wind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
   Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kiss'd, and fair the form
I floated with about that melancholy storm.
As in "The Fall of Hyperion," this poem gives not the dream as such but Keats's experience of entering the uncanny world of dream. The event is typically Keatsian, as one sees in early poems like "Sleep and Poetry" and "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer." Although not literally a dream poem, the latter is, like "The Fall of Hyperion," the record of the discovery of the power of imaginative vision. The difference separating Keats's work, in this respect, from Blake's and Coleridge's and Byron's measures the close affinity of Keats to Wordsworth. Keats's dream poetry follows the form of, for example, the Arab-Quixote dream sequence detailed in the
Prelude
Book Vin this kind of work we behold the dreamer first; the dream itself is mediated as an experience of discovery.
 
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In the Wordsworthian model, the discovery is then self-consciously meditated and read by the poet. In all such work the contrast with Byron's "Darkness" could not be more complete. As with
Manfred
, "Darkness" records a process of (as it were)
un
discovering the powers of the human mind. The epigraph to
Manfred
is telling: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The special perversity of Byron's work would be picked up later by Poe, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche.
NN
. Mediated or unmediated, Romantic dream poetry traces itself to the strange materials made available by late eighteenth-century philologists and ethnographers: ballad editors like Bishop Percy and Joseph Ritson, translators like Sir William Jones and Charles Wilkins. Jones's influential translations of Sanscrit originals are explicit testimonies to the reality of originary existences. The Vedic hymns reveal utterly strange worlds:
Hail, self-existent, in celestial speech
   
NARAYEN
, from thy watry cradle, nam'd;
   Or 
VENAMELY
 may I sing unblam'd,
   With flow'ry braids that to thy sandals reach,
   Whose beauties, who can teach?
                      ("A Hymn to Na'ra'yena," 1785)
The strangeness of these pieces of "celestial speech" measures something besides the distance between Orient and Occident. Indeed, the cultural differences between these two great worlds are not what drives Jones's interest in the Vedic hymns. On the contrary, the universalist eighteenth-century style of Jones's texts fashions a verse argument about secret congruences between East and West.
Through Jones's translations the Sanscrit texts reveal the vision of an originary and transcendant unity of being. The Vedic hymns are important for Jones's imperial intellect because they carry an "attestation strong, / That, loftier than thy [poetry's] sphere, th' Eternal Mind, / Unmov'd, unrival'd, undefil'd, / Reigns..." ("Hymn to Su'rya," 1789).
AA. Well, important as Jones was, Western writers found their favorite unknown worlds much closer to home, in the folk literature of European culture. The poetry of the period is dominated by those sophisticated appropriations of original song and ballad materials, the literary ballads: texts like William Taylor's "Ellenore" (translated from
 
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an already sophisticated German text), Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel," Keats's "Belle Dame Sans Merci," Baillie's "Ghost of Fadon." Taylor's "Ellenore,'' for example, opens under a traumatic sign ("At break of day from frightful dreams / Upstarted Ellenore"), but the story means to deliver us over to strange realities all the more "frightful" just because they appear conscious and undreamt.
XX. Which is why the work of M. G. Lewis calls for special attention, as I said before. It not only represents a vigorous contemporary literary tradition, it was a tradition denounced by Wordsworth, who anticipated later criticism's retrospective view of the issues involved. When Wordsworth refers (in his 1800 Preface to
Lyrical Ballads
) to "frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse," he is reflecting on literary work of the 1790s that Lewis epitomized and fostered. No text illustrates better what Wordsworth disapproves than
The Monk
(1796), that wonderful "frantic novel" imbedded with several "extravagant stories in verse."
The Monk
(1796): This book signals the importance of "the Gothic," and in particular the Gothic novel, for Romantic writers. "Tales of Terror" and "Tales of Wonder" appear throughout the period and they testify to Romanticism's preoccupation with conditions of social and psychological dislocation, on the one hand, and with mythic and primitive materials on the other.
Wordsworth's phrase "idle and extravagant" points to what is most distinctive and peculiar about Lewis's workits marriage of the comic and the ludicrous with the horrible and the terrifying. Rent by internal contradictions, the work appears to have little interest in bringing them under controlas if pure effect (and affect) were the sole resource and only plan of the writing. In this respect
The Monk's
imbedded poems reflect the novel as a wholeand none more so than the famous ballad (much parodied, much imitated) "Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogine."
A tale of betrayed love, revenge, and damnation, the poem's most disturbing effects develop from the "idle and extravagant" way it handles its materials. When Alonzo returns from the dead to claim his false beloved at her wedding feast, he comes helmeted, his identity concealed. Faced with this strange wedding guest, Imogine barely manages to keep her composure:
At length spoke the bride, while she trembled"I pray,
Sir Knight, that your helmet aside you would lay,
    And deign to partake of our chear."

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