by Harold Bloom
Roger Lonsdale, in his very useful edition of the poems of Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith, takes issue with Northrop Frye, myself, and Weiskel. For Lonsdale, the “rich-haired youth of morn” is simply the sun. And yet the language is palpably sexual. God and Fancy have intercourse, and the Poet is born:
The band, as fairy legends say,
Was wove on that creating day,
When He, who called with thought to birth
Yon tented sky, this laughing earth,
And dressed with springs, and forests tall,
And poured the main engirting all,
Long by the loved enthusiast wooed,
Himself in some diviner mood,
Retiring, sate with her alone,
And placed her on his sapphire throne;
The whiles, the vaulted shrine around,
Seraphic wires were heard to sound;
Now sublimest triumph swelling,
Now on love and mercy dwelling;
And she, from out the veiling cloud,
Breathed her magic notes aloud:
And thou, thou rich-haired youth of morn,
And all thy subject life was born!
The dang’rous Passions kept aloof,
Far from the sainted growing woof;
But near it sate ecstatic Wonder,
List’ning the deep applauding thunder;
And Truth, in sunny vest arrayed,
By whose the tarsel’s eyes were made;
All the shad’wy tribes of Mind,
In braided dance their murmurs joined;
And all the bright uncounted powers
Who feed on Heav’n’s ambrosial flowers.
Where is the bard, whose soul can now
Its high presuming hopes avow?
Where he who thinks, with rapture blind,
This hallowed work for him designed?
The youth is at once the sun, Apollo, and the new Poet. I do not believe that Collins was schooled in theosophical speculations, as Christopher Smart and William Blake were, but his Fancy is remarkably parallel to the Kabbalistic Shekhinah, Yahweh’s indwelling female presence. In any case, he sees the poetic character as being incarnated in a bard, and not a poet of the school of Alexander Pope. Collins is urging a return to the school of Edmund Spenser and John Milton:
High on some cliff, to Heav’n up-piled,
Of rude access, of prospect wild,
Where, tangled round the jealous steep,
Strange shades o’erbrow the valleys deep,
And holy Genii guard the rock,
Its glooms embrown, its springs unlock,
While on its rich ambitious head,
An Eden, like his own, lies spread:
I view that oak the fancied glades among,
By which as Milton lay, his evening ear,
From many a cloud that dropped ethereal dew,
Nigh sphered in Heav’n its native strains could hear:
On which that ancient trump he reached was hung;
Thither oft, his glory greeting,
From Waller’s myrtle shades retreating,
With many a vow from Hope’s aspiring tongue,
My trembling feet his guiding steps pursue;
In vain—such bliss to one alone
Of all the sons of soul was known,
And Heav’n and Fancy, kindred powers,
Have now o’erturn’d th’inspiring bowers,
Or curtained close such scene from every future view.
Edmund Waller was taken by John Dryden and Alexander Pope as being the ancestor of Augustan poetry. The “myrtle shades” were sacred to Venus.
Thomas Gray:
The Poet as Outsider
THE TWO POEMS in English widely read and appreciated by people who do not read poetry are Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard and Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. John Hollander and I had many discussions as to why these two poems so uniquely found and maintain a vast popular audience. They are both powerful and authentic poems, but that in itself cannot account for their success.
The leading authority on Thomas Gray remains Roger Lonsdale. He taught us to locate the elegy’s central meaning in Gray’s transition from the initial version in the Eton manuscript to our familiar text. You can say of Gray’s first elegy that it is essentially a poem in praise of country retirement, in the mode of Horace. Gray revised it so that it became more Miltonic, and took as its matrix the desire of each of us to be remembered somehow after we are dead.
Lonsdale deftly shows that Gray in revision gives us a very different vision of the poet:
The figure of the Poet is no longer the urban, urbane, worldly, rational Augustan man among men, with his own place in society; what Gray dramatizes is the poet as outsider, with an uneasy consciousness of a sensibility and an imagination at once unique and burdensome.
That burdensome imagination stems from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. The original, more Augustan Elegy concludes with four splendid stanzas:
The thoughtless World to Majesty may bow
Exalt the brave, & idolize Success
But more to Innocence their Safety owe
Than Power & Genius e’er conspired to bless
And thou, who mindful of the unhonour’d Dead
Dost in these Notes their artless Tale relate
By Night & lonely Contemplation led
To linger in the gloomy Walks of Fate
Hark how the sacred Calm, that broods around
Bids ev’ry fierce tumultuous Passion cease
In still small Accents whisp’ring from the Ground
A grateful Earnest of eternal Peace
No more with Reason & thyself at strife;
Give anxious Cares and endless Wishes room
But thro’ the cool sequestered Vale of Life
Pursue the silent Tenour of thy Doom.
This is immensely different from the conclusion of the poem we know:
For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e’er resign’d,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing, ling’ring look behind?
On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires.
For thee, who mindful of th’ unhonour’d Dead
Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,
Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,
“Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.
“There at the foot of yonder nodding beech
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
“Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
Mutt’ring his wayward fancies he would rove,
Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,
Or craz’d with care, or cross’d in hopeless love.
“One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill,
Along the heath and near his fav’rite tree;
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;
“The next with dirges due in sad array
Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay,
Grav’d on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.”
THE EPITAPH
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heav’n did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear,
He gain’d from Heav’n (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose)
The bosom of his Father and his God.
Dr. Samuel Johnson judged poetry by a test of asking whether any new matter had been disclosed. Though he loathed Gray’s poetry, Johnson nevertheless praised the Elegy on encountering notions that seemed to him utterly original:
The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas beginning Yet even these bones, are to me original: I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here, persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him.
It has always baffled me that Johnson, as learned a critic as Gray was a poet, chose to overlook the echoes here of Lucretius, Ovid, Petrarch, Milton’s Belial, Pope’s Odyssey, and Swift. I assume that the great critic found an expression of his own deepest anxieties concerning both the poetic self and the fate of the soul after death.
Wisdom and Unwisdom
of the Body
IN MY FAR-OFF YOUTH of the early 1960s, I was a scholar of William Blake (1757–1827) and composed several lengthy commentaries upon his three “brief epics,” The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem. Now, more than fifty years later, I wake up in the middle of the night and include his lyrics among those I chant to keep myself going. For some reason (I wish I knew why), I have found myself repeatedly chanting the preface to Milton: A Poem (1810):
And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
Blake would have been surprised that this highly personal lyric has been absorbed by the Anglican Church and by Nonconformists as almost a normative Christian hymn. But, then, John Milton’s Paradise Lost has become the Protestant epic, rather in the way that Dante’s Commedia has been judged by many to be an expression of devout Catholic doctrine. Milton sets “before all temples the upright heart and pure,” his own.
The preface to Blake’s Milton opens with a series of rhetorical questions to which the reply is positive. The Dark Satanic Mills could refer to industrialization, yet any informed reader of Blake will recognize in them the image of Urizen, who grinds on in the mills of our minds and renders us victims of a stony sleep. Blake, like Milton a sect of one, assumes the mantle of the prophet Elijah, who ascends to the Divine in a chariot of fire. Refusing to cease from mental fight, the poet-prophet William Blake dedicates his vision of a Blakean John Milton to the building of a New Jerusalem in a redeemed England.
Many readers who now encounter this lyric cannot get the church melody out of their heads, which is an irony Blake would have enjoyed. For me, the resolution is to recover Blake by hearing his highly individual tone of voice:
What is the price of Experience do men buy it for a song
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath his house his wife his children
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy
And in the withered field where the farmer plows for bread in vain
Night the Second, “Song of Enion,” The Four Zoas
The tens of thousands who sing what they mistitle “Jerusalem” ought to ponder these searing lines. Koheleth (Ecclesiastes) is echoed here with high deliberation, yet to prophetic purpose alien to the supposed King Solomon the Wise contemplating the emptiness of hevel (mistranslated as “vanity”). It is Blake’s unread poetry and neglected paintings that are sold with no buyers and become the absent bread withered in the field.
William Blake’s poetic voice is plangent with reverberations of the prophet who knows he will not be heard. Like John Milton’s organ voice, it sounds against the horizons we have imposed upon ourselves. The burden of these voices is: Why will you turn away? Walt Whitman called himself the Answerer, and Blake could have done the same. Here is one of the most direct and masterful lyrics in the language, “The Crystal Cabinet”:
The Maiden caught me in the Wild
Where I was dancing merrily
She put me into her Cabinet
And Lockd me up with a golden Key
This cabinet is formd of Gold
And Pearl & Crystal shining bright
And within it opens into a World
And a little lovely Moony Night
Another England there I saw
Another London with its Tower
Another Thames & other Hills
And another pleasant Surrey Bower
Another Maiden like herself
Translucent lovely shining clear
Threefold each in the other closd
O what a pleasant trembling fear
O what a smile a threefold Smile
Filld me that like a flame I burnd
I bent to Kiss the lovely Maid
And found a Threefold Kiss returnd
I strove to seize the inmost Form
With ardor fierce & hands of flame
But burst the Crystal Cabinet
And like a Weeping Babe became
A weeping Babe upon the wild
And weeping Woman pale reclind
And in the outward Air again
I filld with woes the passing Wind
The Maiden is sexually more active than the youth who puts up no resistance. This cabinet, a cosmos in itself, opens into a moonlit night of another England and another Maiden, but this one translucent: a Chinese box in which three mirror images are enclosed each within the other. Blake prophesies Lewis Carroll’s looking-glass world, yet more subtly, since the Maiden’s three sides converge only in part, in their midst, which gives an evasive image. The youth’s kiss confronts a returned threefold kiss so frustrating that he attempts to embrace the inmost of the three images and bursts the crystal cabinet, since sexual fulfillment by itself cannot achieve a knowledge of reality.
The unfortunate lover becomes a crying infant again, and the Maiden weeps too. A reader who desires a further development of this symbolic drama can find it in Blake’s engraved epic Jerusalem 70:17–31, where the Maiden is named Rahab. In the book of Joshua, Rahab is a redeemed harlot, and Dante continues her identification with redemption by associating her with Christ’s sacrifice. Blake furiously reversed this, an
d made Rahab all the churches of the world, each another Whore of Babylon. I do not urge any but a few readers to struggle with the rewarding complexities of Blake’s mythmaking in his three brief epics. The splendor of “The Crystal Cabinet,” as of so many of Blake’s lyrics, is that the myth remains implicit and the drama of loss conveys a mysterious beauty.
Sometimes, in the hard hours before dawn, when invariably I lie awake, I hear a Blakean quatrain echoing in my head. It is the enigmatic motto to The Book of Thel:
Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole:
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?
Or Love in a golden bowl?
I do not think Henry James had Blake in mind when he gave his late masterpiece The Golden Bowl its title. Rather, he shared Blake’s source in Ecclesiastes 12:
…and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets:
Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.
Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was….
William Butler Yeats, professed disciple of Blake, follows neither Ecclesiastes nor Henry James but varies the motto to The Book of Thel:
I thought it out this very day,
Noon upon the clock,
A man may put pretence away
Who leans upon a stick,
May sing, and sing until he drop,
Whether to maid or hag:
I carry the sun in a golden cup,
The moon in a silver bag.
“Those Dancing Days Are Gone”
Swerving from his precursor, the Anglo-Irish Archpoet renders as triumph what Blake regards as a rhetorical question with an implied answer in the negative mode. For Yeats, the wisdom of the body had to be sufficient, despite all his occult yearnings. Blake finds a great unwisdom in all those who seek to reason with the loins. D. H. Lawrence shared Yeats’s heroic vitalism, but for Blake, more is required than sexual exaltation if we are to become fully human.
