In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  Tablet containing part of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

  When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh is overcome with grief. He is very reluctant even to bury him for a long time, Martin Worthington mentioned, ‘until a worm drops from his nose’. He then worries about his own mortality, and sets off to find the man who became immortal, the flood hero Utnapishtim. On his way, Gilgamesh takes on some of the traits of Enkidu, roaming the wild, wearing lion skins, something that the god Shamash, the sun god, had foretold to Enkidu on his deathbed.

  The story of Utnapishtim, the flood hero, is found elsewhere in Babylonian literature, but the poet of Gilgamesh has used it as a story within a story, Andrew George told us, for a very good reason. Gilgamesh asks Utnapishtim how he became immortal, and, in reply, he tells the story of how, a long time ago, the gods sent a great flood, but had first warned him to prepare a boat and bring into it the seed of all living things, and his family and kith and kin, to survive the deluge.

  ANDREW GEORGE: There’s a very moving bit here where Utnapishtim describes how, when the rain ceased and things had gone quiet, he opened a hatch and looked out and he could see only water. And then he reflects on his position, on what has happened. He sees that all men have died and he says, ‘I knelt me down and sat there weeping, and over the sides of my cheeks the tears did flow.’ And when I read this with my students, many students say they’re actually moved by the original Babylonian here, which is interesting in a poem that’s 4,000 years old.

  The purpose of the flood story, it appears, is for Utnapishtim to tell Gilgamesh that he only became immortal because of a one-off event a long time ago, and the same was not going to happen to him. He does, though, tell Gilgamesh something about life and death.

  ANDREW GEORGE: He teaches Gilgamesh that life is something the gods have given to mankind but, as for each individual, they’re like a mayfly on the river: they’re there for a moment and then they die. But the human race, symbolised by the family, recreates itself cyclically, so that the human race is immortal but the individual is mortal, the individual must die.

  By way of compensation, Utnapishtim gives Gilgamesh a plant of rejuvenation, only for a snake to steal it and then shed his skin on the way.

  This flood story, when it was first deciphered by George Smith in 1872, had an extremely high impact. There was an account of how Smith was so excited and amazed that he tore off his clothes and ran around the room at the British Museum. An ancient flood story, outside Genesis and without Noah, was extraordinary.

  FRANCES REYNOLDS: This became a matter of national discussion involving prime ministers, heads of state – it was internationally discussed. And, of course, for some people it was seen as a threat. The question was: was it something that somehow undermined the Bible, or, indeed, was it something that supported the Bible? Could it be seen as supporting the belief in the Bible as a literal text?

  The argument continued and still continues, we heard, and tends to be resolved by Assyriologists and Old Testament scholars, with each generally in favour of their own areas of study. Old Testament scholars may make a strong case, but we had Assyriologists in the studio.

  ANDREW GEORGE: The evidence of archaeology is clearly that these tablets, on which the flood story survives in Mesopotamia, date back 4,000 years from now. There’s nothing that suggests that the story in Genesis, of Noah, dates back anything like that long. So, in terms of precedence, the Mesopotamian story, both as an independent story and probably also in Gilgamesh, is considerably older than the story in Genesis.

  There may have been a further element of futility in Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality. While he was given the rejuvenation plant, it is not clear if listeners of the poem were ever to expect that this would turn out well for him.

  MARTIN WORTHINGTON: If you ask Gilgamesh, he’ll probably tell you, ‘Oh, I was so close, I had this plant, it would have given me youth or eternal life or something, and the damn snake bore it off and here I am without it.’ But actually he had to go and get that plant down in the subterranean waters called the Apsu, which are the realm of the god Ea, who’s the trickiest of Mesopotamian gods.

  Knowing the guardianship of the tricky god, it followed that Utnapishtim always knew that the gift of the plant would never work out.

  Gilgamesh returns to Uruk and tells his companion, the ferryman, to go up on the wall and look at the city. We assume that Gilgamesh must have been transformed by his experiences, but that is not explicit.

  ANDREW GEORGE: When he gets home, everything stops. All the verbs are in what we call the stated form that describes inaction, as if, when he got to the end of his journey, which you might think is the end of a human life, he stops doing anything and he doesn’t do any more. He’s like Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace – he suddenly finds contentment in actually observing life and not doing anything himself.

  That state may be taken as an ascension to wisdom, and there are many people who think the Epic of Gilgamesh has a spiritual side to it. There may also be gaps in the story that could be filled by discoveries, to make this interpretation clearer. While the spiritual side is part of the story’s appeal, another allure is the intellectual adventure for those studying the originals, and another is the strength of the story itself.

  MARTIN WORTHINGTON: You talk to people who specialise in Dante and they say, ‘Dante’s so great because you can never get to the bottom of him, you can always re-read him.’ Talk to people who study Thucydides and they say exactly the same. And I think we can say the same about Gilgamesh. You have got everything – you’ve got sex, you’ve got the gods, you’ve got loss, you’ve got getting old, you’ve got youthful adventure, you’ve got a monster. What isn’t to like?

  In the studio afterwards, there was discussion of the uncertain timescale of the poem, which could have been anything from a few days to a millennium, so scarce are the clues. There was some doubt raised over the attractiveness of immortality as represented by the flood hero Utnapishtim, who appeared to be in a living hell. There was wonder at the interplay of the semi-divine Gilgamesh and the many different gods, and their attitude to humanity, particularly in the context of the flood. And there was discussion of the gods as forces of nature, where they act to address the humans who were disturbing the world with their behaviour and large numbers.

  ANDREW GEORGE: Embedded there is the idea of a view of ecology in which human beings do not, as in the Bible, have dominion over the earth, but they’re actually part of a world that is very carefully balanced, and there are opportunities for them to endanger this balance by cutting down the Cedar Forest, by growing too fast in numbers, which, I think, is a very sophisticated notion and anticipates modern ideas about humans on the planet.

  THE PRELUDE

  The winter of 1798 was a terrible one across Europe, allegedly the coldest of the century. In the small town of Goslar, in northern Germany, a bitterly cold young English poet wrote some of his finest short poems and, feeling dreadfully homesick, then wrote a few consolatory verses about his childhood. That was William Wordsworth and the poem he started writing was to be his masterpiece, The Prelude, an epic retelling of Wordsworth’s own life and a foundation stone of English Romanticism.

  With Melvyn to discuss The Prelude were: Rosemary Ashton, emeritus Quain professor of English language and literature at University College London; Stephen Gill, emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Oxford and supernumerary fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford; and Emma Mason, professor of English and comparative literary studies at the University of Warwick.

  Rosemary Ashton explained what Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth were doing in Goslar in 1798, the small town mentioned by Melvyn above. The two men had met the year before when they were both writing and, she said, they fell in love with each other’s genius. Lyrical Ballads had just been published in Bristol when they set off for Germany. Coleridge wanted to study philosophy there, particularly Kant, to learn the German language and to get
away from his wife and their two young children. William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were drawn to him like a magnet, though they also had more prosaic reasons for leaving England.

  ROSEMARY ASHTON: They went off to Germany together, Wordsworth and Dorothy, because they were hard up. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth had no income of any sort, they hadn’t got a profession. They wanted to be poets. They wanted to be poets together, they wanted to live cheaply and they had heard that life in Germany was cheaper.

  For all this, it soon became clear that the Wordsworth hearts were not quite in it; they felt homesick and Wordsworth started writing poetry, remembering his childhood in the Lakes. This became the start of The Prelude. Melvyn noted how abandoned they both felt when Coleridge left them to study elsewhere, and that Wordsworth felt a longing to be back in a childhood that he and his sister had not spent together, which set Wordsworth off writing.

  ROSEMARY ASHTON: Wordsworth and Dorothy had been separated as children after the death of their mother, when Wordsworth was eight and Dorothy was a year or so younger. And they had come together more recently. And they just were desperate to stay in one another’s company. And Dorothy was a perfect helpmate (until Wordsworth later married) for a poet.

  There were tensions between Coleridge and Wordsworth; they had different agendas. Coleridge wanted Wordsworth to write a philosophical poem, and yet he would not provide him with the notes Wordsworth wanted for this, and Wordsworth was still chasing him for these as late as 1804 when Coleridge was in Malta for his health.

  Melvyn suggested that the poem at the end of Lyrical Ballads, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’, could be said to be a prelude to The Prelude. Emma Mason thought of that work as a springboard or blueprint, one of the few poems that Wordsworth felt he really finished, and he felt so strongly about it that he argued with Coleridge over it when they were deciding what should be the final poem for Lyrical Ballads.

  EMMA MASON: Wordsworth wanted it to be ‘Tintern Abbey’ because that poem is so different from the other poems in that volume. The other poems tend to be about suffering individuals and, when the readers come to those poems in the Lyrical Ballads, they feel the suffering of those individuals, and then ‘Tintern Abbey’ gives a way to feel affection for them at the end, it produces a different kind of feeling.

  Even though Coleridge wanted Wordsworth to write a philosophical poem, Wordsworth said that one of the reasons he could not do this was that he was more invested in memory than in philosophy. He thought that individual memories were important springboards for poetry, partly as everybody could have them, and, in ‘Tintern Abbey’, he found a space to develop his self through memories and their emotional content. In Lyrical Ballads, Emma Mason said, he had found what he thought poetry should do, which was to foster one’s feelings and make more subtle the sensibility of others.

  EMMA MASON: His poetic vocation comes very strongly from the fact that he thinks he’s the figure to re-emotionalise a dead society in Britain. And he’s reacting very much against strong ideas of rationality and reason that the Enlightenment has pushed on people, invested in industrialisation and capitalism, in ideas that are about an abstract idea of collective good, as opposed to a real individual idea of collective feeling.

  Melvyn asked Stephen Gill to provide a broad outline of The Prelude. He described it as an autobiographical poem, where the first part concerns Wordsworth’s childhood in the Lake District, with its rich evocation of childhood joys and sports with friends. The poem follows chronologically from that youth in the Lake District to his time at the University of Cambridge, then to an amazing walking tour of Europe with Robert Jones, a friend, where they walked something like 2,000 miles to reach and cross the Alps. There is the life in London, and then his time in revolutionary France from 1791 to 1793. The poem concludes with Wordsworth back in England, meeting Coleridge and writing Lyrical Ballads. It marks the growth of the poet’s mind, from birth to the age of twenty-eight. It also reflects Wordsworth’s growth as he worked on the different versions of The Prelude. He started with two books in 1778–9, which many feel to be the most wonderful compressed high-quality poetry Wordsworth wrote, and he then extended it to thirteen books in 1805, writing many thousands of lines of concentrated blank verse.

  STEPHEN GILL: He lives with this poem for the rest of his life. There are no more bursts of composition of such intensity and length as there were in 1804–5. But we have to imagine Wordsworth growing old, forty years old, fifty years old, sixty years old. He’s sixty-nine years old when he last revises this poem. And he’s an old man and he’s writing about himself in the French Revolution. He’s going back to it and he’s living with it.

  He was living with it but, significantly, he was not publishing it. He read his 1805 version to Coleridge and other friends and they praised it as a masterpiece, but Melvyn stressed that The Prelude was not published until after Wordsworth’s death, when his wife arranged it. Emma Mason thought that there was never a point at which he had finished the poem; for a long time he was trying to write his philosophical poem and, until he finished, he could not complete the prelude to that poem. There was something that Wordsworth wanted to say about the nature of existence, that it was fractured and it was always in process and, if you fixed those details, you crushed life itself. Stephen Gill mentioned the declared position on this, which Wordsworth included in the preface to his philosophical poem The Excursion in 1814.

  STEPHEN GILL: He explains to everybody that there is another poem, an autobiographical poem, which is a prelude to this one, which is where the poem gets the title. Wordsworth never ever used the title ‘The Prelude’. He says this autobiographical poem does exist, but, of course, I shan’t publish it until the philosophical work is complete.

  Rosemary Ashton noted this, but said that there was something else. Wordsworth was writing to his patron, Sir George Beaumont, to say it was unprecedented that anyone should write at such length about himself, and he was aware that it was preparatory to another poem, which did not itself get written. What Wordsworth failed to grasp was that The Prelude was the philosophical poem they were anticipating. While he went on to write The Excursion, that Rosemary Ashton said she found that almost unreadable as he does not talk about himself but about a wanderer, with some of his childhood experiences but only at a distance.

  Melvyn quoted a line from The Prelude where Wordsworth described himself being brought up by nature, ‘fostered alike by beauty and by fear’. Wordsworth ran around the Lakes wherever he chose, climbing trees and cliffs, stealing birds’ eggs, as he wrote in The Prelude. He also appears to relate nature to religion.

  ROSEMARY ASHTON: Early on, he’s rather pantheistic, so that God is found in nature. And, to some extent, because he lost his mother at eight and his father at thirteen, there is a school of thought, with which I have some sympathy, that says that nature stood in as parents for him and he more or less says that himself, with ‘fostered alike by beauty and by fear’.

  Many extracts of The Prelude show the power that nature came to bear over Wordsworth. One, recalled by Stephen Gill, describes the poet as a schoolboy, playing with his friends in front of an inn by the side of a lake, and as evening comes on, he describes the pleasure they have taken in the afternoon.

  The garden lay

  Upon a slope surmounted by the plain

  Of a small bowling-green; beneath us stood

  A grove, with gleams of water through the trees

  And over the tree-tops; nor did we want

  Refreshment, strawberries and mellow cream.

  And there, through half an afternoon we played

  On the smooth platform, and the shouts we sent

  Made all the mountains ring. But ere the fall

  Of night, when in our pinnace we returned

  Over the dusky lake, and to the beach

  Of some small island steered our course with one,

  The minstrel of our troop, and left him there,

 
; And rowed off gently, while he blew his flute

  Alone upon the rock,— O, then the calm

  And dead still water lay upon my mind

  Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,

  Never before so beautiful, sank down

  Into my heart, and held me like a dream!

  What Stephen Gill particularly liked about this passage was the way Wordsworth gave a sense of the pleasure he took with his friends, the little boys shouting and making the mountains ring.

  STEPHEN GILL: Most of all, look at the language of this; it’s all about your body being taken over by the outside world. The ‘dead still water lay upon my mind’. The sky sinks down into my heart. And the pleasure of it all is a weight. One of Wordsworth’s most-used words is joy. And one of the things that I value most in him is the emphasis he puts on trying to foster that in children.

  One of the many things that people pick out of The Prelude is the notion of ‘spots of time’ (‘There are in our existence spots of time / That with distinct pre-eminence retain / A renovating virtue’), which Emma Mason said took us directly into Wordsworth’s main interests, namely consciousness, the way in which we get to know ourselves, and affection, the way in which we learn to love others through knowing ourselves. ‘Spots of time’ is his phrase for memories that he can call on from the past and use to renovate or fructify himself.

  EMMA MASON: In the earlier editions, he uses the word ‘fructify’, to suggest that memories are fruitful for him. In the later editions, and in the very last edition, he uses the word ‘renovate’, to suggest that memories somehow restore him. He’s not suggesting that we go back into our memories and sit there and indulge in them. Memories are only important to Wordsworth as they impact on your present moment.

  Melvyn suggested that present feeling can be underpinned by past feeling, even if the past feeling was opposite to the present feeling, so that pleasure today can be enhanced by looking back on a bleakness of a very similar situation long ago. As well as joy, Wordsworth’s other concern was grief, and Emma Mason thought his whole poetic process was to think how to translate grief into joy through recalling memories in poetic form, not as massive adventures, but in everyday activities. Poetry gives us that rhythm of everyday life and teaches us how to feel. Rosemary Ashton noted the passage in the ‘spots of time’ section where Wordsworth talks about those moments in childhood ‘by which our minds are nourished and invisibly repaired’, where nourished suggests the mother and baby hinted at elsewhere and the invisibility of the repair makes it harder to grasp.