The Fourth Dimension of a Poem

by M H Abrams

  Early in the fourteenth century, Dante wrote the greatest of all literary instances of this central Christian plot form. The Divine Comedy, Dante’s spiritual history, introduces in its opening line its root metaphor, when the protagonist, “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita [midway in the journey of our life],” is granted the vision of another journey, with a relay of guides, through hell and up through purgatory to the verge of the heaven of heavens—thence to return, though only temporarily, to his journeying in this realm of “the sun and the other stars.”

  The medieval chivalric romances—with their literal plots of journeying knights, quests, and perilous trials by which the protagonist proves that he merits his lady love—obviously invited adaptation into allegories of the wayfaring Christian life. A late and elaborately designed instance is Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The plot of the first book consists of the journey, quest, and trials of the faith and morality of the Red Cross Knight and ends with his betrothal to Una in the land of Eden, which he has just delivered from the dragon. This event prefigures the projected ending of the poem as a whole—the successful conclusion of Arthur’s protracted search for the Faerie Queene, by whose beauty, seen in a vision, he had been ravished before the beginning of the narrative proper. Almost a century later, John Bunyan wrote the great working-class equivalent of the adventurous quest of the aristocratic knight on horseback, in his story of the pilgrim who shoulders his pack and trudges sturdily through commonplace obstacles, temptations, and perils, toward the celestial city for which he longs. Even in Bunyan’s demotic and puritan version, the motivation for the quest continues to be expressed in the language of overwhelming sexual desire. When Christian and Hopeful finally arrive “within sight of the city they were going to,” in the land where “the contract between the bride and the bridegroom was renewed,” Christian “with desire fell sick,” wherefore the travelers “lay by it a while, crying out because of their pangs, If you see my Beloved, tell him I am sick of love.”6

  THE LITERATURE OF the early nineteenth century, especially in Germany and England, was to a remarkable degree a literature of literal, allegorical, and symbolic travelers. One familiar type is the exiled and guilt-ridden wanderer—recognizably on the model of Cain and his later avatar the Wandering Jew—represented by Coleridge’s penitent Ancient Mariner and Byron’s impenitent Manfred. Another type, like the protagonist in Shelley’s Alastor, wastes away on a journey in an insatiable quest for an inaccessible object, which is represented as a woman of irresistible allure. Most widespread is the reemployment of the ancient trope of the peregrinatio vitae. The representation of the normative life as a toilsome but indefatigable journey toward an ultimate land or place constitutes the plot form not only in the major literary kinds in verse and prose, but also in the many instances of Universalgeschichte (a summary of the cognitive and moral history of all humankind, from its origin to its future culmination) and in the genre of the partly fictionalized autobiography. And surprisingly, the same trope is deployed as both theme and organizing principle in the most prominent systems of German philosophy. In its distinctive Romantic version, however, whether in literature, history, or autobiography, the fifteen-hundred-year-old plot of the spiritual peregrinatio has undergone a drastic alteration: the goal of the journey has been transferred from heaven to earth and has been internalized and secularized. That is, the journey of life, which had hitherto been a sustained trial for admission to an otherworldly city, is now conceived as a process of self-education, self-discovery, and self-fulfillment in this world. In the economy of statement made possible by German compounds, the Christian Heilsgeschichte (salvation history) has modulated into the Romantic Bildungsgeschichte (history of education); the goal that justifies the ordeal of human experience is located within experience itself; and that goal consists of the mature identity and assurance of vocation that the ordeal of life’s journey has served to form.

  A landmark in the transformation of sacred history into a secular process of self-development is Gotthold Lessing’s The Education of the Human Race, published in 1780. Undertaking expressly to translate the “revealed truths” of the Bible into conceptual terms, the “truths of reason,” Lessing converted the scriptural narrative of humankind’s fall and coming redemption into the natural history of humankind’s gradual education in reason and morality; interpreted the stages of civilization as advancing degrees of the maturation of the human race; and represented the educational process—both of the race and of the individual—in the persistent vehicle of a journey, compelled by an immanent teleology, along a Weg (path) or Bahn (road) toward a distant goal.

  As a thinker of the Enlightenment, Lessing conceived the journey of humankind to be linear, in the mode of a progressive education toward the achievement of rational and moral perfection. The Romantic version of the peregrinatio, however, adopts the circular rather than the linear form of the ancient plot, but with a distinctive difference that fuses the concept of progress with that of a return to the origin. That is, the distinctively Romantic educational journey is imaged not simply as a two-dimensional circle but as ascending along a third, or vertical, dimension so as to form a spiral. The educational process, accordingly, is conceived as moving from an initial unity through multiple divisions back to a complex integrity which replicates the simple unity of the origin, but on a higher level. In many versions of the Romantic spiral journey, the place of origin and return is also figured as the home the traveler left behind and toward which he is compelled back by a homesickness for the father, mother, and a lost sheltered place; but this place, once it has been recovered, proves to be of higher status than the original home, because now it has been earned, and as a result is for the first time properly recognized and adequately valued. In many instances the educational traveler is driven also by desire for a female figure, who turns out to be the beloved he heedlessly abandoned at the outset. In this latter mode of the Romantic peregrinatio, as in innumerable earlier examples, the father and home to which the prodigal returns has been fused with the bride of the Apocalypse, so that the motivation for the journey is erotic as well as nostalgic. The bride, however, now tends to be conceptualized into an abstract feminine principle, but one that is endowed with infinite allure. In the rendering with which Goethe concludes the second part of Faust:

  Das Ewig-Weibliche

  Zieht uns hinan.

  [The Eternal-Womanly

  Draws us upward.]

  This trope of the developing consciousness of the human race and individual as a spiral journey—to reach, at the end, a superior level of its beginning—informs a great variety of literary works in the Romantic era.7 It is identifiable in Hölderlin’s epistolary novel Hyperion, as well as in Novalis’ visionary prose romance Heinrich von Ofterdingen—of which the leitmotif is “Wo gehen wir denn hin?” “Immer nach Hause” (Where are we going to then? Ever homeward)—and serves also as a structural element in Novalis’ verse Hymnen an die Nacht. In William Blake’s cosmic myth, the fall of humankind out of a primitive unity and its long recursion to a higher integrity is at times represented as the wanderings of a mental traveler seeking that “sweet golden clime” at the conclusion of his journey; and Blake pictures the consummation of human history as the sexual reconjunction of Albion with Jerusalem, the female contrary from which he was divided at the beginning. In Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, after the first act in which Prometheus renounces divisive hate for integrative love, the plot consists of the educational journey of Asia down through the underground realm of Demogorgon up, around, and back to her marital reunion with Prometheus. In his quasi-autobiographical prose fiction Sartor Resartus, Carlyle describes how Teufelsdröckh, the foundling who is his protagonist, “lifts his Pilgerstab (Pilgrim staff) . . . and begins a perambulation and circumambulation of the terraqueous Globe.” The quest of Teufelsdröckh, that is, takes him on a great circle route around the world, during which he ever turns “full of longing . . . to th
at unknown Father” who might take him to his paternal bosom. This route turns out to be an educational journey through division and anguished isolation to his ultimate recognition that the seemingly alien earth—“now my needy Mother, now my cruel Stepdame”—was in fact the home in which, educated by suffering, he may now return to live as a member of the family of humanity.8

  German philosophy of the Romantic era incorporated the same radical metaphor as contemporary works of literature—the metaphor of the development of philosophy as a spiraling self-educational journey that ends where it began, but on a higher turning. The major metaphysical systems of that era are never static systems of established truths, but always on the move, compelled by the tension between internal polarities, antitheses, or “contradictions” toward the closure of the circle in an end state that, since all oppositions will be therein maintained but reconciled, constitutes a superior version of the undivided self-unity from which the process originated. And persistently, this progressive systemic movement is rendered in the plot form of a Bildungsreise (educational journey), the restless journey of an exiled agent—named “ego,” or “subject,” or “consciousness,” or “Spirit”—in quest of an ultimate reconciliation with its divided other, in a conclusion that is pictured as a return to the place from which it set out, but on a higher level.

  Fichte, for example, described Wissenschaft (the science of knowledge), as beginning with the unity of the absolute ego, which posits the non-ego and so inaugurates a sustained tension, which drives a process that concludes when it reaches the point at which it “closes with its first principle, returns into itself, and accordingly becomes, by its own agency, completely closed.”9 He also represented universal human history in the pictured form of a circuitous peregrinatio of humankind from a paradise of thoughtless self-unity toward a recovered paradise, which will be a superior one because it will have been earned by all the endeavors en route:

  The collective journey [Weg] which, according to this view, mankind pursues here below, is no other than a way back to that point upon which it stood at the very beginning, and has no other goal but to return to its origin. [Driven out of the paradise of effortless and ignorant innocence, mankind] by effort and knowledge builds his paradise for himself according to the model of the one he has lost.10

  Friedrich Schelling’s Transcendental Idealism (1800) presents another version of the division of the unitary subject into polarities that compel a circuitous return to the undivided origin. At one place Schelling describes this process by repeating Plotinus’ reading of the Homeric epic as signifying a circular spiritual voyage back to the home that has been left. Alienated nature, Schelling wrote, “is a poem” that, if unriddled, would disclose itself to be “the Odyssey of the spirit which, wonderfully deluded, in seeking itself, flees itself,” and will reach its goal only when it “returns completely to itself,” as a subject that finally recognizes it is itself the object it seeks.11

  In his book of letters entitled On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller repeatedly images the history of civilization as a complex educational journey toward maturity through which “both the individual and the species as a whole must pass . . . if they are to complete the full circle of their destiny [Kreis ihrer Bestimmung].” His long essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” develops this figure, representing the evolution of human culture as a circuitous educational journey in which we (like the prodigal son) arrogantly storm “into an alien land,” only to discover that “we desire with painful longing to go back home”—a home that Schiller also identified as “a paradise, a state of innocence, a golden age.” But this painful way out turns out to be the way back, although to an infinitely higher form of the innocence and self-unity we have lost. “The road [Weg] upon which the modern poets are traveling is the same which mankind must travel, collectively and as individuals. Nature makes him in unity with himself; art divides and cuts him in two; through the ideal he returns to unity.” In an important variant of the circuitous journey, however, that Schiller shares with Fichte, Hölderlin, and others, he maintains that, since the goal of the journey is infinite while mankind’s powers and possibilities are finite, “the ideal is an infinite which he can never reach,” but can only approximate.12 In this version of the motif we find the common Romantic view that “der Weg ist das Ziel,” that the goal of the journey is the journey itself, as well as the distinctive Romantic ethos that the proper aim of humankind is an indomitable “Streben nach dem Unendlichen [striving after the infinite],” in which the measure of dignity and greatness consists, not in absolute achievement, but in maintaining the discrepancy between an infinite reach and a finite grasp.

  Wordsworth described his work as a “poem on my own poetical education,” and his account of this education is repeatedly represented as a self-formative journey. The poem opens with a deliberate echo of the exodus from Egypt, as the poet departs on foot from the city that to him had been “a house / Of bondage”; in the course of this walk, which is at first desultory, he becomes “as a Pilgrim resolute” and sets out toward a goal, “the chosen Vale.” In Wordsworth’s retrospective narrative of his life, many of the crucial episodes are literal journeys on foot, which modulate into spiritual landscapes traversed by a metaphorical wayfarer. Wordsworth deploys the figure of the journey in a double way: On the one hand, he applies the figure to the educational course of his life in the outer world, “from stage to stage / Advancing” until it achieves the “consummation of the Poet’s mind.” On the other hand, Wordsworth applies the figure internally, to his artistic quest through his memory, in the process of composing the poem that narrates the journey of his life. In symmetry with its first book, the last book of the Prelude opens with a literal walk; this time, however, he travels not on a level plain but up Mount Snowden where—in the tradition of definitive visions on a mountain established by Moses on Sinai—Wordsworth recognizes in the cloud-shrouded and moonlit landscape the outer correlation to his own poetic mind and imagination. The close of the poem rounds back to its narrative beginning as Wordsworth, confirmed in his mature identity and vocation as a poet, takes up his “permanent abode” in the Vale that, in the initial passage, he had chosen as the goal of his journey. And in the title of the opening book of The Recluse, to which his entire autobiography was designed as prelude, this goal of his life’s pilgrimage, in accord with the ancient tradition of the circular journey, is identified as home—Home at Grasmere—and is at the same time conflated with Eden. But consonantly with the Romantic pattern of the spiral return, Wordsworth describes his achieved Eden as immensely superior to the original Eden because he has earned it in the painful course of his self-formative journey: “Here must be his Home, this Valley be his World.”

  The boon is absolute; surpassing grace

  To me hath been vouchsafed; among the bowers

  Of blissful Eden this was neither given,

  Nor could be given—possession of the good

  Which had been sighed for, ancient thought fulfilled. . . . 13

  Hegel’s metaphysical system is in ceaseless motion, and that motion, compelled by an internal, goal-directed tension of successive antitheses, is always circular. “The true,” as he describes this timeless circulation in his preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, “is its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal and so has it for its beginning.” But, he also says, the circling is always a spiraling upward, in that “this return to the beginning is also an advance.” The Phenomenology narrates the history of the Spirit’s painful process toward acquiring the knowledge of systematic metaphysical truth (Wissenschaft)—a process that incorporates, within the temporal course of time and history, the timeless spiral pattern manifested in the truth toward which it unknowingly strives. The history of the Spirit, that is, evolves spirally from an original self-unity, through a passing over into its other, then into many successive others, toward the ultimate achievemen
t of a higher reunion with itself. Hegel renders this history in the literary plot form of the self-educative journey of the Spirit, which is represented (in its aspect as the collective human consciousness) as though it were a single protagonist: “The task is to consider the general individual, the self-conscious Spirit, in its education [Bildung],” of which “the aim is the Spirit’s insight into what it is that constitutes knowledge”—the knowledge that is articulated in Hegel’s metaphysical system. Repeatedly this Bildungsgeschichte, both of the race and of each individual, is imaged in the traditional mode of the Bildungsreise: “To become genuine knowledge,” the Spirit “has to work its way through a long journey [Weg]”; while “each individual consciousness must also pass through the contents of the educational stages of the general Spirit, but . . . as stages of a way [Weg] that has been prepared and leveled for him.” This way can be considered as an educational pilgrimage and quest, “the way of the natural consciousness, which presses on to true knowledge.”14

  The denouement of Hegel’s protracted quest narrative, which he calls the stage of absolute knowledge, is rendered in the form of a recognition scene, in which the Spirit, now fully “self-conscious,” recognizes that the knowledge that has been its goal is in fact self-knowledge. The Spirit, that is, finally becomes aware of its own identity as constituting not less than everything and everyone, all of which had once been alienated from itself, but are now recollected, and so repossessed, by an act of ultimate awareness. This culmination of the self-educative way is a circuitous recursion to “the beginning from which we went out,” although now “at a higher level.” Hegel images the recursion to the beginning in the time-honored figure of a spiritual return home, although it is a home where the Spirit has all along been without knowing it: at that moment at which the Spirit “has annulled and taken back into itself this alienation and objectification, it is at home with itself [bei sich ist] in its otherness as such.”15 And since the homecoming that concludes the educational quest of the Spirit is achieved in Hegel’s own consciousness, in his role as both a manifestation and an amanuensis of the Spirit, we in turn now recognize that Hegel’s educational history of the Spirit has in fact been—like Wordsworth’s Prelude—the autobiography of its own protagonist.