The Orphic Voice, page 28
Almost every word here is significant if we are to draw full advantage from the comment of one great Orphic mind on another: the diagnosis of the theme of The Prelude; the recognition of the historical importance of this poem as a document of knowledge, science, and truth whose full meaning for mankind will only gradually emerge; of the timelessness and unity of the central poetic task in which there is neither supersession nor emulation; the originality of the enterprise; the likening of the poet’s subject matter and method to organic growth. Yet there is one strange note here— “theme hard as high”— “thou hast dared to tell.” What does this mean?
Only Wordsworth can answer this question, and it has to do with Orphic question, method, and genealogy all at once.
In the 107 lines of blank verse prefixed to the 1814 edition of The Excursion but possibly written much earlier (Mary Moorman’s biography suggests 1798), Wordsworth sets out his own aims. They do not relate only to The Excursion, but were intended as an introduction to that life work of his which he had always in his eye but never completed. “The following passage,” he says, “taken from the conclusion of the first book of ‘The Recluse,’ may be acceptable as a kind of Prospectus of the design and scope of the whole Poem.” It begins:
On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,
Musing in solitude,
the great universal themes of natural history and history itself, individual and social. After a few lines of introduction Wordsworth expands his theme and aim:
Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love and Hope,
And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith;
Of blessed consolations in distress;
Of moral strength and intellectual Power;
Of joy in widest commonalty spread;
Of the individual Mind that keeps her own
Inviolate retirement, subject there
To Conscience only, and the law supreme
Of that Intelligence which governs all—
I sing:— “fit audience let me find though few!”
So we are led to the mind in its full complement of correspondence with and responsibility to the Mind of the universe, and then at once, by the Paradise Lost quotation, to Milton. This is no accident, and Wordsworth at once fills out the reference.
So prayed, more gaining than he asked, the Bard—
In holiest mood. Urania, I shall need
Thy guidance, or a greater Muse, if such
Descend to earth or dwell in highest heaven!
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep—and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
All strength—all terror, single or in bands,
That ever was put forth in personal form—
Jehovah—with his thunder, and the choir
Of shouting angels, and the empyreal thrones—
I pass them unalarmed. Not Chaos, not
The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,
Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out
By help of dreams—can breed such fear and awe
As fall upon us often when we look
Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man—
My haunt, and the main region of my song.
This is, however you look at it, an astonishing passage, but for the moment we will carry on with the poem itself before looking at it a second time. In the next ten lines he speaks of a Paradise perhaps realizable on earth, springing from
the discerning intellect of Man
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion,
which he clinches with a phrase of pure Baconian vintage, speaking of his own hope to chant, prophetically, long before such a time could come, “the spousal verse Of this great consummation.” This is Bacon’s vision of his Organum; Wordsworth describes his own:
while my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:— and how exquisitely, too—
Theme this but little heard of among men—
The external World is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish: this is our high argument.
He describes next where and how this is to be done; not in the haunts of nature alone, but in cities and in social life, as the Ovidian progress moved also. Then comes an invocation to the power by which this must be accomplished:
Descend, prophetic Spirit! that inspir’st
The human Soul of universal earth,
Dreaming on things to come; and dost possess
A metropolitan temple in the hearts
Of mighty Poets: upon me bestow
A gift of genuine insight.
So Shakespeare too is summoned up. The method is to be, in part at least, autobiography:
And if with this
I mix more lowly matter; with the thing
Contemplated, describe the Mind and Man
Contemplating; and who, and what he was—
The transitory Being that beheld
This Vision; when and where and how he lived;—
Be not this labour useless.
And with a final invocation of the “dread Power” and “unfailing Love” sustaining all things, the statement or plan of research—for it is no less—comes to an end.
Research into the nature and development of the mind, its genetics and evolution, in the individual autobiographically, more generally in the species—this is what Wordsworth proposes for himself. It is a self-imposed vocation which is to add to the sum of human knowledge, and no academic blindness or would-be scientific prejudice must come between us and the realization, so badly needed in our present state of learning and literature, that this is poetry’s function, as it is that of science. Yet even so, why the particular excitement? After all, others before Wordsworth had written about the mind, and autobiography had been attempted before. To describe and account for oneself is admittedly no easy matter, but it need not seem so alarming. How explain this note, in these lines, in Coleridge’s poetic commentary, and intermittently all through The Prelude too?
The explanation is to be found in the very lines which express the excitement most clearly, the lines about Milton and Paradise Lost. What Wordsworth is saying is that he means to take on where Milton left off, on a task as cosmic in scope and even more difficult. When one thinks of the grandeur of Milton’s work and of his stature, this becomes audacious indeed; but we must confront the audacity. Wordsworth is claiming the direct succession; not so much, as it has been called, a “by-passing”9 of the thunderous and angel-beclouded Jehovah of Milton’s theology as a carrying forward, in new and yet related terms, of the selfsame task, the explanation of the universe, the Baconian Work of the Interpreter.
Hazlitt and Lamb each came up against this claim in Wordsworth, for he makes or implies it in other places as well as here.10 They were roused by it as presumption; but they are lesser voices speaking out of turn, for poetry, like wisdom, is justified of all her children, and Wordsworth’s insight is vindicated by greater minds than these. Keats’ letters and his poem to Milton and Blake’s Milton suggest something similar going on in other great minds of this time, corroborating Wordsworth’s perhaps supreme attempt in the same direction. The clearest Orphic evidence here lies in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and we will glance at this before returning to Wordsworth’s central task.
The vision in Prometheus Unbound, which is cast in dramatic form with lyrics and chorus (Shaw claims it is a forerunner of Wagnerian libretto and engaged on the same task), is of an all-embracing renewal of nature in and through the human mind. Shelley’s insight takes him to the central Orphic question of his time, and to Greek myth in which to embody the theme, the Titan Prometheus, at first chained to the precipice under the ban of the tyrant Jupiter till the latter is overthrown by Demogorgon, who is Eternity, the Spirit of the Hour, and Prometheus’ own progression into deeper love and understanding, after which a new era dawns in which Prometheus is reunited to his beloved, Asia, and “the world’s great age begins anew.”
It is possible to take this as allegory, to say that Prometheus is, as Shelley says in the preface, “the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends,” that Jupiter is the conventional concept of God, that Asia is Nature. But myth, if properly used, always goes beyond allegory, and Shelley’s use of myth is postlogical in that it is at once an exposition of subject matter and a comment upon method. The latter becomes explicit from time to time in the poem, as for instance in passages where science and poetry are given equal rights in the new awakening of the mind:
He gave man speech, and speech created thought,
Which is the measure of the universe;
And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven
Which shook, but fell not; and the harmonious mind
Poured itself forth in all-prophetic song.
Later, in Act iv, the Chorus of Spirits sing, after the great liberation has taken place:
We come from the mind
Of human kind
Which was late so dusk, and obscene, and blind,
Now ‘tis an ocean
Of clear emotion,
A heaven of serene and mighty motion . . .
From the temples high
Of Man’s ear and eye,
Roofed over Sculpture and Poesy;
From the murmurings
Of the unsealed springs
Where Science bedews her Daedal wings.
Poetry and myth are being used as the figures by which mind and nature are to interpret each other, and this play is truly mythological in that one is not certain whether the action takes place inside or outside the mind, a good reflexive ambivalence which mythological theater fosters. Shelley in his preface explains that the imagery he uses in the play “will be found, in many instances, to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed.” He then adds, “This is unusual in modern poetry, although Dante and Shakespeare are full of instances of the same kind: Dante indeed more than any other poet, and with greater success.” So he begins the tale of his own Orphic ancestors, Dante, whom Goethe claims as a forerunner of “metamorphosis in the higher sense,” Shakespeare, of whom Goethe says that he is “more epic and philosophic than dramatic,” as if that great corpus of plays could be looked on as one immense philosophical epic.11 (Bacon appears in Shelley’s preface also, as in that to The Revolt of Islam, where there is another list of ancestors, and in The Defence of Poetry: “Lord Bacon was a poet.” Shelley is as fervent a Baconian as Coleridge.) But Shelley’s most interesting reference of all is this:
The only being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgment, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, revenge, envy, and a desire for personal aggrandizement, which, in the Hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest.
This is a misinterpretation of Milton’s intent, similar to that shown by Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; but this does not affect Shelley’s heartfelt piety toward him whom he calls the sacred Milton, nor does it annul the rightness of the comparison Shelley makes between his poem and that of Milton.
We glanced at Milton as we came by in Part II, Section 2, noticing then his obsession with the final Orpheus figure, the tearing asunder and the resolving into water and stars and song, at which neither we nor the Orphic research have yet arrived. It is not only his choice of figure which is prophetic. His great work may be so also, capable of anticipating the Orphic research of the present time and giving it direction. Milton in these terms is not a great poet bound down by theology. He is a free spirit inquiring into the nature and status of the human spirit in the universe, natural and supernatural, writing an epic upon Genesis; the generation of the universe in Raphael’s narration in Book VII, to which Urania and her son Orpheus act as prologue; the genesis of man in Adam’s recapitulation in Book VIII of his calling into life; and conscience or genesis in the spirit, the beginnings of moral obligation, choice and failure. To this the modern Orphic voices, intent with their own kindred questionings, turn as if by compelling and common instinct.
The tradition, before and after Wordsworth, gives us sanction to take Wordsworth at his word: to assume that he is indeed the successor to the Milton of Paradise Lost, that he is to assimilate all Milton’s resources of subject matter and instrument in their reciprocal relationship, and to take them forward. The subject matter is a genetic inquiry into the human mind, set in the universe natural and moral. The instrument is epic, and this means not just one single example but the whole epic tradition. So we come to The Prelude as epic, and epic as postlogic.
3
where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat
THAT The Prelude is an epic has been said before, and beautifully said, by Lascelles Abercrombie, himself a poet. He compares the poem with the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, on equal terms, and says of The Prelude and its theme of the correspondence of universe and mind, “This is the modern epic; this is the heroic strain today, the grand theme of man’s latter experience.”12 Wordsworth himself had epic in mind as his goal. In 1805 he is saying of The Prelude, “This work may be considered as a sort of portico to ‘The Recluse,’ part of the same building, which I hope to be able, ere long, to begin with in earnest; and if I am permitted to bring it to a conclusion, and to write, further, a narrative poem of the Epic kind, I shall consider the task of my life as over.”13 He sees The Recluse, and the projected epic, as lying ahead of him. In fact he never wrote either, and I think the reason is, in part, that the task was already done. You cannot, after all, write something you have already written. The Prelude is the great poem “On Man, on Nature and on Human Life,” and is itself epic.
What is epic? We may well ask. It is a form of poetry which has suffered a strange fate at the hands of critics. It has been supposedly embalmed and buried, and now falls under the heading of literary archaeology. It has been classified as “oral” or “authentic” epic, arising in primitive heroic society, and as “literary”; also as “primary” and “secondary.” But even literary and secondary epic is now considered to be gone for good. We are told that Paradise Lost is the last, that epic found there “a finality which forbade any extension of its scope.”14
What then of Wordsworth’s proposal, in those pre-Excursion lines, to take over from Milton? Either the poet is unaware that epic is dead, and, misled himself, misleads us, or epic is not dead at all. Funeral services for it may be well enough as an occupation for critics, but they are no concern of the poet, intoned as they are over an empty grave. For the poet epic is no more dead than lyric, or poetic drama, or any other of those tough, infinitely adaptable, and lively organs of his. It is eternally available, with its own special resources, as a method of postlogical research. Poets cannot afford to be bereft of their working instruments in this way, and neither can human thinking in general. That is why it matters so much that we should let Wordsworth reassure us, in his poetic practice if not in his theorizing, that epic is as alive and prophetic as ever it was, moving forward in our name and changing and developing as it goes.
Epic is one of the greatest of the postlogical disciplines. Just how postlogical it is we can begin to see when we look at some of its characteristics, its preoccupation with the structure of the universe and the place and course of man’s life and death within it, its essential activity, its attachment to mythology. This is supremely the point where poetry espouses time, in the form of narrative, on the grand scale. It is therefore peculiarly adapted for thinking, on that scale, about any human relationships and activities in the universe which are susceptible of development or process, up to and including history and natural history, individual or general.
But it does not merely deal with developing subject matter; it develops itself in its progress through time, in that reflexive interaction and identification of subject, instrument, and agent which is part of postlogic. When an Orphic mind selects a poetic instrument as appropriate for a special work of discovery in that day and age, that instrument will and should be changed; but the change is never a perversion, a forcible wrenching of an old tool to untried uses. Each poet who sets himself in the epic tradition is going to reinterpret that tradition. The process of reinterpretation, however, resembles a process in nature and organic growth, the drawing-out of latent possibilities, the discovery of a Novum Organum. These are the metamorphoses of the poetic spirit of which Coleridge spoke, by which the human race forms for itself new instruments of power according to its new needs and activities. This is the nature of living tradition.
It is beyond my competence to say much about the experiments which are made before Wordsworth’s, though it seems that as early as the Aeneid epic is beginning to take on a more explicitly genetic character,15 confirmed by Milton; he too conceives of epic activity as in the spiritual rather than the military field, as Dante does, who also begins to illuminate the inclusiveness of the methodology by involving the poet in his own subject matter. Now in The Prelude it is the reflexiveness of postlogic which comes to the forefront. The mind becomes its own subject matter.
Epic, seen from the point of view of the working poet, is a dynamic instrument concerned with heroic achievement, advance, exploration. The significance of these, in terms of man moving between earth and heaven, is inquired into in the person of the epic hero. Here, too, our critical and historical sense has not helped us. To represent epic as the high doings of one solitary figure of however superhuman proportions, a great cult of individualism, is to strike it dead, just as to represent the heroic age of such deeds and discoveries as primitive and left far behind is to strike us all dead. Unprecedented deeds and explorations, with which epic deals, are lonely courses, and necessarily so. But the important thing from the beginning has been that the hero is identified with his people. He is his people in some sense. What are Gilgamesh or Beowulf or Dante or Adam doing if they are not carrying us forward with them, exploring and struggling and suffering, out in advance of us but one with us still?16 It is as if the deeds were consolidated only later, by after-comers, and find their ultimate justification in that; for achievement and discovery that relate solely to one individual are useless. Only the transmissible in some terms, tradition or heredity which are so closely linked together, is of value. This is, so far as we know (and we do not know much about it yet) how nature and human nature make progress into newness of any kind. With this, epic is of right concerned. It is Wordsworth’s vocation to apply it to the contemporary Orphic question, the relation of the mind to nature, its origin and development. He will explore the question, in the main, within himself.
