The Orphic Voice, page 30
Now we have two poets, and two works, ranged before us; we will see first what each poet has to say about the nature of his research, in the shorter poems each wrote under Orpheus’ name and sign.
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that scientific imagination which precedes the purely poetic and is nothing more nor less than the faculty of true observation of nature. This is the maternal well-spring of all mythology, full of mastery and power still in this present age which is urged toward, and led back to, mythology by the dynamics of science
WORDSWORTH gives us two minor poems in which Orpheus appears, and they have interestingly parallel titles. The first is Power of Music, written in 1806 and the second, On the Power of Sound, written in 1828. Both are included in the section of his works called “Poems of the Imagination,” as if both were related, as expression or questioning, to that Imagination which is the height and depth of the poetic faculty and which plays such a part in The Prelude itself. Neither of these poems is among the greatest, by common consent, nor among the most familiar of this poet’s works, but each is a revelation of Wordsworth’s own Orphic nature, and that repeated emphasis on power is interesting in this connection. The first is the Orphic power in its first figure, the control and reordering of the things of creation; the second is the power needed in the second Orphic figure for the journey to the underworld and the unloosing of the bands of death.
Power of Music follows immediately The Reverie of Poor Susan in the Poems of the Imagination, and has the same unpretentious street-ballad-like meter sorting with the subject matter. Like so many of Wordsworth’s poems, its complete apparent simplicity and naivete make it the kind of thing we find utterly unacceptable when young, when we are looking for stronger stuff—sacred underground rivers, perhaps, or skeleton barks ribbed black against the sunset; and that is well enough. But later on, the more one looks into this type of Wordsworthian poem, the more one comes to see in it, and I believe this would be true of almost any poem of this kind he wrote. They show a profound subtlety, infinitely removed from sophistication, a subtlety whose precondition is the simplicity of the approach and of the subject.
The poem begins in this fashion:
An Orpheus! an Orpheus! yes, Faith may grow bold,
And take to herself all the wonders of old;
the Orpheus turns out to be a fiddler in Oxford Street who gathers a crowd round him and holds them spellbound by his music. At first it seems so pedestrian and commonplace as to be almost insulting to the high myth the poet invokes: a street-player— “He fills with his power all their hearts to the brim”— this seems no adequate Orpheus, with his chance audience, lamplighter, apprentice, newsman, lass with a barrow. Only slowly do we notice, or notice backward after we have passed the stanza in question, that the language has a touch of Gospels or Beatitudes,
The weary have life, and the hungry have bliss;
The mourner is cheered, and the anxious have rest.
Then comes the first of the two beautiful nature similes of the poem, also keeping very common company:
As the Moon brightens round her the clouds of the night,
So He, where he stands, is a centre of light;
It gleams on the face, there, of dusky-browed Jack,
And the pale-visaged Baker’s, with basket on back.
Sooty sweep and floury baker’s boy are made one with the gentle light and dark of moon, clouds and night sky; a celestial image, and is it too, as we thought Orpheus was, out of keeping? But now we begin to see what is happening. They are compared not as like to unlike but as like to secret like. The people of this city are part of nature, at least the humble and simple people such as these, and the Orphic power runs right through nature from celestial bodies into human bodies and souls, recognizable in the response made, as here, to manifestations of the Orphic power. Suggestions of this unity of nature, up to and including man, under Orpheus’ singing are to be found in earlier interpretations of the myth, when Orpheus is said to tame not only brute nature and wild beasts, but savage men also, “stony and beastly people” as Sir Philip Sidney says. But Wordsworth has another vision, of an immense relationship through the whole of nature including man, manifested in a mutual interchange of gifts, as the pennies drop into the hat of the violin player,— “The one-pennied Boy has his penny to spare.”
Then Wordsworth brings us up short. Casually, as if it were pure accident or were to be taken for granted, he says that the player is blind. It is impossible not to be reminded of that other blind figure in Wordsworth’s poetry, that strange and wonderful image in The Prelude, set among his experiences in London (I give the 1850 version, which is slightly the better):
And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond
The reach of common indication, lost
Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten
Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare)
Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,
Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest
Wearing a written paper, to explain
His story, whence he came and who he was.
Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round
As with the might of waters; an apt type
This label seemed of the utmost we can know,
Both of ourselves and of the universe;
And, on the shape of that unmoving man,
His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed
As if admonished from another world.
In that visionary and mysterious passage the Orphic power speaks to, and in, Wordsworth about the universe. In the lesser poem the image and center of the power, the Orpheus, is also blind. Does this nullify the unity of nature, set him among the deformed and unnatural? The next stanza, however, goes on unperturbed to a living creature of splendid physique, “a giant in bulk and in height,” an image of strength and plenitude, not weakness and deprivation, and gives us the second of the nature similes, drawing him in to that blindly executed power:
Not an inch of his body is free from delight . . .
Can he keep himself still, if he would? oh, not he!
The music stirs in him like wind through a tree.
Nothing is lost, the maimed and the halt and the blind are simply added in as part of the total, which is beautiful as nature itself. Now in the next verse come the Cripple, who has by sheer immobility taken on the character of an immemorial landscape:
Mark that Cripple who leans on his crutch; like a tower That long has leaned forward, leans hour after hour,
followed by a recurring figure in Wordsworth’s thoughts and poetry, the mother whose mind is astray; she is here with her baby and together they make their own answer to the music’s joy. Only in the last verse do we see a world where there is no response, the world of the busy and the rich which has nothing to do with the world of the simple or with that of nature.
Now, coaches and chariots! roar on like a stream;
Here are twenty souls happy as souls in a dream:
They are deaf to your murmurs—they care not for you.
Only here is there no power and no relatedness between the natural universe and human beings. The rich and careless are rejected not as immoral but as irrelevant, and the poor and meek do indeed here inherit the earth, the earth of nature. So in Wordsworth’s first Orpheus poem, Orpheus is a musician, and in and through his music a power is traced running through and binding together the whole of nature, apart from those mortals who have chosen to harden their hearts and to fall out of the natural unity of things.
The second poem, On the Power of Sound, is substantial, consisting of fourteen long stanzas, and possessing at its best a sober sublimity. It is not well-known, and it is the more interesting to find that Wordsworth set particular store by this poem, and at one point put it at the end of the “Poems of the Imagination” to show what it meant to him.29 The range of subject now is wider: this is not Power of Music, but Power of Sound. (Its development is not very easy to follow, as Wordsworth himself must have sensed, for he put at the beginning of the poem a brief Argument or synopsis.) Sound will here include all the voices of earth, from the lions roaring after their prey to the music of the spheres. With Orpheus at the heart of the poem, however—he occurs in stanza 8—we may find that he lends us a shape for the whole. Besides the middle stanza we will look at the first and the last, with Orpheus to link them; the intervening verses, though with interesting hints in them, are mostly illustrations and images of sounds “acting casually and severally,” as the Argument says, the “wandering Utterances” of stanza 11. But the first, middle, and last verses give a kind of framework for this, with a development of their own:
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Thy functions are ethereal,
As if within thee dwelt a glancing mind,
Organ of vision! And a Spirit aerial
Informs the cell of hearing, dark and blind;
Intricate labyrinth, more dread for thought
To enter than oracular cave;
Strict passage, through which sighs are brought,
And whispers for the heart, their slave;
And shrieks, that revel in abuse
Of shivering flesh; and warbled air,
Whose piercing sweetness can unloose
The chains of frenzy, or entice a smile
Into the ambush of despair;
Hosannas pealing down the long-drawn aisle,
And requiems answered by the pulse that beats
Devoutly, in life’s last retreats!
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Oblivion may not cover
All treasures hoarded by the miser, Time.
Orphean Insight! truth’s undaunted lover,
To the first leagues of tutored passion climb,
When Music deigned within this grosser sphere
Her subtle essence to enfold,
And voice and shell drew forth a tear
Softer than Nature’s self could mould.
Yet strenuous was the infant Age:
Art, daring because souls could feel,
Stirred nowhere but an urgent equipage
Of rapt imagination sped her march
Through the realms of woe and weal:
Hell to the lyre bowed low; the upper arch
Rejoiced that clamorous spell and magic verse
Her wan disasters could disperse.
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A Voice to Light gave Being;
To Time, and Man his earth-born chronicler;
A Voice shall finish doubt and dim foreseeing,
And sweep away life’s visionary stir;
The trumpet (we, intoxicate with pride,
Arm at its blast for deadly wars)
To archangelic lips applied,
The grave shall open, quench the stars.
O Silence! are Man’s noisy years
No more than moments of thy life?
Is Harmony, blest queen of smiles and tears,
With her smooth tones and discords just,
Tempered into rapturous strife,
Thy destined bond-slave? No! though earth be dust
And vanish, though the heavens dissolve, her stay
Is in the WORD, that shall not pass away.
The stanzas are relatively independent, so that one can begin in the middle without being too much out of context. The seventh does not lead particularly closely into the eighth, while the ninth seems to make a fresh start again, although only someone who had forgotten the Metamorphoses and Wordsworth’s love of it would ignore the way in which here also the Orpheus story leads straight into the building of a city wall. On the whole, however, in this poem as in Ovid’s, Orpheus seems just to appear, at the heart of things.
In stanza 8 Orpheus comes in twice, at beginning and end. First there is the adjective “Orphean,” qualifying “insight,” so that we have a power or method before we have anything else. The actual mythological narrative does not come till the end of the verse, and then it proves to be the second figure, the search for Eurydice. The two are not really separated, however. From the very beginning we have a suggestion of a journey backward into time to rediscover or recover something. The Orphean insight (the phrase reminds us of the Prelude-Recluse epic, in whose prefacing lines Wordsworth begs “the gift of genuine insight”) is to accomplish two things. First, it is to restore to us an ancient treasure, partially but not wholly lost; but because that journey of recovery also is couched in Orphic terms at the end of the verse, the Orphean exploration is to take the form of a recapitulation of the Orphic journey, and by its own power to discover and interpret its own nature. The goal is not merely self-discovery, however. The Orphean insight is called “truth’s undaunted lover,” and so by a lovely shift of figure Eurydice and truth become one and the same, to be sought by the power of love and poetry in an endeavor perpetually renewed, never wholly completed, and depending the whole time on a necessarily blind faith.
In the middle of the verse the Orphic power is introduced at first as music, as it was in the earlier poem Power of Music. Then, with the lines beginning “Yet strenuous was the infant Age,” carrying Wordsworth’s own emphasis, the poet broadens out the Orphic quest. We now see art as that quest, a daring and difficult feat of discovery sped by the forms of imagination. At last the exploration becomes explicitly Orphic: “Hell to the lyre bowed low.” But the last lines take us further still. We have gathered up the powers of music, art, and mythology in this stanza; now we come to a direct mention of poetry, the “magic verse” of the penultimate line.
So the progression from the first poem to the second, and within this second poem itself, becomes clearer. The chorus of nature rises up in unity to humanity, passes through human music, and reaches its consummation in articulate speech and poetry. This is profoundly important, not merely for this poem or for Wordsworth, but for the whole Orphic line, forward and backward. (One cannot help remembering Milton’s At a Solemn Music, with its “sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse,”30 where also music is given the due complement of words.) In Wordsworth’s poem, music and words appear together again in stanza 13:
Unite, to magnify the Ever-living,
Your inarticulate notes with the voice of words.
But the progress goes on, and stanza 14 seals man and language home in the most exalted level possible to thought, for finally Wordsworth invokes the Logos, in Whom a poet may indeed see, if he be so minded, his most absolute and amazing letters of credence. That is the term of the harmony which Wordsworth sees, as universal nature, throughout the poem, rising up to, and contained in, the Eternal Word.31 Not merely does the poet give language the supremacy over music; he gives sound as language the supremacy over silence. The ninth and tenth lines of the last stanza are closely akin to the lines in the Immortality Ode about our noisy years being moments in the eternal silence, but the resolution is different. Wordsworth speaks up for harmony, language, and mankind, and this is extremely important in view of what was to happen later with the Orphic line in Mallarmé and Valéry. Each of them would have preferred, absolutely, either music or silence above the “impurity” of human language. It is most interesting to see Wordsworth in this poem rule that out long beforehand as reaction and impietas, poetically, humanly, and theologically.
So far we have worked through the poem by means of the thought in it, but there is still the starting point to consider, to which that central Orphic verse can lead us back, as it led us forward to the main theme. We saw how in The Prelude the culminating vision of the possible epic took the form of a journey where something was to be brought to light from “the deep recesses of man’s heart.” Now in the first stanza of this poem the place or map of that journey is indicated, for it has a place, it is not solely in the imagination, though it is there too. We start with the two most articulate of the organs of sense, eye and ear. The first is given almost a mind of its own, so close is it to the operation of thinking; but it is to the second that we are more nearly directed. (The first of the Sonette an Orpheus will begin in the same way.) Now an extraordinary thing happens. We come once again to that labyrinth which has followed us all through this investigation, as an image or hieroglyphic, only to find that it has now become literally embodied, anatomically, in the most précise terms, for the labyrinth here is part of the mechanism of the human ear. This becomes now the starting point of the journey of exploration. The epic which is to inquire into the biology of thinking begins as a journey in and through the body.
The whole stanza confirms this, the labyrinth of sense as the strict passage into a dark world which is the body but is mind as well, for did not Wordsworth say of that, “I must tread on shadowy ground”? This is Orpheus’ journey, accredited even in the Miltonic echo in lines 10–12 in this stanza, the piercing sweetness of music un-loosing chains; this is L’Allegro and the linked sweetness long drawn out which there too unwinds chains and then leads straight on in Milton’s mind to Orpheus and “his half-regained Eurydice,” so that one feels they must have been in Wordsworth’s mind also from the beginning. But this is not all. The shadowy ground of body and mind is shadowy in a double sense, as the end of this first verse tells us: it is dark in itself, but it is also haunted by the shades of the dead. The exploration lies between the two kingdoms, of life and death, which Wordsworth, in the beautiful image which closes this stanza, sees as corresponding to and answering each other:
