The Columbia History of British Poetry (85 page)

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Page 353

Poetry, 17851832

Jerome McGann

AA, XX and NN gather to talk.

AA. According to the official guides, our best view of the Romantic ranges extending across the great divide of 1800 will be found in 1798, or perhaps the immediately adjacent 1800: from that splendid overlook called
Lyrical Ballads
. It's a picturesque and (historically) important locale.

Equally arresting, however, is that more remote point known as
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
(1794). A favorite now of many, this vantage was scarcely known or frequented until the Pre-Raphaelites popularized it in their late-nineteenth-century aesthetic adventures.

Neither of these now famous spots of time will lose its hold upon the imagination. We may start a long, an interesting, and a reasonably thorough exploration of Romanticism and its majestic adjacencies from both places, as many have already shown.

"spots of time": A key Romantic concept, formulated by Wordsworth in his
Prelude
project. Wordsworth's idea is that experience yields certain sacred moments that preserve a restorative power through one's later life. Such moments often come without one's realizing their importance at the time of their occurrence. Memory clarifies their significance. These moments testify to the invisible but permanent presence of a benevelent Spirit in the universe. See
Prelude
(1850) Book II.208286.

Traditional and favorite routes are, however, just thattraditional and favored. I his particular world of the sublime and the beautiful is so extensive and complex that we may enter it, or move about its regions, in an endless variety of ways.

For instance, on the way to
Lyrical Ballads
we will inevitably skirt another spot that provides, in its fashion, an even more magnificent

Page 354

view of the territory. I mean the once-famous but now somewhat neglected outcropping called
Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect
(Kilmarnock, 1786). From the latter the way leads directly on to both Blake's
Songs
and Wordsworth and Coleridge's
Lyrical Ballads
. The route from Burns's 1786
Poems
to
Lyrical Ballads
is well known if no longer so well frequented. But the rigs o' Burns run into the range of Blake. We trace this route very clearly by following certain of their shared territorial features: their critiques of moralized religion, their sympathy with the ideals of the French Revolution, and their commitment to what Blake called "exuberance" and "energy" (and Wordsworth, later, the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings").

Blake found his way by various paths, it is true, but one of them followed the trail of Burns. Indeed, Blake marked the route he took in one of his greatest early works, "The Tyger," although later travellers have failed to note the signs he left:


When the stars threw down their spears, And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Blake's starry spears of 1794 broke across the earlier sky of 1786 in another satanic text, Burns's great "Address to the Deil." The second line of Blake's verse is an English translation of Burns's Scots:


Ae dreary, windy, winter night, The stars shot down wi sklentan light, Wi' you, mysel , I gat a fright. . . .

Blake's "smile"like the high-spirited comedy of that associated text
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(1 793)is a memorial tribute to Burns, who also liked to treat his gods and demons with familiarity. Like Blake, he knew that all deities reside in the human breast, as the very next lines of his address to the "deil" show: