A Romantic Metaphor

 The Correspondent Breeze:

A Romantic Metaphor

WHITING in 1834, Henry Taylor noted that Wordsworth's assaults on eighteenth-century diction had succeeded in making poetry, in some attributes, more ordinary spoken. But Taylor also remarked that in effect a new poetic diction had covertly replaced the old. If Romantic poets no longer refer to the nightingale by the Greek name, Philomel, some of them refer to it by the Persian name, Bulbul; Taylor cites one reader who said 'he had learnt, for the first time, from Lord Byron's poetry, that two bulls make a nightingale.' Worse still are the stock terms dispersed through poetry 'with a sort of feeling senselessness,' such as 'wild,' "bright,' lonely," and 'dream," and particularly the variant forms of the word "breathing'; "to breathe,' Taylor says, has become "a verb poetical which [means] anything but respiration.’’

To this cautious observation, I would add that "breathing" is only one aspect of a more general ingredient in Romantic poetry. This is air-in- motion, whether it occurs as breeze or breath, wind or respiration— whether the air is compelled into motion by natural powers or by the action of the human lungs. That the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron should be so completely refreshed is itself notable; but the startling aspect is how often, in the major poems, the wind is not only a property of the landscape, but also a vehicle for revolutionary changes in the poet's mind. The increasing wind, usually associated with the outer transition from winter to spring, is associated with a complex subjective process: the return to a sense of community after isolation, the revival of life and emotional strength after apathy and a deathlike inactivity, and an explosion of productive strength following an era of imaginative sterility.

Coleridge's Dejection: An Ode, written in 1802, furnishes the firstest inclusive illustration of this symbolic equation. The poetic reflection is set in April, which turns out, as in Eliot's Waste Land, to be the crudest month because, in breeding Me out of the dead laud, it bitterly revives emotional life in the spectator, miring recollection and ambition. And as the poem opens, a desultory breeze makes itself audible on a wind-harp—an instrument whose incredible modulations sound through most of the writings with which we are apprehensive.

Jarnes Bowyer, Coleridge's schoolmaster and pre-Wordsworthian reformer of poetic diction, had energetically proscribed the conventional lyre as an emblem for poetizing. 'Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! But by the procedure already noted—we might call it Taylor's principle—the lyre of Apollo was often supplanted in Romantic poetry by the Aeolian lyre, whose music is provoked not by art, human or divine, but by an impetus of nature. Poetic man, in a statement by Shelley which had close paradigm in Coleridge and Wordsworth, is an instrument subject to impressions Tike the shifts of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing symphony. “The wind-harp has become a constant Romantic analogue of the poetic mind, the figurative mediator between outer motion and inner sentiment. It is possible to infer that, without this plaything of the eighteenth century, the Romantic poets would have lacked a conceptual model for the way the mind and imagination respond to the wind, so that some of their most characteristic passages might have been, in a literal sense, unthinkable.

In Coleridge's Dejection the moaning wind-harp predicts a storm which the lyric speaker in his indifference awaits in the expectation that, as in the past, it may send ‘my soul abroad' and send out the

stifled, drowsy, impassioned grief,

Which Buds no natural outlet, no relief ....

The speaker reviews the sufferings that have made him take shelter in "abstruse research," and have demolished his inner joy and any possibility of emotional commerce with the outer scene. Worst of all is the attendant paralysis of his poetic power, the "shaping spirit of Imagination.' But even as the speaker indexes the situations of his death in life, the outer wind braces to a storm of driving rain and constrains the wind-harp into loud and violent music. In implied parallel with the wind-harp, the poet also responds to the storm with mounting vitality—what he calls 'the passion and the life, whose fountains are within, once more break out—until, in a lull of the wind, the poem rounds on itself and ends where it commenced, with a gentle both of nature and of mind. But the poet has moved from the calm of apathy to one of stability after passion. By the agency of the wind storm it describes, the poem turns out to contradict its own premises: the poet's spirit arouses to severe life even as he bemoans his inner death, accomplishes release in the discomfort at being cut off from all outlet, and indicates the power of vision in the strategy of commemorating its failure.

That the poem was grounded in experience is apparent from Coleridge’s many letters confirming to his pleasure in wind and storms, which he watched ‘with a total impression worshipping the power and “eternal Link” Of Energy,” and through which he had walked, “stricken . . . with Barrenness in a “deeper gloom than I am willing to remember,” seeking The inspiration for finalizing Christabel,* In one passage, written some nine months after he had accomplished Dejection, we discover a symbolic wind Again involving the renewal of feeling and imagination, and leading to the sense of the one life within us and abroad:

In modest solemnness, I never find myself alone within the embracement of rocks and hills, a traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit courses, drives, and eddies, like a Leaf in Autumn: a wild activity, of thoughts,imagination, feelings, and impulses of motion, rises up from within me—a sort of bottom-wind, that blows to no point of the compass, and comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me. . . . Life seems to me then a universal spirit, that neither has, nor can have, an opposite. . . . where is there room for death?

Furthermore with Coleridge's friend, Wordsworth: "Winter winds,' Dorothy wrote, 'are his delight—his mind I think is often more fertile in this season than any other.' ° Of this phenomenon Wordsworth himself gave remarkable testimony in the autobiographical Prelude, From the beginning of this work, in fact, the recurrent wind serves unobtrusively as a leitmotif, representing the chief theme of continuity and interchange between outer motions and the interior Me and powers, and providing the poem with a principle of organization beyond chronology.

Earlier poets had inaugurated their epics by conjuring for inspiration a Muse, Apollo, or the Holy Spirit, Wordsworth's opening lines, which have an identical function, are:

Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze

That blows from the green fields and from the clouds

And from the sky ....

Acquitted at last from the city and the tyrannical weight of the past, the poet says 'I breathe again"; but so, we find, is nature breathing, in a passage where the wind becomes both the impetus and outer correspondent to a spring-like renewal of the spirit after a wintry season, and also to a revival of poetic enthusiasm which Wordsworth, going beyond Coleridge, equates with the inspiration of the Prophets when touched by the Holy Spirit. There is even a glancing metaphoric parallel between the resulting poetic creation and the prototypal innovation by divine utterance—For 'Nature's self," as Wordsworth said later, 'is the breath of God' (Prelude, 1805 ed., V, 222.)

For I, methought, while the sweet breath of Heaven

Was blowing on my body, felt within

A corresponding mild creative breeze,

A vital breeze which travell'd gently on

O'er things which it had made, and is become

A tempest, a redundant energy

. Vexing its own creation. Tis a power

That does not come unrecogniz'd, a stonn

Which, breaking up a long-continued frost

Brings with it vernal promises . . .

The holy life of music and of verse ....

To the open fields I told

A prophecy; poetic numbers came

Spontaneously, arid cloth'd in priestly robe

My spirit, thus singled out, as it might seem,

For holy services. . . .

And a bit farther on comes the remaining element of the Romantic

complex, the analogy between poetic mind and Aeolian harp:

It was a splendid evening; and my soul

Did once again make trial of the strength

Restored to her afresh; nor did she want

Eolian visitations; but the harp

Was soon defrauded, . . . (1805 ed., I, 1-105)