Romantic Age

Wordsworth’s Treatment of Nature and Mysticism:

As a poet of Nature, Wordsworth stands supreme. He is a worshipper of Nature, Nature’s devotee or high-priest. Wordsworth had a full-fledged philosophy, a new and original view of Nature.

He conceived of Nature as a living Personality. He believed that there is a divine spirit pervading all the objects of Nature. Wordsworth philosophy can be termed as mystical Pantheism. As a true pantheist he also says that all is God and God is all. Nature is the means through which a man can come into contact with God. This perception is particularly reverberated in Tintern Abbey, where he says with great devotion:

   “...And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something for more deeply infused,
Whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:”

He finds the existence of God even in the mind of man. Wordsworth upholds that there is a pre-arranged harmony between the mind of man and the spirit in nature, which enables man to form a relationship or communication with nature.

      “Dust as we are immortal spirit grows like

Harmony in music, there is a dark

    Inscrutable craftsmanship which binds together

    Discordant elements and makes them cling together

         In a society.”  

The relationship is materialised when the mind of man forms a kinship with the thoughts of nature. And it is this cordial and intellectual junction between man and nature that helped to shape his belief that nature has the power to teach and educate human beings. The poet considers nature as a bountiful source of knowledge. He also believes that nature is the nurse and the protector of the mankind. Nature’s benignity considers only the welfare of human beings. In his words, nature is:

   “The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.”

Wordsworth believed that the company of Nature gives joy to the human heart and he looked upon Nature as exercising a healing influence on sorrow-stricken hearts.  In Wordsworth’s belief, nature is capable of alleviating the tormented mind of man. The beautiful and frolicsome aspects of nature are an infinite source for healing power. To him the primrose and the daffodils are symbols to him of Nature’s message to man. A sunrise for him is not a pageant of colour; it is a moment of spiritual consecration. In his eyes, “Nature is a teacher whose wisdom we can learn, and without which any human life is vain and incomplete.”

Cazamian remarks: “To Wordsworth, Nature appears as a formative influence superior to any other, the educator of senses and mind alike, the sower in our hearts of the deep-laden seeds of our feelings and beliefs. It speaks to the child in the fleeting emotions of early years, and stirs the young poet to an ecstasy, the glow of which illuminates all his work and dies of his life.”

In the Immortality Ode he tells us that as a boy his love for Nature was a thoughtless passion but that when he grew up, the ob­jects of Nature took a sober colouring from his eyes and gave rise to profound thoughts in his mind because he had witnessed the suffer­ings of humanity:

“To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

When life becomes pungent and unbearable then the sweet and affectionate contact with nature and even the recollections of nature can eliminate the burden of desolation, anxiety and suffocation:

“But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensation sweet.
Felt in the blood and felt along the heart;
And passing even into the purer mind
With tranquil restoration...”

Again in Daffodils Wordsworth recalls:

          “For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood

They flash upon that inward eye

 Which is the bliss of solitude.

Unlike most descriptive poets who are satisfied with a static pictorial effect, Wordsworth never confines his verse within the vivid portrayal of the sights, sounds, odours, and movements of various elements of nature. He aims at attaining something higher and divine and leaving behind a record of his mystical experiences. So his poetry is not simply an artistic encapsulation of lovely and tranquil aspects of nature but also a comprehensive account of his mystical experiences.

Wordsworth, like a true mystic, sees life in all objects of nature. According to him, every flower and cloud, every stream and hill, the stars and the birds that live in the midst of nature, has each their own life.

Wordsworth honours even the simplest and the most ordinary objects of nature and human life.  For him nothing is mean or low, since everything that is present in the universe is touched by divine life.

To conclude we ought to say that Wordsworth never looked at nature like the way we do. With great devotion and enthusiasm, he sought to read the profoundest meaning of human life in nature. In the way of doing so he forged himself as a great poet of nature with a true mystical vision.

Shelley as Rebel and Revolutionary Poet:

Shelley was a true-born kid of the revolution. The spirit of that revolution found its expression in Shelley’s poetry. Throughout his life he dreamt of a brand new society, a brand new world, completely free from tyranny and oppression. He was a dreamer of dreams and the sole fervid singer of the revolution.

Unlike Wordsworth or Coleridge, Shelley never abandoned the ideals of the revolution, though he was appalled by the dictatorship of Napoleon. Shelley only experienced the revolution at second hand through the books of the writers as Rousseau and William Godwin etc. When he looked back, all he could see was the flame of revolution still flickering in spite of the terror, war and disease. In his preface to “The Revolt of Islam”, he pointed out that the wanted to kindle in the bottom of his readers a virtuous enthusiasm for liberty and justice, which neither violence nor prejudice, can ever wholly extinguish among mankind.

In another allegorical work “Prometheus Unbound” Shelley made his hero arch-rebel which stole the divine fire for humanity and was punished by Jupiter.  In the concluding stanza of the song there is a return of belief that Earth shall share in the emancipation of man:

“Where morning dyes her golden tresses,
Shall soon partake our high emotions;
Kings shall turn pale!” 

In his most cherished lyrical poems, ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘To a Skylark’ Shelley transcends all the limits and indeed explodes.  It is in these lyrics that we often find Shelley at his best. Indeed most of Shelley’s poems are sad in tone and as such he is regarded as “the singer of endless sorrows”.

In ‘Ode to West Wind’, the poet begins his invocation in a buoyant mood. He looks upon the Wind as the destroyer of the present order and usherer of a new one. He quickly introduces the theme of death and compares the dead leaves to ghosts. The way Shelley invokes to the West Wind and the imagery of "Pestilence-stricken multitudes" makes the reader well aware of Shelley’s imaginative powers.

Although the West Wind symbolizes his own personality, yet in the middle of the poem he seems somehow pessimistic when he says, "Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!/ I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" The subsequent thought of the future at once turns his melancholy into ecstatic rapture as he foresees the approaching happiness:

“The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

     Each like a corpse, within its grave, until

     Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

  Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth,”

The ecstasy arises out of his ardent belief in the imminent regeneration of mankind and the end of all evils. The West Wind acts as a driving force for change and rejuvenation in the human and natural world. He hopes that all forms of tyranny and oppression will be replaced, in the millennium to come, by all-round happiness. The joyous rapture is born of an intense feeling of optimism:

“Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!”

We also find Shelley’s same revolutionary zeal in ode “To a Skylark”. In the opening stanza, the bird is seen as a "blithe spirit" that "pourest thy full heart/ In profuse strains of unpremeditated art." There is nothing artificial in the music of the bird; it overflows profusely from its heart. Shelley’s Skylark, is not just a bird but an embodiment of this ideal, the poet can hear its song but the bird ever remains invisible.

Among the Romantic poets, Shelley is marveled for his inimitable abstract ideas, but he is less of an artist .He was aiming not at the poetry of art, but at the poetry of rapture. Keats advised him to be “more an artist” and to “load every rift with ore”, but Shelley was aiming at a different effect from that of Keats’s richly decorated poetry. The poem” Ode to the West Wind” is universally accepted as one of the best poems in English literature remarkable for its theme, range of thought, spontaneity, poetic beauty and lyrical quality.

In his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, he describes it as the spirit of Beauty pervading the universe. He speaks of it as an “unseen power” that rarely visits human hearts as an “awful loveliness” that can free this world from tyranny and oppression. Thus, a profound note of yearning for the unattainable is another feature of Shelley’s poetry. According to Cazamian,

“The tone of Shelley’s poetry is that of a keen aspiration, in which mystical desire, with its anguished pangs and spiritual raptures, transcends the joys and sufferings of ordinary mankind.” Mathew Arnold very aptly refers to Shelley as “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”.

Shelly’s optimism about the imminent dawn of a golden age is genuine and firm and his prophecy of that millennium underlies most of his poems. In Ode to West Wind also this prophetic note is present with sheer intensity of expression:

“And, by the incarnation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! 

Shelly’s personification of West Wind is equally forceful:

“Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,

Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,

 Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning!”

Hand in hand with his irreconcilable spirit, is his utopian idealism? He wants to reconstitute society in keeping with his ideals of goodness, truth and beauty. According to Compton- Rickett, “To renovate the world, to bring about utopia, is his constant aim, and for this reason we may regard Shelley as … the visionary and reformer.”

Summing up, Shelley is emphatically the poet-militant, and the prophet of struggling manhood. His words are like trumpet-calls sounded in the van of man’s struggle, wafted back by winds, and heard through the din of conflict by his meaner brethren, who are obscurely fighting for good in the throng and crush of life. So he invokes the West Wind to become trumpet of his prophecy and scatter his revolutionary message that “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

         Synaesthesia in Keats’ Poetry:

The word synaesthesia has been derived from a Greek word which means ‘perceiving together’. It means concurrent appeal to more than one sensations of the body or response through one sense to the stimulation of other.

Synaesthetic imagery or sensuousness is the paramount quality in Keats’ poetry. Keats’ synaesthetic powers were unrivalled: nothing in the world was abstract to him, abstractions wearied him. Keats admits, “My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.” And that aesthetic dreamlife which separated so sharply from the reality was more desireable.

Keats has crowned every line of his poetry with beautiful colouring of synaesthetic imagery. Richard H. Fogle calls his synaesthesia as the product of his “unrivalled ability to absorb, sympathise, and humanise natural objects”. Synaesthesia in Keats, according to him, is a “natural concomitant of other qualities of his poetry”.

Sensuousness is that quality of poetry that appeals to our five senses of taste, touch, smell, vision and hearing. Keats’ sensuousness was unbounded: the song of a bird, the changing pattern of wind, the rustling of an animal, the smile on the child’s face—nothing escaped from her watchful eyes. G.K Chesterton rightly remarks:

“The record of taste, touch and smell crown every line of his poetry.”

The following lines from ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ appeal directly to our five senses.

“Of all her wreathed pearls her hair she frees

 Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one

 Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees

 Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees

 Half-hidden like a mermaid in sea-weed.”

In the sonnet, ‘Bright Star’, Keats spreads fantastic colours of synaesthetic imagery.

“Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast

  To feel for ever its soft fall and swell

  Awake forever in a state of sweet unrest

  Still, still to hear tender taken breath

  And so live ever—or else swoon to death.”

The quality of sensuousness is so deeply infused in Keats’ poetry that Louis McNiece calls him ‘a sensuous mystic’. Keats is mystic of senses and not of thoughts as he sought to apprehend the ultimate truth of the universe through his aesthetic sensations and not through intellectual or philosophical ideas.

Regarding Keats’ sensuousness Mathew Arnold very aptly remarks:

“No one can question the eminency in Keats’ poetry of the quality of sensuousness. Keats as a poet is eminently and enchantingly sensuous.”

Keats’ sensuousness is seen at his very best in his odes. Keats is primarily and pre-eminently is a poet of sensations and not of intellect. In ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, for example, Keats produces a series of sensuous pictures by his powerful imagination.

“Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard

 Are sweeter; therefore ye soft pipes play on

  Not to the sensual ear but more endeared

  Pipes to the spirit ditties of no tone.”

In ‘Ode to Autumn’, Keats produces a feast of colourful images.

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

 Close bosom-friend of maturing sun

 Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run

To bend with apples moss’d cottage-trees.”

Perhaps the best illustration of Keats’ synaesthetic imagery is in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Here Keats’ imaginative powers are seen at the very best.

“O for a draught of vintage! That hath been

  Cooled a long in deep delved earth

  Tasting of flora and country green

Dance, Provencal song and sunburnt mirth.”

Owing to dense foliage of beach trees the poet cannot see the flowers but still can differentiate them from their fragrance:

“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs

But in embalmed darkness guess each sweet.”

In Keats’ late poetry we see that it underwent a change. There is increasing concern of human problems and longing for death. Nevertheless sensuousness is still wearing its fairy pattern though colouring is different: it is touched with “still sad music of humanity”:

“Then in a wailful choir small gnats mourn

   Among the river sallows born aloft

  Or sinking as light wind lives or dies.”

In the final stanza of ‘Ode to Autumn’, Keats enthusiastically presents universal and all-embracing sensuous images which enthrall and enchant us:

“Hedge-cricket sings and now with treble soft

  The red-breast whistle from a garden croft

 And gathering swallows twittering in the skies.”

The above lines are so beautiful in rhythm and composition that Compton Rickett finds a ‘symphony of sounds’ in these lines.

Summing up, we can say that poetry comes to Keats as a ‘joy wrought in sensations’ and he accordingly advised Shelley to ‘load every rift with ore’. Be it ode or sonnet or narrative poetry, Keats is richly sensuous. Keats’ sensuousness is not only delicate and delicious but also aesthetic and delightful.