The Language of the Senses

Sensory-Perceptual Dynamics in Wordsworth, Coleridge,

Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson

In this stimulating and original analysis of some of the most important

nineteenth-century poems in English, Kerry McSweeney offers an al-
ternative to non-referential and New Historicist critical methods.
McSweeney discusses the sensory acuity that informed Words-
worth's, Coleridge's, Thoreau's, Whitman's, and Dickinson's finest
achievements and then, when blunted by illness or age, contributed
to an attenuation of their creative power. He supplies a "sensory pro-
file" or sensory history for each author and through close readings
shows how this profile affected their relationship to the external
world and their powers of symbolic perception.
Using perspectives gleaned from the poets themselves and an un-
derstanding of the physiological ground of perception, McSweeney
establishes a compelling theoretical basis for his approach. In clear
and elegant prose, he studies the physical basis of aesthetic plenitude
- such as the sensory manifold of Synesthesia - not only in the Ro
mantic writers mentioned above but also in two Victorian poets,
Hopkins and Tennyson.

KERRY MCSWEENEY is Molson Professor of English, McGill University.

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The Language of the Senses
Sensory-Perceptual Dynamics in
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau,
Whitman, and Dickinson

Kerry McSweeney

Liverpool University Press

 © McGill-Queen's University Press 1998
ISBN 0-85323-663-1

Legal deposit second quarter 1998

Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

Published simultaneously in the European

Union by Liverpool University Press

This book has been published with the help of a

grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences
Federation of Canada, using funds provided by
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada.

McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges

the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
for its publishing program.

British Library
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A British Library CIP record is available.

Poetry by Emily Dickinson is reprinted

by permission of the publishers
and the Trustees of Amherst College from
THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON,
Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
Copyright © 1951,1955,1979,1983 by
the President and Fellows of Harvard College
and from THE COMPLETE POEMS
OF EMILY DICKINSON, edited by
Thomas H. Johnson. Copyright 1929,1935
by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; Copyright ©
renewed 1957,1963 by Mary L. Hampson:
Little, Brown and Company, Boston.

This book was typeset by Typo Litho

Composition Inc. in 10/12 Palatino.
For Luke and John
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 Contents

Prefacei ia
Note on Texts and Citationsxiii xii
1 • Organic Sensibility 3
2 • Symbolic Perception 14
3 • Sublime or Mock Sublime? 29
4 • Wordsworth's Mighty World of Eye and Ear 41
5 • Coleridge's Blessed Interval 70
6 • Thoreau: A Purely Sensuous Life 98
7 • Whitman: The Feeling of Health 117
8 • Dickinson: The Glimmering Frontier 144
9 • Afterword: Two Victorian Seer 171
Notes 185
Works Cited1 193
Index 205
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 Preface

The premise of this book is that if Coleridge and Emerson, the princi-
pal theoreticians of English and American Romanticism respectively,
were correct in identifying sensory-perceptual acuity as an essential
attribute of a poet, it follows that the sensory profiles and the distinc-
tive patterns in the interplay of the senses of individual Romantic
poets are important subjects for critical investigation. In the far back-
ground of my inquiry is my undergraduate mentor at the University
of Toronto, the late Marshall McLuhan, whom I first encountered in
1960 in a Renaissance poetry course from which I learned rather more
about such subjects as the Inuit sensorium than about the course's
ostensible subject matter. Two summers later, I was among the ini-
tiates who gathered in the St. Michael's College library to help verify
the myriad quotations in the proofs of The Gutenberg Galaxy. It was
only several years later, when as a graduate student I took McLuhan's
renowned Monday night seminar on Media and Society, that I realized
how sceptical I had become of the value of cultural-studies theorizing
to the study of literature.
I did, however, retain an interest in what McLuhan called sensory
typology. In time, this led me to the work of anthropologists interested
in the sensory profiles of societies. From David Howes's Varieties of
Sensory Experience (1991) I learned of a "crisis of representation" in
his discipline caused by the dominance of the interpretative model of
Clifford Geertz (8) - a "crisis" that I recognized as another instance
of the interpretative "turn" taken by a number of disciplines in recent
decades. In literary studies, for example, there has been a virage caused
by the "hermeneutic universalism" of some interpretative theories and
the "hermeneutic contextualism" of others (see Hiley 7). As an alterna-
tive to interpretative models, Howes offered an anthropology of the
senses that would move "beyond textualism and hermeneutics" (300).
x Preface

My study offers a comparable alternative - a twofold one that relates

to both the status of sensory-perceptual experience in Romantic stud-
ies and readings of literary texts.
In a critique of the dominance of what he calls "ocularcentrism,"
Martin Jay observes that "we have increasingly come in the twentieth
century to distrust perception in general and vision in particular as
the ground of knowledge, often turning instead to language in all its
various guises as an alternative." This has led to an overemphasis on
interpretation and an "increasingly iconoclastic discursive climate"
("Rise" 318-19). Jacques Derrida, for example, does not "believe that
anything like perception exists. Perception is precisely a concept ...
interdependent with the concept of origin and of center and conse-
quently whatever strikes at [this] metaphysics ... strikes also at the
very concept of perception" (272).
Like my subjects, I "believe" in perception and the referential
capacities of language. In this study, sensory-perceptual experience
is shown to be a source or enabling condition of imaginative power
in five Romantic writers (and, more briefly, in two Victorian poets).
A common pattern is traced in the creative careers of five of them:
sensory-perceptual acuity informs the finest achievements of Words-
worth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Whitman, and Hopkins; when this is
blunted by illness or age, their creative powers attenuate markedly.
And in all of my subjects, sensory ratios are shown to be an essential
constituent of both symbolic perception and expansion of conscious-
ness experiences, descriptions or representations of which are a cen-
tral feature of their work. In Wordsworth's Prelude, for example, the
dynamic interplay of eye and ear is a fundamental constituent of the
"spots of time" and related experiences and thus has an important
bearing on one of the most contentious areas in Wordsworth criti-
cism: the mind/nature dialectic.
The timeliness of this contextualization could be illustrated by a
review of the work done on any of my subjects over the last two
decades. To take only one example, most of the attention Emily
Dickinson's poetry has received during this period has been of two
kinds. One is the language-talking-to-language, unrestricted-play-
of-signifiers discourse that denies the referentiality of texts. In Dick-
inson: The Modern Idiom, for example, David Porter argues that
Dickinson's art was "autogenetic": "almost everything in her poems
is allegorized, removed from sensation into words of a privately
coded intent." He speaks of Dickinson's "physical withdrawal from
the referential world": the poetry "does not regard the actual world
so much as words that stand for that world. Similitude no longer
being the dominant form of knowledge in the poems, they become
nonrepresentational and allegorical" (117,123,119-20).
 Preface xi

The other kind of criticism is New Historicist, particularly feminist.

While feminist critics have altered and greatly enriched our sense of
Dickinson's art and achievement, it was inevitable that trade-offs
would be involved. In her excellent Undiscovered Continent: Emily
Dickinson and the Space of the Mind, for example, Suzanne Juhasz reads
"Presentiment - is that long Shadow - on the Lawn" (#764) as "a tidy
aphorism, a statement of general truth" (32), a calculated analogy be-
tween an abstraction and a concrete image. This emphasis follows
from the book's central premise: "the mind [is] the setting for Dickin-
son's most significant experience"; the poet chose "to live in her
mind rather than in the external world, in order to achieve certain
goals and to circumvent or overcome certain forces in her environ-
ment and experience that were in opposition to those goals - particu-
larly, the expectations and norms that a patriarchal society creates for
women" (i, 4-5). My reading of the poem (in chapter 2) in perceptual
terms, which I believe makes it a livelier and more interesting per-
formance, follows from a premise opposed to those of both Porter
and Juhasz: that much of Dickinson's most significant experience is
referential and is found in her sensory-perceptual relationship to the
natural world.
Another feminist critic has claimed that Dickinson "concentrates]
on the sense of touch," offering as her sole evidence Luce Irigaray's
statement that "a woman finds pleasure more in touch than in sight"
(Dickie 31). The truth is that the dominant senses in Dickinson's
poetry are sight and hearing, especially the former. Indeed, one could
argue that exotropia, the serious eye disorder with which she was
afflicted, was as important a factor in Dickinson's creative life as was
the factor of gender.
Such an argument, however, would inevitably become reductive,
and I have no intention of making it. It is one thing to go from the
work of art to its conditions; but quite another to go from the condi-
tions to the work of art. Whitman's robust good health and extra-
ordinary haptic sensitivity, for example, are presuppositions of Song
of Myself. But Song of Myself, the achieved poem, is not fully or ade-
quately explained by his good health and haptic sensitivity. As
Wordsworth insists in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, poems "to which
any value can be attached were never produced ... but by a man
who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also
thought long and deeply" (PW ii 387-8). Similarly, while Dickinson's
exotropia was a condition of her poetic practice, it would be as ab-
surd to claim that this condition explains her creative genius as it
would be to argue that Paradise Lost is explained by Milton's blind-
ness. Such claims would be as patently reductive in connection with
any of the subjects of this study as are critical discourses that deny
xii Preface

the referentiality of texts, that proceed as if poems were fully compre-

hensible in terms of their cultural and ideological context, and that
fail to take into account, in Wordsworth's hyperbole, the "majestic
sway" that at times he, Coleridge, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson
all experienced "As natural beings in the strength of Nature" (Prelude
iii 193-4).

Each of my subjects has received an enormous amount of scholarly,

critical and theoretical attention. As my list of works cited indicates, I
am greatly in the debt of numerous scholars and critics. I am more
particularly grateful in various ways to Kim Blank of the University
of Victoria; Mark Jones of Queen's University; Tilottama Rajan of the
University of Western Ontario; Peter Sabor of Universite Laval; Boris
Castel, editor of Queen's Quarterly, in which a version of part of my
chapter on Thoreau first appeared; Philip Cercone and the late Peter
Blaney of McGill-Queen's Press; my research assistant Bruce Gil-
christ, from whose training in neuroscience I benefited; Rebecca
Katzin and the members of my 1994-95 seminar on the Romantic
symbol; and, encore une fois, Susanne McSweeney of College Jean de
Brebeuf.
 Note on Texts and Citations

COLERIDGE In quoting from Coleridge, I have used wherever possi-

ble the editions in the Collected Works, general editor Kathleen Coburn.
The text for quotations from the poems is Ernest Hartley Coleridge's
edition of the Complete Poetical Works.

DICKINSON The texts for all quotations from Emily Dickinson's

poems and her letters are the three-volume editions edited by Thomas
H. Johnson. Poems and letters are identified by the number assigned
them by Johnson. In quoting from the poems, I have silently incorpo-
rated a few of the presentational emendations Johnson made for his
one-volume edition The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (e.g., its for
it's, ecstasy for extasy).

EMERSON Unless otherwise noted, the text for quotations from Emer-
son is the Library of America edition of Essays and Lectures, edited by
Joel Porte.

HOPKINS The text for all quotations from Hopkins' poems is the
Clarendon edition of Poetical Works, edited by Norman H. MacKenzie.

TENNYSON The text for all quotations from Tennyson's poems is the
second edition of The Poems of Tennyson, edited in three volumes by
Christopher Ricks. Volume and page numbers are supplied for quota-
tions only when their absence would make a passage difficult to find.

THOREAU Wherever possible, the texts for quotations from Thoreau's

works are those in the Princeton University Press edition of his works.
For later entries from the Journal I have used the fourteen-volume
Torrey and Allen edition of 1906.
xiv Note on Texts and Citations

WHITMAN Unless otherwise indicated, the text of all quotations

from Whitman's poetry and prose is the Library of America edition of
the Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan. This
edition includes the text of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, which is
cited for the poems that first appeared in it (e.g., Song of Myself and
"There Was a Child Went Forth"). But quotations from Song of Myself
are identified by the section divisions Whitman later added to the
poem.

WORDSWORTH Unless otherwise noted, the text for all quotations

from Wordsworth's poetry (except the Prelude) and prose is the Poeti-
cal Works, edited by E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. For the
Prelude I have used The Prelude 2799, 1805, 1850, edited by Jonathan
Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. Unless otherwise indi-
cated, the 1805 version is the text cited. Line numbers are parentheti-
cally supplied for quotations from the Prelude. Similar information is
supplied for other poems only when its absence would make a pas-
sage difficult to find.

In addition to shortened forms of titles, the following abbreviations

are used in citations:

PW Wordsworth's Poetical Works

J Thoreau's Journal (Torrey and Allen edition)
*/ Thoreau's Journal (Princeton edition)
SM Coleridge's Statesman's Manual
The Language of the Senses
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 ONE

Organic Sensibility

In "My First Acquaintance with Poets/' William. Hazlitt recalls

meeting Wordsworth at Coleridge's cottage in Nether Stowey. At one
point, the poet looked out of a latticed window and observed: "How
beautifully the sun sets on that yellow bank!" Hazlitt remembered
thinking to himself, "'With what eyes these poets see nature!' and
ever after, when I saw the sun-set stream upon the objects facing it,
conceived I had made a discovery, or thanked Mr. Wordsworth for
having made one for me" (xvii 118). There is nothing unusual in
Hazlitt's associating poetic gifts with sensory acuity. A "great Poet,"
Coleridge insists, must have "the ear of a wild Arab listening in the
silent Desart, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps
of an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the Forest -; the Touch of a
Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child" (Letters ii 810). And
keenness of sensation is the basis of Emerson's theory of imaginative
creation. "What else is it to be a poet?" he asks; "What are his garland
and singing-robes? What but a sensibility so keen that the scent of
an elder-blow, or the timber-yard and corporation-works of a nest of
pismires [ants] is event enough for him, - all emblems and personal
appeals to him" ("Poetry" 36). This last phrase intimates what in other
places Emerson and Coleridge make abundantly clear. Perception and
apperception are equally necessary for the poet. Without them a natu-
ral object could never become a figure or make a personal appeal.
One way in which Coleridge emphasized the importance of organic
sensibility was to describe the poet as a person who has retained into
adult life the sensory-perceptual acuity of the child:
4 The Language of the Senses

To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine

the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every
day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar ... this is the character and
privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from
talents. And so to represent familiar objects as to awaken the minds of others
to a like freshness of sensation concerning them ... this is the prime merit of
genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation. (Friend i 109-10)

To understand the connection that Coleridge makes between the child-

hood sensorium and poetic genius, it is necessary to become familiar
with his observations on the sensory development of children.
Through studying his infant son, Coleridge was led to conclude that
touch and taste are the first channels of knowledge of the outer world:
"Contact - the womb - the amnion liquor - warmth + touch/ - air
cold + touch + sensation & action of breathing - contact of the mother's
knees + all those contacts of the Breast + taste & wet & sense of
swallowing -"; "Babies touch by taste at first - then about 5 months old
they go from the Palate to the hand - & are fond of feeling what they
have taste[d] - /Association of the Hand with the Taste - till the latter
by itself recalls the former - & of course, with volition" (Notebooks
i #1414, #924).
Coleridge was correct. The senses develop in a definite sequence:
tactile, auditory, visual. As the child grows, the order of precedence
becomes reversed. But in the early phases of development it is "much
more important to experience tactile and auditory stimulations ...
than it is to experience visual ones" (Montagu 236). Eventually, vision
becomes by far the most important sense, one reason being that the
optic nerve has "some eighteen times more nerve endings than the
cochlear nerve of the ear, its nearest competitior." And with its
800,000 fibers the eye "can transfer an astonishing amount of informa-
tion to the brain, and at a rate of assimilation far greater than that of
any other sense organ" (Jay Eyes 6). But this information only be-
comes meaningful on the basis of what has been previously felt and
heard. As Coleridge puts it: "The first education which we receive,
that from our mothers, is given to us by touch; the whole of its pro-
cess is nothing more than, to express myself boldly, an extended touch
by promise. The sense itself, the sense of vision itself, is only acquired
by a continued recollection of touch" (Philosophical Lectures 115).
"In the infancy and childhood of individuals," Coleridge notes,
"the first knowledges are acquired promiscuously." This was "the
happy delirium, the healthful fever of the physical, moral and intel-
lectual being, - nature's kind and providential gift to childhood. In
 Organic Sensibility 5

the best good sense of the words, it is the light-headedness and light-
heartedness of human life!" Nature supplies "a gay and motley chaos
of facts, and forms, and thousand-fold experiences, the origin of
which lies beyond the memory, traceless as life itself" (Snyder 105).
This period of healthy promiscuity is the subject of Whitman's mar-
velous poem, "There Was a Child Went Forth," which is both a repre-
sentation of a child's sensory-perceptual development and, like the
first two books of Wordsworth's Prelude, its author's pre-history as a
Romantic poet.
Whitman's poem begins in springtime as the child for the first time
crosses the threshold of the early home environment into a predomi-
nantly visual post-infancy world. Outside the home, touch, taste and
smell are recessive. There are some sounds, but predominantly there
are sights. The child becomes part of what he sees, not what he
touches, and his experiences are pristine and chaste. Touch in its role
as the principal channel of sexual feeling - the sense that overwhelms
the mature man in Song of Myself - has yet to be awakened:

The early lilacs became part of this child,

And grass, and white and red morningglories, and white and red clover,
and the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the March-born lambs, and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the
mare's foal, and the cow's calf, and the noisy brood of the barnyard or
by the mire of the pond-side..and the fish suspending themselves so
curiously below there..and the beautiful curious liquid..and the
water-plants with their graceful flat heads..all became part of him.

The adjective "curious" refers to both subjective and objective states

- it means both "eager to learn" and "exciting attention" or "awaken-
ing surprise." The fish seemingly suspended in the water of the pond
are curious to the boy because in his previous experience of water
inside his home anything that did not float on top sank to the bottom.
The water-plants are odd in another way; "they have flat heads,
unlike the other plants he knows, but they strike him as admirable
nonetheless" and he thus juxtaposes what to an adult would seem
two contradictory characteristics: "their graceful flat heads" (Vendler
"Placing" 22).
In the next lines, the circles of sensory-perceptual awareness expand
to include the sprouts in the garden, the blossoms on the apple-trees,
the weeds by the road, and the humans that use the road: "the old
drunkard staggering home," the schoolmistress, "the friendly boys
that passed..and the quarrelsome boys" (a crucial distinction for a
6 The Language of the Senses

child), "the tidy and freshcheeked girls," and the "negro boy and
girl" who are not freshcheeked but whose bare feet are notable. In the
temporally elided middle of the poem, more complex and destabiliz-
ing experiences are noted as the circles of curiousness expand: the
mother's wholesome odor, recalling the sensory security of infancy,
contrasts with the father's minatory attributes; there is socialization
("family usages," "company"); there are powerful feelings seeking an
outlet ("the yearning and swelling heart").
And, as for Wordsworth as a child, there is a tendency towards
idealism: "The sense of what is real.. ..the thought if after all it should
prove unreal,/The doubts of daytime and the doubts of night-
time... the curious whether and how,/Whether that which appears so
is so....Or is it all flashes and specks?" Wordsworth reported that
during childhood he often had to recall himself from the "abyss of
idealism" through the sense of touch - by grasping at a wall or tree
(PW iv 463). In Whitman's poem, this tendency is subsumed by the
expanding circles of visual awareness that culminate in an exquisitely
rendered sunset scene:

Shadows .. aureola and mist.. light falling on roofs and gables of white
or brown, three miles off,
The schooner near by sleepily dropping down the tide .. the little boat
slacktowed astern,
The hurrying tumbling waves and quickbroken crests and slapping;
The strata of colored clouds.. ..the long bar of maroontint away solitary
by itself... .the spread of purity it lies motionless in,
The horizon's edge, the flying seacrow, the fragrance of saltmarsh and
shoremud;
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now
goes and will always go forth every day.

This scene is a perceptual continuum stretching from the odors

of the proximate shoreline, through the visual and auditory agitation
of the tumbling and slapping waves and the visual particulars of
the more slowly moving schooner and flying seacrow in the middle
distance, to the visual limit - the horizon's edge out there and the
motionless clouds and unbounded spread of purity up there. This
continuum is simultaneously, not sequentially experienced; this is em-
phasized by the near-far alternations in the enumeration of particu-
lars. To borrow a phrase of Whitman's from another piece of natural
description, the sunset scene offers "purity without sentiment" (826).
There is no subjective projection; in Friedrich Schiller's terms, it is a
naive rather than a sentimental perception of the natural world.1
 Organic Sensibility 7

The aggregative ripples of expanding consciousness have culmi-

nated in a totality, a holistic moment. The synchronic experience at
the poem's conclusion recapitulates spatially the diachronic move-
ment of the poem outward from the maternal environment to the
external world. Inscribed in its perceptual particulars is the depen-
dence of aesthetic perception on the childhood perception that pre-
ceded it. The little boat slacktowed astern faintly recalls the lambs,
the foal, the calf, and the sow's litter; the delicate color discrimina-
tion ("maroontint") recalls the pink-faint litter and the white and red
morning-glories and clover seen by the child; the mud of the shore
recalls the mire of the pondside; and the shoreline fragrance recalls
the other olfactory image and the other terminus a quo in the poem -
the maternal aroma.
What of the assertion that the child will "always go forth every
day"? It may be taken both metaphorically (duration as the vehicle,
present intensity as the tenor) and psychologically (the child/youth
lives in a timeless "now," not yet having a felt awareness of his mor-
tality). The "always" may also be considered in relation to the later-
deleted last line of the poem: "And these become part of him or her
that peruses them now." Here the "always" suggests indefinite tem-
poral extension. The child/youth has grown up to become the poet
who writes "There Was a Child Went Forth" and who will always go
forth in the sense that his sensory-perceptual progression is re-enacted
each time a reader experiences the poem.
What cannot be done is to take the "always" literally. Like
Coleridge and Emerson, Whitman came in time to experience the
negative effect on poetic genius of the diminution of sensory-percep-
tual acuity that is an inevitable part of the life cycle. Since age-related
sensory changes occur gradually over a long period, beginning in
adolescence or early adulthood, most persons adapt to them without
difficulty. But for Romantic writers, the change could seem cata-
strophic. We can have "health and reason," as Emerson puts it in
"Experience," and yet "have no superfluity of spirit for new creation
... We are like millers on the lower levels of a stream, when the facto-
ries above them have exhausted the water" (471). This heavy change
is the subject of Coleridge's Dejection Ode and Wordsworth's Intima-
tions Ode, the latter of which was Thoreau's master-text for compre-
hending and articulating the devastating decline in his own sensory-
perceptual powers. As for the author of "There Was a Child Went
Forth": the antiphonal voice of that poem is heard in the "Sands at
Seventy" section of the final edition of Leaves of Grass, particularly
in the poem that figures the Romantic poet in old age as "The Dis-
mantled Ship":
8 The Language of the Senses

In some unused lagoon, some nameless bay,

On sluggish, lonesome waters, anchor 'd near the shore,
An old, dismasted, gray and batter 'd ship, disabled, done,
After free voyages to all the seas of earth, haul'd up at last and
hawser 'd tight,
Lies rusting, mouldering.

Coleridge's observations of the sensory development of children

were part of his interest in the classification of the senses and their
interaction and interdependence. Clustering his notations on these
subjects (and amplifying them with other references) will introduce
those aspects of sensory-perceptual experience that have a particular
importance in his own work and in that of Wordsworth, Thoreau,
Whitman, and Dickinson.
Coleridge was opposed to the traditional hierarchical division of
the senses into higher (sight and hearing) and lower (smell, taste and
touch) and to the valorization of sight as the supreme sense that
had occurred in the late seventeenth century following the impact of
Newton's Opticks and the empirically-based psychology of Locke. Heh
was also opposed to aesthetic thinkers who equated imagination with
sight and regarded the eye as the essential sensory organ upon which
imagination was based.2 The privileging of sight, Coleridge feared,
could lead to a separation of subject and object. Sight and hearing
present objects to the mind distinct from our perceptions of them, un-
like the mixed or imperfect senses that "combine with the perception
of the outward Object a distinct sense of our own Life" (Lectures i 36).
In modern scientific terminology, touch, taste, and smell have an
autocentric rather than allocentric mode of operation. It is mainly
through these senses that the sixth or proprioceptive sense, the body's
sense of itself, is activated. In touch, for example, both poles of the
sensory experience - subjective and objective, active and passive - are
present. In touching an object, I at the same time feel myself touching
it: it is "as if the same stimulating event had two possible poles of
experience, one objective and the other subjective" (Gibson 99). Cole-
ridge believed that if unaccompanied by touch (and taste and smell),
visual and auditory perceptions were "liable to cause false represen-
tations of the self" (Modiano "Views" 34). For example, he came to
conclude of his wife Sara that eye and ear were her "great organs"
(Letters ii 882) to such a degree that the imbalance had resulted in

coldness perhaps & paralysis in all tangible ideas & sensations - all that
forms real Self- hence she creates her own self in a field of Vision and Hear-
 Organic Sensibility 9

ing ... & hence becomes the willing Slave of the Ears & Eyes of others. -
Nothing affects her with pain or pleasure as it is but only as other people
will say it is - nay by an habitual absence of reality in her affections I have
had a hundred instances that the being beloved, or the not being beloved, is
a thing indifferent; but the notion of not being beloved - that wounds her
pride deeply. (Notebooks i #979)

The crucial element in the constitution of real Self was tangible or

tactual sensation, which was "not a mere moment of sensation" but a
pathic merge, "the blending & unifying of the sensations that inhere
in the manifold goings on of the Life of the whole man" (Notebooks
i #979). In one of his attempts to represent this, Coleridge used a cir-
cular model, an adaptation of the medieval sense wheel, distributing
the senses of hearing, sight, smell, and taste at equidistant points on a
circumference and placing in the center both feeling and its direct
manifestation, touch. He explained that "Feeling organized in addi-
tion to and in co-existence with the other senses is Touch"; while
"Feeling organized by the absorption or subsumption of the other
senses is that mysterious Sense of vital Warmth" (Letters iv 774).
There was to be sure an essential difference between touch and feel-
ing; the latter was "an act of consciousness having itself for its only
Object, and not a Symbol or representative of any thing else. Thus I
have a sensation of Heat, a Feeling of Life" (Notebooks iii #3605). But be-
cause they both occupied the same central place in the sensorium
they were bound to dissolve into each other.
How can the visual perception of a distant object be accompanied
by feeling/touch? Like Aristotle, Coleridge considered touch the orig-
inating sense; the other senses, including vision, were only acquired
by a continual recollection of touch. For example, the sense of magni-
tude (as opposed to mere spaciousness) was dependent on the idea of
substance which was in turn dependent on touch. "[A] 11 our feelings
& ideas of magnitude, magnitudinal sgublimity, &c" are evolved
"from a scale of our own bodies"; if there "were pure vision, as a per-
ceptive sense abstracted from feeling gin the organ of vision, why do I
seek for mountains when in the flattest countries the Clouds present
so many so much more romantic & spacious forms, & the coal-fire so
many so much more varied & lovely forms?" (Notebooks ii #2402).
Without feeling/touch, all kinds of visual tricks and specious frissons
were possible, such as those described in Coleridge's own "Apologia
pro Vita Sua" (1800), a poem that I shall cite in chapter 5 in discussing
the deterioration of his imaginative power:

The poet in his lone yet genial hour

Gives to his eyes a magnifying power:
io The Language of the Senses

Or rather he emancipates his eyes

From the blank shapeless accidents of size -
In unctuous cones of kindling coal,
Or smoke upwreathing from the pipe's trim bole,
His gifted ken can see
Phantoms of sublimity.

In associating smell with taste and touch, Coleridge disagreed with

Aristotle, who considered this sense the pivotal point between the
two outer senses (sight and hearing) and the two inner senses (taste
and touch). Coleridge may be judged more correct in that sight and
sound are air-wave disturbances while smell is chemical and mole-
cular, and as such closer to taste and touch. But Aristotle also had a
point: smell does have unique sensory characteristics. As Poe cor-
rectly observed: "odors have an altogether idiosyncratic force, in
affecting us through association; a force differing essentially from that
of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight, or the hearing"
(1333). The reason that the perception of odors is idiosyncratic be-
comes evident when the anatomy of smell is considered. The brain's
processing of smells occurs through two distinct pathways. After the
initial transduction from chemical to neuronal messages that occurs
in the olfactory bulbs, some messages are relayed into the limbic sys-
tem, an evolutionarily old and intensely emotional part of the brain.
Olfaction is thus "more involved in visceral and emotional activities
than in sensory information transmission" and may well cause a feel-
ing before eliciting a concern with its meaning (Engen 4). The range
of the human olfactory spectrum is wide, extending from sexual
arousal to images of eternity (as in Dante's Paradiso and Whitman's
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"). But the physiological dynamics of
human smell are such that a person can easily be deprived of the dis-
tinctive properties of this sensory avenue and its important role in in-
tensifying other sensory experiences - as is known to anyone who
has ever eaten a gourmet dinner while suffering from a head cold.
Concerning the outer senses of sight and sound, Coleridge made
an interesting comparative observation during the winter of 1798-99,
when he was living in Germany:

About a month ago, before the thaw came on, there was a storm of wind;
during the whole night, such were the thunders and howlings of the break-
ing ice [of the Lake of Ratzeburg], that they have left a conviction on my
mind, that there are sounds more sublime than any sight can be, more abso-
lutely suspending the power of comparison, and more utterly absorbing
the mind's self-consciousness in its total attention to the object working
upon it. (Friend i 367)
 Organic Sensibility 11

He was once again on the mark. In contrast to sight, hearing is more

proximate, pervasive and penetrating. In Hans Jonas' account, sound,
"itself a dynamic fact, intrudes upon a passive subject":

For the sensation of hearing to come about the percipient is entirely depen-
dent on something happening outside his control, and ... is exposed to its
happening. All he can contribute to the situation is a state of attentive readi-
ness ... He cannot let his ears wander, as his eyes do, over a field of possible
percepts ... he has no choice in the matter. In hearing, the percipient is at the
mercy of environmental action, which intrudes upon his sensibility without
his asking. (139)

These generalizations, however, are partial in that they refer to

near or proximate sounds. When sounds are heard from a distance,
the effect can be not an intrusion but an inducement to reflection and
rapture. Here, for example, is a passage from the journal of Thoreau,
a connoisseur of the effects of distant sounds:

Heard at a distance the sound of the bell acquires a certain vibratory hum, as
it were from the air through which it passes - like a harp ... It is not the mere
sound of the bell but the humming in the air that enchants me - just [as the]
azure tint which much air or distance imparts delights the eye. It is not so
much the object as the object clothed with an azure veil. All sound heard at a
great distance thus tends to produce the same music - vibrating the strings of
the universal lyre. There comes to me a melody which the air has strained. -
which has conversed with every leaf and needle of the woods. It is by no
means the sound of the bell as heard near at hand, and which at this distance
I can plainly distinguish - but its vibrating echoes that portion of the sound
which the elements take up and modulate. A sound which is very much
much modified sifted and refined before it reaches my ear. (*/ iv 142-3)

At a proximate distance, sight organizes a perceptual field of co-

temporaneous particulars, imposing a hierarchy and figure/ground
distinctions, and privileging a central object. One is able to observe
dispassionately, to abstract, and to compare (see Jonas 148-9). The
dynamics of distant sight are different, as an entry from Walter
Scott's journal suggests: "Ah, that Distance! What a magician for con-
juring up scenes of joy or sorrow, smoothing all asperities, reconciling
all incongruities, veiling all absurdness, softening every coarseness,
doubling every effect by the influence of the imagination" (i 172).
But the effects of distance can be more than simply charming or
enchanting. Other advantages are instanced in Wordsworth's Pre-
lude. In the eighth book, for example, the subject of which is "Love of
Nature Leading to Love of Mankind," the poet describes standing on
12 The Language of the Senses

Helvellyn (a peak in the Lake District) looking down on a village fair.

The distance allows both the detailed observation of the human
scene and a shift in focus so that it is seen against the background of
the immense "circumambient world": "How little they, they and
their doings, seem," Wordsworth reflects, "and yet how great,/For
all things serve them" - the morning light, the silent rocks, the
brooks, the peak, and the blue sky (47-61). And later in the book he
recalls as a boy seeing in the distance a shepherd against the sky
looking "like an aerial cross" positioned for worship (408). Also im-
portant to Wordsworth was "the way in which distance can bring
about oxymoron in perception" (Ogden 254). Alpine examples are
found in the Prelude's sixth book: the "dumb cataracts and streams of
ice - /A motionless array of mighty waves" (458-9); and "the sta-
tionary blasts of waterfalls" (558) which, as we shall see, were one of
the ingredients in Wordsworth's sublime experience in the Gondo
Gorge.
Another characteristic of distanced sight is the "indefinite 'and so
on' with which the visual perception is imbued [which] is the birth-
place of the idea of infinity" (Jonas 150). As Ortega y Gasset has
noted, as distance increases "we no longer see one thing clearly and
the rest confusedly ... the duality of proximate vision is succeeded by
a perfect unity of the whole visual field." Distant objects become
"mere chromatic entities" and can acquire illusory or apparitional
qualities (824-5). In Emerson's hyperbole, it is "especially in the dis-
tant line of the horizon [that] man beholds somewhat as beautiful as
his own nature" (10).

When Whitman speaks of "those beautiful wonders, the perceptions

or senses" (Notebooks 124), the "or" seems to imply that there is little
difference between the two. Coleridge is helpful both in distinguish-
ing between these faculties and in explaining why it is practically im-
possible to consider them separately. A sensation is a particular kind
of feeling, "a Feeling referring to some Thing, and not yet organized
into a definite Object nor separated from the sentient Being":

The sensitive faculty is the power of being affected and modified by Things,
so as to receive impressions from them. The Quality of these Impressions is
determined partly by the nature of the sensitive faculty itself and its organs,
and partly by the nature of the Things. These impressions are in the first
instant immediate Sensations: as soon as the attention is directed to them, and
they are taken up into the Consciousness, they become Perceptions.
 Organic Sensibility 13

A perception is "sensations organized into an Object, and thus pro-

jected out of the sentient Being." With reference to the objects of
present or past perception, "the presentations or representations of
Things/' it is not possible

to distinguish by determinate boundaries, what part proceeds from the

sensitive faculty itself, and what from the outward Causes or the Things
acting on the faculty ... The cause of this impossibility is that we become
conscious both of the one and of the other in one & the same way; namely,
as modifications of our own Being. What precedes the modification as its
cause, we can never know; because our consciousness originates in the
modification. (Notebooks iii #3605)

This originative and constitutive power of perception is the basis of

Coleridge's conception of the creative activity of the mind, including
symbolic perception. This is the subject of the next chapter, in which
Coleridge is once again the point d'appui.
 TWO

Symbolic Perception

In the seventh chapter of Biogmphia Litemria, Coleridge develops an ex-

tended analogy for "the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking":

Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface

of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic
colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the lit-
tle animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and
passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to
gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion.

There are two powers at work, "which relatively to each other are
active and passive"; but their operation is not possible "without
an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive."
In "philosophical language," Coleridge explains, this intermediate
faculty "in all its degrees and determinations" is called imagination,
while "in common language, and especially on the subject of poetry,
we appropriate the name to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to
a superior voluntary controul over it" (i 124-5).
Coleridge makes the same distinction six chapters later. The primary
imagination is "the living Power and prime Agent of all human Per-
ception ... a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in
the infinite I am." As we have seen, for Coleridge perception (primary
imagination) is "the context for a distinction between perceiver and
perceived, not the product of that duality"; " 'reality' is understood to
reside neither in an absolute subject nor in the object, but in the experi-
enced interaction between the two" (Wheeler "Theory" 26,17-18). The
 Symbolic Perception 15

secondary imagination is "an echo of the former, co-existing with the

conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its
agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It
dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create." It is "essentially
vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead"
(i 304).
Coleridge's water-insect analogy is not the appropriate emblem
for the creative activity of mind of all the subjects of this study. It is
excellent for the author of "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" and
"Frost at Midnight"; but something much faster-moving is required
for Emily Dickinson - for example, her evanescent hummingbird,
reeling oriole, or delirious bee. As for Whitman, his noiseless patient
spider constantly unreeling filaments out of itself is perhaps the em-
blem one wants, though something more dynamic and erotic would
be preferable for the poet of Song of Myself - perhaps the stallion in
section 32 of that poem, who is "fresh and responsive" to the caresses
of its rider: "His nostrils dilate ... his well built limbs tremble with
pleasure."
But what these writers, and Wordsworth and Thoreau, all have in
common is that perception or primary imagination is an essential as-
pect of the creative process. So is the detection of analogies. A key
premise for all of them is, in Emerson's formulation, a "radical corre-
spondence between visible things and human thoughts": "Every nat-
ural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in
nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the
mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as
its picture ... man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects
... neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these
objects without man" (20-1).
When the particular "man" in question is a poet, there is nothing
unusual about this declaration. Aristotle, for example, regarded the
mastery of metaphorical language - the ability to perceive similari-
ties that was an inborn gift and could not be taught - as the distin-
guishing feature of the poet (49). Emerson was in complete
agreement: "As a power [poetry] is the perception of the symbolic
character of things, and the treating them as representative: as a
talent it is a magnetic tenaciousness of an image" ("Poetry" 27). In
the particular case of natural facts and spiritual facts, the former are
the vehicles of metaphorical relationships; the tenors are mental,
psychological, and emotional states. In Nature, Emerson provides
examples: "An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm
man is a rock, a learned man is a torch ... flowers express to us the
delicate affections" (20).
16 The Language of the Senses

But these are conventional, even hackneyed figures. What is dis-

tinctive about the Romantic use of such tropes, what makes Emer-
son's assertion a key Romantic postulate, is the emphasis on the
perception of an analogy between subject and natural object. Writing
in 1829, the critic Francis Jeffrey considers it axiomatic that "the very
essence of poetry ... consists in the fine perception and vivid expres-
sion of that subtle and mysterious Analogy which exists between the
physical and the moral world - which makes outward things and
qualities the natural types and emblems of inward gifts and emo-
tions" (474). A principal reason why in the Romantic period this ana-
logical activity of mind came to be considered the distinguishing
feature of poetry is suggested by a passage in Coleridge's Statesman's
Manual. It occurs when he turns his attention from the scriptural rev-
elation of God to "the great book of his servant Nature":

I have at this moment before me, in the flowery meadow, on which my eye is
now reposing, one of its most soothing chapters ... For never can I look and
meditate on the vegetable creation without a feeling similar to that with
which we gaze at a beautiful infant that has fed itself asleep at its mother's
bosom, and smiles in its strange dream of obscure yet happy sensations. The
same tender and genial pleasure takes possession of me, and this pleasure is
checked and drawn inward by the like aching melancholy, by the same whis-
pered remonstrance, and made restless by a similar impulse of aspiration. It
seems as if the soul said to herself: from this state hast thou fallen! Such
shouldst thou still become, thy Self all permeable to a holier power! thy Self
at once hidden and glorified by its own transparency, as the accidental and
dividuous in this quiet and harmonious object is subjected to the life and
light of nature which shines in it... (71)

The best gloss on this passage is Schiller's description of the rela-

tionship of the modern poet to the natural world in his Naive and
Sentimental Poetry (1795-6): "Our feeling for nature is like the feeling
of an invalid for health." The reason natural scenes so deeply affect
their human perceivers is that we are responding to "the serene
spontaneity of their activity, existence in accordance with their own
laws, the inner necessity, the eternal unity with themselves. They
are what we were," says Schiller: "they are what we should once again
become." Natural scenes are "not only the representation of our lost
childhood, which eternally remains most dear to us, but fill us with
a certain melancholy"; they are also "representations of our highest
fulfilment in the ideal, thus evoking in us a sublime tenderness"
(105, 84-5).1
 Symbolic Perception 17

In the subjects of this study, the varieties of inner/outer analogical

figuration range from the emblematic to the implicit, the determinate
to the polysemous, and the metaphorical to the metonymic. At one
end of the spectrum are examples of the charm that attends natural
phenomena as, in Wordsworth's phrase, "they present to Fancy's
choice/Apt illustrations of the moral world,/ Caught at a glance, or
traced with curious pains" (1850 Prelude xiv 317-20). Both of the
following are superior examples of elaborate tracing:

Truth considered in itself and in the effects natural to it, may be conceived
as a gentle spring or water-source, warm from the genial earth, and breath-
ing up into the snow drift that is piled over and around its outlet. It turns
the obstacle into its own form and character, and as it makes its way
increases its stream. And should it be arrested in its course by a chilling sea-
son, it suffers delay, not loss, and waits only for a change in the wind to
awaken and again roll onwards. (Coleridge Friend i 65)

Again I scent the white water-lily ... It is the emblem of purity, and its scent
suggests it. Growing in stagnant and muddy [water], it bursts up so pure
and fair to the eye and so sweet to the scent, as if to show us what purity and
sweetness reside in, and can be extracted from, the slime and muck of earth
... What confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of the water-lily! ...
The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man; the fragrant flower that
springs from it, for the purity and courage which springs from its
midst. (Thoreau / vi 352-3)

The tenor of both figures is an idealized abstraction with a general-

ized inspirational import; but neither figure seems arbitrarily devel-
oped or mere rhetorical embellishment. Both presuppose attentive
observation of natural phenomena, and in each case it appears as if
observation has stimulated reflection. Both bring to mind Thoreau's
generalization that it is "as language that all natural objects affect the
poet... He sees a flower or other object, and it is beautiful or affecting
to him because it is a symbol of his thought, and what he indistinctly
feels or perceives is matured in some other organization" (/ v 359).
Both figures, however, depend on conceptual transference rather than
a single intense perceptual act or the detection of a complementarity
between perceiver and perceived. Both might even be thought to
answer to Coleridge's complaint:

never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature, without

connecting it by dim analogies with the moral world, proves faintness of
i8 The Language of the Senses

Impression. Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who
believes & feels, that every Thing has a life of it's own, & that we are all one
Life. A Poet's Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & uni-
fied, with the great appearances in Nature - & not merely held in solution &
loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similies.2 (Letters ii 864)

Stronger impressions and more intimate combinations of inner and

outer are found in the following two passages:

Does Lust call forth or occasion Love? - Just as much as the reek of the Marsh
calls up the Sun. The sun calls up the vapor - attenuates, lifts it - it becomes a
cloud - and now it is the Veil of the Divinity - the Divinity transpiercing it at
once hides & declares his presence - We see, we are conscious of, Light alone;
but it is Light embodied in the earthly nature, which that Light itself awoke &
sublimated. (Coleridge Letters iii 305)

As Frost is best conceived

By force of its Result -
Affliction is inferred
By subsequent effect -

If when the sun reveal,

The Garden keep the Gash -
If as the Days resume
The wilted countenance

Cannot correct the crease

Or counteract the stain -
Presumption is Vitality
Was somewhere put in twain. (Dickinson #951)

Unlike the first two examples, the tenors of these figures are not ideal-
ized abstractions but processive emotional states, and the detailing of
similarity between natural and spiritual processes yields psychologi-
cal insight. Moreover, the appositeness of the analogy (the intimacy
of the combination) is not exhausted in the tracing. For example, in
addition to its explicit tenor, the second example also suggests that
affliction brings a blighting, numbing deadness to the affective and
perceptual life. But while these two examples are different from the
first two in degree of impression and of complementarity of subject
and object, they are similar in that they also involve conceptual trans-
ference and thus make one reluctant to cite either passage as an exem-
plification of subject and object sharing in the common life of all.
 Symbolic Perception 19

The next two passages contain still more intimate combinations of

inner and outer:

Presentiment - is that long Shadow - on the Lawn -

Indicative that Suns go down -

The Notice to the startled Grass

That Darkness - is about to pass - (Dickinson #764)

Lo! - with the rising sun it [a tree or flower] commences its outward life and
enters into open communion with all the elements, at once assimilating them
to itself and to each other. At the same moment it strikes its roots and unfolds
its leaves, absorbs and respires, streams forth its cooling vapour and finer
fragrance, and breathes a repairing spirit, at once the food and tone of the
atmosphere, into the atmosphere that feeds it. Lo! - at the touch of light how
it returns an air akin to light, and yet with the same pulse effectuates its own
secret growth, still contracting to fix what expanding it had refined. Lo! -
how upholding the ceaseless plastic motion of the parts in the profoundest
rest of the whole it becomes the visible organismus of the whole silent or
elementary life of nature and, therefore, in incorporating the one extreme
becomes the symbol of the other; the natural symbol of that higher life of rea-
son, in which the whole series (known to us in our present state of being) is
perfected, in which, therefore, all the subordinate gradations recur, and are
re-ordained "in more abundant honor." (Coleridge SM 72)

The subject of Dickinson's poem is not an idealized abstraction or

generalized emotional state but rather a mood or sudden feeling.
The analogy is connotative rather than denotative, suggestive rather
than determinate. It depends not on conceptual transference or asso-
ciative tracing but on a perceptual/emotional intuition (it is not the
long shadow, but that long shadow). What is intuited or felt is the
coextensiveness of inner and outer that is figured by the transferred
epithet "startled." There is no suggestion of conceptual transfer-
ence; intense perception of the natural fact is itself the trigger of the
analogy, and the act of analogical perception is delicately inscribed
in the poem.
The passage from the Statesman's Manual is a more extended
example of an analogical figure that inscribes the act of perceiving the
analogy. It is the climax of Coleridge's meditation on the flowery
meadow outside his window, the beginning of which was cited
above. In that poignant reflection, Coleridge had discovered or been
reminded of a counterpart in himself to the light of the sun - the
'Tight of conscience" or, rather, the potential of that internal power to
2O The Language of the Senses

compose what is "accidental and dividuous" in his nature into an

harmonious unity (SM 71). But, as Margery Sabin has pointed out, in
that analogical perception the burden of "correspondence between
nature and spirit falls on the metaphor of light, and there seems no
reason other than religious and literary tradition to call conscience a
light. The 'light of conscience' is a figure of speech, perhaps only an
arbitrary verbal convention" (205). As soon as he had composed the
passage, Coleridge seems to have had the same realization:

But ... I seem to myself to behold in the quiet objects, on which I am gazing,
more than an arbitrary illustration, more than a mere simile, the work of my
own Fancy! I feel an awe, as if there were before my eyes the same Power, as
that of the Reason - the same power in a lower dignity, and therefore a sym-
bol established in the truth of things. I feel it alike, whether I contemplate a
single tree or flower, or meditate on vegetation throughout the world, as one
of the great organs of the life of nature. (72)

A single plant is now perceived as a symbol of the processes of the

life of the natural world, which is itself a "natural symbol" of the
inner life of reason with which it is felt to be coextensive. That is to
say, a metonymical or synecdochal relationship, rather than simply a
metaphorical one, is the basis of the analogy.
For Coleridge, this contiguous relationship is the distinguishing
feature of the natural fact as symbol. It is "not a metaphor or allegory
or any other figure of speech or form of fancy, but an actual and
essential part of that, the whole of which it represents" (SM 79).
While the gentle spring in the passage quoted above is an allegorical
emblem of truth, the plant in the flowery meadow is a symbol of the
one life within and abroad. An allegory is simply "a translation of
abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an
abstraction from objects of the senses"; a symbol is "characterized by
a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the
Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translu-
cence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal" (SM 30).

"Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Tem-
poral." Coleridge was as much or more interested in natural facts as
figures and symbols of the transcendent as he was in them as figures
or symbols of inner states. So was Emerson, who in Nature is at pains
to point out that the correspondence of outer nature to inner nature is
 Symbolic Perception 21

only one of the two ways in which nature is symbolic: "Have moun-
tains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously
give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?" The
answer (quoting Swedenborg) is that "'The visible world and the
relation of its parts, is the dial-plate of the invisible'." For Emerson,
there is no doubt as to which of the two kinds of "spiritual facts" is
superior: "the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition
of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to
the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it" (24,40).
This lower/higher mode of Romantic symbolic perception of nat-
ural facts is no more new than the inner/outer mode. As Coleridge
observes: "it has been the music of gentle and pious minds in all
ages, it is the poetry of all human nature, to read [the natural world]
in a figurative sense, and to find therein correspondences and sym-
bols of the spiritual world" (SM 70). Had not Paul written in his
Epistle to the Romans (1:20) that "the invisible things of Him from
the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the
things that are made"? This mode also has the same qualitative
range as the inner/outer mode. At one end, there are conventional or
arbitrary figures involving conceptual transference, like those in a
poem written by Wordsworth at the beginning of the post-Romantic
decades of his career:

Yes, it was the mountain Echo,

Solitary, clear, profound,
Answering to the shouting Cuckoo,
Giving to her sound for sound!

Unsolicited reply
To a babbling wanderer sent;
Like her ordinary cry,
Like - but oh, how different!

Hears not also mortal Life?

Hear not we, unthinking Creatures!
Slaves of folly, love, or strife -
Voices of two different natures?

Have not we too? - yes, we have

Answers, and we know not whence;
Echoes from beyond the grave,
Recognised intelligence!
22 The Language of the Senses

Such rebounds our inward ear

Catches sometimes from afar -
Listen, ponder, hold them dear;
For of God, - of God they are. (ii 265-6)

The poem's first two stanzas present a two-part natural fact: the
sounds of the cuckoo and the enhanced echoes of these sounds. The
remainder of the poem is devoted to the spiritual truth for which
the natural fact is made to stand. Human beings, if not babbling wan-
derers, are unthinkingly in the grip of lower passions. But "we" have
the ability to distinguish sounds of "two different natures": terres-
trial sounds and higher sounds from beyond that do not simply echo,
are not merely what cuckoos can hear, but that come from another
realm of being, that are "of God" and "beyond the grave."
Wordsworth's crude emblem or allegory is not rooted in a percep-
tually intense experience and requires no special sensitivity to the
natural world. Indeed, the poem turns on the assumption of a dis-
continuity between man and nature owing to the former's privi-
leged access to intimations from a supernatural world. In Romantic
symbolic perception, on the other hand, the emphasis is as much on
the perceiver as on the perceived; their relationship is dynamic
rather than static, and depends on the disposition of the perceiver.
"In the transmission of the heavenly waters," as Emerson extrava-
gantly said, "every hose fits every hydrant ... Every thing must be
taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition, to under-
stand any thing rightly" (676).
But the more attention is drawn to the importance in symbolic
perception of the subjective state of the perceiver, the more equivocal
the fit between subject and object can come to seem. This problem is
the subject of a number of Emily Dickinson's poems on the phenome-
nology of perception. "Of Bronze - and Blaze" (#290), for example,
is an epistemological satire warning of the dangers at the idealistic
extreme of symbolic perception. The poem describes the comical re-
sults of too ardent an identification with an extraordinary natural fact,
the northern lights or aurora borealis. Their majestic self-sufficiency
and sovereign unconcern "infects" the "simple spirit" of the poem's
speaker "With Taints of Majesty," prompting her to enter into ludi-
crous, self-destructive competition with "their competeless Show":

I take vaster attitudes -

And strut upon my stem -
Disdaining Men, and Oxygen,
For Arrogance of them.
 Symbolic Perception 23

In another poem (#668), the speaker asserts that " 'Nature' is what we
see -/The Hill - the Afternoon -/Squirrel - Eclipse - the Bumble
bee" and that it is also "what we hear -/The bobolink - the Sea -/
Thunder - the Cricket." But these empirical definitions are qualified
by counterstatements - "Nay - Nature is Heaven ... Nay - Nature
is Harmony" - suggesting that the natural world is not the aggregate
of the various particulars presented to the senses but a perceptually
integrated whole that is more than the sum of its parts and that can
sometimes seem an ideal essence. In this poem, the conclusion is that
"Nature is what we know" even if we "have no art to say" what pre-
cisely we know about it.
In other poems, however, Dickinson is less confident - for example
#1071:

Perception of an object costs

Precise the Object's loss -
Perception in itself a Gain
Replying to its Price -
The Object Absolute - is nought -
Perception sets it fair
And then upbraids a Perfectness
That situates so - far -

The "Object Absolute," the Ding-an-sich, cannot be known and is thus

without value, a nought. What can be known is one's perception of
the object, the value or "Gain" of which is dependent on the intensity
of the perception (the "Price" paid for it). But a dearly purchased
object may have an enticing beauty or ideal quality that paradoxically
places it at a distance from us ("so Heavenly far" in a variant reading)
or that it can only retain when it is at a distance. We thus perceive a
fairness or perfectness that we cannot possess. "The sea is lovely,"
as the later Emerson observed, "but when we bathe in it, the beauty
forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot
be gratified at the same time. Wordsworth rightly speaks of 'a light
that never was on sea or land/ meaning, that it was supplied by the
observer" (1110).
Emerson's animadversions anticipate the mid-century British cri-
tique of symbolic perception. In The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Par-
ticularity in Victorian Poetry, Carol Christ shows that in contrast to the
Romantics, perceptual particulars in the poetry of Tennyson, Brown-
ing, Hopkins, and D.G. Rossetti are not "representative of a moment
of imaginative experience that becomes in some way universal ...
but merely descriptive of a single moment of consciousness." The
24 The Language of the Senses

difference, Christ suggests, is symptomatic of the Victorians' gradual

loss of "the Romantic assurance that there existed universal corre-
spondences ... between the imagination and the sensible world"
(12-14).
A negative critique of the Romantic belief in the correspondence
between states of mind and natural facts is also a conspicuous feature
of Victorian aesthetic thinking. In the third volume of Modern Paint-
ers, for example, John Ruskin offers an extended analysis of what he
terms the "pathetic fallacy" - the projection on to natural objects of
the emotions and feelings of the perceiver. Poets of the first order like
Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare were able to see and describe natural
objects without subjective distortion. The pathetic fallacy was com-
monly the practice, not of bad poets, but of poets of the second order
like Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson. Such poets were imaginative,
not fanciful; and the employment of the pathetic fallacy allowed
them to express and communicate the emotional and psychological
truth of their subjective state. But it did so at the cost of producing "a
falseness in all our impressions of external things" (v 205). To avoid
this falseness was of enormous importance: "the greatest thing a
human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what
it saw in a plain way ... To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and reli-
gion, - all in one ... The true Seer always feels as intensely as anyone
else; but he does not much describe his feelings" (v 333-4).3
There was criticism from the other side of the Atlantic as well. In
Pierre or, the Ambiguities (1852), for example, Herman Melville has
his narrator caustically observe: "Say what some poets will, Nature is
not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of
that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he
pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own
peculiar mind and mood" (402). So severe are aspects of Melville's
critique of Romantic symbolic perception that they anticipate the
deconstructive critique of the past thirty years.4 Melville did to
the optimistic postulates of Emerson's Nature what deconstructive
commentators like Hillis Miller and Paul de Man did to the construc-
tive readings of Romantic literature by M.H. Abrams and others.
Abrams' summa, Natural Supernaturalism (1971), celebrates the suc-
cess of "the central enterprise" of the Romantic period: "to join
together the 'subject' and 'object' that modern intellection had put
asunder, and thus to revivify a dead nature, restore its concreteness,
significance, and human values, and re-domiciliate man in a world
which had become alien to him" (Breeze 96). But even before this
work was published, its premises had begun to be attacked.
 Symbolic Perception 25

One of the most influential assaults was de Man's analysis of

the Romantic symbol in "The Rhetoric of Temporality" (1969). In the
early nineteenth century, so his argument runs, there was a longing
for "a transcendental source" or ground of being (192). The tempta-
tion "for the self to borrow ... the temporal stability that it lacks from
nature" could not be resisted; the result was "the spiritualization of
the symbol" (197, 192). For de Man, a non-spiritualized symbol is an
allegory, "a sign that refers to one specific meaning and thus exhausts
its suggestive potentialities once it has been deciphered" (188). Alle-
gory "designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin,
and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes
its language in the void of this temporal difference" (207). Symbol on
the other hand offers an illusory identification with the not-self: its
"main attraction" is its "appeal to the infinity of a totality" - a
"supersensory totality" (188-9). IR their flight from temporality and
an "authentically human destiny," Romantic poets became "trapped
in the contradiction of a pseudo dialectic between subject and object"
(206,198). Romantic symbolic perception was thus a "defensive strat-
egy" or mystification that attempted to suppress self-knowledge of
an "authentically temporal predicament" (208).
De Man's analysis was in turn equally strongly attacked. Thomas
McFarland, for example, complained that the Coleridgean symbol
was wrongly identified by de Man with metaphorical diction. In con-
trast to allegory, a symbol remains intimately bound up with the
world of organic nature. It partakes of "the highest cognitive efforts
of the mind" and its structure is "one of cognitive synecdoche, not
rhetorical mystification." Far from being a mystification, symbol is "a
direct accounting of human perception" (52). There were also histori-
cal distortions: the dialectic of subject and object, for example, is
"intrinsic to human awareness and therefore cannot be restricted to
Romantic thought" (46). On this last point, McFarland might well
have cited a passage from Coleridge that reads like a pre-emptive
refutation of de Man:

In a self-conscious and thence reflecting being, no instinct can exist, without

engendering the belief of an object corresponding to it, either present or
future, real or capable of being realized: much less the instinct, in which
humanity itself is grounded: that by which, in every act of conscious percep-
tion, we at once identify our being with that of the world without us, and yet
place ourselves in contra-distinction to that world. Least of all can this myste-
rious pre-disposition exist without evolving a belief that the productive
power, which is in nature as nature, is essentially one (i.e. of one kind) with
26 The Language of the Senses

the intelligence, which is in the human mind above nature ... So universally
has this conviction leavened the very substance of all discourse, that there
is no language on earth in which a man can abjure it as a prejudice, without
employing terms and conjunctions that suppose its reality, with a feeling very
different from that which accompanies a figurative or metaphorical use of
words. (Friend i 497-8)

De Man's essay is now more than a quarter century old. From this
perspective, it is clear that while Abrams and other commentators
were unquestionably too constructive and totalizing in their reading
of the Romantics, often mistaking "the poem, an intentional object,
for a natural object" (Chandler 467), de Man made the error of con-
flating these commentators with the subjects of their discourse. He is
more telling as a critic of totalizing organicist commentators than as a
critic of Romantic poetry. In my view, what most weakens de Man's
argument is the apparent paucity of his literary-historical knowledge
of the rich body of nineteenth-century British and American Roman-
tic literature. This material, in which the dialectic of subject and object
is a given, contains a variety of engagements of the imagination and
h natural world and a corresponding diversity in the kinds and
the
modalities of symbolic perception.
But de Man does not distinguish between inner/outer and lower/
higher symbolic perception; he does not allow for the variety of
engagements among poets - Keats's "camelion Poet," for example,
as opposed to poets of the "wordsworthian or egotistical sublime"
(Letters i 387). Nor does his agenda allow him to recognize the vari-
ety that is the result of the changing ratios and intensities of sensory
and perceptual engagement within writers. In this regard, de Man's
misuse of the Fenwick note on the Intimations Ode is as telling as his
apparent ignorance of Coleridge's thinking about symbol in the
years preceding the definition in Statesman's Manual (which de Man
cites from a secondary source).
As an antidote to de Manian deconstruction, I offer Whitman's
expansive celebration of symbolic perception in section 6 of Song of
Myself:

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child? ... I do not know what it is any more
than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff

woven.
 Symbolic Perception 27

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see
and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child ... the produced babe of the
vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic;

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive
them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Later in this section, Whitman remarks of his cornucopic generation

of tropes: "O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!" But the
tongues are not contradictory or mutually exclusive. The grass is a
polysemous symbol, but it is not split up into a multiplicity of arbi-
trary signifieds (like the doubloon in Moby-Dick) because there is a
single perceiver with a radiating intensity of affirmative apprehen-
sion. The flag of my disposition: in this trope, the grass, a natural fact, is
the vehicle of a metaphor, the tenor of which is the inner being of the
perceiver. The handkerchief of the Lord: a fresh instance of the Pauline
lower/higher correspondence by which invisible things are under-
stood by the things that are visible. In this delightful trope, the Deus
absconditus is figured as a coquette, who flirtatiously leaves a token of
herself to be found. The grass is itself a child: this is "a tautological
answer to the questioner, the 'produced babe of the vegetation' mir-
roring the 'child'" (Biasing 123). It is also a metaphorical figuring of
the one life within and abroad. Unlike the passage's first trope, how-
ever, the vehicle here is human (a child), the tenor natural (the vegeta-
tion). A uniform hieroglyphic: the grass as an emblem ("symbolic object
represent[ing] a set of values" [Dupriez 443]) of democratic equality.
The beautiful uncut hair of graves: a metaleptic grace-note. Here the
grass is a synecdochal symbol of the participation of humans in the
nitrogen cycle - an instance of the "procreant urge of the world" (#3)
and its "perpetual transfers and promotions" (#49).
As the section continues, it becomes apparent that this recognition
of the symbiotic life of man and nature is a step towards the assertion
that the dead "are alive and well somewhere;/The smallest sprout
28 The Language of the Senses

shows there is really no death." The natural fact of the sprouting

grass becomes a trope for spiritual immortality. In Thoreau's similar
figure, "human life ... dies down to the surface, but puts forth a green
blade to eternity" (*/ i 470). Behind Whitman's radiant apprehension
of immortality, however, is the spectre of an authentically temporal
destiny, of which there are numerous intimations in Song of Myself
and the other poems in the first edition of Leaves of Grass: maggots
and rats; beetles rolling balls of dung; the turbid pool in the autumn
forest and the black stems that decay in its muck; gashed bodies on
battlefields; the massacre of the Alamo's defenders; a deathbed scene
with its smell of camphor, useless medicines, helpless physician, and
grieving family. It is true that there are numerous assertions of the
opposite - that "there is nothing but immortality" ("To Think of
Time"). But the very frequency of these asseverations is itself evi-
dence of Whitman's recessive recognition of his mortality.
What happened to Whitman and his poetry when his powers of
symbolic perception waned and he no longer felt deathless is part
of the subject matter of a later chapter. The subject of the next chap-
ter is the representation of expansion of consciousness experiences in
which mortal limitations seem transcended.
 THREE

Sublime or Mock Sublime?

Emerson's Nature contains a well-known description of an expansion

of consciousness experience: "Standing on the bare ground, - my
head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all
mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing;
I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am
part or particle of God" (10). Descriptions and representations of such
experiences are a central feature of Romantic literature. In "Tintern
Abbey," Wordsworth speaks of a "blessed mood" during which "we
are laid asleep/In body, and become a living soul" able to "see into the
life of things." Shelley describes a "state called reverie" in which those
subject to it feel "as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding
universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their
being. They are conscious of no distinction" (Prose 174). Emily Dickin-
son calls these states "Heavenly Moments ... A Grant of the Divine"
(#393); Melville's term is the "'all' feeling" (Letters 131). Whitman's
disciple, Richard Maurice Bucke, uses the term "cosmic conscious-
ness"; while Robert Jay Lifton employs "experiential transcendence"
to describe the mode of "symbolic immortality" involving "extra-
ordinary psychological unity, intensity of sensual awareness, and
inexpressible illumination and insight" (82-3). Yet another term is
"natural mystical experience," which R.C. Zaehner uses to denomi-
nate the merging of consciousness and nature - the ecstatic state
in which the boundaries of space and time seem transcended, every-
day reality seems pathetically unreal, and death becomes unthinkable
(Mysticism 41).
30 The Language of the Senses

It is far from easy to distinguish these experiences from three

other types of experience: religious mystical experiences; neurological
episodes or other psychically generated phenomena; and substance-
induced transformations of consciousness. Concerning the first, for
example, Zaehner takes a strict line, insisting that natural mystical
experiences, which are often undergone by those who are not other-
wise known as mystics, have nothing in common with traditional reli-
gious mysticism. They are unlike both Hindu mysticism, which is
characterized by complete absorption of the individual soul into the
Absolute, and "the normal type of Christian mystical experience in
which the soul feels itself to be united with God by love." For Zaehner,
only these two kinds of experience, both of which have as a sine qua
non "the exclusion of all that we normally call Nature," may be prop-
erly described as religious (Mysticism 29, 33). On the other hand, in his
Varieties of Religious Experience, William James is inclusive rather than
exclusive in proposing "four marks" - ineffability, noetic quality, tran-
siency, and passivity - which, "when an experience has them, may
justify us in calling it mystical" (380-1).
Concerning the second kind of experience, it is interesting to
consider the "ecstatic aura" sometimes experienced by epileptics just
before the onset of a seizure. A detailed description of such an experi-
ence occurs in Dostoevsky's The Idiot: in a moment of "extraordinary
illumination," Prince Myshkin's brain "seemed to flare up momen-
tarily and all his vital forces tense themselves at once in an extraordi-
nary surge." His consciousness was filled with "pure, harmonious
gladness and hope, and filled too with the consciousness of the ulti-
mate cause of all things." During "these gleams and lightning-flashes
of heightened self-awareness, and hence also of 'higher existence',"
there is a "profound experience of infinite happiness" and an under-
standing of the hitherto strange biblical phrase, "there should be time
no longer" (237-8).
This sounds very much like the ecstatic experiences found in the
subjects of this study, and like Zaehner's description of natural mysti-
cal experiences. Indeed, Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky's biographer, uses
Zaehner's terminology in his discussion of what the Russian novelist
experienced at the beginning of his epileptic attacks (194-8). To
the question of whether such neurologically triggered episodes are
identical with experiences of expanded consciousness found in nine-
teenth-century Romantic literature, some might well answer as Prince
Myshkin does: if the experiences are equally transporting, what does
it matter? The gleams and lightning flashes that preceded his attacks,
he reflects, "were no weird figments brought on by hashish, opium,
or wine, degrading the intellect and distorting the soul"; and even if
 Sublime or Mock Sublime? 31

his illness were the cause, "what does it matter ... if the end-result,
the instant of apprehension, recalled and analysed during recovery,
turns out to be the highest pitch of harmony and beauty, conferring a
sense of some hitherto-unknown and unguessed completeness, pro-
portion, reconciliation, an ecstatic, prayerful fusion with the supreme
synthesis of life?" (237).
The same argument has been made concerning expansions of
consciousness triggered by intoxicants, anaesthetics, and other sub-
stances. Dostoevsky's prince insists on a distinction between them
and the ecstatic aura experience. So does Emerson, who warned of
the "dangerous attraction for men" of opium and alcohol, which
were "the semblance and counterfeit of [the] oracular genius" (414).
But Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell and
R.A. Durr in Poetic Vision and the Psychedelic Experience both argue
that there is no qualitative difference between substance-induced
and other forms of expansion of consciousness experiences.
Huxley celebrated the life-enhancing properties of mescalin, which
when correctly administered "changes the quality of consciousness
more profoundly and yet is less toxic than any other substance in
the pharmacologist's repertory" (5). Huxley explained that the drug
inhibits the production of enzymes regulating the supply of glucose
to the brain cells, thus lowering the brain's biological efficiency and
permitting "the entry into consciousness of certain classes of mental
events, which are normally excluded" by the regulating mechanism
of the brain and the nervous system (76). When Huxley took mesca-
lin, habitual perceptions were superseded by a "sacramental vision of
reality" (15). Perception itself was "enormously improved"; visual
impressions, for example, were greatly intensified as the eye recov-
ered "some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sen-
sum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the
concept" (18). Other effects detailed by Huxley are also similar to
those found in natural mystical experiences, such as the merging of
inner and outer, and the suspension of spatial and temporal catego-
ries. Durr compares Huxley's "open-eyed psychedelic vision" to
literary texts "celebrating the everyday world," arguing that "the
similarities between the world of psychedelic vision and the world of
imaginative vision are numerous, striking, and of the essence"; that
they share "a fundamentally identical power of apprehension, or
mode of being" (vii-xii).
Are Durr and Huxley correct, or can one make category distinc-
tions and qualitative discriminations between fortuitous experiences
and those chemically induced? Is there, for example, a difference be-
tween Whitman's visionary experience of the universe held together
32 The Language of the Senses

by love, as represented in the fifth section of Song of Myself, and the

distinctly droll proclamations of a fifty-year-old widow who was
given LSD in a clinical setting and whose utterances while under the
drug's influence were recorded:

I am Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. ... Negroes and little fishes, lampshades
and vinegar. These I love. Coats and hats and three-ring pretzels. Radios and
Russians, bobolinks and tree sap, medicine chests and Freud and the green line
down the center of the street on St Patrick's Day, these I love. These I cherish.
... Hair spray and Buddha and Krishna Menon. My love overfloweth to all.
My nephew - and mushrooms. Red cars, red caps, porters, Martin Luther
King, Armenians, Jews, Incas, and John O'Hara. Love. Love. Love. Love. Big
yellow Chrysanthemums and the sun and pancakes and Disneyland and
Vermont and cinnamon and Alexander the Great. The UN and aluminium foil
and apple cider and cigars. Clark Gable, Tony Curtis and salamanders, crochet,
the aurora borealis and dimples, mustard plasters and even Mayor Wagner. I
am just bursting with joy, with love, (qtd in Zaehner Drugs 95)

There is also the considerable problem of making qualitative dis-

tinctions between fortuitous and self-induced (rather than chemically
induced) experiences. An example of the latter is the degree of sub-
limity attained by Tennyson through repeating his name over and
over. Replying to Benjamin Paul Blood, the American author of The
Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy, Tennyson told this
precursor of Huxley that while he had "never had any revelations
through anaesthetics":

A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when
I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me thro' repeating my
own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out
of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself
seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, [a state] where death
was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were)
seeming no extinction but only true life. (Collins 153-4; Memoir i 320)

Zaehner regards this experience as a bona fide form of natural mysti-

cal experience; but Philip Collins suggests that "such a self-regarding
technique may strike us as a form of spiritual masturbation" (154).
Collins does not say, however, how he would qualitatively distinguish
this from something more penetrative and less onanist - from, for
example, the visionary experience represented in the climactic ninety-
fifth poem of Tennyson's In Memoriam, a precondition of which, as the
preceding poem makes clear, is Tennyson's having ceased actively to
desire the experience.
 Sublime or Mock Sublime? 33

A instructive example of this difficulty is found in the opening sec-

tion of Coleridge's "Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni"
(1802):

Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star

In his steep course? So long he seems to pause
On thy bald awful head, O sovran Blanc,
The Arve and Arveiron at thy base
Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful Form!
Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines,
How silently! Around thee and above
Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black,
An ebon mass: methinks thou piercest it,
As with a wedge! But when I look again,
It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine,
Thy habitation from eternity!
0 dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee,
Till thou, still present to the bodily sense,
Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer
1 worshipped the Invisible alone.

Yet, like some sweet beguiling melody,

So sweet, we know not we are listening to it,
Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my Thought,
Yea, with my Life and Life's own secret joy:
Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused,
Into the mighty vision passing - there
As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven!

In a letter of 1819, Coleridge glosses this passage by stating that

he had long "been accustomed to abstract and as it were unrealize
whatever of more than common interest my eyes dwelt on; and then
by a sort of transfusion or transmission of my consciousness to iden-
tify myself with the Object." He also reports that Wordsworth had
"censured the passage as strained and unnatural, and condemned
the Hymn in toto ... as a specimen of the Mock Sublime" (Letters
iv 974-5). The basis of Wordsworth's condemnation is suggested by
comments made to Henry Crabb Robinson in 1812 criticizing in
Coleridge "a sort of dreaminess which would not let him see things
as they were": Coleridge preferred using his "extraordinary powers
[to summon] up an image or series of images in his own mind" to
"the influence of external objects" (qtd in Parrish 41).
How does one judge this matter? Is the experience Coleridge de-
scribes bona fide or bogus, sublime or mock sublime? For that matter,
34 The Language of the Senses

how can a literary critic ever be certain of a correspondence between

the after-the-fact verbal representation of an experience of expanded
consciousness and the experience itself, or even be certain that there
ever was an experience? In my view, there are three methodological
keys to a successful consideration of these questions.
(a) The first is to place the text under consideration in its biograph-
ical and literary context. In the case of Coleridge's "Hymn before
Sun-rise/' the crucial context (described in my fifth chapter) is the
precipitate decline of the poet's health during the early iSoos and
consequently of his sensory acuity - particularly his sense of feeling/
touch, the weakening of which is instanced in the so-called eman-
cipation described in "Apologia pro Vita Sua." There is also a letter
contemporaneous with the composition of the "Hymn" in which
Coleridge explains that the experience he placed in an Alpine vale
had actually occurred on Scafell in the Lake District. There he says he
had "involuntarily poured forth a Hymn in the manner of the Psalms,
tho' afterwards I thought the Ideas &c disproportionate to our hum-
ble mountains - & accidently lighting on a short Note in some swiss
Poems, concerning the Vale of Chamouny, & it's Mountain, I trans-
ferred myself thither, in the Spirit, & adapted my former feelings to
these grander external objects" (Letters ii 864-5). But other letters and
a long journal entry concerning his experiences on Scafell suggest
that no sublime effusion of the kind described in the poem had
occurred there. This suggestion is strengthened by the evidence first
brought to light by De Quincey in 1834: that Coleridge's poem has
an "unacknowledged obligation" to Friederike Brun's poem "Cha-
mouny beym Sonnenaufgange."1 Thus, although one cannot ever be
absolutely certain that Coleridge had never had an experience tally-
ing with the one represented in his "Hymn," convincing evidence
suggests that Wordsworth was correct in condemning the poem as a
specimen of the mock sublime.
(b) The second methodological key is to pay particular attention to
the perceptual basis (or otherwise) of the experience. It is obvious that
in low forms of the sublime the perceptual basis is crucial: the experi-
ence is triggered when a given sense is freed from its customary
groove. But the perceptual basis can be equally important in less crude
experiences. Consider, for example, a distinctive feature of a number
of Tennyson's poems, to which several commentators have called
attention: a glimmering shape or light, usually white, seen against a
dark background evokes powerful feelings of reassurance and com-
fort. Examples are the tablet glimmering in the dark church in poem
Ixvii of In Memoriam; the white kine in poem xcv of the same work;
and the "stream that flashest white" in "In the Valley of Cauteretz."
 Sublime or Mock Sublime? 35

How can this association be explained? F.E.L. Priestley uses a gambit

common in literary-critical discourse - pseudo-explanation by means
of learned allusion: "A dim whiteness gleaming in a dark background
is always for [Tennyson] a symbol of reassurance, a faint but adequate
glimmer of light in the darkness, analogous to the 'candle of the Lord'
of the Cambridge Platonists" (161). But this explains nothing.
Is there, one might well ask, a perceptual reason why this visual
image resonates with such positive intensity for the severely myopic
Tennyson? When a bright object is seen against a dark background,
there is an increase in the "temporal integrating time" needed in order
for the eye to take in the object. It is "as when a photographer uses a
longer exposure in dim light" (Gregory 83).2 This presupposes intense
attention on the part of the perceiver. The result is a deeper, more last-
ing visual impression. At the same time, the slowness plus the con-
centration of attention has a tranquillizing effect.
The best example is found at the close of "Audley Court," where the
color of the illumination seen against a dark background is green:3

ere the night we rose

And sauntered home beneath a moon, that, just
In crescent, dimly rained about the leaf
Twilights of airy silver, till we reached
The limit of the hills; and as we sank
From rock to rock upon the glooming quay,
The town was hushed beneath us: lower down
The bay was oily calm; the harbour-buoy,
Sole star of phosphorescence in the calm,
With one green sparkle ever and anon
Dipt by itself, and we were glad at heart.

The flashing buoy and its effect on the speaker have elicited critical
commentary of the pseudo-explanation-by-allusion sort (e.g., Nichols
137-9), but the passage can be much more satisfactorily discussed
in terms of the dynamics of perception. It comes at the close of an
account of a peaceful, quietly joyful day that two old friends have
spent together. As they saunter back to the quay, their spirits are
at peace with all. One perceptual aspect of the scene that intensifies
the peacefulness is spatial breadth. Coleridge distinguished between
vertical distant views and horizontal ones: while the former induce
excitement and intense emotion, the latter are calming (Notebooks
ii #2357). The other important aspect is the intensity of visual impres-
sion made possible by the longer integrating time. This is intimated
stylistically by the one-sentence description prolonged over many
36 The Language of the Senses

lines, and was further enhanced, twenty-five years after the poem
was first published, by the addition of the antepenultimate line - the
time it takes to say the line, prolonged by the abundance of long
vowels, mimes the slow integrating time during the descent.
But what about ecstatic expansions of consciousness? After all, in
some visionary experiences the senses and the objects of perception do
not figure. Blake, for example, insisted that "Natural Objects always
did & now do Weaken deaden & obliterate Imagination in Me"; "I
question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would
Question a window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it" (655,
555). With other writers, it is a different matter. Wordsworth, whose
dependence on natural objects infuriated Blake, is a good example. The
well-known accounts of visionary experience in "Tintern Abbey" are
generalized reformulations of past experiences, which are summarized
but not represented. But in Wordsworth's representations of sublime
experiences, the vital role played by perception is usually clear. One
example is "A Night-Piece," which I must quote in toto.

—The sky is overcast

With a continuous cloud of texture close,
Heavy and wan, all whitened by the Moon,
Which through that veil is indistinctly seen,
A dull, contracted circle, yielding light
So feebly spread that not a shadow falls,
Chequering the ground - from rock, plant, tree, or tower.
At length a pleasant instantaneous gleam
Startles the pensive traveller as he treads
His lonesome path, with unobserving eye
Bent earthwards; he looks up - the clouds are split
Asunder, - and above his head he sees
The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens.
There, in a black-blue vault she sails along,
Followed by multitudes of stars, that, small
And sharp, and bright, along the dark abyss
Drive as she drives: how fast they wheel away,
Yet vanish not! - the wind is in the tree,
But they are silent; - still they roll along
Immeasurably distant; and the vault,
Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds,
Still deepens its unfathomable depth.
At length the Vision closes; and the mind,
Not undisturbed by the delight it feels,
Which slowly settles into peaceful calm,
Is left to muse upon the solemn scene. (PW ii 208-9)
 Sublime or Mock Sublime? 37

Unlike Blake, Wordsworth's observer is looking with the eye and

not through it. The essential given of the poem is that visual percep-
tion of distant objects offers an experiential basis for the idea of infin-
ity: "the unfolding of space before the eye, under the magic of light
bears in itself the germ of infinity - as a perceptual aspect" (Jonas
151). As the celestial quiet is emphasized by its contrast with the
sound of the wind in the nearby tree, so the depth of the vault is
emphasized by its contrast with the clouds. As Kenneth R. Johnston
points out: "that the cloud-veil changes from visual obstruction to
visual aid implies that limitations upon vision are helpful ... By its
contrasting of ground and background of vision, 'A Night-Piece' ...
suggests that the eternal dimension would not be recognized without
the natural scene. Literally, it would lack focus" (22). But Johnston
does not note the principal cause of this striking effect, which is, so to
speak, a perceptual trick: "they wheel away/Yet vanish not." The
moon and stars seem to wheel away, but in fact they are stationary.
What has happened, to use Coleridge's phrasing in the Dejection
Ode, is that the clouds "give away their motion to the stars." Thus,
perceptual experience is a sine qua non of this striking instance of the
distinctively Wordsworthian sense of the permanent in the transitory
("still they roll along") that Tennyson found in the "something"
of "Tintern Abbey" whose "dwelling is the light of setting suns"
(Page 176).
In the opening lines of Coleridge's "Hymn before Sun-rise," the
most conspicuous use of figurative language is the simile comparing
the speaker's visual apprehension of the mountain to "some sweet
beguiling melody,/So sweet, we know not we are listening to it." The
intensification and interpenetration of the senses is often found in
representations of expansion of consciousness experiences. Could this
synesthetic image therefore be taken as evidence that the account has
some kind of perceptual grounding? The question raises important
methodological considerations that must be addressed at some length.
Synesthesia, the not uncommon experience of one modality of sense
experienced in terms of another, might be considered a bodily trope or
metaphor in which one sense is the tenor and another the vehicle. An
example is "sonogenic synesthesia, in which music provokes intense
visual experiences or cutaneous paraesthesias" (Stein and Meredith 9).
The most common occurrence of the former is audition coloree - sounds
received as colors - which is often found in children and in accounts
of chemically altered states of consciousness, such as those induced by
mescalin and hashish.
But synesthesia has two meanings: it is both a quality or kind of
perception and a figurative use of language. The former is called clin-
ical or psychological synesthesia; the latter literary synesthesia. In his
38 The Language of the Senses

Unity of the Senses: Interrelations among the Modalities, Lawrence

E. Marks provides a good deal of interesting information about syn-
esthesia from the scientific point of view. His eighth chapter is con-
cerned with "synesthetic metaphor in poetry/' which is considered
from a strictly psychological aspect. For Marks, synesthesia in poetry
reflects the convergence of the senses - their analogical properties and
the correspondences between different senses. As authorities, he cites
Aristotle and Coleridge, the latter of whom wrote that "the poet must
... understand and command what Bacon calls the vestigia communia
of the senses, the latency of all in each, [especially] the excitement
of vision by sound and the exponents of sound" (Biographia ii 128).
Marks might have also cited Edmund Burke's observations con-
cerning "a chain in all our sensations," a "general agreement of the
senses": they "bear witness to each other ... bear an analogy to, and
illustrate one another" (no, 113,126).
Unfortunately, Burke did not consider how the interpenetration of
the senses might contribute to the emotional intensities of his subject
- the sublime. And Marks' discussion does not address aspects of his
subject relating to intensity and expansion. He does say that a "uni-
versal synesthetic capacity" can be aroused "by powerful sensory-
esthetic experiences," and he does recognize intensity as a classic
example of a "suprasensory attribute" or quality - that is, a dimen-
sion of sensory experience not limited to a single sense modality (8,5).
But he does not consider that an essential characteristic of synesthetic
metaphors is that they indicate or express intensity. Nor does he con-
sider that the unity of the senses in synesthetic perception corre-
sponds to, is coextensive with, the apprehension of the unity of the
external world (and of the perceiver and the world).
He also fails to take into account the question of whether the repre-
sentation of a given synesthetic experience is neurological or literary.
How far, for example, are synesthetic comparisons in a poem the
result of the poet's intention to produce certain artistic effects as
opposed to their being representations of his/her perceptual experi-
ences? In many instances, it is the former. As Glenn O'Malley has
explained: "it is precisely an inescapable oddness and mystery about
intersense harmony (its supersensuousness, so to speak) which imag-
inative adaptations of synesthetic expression often hope to exploit."
In order to convey "sensuous intimations of spiritual perception,
rather than to achieve psychological verisimilitude, intersense meta-
phors and synesthetic concepts may be designed to represent a tran-
scendence of ordinary experience" (398). Dante's Divine Comedy, for
example, is "one of the best illustrations of a philosophic or spiritual
use of intersense metaphor and of synesthetic conceptions." There is
 Sublime or Mock Sublime? 39

a synesthetic registration of the movement upward from the Inferno

in which intersense analogies are rare and negative ("the sun is
silent"; "every light [is] mute") through to the Pamdiso, in which the
distinctions among the senses largely dissolve (409-10).
The conclusion seems to me clear: for the literary critic, no distinc-
tion can be made between the poet's experience and his representation
of it in words. Consequently, all synesthesia should be considered
literary synesthesia. When we talk about the poet's experience we are
in fact talking about his/her representation in words and figures of
a putative experience. But these representations can be compared
and contrasted, and distinctions made among them. This includes
qualitative discriminations between superior representations and infe-
rior ones like Byron's derivative synesthetic images, Swinburne's
metronomic ones, or the bombast of Dylan Thomas' "Poem on his
Birthday" ("I hear the bouncing hills/Grow larked and greener ... and
the dew larks sing/Taller ... ").4
(c) The third methodological key, then, is to pay close attention to
the language and style of the representation. "Veracity," declares
Emerson, "is that which we require in poets ... The poet writes from
a real experience, the amateur feigns one. ... Style betrays you ... We
detect at once by it whether the writer has a firm grasp on his fact or
thought, - exists at that moment for that alone" ("Poetry" 29, 31, 33).
Let us return to the opening lines of Coleridge's "Hymn before
Sun-rise." Surely F.R. Leavis' point is well taken: "Coleridge makes a
dutiful show of the sublime, but it amounts to little more than the
explicit 'awful/ 'rave' ... and 'dread'" (234). For another critic, the
forced language makes it seem "as if Coleridge were trying to make
something happen rather than expressing what had happened"
(Haven 76). What both these critics are suggesting is that Coleridge
was insincere.
Sincerity as a critical term has fallen into disrepute in the twentieth
century. In a recent attempt to re-establish its usefulness in the criti-
cism of lyric poetry, Malcolm Budd has persuasively argued that
"defects in sincerity, or forms of insincerity, can properly be attrib-
uted on the basis of the manner in which a person expresses his
feeling or the style of his self-communion." Lack of sincerity or
"imaginative integrity" on the part of the implied author "can be
revealed by such features as the use of inflated language, vague emo-
tional cliches, the lack of precision and the manner of the poem's in-
debtedness to other poetry" (142-3). In Ezra Pound's blunter
formulation: "Technique is the test of sincerity" (Hall 25).
The qualitative difference between Whitman's representation of the
visionary experience of love in the fifth section of Song of Myself and
40 The Language of the Senses

that of the psychedelic widow quoted above would become patent in

a literary-critical analysis that paid close attention to technique and
style. Neither I nor anyone else can presume to know with certainty
whether Whitman is recounting an actual experience, as Richard
Maurice Bucke and William James believed; whether he is offering a
"dramatic representation ... conceived in the imagination," as James
E. Miller thinks (6-7); or whether he is making an intertextual maneu-
ver - "a considered re-vision" of the transparent eye-ball experience
in Emerson's Nature (Gatta 176). But I am sure that the fifth section of
Song of Myself is sincere in Budd and Pound's use of the term. The
passage is discussed in my sixth chapter; like all the close readings in
this study, it is informed by attention to biographical and literary con-
text, sensory-perceptual dynamics, and language and style.
 FOUR

Wordsworth's Mighty World

of Eye and Ear

No poet has been more concerned with the sources of his creative
power than Wordsworth. Much of his finest poetry is not only the
effluence of what in the prospectus to The Recluse he calls the "dread
Power!/Whose gracious favour is the primal source/Of all illumina-
tion"; it is also about the genesis and nature of this power. Sometimes
Wordsworth speaks of it as a gift:

to me I feel
That an internal brightness is vouchsafed
That must not die, that must not pass away.
Why does this inward lustre fondly seek,
And gladly blend with outward fellowship?
Why do they shine around me whom I love?
Why do they teach me whom I thus revere? (PW v 335-6)

These questions are not rhetorical. Wordsworth really did not under-
stand the nature and operation of this gift any more than in section 50
of Song of Myself Whitman understood the similar force at work in
him. Like Wordsworth, the American poet did "not know what it
is.... but I know it is in me"; it seemed connected with a larger force
outside the self ("Something it swings on more than the earth I swing
on"), and it was not "chaos or death" but "form and union and plan,"
"happiness," and even "eternal life."
The imagery of blending and mutual giving in Wordsworth's lines
suggests that the internal brightness is in a symbiotic relationship
with the outside world. When consciousness and the goodly uni-
verse are fused, the result is an experience of transport, an expansion
42 The Language of the Senses

of consciousness, a sense sublime. At other times, however, Words-

worth seems to describe creative power as something whose source
is loss. Among the qualities attributed to a poet in the preface to
Lyrical Ballads, for example, is "a disposition to be affected more than
other men by absent things as if they were present" (PW ii 393). And
while the speaker of "The Solitary Reaper" does not know the lan-
guage in which the Highland maiden (a figure of the poet) is singing,
he is in no doubt that the emotion her "melancholy strain" power-
fully and memorably communicates is loss.
Whitman's poetry also contains an alternative, loss-based account of
the sources of his creative power. The explanation for his opposing
accounts - gain versus loss, gift versus deprivation - is that Whitman
was not the same man in 1860 that he had been in 1855, and the change
had resulted in a radical reassessment of the nature and genesis of his
creative power. In Wordsworth, the distinction between gift and depri-
vation is less clear-cut. The key point is that while he seems to offer
differing accounts of the sources of his power, he never doubted that
its origin was in his childhood and adolescence and was intimately
connected with his felt recollections of earlier experiences and states of
being. "The days gone by," including those from "the dawn almost/
Of life," are "the hiding-places of [his] power" (xi 333-5).
In the first book of the Prelude, Wordsworth turns from the creative
vexations of the present to his earliest memories in the hope "that I
might fetch/Invigorating thoughts from former years" (648-9). He
reviews his early life in order to reassure himself that his childhood
among the rivers, lakes, mountains, and shepherds of Cumberland
had uniquely equipped him to be a great poet. The subject of the
Prelude thus becomes the sources of Wordsworth's creative power. But
even this thorough examination of his development does not yield a
clear explanation. In what was recollected from "the days gone by"
one again finds the contrasts of gift versus deprivation, internal bright-
ness versus internal darkness. As Wordsworth says, he "grew up/
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear" (i 305-6).

Freud begins Civilization and its Discontents with a discussion of what

he calls the "oceanic" feeling. A friend had written saying that in his
previous work, The Future of an Illusion, Freud failed to appreciate
"the true source of religious sentiments," which were found in "a
peculiar feeling" present in himself and in many others, "a sensation
of 'eternity', a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded - as it
were 'oceanic'." These views caused Freud "no small difficulty. I can-
 Wordsworth's Mighty World of Eye and Ear 43

not discover this 'oceanic' feeling in myself." There being no physio-

logical signs to describe, one had to fall back on the "ideational
content" with which the feeling was first associated. This seemed to
be "a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external
world as a whole." Its source was apparently in early childhood: "An
infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the exter-
nal world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him."
Gradually, however, the developing ego learns to make distinctions
between inner and outer and to detach itself from the external world;
eventually the "reality principle" comes to dominate development.
"Our present ego-feeling is, therefore," says Freud, "only a shrunken
residue of a much more inclusive - indeed, an all-embracing - feeling
which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and
the world without it" (1-5).
In book ii of the Prelude (237-87), Wordsworth makes his own
analysis of the oceanic feeling. The similarities with Freud's thinking
are up to a point remarkable, but the differences are equally striking.
"Blessed the infant babe," Wordsworth begins, "For with my best
conjectures would I trace/The progress of our being." From his
mother's breast and eye, feelings pass into the life of the infant "like
an awakening breeze," quickening his mind and perceptual faculties.
In the sensations derived from the "beloved presence" of the mother,

there exists
A virtue which irradiates and exalts
All objects through all intercourse of sense.
No outcast he, bewildered and depressed;
Along his infant veins are interfused
The gravitation and the filial bond
Of Nature that connect him with the world.
Emphatically such a being lives,
An inmate of this active universe.

"Such, verily," says Wordsworth, "is the first/Poetic spirit of our

human life." But he immediately goes on to speak of the growing
dominance of what Freud calls the reality principle. The first poetic
spirit, the great birthright of our being, is "By uniform controul of after
years/In most abated and suppressed." An obvious question arises:
why does the gift survive in some while it is extinguished in most?
Why, for example, did it survive in Wordsworth? Part of the answer
is given in the first two books of the Prelude, which describe how dur-
ing childhood Wordsworth's infant sensibility was "augmented and
sustained" (ii 287) through intense perceptual experiences. The other
44 The Language of the Senses

part of the answer is the affective memory, which sustained the poet's
gift in post-childhood years and enabled him to tap the distinctive
power of those intense early experiences.
Understanding why they were powerful, however, was a different
matter. It was difficult to separate the "naked recollection" of past
events from "what may rather have been called to life/By after-
meditation" (iii 646-8). And there was the recurrent problem of the
perceptual and affective overlay of past and present. This difficulty
is imaged in the fourth book's comparison of the autobiographical
poet "Incumbent o'er the surface of past time" to looking over the
side of a slow-moving boat on still water. One sees many "beauteous
sights" on the bottom, but "fancies more"; often "perplexed" by sur-
face reflections, one "cannot part/The shadow from the substance"
(252-63). There was also the considerable problem of present beliefs
or preoccupations affecting the representation and evaluation of past
experiences. In the manuscripts that record the growth of the Prelude
from the two-book version of 1799, through the 1805 to the 1850
version, there are numerous instances of Wordsworth's reinterpret-
ing early experiences and assigning different meanings to them.1
Wordsworth calls the most important of his earlier experiences
"spots of time." The passage in book xi of the 1805 Prelude in which
these crucial moments are described contains a notable example of
dubious reinterpretation prompted by after-meditation:

There are in our existence spots of time,

Which with distinct preeminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight
In trivial occupations and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired -
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among those passages of life in which
We have had deepest feeling that the mind
Is lord and master, and that outward sense
Is but the obedient servant of her will.
Such moments, worthy of all gratitude,
Are scattered everywhere, taking their date
From our first childhood - in our childhood even
Perhaps are most conspicuous. (257-78)
 Wordsworth's Mighty World of Eye and Ear 45

A puzzling feature of this passage is the emphasis both on experi-

ences of "our first childhood" and on experiences that show the mind
to be "lord and master" and "outward sense ... but the obedient ser-
vant of her will." As we shall see, the two childhood experiences that
Wordsworth proceeds to describe in book xi hardly show the mind to
be lord and master of anything. Of course, one understands that in
each case what the child Wordsworth experienced depended on his
emotional state. In the first, for example, an "ordinary sight" became
invested with "visionary dreariness" (xi 308, 310) because of the
internal disposition of the perceiver, a child not six years old who
had just undergone a subjectively terrifying experience. But neither
episode shows the child's mind as in any way autonomous, self-
sufficient, or possessing lordly prerogatives.
Of what can Wordsworth have been thinking? The lord-and-master
lines were not in the original 1799 version of the spots of time passage
and, as Sybil Eakin has shown, such notions played no role in his
initial description and evaluation of the two episodes. Moreover, in
other places in the 1805 Prelude Wordsworth had been much con-
cerned with the question of the relative contribution made by each of
the two participants in the mind-nature relationship. In book ii, for
example, he poses the question of why in his seventeenth year he saw
"blessings spread around me like a sea." Was it "the power of truth/
Coming in revelation"? Or was it the result of his own transference of
enjoyment on to "unorganic natures," thus "Coercing all things into
sympathy" (405-14)? A number of passages suggested that the
answer was found not in the master-servant model but in a symbiotic
model -

A balance, an ennobling interchange

Of action from within and from without:
The excellence, pure spirit, and best power,
Both in the object seen, and eye that sees, (xii 375-8)

The passage in book xi can thus be explained as a later interpolation

by the post-i8o4 Wordsworth, as he reassesses his early experiences
in the light of his growing concern with the mind's capacity to move
beyond nature and access the transcendent.
While many commentators have regarded ennobling interchange
as the essence of the Wordsworthian mind-nature dialectic, another
line of Wordsworth criticism has been more sceptical. In the 19605
this reading came under pressure from three influential commenta-
tors, each of whom attached great importance to three crucial pas-
sages in the Prelude that seemed to privilege mind/imagination over
nature: the interpolation in book xi; the crossing the Alps episode in
46 The Language of the Senses

book vi; and the ascent of Snowdon episode in book xiii. Paul de Man
observed that in the second of these Wordsworth "goes so far as to
designate the earth by the astonishing periphrase of 'Blank abyss/ "
and to insist that the imagination can only come into full play when
"the light of sense goes out" and its activity becomes "its own per-
fection and reward" ("Intentional" 77). Harold Bloom insisted on a
"hidden conflict between Poetry and Nature in Wordsworth" that
reminded him of the Russian proverb "two bears in one den" (145).
And Geoffrey Hartman emphasized the apocalyptic tendency of
Wordsworth's imagination: "By apocalyptic I mean that there is an
inner necessity to cast out nature" (49).2
These antithetical readings were in turn strongly opposed by critics
like Jonathan Wordsworth and Thomas McFarland. The latter, for
example, insisted that Bloom's and Hartman's views could not be
maintained "except by disregarding overwhelming evidence to the
contrary." Nature was not in opposition to Wordsworth's imagina-
tion; his "poetic genius and his poetic achievement were inseparable
from an enormous imaginative intensity about nature and natural
objects" (30, 36). I believe that the case made by Coleridgean com-
mentators can be strengthened if attention is concentrated on the per-
ceptual particulars of Wordsworth's representations of the spots of
time and related experiences rather than on his after-the-fact explana-
tions that, in Hartman's own phrase,"usually overlay rather than
deepen insight" (xvii). There can of course be no question of recover-
ing what the child Wordsworth actually experienced. Naked recollec-
tions do not exist in the text, for they are necessarily mediated by the
words of the adult poet, whose verbal representations of early experi-
ences will inevitably differ from the experiences themselves. On the
other hand, one is interested in the sources of Wordsworth's creativ-
ity primarily because of the quality of the poetry that is its effluence;
and these are found in his representations of childhood experiences,
not in his generalizations about them. In Thomas Hardy's terms, the
reader of the Prelude should be primarily concerned with Words-
worth's powerfully articulated "impressions" rather than his shifting
"convictions" (408).

In his recollections of the poet, Thomas De Quincey recalls an inci-

dent that occurred one midnight when he and Wordsworth had
walked out from Grasmere to wait for the carrier bringing the Lon-
don newspapers. At intervals, Wordsworth would lie flat on the road
and place his ear to the ground to see if he could catch any sound of
 Wordsworth's Mighty World of Eye and Ear 47

distant wheels. Once, as he was rising from the ground, his eye
caught a bright star "that was glittering between the brow of Seat
Sandal and of the mighty Helvellyn." Wordsworth gazed at the star
"for a minute or so" and then made the following observation:

I have remarked, from my earliest days, that, if under any circumstances,

the attention is energetically braced up to an act of steady observation, or of
steady expectation, then, if this intense condition of vigilance should sud-
denly relax, at that moment any beautiful, any impressive visual object, or
collection of objects, falling upon the eye, is carried to the heart with a power
not known under other circumstances. Just now ... when I raised my head
from the ground, in final abandonment of hope for this night, at the very
instant when the organs of attention were all at once relaxing from their
tension, the bright star hanging in the air above those outlines of massy
blackness fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated my capacity of appre-
hension with a pathos and a sense of the infinite, that would not have
arrested me under other circumstances. (160)

Wordsworth illustrated "the same psychological principle" with

reference to his poem about the mountain boy blowing mimic hoot-
ings to the owls. This poem was first published in the 1800 edition of
Lyrical Ballads under the title "There was a Boy" and subsequently
placed among "Poems of the Imagination" in later arrangements of
his works. But it was also included in the 1805 Prelude, and earlier
versions, written partially in the first person, are found among the
drafts of the 1799 Prelude. There is therefore good reason for consider-
ing "There was a Boy" as a spot of time experience that is deployed
in the third person in book v of the Prelude to suit the structural and
thematic plan of that extended work, just as the two episodes explic-
itly called spots of time were moved to book xi from their proper
chronological position in books i and ii. Here is the 1805 text:

There was a boy - ye knew him well, ye cliffs

And islands of Winander - many a time
At evening, when the stars had just begun
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone
Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake,
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth
Uplifted, he as through an instrument
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls
That they might answer him. And they would shout
48 The Language of the Senses

Across the wat'ry vale, and shout again,

Responsive to his call, with quivering peals
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud,
Redoubled and redoubled - concourse wild
Of mirth and jocund din. And when it chanced
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,
Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake. (389-413)

Attention is initially directed to the evening horizon, the place

"Where earth and heaven do make one imagery" (PW i 247). Low-
hanging stars seem to be moving along the edges of the hills, thus
imparting a sense of animation to the natural world. Against this cre-
puscular background occur two of the most unruffled experiences of
expanded consciousness represented in Wordsworth's poetry. As the
boy strains to hear the owls' replies, which have been coaxed into
being by his own mimetic skill (which presupposes an intimate and
patiently acquired knowledge of natural phenomena), the pauses of
deep silence seem to mock his efforts. They also raise the intensity
of his perceptual expectation to such a pitch that when, to quote De
Quincey, "his attention [begins] to relax - that is, in other words,
under the giving way of one exclusive direction of his senses, [begins]
suddenly to allow an admission to other objects" (161), the result is
an extraordinary perceptual experience. The visible scene enters into
the boy's mind "unawares" because it, unlike the owls' hootings, has
been unsought. The scene includes the image of the darkening ("un-
certain") sky, reflected on ("received into") the surface ("bosom") of
the steady lake. The memorable sweetness of this perception and
its powerful effect are unobtrusively intimated - the aptness of the
expression matching that of the experience described - by the way
in which the quiet fusion of sky and water, metaphorically described
in human terms, intimates the fusion of the natural setting and the
inner being of the boy - a fusion that had already been suggested at
the beginning of the passage by the mingling of terrestrial and celes-
tial on the horizon.
But this is not the passage's principal felicity. As Walter Pater
observes: "Clear and delicate at once, as he is in the outlining of visible
imagery, [Wordsworth] is more clear and delicate still, and finely
 Wordsworth's Mighty World of Eye and Ear 49

scrupulous, in the noting of sounds" (43). As he strains to hear the now

silent owls, the boy hears something else, something from beyond
quotidian perceptual limits that gives "a gentle shock of mild surprize"
and carries "far into his heart the voice/Of mountain torrents." The
perceptual dynamics of this quietly transporting experience are sug-
gested by Thoreau's observation that "All sound heard at the greatest
possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the
universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge
of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it" (Walden
123). In his description, Wordsworth uses two metaphors to suggest
the effect on the boy of hearing such vibrations. One is the humanizing
metaphor - the sound of the mountain torrents described as
their "voice" - which is comparable in effect to the similar metaphors
already noted in the closing lines of the passage. The other metaphor
also intimates the interpenetration of human perceiver and natural set-
ting, though in this case a natural term is used to describe a human
quality. Its suggestiveness was finely caught by De Quincey: "This
very expression, 'far', by which space and its infinities are attributed to
the human heart, and to its capacities of re-echoing the sublimities of
nature, has always struck me as with a flash of sublime revelation"
(161).
"There was a Boy" has two further points of interest. One is Words-
worth's later comment on the poem: "Guided by one of my own pri-
mary consciousnesses, I have represented a commutation and transfer
of internal feelings, co-operating with external accidents, to plant, for
immortality, images of sound and sight, in the celestial soil of the
Imagination" (PW ii44on). Prima facie, it is hard to see how such
idealizing commentary can be justified. A "heaven" is mentioned, but
in reference only to the evening sky, which is "uncertain" because it is
being reflected in the shifting waters of the lake, and also for the same
reason that the lake is glimmering rather than shining: because of the
waning of the light. The entire thrust of the poem concerns the inter-
penetration of man and nature, not of human and suprahuman. On
the other hand, it is from the limits of the perceptible, the threshold of
the transcendent, that the voice of mountain torrents comes; the ter-
restrial and celestial mingle on the horizon; and when a vibration of
the universal lyre is felt, there is a sense of contact with something
beyond, for the description of which a supernatural vocabulary ("im-
mortality," "celestial") would seem unavoidable.
The final point is a related one. In his essay, "Why Distant Objects
Please," Hazlitt notes that "Distance of time has much the same effect
as distance of place" (viii 256). If one thinks about "There was a Boy"
in the context of the informing concerns of the Prelude, one soon
becomes aware of the force of this analogy. Just as the distant, barely
5O The Language of the Senses

perceptible voice of mountain waters is carried far into the boy's

heart (whereas the very same sound heard from a closer distance
wrould be unremarkable and unmemorable), so the childhood spots
of time gain part of their power from the very fact that they are
distant in time, and that from a temporal rather than a spatial per-
spective they are on the border between the perceptible and imper-
ceptible, the immanent and what is beyond, and are therefore
potentially capable of striking vibrations on the universal lyre. Thus,
implicit within this spot of time is a spatial model of the temporal
relationship between early experience and adult consciousness that
helps to account for the lasting power of the remembered moments.
In De Quincey's anecdote and in "There was a Boy" the perceptual
displacement is from the aural to the visual. When the flow of
heightened sensitivity moves in the opposite direction, the resultant
impact on the consciousness of the Wordsworthian perceiver can be
less sweetly penetrating than roughly unsettling. One example is the
second of the two spots of time described in book xi. But before turn-
ing to these two crucial episodes, we first need to consider Word-
sworth's sensorium and the eye-ear relationship in his poetry, and
to examine some of the moments of intense perceptual experience
described the books i and ii of the Prelude.
In the preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth declares that a poet
must be a man "possessed of more than usual organic sensibility"
(PW ii 387-8), by which phrase is meant the capacity to receive im-
pressions through the senses. In the case of Wordsworth himself, the
capacities of his lower senses were less, not more, than usual. Robert
Southey reported that his friend "had no sense of smell," a depriva-
tion also noted by James Payn, who observed that Wordsworth could
not distinguish the scent of a beanfield in bloom (Smith i, 11-12). As
with odors, few gustatory impressions are found in Wordsworth's
poetry. Nor is there evidence of a strong haptic capacity.3 Hearing
and especially sight are the dominant senses in Wordsworth's poetry.
Wordsworth describes his younger self as having an eye that
"evermore" was looking for "the shades of difference/As they lie hid
in all exterior forms /Near or remote, minute or vast." His sight
"Could find no surface where its power might sleep" (iii 157-9,164).
The "manifold distinctions ... Perceived in things where to the com-
mon eye/No difference is" produced "gentle agitations of the mind"
that contributed to the expansive sense of seeing "blessings spread
around me like a sea" (ii 317-20, 414). This unceasing activity of dis-
crimination makes vision the dominant perceptual organ in Word-
sworth's poetry. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads, the poet is referring
to metre, and consequently to the ear, when he speaks of "the plea-
sure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dis-
 Wordsworth's Mighty World of Eye and Ear 51

similitude" as the "principle [which] is the great spring of the activity

of our minds, and their chief feeder" (PW ii 400). But in quotidian
perceptual experience this spring is fed primarily through the eye
and not the ear. So dominant is the role of sight that it is "in every
stage of life/The most despotic of our senses" (xi 172-3). At one
point Wordsworth feared that the hegemony of the eye would reduce
him to being a mere connoisseur of visual sensations. He was also
concerned with the tyranny that sight (together with the analytic
powers of the mind) could exercise in post-adolescent life over the
creative faculties. In book xi the spots of time experiences are intro-
duced to explain why in the despondent period after the failure of his
hopes for the French Revolution he did not long remain under the
tyranny of an eye that brought him "vivid but not profound"
delights. It is the very reason one would expect: because he "had
felt/Too forcibly, too early in my life,/ Visitings of imaginative
power" for this condition to last (188, 250-2).
One of the ways of overcoming the power of the eye was through
internalizing the object of visual perception: the bodily eye was
superseded by "the inward eye" and "the mind's eye." In "Resolu-
tion and Independence," for example, the speaker's dejection gives
way to a more resolute state of mind as a result of the self-reparative
activity of his imagination, which internalizes the figure of the aged
leech-gatherer and re-creates him as a type of human endurance.
Three visual images describe the aged figure: a huge stone; a sea
beast crawled forth to sun itself; a motionless cloud. But the trans-
forming power of the imagination becomes intense only when the
dominance of the visual begins to abate:

The old Man still stood talking by my side;

But now his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the Man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man front some far region sent,
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.

This adult creative experience, so the imagery suggests, recapitu-

lates an intense perceptual experience of the Wordsworthian child.
The "body of the Man" is carried from the external world far into
the consciousness of the poet, just as the sound of distant mountain
torrents is carried far into the heart of the boy.
A second way of overcoming the eye's dominance was by "replac-
ing sight with sound, or in less definite cases, by shifting the em-
phasis from sight to sound" (Miyagawa 32). In "Resolution and
52 The Language of the Senses

Independence/' the visual images are superseded by an auditory

image (the old man's voice as a stream scarce heard) as the process of
internalization occurs. A more fully articulated example is found at
the beginning of the discharged-soldier episode in book iv of the Pre-
lude (363-99). Wordsworth is describing what happened to him one
night while indulging "a favourite pleasure" - walking alone along
the public road on a summer night. As he mounts a steep ascent, the
road before him, glittering in the moonlight, seems like a river (a
"wat'ry surface") flowing along to join "the brook/That murmured
in the valley" - murmured rather than, say, babbled because its
sound is heard from a distance. As he walks, "in my own despite"
(i.e., passively) the young man receives "amusement" from such
near visual objects as intrude on his "listless sense,/Quiescent and
disposed to sympathy." But as he enters more deeply into the still-
ness of the "silent road" he begins to have a deeper experience. His
body is described as "drinking in/A restoration," and, as this sweet
state of being intensifies, the dominance of the ear is again noted:
"I looked not round, nor did the solitude/Speak to my eye, but it
was heard and felt."
A manuscript fragment from the late 17903 contains the following
notation:

The clouds are standing still in the mid heavens;

A perfect quietness is in the air;
The ear hears not; and yet, I know not how,
More than the other senses does it hold
A manifest communion with my heart, (v 343)

In thinking about why hearing is so privileged rather than sight it is

helpful to recall Coleridge's observation that sounds can be "more
sublime than any sight can be" because they can more fully suspend
"the power of comparison" (in Wordsworth's phrase, the ability to
perceive "manifold distinctions") and more completely absorb "the
mind's self-consciousness in its total attention to the object working
upon it" (Friend i 367). It is also helpful to reflect on an observation
made by Hazlitt in "Why Distant Objects Please": "Sounds, smells,
and sometimes tastes, are remembered longer than visible objects,
and serve, perhaps, better for links in the chain of association,"
because "they are in their nature intermittent, and comparatively
rare; whereas objects of sight are always before us, and, by their con-
tinuous succession, drive one another out. The eye is always open,"
while the ear "is oftener courted by silence than noise; and the
sounds that break that silence sink deeper and more durably into the
 Wordsworth's Mighty World of Eye and Ear 53

mind. I have for this reason/' Hazlitt says, "a more present and lively
recollection of certain scents, tastes, and sounds than I have of mere
visible images, because they are more original, and less worn by fre-
quent repetition" (viii 258).
When Hazlitt gives particular examples from his own past (the
taste of barberries, the smell of a brick kiln, certain musical sounds),
it is hard not to think of the non-visual touchstones of vision in
Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu in which through involuntary
memory the past is recovered: the taste of a madeleine cake soaked in
tea; hearing an exquisite passage in a musical composition; stepping
on an uneven paving stone; the touch of a starched napkin. As has
long been recognized, there are similarities between Wordsworth and
Proust concerning the importance of affective memory and the tre-
mendous power of special moments from the past to irradiate the
present. But there are important differences as well.
Near the beginning of A la recherche du temps perdu, the adult narra-
tor, weary and dispirited, soaks a madeleine in a cup of tea and takes
up a spoonful of the mixture. When it touches his lips, a transforma-
tion occurs:

at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me ... I had ceased
now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me,
this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea
and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not,
indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How
could I seize and apprehend it? (i 48)

The answer was that the tea-soaked madeleine had evoked the memory
of long-ago Sunday mornings of his childhood when he would visit
Aunt Leonie in her room. The all-powerful joy was not found in the
childhood experience itself, but in the fusion of two temporal mo-
ments, one belonging to the adult present, the other to the childhood
past, that had been triggered by the involuntary memory of a sense
impression. Near the end of the novel, the narrator reflects that the re-
ality of his life is found in just such fortuitous moments of connection
"between these immediate sensations and the memories which en-
velop us simultaneously with them" (iii 924). For him, truths based on
sense impressions are more profound than truths directly appre-
hended by the intellect. The former were material in that they derived
from and were triggered by sensory experience, but they were also
transcendent. While the moments of rapture lasted he could not have
said whether he was in the one temporal medium or the other; what
was experienced was "in some way ... extra-temporal" (iii 904).
54 The Language of the Senses

In Wordsworth, the involuntary operation of memory has not the

same emphasis, although it is hardly the case that he had other than
fortuitous access to the past experiences that were the hiding places of
present power. Furthermore, in Proust the particular perceptual mem-
ory is simply the trigger of recollection; it is not the pivotal point
of the recollected experience or in itself a cause of the intensity of
impression that makes the experience memorable. This is why the
vivid childhood experiences evoked in the Prelude do not affect the
present in the same way that those in Proust do. An essential aspect of
the difference is that in Wordsworth's spots of time and related expe-
riences the dominant senses are invariably sight and hearing - the
two least physically involving of the senses. Unlike smell, taste and
touch, these senses can be deeply engaged by what is at a distance
from the perceiver. In the Prelude, the sights and sounds that strike
most deeply are often those at the perceptual limit and thus able of
themselves to evoke feelings of sublimity and transcendence. The im-
portance in later life of these childhood experiences is not that they
can be recovered intact. It is rather that these early experiences of sub-
limity are the source of future experiences of expanded consciousness.
In book ii, Wordsworth describes being out alone at night during
childhood

listening to sounds that are

The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim. abode in distant winds.
Thence did I drink the visionary power.

These fleeting moods of exultation, during which he had "felt

whate'er there is of power in sound/To breathe an elevated mood,
by form/Or image unprofaned" (that is, undiluted by visual percep-
tions) were valuable not because they suggested that the mind is its
own lord and master, but because they permanently sensitized his
consciousness:

the soul -
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not - retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, to which
With growing faculties she doth aspire. (326-38)

Most of the memorably intense experiences recounted in the

first two books of the Prelude are more particularly and concretely
described and as a result show more clearly the central role of percep-
 Wordsworth's Mighty World of Eye and Ear 55

tion. Take, for example, the ice-skating passage (i 452-89). Words-

worth describes how he would sometimes leave his playmates and
skate off alone "To cut across the image of a star/That gleamed upon
the ice." When he attempted to do so, the reflection moved away
from him as he approached. Because of the remoteness of the re-
flected object, the skater would never have been able to cross the
star's reflection on the ice, which achievement would remain, no
matter how long the attempt, what in book vi is called a "something
evermore about to be." In the next lines, Wordsworth recalls that
when, after skating hard, he suddenly stopped short "yet still the
solitary cliffs/Wheeled by me." It seemed as if the visible world had
a perceptible life and motion of its own - seemed, that is, a showing
forth of the force of the something that rolls through all things.
In the fullest representation of a glacial frisson, the effects are
primarily aural:

So through the darkness and the cold we flew,

And not a voice was idle. With the din,
Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed; while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.

As in "There was a Boy," the coming on of night amplifies the audi-

tory aspect of the scene, allowing a non-visual apprehension of the
reciprocity of human and natural. The noise of the children's activity
is given back as an alien sound by the distant hills, as a reverberating
ringing by the nearer precipices, and as a tinkle by the icy crags
and leafless trees. Coleridge, the first commentator on this passage,
explained the last acoustic effect, which is not an echo: "When very
many are seating together, the sounds and noises give an impulse to
the icy trees, and the woods all round the lake tinkle" (friend i 368).
The visual equivalent of a tinkle is a twinkle or a sparkle, and in the
climax of the passage the eye is raised to the evening horizon, where
the setting sun has left a swathe of orange and made perceptible the
sparkle of the stars - just as it has the tinkling of the trees.
Other intense childhood experiences were more destabilizing. One
of them describes how in springtime the young Wordsworth would
climb to the high places of lonely peaks to plunder ravens' nests.
He describes himself hanging precariously upside down above a nest
56 The Language of the Senses

while "the loud dry wind" blew "with what strange utterance"
through his ears and, to turn to the scene's visual aspect, "the sky
seemed not a sky/Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds"
(i 347-50). The perceptual foundation of this description needs no
underlining. As Emerson observes, if one bends over and looks at a
landscape through one's legs, the "pleasure mixed with awe" that is
experienced would be "a low degree of the sublime" (34). In the case
of the child above the raven's eggs, this low form of visually induced
ecstasy is intensified by the strangeness of the wind's sound.
Another experience - the famous boat-stealing episode (i 372-426)
- was more deeply disorienting. One evening Wordsworth chanced
upon a shepherd's boat "by the shores of Patterdale, a vale/Wherein
I was a stranger," and impulsively took the boat and rowed out into
the lake. There he has an experience similar in kind to, but more psy-
chologically complex in origin and different in degree of intensity
from, what he experienced on another evening on another lake when
he suddenly stopped short on his skates and sensed the solitary hills
wheeling around him. In this episode, "huge and mighty" natural
forces seem to stride after the boy while he is on the lake. For many
days after his mind "Worked with a dim and undetermined sense/Of
unknown modes of being," as these forms moved slowly through his
mind by day and troubled his dreams at night.
What is the cause of this powerfully destabilizing experience? One
factor is the boy's state of mind as he rows the stolen boat out into the
lake. He already feels a degree of guilt about what he is doing: "It
was an act of stealth/And troubled pleasure." The oxymoronic last
phrase is particularly suggestive. At one level, the boy's pleasure is
qualified by an inner uneasiness because of his transgression. But it is
also intimated that at a deeper level of consciousness a part of the
boy's pleasure is owing to the very fact of its being "troubled," that
is, of its being felt to be illicit. That this act has darkly intensified the
boy's experience is further suggested by the aggressive energy with
which he rows. Even hints of a sexual element in his energy enter as
he "lustily" dips his oars into the lake and rises "upon the stroke"
with the boat.
The turning point in the episode is a startling perceptual experi-
ence. As the boy rows outward into the lake he is looking backward at
the receding shore and "a rocky steep" rising above it. But he reaches
a point on the lake's surface where, because his angle of vision has
changed, this steep ceases to be the bound of the horizon. Suddenly
from behind that unexceptional elevation, "a huge cliff,/As if with
voluntary power instinct,/ Upreared its head." What has happened
is that to the unusually stimulated and apprehensively intense con-
 Wordsworth's Mighty World of Eye and Ear 57

sciousness of the boy the second cliff, the sudden appearance of

which has surprised him, seems a hugely minatory apparition. As he
begins frantically to row, the changing angle of his vision reveals
more of the cliff, which "growing still in stature ... like a living thing/
Strode after me." It is clear that the boy has projected onto the cliff
both his own emotional state and the "measured motion" of his
vigorous rowing. Thus, the episode is fully explicable in perceptual
terms. The boy is scared out of his wits by the fortuitous conjunction
of heightened sensitivity caused by the "troubled pleasure" of his
internal condition and a particularly striking example of a not uncom-
mon perceptual experience.
The experience is of course memorable. But what the account of the
boat-stealing episode, and the other accounts of specific early experi-
ences in the first two books of the Prelude, do not directly address is
how these experiences relate to adult creative power and visionary
capability. It is in connection with the two childhood experiences
described in book xi - the spots of time explicitly so called - that
Wordsworth does address this difficult subject. It is clear that Words-
worth himself did not fully understand the peculiar continuing
power of the two episodes - he was in no doubt that he had experi-
enced something vitally important; but what he had experienced and
why it remained incandescent were more complicated matters.
In the first spot of time (xi 278-315) a very early experience is
recalled - "I was then not six years old." Though scarcely able to hold
a bridle, the child is taken for a horseback ride. He begins the outing
with "proud hopes"; but this little rise in the five-year-old ego is soon
deflated when through "some mischance" he is separated from his
guardian. Doubtless feeling increasingly apprehensive, the boy dis-
mounts and, leading his horse down "the rough and stony moor ...
and stumbling on," comes to the valley bottom "where in former
times/A murderer had been hung in iron chains" and where, owing
to local superstition, the murderer's name had been carved in monu-
mental writing on the turf by the mouldered gibbet-mast. After the
boy's eye takes in the scene, he "forthwith" leaves the spot and rea-
scends to the bare common. What he sees there - or rather how he
sees - shows that he has undergone a subjectively terrifying experi-
ence. He sees

A naked pool that lay beneath the hills,

The beacon on the summit, and more near,
A girl who bore a pitcher on her head
And seemed with difficult steps to force her way
Against the blowing wind. It was, in truth,
58 The Language of the Senses

An ordinary sight, but I should need

Colours and words that are unknown to man
To paint the visionary dreariness
Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide,
Did at that time invest the naked pool,
The beacon on the lonely eminence,
The woman, and her garments vexed and tossed
By the strong wind.

This passage powerfully conveys the visionary state of the boy's con-
sciousness through understatement and repetition, which are appro-
priate rhetorical registers both for the description of an ordinary sight
and for the communication of the sheer desperate lostness of the five-
year-old boy. No feelings of guilt or of troubled pleasure are projected
onto extraordinary natural sights as night comes on. There is rather
primal terror in the broad daylight and a consequent expansion of
consciousness - a "visionary dreariness" in which a naked pool, a
lonely beacon, and a woman struggling against the wind are power-
fully registered on the boy's sensitized consciousness and come to
stand as elemental emblems of his subjective sense of desolation.
In the 1799 two-part Prelude Wordsworth ended his account of the
first spot of time with the lines quoted above. By 1805, he had sup-
plied a thirteen-line coda that attempted to account for the continuing
power that the memory held for him. Before examining this coda, one
might first ask if there is anything in the description itself that can
help explain its continued power. A notable aspect of the representa-
tion is that no specific perceptual occurrence serves as the trigger of
expanded consciousness. (It should be noted, however, that the boy
moves abruptly from an enclosed space to an open one, and from a
sheltered and presumably silent location to one where a strong wind
is blowing.) On the other hand, in the 1799 text, an extremely interest-
ing metaphor is employed at the beginning of the episode. In empha-
sizing the fact that the experience was a very early one, Wordsworth
remarks that it is "of an early season that I speak,/The twilight
of rememberable life" (i 297-8). He does not say the dawn of remem-
berable life. Had he done so, one would have had a conventional
figure in which the cycle of an individual's life is compared to the
diurnal cycle, early childhood being equated with dawn, and so on.
But Wordsworth specifies the twilight, a more complex figure that be-
comes suggestive as soon as the terms of the comparison are under-
stood. Something far removed in time, at the very limit of what is
recoverable by memory, is compared to something at the spatial limit
of visual perception.
 Wordsworth's Mighty World of Eye and Ear 59

One can therefore suggest that part of the reason the first spot of
time is so memorable is simply that it was such an early experience.
But in the 1805 coda (xi 315-27), Wordsworth does not suggest any-
thing so direct. A "blessed season" in later life is described, when the
poet, his sister Dorothy, and his future wife strolled in daily presence
of the "ordinary sight." It is weakly asserted by means of a limp rhe-
torical question that, when they did so, the radiance of their mutual
love was enhanced for the poet - was made "more divine" - by
his remembrances of "the power/They left behind." What is being
claimed here - the transformation of dreariness into radiance - is in
essence an adaptation of the Christian felix culpa paradox: destabiliz-
ing early experiences - "obstinate questionings" and "blank misgiv-
ings" are two of the names they are given in the Intimations Ode -
later come to have a positive value. The principal difficulty with this
part of the coda is not, so to speak, with the doctrine, but with the
implicit restriction of the after-effect to the setting in which it first
occurred. As is clear from other episodes in the Prelude, physical
proximity is by no means a precondition for the continued efficacy of
early experiences. The metaphorical phrase "spots of time" does not
refer to the fixing of temporal events in space but rather to the eman-
cipation of temporal experiences from the spatial order.
The last three lines of the coda, however, break away entirely from
temporal and spatial determinants (the time of early love and the par-
ticular setting) to state with convincing directness the essential point
of contact between intense childhood experiences and intense later
experiences: "So feeling comes in aid/Of feeling, and diversity of
strength/Attends us, if but once we have been strong." In the first
spot of time, the boy was hardly strong in the sense of being lord and
master of his situation. But what he experienced was strongly experi-
enced, and this early activation of intense feelings creates the capacity
and hence the possibility of his experiencing other feelings of compa-
rable intensity in later life. What the child felt is less important than
how he felt; through the memory of the latter an "obscure sense/Of
possible sublimity" is retained.
The second spot of time (xiii 344-88), which dates from Words-
worth's fourteenth year, is more complicated than the first, if not
more complex. As one would expect, a principal reason is the subjec-
tive consciousness of the older perceiver. The major difficulty con-
cerns the interrelationship between two temporally close past events.
The first is Wordsworth's experience while he waited impatiently for
the sight of the horses that would take him and his brothers home
from school for the Christmas holidays. The second event is his reac-
tion to the unexpected death of his father less than ten days later. A
60 The Language of the Senses

summary of this second event is interpolated into the middle of the

description of the first.
If this interpolation is set aside for the moment and the earlier
experience examined on its own terms, it can be seen that the experi-
ence turns on the dynamics of sensory perception, more particularly
on the displacement of one sense by another. "Feverish, and tired,
and restless," and "impatient for the sight" of the horses, Wordworth
climbed to a craggy summit that gave a view of "at least a long half-
mile" of two roads, by one of which the horses would be arriving.
The day was stormy, rough and wild and the visibility poor. The boy
sat down on grass "half sheltered by a naked wall," with a single
sheep on one side of him and a "whistling hawthorn" on the other.
There he waited and watched, "Straining my eyes intensely as the
mist/Gave intermitting prospect of the wood/And plain beneath."
What happened next is not immediately reported, for at this point a
summary of the later event (the father's death and the boy's reaction
to it) is interpolated. Then there is a return to the original experience
of waiting for the horses. Afterwards (that is, after the death of the
father), this experience became vividly memorable:

the wind and sleety rain,

And all the business of the elements,
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music of that old stone wall,
The noise of wood and water, and the mist
Which on the line of each of those two roads
Advanced in such indisputable shapes -
All these were spectacles and sounds to which
I often would repair, and thence would drink
As at a fountain.

Given the texts we have been examining, it can hardly be doubted

that what happened to make this experience so memorable, and so
pregnant with restorative power, was not simply a subsequent event
but a perceptual experience similar to that described in the De
Quincey anecdote and in "There was a Boy" - save that the percep-
tual displacement was from sight to hearing and the experience was
not sweetly transporting. "Though it may appear strange," Edmund
Burke notes in his treatise on the sublime, "that such a [perceptual]
change as produces a relaxation, should immediately produce a
sudden convulsion; it is yet most certainly so" (134). The boy's atten-
tion had been energetically braced up to an act of intense visual
 Wordsworth's Mighty World of Eye and Ear 61

observation. But the predominantly aural particulars of his immediate

surroundings ("all the business of the elements") had suddenly pen-
etrated his "capacity of apprehension" in a roughly unsettling way
that left a lasting resonance in memory. In Wordsworth's figure, the
experience became a fountain from which he continued to "drink."
The same verb is used in the passage in book ii in which Wordsworth
describes his boyhood self "drink[ing] the visionary power" that
flowed from the night-time sounds of the natural world. And at
the root of both images is the primal imbibing of the child at the
mother's breast.
It is thus possible to explain part of the lasting power of the first
experience described in the second spot of time without reference to
the interpolated later experience. The latter takes up the space in the
account of the earlier experience where the notation of the sudden
relaxation of the organs of visual perception straining to catch sight of
something far off would have come. In the interpolation, Wordsworth
sketches a different explanation of the power of the remembered
"business of the elements": in the time immediately after his father's
death the boy came to associate this desolating event with what he
had experienced on the summit. It had "appeared/A chastisement"
for his having waited in "such anxiety of hope," and it had caused
him to bow low to God, who, the boy believed, "thus corrected my
desires."
Whether it is at all reasonable for the boy to have felt this way is
not in question. The reported information, which does not ipso facto
strain credulity, is simply that he did come to associate the two
events in this way. The moot point is the inference of the adult poet
searching for the hiding places of his power: that the second event
caused the first experience to become impregnated with significance
so that "afterwards" it remained incandescent in his memory. One
need not disagree entirely with the after-recollection. The problem is
with the implication of causality. Through association, the second
event may well have added enormously to the power of the memory
of the first. But this does not mean that the power of the first experi-
ence is dependent on the power of the second. After all, the first
experience must have been memorably intense and destabilizing in
its own right for the boy to have imagined that it warranted such a
powerful divine rebuke. Like the enhanced radiance of young love in
the first spot of time, the sense of divine rebuke exemplifies the
power of the experience rather than explaining it; and it is implicitly
misleading in suggesting that the affective power of the experience is
dependent upon proximity (spatial in one case, temporal in the
62 The Language of the Senses

other). A sine qua non of the power of the second spot of time, implicit
in the representation of the experience at the craggy summit, is the
dynamics of perception.

Attention to perceptual dynamics also throws light on two of the most

important episodes in the Prelude - the ascent of Mount Snowdon and
the crossing of the Alps. The former (xiii 1-119) describes the night-
time ascent of the Welsh mountain that Wordsworth made when he
was twenty-one. He and a companion were climbing at night because
they wished to see the sunrise from the mountain top. The poet
walked in silence, his head bent earthward, his "eager pace" match-
ing his "no less eager thoughts," which are not specified but obvi-
ously centered on the anticipation of seeing a spectacular sunrise. The
night was close and warm; "a dripping mist/Low-hung and thick"
covered all of the sky. "Hemmed round on every side by fog and
damp," the climbers could see little until they reached the summit,
which on this particular night was on an exact level with the top of
the heavy-hanging, mist-laden clouds. As a result, upon reaching the
summit Wordsworth experienced a sudden perceptual displacement:

For instantly a light upon the turf

Fell like a flash. I looked about, and lo,
The moon stood naked in the heavens at height
Immense above my head, and at the shore
I found myself of a huge sea of mist,
Which meek and silent rested at my feet.
A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still ocean, and beyond,
Far, far beyond, the vapours shot themselves
In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes,
Into the sea, the real sea, that seemed
To dwindle and give up its majesty,
Usurped upon as far as sight could reach.

The visual scene, with its mixture of land and land-like clouds, is
spectacular in its own right; but as the representation of the Snowdon
experience reaches its climax a third displacement occurs. This time
it is not from anticipated sunrise to full moon, or from darkness to
light and closeness to expansive vision, but the unsettling shift from
seeing to hearing. At a mediate distance from the summit/shore of
the cloud/ocean is
 Wordsworth's Mighty World of Eye and Ear 63

a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour,

A deep and gloomy breathing-place, through which
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice.

Once this extraordinary spectacle has "passed away," it is followed

by an equally spectacular meditation that "rose in me that night/
Upon the lonely mountain." In retrospect, the scene becomes figural:
"The perfect image of a mighty mind,/Of one that feeds upon infin-
ity." The power that Nature had thrust forth "upon the senses" now
comes to stand for

the express
Resemblance - in the fullness of its strength
Made visible - a genuine counterpart
And brother of the glorious faculty
Which higher minds bear with them as their own.

Thus, through the conceptual transference made possible by hind-

sight, what was perceived from the top of Snowdon becomes an
emblem or allegory of the autonomy of higher minds whose imagi-
nations have no need of a reciprocal relationship with the natural
world because they have the power to dominate "all the objects of
the universe."
Nonetheless, if one attends to the description of what Wordsworth
saw and heard that night rather than to the after-meditation, to the
impression rather than the retrospective convictions, striking simi-
larities between the Snowdon episode and the poet's childhood
experiences become apparent. The first point, already intimated, is
the importance of the perceptual dynamics. Take, for example,
Wordsworth's sudden apprehension of the tsunami of sound roaring
up from the blue chasm. As Hartman explains, this apprehension
"cannot be sudden except psychologically": if Wordsworth "does
not hear the stream of sound, which must have been there all along,
it is because his senses were fixed by [a] visual image." The usurpa-
tion of sight is so strong that "it masks the continuous sound, and
the re-entry of the latter into consciousness appears like a break-
through. Though the vision ... is about nature, it is also about the
poet's perception of nature" (185).
Furthermore, a degree of interdependence between the experience
itself and the transcendent after-claims becomes apparent if one
recalls the experience of the boy who blew mimic hootings to the
owls but came to hear instead the "voice of mountain torrents" that
64 The Language of the Senses

was carried far into his heart - by which metaphor, as De Quincey

noted, space and its infinities were attributed to the human heart. In
the Snowdon after-meditation, Wordsworth uses the same spatial
metaphor (though on a scale that registers the difference between a
moving sea of clouds and a steady lake, and between the roar of
waters and the barely heard sound of distant streams): a mighty
mind is "exalted by an under-presence,/The sense of God, or what-
soe'er is dim/Or vast in its own being." And when the mighty mind
is described as one that "feeds" upon infinity, it is impossible not to
recall the child Wordsworth drinking visionary power from the
sounds of the night winds and, earlier still, the oceanic feelings of
the infant feeding at the mother's breast.
Of the crossing the Alps episode in book vi, David Ellis has
observed that "If one could momentarily put on one side the inter-
polated tribute to Imagination ... then it would be more obvious
that Wordsworth's apocalyptic vision of the Alps ... can be read as
dependent on the relaxation of will [I would say, with De Quincey,
on the relaxation of an intense condition of perceptual vigilance]
which ensues when he learns he has already crossed them" (65). But
there is no reason why this interpolation cannot be momentarily set
aside, just as the interpolation in the waiting-for-horses episode was.
Wordsworth presents his crossing of the Alps as an example of a
powerful emotion, "a deep and genuine sadness" (492) that over-
came him during his continental peregrinations in the summer of
1790 when he was twenty. He and his companion had looked for-
ward to savoring the actual moment when they would cross the
Alps. But they had mistaken their route, become disoriented and,
when finally set right by a peasant, discovered that they had in fact
already made the crossing. Wordsworth says that the "dull and
heavy slackening" in attention that ensued when they realized their
mistake was "soon dislodged" (549-51). Certainly there is nothing
dull about the famous description of the Gondo Gorge (556-72)
which they then entered and through which they journeyed down-
ward for several hours:

The immeasurable height

Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And everywhere along the hollow rent
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears -
 Wordsworth's Mighty World of Eye and Ear 65

Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside

As if a voice were in them - the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light,
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great apocalypse,
The types and symbols of eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.

Despite the statement that his disappointment was soon dislodged,

it is obvious that Wordsworth had in fact experienced a severe inner
displacement, as he had done years before when he had come upon
the mouldered gibbet-mast, and that he entered the gorge in a height-
ened perceptual state similar to that of the boy when he had fled
the valley bottom and reascended the bare common. In the gorge,
Wordsworth's frustrated intensity of expectation reaches a vertiginous
pitch. It is the perceiver rather than the winds who is "bewildered and
forlorn." The "sick sight/And giddy prospect of the raving stream"
(my italics) refer principally to a human rather than a natural condi-
tion. The giddy effect is also conveyed by the fact that the description
is a composite of Wordsworth's sequential perceptual experiences as
he descended the gorge. As Elizabeth Helsinger has noted, there
is "no sense of the perceiver's location in the passage; almost every
visual element is plural, and the spectator is somewhere in the midst
of woods, waterfalls, winds, torrents, rocks, crags, clouds" (99). To his
intensified perceptions, the rocks and drizzling crags seem to speak
with a human voice, while his visual distance from other aspects
of the scene makes for a perceptual oxymoron (Ogden 254) - "the
stationary blasts of waterfalls" - that compounds the effect of the
natural-cycle oxymoron of "woods decaying, never to be decayed."
These perceptual particulars, together with the more general fused
contrasts of tumult and peace, darkness and light, mirror the interpen-
etration of consciousness and landscape and exemplify the "paradox
of immanence and transcendence" that Merleau-Ponty identified as
an essential characteristic of all perception: "immanence, because the
perceived object cannot be foreign to him who perceives; transcen-
dence, because it always contains something more than what is actu-
ally given" (16).
In the last lines of the passage, however, a new element enters
into the representation of Wordsworth's experience in the gorge.
66 The Language of the Senses

"Characters," "types," and "symbols": these allegorizing terms sug-

gest the supersession of intense perceptual activity by an idealizing
after-meditation in which, as in the Snowdon episode, transcendent
notes are sounded. This is a different kind of imaginative activity
from that occurring earlier in the passage. The objects of perception
are here translated into "characters"; the inner/outer, subject/object
dynamic is replaced by a lower/higher schema; vertiginous intensity
is controlled by conceptual transference. The last five lines of the pas-
sage, that is to say, seem just as much a later interpolation (or interpre-
tation) by Wordsworth as does the address to imagination that had
been temporarily put to one side but must now be examined.
Commentators agree that this interpolation records a sudden real-
ization of the significance of his 1790 experience that came to Word-
sworth in 1804 while recreating the experience in verse. It is the
recognition that beyond the natural or material sublime there is a
higher sublime where "greatness make[s] abode." This is experienced
in "visitings/Of awful promise, when the light of sense/Goes out
in flashes that have shewn to us/The invisible world" (532-6). "Blest
in thoughts/That are their own perfection and reward" (545-6), the
mind, as Stephen Gill puts it, "outsoars the material sublime with
glimpses of infinitude." But while Gill acknowledges the transcendent
thrust of this passage, he nonetheless insists on the primacy of the
imagination-nature linkage. Wordsworth "is not Blake," and while his
imagination may transcend both memory and natural objects and give
glimpses of the invisible world, "its ground" is nonetheless in this
world (71).
What does not seem to have been noticed by Gill and other Col-
eridgean commentators is that the interpolation itself can be used to
make this point. The flash of insight that Wordsworth experienced in
1804 was mto the cause of his profound dejection on learning that he
had crossed the Alps without realizing it. The sadness he then
felt, Wordsworth subsequently realized, revealed an "under-thirst/
Of vigour" (489-90) in him that he ultimately identified as a longing
for the transcendent. "Our destiny," the exultant poet proclaims,

Our destiny, our nature, and our home,

Is with infinitude - and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be. (538-42)

These lines appear to refer to something in the transcendent future

beyond what can be attained by the union of the mind and the visible
 Wordsworth's Mighty World of Eye and Ear 67

universe, and thus to anticipate the Snowdon after-meditation and its

claims for an autonomous imagination or "mighty mind" with unme-
diated access to an invisible world. But this is not entirely the case.
For one thing, as William Empson points out, there is ambiguity in
Wordsworth's saying that "the light of sense/Goes out in flashes that
have shewn to us/The invisible world": "goes out" can mean both
"proceeds from" and "fails" (or "is extinguished"). This verbal ambi-
guity "drives home the paradox" that (in terms cognate with those
used by Empson) the showing forth of the invisible world both tran-
scends and is dependent upon perceptual experience (294-5). ORe
should also recognize that, as in the second spot of time, the recol-
lected experience unquestionably has a perceptual basis to which the
interpolated material may well make a synergistic addition, but
which does not of itself cause the experience to occur or to be memo-
rable. And of course, as we have seen, in book ii of the Prelude the
"sense of something evermore about to be" - there called "an obscure
sense/Of possible sublimity" (336-7) - is shown to be rooted not
in the invisible world but in intense perceptual experiences of child-
hood.

To speak of the relationship between childhood experiences and tran-

scendent intimations is inevitably to bring into the discussion "Ode:
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood."
In later life Wordsworth remarked that "to the attentive and compe-
tent reader the whole sufficiently explains itself." But he had earlier
told a correspondent that the poem rested "entirely upon two recol-
lections of childhood, one that of a splendour in the objects of sense
which is passed away, and the other an indisposition to bend to the
law of death as applying to our particular case. A Reader who has not
a vivid recollection of those feelings having existed in his mind can-
not understand the poem" (PW iv 463-4). For a reader lacking these
prerequisites, the next best thing is a knowledge of the spots of time
and related experiences that we have been considering.
The fourth stanza of the ode ends with two urgent questions:
"Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/Where is it now, the glory and
the dream?" The remainder of the Intimations Ode attempts to find
an answer to these insistent interrogatives as well as to the unstated
question concerning what can sustain the person who has ceased to
be a child and is daily travelling ever further from the dawn of his life
and its visionary intensities and ever closer to "the darkness of the
grave."
68 The Language of the Senses

The positive part of the answer begins in the ninth section with an
abrupt exclamation:

O joy! that in our embers

Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!

In the ashy darkness of our adult existence there remains in memory

a glowing remnant of the visionary intensity of childhood. The gleam
and the glory have vanished from out there, but an afterglow remains
within. So does the memory of two other kinds of early experiences,
with which we have become familiar. The first is

those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised.

In his turn-of-the-century essay on Wordsworth, A.C. Bradley ob-

serves that "the best commentary on a poem is generally to be found in
the poet's other works" and that the closing lines of the boat-stealing
episode in the second book of the Prelude furnish the best commentary
on these difficult but unquestionably central lines (133). Equally appo-
site "commentary" is provided by a number of the other destabilizing
early experiences recounted in the Prelude, especially the two explicitly
denominated spots of time.
The other kind of early experience that remains incandescent in the
adult memory are

those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing.

Here the synesthetic image of "fountain light" fuses the drinking-

in quality of the oceanic feeling that has its origin in the child at the
maternal breast with the celestial visual imagery employed earlier in
the ode. The stanza concludes with the assertion that, by enabling us
 Wordsworth's Mighty World of Eye and Ear 69

to make contact with the childhood time when we felt part of a larger
unbounded continuum, the felt memory of these two kinds of early
experience can supply a sustaining sense of continuity in time.
The complex image at the stanza's close becomes comprehensible
as soon as it is seen against the correct background:

Hence in a season of calm weather

Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

In this image, spatial distance (from the seashore to far inland) is used
as a metaphor of temporal distance (between childhood and adult
life). In certain moments of good weather someone far inland can
catch sight of the sea. It is described as "immortal" because in Word-
sworth's figure tenor and vehicle are allowed to blur together: like the
inland traveller looking back at the sea on a clear day, "our souls"
through memory can regain contact with the oceanic ("immortal")
feelings of childhood. As we have seen, the intensity of such feelings,
whether sweet or unsettling, was often characterized by perceptual
displacement, as one is reminded by the final lines of the passage in
which the inland traveller's visual image of children sporting on the
shore is superseded by a more powerful auditory image of the perma-
nent in the transitory: the sound of "mighty waters rolling evermore."

Writing in 1886, Gerard Manley Hopkins identified the Intimations

Ode as the poem in which Wordsworth's "insight was at its very
deepest... when he wrote that ode human nature got [a "shock"], and
the tremble from it is spreading" (Correspondence 148). Coleridge and
Thoreau, the subjects of the next two chapters, both felt the tremble.
For them, Wordsworth's poem was an essential point of reference in
reflecting on and coming to terms with the dulling of their organic
sensibilities and the decay of their rare powers of symbolic perception.
 FIVE

Coleridge's Blessed Interval

In the first chapter of Biographica Literaria, Coleridge speaks of

"a long and blessed interval" in his earlier life, "during which
my natural faculties were allowed to expand, and my original ten-
dencies to develope themselves: my fancy, and the love of nature,
and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds" (i 17). The time was
1795-8, when Coleridge was in his mid-twenties. It began with his
engagement to Sara Fricker, whom he married in September 1795.
However unpromising the circumstances of their coming together
and unhappy the eventful outcome of their marriage, Coleridge ini-
tially found that "Domestic Happiness is the greatest of all things
sublunary" (Letters i 158). During this period, he also became a
father and found a patron and friend in Thomas Poole; his long-
standing friendship with Charles Lamb deepened; William and
Dorothy Wordsworth became close friends; and the former became
one half of an extraordinary creative association.
Coleridge also came into sustained, intimate contact with the natu-
ral world for the first time: initially at Clevedon for three months in
late 1795; then from the beginning of 1797 to September 1798 at
Nether Stowey, also in Somerset, where he lived in a cottage within
walking distance of a variety of scenic places and prospects. "I love
fields & woods & mountains] with almost a visionary fondness,"
Coleridge writes in a letter of March 1798, "and because I have found
benevolence & quietness growing within me as that fondness [has]
increased, therefore I should wish to be the means of implanting it in
others." He then quotes Wordsworth on man's "shadowy Sympathies
 Coleridge's Blessed Interval 71

with things that hold/An inarticulate Language." Once taught to

love natural objects, "The Joy of that pure principle of Love" would
necessarily lead a person to "seek for objects of a kindred Love/In
fellow-natures, & a kindred Joy" (Letters i 397-8). The inter-amplifying
love of natural objects and fellow natures is one of a number of
minglings, mirrorings and doublings that characterize this period of
Coleridge's life - the time when Memory and Hope "sang the same
note" and blended "with each sweet now of/My felicity/'

Like Milk that coming comes & in its

easy stream Flows ever in, upon the
mingling milk, in the Babe's murmuring
Mouth/or mirrors each reflecting each.
(Notebooks ii #3107)

The difference that personal happiness and closeness to nature

made in Coleridge's life are registered in his poetic development. He
later recalled that

In the great City rear 'd, my fancy rude

By natural Forms unnurs'd & unsubdued
An Alien from the Rivers & the Fields
And all the Charms, that Hill or Woodland yield[s],
It was the pride & passion of my Youth
T' impersonate & color moral Truth
Rare Allegories in those Days I spun,
That oft had mystic senses oft'ner none.
Of all Resemblances however faint,
So dear a Lover was I, that with quaint
Figures fantastically grouped I made
Of commonest Thoughts a moving Masquerade.
(Whalley 17-18)

An example is "Sonnet: To the Autumnal Moon," written in 1788. Its

octet describes the moon as seen at different times; the sestet, begin-
ning "Ah such is Hope!", finds parallels between the lunar tableaux
and the virtue that is "as changeful and as fair." The parallels are
emblematic figurations of the pre-Romantic type: resemblances traced
with curious pains that necessitate conceptual transference. The result
is a rhetorical proclamation of an overdetermined message addressed
to anyone within shouting distance. The sonnet also illustrates other
features of his early verse that by the later 17905 Coleridge had come
72 The Language of the Senses

to recognize as defects: "the swell and glitter both of thought and

diction," the "profusion of double-epithets, and a general turgidness"
(Poems ii 1145).
Another characteristic of the early poetry is the absence of vivid
sensory notations and images. In the sonnet, the "I" is only nominally
present and his eye is as "weak" and "dimly peering" in the literal
sense as the moon (in one of its appearances) is in the figurative. In
contrast, the poetry Coleridge wrote in the later 17905 is full of acute
visual notations. Here, for example, is the description from "Reflec-
tions on Having Left a Place of Retirement" of what Coleridge saw
from the top of a "Mount sublime" that commanded a view of the
Bristol Channel:

Oh! what a goodly scene! Here the bleak mount,

The bare bleak mountain speckled thin with sheep;
Grey clouds, that shadowing spot the sunny fields;
And river, now with bushy rocks o'er-brow'd,
Now winding bright and full, with naked banks;
And seats and lawns, the Abbey and the wood,
And cots, and hamlets, and faint city-spire;
The Channel there, the Islands and white sails,
Dim Coasts, and cloud-like hills, and shoreless Ocean -
It seem'd like Omnipresence! God, methought,
Had built him there a Temple: the whole World
Seem'd imag'd in its vast circumference:
No wish profan'd my overwhelmed heart.
Blest hour! It was a luxury, - to be!

In contrast to the autumnal-moon sonnet, this descriptive passage

is dramatic rather than didactic: "The speaker is not merely an
observer and commentator standing apart from what he describes ...
[He] is now involved in an experience which is intrinsically signifi-
cant. [The images] reveal the movement of the speaker's mind from
one mode of apprehension (the perception of things) to another (the
apprehension of wholeness)" (Haven 54-5). The perceptual discrimi-
nation is sharp; the monochrome pattern of black speckled with
white on the near mountain is reversed in the dark on bright patterns
in the middle distance - both the fields in strong sunlight with spots
of shadow and the "bright" river dotted with rocks. The eye is then
led beyond the human habitations to wider vistas - first the channel
spotted with islands and sails and then the vast unpatterned expanse
of ocean and sky. The mirroring of one part of the natural scene
 Coleridge's Blessed Interval 73

by another is more than simply refreshing; it is awe-inspiring. The

expansion of consciousness, coextensive with the expansion of the
poet's intense visual apprehension, culminates in a sense of some-
thing big and indivisible. This sense is intensified by perceptual
dynamics unremarked (or unrecorded) at the time but noted in the
analysis of such vistas that Coleridge made eight years later in his
Notebooks (i #1675): "The View of an extensive Plain, all cultivated,
from a high mountain, would be merely an amusing object - a curios-
ity ... were it not for the imposingness of the situation from which we
view it - the feelings, possibly worked on by the air &c. Hence, the
advantage of Sea, & Lake in these Views - they take off the littleness &
picturishness - the Camera obscura effect."
Personal happiness, a sense of community, closeness to nature, sen-
sory acuity and the physical health it presupposes - all simulta-
neously experienced in the sweet now: this is the biographical basis of
Coleridge's later description of the genius of youth: "all genius exists
in a participation of a common spirit. In joy individuality is lost." To
have "genius is to live in the universal, to know no self but that which
is reflected not only from the faces of all around us, our fellow crea-
tures, but reflected from the flowers, the trees, the beasts ... A man of
genius finds a reflex to himself, were it only in the mystery of being"
(Philosophical Lectures 179). Coleridge wrote most of his finest poetry
during this blessed interval, including "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner." My interest is in the four principal conversa-
tion poems, each addressed to a different member of his intimate
circle: "The Eolian Harp" to Sara Fricker in the time just before
their marriage; "This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison" to Charles Lamb;
"Frost at Midnight" to his infant son; and "The Nightingale" to
William and Dorothy Wordsworth. In these poems, a wealth of deli-
cately inscribed sensory notations and blendings of thought and
feeling are the poetic distillation of the time when "every sense, each
thought, & each sensation/Lived in my eye, transfigured, not sup-
prest" (Notebooks ^#3107). Mirrorings and blendings of inner and
outer, lower and higher, micro and macro, are the signs of Coleridge's
felt sense that "every Thing has a life of it's own, & that we are all one
Life" (Letters ii 864). But as we shall see, while these poems represent
and enact the apprehension of the one life, they also problematize it.1

My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclined

Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is
74 The Language of the Senses

To sit beside our Cot, our Cot o'ergrown

With white-flower'd Jasmin, and the broad-leav'd Myrtle,
(Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!)
And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light,
Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve
Serenely brilliant (such should Wisdom be)
Shine opposite! How exquisite the scents
Snatch'd from yon bean-field! and the world so hush'd!
The stilly murmur of the distant Sea
Tells us of silence.

Thus begins "The Eolian Harp/' the first and least aesthetically satis-
fying of the four poems. The lines recapitulate the evolution of
Coleridge's poetic manner: conventional, even hackneyed, figures -
the emblematic jasmin, myrtle and star - give way to a more active
and fresh perception of the natural world. Kathleen Wheeler has
tracked the "gradual progression through the imagery from a state
of relative passive observation, to a highly responsive, articulate level
of appreciation": the twilight used as a metaphor for a state of mind
poised between passive and active; the "humanizing qualification" of
"saddening" and the "progressive immediacy of [its] participial
form" - the first indications of an active, imaginative response to
the scene; and the "delightful topographical design" in which "the
'landscape' of the heavens is now mirrored by the landscape of the
earth in terms of the relations amongst the predominant elements"
(Creative 67, 70, 72).
The subtle transition from sluggish to more active perception
may also be traced in the lulling, murmuring flow of the lines, which
encourages the loosening of habitual responses, and in the effects of
the waning of the light. As visibility diminishes, the visual arrange-
ment of clouds and stars above is superseded by the olfactory and
aural arrangements at ground level of beanfield on one side and sea
on the other. At the climax of the passage, a delicious sensory felicity
occurs: the speaker becomes aware of silence through the one excep-
tion to it - a far-off sound that does not intrude on the silence
but seems part of it; the murmur is "stilly," that is, partaking of the
motionlessness and quiet of the scene. This oxymoronic registration
also brings the suggestion of the one life, of nature as potentially or
incipiently animate - the sea's "murmur" as of a voice.
This anticipates the more elaborate figuration in the center of the
poem of the "mute still air" as "Music slumbering on her instru-
ment." In these lines, the atmosphere is still (calm and silent) but still
 Coleridge's Blessed Interval 75

(nonetheless) pregnant or instinct with musical sound - as air (atmo-

sphere) is homologous with the air (musical strain) that is actualized
by the wind-harp. This similarity is signalled by the repetition in the
second half of the antepenultimate lines of each stanza: "the world
so hush'd"/"a world so fill'd." The movement is from the particu-
lar, scarcely heard, and microcosmic to a macrocosmic expansion of
consciousness that is rooted in, and coextensive with, the sensory-
perceptual particulars.
What fills the hushed world are the sounds of "that simplest Lute,/
Placed length-ways in the clasping casement." In lines 14-25, the
sounds are mainly figured in delicately erotic terms. By "the desul-
tory breeze caress'd," the lute seems

Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover,

It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs
Tempt to repeat the wrong!

As its strings are "boldlier swept" by the breeze, the lute produces "a
soft floating witchery of sound" that is likened to the sound made by
elves in "Fairy-Land"

Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,

Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untam'd wing!

Erotic undertones are again detectable. This passage does not describe
a spiritualizing of the mind as does the "Omnipresence" passage in
"Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement," the other conver-
sation poem of 1795. The sound is bewitching rather than blessed; the
melodies induce an oceanic ("soft floating") state of feeling/touch - a
mode of the polymorphously perverse. In Whitman's phrase, from the
description of a similarly induced experience in section 26 of Song of
Myself, it is like being "steeped amid honeyed morphine." It is not an
imaginative state unprofaned by wish in which the intellect is raised
to an apprehension of God; it rather resembles the fulfillment of a
wish expressed by Coleridge in a letter of 1797: like the Hindu god
Vishnu "to float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of
the Lotos, & wake once in a million years for a few minutes - just to
know that I was going to sleep a million years more" (Letters i 350).
The next lines contain no erotic or regressive undertones; this is not
surprising given that they were composed and added to "The Eolian
Harp" two decades after its first publication:
76 The Language of the Senses

O! the one Life within us and abroad,

Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where -
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so fill'd;
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument.

This passage reflects Coleridge's later philosophical and scientific

reading, as Abrams has shown (Breeze 158-91), but in essence it rep-
resents how Coleridge felt at times during the later 17905. The domi-
nant trope in the passage, synesthesia, functions as a Coleridgean
symbol in absorbing sensory particulars into a perceptual totality
and thus linking part to whole. Moreover, secondary qualities like
light and sound are fused with primary qualities like motion (see
Rajan "Displacing" 470). Joy or joyance is the name of this feeling; it
presupposes the supersession of onlooker consciousness by partici-
patory consciousness. In the former, "we think of ourselves as sepa-
rated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to
subject, thing to thought, death to life"; the latter is "that intuition
of things which arises when we possess ourselves, as one with the
whole" (Friend i 520-1).
The later-interpolated passage is followed by the description of a
visually rather than aurally induced expansion of consciousness cul-
minating in pantheistic speculation. The breeze animates the passive
lute just as

on the midway slope

Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon,
Whilst through my half-clos'd eye-lids I behold
The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main,
And tranquil muse upon tranquillity;
Full many a thought uncall'd and undetain'd,
And many idle flitting phantasies,
Traverse my indolent and passive brain,
As wild and various as the random gales
That swell and flutter on this subject Lute!
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?
 Coleridge's Blessed Interval 77

In Wheeler's tracing, these lines "are full of indications about the

imaginative experience" - for example, the twilight-like mixture of
active and passive ("half-clos'd eye-lids" and the ambiguous "stretch
my limbs," which can mean either vigorous exercise or recumbent
relaxation) leading to speculations that reach out "into the mystery
of existence and the individual's relation to nature" (Creative 79-80).
My reading notes the self-induced aspect of the poet's squinting
and finds instead a return to the indolent and indulgent mode of
the "witchery of sound" passage that ultimately takes one beyond
sensory-perceptual experience ("intellectual" means "beyond the
senses") into vertiginous neo-Platonic musings that are less integral
to the poem than the one-life passage (see House 75).
These speculations bring a "mild rebuke" from pensive Sara,
prompting the speaker's recantation. Her "more serious eye" bids
Coleridge to "walk humbly with my God" and to abjure what he
now identifies as

shapings of the unregenerate mind;

Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break
On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring.

In the light of the poem's ending, the speaker's opening figurations -

the emblemizing of the flowers and the star followed by a fresher,
more active perception of the natural world, may be read as part of a
strategy of address to his less imaginative and more conventionally
Christian fiancee. The goal was presumably to encourage a more per-
ceptually active response to nature and thus a more sensuous mode
of being in the world. But the strategy led the speaker down the road
of excess and culminated in Sara's understandable rebuke. An indo-
lent and passive brain, after all, is not the most desirable quality in a
prospective husband and parent; nor is the cultivation of "feelings all
too delicate for use" or the tendency to nurse "in some delicious
solitude ... slothful loves and dainty sympathies."
These phrases are from the contemporaneous conversation poem,
"Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement," in which in propria
persona Coleridge voices the same sentiments that are put into Sara's
eye. They suggest that while his recantation at the end of "The Eolian
Harp" explicitly refers to the "intellectual breeze" passage, it implic-
itly qualifies everything that has gone before, including the one-life
passage. The near pun in "aye-babbling spring" nicely focuses the
poem's ambivalence about itself. The question of egotism in poetry
was one on which Coleridge had equivocal views, as can be seen by
juxtaposing two contemporaneous entries in his notebooks: "Poetry
78 The Language of the Senses

without egotism comparatively uninteresting"; "Poetry - excites us to

artificial feelings - makes us callous to real ones" (i #62, #87).

By June of 1797, when Coleridge returned to the creative mode of the

conversation poem, this dichotomy appearred to have been resolved.
"This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison" is a much more aesthetically suc-
cessful composition than "The Eolian Harp" - more all of a piece,
with better transitions and modulations, and a greater naturalness
and subtlety in the inner/outer figurations. There is no ideological
tension - no dissonance between pantheistic tendencies and Chris-
tian supernaturalism. In the poem, natural objects "evident to ear and
eye are veilings of the Almighty Spirit; they clothe and render that
spirit sensible"; but they are not the essence of that spirit (Engell 84).
Nor is there a vocational tension between "feelings all too delicate for
use" and the Christian life of other-regarding activity. The poem
shows the value, the good, of the creative activity of mind - even if
the wholesome moral is spelled out in its least poetically interesting
lines (59-67). There is also no sexual subtext in the poem: the relation-
ship of speaker to addressee is that of close friendship. Charles Lamb,
"my gentle-hearted Charles," had been Coleridge's intimate friend
since their school days and they had recently drawn even closer after
Lamb's "strange calamity" (in a fit of madness, his sister Mary had
killed their mother).
The poem's occasion is explained in a headnote: "some long-
expected friends" (Lamb, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth)
had arrived for a visit, but on the morning of their arrival Coleridge
had "met with an accident" (Sara had spilled a skillet of boiling milk
on his foot) that kept him from walking during the whole of their
stay. Thus, "This Lime-Tree Bower" opens with the speaker vexed at
being immobile and confined to his bower while his friends are
imagined to "Wander in gladness." He is even feeling a little sorry
for himself: he has lost, he says, "Beauties and feelings" that could
have added to his inventory of sweet memories. His sense of con-
finement and immobility is reflected in his initial conjecture that his
friends have descended into a confined and uncheering place:

that still roaring dell, of which I told;

The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge; - that branchless ash,
 Coleridge's Blessed Interval 79

Unsunn'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves

Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fann'd by the water-fall! and here my friends
Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds,
That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge
Of the blue clay-stone.

The primary meaning of "still" in each of its three occurrences is

"nonetheless": even in June the flow of the water is strong; although
the ash leaves and the weeds are not moved by the breeze, they do
tremble or nod because of the atmospheric displacement caused by
the waterfall. All three instances also have a secondary suggestive-
ness: the oxymoronic sense of moving in place - the visual equivalent
of the stilly murmur at the beginning of "The Eolian Harp."
The last notation, "the dripping edge/Of the blue clay-stone," is a
diminished echo and mirroring of the roaring water of the stream and
an instance of a distinctive feature of "This Lime-Tree Bower" - the
numerous pairings of macro and micro, spectacular and common-
place. The suggestion is that nothing is unconnected or singular in the
continuum of nature, that there is a rhythm in the external world. This
in turn relates to a final aspect of the triple use of "still": as with an-
other fantastic sight, "the stationary blast of waterfalls" in the Gondo
Gorge in book vi of the Prelude, the perceptual oxymoron carries
the suggestion of the coexistence or complementarity of the abiding
in the transient.
One other notable aspect of the description of the roaring dell is
that it records the poet's increasing intensity of perceptual recollec-
tion and empathetic identification with what his absent friends are
experiencing - a movement of mind from a passive notion of percep-
tion as the reception and storing of pleasing data to a more dynamic
notion (which is synonomous with the increasing engagement of the
secondary imagination with the materials of the poem). The friends
are first imagined to have "perchance" come to the dell. The next verb
referring to them is "Behold"; like "Wander," it is indicative, but its
positioning at the beginning of a line makes it incipiently imperative.
It suggests both the friends' and the poet's intense aesthetic delight in
the scene and their experience of a certain degree of awe ("a most fan-
tastic sight") in the perceptual paradox; and it prefigures the domi-
nance of the imperative mood in the climax of the next section.
A sensory displacement occurs in the white space between the
first and second sections: from the roaring dell to the silent hill-top
edge; from a close-up, particularized perception of natural objects to
80 The Language of the Senses

an expansive vista of distanced objects - from the long lank weeds to

the "many-steepled tract magnificent/' from the wet blue clay-stone
to the kindling blue ocean. Now the poet fully achieves imaginative
release from his sense of confinement in the bower and subjection
to peevish feeling. This movement brings into focus another of the
poem's macro-micro mirrorings: Charles Lamb had "pined/And
hunger 'd after Nature, many a year, in the great City pent" and had
suffered a great calamity, while Coleridge is experiencing only a
brief confinement as a result of a trifling domestic mishap. Just as
external nature is to revive Charles, so Coleridge will be revived
through his imaginative involvement in Charles' revivification.
This section represents a further transition - a movement from see-
ing to gazing that culminates in vision:

Ah! slowly sink

Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.

The imperative verbs register the shift from onlooker consciousness

to participatory consciousness, the hallmark of which is the sense of
the oneness of, and of oneness with, the external world (see Kirkham
132). Coleridge had quoted a version of the last six lines in a letter of
October 1797: "frequently all things appear little [to me] ... the uni-
verse itself - what but an immense heap of little things? - I can con-
template nothing but parts, & parts are all little ... My mind feels as if
it ached to behold & know something great - something one & indivis-
ible ... But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity" (Letters 1349).
What is apprehended is a sense of the abiding in the transient - in
Wordsworth's formulation in "Tintern Abbey," "a sense sublime/Of
something far more deeply interfused,/Whose dwelling is the light
of setting suns." In the phrase "less gross than bodily," gross has the
sense of dense, thick, solid; not ethereal, transparent, or impalpable.
The meaning of bodily is clear from the phrase that follows in manu-
script versions of the passage: "a living Thing/Which acts upon the
 Coleridge's Blessed Interval 81

mind." Gazing takes on "the character of a spiritual communion and

loses its 'grosser' meaning as an experience of the eye" (Ball 41). The
"Almighty Spirit ... makes Spirits perceive": the same word is used
for both divine and human. In this complex reciprocity, it is as a spirit
(not as a body) that the Spirit is perceived; but this is possible only
because the Spirit spiritualizes the body.
"A delight," the poet declares at the beginning of the third section,
"Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad/As I myself were there."
His imaginative participation in his friends' gazing brings release
and a re-perception of his own surroundings:

Nor in this bower,

This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark'd
Much that has sooth'd me. Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch'd
Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov'd to see
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree
Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight; and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in the bean-flower.

Even in this confined space, Coleridge now finds examples of "the

poetry of nature" (Biographia ii 5): the transparent foliage, the broad
and sunny leaf dappled by shadow, the rich colors of the walnut-
tree, the golden light of the setting sun on the ivy, the lighter greens
of the ivy against the dark mass of arborial foliage. There is the addi-
tional aesthetic charm of the mirroring of the first two stanzas in the
third (to which Wheeler [Creative 140-1] has called attention): the
dell relates to the bower, the ash to the walnut-tree, the foliage in one
place to that in the other, the bark on the ocean to the bat against
the sky. Finally, the solitary humble-bee sings in the bean-flower, a
natural mirroring or companionable form of the poet - solitary,
humble (non-egotistical), but nonetheless expressing itself musi-
cally. The bee's still audible sound echoes the big sound of the "still
roaring dell" in an aurally diminished way, just as the "late twi-
light" is a visual diminution of the gloriously setting sun of the sec-
ond stanza.
82 The Language of the Senses

This section of the poem also has the same pattern of progression
as the first two (see Benzon 1100): intense sensory and perceptual ac-
tivity with gradual narrowing of focus, followed by discursive
reflection ("methinks/' "I shall know") and then by epiphany:

when the last rook

Beat its straight path along the dusky air
Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross'd the mighty Orb's dilated glory,
While thou stood'st gazing; or, when all was still,
Flew creeking o'er thy head, and had a charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.

There is a double reference in "the mighty Orb's dilated glory." It

refers not only to the sun, but also to an eye become "soliform" as the
subjective precondition for the perception of the sun's radiance: "in
order to direct the view aright," as Plotinus says (in Coleridge's
translation), "it behoves that the beholder should have made himself
congenerous and similar to the object beheld. Never could the eye
have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soliform"
(Biographia i ii4~5n). Thus, the end of "This Lime-Tree Bower" con-
tains a diminished sunset version of spirits perceiving Spirit because
they have been spiritualized by it. And the declension from "vanish-
ing in light" to "creeking o'er thy head" - from the visually distant
to the aurally near; from sublimity to being "sooth'd"; from ecstasy
to "charm" - encapsulates the poem's key contrast between distant
perceptual stimulations of sublime feelings and sustaining natural
particulars nearer at hand. Since the difference is one of degree, not
of kind, the controlling trope is synecdoche: no natural sight or
sound is dissonant because each tells of the one life in which it partic-
ipates.

The non-problematic charm of "This Lime-Tree Bower" is missing

from "Frost at Midnight," which Coleridge wrote the following Feb-
ruary. The natural setting of the poem is the cold darkness and silence
of a winter midnight: there is little sensory acuity because there is
little to be acute about. The loudness of the "owlet's cry" clashes with
the silence - unlike the "stilly murmur of the distant sea" at the open-
 Coleridge's Blessed Interval 83

ing of "The Eolian Harp." With no sense of the one life within and
abroad, Coleridge's thought has no rhythm: the dead calm "disturbs/
And vexes meditation with its strange/And extreme silentness."
There is a comparable stillness inside the cottage. Coleridge's
"cradled infant slumbers peacefully"; a "thin blue flame" lies without
quivering on the "low-burnt fire." The "sole unquiet thing" is a film
fluttering in the grate. Faute de mieux, the "idling Spirit" of the poet,
"every where/Echo or mirror seeking of itself," seems to find in the
film "dim sympathies with me who live,/Making it a companionable
form." There is nothing at all unusual in this; as Coleridge observes in
The Friend, "In a self-conscious and thence reflecting being, no instinct
can exist, without engendering the belief of an object corresponding
to it, either present or future, real or capable of being realized" (i 497).
But one must distinguish among the kinds of corresponding thought
to be realized - that is, among the interpretations made of natural
facts. Like the low-burnt fire, the fluttering film is a suggestive meta-
phor of the speaker's "idling spirit." But he "interprets" the film as a
"companionable form" or answering other and thus as giving evi-
dence of the one life within and abroad. As such, the film would
appear to be what in the Statesman's Manual Coleridge calls an "arbi-
trary illustration ... a mere simile, the work of my own Fancy" (72).
In the next verse paragraph, attention shifts from present to past as
the speaker recalls a childhood experience in which the fluttering of a
film in a grate was given another subjective meaning, this time pro-
jected not by him alone but by popular superstition. As a footnote ex-
plains: "In all parts of the kingdom these films are called strangers and
supposed to portend the arrival of some absent friend." As a child, Col-
eridge had believed this superstition; often at Christ's Hospital in Lon-
don, where he had been sent to school at the age of ten, after gazing at a
fluttering film in the evening, the next morning in class he would watch
the door in expectation of the arrival of someone from his Devon birth-
place: "For still I hop'd to see the stranger's face,/Townsman, or aunt,
or sister more beloved." The reader is not told whether the arrivals pre-
saged by the film occurred, but it must have been the case that they did
not. Popular superstition posits in the film a meaning or a human refer-
ence that it does not possess and is therefore bound to result in disillu-
sionment. If an object is to function as "a symbol established in the
truth of things" (SM 72), its meaning must be discovered, not imposed.
This verse paragraph also contains the representation of a memory
of his birthplace that as a schoolboy Coleridge had once had: a sum-
mer fair-day during which the church bells rang all day, stirring and
haunting the child with "a wild pleasure," in part because they
84 The Language of the Senses

seemed a portent - seemed "like articulate sounds of things to come."

Even in the speaker's childhood, then, there was longing and unful-
fillment. At that time it was prospective; at school in London it was
retrospective. Thus a mirroring effect: the boy at school longing back-
ward in time to his "sweet birth-place" recovers a memory of himself
longing forward in time for "things to come." Moreover, this cameo in
the middle of "Frost at Midnight" itself mirrors the surrounding text
in which the adult speaker first remembers back in time to his child-
hood and then looks forward to the "things to come" for his infant son
asleep in the cradle next to him.
In the following stanza, Coleridge recalls that during his years
at Christ's Hospital he was "pent 'mid cloisters dim,/And saw
nought lovely but the sky and stars" - that is, his only experience of
the natural world was the visual observation of distant objects with
no proximate sensory contextualization. In contrast, he foresees that
during his son's crucially formative years he shall

wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

One might have expected the self-imaging to be represented by lakes

mirroring shores, crags, and clouds. But the kind of self-reflecting har-
mony described is different: this imaging relies on a perceiver to make
the connection, to note the similarities. Unlike the "echo or mirror seek-
ing" of the adult speaker, however, it does not involve subjective pro-
jection onto nature. The syntax of this eternal language largely consists
of parallelism, chiasmus and repetition. The lakes, shores and moun-
tain crags are each twice named; "lovely shapes and sounds intelli-
gible" is chiasmic, as is God's teaching "Himself in all, and all things in
Himself." These constructions are syntactic mirrorings of God's eternal
natural language which, as a Coleridgean symbol, is "always tautegori-
cal," always "expressing the same subject but with a difference ... in
contra-distinction from metaphors and similitudes, that are always alle-
gorical" (SM 3on).
 Coleridge's Blessed Interval 85

But this natural language is one to which only children have access.
In his poem of 1796, "The Destiny of Nations/' Coleridge declares that
"all that meets the bodily sense I deem/ Symbolical, one mighty alpha-
bet/For infant minds." The purpose of the alphabet is that "we may
learn with young unwounded ken/The substance from the shadow."
The post-childhood wound is self-consciousness, the loss of the feeling
of coextensiveness with the natural world, which prompts the longing
for a "companionable form" out there.
The long-term benefits of having learned the divine language are
asserted at the close of "Frost at Midnight":

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

For Coleridge's infant son, the poem's ending is prospectively posi-

tive: all seasons shall be sweet to thee.2 In "This Lime-Tree Bower,"
Coleridge's other-regarding vision of Charles Lamb's vision had a
positive value for himself as well as for Lamb. It is not at all clear that
the same may be said for his vision of his son's future in "Frost at
Midnight." The first of the two whether/or constructions may be
associated with the future of the infant: sweetness in all seasons -
even in winter, which is beautifully figured as a red-breasted bird
singing on a branch and flanked by white snow and green moss.
The second construction refers principally to the adult. The
"whether" clause describes "the eave-drops fall/Heard only in the
trances of the blast." A blast is a blowing or strong gust of wind.
The principal meaning of trance is a passage, a way through (from
the Latin transitus); in the aural sense of this line, the precise meaning
would be a pause or suspension. But the more usual meaning of the
word is an unconscious or insensible condition, a suspension of con-
sciousness, an intermediate state between sleeping and waking, or a
state of mental abstraction from external things. All of these mean-
ings are suggestive in relation to the perceiving consciousness of the
poem. At this second level of meaning the trances are a kind of hypal-
lage or transferred epithet (like the "swimming book" at line 38)
86 The Language of the Senses

referring to the speaker's idling or abstracted state. We have, then,

another instance of the doubling or mirroring of inner and outer:
the breaths of the infant inside the cottage fill up the vacancies and
momentary pauses (the trances) in the speaker's thought, while out-
side the drip of the eave-drops is heard in the trances of the blast.
Does this count as an instance of the one life? If so, it is a minimal
one. And it is further problematized by the fact that the storm or blast
of wind may be taken as a figure for the spirit or consciousness of the
adult, vexed by its sense of separation from external reality.
The second alternative in the final whether/or construction is
found in the final lines of the poem:

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Like the description of the lakes, shores and crags, that of the icicles
makes use of repetition. The last line repeats the word "quiet" first in
its abverbial, then its adjectival, form, both of which reinforce the
silence in the previous line. The image is also a repetition in that the
icicles are reflecting the light of the moon, which in turn is reflecting
that of the sun. Thus, both the recursive rhythm of the lines and the
icicles' reflective capability suggest that the image has a one-life, not
subjectively imposed, symbolic suggestiveness.
But precisely what is being suggested? Are the icicles a companion-
able form for the speaker? They come into being as a result of the
"ministry of frost" which, in a hint of the homey, hangs them up on
the eaves as if hanging out the washing. The religious connotations of
ministry also suggest, if not the existence of a providential order, at
least that one is at home in nature and that, since the icicles' arrival is
represented as the result of an intentional act, there is a force in the
natural world responsive to human need. But the operation of the
frost is secret; and like the secret strength of things that compels Shel-
ley's attention in "Mont Blanc," it cannot be known whether it is
benevolent, malevolent, or utterly indifferent to human need.
The secrecy of the frost, like the silence of the icicles, encapsulates a
root paradox of symbolic perception: if a natural object is permitted
to function symbolically, without the imposition of subjective inter-
pretations, then its meaning will tend to be known only to itself and
what it will tend to figure forth is its own compelling mysteriousness.
The silent icicles may thus be considered a symbol of the silence
of the natural world in response to the emotional interrogation by
 Coleridge's Blessed Interval 87

the poet searching for a companionable form. It would seem that, for
the adult who has lost the child's sense of wonder, there can be no
companionable form, though there may be simulacra. "Never can
love make consciousness and ascription equal in force," as Emerson
sadly observes in "Experience": "There will be the same gulf between
every me and thee, as between the original and the picture" (488).

"The Nightingale," composed in April 1798, two months after "Frost

at Midnight," has numerous intertextual connections with the conver-
sation poems that preceded it. The echoes and repeated motifs and
images indicate Coleridge's concern to work through pressing ques-
tions concerning symbolic perception and the one-life apprehension -
concerns presumably made more urgent by the problematic ending
of "Frost at Midnight." Indeed, "The Nightingale" is an anatomy of
these subjects, containing examples of no fewer than eight different
subject-object relationships.
From the point of view of the one life, the poem's opening is dis-
tinctly unpromising:

No cloud, no relique of the sunken day

Distinguishes the West, no long thin slip
Of sullen light, no obscure trembling hues.

What is not there in the west is a sunset - not a spectacular sunset as

in "This Lime-Tree Bower" or even a "slow saddening round" as at
the beginning of "The Eolian Harp." What is not there is an attenu-
ated, obscure sunset - a "sullen" sunset. The adjective, a transferred
epithet, suggests not only a sluggish perceptual or imaginative state,
but also a gloomy, unsociable temperament with a predisposition to
melancholy projection - like that found in the poets who made sun-
sets an opening cliche of eighteenth-century melancholy poetry (see
R.H. Hopkins 438). Their representative in "The Nightingale" is the
figure posited in lines 16-21:

some night-wandering man whose heart was pierced

With the remembrance of a grievous wrong,
Or slow distemper, or neglected love,
(And so, poor wretch! filled all things with himself,
And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale
Of his own sorrow).
88 The Language of the Senses

This profile recalls a number of poems Coleridge himself had written

in his early twenties and described in two prefaces of 1796, which
expound and defend the kind of poem "in which some lonely feeling
is developed." The finest examples were those compositions "in
which moral Sentiments, Affections, or Feelings, are deduced from,
and associated with, the scenery of Nature," thereby creating "a
sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the mate-
rial world" (Poems ii 1139).
But this is not the only figure of the poet in the opening section of
"The Nightingale." Another is the versifiers who "in building up the
rhyme" accept the convention that the nightingale is a melancholy
bird. They are of the tribe of wretched bards "in city pent" who in "To
the Nightingale" (1795) are said to address the bird as "Sister of love-
lorn Poets, Philomel." These poets "echo the conceit" of Milton's Pen-
seroso figure in two senses: both the use of conventional figures and
subjective projection (filling all things with themselves). The "youths
and maidens most poetical" who dance the night away are another
example of derivative versifiers. They are "poetical" in the pejorative
sense of inditing conventional and artificially exaggerated effusions.
Instead of listening to the sounds of nature, they rely on the conven-
tional figuration of the female nightingale and its putative "pity-
pleading strains."
Opposed to the projector of melancholy feelings, the conceited
bards, and the frivolous young people is the poet who surrenders his
whole spirit to nature - who has

stretched his limbs

Beside a brook in mossy forest-dell,
By sun or moon-light, to the influxes
Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements
Surrendering his whole spirit, of his song
And of his fame forgetful!

These lines are similar to a contemporaneous fragment of Words-

worth's.3 But where he stresses reciprocity, a combination of giving
and receiving, Coleridge emphasizes an intense but passive sensory
and perceptual receptiveness to nature's "influxes." The stretching of
limbs has only the passive sense of reposing, not the double sense it
had in "The Eolian Harp." What one is open to in this dell is a spec-
trum of mild pleasures, of which lines 4-11 (the description of the nat-
ural setting in which Coleridge is speaking to William and Dorothy
Wordsworth) had already provided an example. As night fell, all was
"still"; in contrast to the opening of "The Eolian Harp," there was "no
 Coleridge's Blessed Interval 89

murmuring" and no illumination from above. But there was a glim-

mer in the stream, and the old bridge was mossy. Used in both pas-
sages, "mossy" is a synecdoche for the two brookside settings. Softly
pleasing to the eye and to the touch, a blotch of green against a dark
wettish background, moss is a relique or token of the "green earth."
(It recalls the "bare branch/Of mossy apple-tree" in "Frost at Mid-
night," where it is in a similar micro-macro relationship to summer
"greenness.") In both mossy settings, we are at a remove from the
conventionally beautiful. Their genius loci is the self-effacing, non-
egotistical poet, a channel through which the "shapes and sounds and
shifting elements" of the natural world are represented in words.
The next section of "The Nightingale" foregrounds the poem's
speaker and his auditors: these three night wanderers are listening
to the ravishing sounds of "the merry Nightingale" whose sex is said
to be male rather than female (the conventional designation). For
them, the bird's notes are "delicious," and "always full of love/And
joyance." The trio do not hear "pity-pleading strains" but a rhapsodic
"love-chant." This is an aural parallel to what happened visually in
the poem's opening lines: conventional perceptions and associations
(the female nightingale as a melancholy bird) give way to a fresh
apprehension. But compared to what is seen from the bridge or in the
forest-dell, what is now heard in the same place has a substantial
upgrading in intensity: from mossy to merry; from delicate visual
particularization to encompassing aural rhapsody; from lulling tones
to robust assertion; from mild passive pleasure to creative exuber-
ance.
To invoke a favorite distinction of Coleridge's, is the cumulative
difference one of degree or one of kind? Is pleasure a low form of joy,
both involving "participation [in] a common spirit" (Philosophical
Lectures 179)? As in "The Eolian Harp," the difference is connected
with the shift from visual to aural apprehension of the natural
world: from the silent scene of lines 1-11, the pleasure of which is
prospective ("we shall find") and therefore a shade notional, to a
"thick warble [of] delicious notes" - a ravishment of present sound
in which duration seems suspended ("always"). Jean-Pierre Mileur
reads lines 40-9 not against the opening lines of the poem, but
against lines 16-22, the melancholy projections of the night-wander-
ing solitary. He concludes that "the more the poet strains ... to con-
vey his immediate response to the experience of the nightingale, the
more recourse he must take to figurative language and projection"
(for example, "love-chant," "a full soul," "as he were fearful"). As a
result, "the same critique which calls into question the assertion that
the nightingale is melancholy is equally destructive of Coleridge's
9O The Language of the Senses

counterassertion that nature is full of love and joyance" (49). This is

an excellent point; but Mileur does not consider whether the implied
author of "The Nightingale" is aware of this or not. There is no rea-
son to think that in propria persona Coleridge is taken in by this senti-
mental illusion (as a number of traditional commentators on "The
Nightingale" have been), and no reason not to regard it as simply
another item in the poem's anatomy of poetic relationships to na-
ture.
In the next section, the scene shifts to "a grove/Of large extent,
hard by a castle huge," where many nightingales congregate:

far and near,

In wood and thicket, over the wide grove,
They answer and provoke each other's song,
With skirmish and capricious passagings,
And murmurs musical and swift jug jug,
And one low piping sound more sweet than all -
Stirring the air with such a harmony,
That should you close your eyes, you might almost
Forget it was not day! On moonlight bushes,
Whose dewy leaflets are but half-disclosed,
You may perchance behold them on the twigs,
Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full,
Glistening, while many a glow-worm in the shade
Lights up her love-torch.

Here we have a non-projective, aesthetic perception of the nightin-

gales' singing, which is self-sufficient and self-sustaining, and has a
visual correlative in the multiple glistening of the birds' "eyes both
bright and full," which is mirrored in the amorous lighting up of the
glow-worms. The natural scene both echoes and reflects itself. Nature
is here both subject and object, needing no subjective figurations.
Into this setting comes another night wanderer, this time an ideal
figure - "a most gentle Maid" who has retained a childhood fresh-
ness of perception and a non-subjective sense of oneness with the nat-
ural world. For Mileur, she is "the self-effacing witness to nature as it
exists when the impositions of human edifice/artifice [represented by
the absenfgreat lord"and his huge dwelling] are withdrawn ... [Her]
self-effacing receptiveness ... allows her to observe the nightingales
without disrupting their natural behavior" (49-50). As such, one
should ask (as Mileur does not) how the maid differs from the poet
reclining in the mossy forest dell who is similarly self-effacing ("of his
fame forgetful"). The answer is that the maid is actively a part of her
setting, not an passive observer of it. She stretches her limbs in the
 Coleridge's Blessed Interval 91

active sense while traversing the grove's broken pathways; he has

passively surrendered his whole spirit to Nature; her calling is higher
- she is "vowed and dedicate/To something more than Nature in the
grove." She is supernal and full; he is earthly and empty.
The second description of the birds' singing is from the point of
view of the maid. After a pause of silence,

the moon
Emerging, hath awakened earth and sky
With one sensation, and those wakeful birds
Have all burst forth in choral minstrelsy,
As if some sudden gale had swept at once
A hundred airy harps! And she hath watched
Many a nightingale perch giddily
On blossomy twig still swinging from the breeze,
And to that motion tune his wanton song
Like tipsy Joy that reels with tossing head.

"With one sensation": that is to say, a mirroring or rhyming of earth

and sky, a synesthetic simultaneity of sound and sight that recalls the
"one life within us and abroad" passage in "The Eolian Harp," as
does the bald use of personification at the close of the passage. It is
one of a number of figures that make the reader aware of the perceiv-
ing subject - of the gentle maid's imaginative engagement with the
"choral minstrelsy" of the nightingales.
The last figure of the poet in "The Nightingale," the final night
wanderer, is the poet's infant son, who is "capable of no articulate
sound." The infant's eyes "glitter in the yellow moon-beam," recall-
ing the "glistening" of the "bright, bright eyes" of the nightingales as
observed by the gliding maid, and suggesting that he too is as much a
natural object as perceiving subject - that there is the same non-
subjective reciprocity between his eyes and the moon as between the
nightingales' harmonious answerings of each other's songs. The poet
describes how one night, when his "dear babe" awoke in a "most dis-
tressful mood" owing to "that strange thing, an infant's dream," he
brought his infant out into the moonlight, which at once cured his
distress. The father vows to make his son familiar with the nightin-
gale's song so that he will grow up to associate it with natural joy, not
conventional melancholy, and then bids his friends a final farewell.
The ending is light-hearted and upbeat. Is it also unproblematic -
the fitting close of a "merry poem, recording the ecstatic triumph of
friendship" (Whalley 114)? Have the darker implications of the end-
ing of "Frost at Midnight" been superseded? I do not believe so. For
one thing, the whole of the poem is less than the sum of its parts. The
92 The Language of the Senses

positive future predicted for the child no more reconciles the parts of
the father's meditative discourse than the same prediction did in
"Frost at Midnight." For another, the high spirits of the speaker at the
close of the poem seem more giddy than ecstatic - seem "Like tipsy
Joy that reels with tossing head/' to recall the peculiar figure (a per-
sonification used as the vehicle of a simile) used earlier in the poem to
describe the unsteady perch of the nightingales on swinging twigs.
The singing of these birds is one of a number subject-object relation-
ships instanced in the poem, the very proliferation of which suggests
that by the time he wrote "The Nightingale" Coleridge's thinking
about symbolic perception and the one life within and abroad had
become thoroughly equivocal.
Indeed, one might well wonder how long the high spirits of the poet
of "The Nightingale" will last. Will nature "always" be able to provide
relief from psychological distress? Can a mature poet "always" expect
to find natural objects "full of love and joyance"? What will happen if
Coleridge is without a beloved other - wife, intimate friends, child -
on whom to bestow the gift of the one life, when there is no one
present to make possible the circuit of communication that was a pre-
supposition of the constructive imaginative activity of the conversa-
tion poems?
The answer was not long in coming. "The Nightingale" was written
in April 1798; in September Coleridge left Somerset for Germany,
where he spent the next eleven months. The following May he climbed
the principal peak in the Hartz forest. "Lines Written in the Album at
Elbingerode" describes his descent through fir groves

Where bright green moss heaves in sepulchral forms

Speckled with sunshine; and, but seldom heard,
The sweet bird's song became a hollow sound;
And the breeze, murmuring indivisibly,
Preserved its solemn murmur most distinct
From many a note of many a waterfall,
And the brook's chatter; 'mid whose islet-stones
The dingy kidling with its tinkling bell
Leaped frolicsome, or old romantic goat
Sat, his white beard slow waving.

The aural and visual particulars of the natural setting are acutely
registered: the breeze murmurs; the brook chatters; the moss is speck-
led by the sunshine; the kidling is dingy; the goat's white beard waves
slowly. But something is not right: the particulars are not blended
or harmonized. They remain discrete; the breeze is perceived as indi-
 Coleridge's Blessed Interval 93

visible only because of its contrast to the scene in which it is simply

one of a number of disconnected items.
That is to say, no rhythm or one-life feeling integrates the particu-
lars of the scene. The reason, Coleridge reflects, is that "outward
forms ... receive/Their finer influence from the Life within; - /Fair
cyphers else." He might have added that the same is true of outward
sounds. As Emily Dickinson remarks of the oriole's song, whether it
be common or divine depends on the "Fashion of the Ear" that attires
what it hears "in Dun, or fair" (#526). It is the perceiver who finds
the bird's intermittent song to be hollow rather than resounding, and
the other natural sounds to be dissonant rather than harmonious. It is
he who supplies a sepulchral cast to the terrain.
As early as the spring of 1799, then, Coleridge had come to recog-
nize through its absence the importance of the subjective component
in perception. He had also recognized part of the reason his percep-
tion could no longer animate and unify the natural world and make it
positively signify: the natural particulars were "fair cyphers ... but of
import vague/Or unconcerning" because on that foreign slope his
English heart did not find "History or prophecy of friend, or child,/
Or gentle maid, our first and early love ..." There was no loved other
to raise Coleridge out of his "low and languid mood." Nor was he
any longer living in Somerset, the setting of the blessed interval, a
synecdoche for which was "the beautiful Fountain or natural Well at
Upper Stowey":

The images of the weeds which hung down from its sides, appeared as plants
growing up, straight and upright, among the water weeds that really grew
from the Bottom/& so vivid was the Image, that for some moments & not till
after I had disturbed the water, did I perceive that their roots were not neigh-
bours, & they side-by-side companions. So - even then I said - so are the
happy man's Thoughts and Things. (Notebooks ii #2557)

By the early iSoos, the blessed interval was in the past: Coleridge was
the opposite of a happy man and the distance between his thoughts
and things had become unbridgeable. In the spring of 1801, he wrote
to William Godwin from Keswick in the Lake District, where he had
moved with his family the year before: "You would not know me -!
all sounds of similitude keep at such a distance from each other in my
mind, that I have forgotten how to make a rhyme ... I look at
the Mountains only for the Curves of their outlines; the Stars, as I
behold them, form themselves into Triangles." Coleridge developed
94 The Language of the Senses

two striking images of his condition (they are among the first of a
number of extraordinary prose analogies he used over the next three
decades to figure his post-poetic, post-creative being):

The Poet is dead in me - my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that

had been imaginative) lies, like a Cold Snuff on the circular Rim of a Brass
Candle-stick, without even a stink of Tallow to remind you that it was once
cloathed & mitred with Flame. That is past by! -1 was once a Volume of Gold
Leaf, rising & riding on every breath of Fancy - but I have beaten myself
back into weight & density, & now I sink in quicksilver, yea, remain squat
and square on the earth amid the hurricane, that makes Oaks and Straws join
in one Dance, fifty yards high in the Element. (Letters ii 714)

A year later, he described his torpid condition at greater length in

another letter - the verse epistle "A Letter to —,"4 which in shortened
and rearranged form was published later that year as "Dejection: An
Ode." The addressee is Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth's
wife, whom Coleridge had met in 1799, and was to love from a
distance for many years. A number of the verse letter's features recall
the conversation poems written a few years before: the evocative
evening and night skies; the stilly murmuring of a bee-hive, that
"ever-busy & most quiet Thing"; a bird's song heard as darkness
falls; the wind animating the strings of a wind harp; and the bestowal
of natural bounty on a composite figure of beloved, friend, and
"Sister." What is striking is that in each case these features have lost
their power to animate the speaker - to stimulate creative perception
and a sense of the one life. Coleridge sees but does not feel the beauty
of the heavens; the murmuring bee-hive is something remembered
from the past; he is "vainly woo'd" from his "heartless Mood" by the
throstle; the "dull sobbing" lute "better far were mute" (when later
in the poem its strings are "boldlier swept" it sounds first like
"a Scream/Of agony by Torture lengthen'd out" and then like the
pathetic crying of a lost child); that the absent Sara is simultaneously
gazing at the same evening sky is a "Sweet Thought... yet feebly stirs
my Heart!"
What happened? What caused the heavy change from the blessed
interval to the state in which Coleridge felt himself cut off from
active interchange with the natural world, virtually stopped writing
poetry, and began to downgrade the importance of nature? This
change has been variously explained and it is clear that a number of
factors were involved (see Modiano Concept 29). One was simply
that the season of youth had ended. Genius and joy, Coleridge later
reflected, are "liveliest in youth, not from any principle in organiza-
 Coleridge's
hh Blessed Interval

tion but simply from this that the hardships of life, that the cir-
cumstances that have forced a man in upon his little unthinking
contemptible self, have lessened his power of existing universally"
(Philosophical Lectures 179). The hardships included chronic domestic
turmoil that was only resolved by Coleridge's permanent separation
from his wife and children; complications in his friendship with
Wordsworth; and his hopeless love for Sara Hutchinson. There was
no present or prospective love or joyance to initiate the one-life
sense; rarely did Coleridge feel "that sort of stirring warmth about
the Heart, which is with me the robe of incarnation of my [poetic]
genius, such as it is" (Letters iii 5).
This was compounded by the recurrence of a "mental disease"
first experienced during adolescence: the tendency to become ab-
sorbed in "abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and
subtlety of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the
heart" (Biographia i 17). In 1801, Coleridge explained to William
Godwin that as a result of physical and mental distress "I have been
compelled ... to seek resources in austerest reasonings - & have
thereby ... denaturalized my mind" (Letters ii 725).5 This denatural-
ization was furthered by Coleridge's increasing religious orthodoxy.
As we have seen, as early as "The Eolian Harp" there were indica-
tions that he regarded the mind-nature symbiosis as connected with
an infirmity in his character, a tendency to indolence and self-
indulgent passivity - to being "Morbidly soft" as he described him-
self in "A Letter to —." By the early iSoos, guilt over his reliance on
opium had intensified Coleridge's sense of himself as a weak and
sinful creature needing the support of a merciful heavenly Father.
But one could argue that all of the above are as much symptoms
or results of the loosening of the bond with nature as they are causes
of it, and that the underlying reasons for Coleridge's loss of the one-
life feeling are to be found in the deterioration of his sensory-
perceptual life. As we have seen, this inevitable diminution is the
subject of the Intimations Ode; it was the first part of Wordsworth's
poem (stanzas 1-4) that prompted Coleridge's analysis of the episte-
mological basis of his condition in "Dejection." He could not hope
"from outward forms to win" passion and life because their sources
were within himself. It was from the "the soul itself" that illumina-
tion and sweet sounds must come. They were the outflow of "Joy":

Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,

Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower
A new Earth and new Heaven,
96 The Language of the Senses

And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,

All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colours a suffusion from that light.

The sad wisdom of the Intimations Ode is that the fading of these
sounds and sights is an inevitable part of the human life cycle. In
Coleridge's case, the condition of "diminished impressibility from
Things" (Letters ii 782) was accelerated by a precipitate decline in his
physical health. Letters written between 1796 and 1806 give a great
deal of information concerning his physical afflictions, which had
three principal components. One was the chronic rheumatic disease
which had begun in childhood. Coleridge was free of most of its
symptoms during the years he lived in Somerset in the later 17905;
but in the damp climate of the Lake District his health rapidly deterio-
rated (see Lefebure 45-8). Another component was chronic infections
in the otolaryngeal area (Rea 16-18). This condition is part of the
explanation of Coleridge's lament in "Dejection" concerning the spark-
ling stars and the crescent moon: "I see them all so excellently fair,/I
see, not feel, how beautiful they are!" The physiological dynamics of
human olfaction are such that the slightest barrier between odorifer-
ous molecules and the receptor cells at the root of the nasal cavity will
entirely suppress the sense of smell. This fact is well known to per-
sons with allergic rhinitis, nasal polyps, and other chronic sinus prob-
lems. So is the fact that with a sinus infection, taste and hearing can
also be affected; sounds, for example, can become muffled and echo-
ing. When this happens, the sensory apprehension of a bright sum-
mer day or the sky on a clear night may be greatly reduced; it can be
like looking at the outside world through a plate-glass window: one
sees but cannot feel the beauty of the natural world.
The third component was Coleridge's opium addiction, which by
the early iSoos had become chronic. One result of this addiction is a
dulling of the sensory faculties, which is most pronounced in the
case of tactile sensation, including sexual sensitivity (see Schneider
Coleridge 41-3; Fruman 164-5). m a notebook entry of 1805, Coleridge
speaks of "the influence of bodily vigor and strong Grasp of Touch in
facilitating the passion of Hope" (ii #2398). In another entry made
four years later, this passion is conspicuous by its absence:

O! Heaven! one thousandfold combinations of Images that pass hourly in

this divine Vale, while I am dozing & muddling away my Thoughts & Eyes -
O let me rouse myself - If I even begin mechanically, & only by aid of mem-
ory look round and call each thing by a name - describe it, as a trial of skill in
words - it may bring back fragments of former Feeling - For we can live only
by feeding abroad, (iii #3420)
 Coleridge's Blessed Interval 97

Moreover, as Coleridge knew, the sense of touch was also an essential

component in the visual perception of "magnitudinal sublimity"
(Notebooks ii #2402). Without it, one could not distinguish qualitatively
between sublime and mock sublime - for example between moun-
tains and smoke from a coal-fire or the bole of a pipe. By the early
iSoos, when he wrote "Apologia pro Vita Sua" and "Hymn before
Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni," Coleridge had lost the ability to
make this distinction.
In Biographia, Coleridge uses the movement of a small water-insect
as a figure for the creative activity of the mind in perception. In 1825,
another small insect was used in a very different figuration:

Have you ever noticed the Vault or snug little Apartment which the Spider
spins and weaves for itself, by spiral threads round and round, and some-
times with strait lines, so that it's Lurking-parlour or Withdrawing-room is
an oblong square? This too connected itself in my mind with the melancholy
truth ... that as we advance in years, the World, that spidery Witch, spins it's
threads narrower and narrower, still closing in on us, till at last it shuts us up
within four walls, walls of flues and films, windowless - and well if there be
sky-lights, and a small opening left for the Light from above. (Letters v 414)

The light from above is that of the Christian God; it was the only pos-
sible illumination for Coleridge after the loss of the intersensory one-
life illumination - the light in sound and sound-like power in light -
that had informed his poetry during the blessed interval three decades
earlier.
 six

Thoreau: A Purely Sensuous Life

Thoreau began to keep a journal in 1837, when he was twenty-one. Its

first entry reads: " 'What are you doing now?' he asked, 'Do you keep
a journal?' - So I make my first entry to-day." The interlocutor was
almost certainly Emerson, who had been keeping a journal for seven-
teen years and encouraging those who were coming under his influ-
ence to do the same. Thoreau kept up his journal for the next quarter
century until ill health forced him to stop some months before he
died of tuberculosis in May 1862 at the age of forty-four. By that time
it had become an enormous document of over two million words and
the central work of his literary life.
In its earliest phase, the journal was an omnium gatherum of pas-
sages from Thoreau's reading, his poetry, and his thoughts. In the
second phase, it became a workbook in which he drafted passages
intended for essays, lectures and for the two books published during
his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and VJolden.
The commercial failure of the former in 1849 caused Thoreau to
reassess his literary ambitions. Shortly thereafter the journal entered
its third and final phase in which he regularly recorded his detailed
observations of the natural world. "Whatever things I perceive with
my entire man," he wrote in 1851, "those let me record - and it will
be poetry." For example, "the sounds which I hear with the consent &
coincidence of all my senses these are significant & musical." Thoreau
also continued to record his thoughts, but the dominant subject of
the last dozen years of the journal is his "constant intercourse with
nature and the contemplation of natural phenomenon," which he
regarded as essential to "the preservation of [his] Moral & intellectual
health" (*/ iv 28; iii 217).
 Thoreau: A Purely Sensuous Life 99

An early entry speaks of "the best thought" as being "not only

without sombreness - but even without morality. The universe lies
outspread in floods of white light to it. The moral aspect of nature is a
disease caught of man - a jaundice imported into her ... Occasionally
we rise above the necessity of virtue into an unchangeable morning
light" (*/ i 315). In such early entries Thoreau seems to think that this
higher state of consciousness is to be reached through the superses-
sion or transcendence of the senses. In 1838, for example, he noted:
"If with closed ears and eyes I consult consciousness for a moment -
immediately are all walls and barriers dissipated - earth rolls from
under me, and I float... in the midst of an unknown & infinite sea ...
I am from the beginning - knowing no end, no aim. No sun illumines
me, - for I dissolve all lesser lights in my own intenser and steadier
light" (*/ i 50). In time, however, Thoreau came to realize that it was
through "the coincidence of our life with the life of nature," the
"mysterious relation between myself" and the particulars of the natu-
ral world, that this enhanced consciousness was attained. The key to
expanded consciousness was to "Employ your senses" (*/ iv 290,468;
iii 261). "We need pray for no higher heaven," he writes at the end of
A Week,

than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses
are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become. We are compara-
tively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste or feeling. Every
generation makes the discovery, that its divine vigor has been dissipated, and
each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched. The ears were made, not
for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds.
The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and
worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. May we not see God? Are
we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? Is
not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the sym-
bol merely? ... What is it, then, to educate but to develope these divine germs
called the senses? (382)

Because of the painstaking care with which he recorded his interac-

tions with the natural world, it is possible to develop a detailed sen-
sory profile of Thoreau. Touch had comparatively little value for him
because there could be no distance between subject and object: "It
would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as
where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should
touch him." Moreover, touch was the channel of "the generative
energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean,
[but which] when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chas-
tity is the flowering of man" (Walden 136, 219-20). While he greatly
ioo The Language of the Senses

admired the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, Thoreau warned a corre-

spondent that "There are 2 or 3 pieces in [Whitman's] book which are
disagreeable to say the least, simply sensual. He does not celebrate
love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke. I think that men have not been
ashamed of themselves without reason" (Harding 375).
Unlike touch, there were positive aspects to taste, the other sense
that did not allow for distance. Thoreau had on occasion "derived an
inexpressible satisfaction from ... food in which appetite had no share"
- and he was "thrilled to think that I owed a mental perception to the
commonly gross sense of taste, that I have been inspired through the
palate, that some berries which I had eaten on a hill-side had fed my
genius." The reference is to the huckleberries he found growing on
Fair Haven Hill, which only retained their true flavor and "essential
part" when they grew wild and were consumed by the person who
had picked them (Walden 218, 173). Other berries, as well as apples,
grapes, peaches, and nuts, also provided spiritual sustenance: "I have
felt when partaking of this inspiring diet that my appetite was an
indifferent consideration - that eating became a sacrament - a method
of communion - an extatic exercise a mingling of bloods" (*/ ii 165).
But such occasions were rare and against the grain of this lower,
appetitive sense. For many years, Thoreau rarely used "animal food,
or tea, or coffee, &c." because they were "not agreeable to my imagi-
nation ... I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to
preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been
particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much
food of any kind" (Walden 214-15). The fowls in neighboring barns
were "worth far more to me for their crowing & cackling - than for
their drumsticks & eggs." He could find no difference between the
hunter with his "taste for mud turtles & muskrats & skunks and
other such savage tid bits" and the "fine lady" who indulged "a taste
for some form of potted cheese or jelly made of a calf's foot or ancho-
vies from over the water ... He goes to the mill pond - she to her pre-
serve pot." How could they, how could Thoreau himself, "live this
slimy beastly kind of life - eating & drinking?" (*/ iii 302, 65-6).
Thoreau believed that he possessed "the sense of smell in greater
perfection than usual" and that there were "odors enough in nature
to remind you of everything, if you had lost every sense but smell"
(*/ iv 79; / iv 27). Certainly acute olfactory notation is abundant in the
journal: for example, "the scent of bruised pine leaves where a sled
had passed"; the "strong urine-like scent" from "a pile of red oak
recently split in the woods & now wet with rain"; the "great variety
in the fragrance of the apple blossoms." And one September night he
experienced a particularly sweet olfactory moment: "A field of ripen-
 Thoreau: A Purely Sensuous Life 101

ing corn ... that has been topped with the stalks stacked up to dry -
an inexpressibly dry rich sweet ripening scent. I feel as if I were an
ear of ripening corn myself. Is not the whole air then a compound of
such odors undistinguishable. Drying corn stalks in a field what an
herb-garden" (*/ iv 326, 395; iii 81; iv 48).
But the higher senses of sight and hearing were Thoreau's principal
conveyors of intimations of the one life within and abroad. As a
young man, he had held the traditional view of the superiority of
sight:

The eye does the least drudgery of any of the senses.- It oftenest escapes to a
higher employment - The rest serve, and escort, and defend it -1 attach some
superiority even priority to this sense. It is the oldest servant in the soul's
household - it images what it imagines - it ideates what it idealizes. Through
it idolatry crept in - which is a kind of religion ... Of five casts [castes] it is the
Brahmin - it converses with the heavens ... We see truth - We are children of
light our destiny is dark. No other sense has so much to do with the
future. (*/ii82)

This is the Emersonian eye, the organ of spiritual insight: "its axle is
the axle of the soul" (*/ i 155). For the young Thoreau, it was "more
proper for a spiritual fact to have suggested an analogous natural
one, than for the natural fact to have preceded the spiritual in our
minds" (*/ i 231). At this moralizing level of symbolic perception, the
eye is necessarily predominant because of its ideating and idealizing
power. The result is an emblematic image or (in Coleridge's phrase)
loose simile that is the product of conceptual transference rather than
sensory acuity. For example, "The snow falls on no two trees alike,
but the forms it assumes are as various as those of the twigs and
leaves which receive it. They are as it were predetermined by the
genius of the tree. So one divine spirit descends alike on all, but bears
a peculiar fruit in each" (*/ i 239-40).
In the years of Thoreau's most intense observation of the natural
world, however, the eye is not predominant. Sight and sound are
equally important, and in the moments when he rises above the neces-
sity of virtue and the moral aspect of nature, both senses are likely to
be involved. The eye and the ear had close-up capabilities: "To dis-
cover a gleam in the trenches, and hear a music in the rattling of the
tool we work with - is to have an eye and an ear" (*J i 213). But their
principal superiority lay in the ability to sense what was at a distance.
There was a ratio between extensiveness in space and intensiveness of
feeling: as he puts it in an early entry: "To the senses that is farthest
from me which addresses the greatest depth within me" (*/ i 199). For
1O2 The Language of the Senses

Thoreau, "the imagination require[d] a long range" (/xiiii/), and

only sight and hearing could furnish distant sensations. In his hyper-
bole of 1842: "All sights and sounds are seen and heard both in time
and eternity" (*/ i 400). Nine years later, when a wire for a magnetic
telegraph was strung on poles along the railway line that skirted
Walden Pond, he was soon recording in his journal that its vibration
"reminded me ... of what finer & deeper stirrings I was susceptible ...
a triumphant though transient exhibition of the truth. It told me by the
faintest imaginable strain - it told me by the finest strain that a human
ear can hear - yet conclusively & past all refutation - that there were
higher infinitely higher plains of life - which it behoved me never to
forget" (*/iv 75-6). And in Walden, what is at the utmost limit of the
perceptible is used to figure "the true harvest of my daily life": it is
"somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or
evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which
I have clutched" (216-17).
The ear was not only the equal of the eye. Some of Thoreau's com-
mentators have even claimed "supremacy" for this sense "as the
instrumentality of correspondence and insight" (Paul 512). The ear
undoubtedly had certain advantages over the eye. For one thing, at
least for the young Thoreau, sound had a restorative, renovating capa-
bility and could make an immediate physical impact on the auditor:
"Nature always possesses a certain sonorousness, as in the hum of
insects - the booming of ice - the crowing of cocks in the morning and
the barking of dogs in the night - which indicates her sound state ... I
drink in a wonderful health - a cordial - in sound." The pun is more
apparent in another passage in which Thoreau declares that a test
of health in persons is to determine "if their sensuous existence is
sound" (""71277, 274). Another advantage enjoyed by sound, a
"double virtue," was that it could produce an echo, which was "to
some extent an independent sound - and therein is the magic and
charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of my voice - but it is in some
measure the voice of the wood" (*/ i 320; iv 143).
Sound was also complemented and enhanced by its powerful
opposite, silence. The stillness of an August morning seemed "deep
& significant - each sound seems to come from out a greater thought-
fulness in nature - as if nature had acquired some character & mind
... I whose life was but yesterday so desultory & shallow - suddenly
recover my spirits - my spirituality through my hearing." And when
silence was unpunctuated by sound, as in the "monumental stillness"
of a March night, the "void must be supplied by thought- It extracts
thought from the beholder as the void under a cupping glass ... raises
a swelling" (*/ iii 368; iv 381), Finally, sound more than sight had a
 Thoreau: A Purely Sensuous Life 103

something-evermore-about-to-be aspect: "I was always conscious of

sounds in nature which my ears could never hear-that I caught but
the prelude to a strain- She always retreats as I advance- Away and
behind is she and her meaning- Will not this faith and expectation
make to itself ears at length." As he notes in an entry concerning the
"twittering sound of birds" in the spring dawn: "Expectation may
amount to prophecy" (*/ i 365; iv 415).
Thoreau was calculating in exploiting the potential of the eye and
ear. In order for "the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar/' to
appear very different, all one had to do was to observe it "from a point
a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine" (/ viii 44). For
example, "you have only to stand on your head a moment to be
enchanted with the beauty of the landscape"; the same was true of
looking at a landscape through the bottom of a tumbler (*/ iii 101;
i 129-30). Sometimes the best vantage point was the one that showed
"an indistinct prospect, a distant view, a mere suggestion" (/ ix 495).
Thoreau knew that reflections in water (pools and puddles as well as
ponds, lakes, and rivers) could show familiar natural objects in a new
way. In early November, for instance, a red oak was "a warm greenish
yellow" when seen against the opposite woods; its reflection was inky
black against a clear whitish sky (/ x 156). Certain atmospheric condi-
tions could also intensify visual perception. Mist, for example, "com-
pelled [Thoreau] to look at near objects ... My power of observation
and contemplation is much increased" (/ viii 14). The question was not
"what you look at - but how you look & whether you see" (*/ iii 355).
Or how you listened and whether you heard. "Near at hand you
could fancy" the sound of a hooting owl "the most melancholy sound
in Nature" and even find it "expressive of a mind which has reached
the gelatinous mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy
and courageous thought ... But now one answers from far woods in
a strain made really melodious by distance" (Walden 125). And on a
warm night in June, "the sense of hearing is wonderfully assisted &
asserts a new dignity." Then the squeaking sound made by night-
hawks high in the air was "not so fugacious going off to be lost amid
the spheres but is echoed hollowly to earth - making the low roof of
heaven vibrate- Such a sound is more confused & dissipated by day"
(*/ iii 250).
Most of Thoreau's perceptual tactics are subsumed by his strategic
notion of "sauntering." To succeed "to the highest & worthiest ends"
one had to abandon all specific goals; one needed to have "a genius,
so to speak, for sauntering." Sauntering meant walking "so gently as
to hear the finest sounds - the faculties being in repose- Your
mind must not perspire" (*/ iii 176, 329). Its opposite was the direct
104 The Language of the Senses

purposive scrutiny of the natural world. "I think that the man of
science makes this mistake/' he wrote in 1857, "and the mass of
mankind along with him: that you should coolly give your chief
attention to the phenomenon which excites you as something inde-
pendent [of] you, and not as it is related to you. The important fact is
its effect on me" (/ x 164-5). The astronomer was "as blind to the
significant phenomena - or the significance of phenomena as the
wood-sawyer who wears glasses to defend his eyes from sawdust"
(*/ iii 354). The woodchopper who worked in the woods for weeks or
months at a time was in some respects more open to natural impres-
sions than the naturalist and more intimately acquainted with
the phenomena of nature. Not enough of the "unconscious life" of
the naturalist was passed in the woods: "A man can hardly be said
to be there if he knows that he is there ... The man who is bent upon
his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrele-
vant to his work. (Mem. Wordsworth's obs. on relaxed attention)"
(*/ iv 192-3).
A change in the time of day during which one sauntered could have
a significant impact on what was seen and heard: "If I should reverse
the usual, go forth & saunter in the woods all the forenoon then sit
down in my chamber in the afternoon," Thoreau felt sure "it would
be like a new season to me & the novelty of it inspire me" (*/ iii 329).
A tactic he did employ regularly was sauntering in the evening and at
night. During the former, "The greater stillness - the serenity of the
air - its coolness & transparency the mistiness being condensed - are
favorable to thought. (The pensive eve.)." The stillness made "every
sound ... music," while the coolness condensed "the haze of noon &
[made] the air transparent and the outline of objects firm & distinct.
& chaste (chaste eve)." Sometimes "the pure light that attends the
setting sun ... itself is the phenomenon - and no single object is so dis-
tinct to our admiration as the light itself" (*/ iv 22-3; ii 43). And one
evening at Walden Pond Thoreau experienced a particularly sweet
moment of sensory integration (of what he called perceiving with the
entire man) and of oneness with the natural world:

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes
delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a
part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt
sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing spe-
cial to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bull-
frogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne
on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder
and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my seren-
ity is rippled but not ruffled. (Walden 129)
 Thoreau: A Purely Sensuous Life 105

Because of the waning of the light, nothing attracts Thoreau's eye;

the only visual notation in the passage is the fluttering of the alder
and poplar leaves. But a visual image (rippling) is used to figure
both the undulating serenity of his consciousness and the sound of
the wind - the atmospheric channel through which other sounds (the
trump of bullfrogs, the note of a whippoorwill) reach him. The mir-
roring of outer and inner figures the rhythmic continuum of the one
life within and abroad, while the synesthetic image intimates the per-
ceptual richness of the experience. Moreover, this figuration is itself a
mirroring in different sensory modes of the unruffled haptic intensi-
ties of the beginning of the passage, where the body is described as
one sense drinking in delight through every pore.
Sauntering at night offered, not a refinement of day, but something
different: "Instead of the sun there are the moon & stars - instead of
the wood thrush there is the whippoorwill." Fireflies replaced butter-
flies and instead of singing birds there was "the croaking of frogs &
the intenser dream of crickets- The potatoes stand up straight - the
corn grows - the bushes loom" (*/ iii 92). A principal cause of noctur-
nal perceptual enhancement was moonlight. More valuable "for what
it suggests than for what it actually is," moonlight gave a "new qual-
ity" to the natural world. In moonlight "the shadows of rocks - &
trees & bushes & hills - are more conspicuous than the objects them-
selves"; and in certain conditions moonlight could even take "the civ-
ilization all out of the landscape" (*/ iii 286, 300, 92; iv 47). Moreover,
moonlight was "peculiarly favorable to reflection" in two senses. On
a June night, Thoreau noted that a distant river and pond were
"reflecting the light with a faint glimmering sheen ... The water
shines with an inward light like a heaven on earth ... a certain glory
attends on water by night. By it the heavens are related to the earth"
(*/ iv 86; iii 259-60). Moonlight was also "more favorable to medita-
tion," to human reflection, than sunlight: "what a man does abroad
by night requires more energy & thought - than what he is encour-
aged to do in the sunshine - he is more spiritual - less vegetable"
(*/ iii 354; iv 381).
One night in July 1851, sight and hearing collaborated to produce
a more powerful sense of the one life within and abroad than the
unruffled evening experience cited above:

In Baker's Orchard the thick grass looks like a sea of mowing in this weird
moonlight - a bottomless sea of grass- our feet must be imaginative - must
know the earth in imagination only as well as our heads. We sit on the fence,
& where it is broken & interupted the fallen & slanting rails are lost in the
grass (really thin & wiry) as in water. We ever see our tracks a long way
behind, where we have brushed off the dew. The clouds are peculiarly wispy
io6 The Language of the Senses

wispy tonight some what like fine flames - not massed and dark nor downy -
not thick but slight thin wisps of mist -1 hear the sound of Heywood's brook
falling into Fair Haven Pond - inexpressibly refreshing to my senses - it
seems to flow through my very bones.- I hear it with insatiable thirst- It
allays some sandy heat in me- It affects my circulations - methinks my
arteries have sympathy with it What is it I hear but the pure water falls within
me in the circulation of my blood - the streams that fall into my heart?- what
mists do I ever see but such as hang over - & rise from my blood- The sound
of this gurgling water - running thus by night as by day - falls on all my
dashes - fills all my buckets - overflows my float boards - turns all the
machinery of my nature makes me a flume - a sluice way to the springs of
nature- Thus I am washed thus I drink - & quench my thirst. (*/ iii 301)

As this passage develops, the scene becomes increasingly insubstan-

tial and the boundary between inner and outer increasingly blurred.
In the moonlight, the landscape appears aqueous: the orchard is a
bottomless sea of grass; the fence is lost in the grass as in water; the
human tracks, visible because of the disturbance to the dew, look like
the wake of a vessel. While the visual elements in the scene - the dis-
appearing rails of the fence, the wispy wispy clouds - are attenuated,
the auditory elements are enhanced. Since "acoustic space implies
presence far more than does visual space," sounds heard outdoors at
night tend to "register in the imagination as presences" more than
visual particulars do (Ong 164). As the gurgling water of the
brook, which simultaneously creates and satisfies an insatiable thirst,
comes increasingly to dominate the consciousness of the observer,
the merging of inner and outer is completed. Natural and human cir-
culation are felt to be identical; the outer becomes the amplification
of the inner.

This experience is about as intense and transporting as moments

of oneness with the natural world get in Thoreau's journal. For all
his tactics and strategy, for all his repeated concern to attain a higher,
expanded consciousness through sensory experience, the journal
describes very few experiences of an intensity that might be called
sublime. And in the last decade of his life, few if any moments com-
parable to the one that occurred in Baker's Orchard are recorded.
While Thoreau often gets warm, and sometimes hot, he rarely comes
to a boil.
In attempting to explain this comparatively low energy level, com-
mentators have called attention to two complicating factors in Tho-
reau's relationship to nature. One is his intense self-consciousness
 Thoreau: A Purely Sensuous Life 107

and rigorous spiritual hygiene. "We are not wholly involved in

Nature/' he writes in the "Solitude" chapter of Walden: "By a con-
scious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their
consequences." He was "sensible of a certain doubleness by which I
can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense
my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part
of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no
experience" (134-5). This self-consciousness was intensified by a
strong sense of inner impurity (already instanced in his fastidious-
ness concerning touch and taste). As a young man, Thoreau found
"an instinct in me conducting to a mystic spiritual life - and also
another - to a primitive savage life." Years later, he made a not dis-
similar observation: "After the era of youth is passed the knowledge
of ourselves is an alloy that spoils our satisfactions ... What is this
beauty in the Landscape but a certain fertility in me? I look in vain to
see it realized but in my own life. If I could wholly cease to be
ashamed of myself -1 think that all my days would be fair" (*/ ii 177;
iii 124).
The other explanation calls attention to the resistance that the
natural world offered to Thoreau's desires. The best-known example
is the horrifying realization of nature's otherness that he experienced
while descending Mount Katahdin in the Maine wilderness: "It is
difficult to conceive of a country uninhabited by man ... And yet
we have not seen nature unless we have once seen her thus vast
and grim and drear ... for to be Vast is how near to being waste ...
this was unhanselled and ancient Demonic Nature ... nature primi-
tive - powerful gigantic aweful and beautiful, Untamed forever"
(*/ ii 277-8). But equally unsettling examples were found closer to
home. Here, for example, is a passage in which Thoreau, like Wallace
Stevens' Snow Man, is forced to have a mind of winter - to behold
nothing that is not there and the nothing that is:

A cold & dark [November] afternoon the sun being behind clouds in the west
The landscape is barren of objects - the trees being leafless - & so little light
in the sky for variety. Such a day as will almost oblige a man to eat his own
heart. A day in which you must hold on to life by your teeth ... what do the
thoughts find to live on? What avails you now the fire you stole from
heaven? ... Now is there nothing - not even the cold beauty of ice crystals -
& snowy architecture. Nothing but the echo of your steps over the frozen
ground no voice of birds - nor frogs ... The earth will not admit a spade. All
fields lie fallow - Shall not your mind? (*/ iv 180-1)

Both self-consciousness and the stubbornness of natural facts are

emphasized by Frederick Garber and James Mclntosh in their studies
io8 The Language of the Senses

of Thoreau published during the 19705. The former finds throughout

Thoreau's writings "differing and even contradictory assertions dur-
ing the same period of time" that indicate "a stubborn, radical ambiv-
alence in his sense of the world and himself" (103, 169). The latter
finds "programmed inconsistency," a "persistent self-qualification"
rooted in "his chief epistemological concern, the separation he felt
between mind and nature." Thoreau's "intermittent skepticism tends
to erode his faith in a combining imagination and prompts him to
look for truth in utter factuality" (11, 46, 128). It is well to remember,
however, that Garber and Mclntosh both read Thoreau in the light of
the Hartman, de Man and Bloom revisionary reading of Wordsworth,
which stressed the antagonism between imagination and the natural
world and the drive of the former to overcome the latter. As a result,
these commentators might themselves be said to be programmatic in
pointing up a putative Thoreauvian equivocation.
The same might be said of Sharon Cameron's Writing Nature: Henry
Thoreau's "Journal" (1985), which presents Thoreau as a deconstruc-
tionist avant la lettre. For Cameron, the years 1850 to 1852 are crucial
because during that time Thoreau began to speculate "about a man's
relation to nature." In the journal, she contends, "the central Romantic
question - 'What is man's relation to the nature that he sees' - under-
goes drastic revision" (25,11). The journal "proposes and subverts the
idea of correspondence. The whole of nature may be a metaphor
for the human mind, but Thoreau's formulations emphasize failed
attempts to make, sense of the congruence." In the journal, "analogies
do not inaugurate connections between nature and the mind. They
rather call attention to the impossibility of such connection" (45, 46).
The copious naturalist detail in the journal's final phase was a "strat-
egy for writing about nature that resists being symbolic." Metaphors
were frequently used "not to compare natural and human worlds, but
rather to expand the domain of the former, to insist on nature's infi-
nite self-referentiality" (61,13).
Where Cameron is deconstructive and de-idealizing, H. Daniel
Peck in Thoreau's Morning Work (1990) is recuperative and speaks of a
"redemptive purpose" at work in the journal. According to Peck, for
"the vertical design of Emerson's metaphysic" Thoreau substituted
"a 'horizontal' framework of perception" in which "the most charac-
teristic object of vision is the relation between one feature of the
landscape and another." This "relational imagination" resulted in
analogies and correspondences different from what Emerson or the
younger Thoreau intended by the terms. The exhaustive cataloguing
and comparing of observations in the last phase was not the sign of
ebbing vitality. The late journal was "intensely systematic [but] not
mechanical"; it expressed "another kind of excitement: the drama of
consolidation, of assembling the parts of the grand vision, of com-
pleting the picture of the world" (54, 88, 90).
Whose reading is more convincing, Cameron's or Peck's? One
could equivocate, citing the former's observation that interpretation
of an enormous work written over many years depends on the selec-
tion of quotations. But I am not persuaded by either reading, and
believe there is a better explanatory context than the supersession of
sympathizing by beholding, of vertical by horizontal. It is the Words-
worthian context that Thoreau himself repeatedly invokes in the jour-
nal. As Charles Anderson points out in The Magic Circle of "Walden",
Thoreau adopted the Intimations Ode as a kind of spiritual autobiog-
raphy. The poem is used as a point of reference as early as 1841, when
the young journal writer noted that "There is all the romance of my
youthfullest moment in music. Heaven lies about us in our infancy,"
and as late as 1859 - the entry for 19 December on the subject of youth
versus age is filled with echoes of the Ode (*/ i 242; / xiii 35).
"There was a time," the first words of the Intimations Ode, were
appropriated by Thoreau in a journal entry that speaks of the ravish-
ing intensities of his early experience: "There was a time when the
beauty and the music were all within, and I sat and listened to my
thoughts, and there was a song in them ... I sat and listened by the
hour to a positive though faint and distant music, not sung by any
bird, nor vibrating any earthly harp. When you walked with a joy that
knew not its own origin" (/ vi 294). In his early twenties, Thoreau
described his "fresh New England life" to be "as novel as green peas.
The dew hangs everywhere upon the grass - and I breathe the rich
damp air in slices." He had no doubt that "joy is the condition of life";
even in autumn he was "sensible of a wholly new life - which no man
has lived. My faith is fed by the yellow leaf" (*/ i 317, 167; ii 51). In
"those youthful days," he later recalled, "the walker does not too curi-
ously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only
himself, - the phenomena that show themselves to him, - his expand-
ing body, his intellect and heart. No worm or insect, quadruped or
bird, confined his view, but the unbounded universe was his" (/ v 75).
Nature seemed to develop as he developed and to grow up with
him:

My life was extacy. In youth before I lost any of my senses - I can remember
that I was all alive - and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction,
both its weariness & its refreshment were sweet to me. This earth was the
most glorious musical instrument, and I was audience to its strains. To have
such sweet impressions made on us - such extacies begotten of the breezes. I
no The Language of the Senses

can remember how I was astonished. I said to myself -1 said to others- There
comes into my mind or soul an indescribable infinite all absorbing divine
heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation & expansion ... This is a pleasure, a
joy, an existence which I have not procured myself- I speak as a witness on
the stand and tell what I have perceived. (*/ iii 305-6)

But as he grew older, Thoreau gradually ceased to be attended by this

splendid vision; it eventually faded into the light of common day:
"Methinks my present experience is nothing my past experience is all
in all. I think that no experience which I have today comes up to or is
comparable with the experiences of my boyhood- And not only this
is true - but as far back as I can remember I have unconsciously
referred to the experience of a previous state of existence. 'Our life
is a forgetting' &c" (*/ iii 305-6). The first sentence of this passage
recalls "Tintern Abbey" ("For nature then ... To me was all in all"). Its
last phrase cites the fifth section of the Intimations Ode, which uses
as a poetic postulate the Platonic myth of recollection of a previous
existence. But no more than Wordsworth does Thoreau actually be-
lieve that childhood recollection of pre-existence is the explanation of
the perceptual intensities of early life and fading recollection the ex-
planation of their subsequent diminution. The reason, for which the
journal provides abundant evidence, is that with the passage of time
there was a weakening of Thoreau's sensory and perceptual powers.
"What is called genius," Thoreau observed in 1852, "is the abun-
dance of life or health, so that whatever addresses the senses ... each
sight and sound and scent and flavor, - intoxicates with a healthy
intoxication" (/ iv 218-19). m iS^-i, he speculated that "We may grow
old with the vigor of youth. Are we not always in youth so long as we
face heaven. We may always live in the morning of our days"
(*/ i 258). Ten years later, similar speculations had become more nega-
tively phrased: "Why should we not still continue to live with the
intensity & rapidity of infants. Is not the world - are not the heavens
as unfathomed as ever? Have we exhausted any joy - any senti-
ment?" And later in the same year a distinctly pathetic note was
struck: "Remember thy creator in the days of thy youth, i.e. Lay up a
store of natural influences - sing while you may before the evil days
come - he that hath ears let him hear - see - hear - smell - taste - &c
while these senses are fresh & pure" (*/ iii 194, 323).
For Thoreau, the feeling of immortality was peculiar to the season
of youth. It seemed that "at a very early age - the mind of man - per-
haps at the same time with his body, ceases to be elastic ... It is the
transition from poetry to prose" (*/ iv 265-6). And with age came a
growing recognition of the difference between the human life cycle
and the cycle of nature: "What means this tragical change which has
 Thoreau: A Purely Sensuous Life 111

no counterpart in nature - but is confined to the life of man - from

infancy to youth - from youth to manhood - from manhood to age -
while nature changes not and is never more than one year old"
(*/11378).
In December 1851, Thoreau observed a large hawk circling the
pine wood below him. In a paragraph of what he rightly called
"Coleridgean thoughts/' he apprehended this natural fact as a sym-
bol of his "flights of imagination":

It flies not directly whither it is bound but advances by circles ... But the maj-
esty is in the imagination of the beholder for the bird is intent on its prey ... It
rises higher above where I stand and I see with beautiful distinctness its
wings against the sky ... its inner wings within the outer - like a great moth
seen against the sky. A Will-o-'the-wind. Following its path as it were
through the vortices of the air. the poetry of motion - not as preferring one
place to another but enjoying each as long as possible. Most gracefully so sur-
veys new scenes & revisits the old. As if that hawk were made to be the sym-
bol of my thought how bravely he came round over those parts of the wood
which he had not surveyed - taking in new segment.- annexing new
territories. (*/ iv 210-11)

But this passage is more in the nature of an envoi to symbolic percep-

tion than an celebration of it. By 1851, an elegiac quality is noticeable
in the reflective passages of Thoreau's journal: in September, as in the
feelings of an older man, "the year is already past and [a man] looks
forward to the coming winter. His occasional rejuvenescence & faith
in the current time is like the aftermath of a scanty crop ... The
period of youth is past." And in April of the following year he
lamented: "Too late now for the morning influence & inspiration.-
The birds sing not so earnestly & joyously - there is a blurring ripple
on the surface of the lake ... Once I was part and parcel of nature -
now I am observant of her" (*/ iv 62, 416).
Against this background, can there be any doubt what Thoreau
really meant when he declared in 1854 that "We soon get through
with nature. She excites an expectation which she cannot satisfy"
(/vi 293)? The cause of the non-fulfillment of expectation was not
in the natural world but in Thoreau - as he came to realize later in
the same journal entry: "How many springs shall I continue to see
the common sucker ... floating dead on our river! Will not Nature
select her types from a new fount? The vignette of the year. This
earth which is spread out like a map around me is but the lining of
my inmost soul exposed. In me is the sucker that I see. No wholly
extraneous object can compel me to recognize it. I am guilty of suck-
ers" (/vi 294).
112 The Language of the Senses

This passage anticipates Whitman's 1860 poem, ''As I Ebb'd with the
Ocean of Life": seeking natural facts that can be perceived as types or
symbols of sustaining spiritual facts, both men find only watery
refuse suggestive of the psychological detritus within themselves.
The key antecedent text for both the Thoreau of 1854 and the Whit-
man of 1860 is Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" (the poem is alluded
to by Thoreau in the only sentence in Walden to occur twice - as title-
page epigraph and in the second chapter). Like Coleridge, Thoreau
and Whitman "may not hope from outward forms to win/The pas-
sion and the life, whose fountains are within."
Thoreau knew that "he is the richest who has most use for nature as
raw material of tropes and symbols with which to describe his life":

If these gates of golden willows affect me, they correspond to the beauty and
promise of some experience on which I am entering. If I am overflowing with
life, am rich in experience for which I lack expression, then nature will be my
language full of poetry, - all nature will fable, and every natural phenomenon
be a myth. The man of science, who is not seeking for expression but for a fact
to be expressed merely, studies nature as a dead language. I pray for such
inward experience as will make nature significant. (/ v 134-5)

But to whom or to what could Thoreau pray? What power could stop
the aging process, restore elasticity, and make nature once again
significant? He could remind himself to "Improve the opportunity to
draw analogies. There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the
truth ... All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy- we
reason from our hands to our head" (*/iv 41, 46). But knowing the
paths to poetic truth was not the same as being able to traverse them.
In 1841, Thoreau drank in "a wonderful health" from the "rare
soundness" of cow-bells and other natural sounds; ten years later,
similar sounds "only remind me that they once said something to me,
and are so by association interesting. I go forth to be reminded of a
previous state of existence, if perchance any memento of it is to be met
with hereabouts" (*/ i 277; iii 303). One year after he had heard ravish-
ing intimations in the vibration of the telegraph-wire, this natural fact
had lost its higher suggestiveness and become a type of inner deterio-
ration: "I have scarcely heard one strain from the telegraph harp this
season. Its strings are rusted and slackened, relaxed, and now no
more it encourages the walker. I miss it much. So it is with all sublu-
nary things. Every poet's lyre loses its tension. It cannot bear the alter-
nate contraction and expansion of the seasons" (/ iv 206). Even the
sound of crickets, which had long been particularly evocative for
Thoreau, was losing its magic. He did not cease to be drawn to the
 Thoreau: A Purely Sensuous Life 113

sound, but his interest was becoming scientific rather than Romantic.
Through close observation, he discovered what made the crickets'
sound so suggestive: it always retreated as he advanced and thus
always came from a comparative distance: "Those nearest me contin-
ually cease their song as I walk so that the singers are always a
rod distant" (*/ iii 381). The something-evermore-about-to-be quality
of the sound was thus explained. But the discovery was the result of
careful observation, not of a sauntering of the ear. In Emily Dickin-
son's figure, it was like splitting the lark in order to find the music.

As early as 1843, Thoreau had wondered: "When nature ceases to be

supernatural to a man - what will he do then? Of what worth is
human life - if its actions are no longer to have this sublime and
unexplored scenery?" (*/i48i). This was precisely the question
addressed by Wordsworth in the closing sections of the Intimations
Ode. One of his two answers is the recompense of memory: the
recovery of a felt contact with "what was so fugitive," with the some-
thing living "in our embers." For Wordsworth, the thoughts of past
years bring a "perpetual benediction." But Thoreau found nothing
renovating or sustaining about his memories. There was only regret
and nostalgia: "Ah that life that I have known!" he wrote in 1851:
"How hard it is to remember what is most memorable! We remember
how we itched, not how our hearts beat. I can sometimes recall to
mind the quality the immortality of my youthful life - but in memory
is the only relation to it." And in the following year, he wondered:
"Does nothing withstand the inevitable march of time? Why did I not
use my eyes when I stood on Pisgah? Now I hear those strains but
seldom- My rhythmical mood does not endure- I cannot draw from
it - & return to it in my thought as to a well ... Ah sweet ineffable
reminiscences" (*/ iii 251-2; iv 281-2).
The other Wordsworthian compensation is the replacement of the
natural bond by a human bond: the soothing thoughts that spring out
of human suffering; "the clouds that gather round the setting sun"
(like loved ones around a deathbed) taking "a sober coloring" from
an eye that hath kept watch on man's mortality. Given Thoreau's
prickliness, his difficulties with friendship, his misogynist traits, and
his intensely self-centered preoccupation with purity, one hardly ex-
pects to find in the journal this Wordsworthian mitigation. Thoreau's
parenthetical allusion (cited above) to "Wordsworth's obs. on relaxed
attention" is telling. It refers to a passage in the story of Margaret
in the first book of The Excursion (606-19), in which the narrator
114 The Language of the Senses

describes an aspect of the psychological dynamics of his intense emo-

tional response to "a common tale,/An ordinary sorrow of man's
life,/A tale of silent suffering" (636-8). In contrast, Thoreau's concern
is not with human suffering but with the best state of consciousness
in which to engage the natural world.
Eventually, Thoreau came to suspect that he might be "too cold for
human friendship" and that this deficiency was connected with the
ruling passion of his life: "It appears to be a law that you cannot have
a deep sympathy with both man & nature. Those qualities which
bring you near to the one estrange you from the other" (*/ iv 435).
One thinks not of Wordsworth but of Wallace Stevens: "Life is an
affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and
that is the trouble" (Opus Posthumous 185).
If neither the past nor the human present offered abundant recom-
pense, perhaps the future might. Occasionally in the journal there is
a hopeful yearning for "a place far away - yet actual and where
we have been ... reinspiring me with all the dreams of my youth."
And at least once Thoreau allowed himself to wonder if "our serene
moments" were "foretastes of heavenly joys gratuitously vouchsafed
to us as a consolation" rather than "simply a transient realization
of what might be the whole tenor of our lives" (*/ iii 148, 274). But rec-
ognition of the need to live in the present remained dominant, despite
the disturbing implications of a remarkable dream-like experience he
had one morning in 1851. As Thoreau awakened, he seemed to vibrate
to the dying strain of a musical instrument that was his own body. But
with "an infinite regret" he awoke to "find myself not the thorough-
fare of glorious & world-stirring inspirations - but a scuttle full of dirt
- such a thoroughfare only as the street & the kennel - where per-
chance the wind may sometimes draw forth a strain of music from a
straw" (*/ iv 155).
In his later years, one sensory instrument was of sustaining value
to Thoreau: his eyes. The journal for 1851 and 1852 has abundant
evidence that Romantic perception of the natural world was being
superseded by a different kind of perception, which was predomi-
nantly visual. (This is also noted by both Cameron and Peck.) It was as
Thoreau feared it would be: "the character of my knowledge is from
year to year becoming more distinct & scientific- That in exchange for
views as wide as heaven's cope I am being narrowed down to the field
of a microscope- I see details not wholes nor the shadow of the
whole" (*/ iii 380). This narrowing had a dual issue: scientific or natu-
ralist perception on the one hand; aesthetic perception on the other.
An epitome of each visual mode is found in a late essay worked up
from journal material: "The Succession of Forest Trees" (1860), which
is Thoreau's principal contribution to environmental studies; and
 Thoreau: A Purely Sensuous Life 115

"Autumnal Tints" (1862), which is concerned with helping others to a

greater appreciation of the beauty of the October foliage. In both
essays there is something necessarily different from a sauntering of
the eye. "It is impossible," he wrote in 1852, "for the same person to
see things from the poet's point of view and that of the man of
science." Some men were born with a scientific "condition of mind";
others arrived at that condition "in middle age by the decay of their
poetic faculties" (*/iv 356-7). As Thoreau explains in "Autumnal
Tints": "In my botanical rambles ... the idea, or image, of a plant occu-
pies my thoughts ... and for some weeks or months I go thinking of it,
and expecting it, unconsciously, and at length I surely see it." It
requires "different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to
different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the
nauralist look at objects" (Essays 255).
Thoreau's eyesight remained acute and there are many striking
visual notations in the late journal: "the cool juicy pickled cucumber
green of the potatoe fields" in the July moonlight; in September, "the
intense brilliancy of the red-ripe maples scattered here and there in
the midst of the green oaks & hickories [was] quite charming"; a
winter morning was "the time to see the woods & shrubs in their per-
fection wearing their snowy & frosty dress"; in the same season, pitch
pines on a distant hill-side held the snow so finely that they made
"the most cheerful winter scenery [when] beheld from the window"
(*/iii 295; iv 111, 207, 313). One April he was delighted by "the per-
ception of a new natural fact": when he was directly opposite the
sun that was shining on a clump of dwarf Andromeda, the leaves
that had previously been a greyish brown were lit up and became a
"charming warm ... Indian red color - the mellowest the ripest-red
imbrowned color ... It is a very interesting piece of magic" (*/ iv 471,
462). And in August of 1860, while he was paddling on Walden Pond,
a sudden blaze of the setting sun lit up the green leaves on the eastern
shore at the same time as the sun's reflection on the water lit up the
under side of the same leaves. In this double light, "the most vivid
and varied shades of green were revealed. I never saw such a green
glow before" (/ xiv 65).
Intense looking sustained Thoreau until the end. The final entry in
the journal, made in November 1861, closes with the reflection: "All
this is perfectly distinct to an observant eye, and yet could easily pass
unnoticed by most" (/ xiv 346). Four years earlier, he had written the
following:

The regular phenomena of the seasons get at last to be - they were at first, of
course - simply and plainly phenomena or phases of my life. The seasons
and all their changes are in me. I see not a dead eel or floating snake, or a gull,
n6 The Language of the Senses

but it rounds my life and is like a line or accent in its poem. Almost I believe
the Concord would not rise and overflow its banks again, were I not here.
After a while I learn what my moods and seasons are. I would have nothing
subtracted. I can imagine nothing added. My moods are thus periodical, not
two days in my year alike. The perfect correspondence of Nature to man, so
that he is at home in her! (/ x 127)

The human perceiver of this natural setting resembles Wordsworth's

leech-gatherer, a figure of resignation and endurance, more than it
does Cameron's incessant interrogator or Peck's relational redeemer.
At first, that is, during childhood, before the advent of self-
consciousness and reflection, natural phenomena and their periodi-
cal phases were all in all to Thoreau and seemed coextensive with
the phases of his life. Now, in later life, they seem so again. In the
time between, brooks and rivers had been one of Thoreau's master
tropes for the one life and for the possibility of fulfillment: "The life
in us is like the water in the river," he had written in 1850: "it may
rise this year higher than ever it was known to before and flood the
uplands - even this may be the eventful year - & drown out all our
muskrats" (*/ iii 84). But in 1857, the figure of the rising water level is
not a symbol of spiritual possibility but an hyperbole indicating the
degree to which Thoreau is at home in the natural given, wishing
nothing added or subtracted. There is correspondence; but it is as be-
tween two objects - or two subjects, each of which writes the other,
the one using words, the other dead eels, floating snakes, and gulls.
 SEVEN

Whitman: The Feeling of Health

"In health/' Thoreau notes in his journal, "all the senses are in-
dulged and each seeks its own gratification.- it is a pleasure to see,
and to walk, and to hear - &c" (*/ i 204). Walt Whitman agreed: in
health, "the whole body is elevated to a state by others unknown -
inwardly and outwardly illuminated, purified, made solid, strong,
yet bouyant ... there is no more borrowing trouble in advance. A
man realizes the venerable myth - he is a god walking the earth, he
sees new eligibilities, powers and beauties everywhere; he himself
has a new eyesight and hearing ... Merely to move is then a happi-
ness, a pleasure" (1272-3). With Whitman, as with Coleridge and
Thoreau, physical health and imaginative power are closely con-
nected. At the beginning of Song of Myself (post-i855 version), he
describes himself as "now thirty-seven years old in perfect health."
In section 50 of the same poem he is at a loss for words to describe
the "something" that he feels working within himself that "is not
chaos or death ... it is eternal life ... it is happiness." Whatever the
something is, it is clear that its enabling condition is physical health.1
One could even argue that the sprawling shapelessness of Song of
Myself is itself the result of the poet's robust physical health. An
entry in Thoreau's journal for 1841 uncannily anticipates both the
content of Whitman's poem and the way it conducts itself: "there are
times when we feel a vigor in our limbs - and our thoughts are like a
flowing morning light ... And if we were to sing at such an hour,
There would be no catastrophe contemplated in our verse - no tragic
element in it... It is epic without beginning or end - an eternal inter-
lude without plot.- not subordinate one part to another, but supreme
as a whole - at once - leaf and flower - and fruit" (*/ i 331).
ii 8 The Language of the Senses

The "feeling of health" (#2) is not only a presupposition of Song of

Myself; it is also a principal subject of the poem. In a notebook entry
from the time, Whitman jotted down the idea for a "poem in which is
minutely described the whole particulars and ensemble of a first-rate
healthy Human Body - it looked into and through, as if it were trans-
parent and of pure glass" (Notebooks 304). He does not seem to have
composed such a poem; but Song of My self has elements of it, as does
another 1855 poem, "I Sing the Body Electric." In Song of Myself, the
principal indicator of good health is sensory acuity. The notation of
visual images is as sharp as in "There Was a Child Went Forth."
Acute aural registrations range from natural sounds ("the katydid
work[ing] her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well"
[#33]), through natural cum domestic ("the bravuras of birds....the
bustle of growing wheat....gossip of flames....clack of sticks cooking
my meals" [#26]); to urban noise ("The blab of the pave... .the tires of
carts and sluff of bootsoles....the clank of the shod horses on the
granite floor" [#8]).
There is also abundant evidence that Whitman had a sharp and
discriminating sense of smell, which remained acute even into later
life. The natural descriptions in Specimen Days (1882), for example,
often include olfactory notations. In one of them Whitman notes that
"there is a scent to everything, even the snow, if you can only detect
it - no two places, hardly any two hours, anywhere, exactly alike.
How different the odor of noon from midnight, or winter from sum-
mer, or a windy spell from a still one" (876). In Song of Myself, as later,
it is predominantly natural scents in which Whitman delights: "The
sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and darkcolored
sea-rocks, and of the hay in the barn" (#2); "the white roses sweet-
scented and growing" (#49); "Delicate sniffs of the Seabreeze....smells
of sedgy grass and fields by the shore" (#36); even "The scent of these
arm-pits," which is pronounced "aroma finer than prayer" (#24).
The few discrete images of taste are in the main a function of touch,
the most conspicuously indulged sense in the poems of 1855-6. In a
draft section of Song of Myself, the other senses are described as
"emulous" to become as intensely feeling as touch: "Every one must
be a touch. - /Or else she will... nibble only at the edges of feeling ...
Each brings the best she has,/For each is in love with touch." Touch
is not only the most intense and immediate of the senses; it is even
said to subsume the others:

A touch now reads me a library of knowledge in an instant,

It smells for me the fragrance of wine and lemon-blows,
It tastes for me ripe strawberries and melons. -
 Whitman: The Feeling of Health 119

It talks for me with a tongue of its own,

It finds an ear wherever it rests or taps,
It brings the rest around it... (Notebooks 75-6)

The sense of touch was not present in "There Was a Child/' for
reasons explained in chapter i; but it is overwhelmingly present in
the central 1855 poem, Song of Myself. Whitman is here "the caresser
of life wherever moving" (#13): "the press of my foot to the earth
springs a hundred affections" (#14); "Divine am I inside and out, and
I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from" (#24). "Mine is
no callous shell," he boasts in what has been called the "outstanding
understatement in American poetry" (Rosenthal and Gall 37):

I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,

They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,

To touch my person to some one else's is about as much
as I can stand. (#27)

In trying to account for this extraordinary degree of haptic sensi-

tivity, Roger Asselineau suggests that Whitman had "a hyperesthesia
of all the senses, particularly that of touch ... which is perhaps con-
nected with the repression of his sexual instincts. He appears con-
stantly to feel the need of rubbing himself, in his imagination, against
things and against people, probably because he could not satisfy his
desires otherwise"; the fable of the woman and the twenty-eight bath-
ers in section 11 of Song of Myself is "a case of repression which proba-
bly was a mere transposition of his own" (13, 277n). Asselineau has a
point - if it is qualified by noting that some passages celebrate the
satisfaction (at least the auto-erotic satisfaction) of his desires, and that
touch is presented more than once as a redemptive force. Such spec-
ulation, however, is ultimately reductive and detracts attention from
the great haptic delicacy and comprehensiveness of Song of Myself.
In his Notebooks, Coleridge distinguishes several gradations in the
intensity of this sensory mode. The last three in ascending order are:
(a) "retentive power extinguishing the sense of touch, or making it
mere feeling"; for example, "The Hand grasping firmly an inani-
mate Body - that is the one extreme of this." (b) touch with "reten-
tive power"; for example, the "Lips, or the thumb and forefinger in
a slight pressure." (c) "Touch with the sense of immediate power";
for example, "mem. vi/Riley. in acts of Essex"; that is, the membrum
virile - the phallus (i #2399). Another notebook entry elaborates on
lao The Language of the Senses

this: the erect penis is "the mutually assimilant Junction" of "Love &
Lust"; "the vital & personal linked to & combined with the exter-
nal." The passage continues (the reference seems clearly to be to the
phallus): "an organ acting with what intensity of personal Life/
compare it with the Eye & Ear/then at a less distance with the Smell,
still less with the Taste/less still with the diffused or concentered
Touch/yet at what a distance from all these" (i #1822). In other en-
tries Coleridge speaks of "the influence of bodily vigor and strong
Grasp of Touch in facilitating the passion of Hope" (ii #2398), and of
the "co-adunation [unifying] of Feeling & Sensation [as] the specific
character of the sexual Pleasure: and that which renders this particu-
lar mode of bodily intercourse the apt outward Sign, Symbol, & sen-
suous Language of the union desired & commenced by the Souls of
sincere Lovers" (ii #36o5).2
Loosely using Coleridge's framework, one can sketch a qualitative
typology of touch in Song of Myself, (a) Mere feeling: "each man and
each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,/My left hand hooks you
round the waist ... If you tire ... rest the chuff of your hand on my
hip" (#46); the hand of the accoucheur "pressing receiving support-
ing" the woman during childbirth (#49). (b) Touch with retentive power:
"A few light kisses....a few embraces....a reaching around of arms"
(#2); "the press of a bashful hand ... the touch of my lips to yours"
(#19); feeling the arms of young men "on my neck as I stood, or the
negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat" ("Crossing Brook-
lyn Ferry"); "to be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laugh-
ing flesh is enough,/To pass among them..to touch any one....to rest
my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment... I do not
ask any more delight" ("I Sing the Body Electric").
(c) Touch with immediate power: this category divides into two parts.
In the first, the erotic, most of the examples are instances of passive
touch, of being touched rather than touching. They include "The
souse upon me of my lover the sea, as I lie willing and naked"
("Bunch Poem"); lovers "Crowding my lips, and thick on the pores
of my skin ... Bussing my body with soft and balsamic busses" (#45);
or the "curious roamer, the hand, roaming all over the body - the
bashful withdrawing of flesh where the fingers soothingly pause
and edge themselves" - one place of this haptic reconnaissance
being "The sensitive, orbic, underlapped brothers, that only privi-
leged feelers may be intimate where they are" ("Bunch Poem").
The second is the phallic. The membrum virile or "phallic thumb of
love" ("Bunch Poem") is the dominant organ in the most extraordi-
nary passage in Song of Myself (#26-29). Section 27 emphasizes the
speaker's extreme haptic sensitivity and the primacy of touch in his
sensorium, and stresses the importance of tactile interaction in break-
 Whitman: The Feeling of Health 121

ing down the barriers between subject and object, self and external
world: "To be in any form, what is that?/If nothing lay more devel-
oped the quahaug [a large clam] and his callous shell were enough."
In the preceding section, Whitman began by announcing that he
would do nothing but listen. The ensuing aural catalogue com-
menced with natural and domestic sounds; then came urban sounds
that grew louder; and finally musical sounds with strong emotional,
then erotic, pulls: "the trained soprano ... convulses me like the
climax of my love-grip"; the orchestra "wrenches unnamable ardors
from my breast." The vocal and orchestral music intensifies tactile
sensitivity until their sounds transmogrify into an engulfing oceanic
feeling: "It sails me....I dab with bare feet....they are licked by the
indolent waves" (as in sections 21-22, immersion in the sea is a
figure for the dominance of touch). Finally, the immersion is total:
"I am ... Steeped amid honeyed morphine... .my windpipe squeezed
in the fakes [coils of a rope] of death." "Is it then a touch," section 28
begins,
quivering me to a new identity,
Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,
Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them.
My flesh and blood playing out lightning, to strike what is hardly
different from myself.
On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,
Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,
Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,
Depriving me of my best as for a purpose,
Unbuttoning my clothes and holding me by the bare waist,
Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture
fields.
There follows an extraordinary sequence full of obscure associations
and displacements as inner and outer merge and consciousness be-
comes tactile. The "fellow-senses," having initially acted as "prurient
provokers" of quivering arousal, become recessive; they are "bribed to
swap off with touch, and go and graze at the edges of me." In a manu-
script reading, they have "left me helpless to the torrent of touch"
(Notebooks 76). The torrent is clearly sexual and culminates in orgasm.
But what exactly is going on? Is it consensual sodomy, as Robert K.
Martin seems to think? Is it anal rape, as Karl Keller conjectures? Or
fellatio, as manuscript readings perhaps suggest? Or is it masturba-
tion, as most commentators think? A reading of the figures in sensory
terms is helpful. The grazing herd, the sentries who have deserted
"every other part of me," and "the traitors" are all figurations of the
other senses. Flames and ether rushing into the body while lightning
122 The Language of the Senses

is "playing out" from the flesh and blood suggests the conflation or
merging of active and passive touch. The phallus is the "headland" by
metaphor; by metonomy, it is the "red marauder" (it is engorged with
blood). "I went myself first to the headland....my own hands carried
me there": this surely suggests an auto-erotic act.
The passage reaches its orgasmic climax when "villain touch" -
"Blind loving wrestling touch" - unclenches its floodgates. Section 29
beautifully adumbrates the orgasmic expansion of consciousness:

Parting tracked by arriving... .perpetual payment of the perpetual loan,

Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.

Sprouts take and accumulate... .stand by the curb prolific and vital,
Landscapes projected masculine full-sized and golden.

The compensatory ebb-and-flow figures in the first distich suggest

in the first instance the tumescent-detumescent rhythm of phallic
touch; but they also recall the "respiration and inspiration" of the
poet's lungs and the systole and diastole of the beating of his heart
celebrated in section 2. These are all synecdochal figurations of the
poet's indefatigably curious self - "Partaker of influx and efflux"
(#22) - whose subject matter is "the thrust and withdrawal, the
heightening and declining, the flowing and ebbing of his psychic and
creative energy" (Lewis 5) as well as of his sexual energy. The second
distich associates this rhythm with the natural cycle - harvest abun-
dance after germinating rain. The urban herbage at the curbside
metonymically evokes a rural landscape of fully ripened wheat; and
the masculine thrust of its stalks in turn recalls the orgasmic bounty -
the semen or seed - just poured out. In short, section 29 offers a
condensed epitome of what Emerson called that "great principle of
Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring
of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in
day and night ..." (62).
Sections 26-9 are one of two places in Song of Myself in which an
allusively described sexual act triggers visionary experience. The
other is found in the fifth section, but here the experience is sweetly
transporting, not roughly destabilizing. In Coleridge's terms, it is
more loving than lustful and thus meta-phallic: touch facilitating the
passion of hope - an outward sign of spiritual union.

Loafe with me on the grass....loose the stop from your throat,

Not words, not music or rhyme I want... .not custom or lecture, not
even the best,
Only the lull I like, only the hum of your valved voice.
 Whitman: The Feeling of Health 123

I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning;

You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon
me,
And parted my shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue
to my barestript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge
that pass all the art and argument of the earth;
And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers... .and the women
my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love;
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs by the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and
mullen and pokeweed.

As in sections 26-9, rhythmic sounds - here a lulling hum like "the

murmur of yearning" in section 19 - initiate a shift in sensory domi-
nance. Lying on the ground diminishes the power of the eye and in
other ways leads to a loosening of the sensory stays; as the other
senses recede, touch becomes dominant. It is unclear what precisely
transpires when the tongue and the hands of the "you" take over.
Fellatio would be not a bad guess; for one thing, "orality links vocal
and sexual activity" (Nathanson 132). But the important point is that
this is an instance of what Allen Ginsberg calls "friendly touch"
(238). Section 5 has nothing convulsive, prurient, marauding, or
predatory.
The expansion of consciousness experienced on this transparent
summer morning has been compared to Emerson's "transparent eye-
ball" experience. But Whitman's is grounded in touch rather than in
sight. The part or particle of God that he becomes is figured by his
hand, not his eyeball; and it is not the visual organ that is reflected in
the "leaves stiff or drooping in the fields." The onset of transparency -
the fusion of inner and outer - is signalled by the shift from the past to
the present tense ("And I know ..."). The speaker enters a visionary,
trans-temporal and trans-spatial now in which inner and outer per-
fectly mirror each other: "This is the far-off depth and height reflect-
ing my own face," as Whitman puts it in a later section, "This is the
thoughtful merge of myself and the outlet again" (#19). The last three
lines describe the outlet. As visionary expansion begins to contract,
sight once again becomes dominant: "limitless" is succeeded by the
124 The Language of the Senses

visual limit of what the recumbent speaker can see. What is visible is
the opposite of cosmic: tiny ants and their miniature craters, mossy
scabs, stones, and common weeds. But in the afterglow of his vision-
ary experience of cosmic love, nothing is marginalized; even the
weeds by the fence are lovingly particularized. They are not the phal-
lic "sprouts ... prolific and vital" of section 29, but both are woven out
of the same "hopeful green stuff" as the grass that the questioning
child brings the poet in the following section.

In his preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman observes

that "folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and
dignity which always attach to dumb real objects....they expect him
to indicate the path between reality and their souls." In discovering
this path, the dominant organ of perception is not touch but sight: the
"greatest poet... is a seer ... the other senses corroborate themselves,
but [eyesight] is removed from any proof but its own and foreruns
the identities of the spiritual world" (10). Put more simply, in Song of
Myself, "the unseen is proved by the seen" (#3).
At the center of the concern with the unseen spiritual world was
the question of life after death. One poem in the 1855 edition is
entirely devoted to the subject. "To Think of Time" is a meditation on
temporality - on what de Man calls an authentically human destiny:

To think of today..and the ages continued henceforward.

Have you guessed you yourself would not continue? Have you dreaded
those earth-beetles?
Have you feared the future would be nothing to you?

The poem is unsatisfactory both formally and conceptually because it

breaks in two. The felt awareness of mortality is powerfully evoked
in the first five sections, especially in the description of the December
funeral of a stage driver. But in the sixth stanza, somber meditation
abruptly gives way to assertive optimism: "What will be will be well
- for what is is well ... You are not thrown to the winds..you gather
certainly and safely around yourself,/Yourself! Yourself! Yourself for-
ever and ever." You were not born to be diffused but to receive iden-
tity and having received it you are "henceforth secure, whatever
comes or goes"; the pattern or law is "systematic" and "eternal."
What gives rise to these assertions is simply that it is too awful
to think otherwise: "We cannot be stopped at a given point... .that is
no satisfaction ... We must have the indestructible breed of the best,
 Whitman: The Feeling of Health 125

regardless of time." Once uttered, Whitman attempts to bolster these

assertions by circular reasoning: if he were to "suspect death I should
die now,/Do you think I could walk pleasantly and well-suited
toward annihilation?" But he does walk pleasantly and well-suited
and therefore, although he cannot define his destination, he knows
that it must be good.
That Whitman was himself dissatisfied with these formulations is
suggested by his return to the subject the next year in the masterpiece
of the 1856 edition, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." In this poem, he
adapted to his particular concern with future existence the form that
M.H. Abrams denominated the greater Romantic lyric.3 As in a num-
ber of earlier poems of this type, Coleridge's "This Lime-Tree Bower"
and "Frost at Midnight" for example, symbolic perception (the rela-
tion of natural facts to spiritual facts) is the sine qua non of "Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry." The natural facts are the particulars of the physical
setting - what is seen while crossing by ferry from Brooklyn to Man-
hattan. These are evoked in the third section's composite panorama:
the December seagulls high in the air, seeming to float with motion-
less wings; the reflection of the summer sky; "the fine centrifugal
spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water";
the schooners, sloops, barges, steamers, lighters, steam-tugs, and
hay-boats; the scalloped-edged waves in the twilight; "the fires from
the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night."
The other subject is spiritual facts: "The impalpable sustenence of
me from all things ... the well-join'd scheme, myself disintegrated,
every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme ... The others that are
to follow me, the ties between me and them." The goal of "Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry" is to establish a connection between the two sets of
facts. The poem's principal strategy is to address a "you" - not a
"you" living in present time as in "To Think of Time" and Song of
Myself, but a "you" living in the future - "Fifty years hence ... A
hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence" - who
in crossing from Brooklyn to Manhattan will enjoy the very same
perceptual experiences, "The glories strung like beads on my smallest
sights and hearings," that Whitman did in 1856.
In the course of the poem intimacy between the present "I" and
future "you" increases. In the third section, the speaker softly assures
his auditor that time and space are of no avail in separating them:
"I am with you" in the sense that, in looking at river and sky, in
being part of a living crowd, "you" are experiencing exactly what "I"
experienced. The word used to describe this degree of analogical inti-
macy is "similitudes" - "Just as you feel... so I felt"; "just as you are
refresh'd ... I was refresh'd." In sections 5 and 6, a more intimate
126 The Language of the Senses

connection is suggested: both "I" and "you" have felt "the curious
abrupt questionings stir within." These curious feelings or "dark
patches" include doubts about achievement ("The best I had done
seem'd to me blank and suspicious"); "the old knot of contrariety"
(a variety of moral and emotional failings); and erotic longings. In
the next section, recognition of these shared intimate feelings is said
to have brought speaker and addressee "closer yet."
In section 8, the speaker briefly recapitulates the perceptual simili-
tudes of the natural setting, using the grasping of hands and being
called by his "nighest name" as figures for the inner congruences.
Then - it is the poem's climactic moment in more ways than one - the
object of the loving embrace becomes the future "you": "What is more
subtle than this/' the speaker asks, "Which fuses me into you now,
and pours my meaning into you?" Now there is no more "I" and
"you"; there is "we":

We understand then do we not?

What I promis'd without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach - what the preaching could not
accomplish is accomplish'd, is it not?

What exactly had been promised? and what is it that can be said
to have been accomplished? One key to understanding the speaker's
assertion is the shift in addressee in the poem's closing section. Here
the "you" is no longer the future reader of the poem: "you" are the
natural facts of the physical scene - the "dumb beautiful ministers"
whom "we" directly address. The section opens with a second pan-
oramic description of the physical scene - only this time a celebratory
imperative present replaces the earlier past indicative. As in Col-
eridge's "This Lime-Tree Bower," the change marks the shift from
ordinary to visionary perception - from outlooker to participatory
consciousness. What is celebrated is the fluid merging of inner and
outer. The visual particulars of the scene are no longer individual glo-
ries hung on the speaker's higher senses; they are now figured as a
"necessary film ... envelop [ing] the soul." In another image register-
ing the same supersession of sight by feeling/touch, the whole of the
spatio-temporal continuum of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is figured as
an "eternal float of solution." This trope refers back to the cryptic last
lines of the fifth section:

I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had receiv'd identity by my body,
That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should
be of my body.
 Whitman: The Feeling of Health 127

To be struck from the float is to be born, to assume individual human

form and substance. To die is to become "disintegrated"; this happens
to "every one/' yet every one remains "part of the scheme." Thus, there
can be contact between present "I" and future "you"; indeed, such felt
contact is the evidence of the existence of the "float."
Thus, by the final section the speaker has in some psychologically
satisfying way come to affirm his continued future existence by means
of the natural facts, the "dumb beautiful ministers" that "furnish your
parts toward eternity." What is said is beautifully expressed, but what
precisely is being affirmed is far from clear. The asserted relationship
of natural facts to spiritual facts is not the similitude of tenor and
vehicle as in simile, metaphor, and the Swedenborgian system of
correspondences in which the visible is the dial-plate of the invisible.
Nor is the relationship metonymic - the graduated contiguity of part
to whole as with a Coleridgean symbol in which the temporal shows
forth the eternal. Neither of these kinds of symbolizing would be ade-
quate to Whitman's purpose, which is to affirm not an eternal super-
natural world but rather an endless trans-natural world of perpetual
floating or "crossing."
It is important to note that while the continuum - the film or float -
is "impalpable," it is not wholly imperceptible. In the final stanza of
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," what is said to be hung "About my body
for me, and your body for you" are not sights and sounds but "our di-
vinest aromas." This is not the scent of armpits but some quintessential
olfactory distillation. "Unlike sight," writes F. Gonzalez-Crussi, "olfac-
tion deals with the airy, the insubstantial, and the formless ... smells
often defy localization in space. Sight has regard to the actualities of
space, but olfaction lives in time ... Of all our senses, this is the one
most closely related to time: to the past, because, better than the others,
it evokes memory; to the future, because, more effectively than the
others, it elicits anticipation and awakens our deepest yearnings" (71).
Bluntly put, the assertion at the end of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is
that natural facts are spiritual facts. The riddling couplet later added by
Whitman to one of the 1855 poems might have been better deployed as
the epigraph for "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry": "Strange and hard that
paradox true I give,/Objects gross and the unseen soul are one" ("A
Song for Occupations"). Anagogy is the name for the kind of symbol-
izing in which the duality of tenor and vehicle, signifier and signified,
is overcome. Anagogic symbolism, says Northrop Frye, "is the con-
ceivable or imaginative limit of desire, which is infinite, eternal, and
hence apocalyptic. By an apocalypse I mean primarily the imaginative
conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and eter-
nal living body which, if not human, is closer to being human than to
being inanimate" (Anatomy 119).
128 The Language of the Senses

But there is nothing apocalyptic in the biblical or Blakean sense

about "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry/' which is not a prophetic book but
an intimate lyric communication specifically addressed to a singular
"you" living in the future, on union or fusion with whom everything
in the poem depends. From the point of view of "you" the reader
living a hundred or hundreds of years hence, surely the only achieved
"eternity" is aesthetic - the perfected verbal artwork that represents
for later readers what Whitman felt at what he saw and what still is
the look of things (to paraphrase Wallace Stevens' "A Postcard from
the Volcano"). Despite the poem's canny assertions of the continuing
existence of the "soul," it is very hard to think of "Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry" as offering anything other than what Thomas Hardy called an
"Idealism of Fancy: that is ... an imaginative solace in the lack of any
substantial solace to be found in life" (333). Certainly this was how
the matter came to appear to Whitman only four years later in "Of the
Terrible Doubt of Appearances":

Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded,

That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,

May-be the things I perceive ... are (as doubtless they are) only
apparitions.

The extraordinary differences between the poems in the 1855 and

1856 editions of Leaves of Grass and those added for the edition of 1860
have been variously explained. There can be little doubt that the un-
happy aftermath of a homosexual love relationship was a contribut-
ing factor: "Was it I who walked the earth disclaiming all except what
I had in myself?" Whitman wonders in a manuscript poem: "Was it I
boasting how complete I was in myself?/O little I counted the com-
rade indispensable to me!" (Manuscripts 68). This is also the subjec
one of Whitman's best-known lyrics, "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak
Growing," one of the twelve poems of the "Live Oak with Moss"
sequence (copied into a notebook in the spring of 1859) that alludes to
the love affair more directly than the forty-five Calamus poems of the
1860 Leaves of Grass, of which after reordering they became part.

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,

All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark
green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
 h

But I wonder 'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and
twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary
in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.

At one level, "manly love" may be taken to refer to the love

of same-sex comrades or to love of a particular man. But the context
of Whitman's poetic development presents another, more suggestive
and resonant meaning: self-confident, independent love as opposed to
unmanly love which is sentimentally dependent on another or others.
The declension in meaning of the adjective in "a curious token" as
compared to its deployment in "There Was a Child Went Forth" or
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is telling. Here "curious" means some-
thing quirky or arbitrary rather than something inciting wonder (the
difference is similar to that between unmanly and manly). In Song of
Myself, natural objects had a rich symbolic suggestiveness; but now
we have a token of a token. The twig is a synecdoche for the oak,
which is a metaphor for the independent and joyous poet Whitman
once was. But the poet of 1860 can no longer generate (utter) joyous
leaves of himself; he can only collect tokens. As such, he bears only a
token resemblance to the poet of 1855-6.
Other evidence suggests that the determining factor in the change
from 1855-6 to 1860 was Whitman's physical health: he simply did
not feel as good at the beginning of the i86os as he had only a few
years before. In "A Hand-Mirror" (1860), for example, the speaker
takes stock of his physical being: "No more a flashing eye, no more a
sonorous voice or springy step"; instead, "Words babble, hearing and
touch callous,/No brain, no heart left, no magnetism of sex." The
flashing eye and sexual magnetism are facets of what in another
poem of 1860 Whitman calls his "electric self out of the pride of
which I utter poems." The reference is in part to his extraordinary tac-
tile sensitivity. The skin "is an especially good electrical conductor";
there are those "who when they touch another feel 'a sort of electrical
current' passing between them." But while some individuals "retain
this sensitivity into old age, others tend to lose it in middle age"
(Montagu 148). For Whitman, the diminution of this current may be
130 The Language of the Senses

considered the equivalent of Wordsworth's loss of the visual acuity

that had made the natural world seem "apparelled in celestial light,/
The glory and the freshness of a dream" and left him toiling "In dark-
ness lost, the darkness of the grave" (Intimations Ode).
The onset of middle age is the life-cycle term for this change.
The degree of destabilization and desolation recorded in Whitman's
poems of 1860 suggest that one should go a step further and apply
the concept of mid-life crisis. A number of other nineteenth- and
twentieth-century writers experienced a mid-life crisis that formed a
divide in their careers. Its precipitates and/or symptoms include the
feeling that, perceptually and creatively, something has fled - a loss
that makes earlier works seem like fantastications and fresh creative
achievement impossible. Wordsworth's Intimations Ode, Coleridge's
Dejection Ode, and Emerson's "Experience" are all important points
of comparison for the Whitman of 1860. So is Tolstoy's Confession,
which relates the great watershed in his creative and spiritual life to
irreversible bodily changes. Tolstoy recalled a time when, like the
poet of Song of Myself, he believed that "Everything develops, differ
entiates, moving towards complexity and refinement and there are
laws governing its progress. You are part of a whole." During this
period he was developing physically and intellectually and it was
"natural for me to believe that there was a law governing the world,
in which I could find the answers to the questions of my life." But the
time came when he stopped growing: "I felt that I was ... drying up,
my muscles were growing weaker, my teeth falling out." He realized
that "I had taken for a law something which I had discovered in
myself at a certain time of my life ... it became clear to me that there
could be no law of perpetual development" (35-6).
In "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life" Whitman's crisis is un-
flinchingly faced. The poem opens with the poet musing late in the
autumn day as he walks along the seashore, which since boyhood
had been a special place for him because of its analogical suggestive-
ness. It was the "dividing line, contact, junction, the solid marrying
the liquid - that curious, lurking something, (as doubtless every
objective form finally becomes to the subjective spirit,) which means
far more than its mere first sight, grand as that is - blending the real
and ideal, and each made portion of the other" (796). Not surpris-
ingly, then, as he wends his way along the shore Whitman is thinking
the "old thought of likenesses." He is self-consciously the poet of
Song of Myself, the "electric self seeking types."
As he walks, he is "gazing off southward" - that is, looking out
from the Atlantic coast of Long Island into the limitless expanse of sky
and ocean. But he is also hearing the continual "hoarse and sibilant"
sounds of the waves hitting the shore, which seem to be expressing
 Whitman: The Feeling of Health 131

the timelessness of human suffering and isolation: "the fierce old

mother [the sea] endlessly cries for her castaways." The visual correl-
ative of these natural sounds is not the distant line of the horizon, the
place where Emerson said in Nature a man could behold something
"as beautiful as his own nature" (10). It is the harshly and sibilantly
described particulars on the shore that come to compel the attention
of this seeker of types. He is

... seiz'd by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,

The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the
globe.

Fascinated, my eyes ... dropt, to follow those slender windrows,

Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,
Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide ...

I too but signify at the utmost a little wash'd-up drift,

A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been wash'd
on your shores,
I too am but a trail of drift and debris,
I too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped island.

These extraordinary statements demand to be read against the back-

ground of Whitman's earlier self-proclamations. The symbolic pleni-
tude of the grass in section 6 of Song of Myself, for example, against the
"few sands and dead leaves to gather"; the measureless float of "Cross-
ing Brooklyn Ferry" against merging with the sands and drift; the un-
dulating but always outwardly expanding movement of Song of Myself
against the monotonous linearity of the miles-long trail of debris along
the shore - a difference enacted in the lines of the poem, which are
linear rather than undulating, prosaic rather than poetic; and the claims
of the poet of Song of Myself to be in intimate creative contact with the
"Me myself" against the energetic recantation of this presumption:

Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have
not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch'd,
untold, altogether unreach'd,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.
132 The Language of the Senses

In section 22 of Song of Myself, Whitman had importuned the sea

to "rock me in billowy drowse,/Dash me with amorous wet....I can
repay you"; and elsewhere in the poem the earth and sea were figured
as lovers. But in ''As I Ebb'd/' Whitman has nothing to offer anything
or anyone; and there is nothing erotic about the coming together of
land and sea. In the poem's third section they are figured as parents
from whom the poet desperately seeks revelation. The paternal shore
is beseeched to "Breathe to me while I hold you close the secret of the
murmuring I envy" for (to cite the later excised line that followed in
the 1860 edition) "I fear I shall become crazed, if I cannot emulate it,
and utter myself as well as it" (1860: 198). But the longing for haptic
intensity, the clinging to the shore/father and asking to be touched
"with your lips as I touch those I love," together with the continual
maternal murmuring of the sea, also suggests the desire to "merge
myself as part of the sands and drift" - that is, to be steeped in a
numbing substance, to return to the oceanic state of hearing/touch.
The former plea may be said to be answered in the sense that, like
Wordsworth in the Intimations Ode and Coleridge in the Dejection
Ode, Whitman does powerfully utter himself in his poem about no
longer being a poet. But there is no engulfment, no merging. There is
white space and then the poem's fourth and final section. It opens on
a distinctly false note. "Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return)" reca-
pitulates the opening of the poem which found Whitman held by his
prideful self-conception as an electric self. This momentary regression
to the imperative, affirmative mode of the end of "Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry" suggests a nostalgia for the "the old thought of likenesses"
and the float forever held in solution. But the plenitude of 1855-6 has
been superseded by the perceptual realities of the 1860 shoreline, by
which in the closing lines the poet's attention is once again seized:

I mean tenderly by you and all,

I gather for myself and for this phantom looking down where we lead,
and following me and mine.
Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses,
Froth, snowy white, and bubbles,
(See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last,
See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,)
Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,
Bouy'd hither from many moods, one contradicting another,
From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell,
Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil,
Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,
A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating, drifted at
random,
 Whitman: The Feeling of Health 133

Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,

Just as much whence we came that blare of the cloud-trumpets,
We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before
you,
You up there walking or sitting,
Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.

Who is the phantom? There are two different but not mutually
exclusive possibilities. The first is "the real Me" now recognized as
chimerical. Its defining feature is that it is the part of Whitman "not
wholly involved in Nature" - to quote from another text of Thoreau's
that seems uncannily anticipatory of a Whitman poem. "I may be
either the drift-wood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down
on it," Thoreau reflects in the "Solitude" chapter of Walden: "How-
ever intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criti-
cism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but
spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no
more I than it is you" (135). The other possibility is that the "you" is
the future reader, union with whom in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"
gave Whitman the assurance that he was not doomed to extinction.
Taking the "Whoever you are" of the last line to be the reader allows
for a final contrast between Whitman in 1855-6 and in 1860. In Song of
Myself and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," the poet was fully in control of
the poem's addressee. Here the situation is very different; the poet
has as little knowledge of "you" as of "the real Me." At the end of
"As I Ebb'd," the "you" is an unknown being at the feet of whom
the speaker and his seashore types "lie in drifts." As Whitman reads
the lines on the shore, "you" the reader read the "lines" on his page,
in the words of which his failure and weakness are inscribed.
But something else is inscribed in these lines. The spiritual facts
suggested by the natural facts of the shore have the same symbolic
suggestiveness that they possessed in the poem's second section:
randomness; contradiction; mortality; continual lament; and the
shriving contrast between past plenitude and present emptiness.
There is a difference, however. In the closing lines we have not terse
prosaic cataloguing but copious rhythmic enumeration. For one
critic, the length and tone of the passage suggest "a biding of time, a
wish to prolong the lull between storms" (Larson 203). But I hea
something stronger, a commitment to the natural facts. It is, to be
sure, a commitment faute de mieux. The void has not grown lumi-
nous; but the chastened, no longer proud poet has found in the
debris of the shore sufficient symbolic suggestiveness to allow him
to utter himself. How impressive this effort is, and how difficult to
sustain, can be gauged by comparing the end of "As I Ebb'd"
134 The Language of the Senses

to those of two other major Whitman poems, in both of which the

sea or its figural equivalent does reveal "the secret of the murmuring
I envy."

In "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and "When Lilacs Last

in the Dooryard Bloom 'd," Whitman moves away from the silent
paternal shore toward a liquid mother who communicates a saving
message. At the climax of both poems, the sense of touch, or rather
Whitman's distinctive amalgam of hearing/touch, resumes its domi-
nance. We have already noted this collocation in the key expansion
of consciousness experiences in Song of Myself, in which rhythmic or
musical sounds, what Tenney Nathanson nicely calls an "archaic
fluidity activated by voice" (132), trigger visionary ecstasy.
In "Out of the Cradle," engulfment in operatic sound begins with
the pyrotechnics of the poem's overture, which shows how a curious
boy absorbs and vicariously participates in experiences. The mature
poet's imaginative act - adumbrated in the overture - recapitulates
the child's imaginative act. Like "As I Ebb'd," the opening of this
poem includes an explicit back reference to 1855-6: "I, chanter of
pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter." The chanter is the poet
of Song of Myself; the uniter is the visionary of "Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry." But in 1860 the subject is not "now" or "forever"; it is a remi-
niscence. The implications of this difference are most sharply seen in
the contrasting accounts of how the person becomes the poet. In Song
of Myself, the figuring of poetic incarnation emphasized fulfillment
and plenitude: the fusion of the ordinary self with "the real Me"
or "my soul," with sexual climax as the trigger of expanded con-
sciousness and heightened perception. In contrast, the fable of poetic
incarnation in "Out of the Cradle" offers a loss-based explanation.
Listening both to the unmanly crooning of the lovelorn he-bird, and
to its undertone, the incessant moaning of the sea, the boy experi-
ences a tremendous emotional release. In a moment of empathetic
identification, he becomes "the outsetting bard": "now in a moment I
know what I am for, I awake/ ... Never more the cries of unsatisfied
love be absent from me." The boy becomes the poet the moment he
recognizes that loss and unfulfillment are both his subject matter and
his fate: his awakened songs will be fueled by "the fire, the sweet hell
within,/ The unknown want, the destiny of me."
At the climax of "Out of the Cradle," the boy/poet wonders if
"the sweet hell within" will burn forever unquenched and if so
whether he will be able to bear it. "O give me the clew!" he cries, "O if
 Whitman: The Feeling of Health 135

I am to have so much, let me have more!" In the "Clef Poem" of 1856,

the clew (or clef) was that "A vast similitude interlocks all" - includ-
ing "All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe."
In "Out of the Cradle" the clew is a musical clef or key: the "low and
delicious word death" whispered by the sea in mantric repetition. It
offers a merging and engulfing in which the fire will be quenched and
identity obliterated:

... edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,

Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,
Death, death, death, death, death.

In sensory terms, both he-bird and boy/poet are suffering from

touch-deprivation, a need that originates in infancy. In the womb
the fetus is surrounded by, is steeped in, amniotic fluid; it also feels
the systole and diastole of the maternal heartbeat and experiences the
mother's motions as a gentle rocking. After birth, this condition is
replicated outside the womb: swaddling increases tactile stimulation
and engulfing; lulling, humming sounds recall the maternal heart-
beat, which is often mimed in an infant's first sounds (mama, papa);
and cradle-rocking approximates the floating sensation. Against
this sensory background, the appositeness of the later-added, often-
lamented, penultimate line of the poem becomes clear:

That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,

(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments,
bending aside,)
The sea whisper'd me.

In the climactic revelation of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard

Bloom'd," death is once again imaged as a maternal liquidity in
which the synesthetic richness of infantile feeling/touch is recovered.
But the Lincoln elegy conducts itself in a manner very different from
that of "Out of the Cradle" and offers a much richer orchestration of
its themes. Three natural objects dominate the poem: star, lilac, and
bird. The "great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night" is
Hesper, the evening star (the planet Venus when seen in the western
sky). It is an elegiac trope of long standing (see, for example, the four-
line Greek lyric attributed to Plato that Shelley used as the epigraph
for Adonais). But the star also has a personal meaning for the Ameri-
can elegist. The drooping star with the countenance full of woe that
Whitman saw in Washington in March 1865 came to be associated by
him with the death the following month of President Lincoln, "the
136 The Language of the Senses

sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands." At the limit of visual
perception, the star functions as a determinate symbol (or in de
Man's sense an allegory) of the dead leader.
The lilac, blooming in April, has "heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
[and] many a pointed blossom rising delicate." A sprig from it, ritu-
ally bestowed in section 6, is the funereal offering (another elegiac
convention), the token of the poet's grief. In perceptual terms, the lilac
is proximate sight plus scent ("the perfume strong I love," the "mas-
tering odor"). Figurally, as the poem opens out geographically from
"the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash'd pal-
ings" to the continental expanse of America, "the varied and ample
land," the lilac "blooming perennial" becomes a synecdochal symbol
of natural process and cyclic renewal ("ever-returning spring"). The
third of the poem's trio of natural facts is the solitary hermit-thrush,
whose song comes from "the swamp in the dimness." Here, the sen-
sory mode is first hearing then hearing/touch. Since the bird speaks
for himself, it is perhaps best considered not as a figure of speech, but
as a character in a psychodrama representing an awareness in the
dark depths of the speaker's being - of the "knowledge of death" that
finally supersedes "the thought of death."
The sensory and perceptual movement of "Lilacs" is, then, from
distanced sight, through proximate sight and scent, to hearing and
hearing/touch, and finally (as we shall see) to non-perceptual insight;
from star to lilac to bird's song to vision. The movement from the
dominance of the lilac to the dominance of the thrush also recapitu-
lates Whitman's development from 1855 to 1865. As the lilac "With
every leaf a miracle" recalls the natural supernaturalism of Song of
Myself, so the solitary singing bird recalls the he-bird of "Out of
the Cradle" - the "singer solitary, projecting me." As in that poem,
the turning point of "Lilacs" comes when "the voice of my spirit
tallied the song of the bird." It is in its climactic vision of a Civil War
battlefield that "Lilacs" finally goes beyond "Out of the Cradle."
On the thematic level, the star is the "thought of death" (the death
of Lincoln); it is associated with "black murk" and "the long
black trail" of the funeral journey of the murdered President's corpse
through the cities draped in black. This awareness is internalized as
"the harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul" that keeps
Whitman from tallying with the song of the bird. Because of its con-
solatory and renovative potential, the lilac and what it symbolizes also
detains the speaker. The description of the diurnal movement of the
sun in section 12 invites an analogy between the phases of a human
life and the phases of the day. Each part of the non-linear pattern
is welcome and fulfilling, including the inevitable arrival of "the wel-
 Whitman: The Feeling of Health 137

come night and the stars/' while something more than acceptance is
offered by the repeatedly emphasized timelessness of natural process:
the "ever-returning spring"; "the endless grass"; "the trees prolific";
the growing wheat, "every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown
fields uprisen/' with its nearly explicit suggestion of a corresponding
human triumph over the temporal. And in section 11, to adorn the
walls of "the burial-house of him I love" the poet selects "Pictures
of growing spring and farms and homes ... With the fresh herbage
under foot." Implicit here is what "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" made
explicit: natural wonders furnish their parts for eternity for the soul.
In 1865, however, this is not the last word. The "beautiful fable" of
1856 is alluded to, but it is not believed. In "Lilacs," Whitman does
not succumb to the temptation (in de Man's words) "for the self to
borrow ... the temporal stability that it lacks from nature" (197). The
pill of an authentically human destiny is swallowed - but it is heavily
coated with sugar. Whitman finally hears the bird's song, "liquid and
free and tender," after he has "fled forth to the hiding receiving night
... Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dim-
ness." As Helen Vendler has noted, while in the periodic stanzas of
the rest of the poem long lines and long sentences that drop to a con-
clusion are "the embedded syntactic figure for the temporality of all
life and action," the rhythm of the death carol is "not periodic. Rather,
like the waves of the ocean ... it is recursive, recurrent, undulant, self-
reflexive, self-perpetuating"; it expands "into oceanic and cosmic
space" ("Reading" 145-46).
The drooping star in the sky, the burgeoning land and swelling sun
are all apprehended visually; the dark swamp is not seen but heard
and felt. There is no perception of objects by a subject, but a merging,
an engulfment. In the death carol, all is soothing and soft: "Lost in
the loving floating ocean of thee,/Laved in the flood of thy bliss
O Death." This is haptic absorption, a "nestling close" in the "sure-
enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death." It is a version of being
steeped amid honeyed morphine and squeezed in the fakes of death.
This black hole absorbs into it the sunlit world celebrated in the ear-
lier sections of the poem: "the sights of the open landscape and the
high-spread sky ... And life and the fields ... the myriad fields and
the prairies wide." It also sucks in earlier texts of Whitman: the
"objects and knowledge curious" of "There Was a Child"; the "life
and joy" and "the dense-pack'd cities" of Song of Myself ; "the teem-
ing wharves and ways" of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; "The ocean
shore and the husky whispering wave" of "Out of the Cradle."
As in Song of Myself, immersion in touch brings an expansion of
consciousness: "the sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,/ As to
138 The Language of the Senses

long panoramas of visions." But the vision of section 15 is very differ-

ent from that of sections 5 and 29 of Song of Myself. There is no sense
of experiential immortality or of sprouts prolific and vital; and the
other senses are not heightened, but curtailed - sight is blinkered and
hearing entirely suppressed:

And I saw askant the armies,

I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc'd with missiles I saw
them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,

And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not,
The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remained suffer'd.

In the first stanza, seeing "askant" means not seeing soldiers pierced
with missiles and torn and bloody; one sees only the battle flags and
their staffs. It is these, not the limbs and bones of the soldiers, that are
"all splinter'd and broken." Seeing "askant" also means seeing from
a great distance. The second stanza cuts from the shredded flags and
splintered staffs to corpses "fully at rest" and white skeletons, not a
few but "myriads," including in this temporal as well as spatial pan-
orama "all the slain soldiers of the war." This increase in visual dis-
tance has a blurring and numbing effect. At the distance necessary for
panoramic vision, nothing hurts or disturbs. Moreover, to continue
the cinematic analogy, the scene is filmed without sound; it is a noise-
less battle. In the account of the naval battle in Song of Myself aural
imagery was used to give a powerful sense of the suffering of the
wounded and dying: "The hiss of the surgeon's knife and the gnaw-
ing teeth of his saw,/The wheeze, the cluck, the swash of falling
blood....the short wild scream, the long dull tapering groan" (#36).
The suppression of sound here has exactly the opposite effect. It acts
as a cordon sanitaire between the viewer and the horror of war.
Vendler has called attention to Whitman's "profound de-Christian-
izing" of the elegiac form in "Lilacs," the plot of which she describes
 Whitman: The Feeling of Health 139

as the attempt "to find, in the language of perception, an equivalent

for transcendence" ("Reading" 145, 136). But the poem's plot can be
described another way - a preferable way for readers like myself who
consider "Lilacs" a magnificent poem but find the death carol and the
vision it evokes unwholesome - who prefer the Whitman of "As I
Ebb'd," compelled to recognize himself in the debris on the shore, to
the anaesthetized vision of seeing "the debris of all the slain soldiers
of the war." In Charles Feidelson's formulation, the symbolic objects
in the poem "behave like characters in a drama, the plot of which is
the achievement of a poetic utterance" (22). This self-reflexive aspect
of the elegy is conspicuous in sections 4, 10 and 16, which make
explicit the poem's re-enactment of the problem explored in both
"Out of the Cradle" and "As I Ebb'd": the problem of how to utter
oneself, how to turn pain and suffering into poetry. At the end of
the elegy, the completed utterance is foregrounded. A farewell to the
poem's symbols is followed by the assurance that each and all of
them have nonetheless been kept, and then by the offering of the
completed poem to the memory of its subject:

and this for his dear sake,

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

The poem is not only the funereal offering of the poet Whitman
(as the lilac sprig was of the grieving Whitman within the poem); it
is also his version of the crucial substitution - not that but this -
which is the turning point in the movement of elegy from loss to
recompense. To say this is virtually to say that the ultimate consola-
tion in "Lilacs" is the creative activity of the mind - the making of
metaphors and other figures. The completed poem, and not simply
the two most extraordinary of its component parts, is the principal
consolation for the loss that initially held the poet powerless and
inarticulate.

In Whitman's later poetry, as has often been noted, the Romantic vi-
sionary was largely superseded by the public bard programmatically
celebrating democracy, America and the spiritual evolution of man-
kind.4 The shift from private to public was already marked by 1873,
when at the age of fifty-three Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke and
left Washington an invalid, moving to Camden, New Jersey, to live
with one of his brothers. The stroke was the beginning of two decades
140 The Language of the Senses

of sharply curtailed physical activity and failing physical health -

subjects to which he often referred in his letters, his prefaces and
afterwords to editions of Leaves of Grass, and sometimes in his poems.
When Richard Maurice Bucke visited Whitman in 1880, however,
he noted that the senses of the sixty-one-year-old poet remained
"exceptionally acute, his hearing especially so," and that his "favor-
ite occupation seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors
by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of
light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to ... all the hun-
dreds of natural sounds. It was evident that these things gave him a
feeling of pleasure far beyond what they give to ordinary people"
(216, 220). The literary result of these saunterings were the "Nature-
notes i877-'8i" (collected in Specimen Days), which consist of numer-
ous passages of "spontaneous" natural description written "on the
spot" (690, 807). In these notes, "all the senses, [that is] sight, sound,
smell, [are] delicately gratified" (876).5
In two self-reflexive passages of the "Nature-notes," Whitman
made extremely interesting observations on his new way of perceiv-
ing the external world:

The emotional aspects and influences of Nature! I, too, like the rest, feel these
modern tendencies (from all the prevailing intellections, literature and
poems,) to turn everything to pathos, ennui, morbidity, dissatisfaction,
death. Yet how clear it is to me that those are not the born results, influences
of Nature at all, but of one's own distorted, sick or silly soul. Here, amid this
wild, free scene, how healthy, how joyous, how clean and vigorous and
sweet! (813-14)

[Even in the presence of a magnificent July dawn, he felt] not the weight of
sentiment or mystery, or passion's ecstasy indefinable - not the religious
sense, the varied All, distill'd and sublimated into one, of the night just
described. Every star now clear-cut, showing for just what it is, there in the
colorless ether. The character of the heralded morning, ineffably sweet and
fresh and limpid, but for the esthetic sense alone, and for purity without
sentiment. (826)

The "modern tendencies" described in the first passage are the dark
side of the common nineteenth-century assumption that (in Francis
Jeffrey's formulation) "the very essence of poetry ... consists in the
fine perception and vivid expression of that subtle and mysterious
Analogy which exists between the physical and the moral world"
(474). The second passage rejects the other raison d'etre of symbolic
perception: the sense sublime of natural phenomena symbolizing
 Whitman: The Feeling of Health 141

the transcendent. Instead, the older Whitman looks at nature without

subjective projection. Looking naively rather than sentimentally, he
finds a tonic freshness and health and a purity without sentiment.
"Nature-notes," then, records Whitman's partial recovery of the
aesthetic mode of perception of the child who went forth every day.
But unlike the child, the older Whitman is self-conscious and reflec-
tive and thus aware of the symbiotic bond between himself and what
he perceives:

there comes a time ... when one feels through his whole being, and pro-
nouncedly the emotional part, that identity between himself subjectively and
Nature objectively which Schelling and Fichte are so fond of pressing. How it
is I know not, but I often realize a presence here - in clear moods I am certain
of it, and neither chemistry nor reasoning nor esthetics will give the least
explanation. All the past two summers it has been strengthening and nour-
ishing my sick body and soul, as never before. (809)

Friedrich Schelling and Johann Fichte were proponents of Naturphilos-

ophie, the doctrine that all phenomena, including the human self,
are organically related and maintained in being by a force energized
by the opposition of polar powers. The doctrine may be regarded as a
philosophical cum scientific amplification of the Romantic sense of
the one life within and abroad. The weeds mentioned at the end of the
passage recall the elder and mullen and pokeweed enumerated at the
end of the representation of expanded consciousness in section 5 of
Song of Myself. But the differences between the two passages are more
telling than the similarities. In the latter, the "delicious medicine"
(809) is not the elixir of touch but the less intoxicating objects of the
senses of sight, sound and smell. As a result, there is reciprocity but
not merging, invigoration but not ecstasy.
One July evening, however ("the night just described" referred to
in a passage above), Whitman had an experience different in kind
from those described in the other "Nature-notes":

from a little after 9 till 11 the atmosphere and the whole show above were in
[a] state of exceptional clearness and glory ... A large part of the sky seem'd
just laid in great splashes of phosphorous. You could look deeper in, farther
through, than usual; the orbs thick as heads of wheat in a field. [There was] a
curious general luminousness throughout to sight, sense, and soul ... There,
in abstraction and stillness ... the copiousness, the removedness, vitally,
loose-clear-crowdedness, of that stellar concave spreading overhead, softly
absorb'd into me, rising so free, interminably high, stretching east, west,
north, south - and I, though but a point in the center below, embodying all.
142 The Language of the Senses

As if for the first time, indeed, creation noiselessly sank into and through
me its placid and untellable lesson ... the visible suggestion of God in space
and time - now once definitely indicated, if never again. The untold pointed
at - the heavens all paved with it. (825)

The elemental Wordsworthian grandeur of the sky, particularly its

unusual depth, perceived by a combination of sight and feeling/
touch (here called "sense"), triggers an expansion of consciousness
experience. In Whitman's terminology it is "the religious sense [of]
the varied All, distill'd and sublimated into one" (826); in the cognate
terms used elsewhere in this study, it is the sublime sense of the infi-
nite symbolized by the finite - "the visible suggestion of God in space
and time."
Was the one-life medicine, which on one extraordinary occasion
rose to definite transcendent intimations, sufficient to reconcile the
aging poet to his temporal destiny, which had been his antagonist
in 1855-6 and his suffocating savior in "Out of the Cradle" and
"Lilacs"? Two short poems of natural description, written a few years
before Whitman's death in 1892 at the age of seventy-two, suggest
that the correct answer is yes and no. In "Twilight," the recognition of
mortality is explicit:

The soft voluptuous opiate shades,

The sun just gone, the eager light dispell'd - (I too will soon be gone,
dispell'd,)
A haze - nirwana - rest and night - oblivion.

This is Whitman's last poetic registration of longing to be merged,

steeped, squeezed, floated, laved, enwound, enfolded in some numb-
ing oceanic continuum. In the other poem, "A Prairie Sunset," the
recognition of mortality (here implicit) prompts a different reaction:

Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling silver, emerald, fawn,

The earth's whole amplitude and Nature's multiform power consign'd
for once to colors;
The light, the general air possess'd by them - colors till now unknown,
No limit, confine - not the Western sky alone - the high meridian -
North, South, all,
Pure luminous color fighting the silent shadows to the last.

In Song of Myself, Whitman had described his response to a spectacu-

lar daybreak: "The air tastes good to my palate ... / Something I can-
not see puts upward libidinous prongs,/Seas of bright juice suffuse
 Whitman: The Feeling of Health 143

heaven." The "dazzling and tremendous" sunrise would "kill" him,

he says, if he could not meet it as an equal, "could not now and
always send sunrise out of me" (#24-25). But this abounding egotism
and figural exuberance, an epitome of the alpha point of his poetic
career, was now four decades in the past. "A Prairie Sunset" is an
epitome of the omega point. The aged poet is not competing with the
spectacular sunset, as the younger poet did with the dawn; in tan-
dem with the setting sun, he is fighting the silent shadows to the last.
 • EIGHT •

Dickinson:
The Glimmering Frontier

"The act of imagination/' Emerson declares, "is ever attended by

pure delight. It infuses a certain volatility and intoxication into all
Nature. It has a flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance."
An essential aspect of this delight is the poet's ability to see "the same
sense in things so diverse"; this gives "a pure pleasure ... we find a
charm in the metamorphosis" ("Poetry" 18,25). Perhaps the first poet
that this description brings to mind is Emily Dickinson: the way her
linguistic and metaphorical exuberance infuses volatility into nature
is one of the most immediately arresting features of her work. Exam-
ples abound: the stars - "the wampum of the night" that only God
can count (#128); the lightning - an "electric Moccasin" passing over
"a strange Mob of panting Trees" (#1593) or, in another figuration, "a
yellow Fork/From Tables in the sky/By inadvertent fingers dropt"
(#1173); the atmosphere after a summer thunderstorm: "Nature was
in an Opal Apron,/Mixing fresher air" (#1397); the falling snow that
"sifts from Leaden Sieves [and] powders all the Wood" (#311); the
mushroom as a love child - the "surreptitious scion/Of Summer's
circumspect" (#1298); the darting hummingbird visible only in his
vanishing: "A route of Evanescence/With a revolving Wheel -/A
resonance of Emerald -/A Rush of Cochineal" - "evanescence" here
referring both to the bird's quick exit and, in the ornothological sense,
to the luminous sheen of its feathers (#1463).
A well-known Dickinson poem, #448 ("This was a Poet"), describes
a fundamental aspect of her poetic practice: she is a "Discloser," a per-
son of extraordinary sensory and perceptual acuity who distills the
"Attar" - the essential freshness and vividness - from natural objects.
Other poems say or suggest the same thing: that Dickinson's poetry
 Dickinson: The Glimmering Frontier 145

is the outflow of a special gift or endowment - a bolt of lightning

or "waylaying Light" that "founds the Homes and decks the Days"
and imposes obligation: "Advocate the Azure/To the lower Eyes -/
He has obligation/Who has Paradise" (#1581, #1348). It used to be
axiomatic that this endowment was an essential characteristic of Dick-
inson's creative genius.1 But in the late twentieth century this is no
longer the case. As a description of her poetic practice, most commen-
tators would privilege poem #675, which offers a different account of
the distillation of the "Attar." In this poem the extraction of poetry
from experience is compared to flower pressing: in both cases the
attar or "Essential Oils" are "not expressed by Suns - alone -/It is
the gift of Screws." That is to say, poetic power is the result of suffer-
ing and deprivation rather than a positive endowment. According to
another poem, poets learn "the Transport by the Pain": they are the
amanuenses or "duller scholars/Of the Mysterious Bard" deep
within whose "ceaseless Carol" of anguish they transcribe (#167).
Much current critical emphasis falls not on sensation and percep-
tion, but on Dickinson's internal states and psychological struggles.
David Porter, for example, quotes a poem in which the speaker is
looking at her reflection in a mirror:

Like Eyes that looked on Wastes -

Incredulous of Ought
But Blank - and steady Wilderness -

Just Infinites of Nought -

As far as it could see -
So looked the face I looked upon -
She looked itself - on Me - (#458)

Porter correctly says that this poem epitomizes one of Dickinson's

fundamental subjects: "the nebulous, irrational opacity that subsists
beyond knowledge" (35). Like many of her poems, the subject of #458
is the "Center," the inner landscape of the poet rather than the exter-
nal world. Its source is not sensory-perceptual acuity but a keen sense
of loss, absence, and emptiness, which in one poem is figured as the
mind being "Contented as the Eye/Upon the Forehead of a Bust -/
That knows - it cannot see" (#305). In these poems, sensation and
perception tend to be present only in the vehicles of metaphors or
similes. Not infrequently the dominant senses are touch and taste -
for example "Icicles upon my soul/Prickled Blue and Cool" (#768;
and see #510). And the image of a female being molested by a male is
the vehicle of several metaphorical figures: the "ghastly Fright"
in #512 that caresses the hair and sips from the lips of the defenseless
146 The Language of the Senses

female; the incoming tide in #520 that "made as He would eat me

up"; and the "Agony" that drew nearer and nearer until it "Toyed
coolly with the final inch/Of your delirious Hem" (#414).
Porter laments that so few of Dickinson's poems are about "what it
is exactly to knead dough, put your hands in soil, smell flowers, walk
in grass, feel water in your hand" (116). But the reason for this is not
that all of Dickinson's poetry is autogenetic and non-referential; it is
rather that touch and taste are not the senses that dominate in her
experiences of the external world. Nor is the sense of smell, though
there are occasional notations of odors, usually flowers and plants,
and a few figurative uses of scent, as in #448 and #675. The lower
senses were of limited use to a female poet of the New England middle
class whose point of natural observation was often the window of her
second-floor room in her father's house. Nor for someone in chroni-
cally poor health, who seems, on the basis of circumstantial evidence,
to have suffered from anorexia (see H.K. Thomas). The images of shiv-
ering and freezing cited above, for example, suggest the hypothermia
that is one of the symptoms of this illness, and in the poems are
numerous images of the rejection of food, the definitive symptom.
In an early letter, Dickinson writes: "I do not care for the body, I love
the timid soul, the blushing, shrinking soul" (#39). The observation
posts of this particular soul were the higher senses of sight and sound.
Dickinson's visual acuity has already been instanced; the notations and
figurations of what she heard are equally acute and as freshly ren-
dered. One reason for (or effect of) the dominance of eye and ear
is Dickinson's perceptual and temperamental predisposition to be
affected by the more imperceptible aspects of the natural world -
instantaneous motion, evanescence, transience, diurnal and seasonal
change. It is the eye and ear that detect and register these changes: both
the close-up and the distant - the hummingbird's evanescence and the
spectacular sights and sounds of midsummer electrical storms (the
subject of a number of poems) - and both the rapid and the gradual:
the sudden appearance of the mushroom ("the Elf of Plants ... Vegeta-
tion's Juggler" [#1298]) and the bursting out of the natural world in
early summer ("Bright Flowers slit a Calyx/And soared upon a Stem"
[#606]), as well as the gradual changes of the seasons wonderfully
caught in the time-lapse cinematography of poems #342 ("It will be
Summer - eventually") and #1540 ("As imperceptibly as Grief").
Another reason for the dominance of eye and ear is the stimulus to
contemplation and speculation afforded by distance. A spectacular
evening sunset is given "To Contemplation - not to Touch" (#1241);
what is distant and ungraspable, what is "beyond the hope of touch"
(#1691), has mystery and suggestiveness. The "Tint" (one of the
 Dickinson: The Glimmering Frontier 147

"impalpable Array" of sunset colors) that she "cannot take - is best/'

even though its "Graspless manners - mock us" (#627). In the same
way, the "Far Psalteries of Summer -/Enamouring the Ear/They
never yet did satisfy" are "Remotest - when most fair" (#606). To
want to touch is to be a "Sceptic Thomas," to be like the disciple who
refused to believe in the resurrection of Christ until touching his
wounds gave irrefutable proof. To "split the Lark" in the attempt to
discover the secret of its song would be a "Scarlet Experiment": it
would still the song and kill the singer (#861).
The many poems recording the particulars of Dickinson's intense vi-
sual and aural interaction with the natural world are poems of the
"Circumference" rather than of the "Center." Their subjects are the
interaction of consciousness/imagination with the natural world and
the symbolic potential of natural facts - especially as they relate to the
"Redoubtablest" of subjects: "Where go we -/Go we anywhere/Cre-
ation after this?" (#1417). Dickinson wrote some rhetorically impres-
sive poems that insist that this life and this world are all that there is
and are sufficient - for example #1408 ("The Fact that Earth is
Heaven"), #370 ("Heaven is so far of the Mind"), and #1741 ("That it
will never come again"); their gist is encapsulated in a remark made in
one of her letters: "I was thinking, today ... that the 'Supernatural/
was only the Natural disclosed - Not 'Revelation' - 'tis - that waits/
But our unfurnished eyes" (#280). Other poems assert that it is better
to be uncertain than to be certain: "It's finer - not to know -/If Sum-
mer were an Axiom -/What sorcery had Snow?" (#191); "In insecurity
to lie/Is Joy's insuring quality" (#1434); "How Human Nature dotes/
On what it cant detect./The moment that a Plot is plumbed/Its mean-
ing is extinct" (#1417).
But these poems are the exceptions. The rule is that throughout
Dickinson's poetry there is a predisposition to want to believe, an
eager openmindedness as to the possibility of supernatural revelation,
coupled with an equally strong predisposition to resist substituting
the wish for the fact. She is rarely guilty of following the cynical ad-
vice ironically offered in her poem on the disappearance of God in the
nineteenth century - that an ignis fatuus (the flickering phosphores-
cent light sometimes seen over marshes and swamps and thus a de-
ceptive attraction) is better "Than no illume at all" (#1551). But how is
one to gain knowledge or assurance of the existence of a state that is
"By Ear unheard,/Unscrutinized by Eye" (#160)? In one poem she ar-
gues that "What I see not, I better see -/Through Faith" than through
"my Hazel Eye" (#939). But this is an exceptional thought. For Dickin-
son, the abiding answer was that intimations of what is beyond the
senses come through the eye and the ear. Before going on to scrutinize
148 The Language of the Senses

her scrutiny of these intimations, we must first inquire further into the
particular quality and mode of operation of these senses in her poetry.

Emily Dickinson had a serious eye problem: like her mother and sister,
she suffered from exotropia - that is, she was wall-eyed. This can be de-
termined from ophthalmological analysis of the one extant photograph
of her, taken when she was seventeen or eighteen. The symptoms of ex-
otropia are eyestrain, blurring of vision, headaches, and photophobia
("great discomfort from bright lights ... sunlight in particular"):

For most patients with exotropia, the onset is close to birth, but initially this
deviation is often intermittent ... With time, this deviation becomes more
constant, usually first for distance vision, and later for near vision as well.
The progression may be slow; a person may reach age thirty or later before
developing a constant exotropia. Ironically, when this deviation is intermit-
tent, a person may have the most pronounced symptoms, because when this
deviation becomes constant, some suppression of vision usually develops in
the deviating eye to prevent double vision. (Wand and Sewall 403-4)

In order to receive medical treatment from a distinguished special-

ist, Dickinson lived away from Amherst in a Cambridgeport board-
ing house run by her cousins for more than half of both 1864 and
1865. It is not clear whether during these stays she was operated on
(the standard treatment in severe cases). It is certain that "during this
dismal time the trouble with her eyes precluded much writing"
(Sewall Life 636). In a letter of early 1865, Dickinson sounds upbeat
about her eyes, even though "the snow-light offends them, and the
house is bright" (#302). But in a letter written much later, she recalls
that "Some years ago I had a woe, the only one that ever made me
tremble. It was a shutting out of all the dearest ones of time, the stron-
gest friends of the soul - BOOKS. The medical man said avaunt ye tor-
mentors, he also said 'down, thoughts, & plunge into her soul/ He
might as well have said, 'Eyes be blind/ 'heart be still/ So I had eight
months of Siberia" (Sewall Lyman 76).
It is easy to imagine the fear and apprehension that serious eye ill-
ness or the anticipation of it would have caused a reclusive woman of
literary interests who read widely and wrote verse and letters almost
daily. This fear undoubtedly contributed to Dickinson's psychological
turmoil during the early i86os, her most intense creative period (see
Sewall Life, 605-7). The evidence in the poetry is compelling. A num-
ber of Dickinson's poems either are about her eye illness or use this
 Dickinson: The Glimmering Frontier 149

affliction as a figure for a psychological condition. #574 ("My first well

Day - since many ill"), for example, seems to be about an experience
of visual incapacitation lasting the length of a summer (see Guthrie
18). The subject of #258 is a "certain Slant of light" experienced
on winter afternoons that "oppresses" - an "affliction" or "Heavenly
Hurt" that leaves no external mark but makes an "internal difference."
Charles Anderson allows the poem only a "figurative meaning," say-
ing that it does not belong in the category of nature poems (Emily 216).
But if we remember Dickinson reporting in a letter that the glare
off snow hurt her eyes, the poem can be read at a literal level - as
describing a physical affliction that has psychological repercussions.
In another poem, #327 ("Before I got my eye put out"), the literal
level is patent. The poem states that because of an ocular affliction the
speaker's sense of sight has been hypersensitized and as a result look-
ing directly at the expanse of the natural world - including noon -
would strike her dead. In the last stanza, the speaker concludes that it
is safer not to look at all but rather to guess about the places others
can see. In the context of Dickinson's life and poetry, it is easy to posit
other levels of meaning - for example, "feminine constraint" (McNeil
104). But while there are several possible tenors, it is the vehicle that
dominates the poem.
If a number of commentators have recognized the effects of exotro-
pia on Dickinson's life, very few have considered its connection with
either her creative practice or poetic vision. Even those who have gone
into the question of Dickinson's illness (Sewall, Wand and Sewall,
Wolff) have not considered how it might have affected her perception
of the external world, and hence the creative activity of her mind. Cer-
tainly Dickinson herself saw the connection. "Don't put up my Thread
and Needle," poem #617 begins,

I'll begin to Sew

When the Birds begin to whistle -
Better Stitches - so -

These were bent - my sight got crooked -

When my mind - is plain
I'll do seams - a Queen's endeavor
Would not blush to own -

Hems - too fine for Lady's tracing

To the sightless Knot -
Tucks - of dainty interspersion -
Like a dotted Dot -
150 The Language of the Senses

On the literal level, this poem is about a serious eye condition that for
the time being makes sewing impossible. On another level, the poem
concerns the relationship between the poet's sight or vision and her
poetic texts. The "sightless knot," as Helen McNeil has noted, "is a
brilliant instance of the kind of linguistic condensation which it repre-
sents: Dickinson's poems knot meanings together so skilfully that the
technique is invisible. The tucks - compressions and ellipses - are
signatures of a Dickinson work" (159). So is the metrical and gram-
matical unconventionality that are figured as stitches that have be-
come "bent" or "zigzag" (as they are called in a later stanza).
Another example of the connection between Dickinson's exotropia
and her creative practice concerns the photophobia that is a character-
istic feature of the illness. For Dickinson, who in one poem speaks of a
person eager for the close of a "too bright" day (#878), the intense
light of the sun at noon could not be tolerated. In a number of her
poems this sun is portrayed as overpowering - so much so that in
their Madwoman in the Attic Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar identify
the sun in Dickinson's poetry as a figure for the patriarchal (600). This
was picked up on by Wendy Barker, who made it the subject of an
entire monograph. In her reading of Dickinson's poetry, the sun and
daylight represent "male energy, male power" (2). Barker is not satis-
fied with a physiological explanation for Dickinson's "frequent asso-
ciation of light with pain" because it ignores the "pervasiveness and
complexity of [her] metaphorical associations and their correspon-
dences to similar metaphors occurring in the works of other [female]
writers" (4).
Certainly there is some evidence for Barker's case - for example the
well-known letter of June 1852 in which the transition from bride to
wife is likened to "flowers at morning, satisfied with the dew" as com-
pared with "those same sweet flowers at noon with their heads bowed
in anguish before the mighty sun" (#93). But Barker can be reductive,
as in her reading of the four lines of #1190:

The Sun and Fog contested

The Government of Day -
The Sun took down his Yellow Whip
And drove the Fog away -

This piece is identified not as "another charming 'nature poem' [but]

rather, one of Dickinson's most succinct criticisms of patriarchy."
Since "fog is a female image, an entity composed of individual par-
ticles of dew," the lashing of the sun, which has "long been associated
with the phallus," represents "a cruel act of male power" (70-1).2
 Dickinson: The Glimmering Frontier 151

The truth of the matter is that in Dickinson's poetry the sun has a
number of non-literal meanings. In some poems, it can stand for the site
of the Christian afterlife: "'Heaven' has different Signs - to me -/
Sometimes, I think that Noon/Is but a symbol of the Place" (#575).
Other poems, as Elisa New points out, recall "an old tradition that takes
the sun for the Son; its illumination for his Revelation" (155). In still
others, it is a figure for eternity in the sense of a condition of ecstatic
transcendence - when "Consciousness - is Noon":

There is a Zone whose even Years

No Solstice interrupt -
Whose Sun constructs perpetual Noon
Whose perfect Seasons wait - (#1056)

It is also used as a figure for the directly apprehended, unmediated

truth. Poem #1129, for example, takes on an added resonance once the
reader is aware of Dickinson's ocular sensitivity.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -

Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind -

The "superb surprise" of Truth is imaged as the direct light of a

sun-surrogate - bolts of lightning which are "too bright" for the "in-
firm Delight" of the poet and her audience. If one is not to be blinded,
the truth must be revealed indirectly; in Dickinson's oxymoron, it
must "dazzle gradually." The same contrast between seeing aslant
and seeing directly is picked up again in another poem, the subject
of which may be taken to be the perceptual advantages of Dickinson's
affliction:

Must be a Woe -
A loss or so -
To bend the eye
Best Beauty's way -

But - once aslant

It notes Delight
152 The Language of the Senses

As difficult -
As Stalactite

A Common Bliss
Were had for less ... (#571)

Dickinson's photophobic woe is the physiological basis of her

perceptual preference, not for the harsh light of noon, but for the pris-
matic hues of dawn and, especially, evening, the times of day when
"the sunlight must travel through a much greater thickness of atmo-
sphere, the particles in which, by scattering and absorption, filch
from the white sunlight some of its constituent colours, so that only
certain colours remain, and those generally warm ones" (Lockyer
and Lockyer 57). Indeed, one may wonder whether without her afflic-
tion Dickinson would have realized what a challenging poetic subject
sunsets were. According to #291, the pictorial skills of Guido, Titian,
and Domenichino were unequal to the task of successfully rendering
them. Another poem suggests that to succeed in doing so would be to
attain artistic fame: the person who "could reproduce the Sun"

At period of going down -

The Lingering - and the Stain -1 mean -

When Orient have been outgrown -

And Occident - become Unknown -
His Name - remain - (#307)

Thoreau observed that "we never tire of the drama of sunset"; each
day one looks "with fresh curiosity to see what new picture will be
painted there - what new panorama exhibited - what new dissolving
views" (*J iv 242). This was certainly the case with Dickinson. Her
oeuvre contains more than forty renderings of the metamorphosis of
day into night.3
Sunsets were not simply a congenial subject for the display of Dick-
inson's exuberant powers of invention. Coleridge had wondered
"What is it that makes the silent bright of the Morning vale so differ-
ent from that other silence & bright gleams of late evening? Is it in the
mind or is there any physical cause?" (Notebooks i #789). In Dickin-
son's case, the correct answer is the former. The sun is "Fairer
through Fading" (#938) because "To disappear enhances" (#1209);
"going out of sight in itself has a peculiar charm" (Letters #471). She
would "rather recollect a setting/ Than own a rising sun" because
"in going is a Drama/Staying cannot confer" (#1349). Moreover, sun-
 Dickinson: The Glimmering Frontier 153

sets are tinctured with "Night's possibility" (#106) - the possibility

of vision or "Amber Revelation" (#552). "By a departing light," she
observes in poem #1714,

We see acuter, quite,

Than by a wick that stays.
There's something in the flight
That clarifies the sight
And decks the rays.

The possibilities suggested by sunsets are seen rather than heard;

but Dickinson's ear is capable of apprehensions equal in suggestive-
ness to those of the eye. Indeed, her aural apprehensions tend to
be more intense in that they were involuntary and immediate. As
D.H. Lawrence noted: "we really have no choice of what we hear.
Our will is eliminated. Sound acts direct, almost automatically, upon
the affective centres. And we have no power of going forth from the
ear. We are always and only recipient" (58). Several poems contain
examples of this aural vulnerability and defenselessness (for exam-
ple #891). Another speaks of the inexplicable and overpowering com-
bination of joy and anguish with which she responds to the sound of
birds on "a Summer morning/Before the Quick of Day": the birds
"stab my ravished spirit/With Dirks of Melody" (#1420). And in
poem #1764, the penetration of a spear rather than simply of a dirk is
the figure for the effect of hearing the dawn sound of birds at the
beginning of spring:

The saddest noise, the sweetest noise,

The maddest noise that grows, -
The birds, they make it in the spring,
At night's delicious close.

Between the March and April line -

That magical frontier
Beyond which summer hesitates,
Almost too heavenly near.

It makes us think of all the dead

That sauntered with us here,
By separation's sorcery
Made cruelly more dear.
154 The Language of the Senses

It makes us think of what we had,

And what we now deplore.
We almost wish those siren throats
Would go and sing no more.

An ear can break a human heart

As quickly as a spear,
We wish the ear had not a heart
So dangerously near.

The unusual (for Dickinson) metrical regularity and the invariably

full rhymes (also unusual) give this poem a pronounced, even insis-
tent, cadence that mimes its subject - the racket that birds make in the
spring dawn. The effect of the noise is to reduce perceptual con-
sciousness to a single sense. Heard at dawn on the equinoctial line
between winter and spring, the noise makes one think of the pleni-
tude of summer that already seems tantalizingly close - "too heav-
enly near." At the same time, one is made to think of heaven in the
sense of a world beyond to which one hopes departed loved ones
have gone. As Dickinson observes in another poem, "The Triumph of
the Birds/When they together Victory make" is one of the signs of
"the Place/That Men call 'Paradise'" (#575).
Part of the associative connection between the birds' sound and
"the dead/That sauntered with us here" is that the contempora-
neous liminal moments in the natural world (dawn and the vernal
equinox) bring powerfully to mind the threshold between life and
death. But since what lies beyond is figured as heaven, why is the
heart pierced as if by a spear by the birds' sound? Because, as Dickin-
son puts it in another late poem, "Parting is all we know of heaven,/
And all we need of hell" (#1732). The difference between the natural
and the human thresholds is the difference between white magic and
black magic - between something "magical" in the deliciously trans-
porting sense and the "sorcery" that bewitches, as sailors in the
Odyssey were bewitched by the sirens, the women-birds whose sing-
ing drew them to their deaths.
What is the poet of acute sensitivity to do - wish for less intense au-
ral perceptions? That would be to wish not to feel deeply and there-
fore not to be a poet. Moreover, for Dickinson it would be to deny
herself access to another, more reflective, level of aural consciousness.
In a late poem, Robert Browning speaks of "the purged ear appre-
hend[ing]/Earth's import" ("Prologue" to Asolando). In several po-
ems, Dickinson similarly speaks of a special power of this sensory
mode. In poem #733, the spirit is called "the Conscious Ear" and is
 Dickinson: The Glimmering Frontier 155

distinguished from the "smaller Ear/Outside the Castle." The former

can hear "Reportless Measures" that are a "suspective - stimulus"
(#1048) and - to cite another poem - can experience "a lonesome Glee
[that] sanctifies the Mind" in overhearing a bird from afar (#774).
In another poem, one of Dickinson's finest, the sound of unseen
crickets has a similar power:

Further in Summer than the Birds

Pathetic from the Grass
A minor Nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive Mass.

No Ordinance be seen
So gradual the Grace
A pensive Custom it becomes
Enlarging Loneliness.

Antiquest felt at Noon

When August burning low
Arise this spectral Canticle
Repose to typify

Remit as yet no Grace

No Furrow on the Glow
Yet a Druidic Difference
Enhances Nature now (#1068)

When August is "burning low" in New England, a late summer soft-

ness and "Glow" to the light, together with other natural effects like the
sound of crickets, give the time of year a hauntingly suggestive quality.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's evocation of this special time, in his preface to
Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), closely anticipates Dickinson's:

There is no other feeling like what is caused by this faint, doubtful, yet real
perception, if it be not rather a foreboding, of the year's decay - so blessedly
sweet and sad, in the same breath. ...
[T]he song of the cricket... may be called an audible stillness; for, though
very loud and heard afar, yet the mind does not take note of it as a sound;
so completely is its individual existence merged among the accompanying
characteristics of the season. [In August, summer still seems at its height] -
and yet, in every breath of wind, and in every beam of sunshine, we hear the
whispered farewell, and behold the parting smile, of a dear friend A pen-
sive glory is seen in the far, golden gleams, among the shadows of the trees.
156 The Language of the Senses

The flowers - even the brightest of them, and they are the most gorgeous of
the year - have this gentle sadness wedded to their pomp, and typify the
character of this delicious time, each within itself. (1142-3)

But there are telling differences between the two renderings. Where
Hawthorne paints a composite picture, and personifies and general-
izes, Dickinson concentrates on a particular perceptual aspect of the
time of year. The emotion evoked in her poem is not explicitly named;
it is stranger and more difficult to express than the sweet sadness
so well conveyed by the ripe fullness of Hawthorne's post-prandial
prose. Dickinson's emphasis is not on the natural moment finding an
echo in every bosom, but on the way in which the auditor's "loneli-
ness" is enlarged by a sharpened sense of the foreignness of the natu-
ral world. This is figured by the alien rituals - those of the Druids and
of Roman Catholics, the Mass being the religious service of the Irish-
Catholic immigrants to New England (see Eberwein "Calvinist" 76).
The first version of Dickinson's poem was much less concentrated
(see Franklin 553-4 for a transcription). It had seven stanzas rather
than four: the first two are virtually identical with those of the final
version; the next three describe the crickets' sound ("audibler at
dusk," no difference of "cadence or of pause," of indeterminate cessa-
tion). The final two stanzas are:

The earth has many keys -

Where melody is not
Is the unknown peninsula
Beauty is nature's fact.

But witness for her land

And witness for her sea
The cricket is her utmost
Of elegy to me.

Here the experience is generalized ("many keys") and thus dissipated;

banality is not avoided (the cricket gets her vote for superior elegiac
sound effects); and a portentous allusion - "the unknown peninsula"
is Hamlet's "undiscover'd country, from whose bourn/No traveller
returns" [iii 1.79-80] - brings into the poem a speculative concern
with the future.
In the final version, the entire emphasis is on the present moment -
on the enhanced "now." There is no looking before or after and there-
fore nothing to adulterate or break the present intensity of apprehen-
sion. In another Dickinson poem, crickets are described as sent by the
 Dickinson: The Glimmering Frontier 157

"Typic Mother" to epitomize the seasonal change: their murmuring is

"The Revelations of the Book/Whose Genesis was June" (#1115). If
there is a typological suggestion in #1068, it is certainly not the silver
lining found by one critic: "the speaker's mind [has] been visited
from beyond circumference by a natural manifestation of grace that
enables the poet to accept the coming death of the year in expectancy
of renewal" (Eberwein Strategies 191). What is typified is exactly what
the poem says is typified: not renewal in the future but "Repose" in
the present - in a strangely enhanced moment in which the enlarged
loneliness of the perceiver has merged with the primordial natural
strangeness that had caused the subjective expansion. But the present
repose of #1068 is not oblivious of impermanence. No grace has been
taken away from the natural moment, there is no furrow on the glow:
yet, as in Keats's "To Autumn/' there is an unvoiced premonition
of future diminution that does not diminish, but rather adds to, the
intensity of the present experience.
In #1068 the ear is the key sense in the poet's enhanced conscious-
ness; in other poems it is the eye. Dickinson (unlike Thoreau) makes no
qualitative distinctions between the sensitive registrations of the ear
and those of the eye. It might be observed that visual intimations tend
to elicit a more reflective response than aural ones, while the latter
carry a stronger emotional charge. But more than once strong visual
impressions are synesthetically described in aural terms: the light in
spring that almost speaks to the poet (#812); the slant of winter sun-
light that oppresses like the heaviness of cathedral music (#258); the
prism that "never held the Hues,/It only heard them play" (#1602).
And in #673, visual and aural perceptions supply equally transporting
intimations of a celestial "diviner thing":

'Tis this - in Music - hints and sways -

And far abroad on Summer days -
Distils uncertain pain -
'Tis this enamors in the East -
And tints the Transit in the West -
With harrowing Iodine -

'Tis this - invites - appalls - endows -

Flits - glimmers - proves - dissolves -
Returns - suggests - convicts - enchants -
Then - flings in Paradise -
158 The Language of the Senses

As the plethora of verbs in the last stanza of poem #673 suggests,

Dickinson's aural and visual intimations of a "diviner thing" were
fleeting and unstable. She longed for clear and unequivocal signs or
symbols of the transcendent - of what one poem calls "Compound
Vision -/Light - enabling Light -/The Finite - furnished/With the
Infinite" (#906). The opening stanza of this poem, however, says that
only "through an Open Tomb" - that is, only by the experience of
dying - can this definitive symbolic perception be gained. The human
condition is one of uncertainty and scepticism: one lives in a terres-
trial "House of Supposition" speculating about heavenly mansions
that are "never quite disclosed/And never quite concealed"; one tries
to reach "The Glimmering Frontier that/Skirts the Acres of Perhaps,"
but the "timid life of Evidence/Keeps pleading - 'I don't know'"
(#696, #1173).
A principal cause of Dickinson's uncertainty is her awareness of
the inevitable subjective component in perception: "The Outer - from
the Inner/Derives its Magnitude -/Tis Duke, or Dwarf, according/
As is the Central Mood" (#451). Just as every day has two lengths, its
"absolute extent/And Area superior/By Hope or Horror lent," so
eternity will seem "Velocity or Pause" depending on the earthly char-
acter of the individual (#1295). This is as true for the ear as for the eye:
the oriole's singing may be common or divine depending on the pre-
disposition of the hearer (#526); the sun "is gay or stark/According to
our Deed" (#878). Another tendency to subjective distortion is found
in the imagination itself. One can imagine a plenitude - "Certainties
of Sun -/Midsummer - in the Mind" - so intensely that the long-
pondered vision "So plausible becomes/That I esteem the fiction -
real -/The Real - fictitious seems" (#646).
At other times, the problem is with the heart's tendency to cloud
the mind, as in Dickinson's lovely Indian summer poem:

These are the Days when Birds come back -

A very few - a Bird or two -
To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies resume

The old - old sophistries of June -
A blue and gold mistake.

Oh fraud that cannot cheat the Bee -

Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief.
 Dickinson: The Glimmering Frontier 159

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear -

And softly thro' the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf.

Oh Sacrament of summer days,

Oh Last Communion in the Haze -
Permit a child to join.

Thy sacred emblems to partake -

Thy consecrated bread to take
And thine immortal wine! (#130)

The poem's stanza form and rhyme scheme are those of "the most
lyrical of hymn meters, aabccb, the so-called Common Particular.
Both the movement and the meaning of the poem call for a division
into three double stanzas instead of the six as printed" (Anderson
Emily 147). The three sections are further demarcated by the two
apostrophes, "Oh fraud" and "Oh sacrament." The second is the
only metrically regular of the three sections, suggesting a balance
between the attitudes to natural fact in the other two. The first
describes Indian summer, which seems like early summer - but only
seems. The discriminating perceiver knows that it is a "mistake" to
think that the blue and gold of the October sky means the return of
June, just as she knows that the blue and gold of early summer were
themselves "sophistries" in that they seemed to encourage belief in
their permanence.
Nonetheless, in the second section the plausibility almost induces
"belief." Almost, but not quite. The natural facts of October - seeds
being blown through the air, leaves falling to the ground when the
stillness of the air is altered by the slightest breeze: these "bear
witness" to the fact that June is long gone. But the third section has
another reversal. There is no disagreement about what the natural
facts are; but a different reading of their signification allows the
poem to end in a haze of Christian symbols. The second attitude is
that of a believing or credulous child, not that of a knowing bee. We
now have not fraud but sacrament; not apian nectar but immortal
wine; not scattered seeds and withered leaf but consecrated bread.
The stasis at the end of #130 might seem a version of poem #1068
("Further in Summer"), but the two poems are quite different. If
#1068 recalls Keats's "To Autumn," #130 looks forward to Robert
Frost's Indian summer poem "October" (from his first volume A
Boy's Will), whose day dreamy speaker has a heart "not averse to
160 The Language of the Senses

being beguiled" and would fain lay an ineffectual finger on the

spoke of Time's great wheel.
Despite her epistemological self-awareness, Dickinson never
doubted the authenticity of her "Heavenly Moments" (#393) or "ec-
static instant[s]" (#125) - for example, that "something in a sum-
mer's noon - /A depth - an Azure - a perfume -/Transcending
ecstasy" (#122). But these moments or instants were infrequent and
fortuitous; most of the time they were known through their absence
- were experienced only prospectively or retrospectively. The former
condition is instanced in poem #812:

A Light exists in Spring

Not present on the Year
At any other period -
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad

On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,

It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step

Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay -

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.

March, as Dickinson says in another poem, "is the Month of Expec-

tation" (#1404). In this poem, a certain quality to the morning light
in early spring stirs a deep-seated longing in the speaker. The light
seems a companionable form or answering other: it waits for us,
reveals the furthest limits of the visible, and "almost speaks." Almost
is the pivotal word (as in #130). Its importance is highlighted by the
 Dickinson: The Glimmering Frontier 161

absence of the expected b rhyme at the end of the third stanza,

which enacts the breaking of the one-life illusion. This vernal light
passes "Without the Formula of sound" (it doesn't speak), and in
doing so affects "Content" in two senses: it leaves one both dissatis-
fied rather than satisfied, and empty rather than full.
The transience of ecstatic moments and the subsequent discontent
are the subjects of numerous poems: as certainly as "A Grant of the
Divine" comes, it "Withdraws - and leaves the dazzled Soul/In her
unfurnished Rooms" (#393). In poem #430, the speaker recalls the
assurance she had once felt that "Difference - had begun" and that
her life "would never be Common - more"; but "suddenly - my
Riches shrank -/A goblin - drank my Dew." She had to put back
on the "The Sackcloth ... The Frock I used to wear." Whatever
happened, she wonders, to "my moment of Brocade -/My - drop -
of India?" And in poem #1257, the ephemeral nature of human fulfill-
ment contrasts with the timeless flitting of the butterflies and bees:

Dominion lasts until obtained -

Possession just as long -
But these - endowing as they flit
Eternally belong.

How everlasting are the Lips

Known only to the Dew -
These are the Brides of permanence
Supplanting me and you.

The contrast here is primarily sexual. The ephemeral natural crea-

tures pollinate the flowers and thus contribute to the regenerative
processes of the natural world. In our pursuits, on the other hand, me
and you desire to possess and to dominate. Butterflies and bees do
not take or appropriate to themselves; they endow rather than pos-
sess. In doing so they seem a part of the continuum of nature - they
eternally belong to it. The flowers (their petals figured as lips) are
reproductive without being impregnated: they are unravished brides
like Keats's Grecian urn and similarly permanent or timeless in com-
parison to all breathing human passion. Human possession, on the
other hand, is lasting only in anticipation.
Despite their elusive nature, however, the longing for the
"Moments of Dominion/That happen on a Soul" cannot be mas-
tered. One reason is that such moments are highly addictive; they
leave the soul "with a Discontent/Too exquisite - to tell" (#627). One
162 The Language of the Senses

poem describes the condition of those "lonesome for they know not
What." They are figured as "Eastern Exiles" from Paradise who once
strayed beyond "the Amber line" on the eastern horizon and ever
since have vainly striven to climb the "purple Moat" on the now
western horizon and so return to the place they know only through
its absence (#262).4
The other reason the longing for "Moments of Dominion" cannot
be mastered is that for Dickinson they seem the predestined or pre-
programmed goal of human existence. In #1099, a poem that in tan-
dem with #1257 illustrates the figural versatility of natural facts in her
poetry, this encoding is symbolized by the butterfly's development:

My Cocoon tightens - Colors tease -

I'm feeling for the Air -
A dim capacity for Wings
Demeans the Dress I wear -

A power of Butterfly must be -

The Aptitude to fly
Meadows of Majesty implies
And easy Sweeps of Sky -

Like the butterfly emerging from its cocoon, humans seem endowed
with the potential for reaching higher things. The "Aptitude to fly" of
itself "implies" (in the variant reading of "concedes" that I have
adopted) a celestial plenitude. "So," the poem concludes,

I must baffle at the Hint

And cipher at the Sign
And make much blunder, if at last
I take the clue divine -

The remaining poems I want to consider instance or comment on

what Robert Weisbuch calls Dickinson's analogical poetics (11), her
frequently baffled perceptual search for divine clues. For "ecstatic
need," as she puts it in poem #1101, "Liquor at the Lip" is superior to
"Liquor in the Jug," But for someone who cannot, or cannot always,
get the cork out, the only other way of slaking this thirst are "Appre-
hensions" (#797) or analogical inferences. The hint or sign in poem
#1241 is a sunset:

The Lilac is an ancient shrub

But ancienter than that
 Dickinson: The Glimmering Frontier 163

The Firmamental Lilac

Upon the Hill tonight -
The Sun subsiding on his Course
Bequeathes this final Plant
To Contemplation - not to Touch -
The Flower of Occident.
Of one Corolla is the West -
The Calyx is the Earth -
The Capsules burnished Seeds the Stars -
The Scientist of Faith
His research has but just begun -
Above his synthesis
The Flora unimpeachable
To Time's Analysis -
"Eye hath not seen" may possibly
Be current with the Blind
But let not Revelation
By theses be detained -

The quotation in the last quatrain is from i Corinthians: "Eye hath

not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man,
the things which God hath prepared for them that love him" (2:9).
The poem contrasts scientific knowledge, which is dependent on the
input of eye and ear, with "Revelation." In contemplating the lilac
sunset, the botanist uses a taxonomy in which the macro is consid-
ered in terms of the micro. The proportion play is ingenious but the
result is reductive: for this scientist, the spectacular sunset is merely
a firmamental shrub. For the "Scientist of Faith" - the Rationalist,
the Unitarian, the Higher Critic - earthbound criteria also obtain. For
him, all transcendent notions are ultimately rooted in or projected
from the human need for a sky-god. Opposed to both scientific syn-
theses - the botanical and the theological - is the view that the Flower
of Occident is beyond temporal analysis; it is not a finer-toned repeti-
tion of the terrestrial but a "Revelation" - a showing forth in percep-
tible form of something transcendent. The conclusion of the poem,
however, does not affirm that tonight's sunset is such a revelation;
it rather suggests that a showing forth of the transcendent cannot be
"detained" (apprehended) by "theses" or by any of the other tools of
rational analysis.
The conclusion to poem #797 is similarly measured. The poem's
first three stanzas are a fanciful exercise in proportion play: what the
speaker sees and smells from her window is perceived as a small-scale
world. This exercise becomes more serious in the fourth and fifth
164 The Language of the Senses

stanzas when perceptual attention centers on what is heard when the

wind blows through the pine:

Of its Voice - to affirm - when the Wind is within -

Can the Dumb - define the Divine?
The Definition of Melody - is -
That Definition is none -

It - suggests to our Faith -

They - suggest to our Sight -
When the latter - is put away
I shall meet with Conviction I somewhere met
That Immortality -

Is there, the speaker wonders, an invisible or supernatural dimension

to the world outside the window? Can the dumb (the pine tree)
"define the Divine" - that is, can a natural fact symbolize the tran-
scendent? When the wind is within, it would seem that the tree can
do so; after all, the definition of the wind's sound, its melody, is that it
has no definition. The definition (the meaning) of "Melody" is that
it is not de-finite: it has no fixed or quantifiable limits. It is infinite,
and as such a suggestive figuration of something beyond the natural.
The fifth stanza has another allusion to i Corinthians: "When I was
a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a
child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things" (13:11).
When the speaker has put away the visual game of figuring the pine
tree as a globe she will meet "That Immortality" of which the wind
was a symbol. But she will presumably be able to do so only because
she has earlier "play[ed] at Paste -/Till qualified, for Pearl," as Dick-
inson puts it in another poem. When the real thing is met, we drop
the imitation "and deem our self a fool" - but we could not have
learned to identify the real thing without the prior play with simu-
lacra (#320).
The confidence in this stanza is prospective; it is succeeded in the
last stanza by a return to a lightly suggestive:

Was the Pine at my Window a "Fellow

Of the Royal" Infinity?
Apprehensions - are God's introductions -
To be hallowed - accordingly -

Fellows of the British Royal Society are scientists. Dickinson is not a

scientist of Faith; she is a connoisseur of the "Apprehensions" - the
 Dickinson: The Glimmering Frontier 165

divine intimations or revelations that are (in a variant of the poem's

final line) "Extended inscrutably."
Poems #797 and #1241 are upbeat and confident; but they are also
cagey in what they suggest. Their principal thrust is to make possi-
bility possible. The caution with which they conduct themselves is
understandable in the light of the powerful counterstatements found
in numerous other poems. Some of them describe an initial confidence
being undermined. In poem #501 the subsidence is brilliantly enacted:

This World is not Conclusion.

A Species stands beyond -
Invisible, as Music -
But positive, as Sound -
It beckons, and it baffles -
Philosophy - dont know -
And through a Riddle, at the last -
Sagacity, must go -
To guess it, puzzles scholars -
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown -
Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies -
Blushes, if any see -
Plucks at a twig of Evidence -
And asks a Vane, the way -
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit -
Strong Hallelujahs roll -
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul -

The most positive point in the poem is the period at the end of its first
line; after that, each image contributes to the undermining of the
initial declaration. This gradual process follows the stages of "Crum-
bling" as analysed by Dickinson in poem #997: it is not "an instant's
Act" but rather "Devil's work/Consecutive and slow -/Fail in an
instant, no man did/Slipping - is Crash's law." The invisible "Spe-
cies" ("sequel" in a variant reading) seems susceptible of aural appre-
hension (as in #797); but this simultaneously beckons emotionally and
baffles intellectually. Philosophy has to play dumb: it "dont know."
"Sagacity" - experientially rather than conceptually grounded knowl-
edge of what is beyond this world - can only be gained "at the
last" by going through the "Riddle" of dying. In the past, men have
heroically endeavored to reach the beyond; women have agitated
166 The Language of the Senses

themselves towards the same end. In their Sunday congregations,

conventional Christians receive powerful rhetorical and choral rein-
forcement of their belief in a sequel to this world. But in the sardonic
final lines, all of these efforts are glossed as pain-killers that cannot
still the gnawing doubt that there may be no sequel to this world.
Poem #501 satirizes more than conventional religious belief. The
marvelous figure of Faith as a well-bred, self-conscious young
woman trying to do the proper thing in distressing circumstances is
also a self-parody of Dickinson's own tendency to analogical inquiry.
The wind, which as any weather vane indicates bloweth where it
listeth, is the same force that is credited with being able to "define
the Divine" in #797; and in her speculative poems many "twigs" are
tentatively plucked. In #742, the twigs belong to "Four Trees - upon
a solitary Acre" in an otherwise barren place. The most striking
feature of this poem is the spareness of both subject and its repre-
sentation. The randomly situated trees on a bare acre suggest no pro-
prietorial purpose, aesthetic or practical: the trees have to maintain
themselves. They have the morning sun and the wind in their
branches, and they have a figure/ground relationship to the earth.
But what does their perceiver have? The last stanza shows the per-
ceiving mind moving in a familiar direction - towards inference and
analogy. Of what spiritual fact might this natural fact be the symbol?
Do the four trees have a relationship to their third nearest neighbor
(God)? What witness "is Theirs" unto the whole of which they are
a part? What evidence do they give of a providential purpose or
plan? The one-word answer to all these questions - "Unknown" - is
utterly and unequivocally agnostic.
"Unknown" is also a key word in #1202. The poem's subject is a
natural process - the work of the frost. Its first three stanzas are play-
fully descriptive, emphasizing the stealth and cunning of a "never
seen" force - a "Stranger" that is felt to be "hovering round" remote
villages. But "search effaces him/Till some retrieveless Night ... The
Garden gets the only shot/That never could be traced." There fol-
lows a stanza of generalization on this natural process:

Unproved is much we know -

Unknown the worst we fear -
Of Strangers is the Earth the Inn
Of Secrets is the Air -

In this nicely turned but unexceptional piece of worldly wisdom,

the operation of the frost is the vehicle of a didactic figure, the tenor
of which is the uncertainty and contingency of human life - that we
 Dickinson: The Glimmering Frontier 167

can be adversely affected by forces that we cannot trace or begin to

understand.
The poem does not end here, however. There is, so to speak, another
final stanza:

To analyze perhaps
A Philip would prefer
But Labor vaster than myself
I find it to infer.

This is a great deal more interesting. Its basis is the familiar Dickin-
sonian distinction between scientific knowledge and inference. In
John's Gospel, when Jesus says "I am the way, the truth, and the life:
no man cometh unto the Father, but by me," Philip replies: "Lord,
shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us." Jesus answers: "Have I been
so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he
that hath seen me hath seen the Father ... Believest thou not that I am
in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak unto you I
speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the
works" (14:6-10). We now have an implicit analogy in which the
lethal effects of the frost's secret ministry are to the unseen, traceless
stranger causing them (the frost itself) what Jesus is to his invisible
Father. But the frost is known only through its effects - indeed, it does
not exist apart from its effects. Consequently, a Philippean or scien-
tific attempt to distinguish between them would yield only a notional
and not a real distinction.
Besides, anyone with common sense and some experience of the
New England climate can infer with confidence that frost is the cause
of the seasonal destruction of gardens. The reader of Dickinson's
poem can be equally confident that frost is not on the speaker's mind
when inference is described as a vaster labor than she can perform.
As the biblical allusion attests, she is thinking about supernatural
inference - about the relationship of visible facts to invisible facts.
The scientific mistake is to analyse - to employ rational thinking in
a sphere where symbolic perception is called for. But it would be
equally a blunder to try to infer the existence of a loving heavenly
Father from the killing operation of the frost. Such analogical reflec-
tion would lead instead to a Hardyesque vision of cosmic malignity,
like that found in poem #1624:

Apparently with no surprise

To any happy Flower
The Frost beheads it at its play -
168 The Language of the Senses

In accidental power -
The blonde Assassin passes on -
The Sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another Day
For an Approving God.

Better no illume at all than the ignis fatuus of the frost.

In the last analogical meditation I want to consider, the illumina-
tion is celestial:

The Moon upon her fluent Route

Defiant of a Road -
The Star's Etruscan Argument
Substantiate a God -

If aims impel these Astral Ones

The ones allowed to know
Know that which makes them as forgot
As Dawn forgets them - now - (#1528)

In another Dickinson poem, the moon is figured as a female stranger,

"A Lady in the Town" who seems "engrossed to Absolute -/With
shining - and the Sky" and shows no "Concern/For little Mysteries/
... /As harass us - like Life - and Death -/And Afterward - or Nay"
(#629). In this poem, the same celestial quality of utter unconcern for
sublunar beings is more cryptically and powerfully intimated.
"Etruscan" may be taken to mean strangely mysterious and awe-
inspiring (like "Antiquest" and "Druidic" in #1068). But the allusion is
more pointed. Little is known of the Etruscans, the pre-Roman inhab-
itants of Italy. Their inscriptions, written in the Greek alphabet and
therefore legible, are transcribed from a mysterious tongue related to
no known language group and are thus undecipherable. Thus, the
stars shining in the night sky may seem natural facts symbolizing and
substantiating a God, just as the moon's graceful movement through
the heavens may seem fluent in the secondary sense of inscribing a
message for terrestrial readers. But one cannot know what is being
said because one does not know the language of the spheres.
The problem implicit in "Etruscan" is made explicit in the opening
line of the second stanza - "If aims impel these Astral Ones." But
agnostic uncertainty is not the conclusion of this poem, as it is of other
Dickinson poems. The conditional phrase is immediately followed by
a powerfully negative statement that erases possibility and replaces
it with negative certainty. This reading presupposes two crucial deter-
minations. The first is to read the last two lines as an analogical prop-
 Dickinson: The Glimmering Frontier 169

osition in which the "them" in the penultimate line refers to "The

Ones allowed to know" and the "them" in the final line to "these
Astral Ones" - the moon and stars. Even if the celestial characters are
legible and do figure a God, the ones allowed to read them only
"know" (have knowledge of) something utterly oblivious of them
(like the Northern Lights in #290), something that makes them as
insignificant, as forgotten, as the light of the rising sun makes the stars
and the moon.
The second determination concerns the identity of "The Ones
allowed to know." There are two possibilities. The privileged ones
might be taken to be the dead - those, and those alone, who have the
sagacity that comes with having gone through the "Riddle" (#501). A
collective example would be the Etruscan race, who by failing to
communicate with succeeding races have become a forgotten people.
In this reading, the poem's closing statement becomes simply a
version of the Christian commonplace that Time like an ever-rolling
stream bears all its sons away, making them forgotten as a dream that
dies at the break of day. The alternative reading is more chilling:
"The ones allowed to know" are Romantic seers like Emily Dickin-
son with the gift of symbolic perception, who are committed to the
principle that natural facts are the symbols of spiritual facts - that as
Ishmael puts it in chapter 99 of Moby-Dick, "some certain significance
lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world
itself but an empty cipher." In this reading, at the end of #1528 all that
these privileged seers have learned is that, like the vanished stars
and moon, they too will be extinguished.

In reading and thinking about the speculative poems of Emily Dick-

inson, where should the final emphasis fall - on the negative or the
positive? There is poem #761:

From Blank to Blank -

A Threadless Way
I pushed Mechanic feet -
To stop - or perish - or advance -
Alike indifferent -

If end I gained
It ends beyond
Indefinite disclosed -
I shut my eyes - and groped as well
'Twas lighter - to be Blind -
170 The Language of the Senses

But a late prose statement implies something very different: "Tis a

dangerous moment for any one when the meaning goes out of things
and Life stands straight - and punctual - and yet no content(s)
(signal) come(s). Yet such moments are. If we survive them they
expand us" (Letters iii 919).
I would say that despite the numerous poems describing terrible
moments where the meaning goes out of things and no signal comes,
the ultimate impression conveyed by Dickinson's poetry is that the
journey is worthwhile even if there can be no arrival. "Wonder/'
the poet says in #1331, "is not precisely Knowing/And not precisely
Knowing not"; a person "has not lived who has not felt" this "beau-
tiful but bleak condition." A better image of Dickinson's analogical
quest than a seeker moving from blank to blank is the traveller in
#1450:

The Road was lit with Moon and star -

The Trees were bright and still -
Descried I - by the distant Light
A Traveller on a Hill -
To magic Perpendiculars
Ascending, though Terrene -
Unknown his shimmering ultimate -
But he indorsed the sheen -

As in #1528, the night scene is illuminated by the moon and stars; the
speaker is just able to make out in the distance the figure of a traveller
on a hill. That this is a figure of the poet is suggested in the third line:
"Descried I -" can be read as "I saw there myself (or a figure of my-
self)." Although the traveller is "Terrene/' not celestial, he is moving
towards, and seems drawn upwards by, a magical illumination. The
specific goal or destination is "unknown" and there is no suggestion
that the earthbound traveller will ever arrive at a "shimmering ulti-
mate." But the poem does affirm that the traveller's presence authen-
ticates (endorses) the illuminated scene (metonymically figured by
the sheen), giving it a focal point and a value it would not otherwise
possess, just as the unknown shimmering ultimate gives a focus, a
direction and a value to the longing for a disclosure of the beyond.
 NINE

Afterword:
Two Victorian Seers

How useful is sensory-perceptual contextualization for the study of

other nineteenth-century poets? It is difficult to generalize. In my
view, it would not be useful to follow up William Michael Rossetti's
observation that "a marked peculiarity in Browning's eyes - one of
them long-sighted, the other short-sighted" - illustrates "the quality
of his mind" or mental vision (299n). Pursuing the implications of
Lionel Trilling's observations on Keats's sensory profile is another
matter. Trilling notes that while in Wordsworth "virtually the only
two sense-faculties of which he takes account are seeing and hear-
ing" and "the matter of the senses' experience passes very quickly
into what Wordsworth calls the 'purer mind'," in Keats there is "no
distinction of prestige among the senses, and to him the sensory, the
sensuous and the sensual were all one ... Eating and the delicacies of
taste are basic and definitive in his experience and in his poetry ...
Sense cannot be left behind" (13-14).
There are also the cases of Tennyson and Hopkins. I want to con-
clude with brief discussions of these two poets because they show the
usefulness of sensory-perceptual contextualization for post-Romantic
poets, even for those who exhibit an antipathy to symbolic percep-
tion. Tennyson's severe myopia was the physiological basis of his
equivocal attitude to symbolic perception and his reliance in his spec-
ulative poetry on intuition rather than sensory-perceptual experience.
In his journals and poetry, Hopkins attempted to perceive the natural
world intensely but objectively, without subjective distortion. But two
of his very finest poems are exceptions to this rule. And the shape of
172 The Language of the Senses

his creative career has more in common with that of Wordsworth,

Coleridge, Thoreau, and Whitman than has been recognized.

In 1892, the year of his death, Tennyson reaffirmed his belief that
"God is love, transcendent, all-pervading! We do not get this faith
from Nature or the world ... We get this faith from ourselves, from
what is highest within us" (H. Tennyson i 314). In understanding
Tennyson's life-long insistence on this point, the place to begin is
with the most conspicuous feature of his sensory profile. "The short-
ness of his sight, which was extreme, tormented him always," James
Knowles recalled: "When he was looking at any object he seemed
to be smelling it ... at my first visit to him he warned me, as I left, to
come up and speak to him whenever I next met him, 'for if not/ he
said, 'I shouldn't know you though I rubbed against you in the
street'" (Page 88). This report comes from a friend of later years;
but Tennyson was just as myopic in youth. As a Cambridge under-
graduate, for example, he "customarily read only with a monocle or
reading-glasses, with the book held close to the end of his nose." He
also used a monocle at meals because he was "unable to see to eat
without it" (Martin Tennyson 93).
The need to peer closely at what was within a limited focal range
helps account for the detailed particularity of Tennyson's natural
descriptions. John Stuart Mill notes of his early poems that "the delin-
eation of outward objects ... is, not picturesque, but ... statuesque;
with brilliancy of colour superadded. The forms are not, as in paint-
ing, of unequal degrees of definiteness; the tints do not melt gradually
into each other, but each individual object stands out in bold relief,
with a clear decided outline" (Jump 89). In Valerie Pitt's formulation,
Tennyson had "cloistered vision": because of the isolation of "visual
details from the things with which they would be associated in a
normal field of vision," he seems in his poetry "to move in a world of
over-emphasised detail so precisely stated that it appears fantastic to
normal vision" (21-2).
Tennyson's shortsightedness also helps to account for other con-
spicuous features of his sensory-perceptual life. For one thing, as
Patrick Trevor-Roper notes in his study of The World through Blunted
Sight, Tennyson's extreme myopia was the reason "his epithets often
have a tactile quality - like the 'wrinkled sea', which recalls the
poems written by the truly blind" (32). For another, when one sense is
defective, another sense will sometimes acquire a compensatory
 Two Victorian Seers 173

acuteness. Zola, for example, who was also severely shortsighted, had
a highly developed sense of smell. In Tennyson's case, the compensa-
tory sense was hearing - or so he believed. His hearing "was
exceptionally keen," Knowles recalled, "and he held it as a sort of
compensation for his blurred sight; he could hear 'the shrieks of a
bat', which he always said was the test of a quick ear" (Page 88).
Myopia also explains the vagueness of the poet's distanced per-
spectives - the frequency with which material phenomena lose their
outline and fade into shadow. Tennyson told an astronomer friend
that "without spectacles the two stars of the Great Bear forming the
pointers appeared to him as two intersecting circular disks" (Lockyer
and Lockyer 31). Another friend reported "that the moon, without a
glass, seemed to him like a shield across the sky" (H. Tennyson i 512).
As Pitt has noted: "sharpness of detail belongs only to the fore-
ground of Tennyson's descriptions, more distant objects appear with
a kind of mysterious generality: landscape takes on a haziness like a
landscape in the half light, and seems like the country of a dream or a
fantasy." Tennyson's world, "physically and emotionally, is a world
without middle distance where the near is detailed, intimate and
striking, and the distant unreal, ungraspable, and vague" (22).
The absence of middle distance in Tennyson's visual field has
important implications for the status of symbolic perception in his
poetry. At the close-up extreme we have this brief reflective lyric:

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower - but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is. (ii 693)

If, could, should: Tennyson is too close to the flower for it to function as
an instrument in apprehending the supernatural. It cannot be a Col-
eridgean metonymic symbol, like the flowery meadow in the middle
distance described in the Statesman's Manual, because there is no con-
tinuum or whole of which it can be perceived to be a part. In Tenny-
son's view,

... any man that walks the mead,

In bud or blade, or bloom, may find,
According as his humours lead,
A meaning suited to his mind, (ii 56)
174 The Language of the Senses

At the other extreme is "The Higher Pantheism":

The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains -
Are not these, O soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?

Is not the Vision He? though He be not that which He seems?

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,

Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him.

And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;
But if we could see and hear, this Vision - were it not He? (ii 706)

The material dissolve at the extreme limits of the phenomenal gives

rise to cosmic ruminations and a pretty taste for sparadox. But the re-
sult is no more conclusive and no more satisfying than Tennyson's
musings on the tiny flower. Celestial facts are equally unhelpful as in-
dicators or examples of spiritual facts.
No wonder, then, that throughout his career Tennyson insisted on a
distinction between knowledge, which is dependent on the experi-
ence of the senses, and a higher faculty that is not empirically based
and that he usually calls wisdom. The former is "earthly of the mind,"
the latter "heavenly of the soul" (ii 436). Assurance of the existence of
transcendent entities can only be gained through inner experience -
the "heat of inward evidence" (i 585). Knowledge is "the swallow on
the lake/That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there" but cannot
penetrate beyond the surface (iii 140). Nor can sensory and perceptual
experience help to "fight the fear of death" (ii 435). All too often, what
the senses discover in the phenomenal world are not tokens of tran-
scendence but "outward signs" of mortality (i 584). At other times,
there seems to be a radical discontinuity between external phenom-
ena and the individual human life: "will one beam be less intense/'
the still small voice asks the tormented speaker of "The Two Voices,"
"When thy peculiar difference/Is cancelled in the world of sense?":

Not less the bee would range her cells,

The furzy prickle fire the dells,
The foxglove cluster dappled bells, (i 573-4)
 Two Victorian Seers 175

Hopkins is the Victorian poetic seer who most closely approximates

Ruskin's anti-Romantic ideal of perception without subjective distor-
tion. As an Oxford undergraduate of eighteen, Hopkins reported that
he was sketching "a good deal." He described the point of view of his
drawings as "Ruskinese" and went on to explain: "I have particular
periods of admiration for particular things in Nature; for a certain
time I am astonished at the beauty of a tree, shape, effect etc, then
when the passion, so to speak, has subsided, it is consigned to my
treasury of explored beauty, and acknowledged with admiration and
interest ever after, while something new takes its place in my enthusi-
asm" (Further Letters 202). The same point of view is found in the
journal that Hopkins intermittently kept from 1866 to 1875. The most
striking aspect of the many renderings of natural phenomena in the
journal is their impersonality. Hopkins does not allow his moods or
thoughts to be associated with his perception of nature and even
seems intent on promoting the self-sufficiency of the object of percep-
tion and demoting the contribution of the perceiver to the perceptual
act. For example, in passages where he is closely scrutinizing a natu-
ral object Hopkins tends to employ a dangling participle or detached
modifier "in such a way as to blur the distinction between the human
observer and the surrounding physical world" (Martin Hopkins 204).
This syntactic equivocation is one manifestation of Hopkins' com-
plex sensibility. On the one hand, his senses were acute and exquis-
itely discriminating. In a journal entry of May 1871, for example, he
notes of the bluebells he had held in his hand that they seemed
"made to every sense" and then shows this in a long passage of de-
tailed description (Journals 209). On the other hand, from an early
age, Hopkins had a rigorous scruple concerning his body and kept
his senses under strict control. His poem "The Habit of Perfection,"
written in 1866, is a catalogue of sensory mortification: silence is
asked to "sing to me" and beat upon his ear; his eyes will be closed in
order to find "the uncreated light"; the palate, "the hutch of tasty
lust," is encouraged to welcome "fasts divine" and the nostrils to
content themselves with what the censers send forth from the sanctu-
ary; and the hands and feet are similarly addressed.
Despite these severities, the journal entries for the late i86os
and early 18705 show that Hopkins allowed himself a good deal of
visual pleasure. "What you look hard at," he notes, "seems to look
hard at you" (Journals 204). This intense interaction brought numerous
aesthetic frissons indicated by terms like "melodious," "beautiful,"
"graceful," and "charming." The journal even shows a Thoreauvian
awareness of how the circumstances and tactics of the perceiver could
176 The Language of the Senses

affect the intensity of perception. For example, in looking hard at nat-

ural objects Hopkins needed to be alone: "Even with one companion
ecstasy is almost banished: you want to be alone and to feel that, and
leisure - all pressure taken off" (Journals 182).
In time, aesthetic perception modulated into a more disciplined
intellectual scrutiny of natural phenomena. But to call the natural
observations in the journal scientific would be misleading. Hopkins'
ruling passion is his perception of "natural objects as active, autono-
mous beings in the continuous process of self-creation" (Frederick
96). Looking hard at objects in attempting to capture their unique-
ness, their informing principle of organization, and their process of
self-creation, led Hopkins to coin the terms "inscape" and "instress."
The former is the distinctive sense-perceived pattern or inner form of
a natural object. The latter is the term for the unifying force in the
object, the energy that sustains the pattern: "all things are upheld by
instress and are meaningless without it" (Journals 127). In this sense,
instress is ultimately a supernatural force. But the term is also used
by Hopkins to connote "that impulse from the 'inscape' which acts on
the senses and, through them, actualizes the inscape in the mind
of the [perceiver] ... Instress, then, is often the sensation of inscape"
(Gardner xxi).
That is to say, instress has both an objective and a subjective
aspect: it is both a quality of an object hor a presupposition of its
existence and an aspect of the interaction between perceived and
perceiver. In its latter aspect, instress resembles Coleridge's primary
imagination - "the living Power and prime Agent of all human Per-
ception" (Biographia i 304). For Hopkins, both subject and object
share in the possession of the energy of instress: there is "a stem of
stress between us and things," a complementarity, a rhyming or mir-
roring, a "canon ... of feeling" (Journals 127,135). (A canon is a musi-
cal piece with different parts taking up the same subject successively
in strict imitation.) But the instress "which unmistakeably distin-
guishes and individualises things" is "not imposed outwards from
the mind as for instance by melancholy or strong feeling" (Journals
215). We are not, that is to say, dealing with examples of the pathetic
fallacy. It is rather the case that (as Hopkins put it in "Hurrahing
in Harvest") "These things, these things were here and but the
beholder/Wanting."
In the late 18705, Hopkins gave up his journal and returned to
writing poetry after having abstained from metrical composition for
eight years because he believed it incompatible with his religious
vocation. This occurred during the period when he was stationed at
 Two Victorian Seers 177

St Beuno's, a Jesuit house in a lovely natural setting in north Wales.

Hopkins later described his three years there as his "salad days"
(Bridges 163), and one may equally well appropriate Coleridge's term
and describe this time as a "blessed interval" during which his poetic
faculties expanded in tandem with his intensified sense of the beauty
of natural facts.
During this period, Hopkins wrote about one-third of all his ma-
ture poetry, including the famous series of nature poems which cele-
brate the particulars of the natural world in the continuous process of
being themselves. One indication of this perceived plenitude is the
mirroring or rhyming of one part of the natural world by another:
"As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame"; "Thrush's eggs
look little low heavens" ("Spring"); skies are "of couple-colour as a
brinded cow" ("Pied Beauty"); the stars in the night sky resemble (in-
ter alia) "Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare" ("The
Starlight Night"). As in Coleridge's conversation poems, synesthetic
imagery is another sign of the intense reciprocity of inner and outer,
of the rhythm in Hopkins' poetic perception of the natural world. In
"Spring," the song of the thrush "Through the echoing timber does so
rinse and wring/The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing"
(rinse and wring are tactile verbs, lightning a visual image). Just as
the trees do, these figures amplify and enhance the bird's song.
As is well known, what helped persuade Hopkins of the appro-
priateness of these poetic celebrations was his discovery a few years
previously of the thought of the medieval theologian Duns Scotus, a
key aspect of which is encapsulated in "As kingfishers catch fire":

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself: myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

Scotus gave, so to speak, a Catholic imprimatur to Hopkins' intense

sensory-perceptual apprehension of nature. In the nature poems the
relationship between the particularized beauty of the natural world
and his Christian supernatural beliefs is repeatedly proclaimed. The
essential difference between Hopkins' apprehension of the natural
world and that of the Romantic subjects of this study was pinpointed
by Marshall McLuhan: his "is literally a sacramental view of the
world since what of God there is he does not perceive or experience
but takes on faith" (82). Most of Hopkins' nature poems presuppose a
belief in what is being celebrated rather than represent the discovery
178 The Language of the Senses

of a relationship between seen and unseen. These poems are rhetorical

rather than meditative, allegorical rather than symbolic. Thus, for
all its greater intensity, there is no difference in intention and theme
between Hopkins' wonderful curtal sonnet "Pied Beauty" and an-
other well-known Victorian doxology, Mrs Alexander's "All things
bright and beautiful."
I agree with Seamus Heaney that Hopkins' nature poems are more
interesting when they do not simply celebrate and declare the super-
natural infusion of the natural, but when they represent or re-enact
the intense apprehension of a natural fact. I would further urge that
the most interesting of these poems are those with a self-reflexive ele-
ment, when one is made aware that the "fine delight" of perceptual
apprehension "fathers thought" ("To R.B.") - that it is the trigger of
the creative activity of mind that has resulted in the poem. It is useful
to remember that as used by Hopkins "inscape" and "instress" can
refer to both natural objects and aesthetic objects - paintings and
sketches, musical compositions, and poems. Just as Hopkins' notion
of the subjective aspect of the instress of natural objects resembles
Coleridge's primary imagination, so too the instress of a poem may
be likened to Coleridge's secondary imagination, which is "identical
with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree,
and in the mode of its operation" (Biographia i 304).
Both degrees or modes of the creative activity of mind are
inscribed in two of Hopkins' very finest poems, "The Windhover"
and "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves." The former, Heaney recognizes, is
"an extended mime of the process described in the sonnet to Bridges,
an anatomy of the movement of inspiration and illumination" (96).
In the octet, the speaker represents his recent perception of the flight
of a kestrel:

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and
striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl
and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the
thing.
 Two Victorian Seers 179

The kestrel is drawn to his hunting by the dawn light: it "patrols the
lower air, 30-50 feet up, in great level loops," effortlessly riding the
air currents (MacKenzie 379). The bird also hovers by flying against
the wind at the wind's own speed and thus in the dawn light seems
drawn in another sense - etched against the sky.
The octet also etches the intensity of the poet's apprehension of the
windhover: he has not simply seen the bird; he has "caught" it. His
heart has been powerfully "stirred" by the bird's showing forth of
itself, enacting its being. The attribution of "ecstasy" to the wind-
hover is a hypallage or transferred epithet; the emotion belongs to
the speaker and not the bird, who is hungry, not ecstatic. This figure,
a perfect example of what Ruskin termed the pathetic fallacy, can also
be associated with the activity of the secondary imagination. The
bird's dealing out of his being has prompted Hopkins' tongue to
fling out broad his distinctive poetic being, to declare and utter him-
self through the composition of the poem. The windhover is also
"drawn" in a third sense: it is inscribed in Hopkins' words and exu-
berant figures - the equestrian and skating imagery, the imagery of
royalty and its Christian connotations.
For the predatory kestrel, one hover in eight "results in a stoop - a
slow, gentle, fairly steep descent on its prey, wings held high above
the back" (MacKenzie 379). Its dive is described in the first half of the
poem's sestet:

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! and the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

As the bird's flight changes from a glide to a more dangerous-

seeming downward swoop, its wings buckle in a V- or plough-shape.
"Buckle" refers to both a visual aspect of the bird's descent and the
fusion of subject and object. The bird's dive causes a quantum leap
("a billion/Times") in the perceiver's intensity of apprehension; this
is registered in the change from "caught" in the past tense to
"Buckle" in the present tense with imperative undertones. The em-
phatic "here" also locates the buckling together of subject and object
in the creative present of its representation. Similarly, while at the
perceptual level "the fire that breaks from thee then" may be taken to
be the now visible russet underside of the kestrel (against the light of
the dawn, any color in the bird would have been obliterated), it also
functions as a transferred epithet, a figure both for rapturous appre-
hension and creative kindling - the "strong/Spur, live and lancing
180 The Language of the Senses

like the blowpipe flame" ("To R.B.") - that impregnates the mind
with the seed of the poem.
The final tercet offers ground-level analogies or mirrorings of the
aerial buckling (it is the level of a self-mortifying Jesuit poet-priest
whose emotions and feelings were usually kept under severe control):

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

The sheer plod of the plough in its quotidian employment causes

both its cutting blade and the overturned earth to "shine"; the embers
of a fire break into brilliant color as they fall from a grate. Both images
may also be taken to refer to "The Windhover" as well as to the flight
of the windhover, just as the Latin word versus can mean both a line
of verse and the turning of a plough at the end of a furrow. Like
plough and earth, poet and bird are both made to shine in the poem.
The gash of gold-vermilion is a figure for the luminosity of the spec-
tacular sonnet that has broken forth from the initial monochrome
apprehension of its subject.
These things are in "The Windhover" but have not always been
beheld. Paul Mariani's explanation is that the "religious signifi-
cance" in the poem - Christ's incarnation, his stooping to take on
human form - "is so continually bursting through the natural scene
that many commentators have spent most of their time on the sec-
ondary meaning without grounding it in the perceptual world"
(111). The ground of the poem is the natural ecstasy of an intense
perceptual apprehension; the figural amplification adds to the
poem's resonance but is not its enabling condition or raison d'etre.
One might even wonder whether without its subtitle ("to Christ our
Lord"), added nearly seven years after the poem's composition, reli-
gious readings would ever have gained such currency.1
The perceptual basis of "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves" has also been
obscured - in this case by commentators who present the poem as
a tripartite Ignatian meditative exercise on the Day of Judgement,
when Christ will separate "one from another, as a shepherd divideth
his sheep from the goats" (Matthew 25:32). In the copiously anno-
tated Clarendon edition of Hopkins' poems, for example, Norman
MacKenzie glosses the poem's title only with the assertion that it
derives from the requiem hymn "Dies Irae" (which speaks of the Day
of Judgement as "Teste David cum Sibyllo") and the suggestion that
there are reminiscences of the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid. But the
title explicitly mentions the leaves of the Sibyl, as neither the hymn
 Two Victorian Seers 181

nor Virgil's epic does. Why, one wonders, couldn't the title equally
well be taken to allude to Coleridge's Sibylline Leaves, the 1817 collec-
tion of his poems, two of which are in fact cited in MacKenzie's notes
to Hopkins' poem? And where is the essential information that the
title specifically alludes to the Sibyl's practice of writing her prophe-
cies on leaves placed at the entrance to her cave?
"Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves" is better read not as a dogmatic aide-
memoire but as a Romantic lyric concerning natural facts and spiritual
facts, that represents the activity of the primary imagination. In this
reading, the natural fact of the fall of night prompts an overpowering
intimation of mortality, just as autumn (the evening of the year) does
in another Hopkins poem, "Spring and Fall," the subject of which is
the inner-outer rhyming of the child Margaret and the falling leaves.
The leaves in this poem are also natural facts symbolically perceived
as figures (oracles) of mortality:

Heart, you round me right

With: Our evening is over us; our night whelms, whelms, and will
end us.
Only the beakleaved boughs dragonish damask the tool-smooth
bleak light; black,
Ever so black on it. Our tale, O our oracle!

At the end of the poem, an apocalyptic element is unquestionably

present - but too much has been made of it. The vision of Hell is the
vehicle of a metaphorical figure, the tenor of which is the speaker's
timor mortis. This is the explanation of what troubled one commenta-
tor about the poem - that while it asserted that man had an ultimate
choice between right and wrong, "in the tone and direction of the
poem there is no hope" (Schneider Dragon 166). There is no hope
because the site of the poem's ending is not an eschatological there
but a psychological here. It is in the poetic present, in the poem itself,
and not in the Hell of an imagined future that "selfwrung, self-
strung, sheathe- and shelterless, thoughts against thoughts in groans
grind."
There is another figurative dimension to the leaves: they may be
taken to refer to Hopkins' own poems and the tale they tell. His
unpublished poems are sibylline leaves in the same sense that that
Coleridge used the figure in his collection of 1817: "in allusion to the
fragmentary and widely scattered state in which [the poems] have
been long suffered to remain" (Poems ii 1150). The tale that is crypti-
cally spelt out is that, like the evening sky, the "dapple" of Hopkins'
poems "is at an end." There will be no more energetic celebrations of
182 The Language of the Senses

the "skeined stained veined variety" of the natural world. With an

exception or two, verbal and descriptive exuberance is not found in
the late poetry.
In a letter of 1879, Hopkins told Robert Bridges: "Feeling, love in
particular, is the great moving power and spring of verse and the
only person that I am in love with seldom, especially now, stirs my
heart sensibly and when he does I cannot always 'make capital' of it,
it would be a sacrilege to do so" (Bridges 66). God, who had been
accessible through the natural world during the years at St Beuno's,
seemed to have withdrawn a sense of himself from Hopkins, to have
become a Deus absconditus. I suggest that there is a perceptual expla-
nation of this sense of desertion - that God, so to speak, stayed where
he was, while Hopkins lost the ability to contact him "sensibly," that
is, through the senses.
By the end of the 18705, Hopkins, who had been in poor physical
health most of his adult life, had become aware of diminished sen-
sory acuity. In reflecting on "the loss of taste, of relish for what once
charmed us," he notes that "insight is more sensitive, in fact is more
perfect, earlier in life than later and especially towards elementary
impressions: I remember that crimson and pure blues seemed to me
spiritual and heavenly sights fit to draw tears once; now I can just see
what I once saw, but can hardly dwell on it and should not care to
do so" (Correspondence 38).2 What replaced this diminution of the ex-
ternal senses was a sharpened proprioceptive sense, the sense of him-
self. In an extraordinary passage from his retreat notes for August
1880, Hopkins notes:

Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinc-
tiveness, and serving, this selfbeing of my own ... to me there is no resem-
blance: searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.
The development, refinement, condensation of nothing shews any sign of
being able to match this to me or give me another taste of it, a taste even
resembling it.
One may dwell on this further. We say that any two things however unlike
are in something like. This is the one exception: when I compare my self,
my being-myself, with anything else whatever, all things alike, all in the same
degree, rebuff me with blank unlikeness. (Sermons 123)

Given this felt sense of the absolute uniqueness of his own being,
there could no longer be any rhyming or mirroring of inner or outer
in Hopkins' perception of natural objects. All that could be feelingly
experienced was the taste of himself:
 Two Victorian Seers 183

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree

Bitter would have me taste; my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

These lines from "I wake and feel the fell of dark" posit a providential
cause of Hopkins' condition ("God's ... decree"). The poem's next
line, however, adumbrates an internal rather than an external expla-
nation: "Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours." That is, Hopkins'
spiritual or creative yeast, the leavening agent for his whole being and
a sine qua non of perceptual intensity, had gone bad, souring the "dull
dough" ("selfstuff" in a variant reading) of the body.
"All things," Hopkins wrote in 1881, "are charged with love, are
charged with God and if we know how to touch them give off sparks
and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him" (Sermons
195). Like Coleridge, Hopkins lost the sense of feeling/touch. He
could still see (though less acutely) the objects of the natural world;
but he was seldom able to feel them - and thus he was unable both to
find God in the natural world and to conceive poetically. "[W]hat is
life without aim, without spur, without help?" he wrote a year before
his death at the age of forty-four: "All my undertakings miscarry: I
am like a straining eunuch" (Sermons 262). The reference is to poetic
creation - the spur and the images of insemination both reappear in
his last poem, the self-reflexive "To R.B." At St Beuno's, Hopkins had
flung out broad his robust poetic signature. Now in "lagging lines" of
verse he laments that he lacks "the one rapture of an inspiration" and
can no longer celebrate "The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation."3
In a letter of 1886, Hopkins had taken vigorous exception to a
correspondent's low opinion of Wordsworth's Intimations Ode, For
Hopkins, the poem had an "extreme value"; indeed, it registered a
liminal moment in human history. Through the ages there had been a
very few men who had "seen something ... human nature in these men
saw something, got a shock ... in Wordsworth when he wrote that
ode human nature got another of those shocks, and the tremble from
it is spreading. This opinion I do strongly share; I am, ever since I
knew the ode, in that tremble" (Correspondence 147-8).4 For Hopkins,
as for Wordsworth, Coleridge and Thoreau, "the radiance which was
once so bright" faded and disappeared because he lost the ability to
perceive it.
This page intentionally left blank
 Notes

CHAPTER 1

1 In Dorothy Emmet's terms, the perceptual mode is that of a higher level of

the "adverbial mode [of] integral feeling/' an "aesthetic seeing" in which
the perceiver is concerned "not only with differentiating contents but with
enjoying the integral feeling conveyed by the composition as a whole"
(42). Helen Vendler describes the end of "There Was a Child" as one
in which the viewer experiences "the sensuality of perception" in an
"aesthetic present" ("Placing" 25).
2 Traditional classifications of the senses are surveyed in Louise Vinge's The
Five Senses. On the influence of Newton's Opticks, see Marjorie Hope Nicol-
son's Newton Demands the Muse. Raimonda Modiano's "Coleridge's Views
on Touch and Other Senses" usefully summarizes the historical background
and brings together many of Coleridge's scattered comments on the senses.

CHAPTER 2

1 Another gloss on the Coleridge passage is found in section 32 of Song of

Myself; there Whitman speaks of animals as "bringfing] me tokens of
myself... .they evince them plainly in their possession. // I do not know
where they got those tokens, / I must have passed that way untold times
ago and negligently dropt them." Lewis Hyde comments: "Natural objects
- living things in particular - are like a language we only faintly remem-
ber. It is as if creation had been dismembered sometime in the past and all
things are limbs we have lost that will make us whole if only we can recall
them." Whitman's sympathetic perception of objects, says Hyde, "is a
remembrance of the wholeness of things" (174).
2 Humphry House usefully summarizes the key points in this important
distinction: "the strength of impression of external nature on the mind is the
186 Notes to pages 24-39

essential starting-point"; nature has "her own proper interest irrespective

of a secondary act of application to moralised human life"; and this proper
interest "derives from the dual fact that everything (including a human
being), while having its own life, yet shares in the common life of all" (54).
3 My account of the pathetic fallacy is indebted to George Landow and
Patricia Ball. On the changing relationship between object and emotion in
the nineteenth century, see Ball, Josephine Miles, Zelda Boyd, and Carol
Christ (Victorian and Modern Poetics).
4 In Moby-Dick (1851), for example, Ahab and Ishmael, both of whom are
committed to the search for the higher spritual facts symbolized by natu-
ral facts, succumb at moments to a horrifying suspicion: "sometimes I
think there's naught beyond," says the former in chapter 36, condensing
into a phrase what Ishmael reflects on at length in "The Whiteness of the
Whale" (chapter 42): that the spiritual fact corresponding to the natural
fact of whiteness is "a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we
shrink"; that "by its indefiniteness ... shadows forth the heartless voids
and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the
thought of annihilation."

CHAPTER 3

1 See Griggs's note in Letters ii 865; Griggs also calls attention to Coleridge's
borrowings from Bowles's "Coombe Ellen."
2 In the change from day to night, the eye switches from the dominance of
one type of retinal light receptor to another - from color sensitive cones,
which are located in the small central area of the retina (the fovea) where
incoming light is received, to rods, which are sensitive to a much lower
threshold of light, offer poor spatial resolution and are slower processing
(see Kandel et al. 402).
3 If lights of different hues but the same intensity are shone into the eyes,
some will look brighter than others. This can be charted on a graph
known as the spectral luminosity curve; the colors in the middle of the
spectrum - green and yellow - are the brightest. This is of great practical
importance in connection with distress signals or markers, which is why
the buoy's light is green.
4 For a complementary view, see Nicholas Ruddick's excellent discussion
of synesthesia in Emily Dickinson's poetry. He argues that "similes and
metaphors with an intersensory texture have been used with varying
degrees of success by most poets of all ages," that attempting to distin-
guish between clinical and literary synesthesia causes "an enormous
amount of confusion," and that the term should be dropped from the
critical vocabulary. Critics "interested in the language of poetry could
 Notes to pages 44-50 187

then concentrate on the problem of whether or not each intersensory

image - regardless of hierarchical reference, source, destination and so on
- is, in its context, vivid, spontaneous and effective" (77).

CHAPTER 4

1 These instances suggest that one of Wordsworth's characteristic creative

modes involved "a continuing reinterpretation not only of what he had
already experienced, but especially of what he had already written"
(Eakin 390; see Wolfson and Stoddard). Obvious examples are those re-
flecting the post-i8o5 movement away from Romantic naturalism toward
Christian supernaturalism. In the 1805 Prelude (ii 428-30), for example,
Wordsworth comments as follows on himself at the age of seventeen:
Wonder not
If such my transports were, for in all things
I saw one life, and felt that it was joy.
In the 1850 Prelude (ii 409-14), this becomes:
Wonder not
If high the transport, great the joy I felt,
Communing in this sort through earth and heaven
With every form of creature, as it looked
Towards the Uncreated with a countenance
Of adoration, with an eye of love.
2 Earlier commentators made similar arguments. In 1944, for example,
J.C. Smith wrote that it was "an open question" whether the Words-
worthian sublime "was simply an extraordinary heightening (hyperaes-
thesia) of the senses of sight and hearing ... or some mode of perception
transcending sense" (13). And in 1959, David Ferry found two views of
nature in Wordsworth, the sacramental and the mystical. In the latter, na-
ture "can be nothing else than purely and simply an obstruction" between
the poet and "direct contact with the eternal Presences. Nature must
therefore be destroyed, obliterated absolutely" (32).
3 The handful of tactile notations in the Prelude include the following. In
book i the poet describes himself as having once been "soothed by a sense
of touch/From the warm ground"; it had "balanced" him when his think-
ing had reached a vertiginous pitch (89-90). And in book iv the account of
a summer night spent in dancing, gaiety and mirth as part of "a festal
company of maids and youths" includes this splendid notation:
here and there
Slight shocks of young love-liking interspersed
That mounted up like joy into the head,
And tingled through the veins. (324-7)
188 Notes to pages 73-88

CHAPTER 5

1 Coleridge's conversation poems have received much critical attention. In

my view, the best commentator has been Kathleen Wheeler, from whose
The Creative Mind in Coleridge's Poetry I learned a great deal. In the main,
my readings are congruent with hers. Both are Coleridgean in the sense
that they work from authorial premises about the mind and its opera-
tions; both are opposed to deconstructive readings like those by Tilottama
Rajan and Jean-Pierre Mileur, which proceed from Derridean and de
Manian premises. But there are significant differences in emphasis
between Wheeler's treatment and mine. She is primarily concerned with
Coleridge's "creative theory of mind" (150), with his strategies to encour-
age the reader's more active engagement with the text of the poems, and
with "theoretical implications about the nature of art and imagination"
(90). Thus, in her book Wheeler devotes chapters to "The Ancient Mari-
ner" and "Kubla Khan" as well as to "The Eolian Harp," "This Lime-Tree
Bower," and "Frost at Midnight." I concentrate on sensory-perceptual
dynamics, on representations of the operation of the primary imagination,
and on discriminating among degrees and kinds of perception. Conse-
quently I examine in detail "The Nightingale," which Wheeler does not
consider.
2 This positive thrust is emphasized in the additional lines of the poem's
original ending, which describe the icicles as being
Like those, my babe! which ere tomorrow's warmth
Have capp'd their sharp keen points with pendulous drops,
Will catch thine eye, and with their novelty
Suspend thy little soul; then make thee shout,
And stretch and flutter from thy mother's arms
As thou wouldst fly for very eagerness.
The contrast between infant and parent is nicely conveyed by "flutter,"
which adumbrates the contrast between the former's enchanted eager-
ness in the daylight and the meditatively vexed father who makes the
midnight fluttering of a film on his grate "a toy of Thought." The cancel-
lation of this charming passage does not gainsay the positive thrust of the
last stanza insofar as the child is concerned; but it does throw into relief
the equivocal resonances of the stanza for the adult speaker.
3 Here is the Wordsworth passage:
There is creation in the eye,
Nor less in all the other senses; powers
They are that colour, model, and combine
The things perceived with such an absolute
Essential energy that we may say
That those most godlike faculties of ours
 Notes to pages 94-120 189

At one and the same moment are the mind

And the mind's minister. In many a walk
At evening or by moonlight, or reclined
At midday upon beds of forest moss,
Have we to Nature and her impulses
Of our whole being made free gift, and when
Our trance had left us, oft have we, by aid
Of the impressions which it left behind,
Looked inward on ourselves, and learned perhaps,
Something of what we are. (PW v 343-4)
4 The text for quotations from "A Letter to —" is that in Letters ii 790-98.
5 The next year Coleridge explained to a correspondent that when he tried
"to force myself out of metaphysical trains of Thought" through poetic
composition, he would "beat up Game of far other kind - instead of a
Covey of poetic Partridges with whirring wings of music, or wild Ducks
shaping their rapid flight in forms always regular (a still better image of
verse) up came a metaphysical Bustard, urging it's slow, heavy, laborious,
earth-skimming Flight, over dreary & level Wastes" (Letters ii 814).

CHAPTER 7

1 In referring to the speaker of Song of Myself as Whitman, I do not mean to

suggest that in every physical particular the "I" of the poem is identical
with its author. The difference between the physical health of the "mythic
Whitman persona" and that of "Whitman's flesh-and-blood self" (3) is
discussed in Harold Aspiz' Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Aspiz
also shows that Whitman's interest in the body and the physiological and
medical lore of his time informs the first editions of Leaves of Grass. In
another cultural study, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and
the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America, Joan Burbick
discusses the "biodemocracy" of the early editions of Leaves of Grass,
in which "the healthy body [is] the perfect 'natural symbol' for the
nation" - a figuration that presupposes Whitman's "ability to represent
the felt sensations of the healthy body in poetic language" (116-30). In
a note (322-3^, Burbick usefully summarizes other recent work on
Whitman and the body.
2 Coleridge's typology anticipates the discoveries of modern neurological
science. For example, (a) "retentive power extinguishing the sense of
touch" describes the loss of salience that is the result of sustained contact
between animate and inanimate objects. When neurons are in a constant
state of stimulation from the same identifiable source, after a short inter-
val they will stop transmitting the 'on' message. An everyday example is
the rapidity with which one forgets about the clothes one is wearing.
190 Notes to pages 125-140

Their touch becomes a "mere feeling" of presence. Concerning (b), "touch

with retentive power": areas like the lips and fingertips are exceptionally
receptive and contain a much greater density of highly specialized touch
neurons than a less sensitive area like the back. There are surface recep-
tors and subcutaneous receptors; in each case some of the receptors are
quickly adapting and some slowly adapting. Their co-presence accounts
for the "retentive" quality of tactile impressions in these areas.
3 "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" closely approximates Abrams' paradigm of
poems that "present a determinate speaker in a particularized, and
usually a localized, outdoor setting, whom we overhear as he carries on,
in a fluent vernacular which rises easily to more formal speech, a
sustained colloquy, sometimes with himself or with the outer scene, but
more frequently with a silent human auditor, present or absent. The
speaker begins with a description of the landscape ... [a meditative move-
ment of mind is evoked] which remains closely intervolved with the outer
scene. [At the poem's climax, the speaker has an insight or realization.]
Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer
scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is
the result of the intervening meditation" (Breeze 76-7).
4 The qualitative implications for Whitman's poetry were summarized by
Wallace Stevens: "It is useless to treat everything in Whitman as of equal
merit. A great deal of it exhibits little or none of his specific power. He
seems often to have driven himself to write like himself. The good things,
the superbly beautiful and moving things, are those that he wrote natu-
rally, with an extemporaneous and irrepressible vehemence of emotion"
(Letters 871).
5 Here are two examples:
June igth, 4 to 6[:^o] p.m. - Sitting alone by the creek ... the wild
flageolet-note of a quail near by - the just-heard fretting of some
hylas down there in the pond - crows cawing in the distance - a
drove of young hogs rooting in soft ground near the oak under which
I sit - some come sniffing near me, and then scamper away, with
grunts. And still the clear notes of the quail - the quiver of leaf-
shadows over the paper as I write ... the swift darting of many
sand-swallows coming and going, their homes in the neighboring
marl-bank - the odor of the cedar and oak, so palpable, as evening
approaches - perfume, color, the bronze-and-gold of nearly ripen'd
wheat - clover-fields, with honey-scent - the well-up maize, with
long and rustling leaves - the great patches of thriving potatoes,
dusky green, fleck'd all over with white blossoms - the old, warty,
venerable oak above me - and ever, mix'd with the dual notes
of the quail, the soughing of the wind through some near-by
pines. (787)
 Notes to pages 145-162 191

... yth [March]. - A snowstorm in the morning, and continuing most

of the day. But I took a walk over two hours ... amid the falling
flakes. No wind, yet the musical low murmur through the pines,
quite pronounced, curious, like waterfalls, now still'd, now pouring
again ... Every snowflake lay where it fell on the evergreens, holly-
trees, laurels, &c., the multitudinous leaves and branches piled,
bulging-white, defined by edge-lines of emerald - the tall straight
columns of the plentiful bronze-topt pines - a slight resinous odor
blending with that of the snow. (876)

CHAPTER 8

1 In reading and thinking about Dickinson's poetry, I have found the fol-
lowing commentators particularly helpful: Charles Anderson; Northrop
Frye; Robert Weisbuch; Joanne Feit Diehl; Helen McNeil; Cynthia Griffin
Wolff; E. Miller Budick; Jane Donahue Eberwein; and Gary Lee Stonum.
2 Another example of feminist over-reading of Dickinson's sun imagery is
Margaret Homans' analysis (203-5) °f #106 ("The Daisy follows soft the
Sun"); see Elisa New's excellent rebuttal (155-6).
3 They include: ships of purple unloading opal bales on the banks of a
yellow sea (#265, #266); a sapphire farm with opal cattle (#628); the
"largest Fire ever known" consuming an "Occidental Town" (#1114);
armies and navies in battle (#152, #1174, #1642); a dying peacock (#120);
the finale of that master entertainer, "the Juggler of Day" (#228); the
"Firmamental Lilac," its corolla the west, its calyx the earth, its seeds the
stars (#1241); the "Lady of the Occident" undressing herself (#716); and
the housewife sweeping "with many-colored Brooms" and leaving shreds
of color behind (#219).
4 The same exile is more starkly described in poem #1382:
In many and reportless places
We feel a joy -
Reportless, also, but sincere as Nature
Or Deity -

It comes, without a consternation -

Dissolves - the same -
But leaves a sumptuous Destitution -
Without a Name -

Profane it by a search - we cannot

It has no home -
Nor we who having once inhaled it -
Thereafter roam.
192 Notes to pages 180-3

CHAPTER. 9

1 On "The Windhover" I have found EX. Shea, Thomas P. Harrison,

Paul L. Mariani, and Michael Sprinker particularly helpful.
2 One of the "structural changes" involved in the aging of the eye is the
"senile yellowing" of the optic lens. This causes "low tone colors, such as
blues, greens, violet, and pastels to fade" (Brant 162). In her detailed
study of Emily Dickinson's use of color, Rebecca Patterson notes that the
"most curious aspect of her color system after 1865," when she was in her
mid 305, was "the dulling and fading of her palette" (137).
3 In the lagging lines of "Work without Hope," one of his last poems,
Coleridge had poignantly documented his loss of the one-life feeling:
All Nature seems at work. Slugs leaves their lair -
The bees are stirring - birds are on the wing -

And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,

Nor honey make, nor pair, not build, nor sing,
At the end of one of Hopkins' last poems, "Thou art indeed, just, Lord,"
the same pathetic recognition is recorded in closely similar images:
See, banks and brakes
Now, leaved how how thick! laced they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds' build - but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
4 Lawrence Kramer shows how the Intimations Ode "stands like a horizon
behind a whole array of Romantic and post-Romantic poems" (315). In his
survey, Coleridge's Dejection Ode, Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty," Tennyson's In Memoriam, Arnold's "The Scholar Gypsy," and
Browning's "Prologue" to Asolando are the primary examples. Other
nineteenth-century texts that show the Ode's extraordinary influence
include: the fifth chapter of John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, Arthur
Henry Hallam's letter of 17 April 1831 to Emily Tennyson; and
J.A. Froude's Nemesis of Faith (118). The importance of the Ode in New-
man's thinking is discussed by Thomas Vargish (100-2). For both John
Ruskin and Thomas Hardy, the poem was an essential point of reference
over many years.
Shocks continue to be felt, as Philip Larkin attested: "Poetry can creep
up on you unawares. Wordsworth was almost the price of me once. I was
driving down the Mi on a Saturday morning: they had this poetry slot on
the radio, 'Time for Verse': it was a lovely summer morning, and someone
suddenly started reading the Immortality ode, and I couldn't see for tears
... I don't suppose I'd read the poem for twenty years, and it's amazing
how effective it was when one was totally unprepared for it" (53).
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 Index

Abrams, M.H., 24, 76,125, Burbick, Joan, 189 - "The Rime of the An-
190 Burke, Edmund, 38, 60 cient Mariner," 73,188
Alexander, Cecil Frances: Byron, Lord, 39 - "Sonnet: To the Autum-
"All Things Bright and nal Moon," 71
Beautiful," 178 Cameron, Sharon, 108-9, - "This Lime-Tree Bower
Anderson, Charles R., 109, 116 My Prison," 73, 78-82,
149,159,191 Chandler, James K., 26 85, 87,125,126,188
Aristotle, 15,38 Christ, Carol, 23,186 - "To the Nightingale," 88
Arnold, Matthew: "The Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, - "Work without Hope,"
Scholar Gypsy," 192 ix, 3,5, 8-13,14-21, 25- 192
Aspiz, Harold, 189 6, 35, 36,52,55, 69, 70- Coleridge, Sara Fricker, 70,
Asselineau, Roger, 119 97,111,112,117,119-20, 73, 95
121, 152, 172, 173, 177, Collins, Philip, 32
Bacon, Francis, 38 181,183,185,188,189-90
Ball, Patricia, 81,186 - "Apologia pro Vita Dante, 24; Divine Comedy,
Barker, Wendy, 150 Sua," 9-10, 34, 97 10, 38-9
Benzon, William, 82 - "Dejection: An Ode," 7, de Man, Paul, 24-6, 46,
Bible: John, 167; Matthew, 37,95-6,112,130,132,192 108,136,137,188
180; i Corinthians, 163, - "The Eolian Harp," 73- De Quincey, Thomas, 34,
164 8, 79, 83,87,88-9, 91,95, 46-7,48,49, 50, 60, 64
Blake, William, 36, 66 188 Derrida, Jacques, x, 188
Biasing, Mutlu Konuk, 27 - "Frost at Midnight," 73, Dickie, Margaret, xi
Blood, Benjamin Paul, 32 82-7, 89, 125,188 Dickinson, Emily, x-xii, 15,
Bloom, Harold, 46,108 - "Hymn before Sun-rise, 29,144-70,186-7,191
Boyd, Zelda, 186 in the Vale of Cha- - "A Light exists in
Bradley, A.C., 68 mouni," 33-4,37, 97 Spring" (#812), 160-1
Brant, Barbara A., 192 - "Kubla Khan," 73,188 - "As Frost is best con-
Browning, Robert, 23,171; - "Lines Written in the Al- ceived" (#951), 18
Prologue to Asolando, bum at Elbingerode," - "Before I got my eye put
!54/ *92 92-3 out" (#327), 149
Brun, Friederike, 34 - "The Nightingale," 73, - "By my Window have I
Bucke, Richard Maurice, 87-92 for Scenery" (#797), 163-
29, 40,140 - "Reflections on Having 5
Budd, Malcolm, 39-40 Left a Place of Retire- - "Dominion lasts until
Budick, E. Miller, 191 ment," 72-3, 75, 77 obtained" (#1257), 161
2O6 Index

- "Don't put up my Eberwein, Jane Donahue, Heaney, Seamus, 178

Thread and Needle" 156,157,191 Helsinger, Elizabeth K., 65
(#617), 149-50 Ellis, David, 64 Hiley, David R., ix
- "Further in Summer Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ix, Homans, Margaret, 191
than the Birds" (#1068), 3, 7,12,15-16, 20-1, 23, Homer, 24; Odyssey, 154
155-7 24,29, 31, 39,40,56, 87, Hopkins, Gerard Manley,
- "Must be a Woe" (#571), 98, 101, 122, 123, 130, 144 23, 69,171-2,175-83,
151-2 Emmet, Dorothy, 185 192
- "My Cocoon tightens - Empson, William, 67 - "The Habit of Perfec-
Colors tease" (#1099), Engell, James, 78 tion," 175
162 Engen, Trygg, 4 - "Hurrahing in Har-
- " 'Nature' is what we vest," 176
see (ftbbS), 23 Feidelson, Charles, 139 - "I wake and feel the fell
- "Of Bronze - and Blaze" Ferry, David, 187 of dark," 183
(#290), 22-3 Fichte, Johann, 141 - "Pied Beauty," 177
- "Perception of an object Frank, Joseph, 30 - "Spelt from Sibyl's
costs" (#1071), 23 Franklin, R.W., 156 Leaves," 178,180-2
- "Presentiment - is that Frederick, Douglas, 176 - "Spring," 177
long Shadow - on the Freud, Sigmund, 42-3 - "Spring and Fall," 181
Lawn" (#764), xi, 19 Frost, Robert: "October," - "The Starlight Night,"
- "Tell the Truth but tell it 159 177
slant" (#1129), 151 Froude, J. A.: The Nemesis of - "Thou art indeed just,
- "The Frost was never Faith, 192 Lord," 192
seen" (#1202), 166-8 Fruman, Norman, 96 - "To R.B.," 178,180,183
- "The Lilac is an ancient Frye, Northrop, 127,191 - "The Windhover," 178-
shrub" (#1241), 162-3 80,192
- "The Moon upon her Garber, Frederick, 107-8 Hopkins, R.H., 87
fluent Route" (#1528), Gardner, W.H., 176 House, Humphry, 77, 185-
168-9 Gatta, John, 40 6
- "The Road was lit with Geertz, Clifford, ix Howes, David, ix
Moon and star" (#1450), Gibson, James J., 8 Hutchinson, Sara, 94, 96
170 Gilbert, Sandra, 150 Huxley, Aldous, 31-2
- "The saddest noise, the Gill, Stephen, 66 Hyde, Lewis, 185
sweetest noise" (#1764), Ginsberg, Allen, 123
153-4 Godwin, William, 93, 95 Irigaray, Luce, xi
- "The Sun and Fog con- Gonzalez-Crussi, E, 127
tested" (#1190), 150-1 Gregory, R.L., 35 James, William, 30,40
- "There's a certain Slant Gubar, Susan, 150 Jay, Martin, x, 4
of light" (#258), 149 Guthrie, James, 149 Jeffrey, Francis, 16,140
- "These are the Days Johnston, Kenneth R., 37
when Birds come back" Hallam, Arthur Henry, 192 Jonas, Hans, 12
(#130), 158-60 Hardy, Thomas, 46,128, Juhasz, Suzanne, xi
- "This World is not Con- 192
clusion" (#501), 165-6 Harrison, Thomas P., 192 Kandel, Eric R., 186
Diehl, Joanne Feit, 191 Hartman, Geoffrey, 46, 63, Keats, John, 24, 26,171;
Dostoevsky, Fyodor: The 108 "To Autumn," 157,159;
Idiot, 30 Haven, Richard D., 72, 76 "Ode on a Grecian
Duns Scotus, 177 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: Urn," 161
Dupriez, Bernard, 27 preface to Mosses from Keller, Karl, 121
Durr, R.A., 31 an Old Manse, 155-6 Kirkham, Michael, 80
Hazlitt, William, 3,49, 52- Knowles, James, 172,173
Eakin, Sybil, 45,187 3 Kramer, Lawrence, 192
 Index 207

Lamb, Charles, 70, 73, 78, O'Malley, Glenn, 38-9 Stonum, Gary Lee, 191
80,85 Ong, Walter J., 106 Southey, Robert, 5
Landow, George, 186 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 12 Swinburne, Algernon
Larkin, Philip, 192 Charles, 39
Larson, Kerry C., 133 Pater, Walter, 48-9
Lawrence, D.H., 153 Patterson, Rebecca, 192 Tennyson, Alfred Lord,
Leavis, F.R., 39 Paul, Sherman, 102 23-4/ 32, 37/171-4
Lefebure, Molly, 96 Payn, James, 50 - "Audley Court," 34-5
Lewis, R.W.B., 122 Peck, H. Daniel, 108-9,n6 - "Flower in the crannied
Lifton, Robert Jay, 29 Pitt, Valerie, 172 wall," 173
Locke, John, 8 Plato, 135 - "The Higher Panthe-
Lockyer, Sir Norman, 152, Plotinus, 82 ism," 174
173 Poe, Edgar Allan, 10 - In Memoriam, 32, 34,192
Poole, Thomas, 70 - "In the Valley of Cauter-
MacKenzie, Norman, 179, Porter, David, x, 145 etz," 34
180-1 Pound, Ezra, 39-40 - "The Two Voices," 174
McFarland, Thomas, 25,46 Priestley, F.E.L., 35 Thomas, Dylan: "Poem on
Mclntosh, James, 107-8 Proust, Marcel: A la recher- his Birthday," 39
McLuhan, Marshall, ix, 177 che du temps perdu, 53-4 Thomas, Heather Kirk, 146
McNeil, Helen, 149,150, Thoreau, Henry David, 7,
191 Raj an, Tilottama, 76,188 17, 28,49, 69, 98-116,
Mariani, Paul, 180,192 Rea, John D., 96 118,133,152,157,172,
Marks, Lawrence E., 38-9 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 33 175,183
Martin, Robert Bernard, Rosenthal, M.L., 119 - "Autumnal Tints," 114-5
172,175 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 23 - Journal, 98-116,118
Martin, Robert K., 121 Rossetti, William Michael, - "The Succession of For-
Melville, Herman, 29; 171 est Trees," 114
Moby-Dick 27,169,186; Ruddick, Nicholas, 186-7 - Walden, 98,99,100,102,
Pierre, 24 Ruskin, John, 24,175,179, 104,133
Merleau-Ponty, M., 65 192 - A Week on the Concord
Miles, Josephine, 186 and Merrimack Rivers, 98,
Mileur, Jean-Pierre, 89-90, Sabin, Margery, 20 99
188 Schelling, Friedrich, 141 Tolstoy, Leo: Confession,
Mill, John Stuart, 172,192 Schiller, Friedrich von, 6, 130
Miller, J. Hillis, 24 16 Trevor-Roper, Patrick, 172
Miller, James E., 40 Schneider, Elisabeth, 96, Trilling, Lionel, 171
Milton, John, 88 181
Miyagawa, Kiyoshi, 51 Scott, Sir Walter, 11 Vargish, Thomas, 192
Modiano, Raimonda, 8, 94 Sewall, Richard B., 148,149 Vendler, Helen, 5,137,138-
Montagu, Ashley, 4,129 Shakespeare, William, 24; 9,185
Hamlet, 156 Vinge, Louise, 185
Nathanson, Tenney, 123, Shea, EX., 192
134 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 29, Wand, Martin, 149
New, Elisa, 151,191 135; "Mont Blanc," 86; Weisbuch, Robert, 162,191
Newman, John Henry, 192 "Hymn to Intellectual Whalley, George, 91
Newton, Sir Isaac: Opticks, Beauty," 192 Wheeler, Kathleen, 14, 74,
8,185 Smith, J.C., 187 77, 81,88
Nichols, Ashton, 35 Sprinker, Michael, 192 Whitman, Walt, 13,15, 29,
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, Stein, Barry E., 37 41-2,100,117-43, *72
185 Stevens, Wallace, 107,114, - "As I Ebb'd with the
128,190 Ocean of Life," 112,130-
Ogden, John T., 12, 65 Stoddard, Eve Walsh, 187 4,139
208 Index

- "Bunch Poem," 120 - Song of Myself, xi, 15,26- 73, 78' 79, 95' 104,142,
- "Clef Poem," 135 8, 31-2, 39-40, 41, 75, 171,172,188-9
- "Crossing Brooklyn 117-24,125,129,130, - The Excursion, 113-14
Ferry," 10,120,125-8, 131,133,134,136,138, - "A Night-Piece," 36-7
129,131,132,133,134, 141,142-3,185,189 - "Ode: Intimations of Im-
137,190 - "A Song for Occupa- mortality," 7, 59, 67-9,
- "The Dismantled Ship," tions," 127 95,109, no, 113,132,
7-8 - "There Was a Child 183,192
- "A Hand-Mirror," 129 Went Forth," 5-7,118, - Prelude, x, 5,11-12,17,
- "I Saw in Louisiana a 119,129,137 42-67, 68, 79,187
Live-Oak Growing," - "To Think of Time," 124 - "Resolution and Inde-
128-9 - "Twilight," 142 pendence," 51-2,116
- "I Sing the Body Elec- - "When Lilacs Last in the - "The Solitary Reaper,"
tric," 118,120 Dooryard Bloom'd," 42
- "Nature-notes," 118, 134-9, H2 - "Tintern Abbey," 29, 36,
140-2 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 37, 86, no
- "Of the Terrible Doubt 149,191 - "Yes, it was the moun-
of Appearances," 128 Wolfson, Susan J., 187 tain Echo," 21-2
- "Out of the Cradle End- Wordsworth, Dorothy, 70,
lessly Rocking," 134-5, 73, 78, 79 Zaehner, R.C., 29-30,32
136,137,139 Wordsworth, Jonathan, 46 Zola, Emile, 173
- "A Prairie Sunset," Wordsworth, William, 3, 6,
142-3 23, 33, 36,41-69, 70-1,