The Victorious, Threshold Existence: An Interpretation of the Liminal Space Between Life and Death in a Selection of Romantic Poets

            Within the collective Romantic conscience – as within the human conscience – there is a keen awareness of death; one finds this manifest in many poems of the era, among them Byron's “Prometheus,” Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale.” While these three poems touch on the theme in varying degrees of subtlety, one finds in all three alike the uniquely Romantic association of death with poetry. At the heart of each poem is a poet-figure who experiences or has experienced death and continues to desire it or cannot help but to be drawn to it. Within that symbolic attraction to death is the Romantic longing to transcend material life and its condition of suffering. As the three poems demonstrate, poetry functions as death in life, allowing the poet to escape his earthly existence. Necessarily, however, the transcendence akin to death, through poetry, is temporary, because the poet – being alive, though drawn toward death – exists on the threshold between the two. “Prometheus,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and “Ode to a Nightingale” suggest, ultimately, that the poet's art depends on his or her existence upon the threshold between life and death, waking and sleeping, mortality and immortality; it is within that liminal space that poetry is generated.

            Each of these poems revolves around a central character who is representative of the

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poet-figure. This is clearest in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” where the mariner of the title has the characteristic quality of a poet: “strange power of speech” (587). Like a bard, he wanders “from land to land” (586), sharing his story. Early in the poem, the wedding guest describes him as a “loon” (11), but the mariner's madness – the “agony.../[wherein the] heart within [him] burns” (583-585) –, as indicated by the fact that it always precedes an instance of storytelling, is, indeed, creative genius, “a poet's extacy” (Scott 90), as Sir Walter Scott elsewhere calls it. The mariner is, then, quite clearly a poet-figure. The poet-figure of Keats's poem is equally clear as being the speaker himself, not least because of the indicative, intimate first-person narrative. (Of course, one must be wary when claiming that the speaker of a poem is the poet him- or herself, but in works of the Romantic era – a period which saw the development and popularity of the personal, lyric genre – it is, arguably, safe for one to assume, excepting obvious reasons for doubt, that the persona and the poet are aligned.) Further proof that the speaker of “Ode to a Nightingale” is indeed a poet is the fact that the character successfully makes use of “the viewless wings of Poesy” (33).  The speaker, then, must be a poet, or at least capable of poetry. Prometheus, though more subtly, also represents a poet, particularly in his role as both an outsider and an insider to humankind. In Wordsworth's “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth outlines this as characteristic of the poet: the poet “is a man speaking to men...who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind” (603). In other words, the poet, in the Romantic conception, is exceptional, his nature beyond what is typical in terms of human nature – thus he stands outside of humanity – and yet he is deeply aware of human nature; the poet is at once, then, within and without, part of and yet separate from the collective human body. Prometheus fits this conception of the poet. He is a markedly isolated being, placed at the “world's-end region.../[in the]...trackless wilderness” (1-2) as Strength says at the beginning of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, and chained, as Hephaestus further indicates in the play, to a “lone peak aloof, by no voice cheered” (21). Despite his extreme separation from others, however, Prometheus, like a poet, “the sufferings of mortality/[sees] in their sad reality” (Byron 2-3). Moreover, like a poet, who, as Wordsworth further details, must have the ultimate aim of leaving his audience “in some degree enlightened” (598), Prometheus seeks to “strengthen Man with his own mind” (Byron 38). Thus, at the core of each of the three poems in question, we are presented with an image of the poet-figure: the mariner in Coleridge’s piece, the speaker-poet (possibly Keats himself) in “Ode to a Nightingale”, and Prometheus in Byron's poem.

            Each of these poet-figures has experienced death. The mariner's journey, following his shooting of the albatross, can be interpreted, for instance, as a reiteration of the descent into hell mytheme. Things deaden – “Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down” (107) – and appear to decompose – “slimy things did crawl with legs/Upon the slimy sea” (125-126). Later, the mariner remarks “that God himself/Scarce seemed...to be” (599-600) with him during his experiences on the sea. Such lines suggest that the mariner has made a journey to and back from death; this interpretation is strengthened by the mariner's description of himself shortly after the albatross has fallen off his neck and he has managed to sleep: “I thought that I had died in sleep,/And was a blessed ghost” (307-308). The speaker-poet in Keats's piece also experiences death, at the very beginning of the poem, when he states that he feels “as though of hemlock [he] had drunk/...and Lethe-wards had sunk” (2-4) – hemlock, of course, being a poison, and Lethe being one of the rivers of Hades. If we accept that the speaker and the author are one in the same, furthermore, we may add that the poet has experienced death of a literal sort: as the editors' notes to the poem state, “Keats's brother Tom, wasted by tuberculosis, had died the preceding winter” (Stillinger and Lynch 903n7). Prometheus's experience with death (as he is immortal) is, again, subtle but evident: his fate is that of eternal punishment. Much like Sisyphus, doomed to roll a boulder up a hill each day only to have it roll back down by the next, Prometheus suffers his liver to be eaten and regenerated daily. Dr. Dominic Manganiello has noted, in discussions of literary modernism, that one of the defining characteristics of hell is hopelessness, often portrayed in modern literature through images of pointless repetition. Prometheus's fate, like Sisyphus's, is one of hopeless repetition, the only substantial difference between the two mythological characters being that Sisyphus's punishment takes place in Tartarus, while Prometheus is not placed in Hades. As far as hellishness goes, however, Prometheus's life is just as hellish as the lives of those in Tartarus; to this extent, one might say that he, too, has effectively experienced what it is to be dead, even though he is immortal.

            The poet-figures in these three poems have not only experienced death but continue to do so – indeed, they seem to want death. The mariner, for example, relives his descent into hell each time he retells his story, the image of his “glittering eye” (3) as he speaks connecting him to the dead men, whose “eyes/...in the Moon did glitter” (437). This reliving of his experience of death is a relief to the mariner, a confessional release of sorts, as is indicated by what happens to the mariner when he is able to tell his tale to the hermit:

                        Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched

                        With a woeful agony,

                        Which forced me to begin my tale;

                        And then it left me free.

                        Since then, at an uncertain hour,

                        The agony returns:

                        And till my ghastly tale is told,

                        This heart within me burns. (578-585)

Keats, as well, recognizes “easeful death” (52) as an escape or release, and in this regard, yearns for it: “That I might...leave the world unseen,/...dissolve, and quite forget/...leaden-eyed despairs” (19-28). What can this desire for death mean? From where does it stem?

            To answer this, we must first understand the Romantic desire not to desire. In his essay “Heroic Victimhood: 'Prometheus' and 'The Prisoner of Chillon,'” Dr. Ian Dennis makes this observation of “Prometheus”: “genuine power...lies with those who can most persuasively demonstrate indifference,...[those] who can betray less desire” (97). In Dr. Dennis's analysis, Prometheus prevails over the tyrannous Zeus precisely through his passivity, his lack of desire, which in the face of Zeus's oppression and torture of him – a torture which “demonstrates...the victim's irresistible attraction for the torturer” (99) – manages to invert the structure of power, such that “the once omni-potent hand holding the lightning bolt 'trembles'” (98). Dr. Dennis gives a nod to the idea that “the ability to resist the attraction of the other...is connected to the transcendence of spirit or mind over materiality” (98).

            Let me expand on this intriguing interpretation. In Romanticism is a belief in a transcendence which is, essentially, a blessed loss, denial or negation of the individual self. One sees this time and again in Romantic literature. To quote a famous example from “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth describes the transcendence attained through observation and remembrance of nature thus:

                        The breath of this corporeal frame,

                        And even the motion of our human blood [is]

                        Almost suspended, [and] we are laid asleep

                        In body, and become a living soul:

                        While with an eye made quiet by the power

                        Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

                        We see into the life of things. (44-50)

Transcendence, then, is to lose one's self, to become unconscious (as if “laid asleep”), and in the becoming unconscious to become conscious and perfectly aligned with “the life of things,” some essence Coleridge in another poem, “The Eolian Harp,” calls “At once the Soul of each, and God of All” (48). There are, in this view of transcendence, in addition to classical elements, notable undercurrents of Eastern philosophical thought – of which, according to Norton Topics Online, there was an influx in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century – in line with the orientalism of the Romantic age. In particular, the Romantic view of transcendence is alike to the Buddhist concept of nirvana. Nirvana, from Sanskrit meaning “to blow out,” is the ultimate goal of Buddhism: the cessation of the cycle of reincarnation. Buddhists seek nirvana because, like Keats, they are keenly aware that earthly life is, inevitably, “weariness...fever...and the fret” (Keats 23). According to Richard Hayes in his article on Buddhism, in “Buddhist doctrine, the...cause of rebirth is simply the desire to continue existing” (620). Because of this, Buddhists seek detachment from people, places, and things – they view attachment to earthly entities as underlying the desire to continue existing; Siddhartha Gautama himself, as Buddhism recounts his life, had to step out of his luxurious existence as a prince – leaving behind his wife, his child, his palaces and riches – in order to become the enlightened Buddha. Buddhism then seeks to transcend suffering by denying desire, with a goal to finally deny life itself – just as, in “Prometheus,” the denial of desire – at its epitome, the ability “not to want life” (Dennis 99) – is what allows the titan to transcend his situation as a victim. In this sense, “Death [is] a Victory” (Byron 59): as the ultimate form of passivity, the complete cessation of the self's desires, death is the ultimate transcendence.

            Although, as I have argued, the Romantic notion of transcendence through death is aligned with Buddhist thought, it is also linked with Christian ideas of the Fall and expresses a desire to return to a prelapsarian state of unity and happiness. One very significant similarity between “Prometheus,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is the depiction of suffering that each poem provides. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” for example, the mariner's killing of the albatross may be interpreted as the original sin which brings about the providential vengeance by his natural environment. The mariner, through his transgression, creates a state of suffering – a state of loneliness and alienation, unquenchable thirst, fear, uncertainty, and guilt – in a parallel to the story of the Fall, as outlined in the third chapter of the Genesis, in which the original sin evicts God's punishment: pain, suffering, and a life of toil outside of Eden (Authorized Version Bible, Genesis 3:16-23). Taking the role of humanity, the mariner must continually repent for this original sin. Death, then, comes to represent his ultimate absolution and freedom from the earthly life of suffering; as a symbol of God's forgiveness of transgression, death represents the return to the former ideal state, a state without suffering. Similarly, in “Ode to a Nightingale,” the poet's symbolic death depicts him as escaping human suffering and uniting with the world of the “immortal Bird” (61), a natural and purely happy world from which the speaker-poet is disconnected. Death, which is transcendence, in these and other Romantic poems, is seen, then, by the poet as a re-entrance into an Edenic existence from which he or she, along with all of humanity, has been evicted. If, as Wordsworth says in “Ode (there was a time),” “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting” (58), death is likewise envisioned as the reversal of that process, a return to “God, who is our home” (“Ode” 65).

            But here is the problem for the central, poet-figures in “Prometheus,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and “Ode to a Nightingale”: simply, they are not dead. In fact, they each exist between life and death. Prometheus is immortal, though he faces mortal suffering. The mariner, though his “body dropt not down” (230) when those of his shipmates did, is an image of death: unnaturally old – “ancient” – with a “skinny hand” like a skeleton, he himself admits he feels like a “ghost” (307), and his travelling “like night” (586) highlights this ghost-like quality. The speaker-poet in “Ode to a Nightingale” similarly has moments of “embalmed darkness” (43), in which he feels as though he is dead, but he is always called back to his “sole self” (72), reminded that he is of the living, knowledgeable of “what [the bird] among the leaves hast never known” (22). Thus, the poet figure is not an enlightened being: he has not completely transcended his mortal existence, but lives in a gray area between life and death, materiality and transcendence of material existence.

            Significantly, however, this is not an utter failure, for as each of these poems insists, there is value in the liminal existence of the poet: it is in that threshold existence that poetry is created. Consider, for example, the mariner: his bard-like vocation is a result of his fluctuating between life and death: whenever he is seized by the experience of death – whenever, that is, the story of his suffering, patterned into the symbolic descent into hell, rears itself in his mind – he enters a moment of ecstasy in which he appears a “'greybeard loon'” (11). Creative inspiration for the mariner is like death in that, in moments of creative genius, as in death, he transcends materiality, forgetting himself in a trancelike state that will not lift until his “ghastly tale is told” (584). Keats's speaker-poet's experience of creativity is much the same. It is no coincidence that the nightingale, the symbol of the speaker's inspiration, is said to sing in “full-throated ease” (10), when death is also described as “easeful” (52). As with the mariner, the speaker’s poetic inspiration is likened to death: the bird's song and the death-like feeling of “numbness” (1) it evokes can be recreated by the poet through “Poesy” (33). Let us consider, for a moment, what the case would be if the mariner and the speaker-poet were to fully transcend, through death. For the mariner, as argued above, this would signify absolution of his original sin, a return to a state in which there is no need for penance; however, without the guilt or memory of that sin to agonize him and cause him to continually repent, there would be no storytelling. Thus it is in the suffering state, being alive and yet aware of and informed by death, and, in some ways, himself dead, that the poet-figure of the mariner derives his creative genius. Likewise, if Keats were a transcended being - either in being dead, or in being a nightingale, which, as an “immortal Bird,” is the symbolic pinnacle in this poem of transcendence - there would simply be no “Ode to a Nightingale.” As the poet himself says, it is his being “half in love with easeful Death” (52) which creates his “mused rhyme” (53). The ode's poetic power and resonance is in the poet's fluctuation between the transcendent, deathlike state of imagination and true life “where but to think is to be full of sorrow” (27), between the “vision [and the]...waking dream” (79). These poems suggest, then, that it is necessary for poetry that the poet is not a completely transcendent being, for poetry depends on the fluctuation contained in a liminal existence – indeed, poetry depends on those desires which transcendence eradicates – namely, the desire for transcendence.

            I believe, as does Byron, that Prometheus is the very model of a poet in the Romantic conception. He is characterized by his eternal suffering – which is to say, by the liminal existence between immortality and mortality, life and death. Because of his connection to life, he is denied “the boon to die” (23) – denied the ability, that is, to become completely passive and thereby transcendent, a poet achieves moments of inspiration, Prometheus approaches complete passivity and a symbolic death in an eradication of desire. One must note, however, that he does not – cannot – achieve a complete erasure of his self and desires, which is transcendence and death. Indeed, it is in his “patient energy” (40), his passivized existence – as opposed to the absence of energy that is non-existence – that the titan is formidable.

            The association between death and art is surprisingly insistent in Romantic literature. This may be because the Romantics were intensely focused on the image of the Fall of man; they saw human existence as a Fallen condition, and, as such, were preoccupied with the issue of transcendence: how to return to the prelapsarian ideal of life and thought. Death is symbolically envisioned as a return to nature, God, inner and outer peace; and poetry, furthermore, is associated with death because, like death, the poetic mind is a gateway to transcendence. But the Romantics recognize the interdependence of life and death, sleep and waking, joy and sorrow; Romantic poetry demonstrates an understanding that poetry, while it depends on the death-like moment of transcendent inspiration, equally depends upon its grounding in life. Thus, the Romantics, while depicting death as a symbolically transcendent state, demonstrate an implicit appreciation of the liminal space between death and life which poets and non-poets inhabit, in which creativity is derived. As Byron states, “Death [is] a victory” (59) – it is transcendence – but, as “Prometheus,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and “Ode to a Nightingale” (among countless other Romantic poems) demonstrate, there is victory in the suffering as well.

SOURCES

Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. Trans. Robert Whitelaw. Fifteen Greek Plays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. 2-32.

Authorized Version Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Byron, George Gordon. “Prometheus.” The Selected Poetry of Lord Byron. Digireads.com             publishing: 2009.190-191. Google Books. Web. Mar 29 2012.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Eolian Harp.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8^th ed. Vol. D. Eds. Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch. New York: Norton, 2006. 426-427.

---. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8^th ed. Vol. D. Eds. Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch. New York: Norton, 2006. 430-446.

Dennis, Ian. “Heroic Victimhood: 'Prometheus' and 'The Prisoner of Chillon.'” Lord Byron and the History of Desire. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009. 95-108.

Hayes, Richard. “Nirvana.” Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2^nd ed. Vol. 6. Ed. Donald M. Borchert. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2006. 620-622. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. Apr 14 2012.

Keats, John. “Ode to a Nightingale.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8^th ed. Vol. D.Eds. Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch. New York: Norton, 2006. 426-427. 903-905.

Manganiello, Dominic. Class Lecture. ENG3320: Modern British Literature. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON. Jan 23 2012.

“Romantic Orientalism: Overview.” Norton Topics Online. W.W. Norton and Company. Web. Apr 6 2012.

Scott, Walter. “The Lay of the Last Minstrels.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8^thed. Vol. D. Eds. Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch. New York: Norton, 2006. 407-410.

Wordsworth, William. “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” William Wordsworth: The Major Works. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2008. 131-135.

---. “Ode ('There was a time,').” William Wordsworth: The Major Works. NewYork: Oxford            University Press, 2008. 297-302.

---. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” William Wordsworth: The Major Works. NewYork: Oxford          University Press, 2008. 595-615.

The Problem With Language in Avison's "Butterfly Bones"

From the onset of “Butterfly Bones,” Margaret Avison likens the act of writing a sonnet to that of capturing a butterfly, and both of these she marks, further, as destructive processes: "The cyanide jar seals life, as sonnets move/towards final stiffness" (1-2). This association between sonnet-writing and death is carried through to the end. The poem is indeed a “sonnet against sonnets.”

                Avison's criticism of the sonnet stems, in part, because it is a fixed form. By comparing sonnet-writing to the capturing, killing, and mounting of butterflies for display in museums, she indicates that the art of sonnets is a science, requiring "skill,...patience,...learning,...[and] precision" (5-8). The writing of a sonnet, that is, depends necessarily on rationality, as opposed, perhaps, to the free-flow of emotions that has been lauded in art since at least the Romantic era, during which time Wordsworth wrote, "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (273). The primary concern of the sonneteer is form, order, and structure - a methodical concern which Avison criticizes.

                In this light, we come to the concluding couplet which contains the rhetorical question "Might sheened and rigid trophies strike men blind/like Adam's lexicon locked in the mind?" (13-14). One might read this as Avison further denouncing sonnets (those "rigid trophies") in favour of more natural forms of poetic expression ("Adam's lexicon" being the most primitive and untampered human language). The question may then be paraphrased thus: Can sonnets have as much of an effect on their readers as unaltered forms of poetry do? The answer, we are led to believe, is negative; just as "shivery wings" (10) are more real, more engaging, than "museum spectres" (9), so too would a poem not forcefully fixed into a preconceived form have more power than one which is – namely, a sonnet.

                However, Avison's diction in the final line can equally lead to an alternate interpretation. Specifically, that she writes "Adam's lexicon [is] locked in the mind" in a poem which criticizes things being sealed (line 1), "cased" (2), and fixed (line 7) brings to mind the question of whether even the most unsophisticated, unformulated poem is truly any more effective than a sonnet.

                I am reminded of the linguistic concept of the sign, developed by Ferdinand de Saussure. The model is as follows: the sign - or the word - is like a coin; on one side is the signifier - ie. the phonemes which make up the word - and on the other is the signified - ie. the idea that is evoked by the word (Barrie). For example, when one says the word "elephant," the pronunciation of it (as e-luh-fuhnt) is the signifier, and the idea one has in their mind (of a big, gray, four-legged animal) when they hear or speak the word is the signified. What the sign must inevitably exclude is called the referent: the actual object to which the word refers (Barrie). There may very likely be a million things regarding the elephant that a word for it either does not or can not convey. Thus, while language may capture an idea of a thing, it can never, ever convey the entirety of it.

                Avison compares writing a sonnet to capturing a butterfly. However, in capturing a butterfly, one kills it. Even as one looks at a butterfly pinned to a corkbord and thinks to oneself, this is a butterfly, there is that disjunction between what has been captured and what actually was - the creature that lived and existed freely. Similarly, what a sonnet captures is not the truth of that captured thing. In the concluding couplet, Avison seems to suggest that this is not an issue of sonnets in particular, but an issue of language itself.

                Language is one of few things that set homo sapiens apart; it is a biological function "locked in the mind" (14) and deeply interfused with other cognitive capacities which make us unique. We are rational creatures and we will always endeavour to understand and communicate what we see and know of the world - but inevitably, Avison suggests, we are doomed to fail because language cannot possibly convey the truth of that to which it refers, ie. reality. In attempting to capture and observe a butterfly - a thought, or an emotion - we are doomed to be left always with the "bones" - the exoskeleton, a mere shell - and never the essence. 

SOURCES

Avison, Margaret. “Butterfly Bones, or a Sonnet Against Sonnets.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in          English. Eds. Donna Bennett and Russel Brown. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. 553. Print.

Barrie, Michael. Introduction Lecture. LIN1310 Introduction to Linguistics I: Words and Utterances. University of Ottawa. Ottawa, 6 January 2010.

Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds. Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch. 8th ed. Vol. D. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 263-274. Print. 

The Duties of Adulthood - a Brief Analysis of Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty"

Upon first reading, “Ode to Duty” seems to conflict with the understood views of its author: it is difficult to attribute an appraisal of duty to a man who is well-known for lauding “the spontaneous overflow of emotion” (“Preface” 598) – spontaneity and duty seem at odds. However, upon closer consideration of the poem, one finds that Wordsworth does not necessarily suggest “duty” to be the adherence and conformity to an established religious or societal code, as one might understand the word today. Rather, “duty,” as Wordsworth describes, is a conscious devotion to the very things readers have overtime come to associate with him: childlike hope, joy, and an alignment with the natural world.

            The connection between Duty and nature is clear in the seventh stanza of the poem, where the speaker recognizes Duty's hand in all the natural world about him, from the flowers up to the stars. He connects Duty, furthermore, to divinity, naming her “the Godhead's most benignant grace” (50); the implication is, then, that the ordering of nature, maintained by Duty, is a reflection of God's will and benediction. This view is not unlike the view the child takes of nature, as Wordsworth describes in “Ode (‘There was a time’)”: “The earth.../To me did seem/Apparelled in celestial light” (2-4). In both cases, nature is recognized as infused with divinity. The difference between the child's view of nature, as remembered in “Ode,” and the adult's view, as expressed in “Ode to Duty,” is that, to the child, the world merely “did seem” heavenly. The adult speaker of “Ode to Duty,” on the other hand, recognizes that the natural world is heavenly because it is ordered on a set of natural laws which have their source in “the most Ancient Heavens” (“Duty” 56), which state, for example, that flowers shall bloom and “laugh” (“Duty” 53) or that stars shall be fixed in their positions. In other words, the child, in his interactions with nature, is filled with awe and thus implicitly aware of nature's divine source; the adult explicitly recognizes a government in nature, which he personifies as Duty, the “Daughter of the Voice of God” (“Duty” 1).

            In writing an “Ode to Duty,” then, Wordsworth is in part writing an ode to adulthood and “the philosophic [or, in other words, thoughtful] mind” (“Ode” 189) which consciously takes up what the child unconsciously carries out – that is, duty. In the poem in question, “Ode to Duty,” Wordsworth writes, “Youth/...without reproach or blot/...do thy work, and know it not” (12-14), indicating that Duty is not societal or religious conventionality or conformity – those are not things which children, purely in being children, adhere to. Thus, though he gives himself to Duty's “controul” (“Duty” 35), we may know that Wordsworth has not given up his childhood ideals; rather he has re-committed himself to them. As an adult, however, who can no longer “rely/Upon the genial sense of youth” (“Duty” 11-12), Wordsworth must consciously dedicate himself to Duty “in the quietness of thought” (“Duty” 36); that is, he must employ the “philosophic mind” (“Ode” 189) of his adulthood to dedicate himself, again, to the duties of his childhood years.

            Then, of course, the final question is that of his exact duties: what are they? What is a child's duty but to be carefree? As it turns out, this is precisely what Duty provides: freedom from “strife and from despair” (8). The poem suggests that children are free of “despair” because they are hopeful by nature:  they are the “blessed” (21) who “entertain” (22) a belief that “Serene will be our days and bright/And happy will our nature be” (17-18) – that is, a belief in a pleasant future. Because they have no doubts of “love” (23) or “joy” (24), children may “live in the spirit” (23) of faith. Adults, on the other hand, because they are aware that things “press/ Upon...present happiness” (29-30), must consciously “find that other strength” (24). That is, they must wilfully take up the duty to be faithful and thus free from “strife and despair” (8).

            As I have said, the duty to be hopeful and happy, which adults must undertake, is unconsciously performed by children. That is not to say, however, that the poet is unaware of duties particular to adulthood. In the middle of the poem, he at length discusses the concept of will in accepting one's duties; it is important to Wordsworth to clarify that he “still [acts] according to the voice/Of [his] own wish” (42-43). Thus the poem indicates that, as an adult consciously aware of him or herself, one has the duty to reconcile one's actions with one's desires and needs – that is, to be true to one's self. Again, children are, by nature, true to themselves; it is as they grow slowly into adults and take up, as Wordsworth writes in “Ode,” the “vocation/[of] endless imitation” (106-107), that it becomes a conscious duty to maintain individuality and free will. Thus, even in consciously exercising free will as an adult, one is merely continuing the work of the child.

            “Ode to Duty,” then, is not discordant with Wordsworth's ideals. Of course, as one might expect, duty is linked to adulthood; in the main, this poem is about the duty of being an adult, of taking responsibility through “the quietness of thought” (36). However, the responsibilities which Wordsworth outlines are essentially synonymous with the duties of a child; like the child, the adult has a duty to be free of “strife and from despair” (8), to live in hope, and to be true to one's self. However, while the child could carry out these duties and “know it not” (14), the adult is inevitably aware of himself and his actions. This does not much change things. Ultimately the adult's true duty is to consciously, thoughtfully, and wilfully do that which he had done unconsciously since birth and as a child. 

SOURCES

Wordsworth, William. “Ode (‘There was a time’).” The Major Works. Oxford: World’s Classics, 2000. 297-302. Print.

---. “Ode to Duty.” The Major Works. Oxford: World’s Classics, 2000. 295-297. Print.

---. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” The Major Works. Oxford: World’s Classics, 200. 595-615. Print. 

Vaguest Gleanings Merely - the dual-voiced persona and its quest for meaning in Reaney's "Starling with a Split Tongue"

As its title suggests, “Starling with a Split Tongue” concerns itself with speech (the figurative tongue) as well as the concept of a single, twofold object (the literal split tongue). Appropriately, then, the speaker that Reaney creates is a dual-voiced persona. One intuits, as one reads the poem, marked shifts in the voice: the first of these arrives shortly after the first stanza, and the second (which re-establishes the voice used in the first stanza) comes shortly before the last stanza. What these separate voices present in and of themselves, and what they symbolize in contrast to and in conjunction with the other, is the topic of this paper.

                The poem begins on a negative note, with a description of a cruel act: boys capturing and cutting the tongue of a bird, and then cooping him in a “cage” (5). The tone employed by the speaker  is matter-of-fact, as though the bird is resigned to his bleak fate and apparent lack of agency as represented in the fact that he merely repeats what “passersby taught” (8). By the end of the stanza, this negativity and resignation has intensified as the speaker settles on the thought of the utter emptiness of his speech: “Though I pray I do not pray/Though I curse I do not curse/Though I talk I do not talk” (10-12). The repetitive structure of these lines gives the voice, as it speaks of the meaninglessness of the things it says, the ring of conclusive certainty. Yet even as the persona within the poem resolves himself to the idea that his words are meaningless, the poet unexpectedly establishes a hope: that one can “talk [but]... not talk...[is] 'kinda nice'” (12-13).

                This hopeful transition leads into the second voice - a voice which, following the first voice's accedence to a belief in hollow utterances – speaks with a resulting abandon of language altogether. This second voice is hardly coherent: it speaks openly in a double voice, as suggested by the structuring of the poem upon the page; it verbalizes nouns (18), and nominalizes articles (15) and prepositions (24); it establishes unlikely comparisons such as “As still as infinitives were the Stones” (28). I am tempted to say that this voice says nothing meaningful at all – and yet I am (and I suspect this was Reaney's objective) engaged by this voice which at first glance defies logical language; that is, my creativity is engaged, and sometimes succeeds, in establishing meaning in the apparent meaninglessness. For example, as unusual as the metaphor of line 28 is, the reader can perceive meaning: infinitives are indeed “still”; the action of an infinitive (i.e. untensed) verb is not done; therefore, no motion takes place.

                Meaning is, however, incontestably vague in the third, fifth, and sixth stanza - perhaps that is both the point and beside the point. The voice which speaks in these passages is not at all concerned with making sense since the speaker, in the first stanza, has already resolved himself to the idea that speech is meaningless. Thus the vagueness is the point of these stanzas: the poet has purposefully established it as resulting from the speaker's abandon of language. Having abandoned the conception of meaning in speech, however, the speaker has liberated himself. He is no longer trapped “in a phrenological cage/...[saying]/The cracklewords passersby taught” (5-7), but creating utterly new, unconventional expressions. He is playing with language and, fascinatingly, the readers are compelled to play with it as well – that is, to engage creatively in interpreting the text. The vagueness in meaning of these stanzas is thus beside the point: what is of more interest is the process of pure creativity within the mind of the speaker/writer as well as the interpreter.

                Now, that is a rather positive observance for a poem to make, but Reaney does not choose to end his piece there, but shifts back into the persona of the speaker's first voice, which has now turned to questioning higher powers about why tongues, and hands, and hearts are split. (We can be sure that this is, indeed, the first voice: the mention of jackknives recalls the poem's introduction; furthermore, the poem is physically structured such that it no longer suggests the double-voice embraced in the middle stanzas; the most obvious indicator, of course, is that the speaker is coherent again!).

                By thus reminding his readers of that first voice, Reaney suggests the split nature of his speaker: he is the creature trapped within the “cage” (5) of things he is taught, yearning for meaning but perceiving naught but lies in both “mask” and “face” (40-41), attempting to resign himself to a stoic belief in meaninglessness but ever “restless” (43) and questioning “Giant Jackknife in the sky” (39); at other times, he is a being at liberty, freed from the constraints of language because he expects nothing of it, and thus freed, able to create fresh meaning. These are, of course, contradictory personas: the one yearns for meaning in speech and does not find it; the other does not seek meaning but inadvertently creates it through language. At the same time, the two personas are deeply fused, for it is the starling's initial abandonment of language that allows him to spring into his free, creative alter-ego; that creative alter-ego would not exist without the ego which is ever giving up on finding meaning in language.

                “Starling with a Split Tongue” is a fascinating but obscure poem that stubbornly resists interpretation. It is, to summarize as briefly as possible, about the condition of being a split entity. Furthermore, it regards the question of how to make language meaningful. At the core of this poem (figuratively and literally), Reaney presents the notions of creation and interpretation of creation, both of which are playful and imaginative, fundamentally alike. By the end, when the starling asks “In the larger garage.../Do they not croak as I?” (46-47), there is, then, a hint that the “larger garage” refers to the world outside the poem, that “they” refers to us (the readers), and that we – starling/poet and the readers – are all a part of this croaking, this deep desire for meaning. But of course, by the last lines, we are, literally and figuratively, away from the heart of the poem where freshest meaning is created. Thus, meaning is elusive; as we attempt to grasp it, it evades us, and when it comes, it comes in vaguest gleanings merely – much like understanding of this poem.



SOURCE

Reaney, James. “Starling with a Split Tongue.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Eds. Donna Bennet and Russel Brown. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. 626-627. Print.