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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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