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 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. 

Dennis Lee's Self-reflexive Examination of Language and the State of Existence in "Worldly"

The preposition “in” proposes two entities (one thing is in another); “only,” which can be broken up into the morphemes 'one' and '-ly' proposes one entity; the affix “un,” signifying negation, suggests no entities. As such, Dennis Lee's poem “Wordly” begins - “If inly, if only, if unly” (1-2) - as a countdown. That, and the fact that, towards its end, Lee brings up the concept of the reckoning (punning with “rekenning,” found in the ninth line of the poem), gives the poem an apocalyptic feel. Following this intuition, one may interpret the poem as Lee's examination of the ultimate state of the world; he envisions it as fragmentary and somewhat absurd, but among these qualities he highlights the possibility for creativity and happiness. His envisioning of the world as such is done through a self-reflexive examination of something intrinsic to the human world: language.

What any reader is likely to immediately notice about the poem is that it defies comprehension, mainly because the poet breaks language down, playing with the “emes” (4) – the sounds and bits of words – in an attempt to forcefully create new meaning. For example, Lee constructs the adjective “cripcryptic” (7). When first reading through the poem and coming upon this, one might exasperatedly think that the poem itself is cryptic. In fact, I think Lee is here speaking about the poem, or, more broadly, about language – alluding to the idea that words are signs which try to capture and convey some truth; that is, words are cryptic. However, the addition of “crip,” a word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, derived from “cripple,” indicates, also, that the crypticness of language is crippling, confusing, so that to speak is merely to stutter - “cripcryp-.” This goes to explaining the sense of incomprehensibility in this poem and, I think, in many postmodernist works, generally: postmodernists believe that language is incapable of conveying truth. Language presents a deconstructed version of truth.

Despite the fragmentariness one finds in language, one also finds “ec-/statisyllabic largesse” (7-8). That is, within the “emes,” the syllables, one finds lavishness, an abundance of something. Perhaps this something is meaning; this is suggested in the word “heart-/iculates” (2-3). “Heart-/iculates” replaces the “art” in “articulate” with “heart” - denoting perhaps the insertion of the heart into language's articulations. At the same time, the only difference between “heart” and “art” is the addition of the phoneme /h/. It is a very minimal addition; phonologically, the sound /h/ is merely an unobstructed exhalation of air. This indicates the close association between art – language – and the heart. As such, Lee suggests that language is an intrinsic part of human nature.

That said, there is still the element of the absurd in language, as evidenced by the ending of Lee's poem: “rekenning, rekeening, re-/meaning our worldly demesne.” With “rekenning, rekeening, re-/meaning,” Lee encapsulates his notion of language. A kenning is a compound metaphor; as such, it represents putting things together – literally, putting words, or free morphemes, together. To keen is to wail, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, particularly over someone's death – and as such, the use of this word signifies things falling apart. “Remeaning,” again, entails putting things together, restructuring after things have fallen apart. Lee's repetition of the prefix “re-” indicates that this happens again and again; furthermore, that he uses the gerundive forms of these verbs indicates that this repetitive process is ongoing, neverending. Finally, the poem ends with Lee referring to our “worldly demesne,” suggesting that there is no possibility of transcendence. In fact, as the entire poem can be seen as a self-reflexive examination of the nature of language, Lee might possibly be suggesting that our “demesne,” our only true possession we have to work with, is language.

In Lee's vision, humanity is like a child with a single set of building blocks – a set of “emes.” The only thing he or she can do is structure and restructure those blocks into various forms, various words, various meanings. This is both a hopeless, resigned view of existence, yet also absurdly hopeful, for as a child plays, he or she derives happiness and employs limitless creativity, as, I believe, Lee did in writing this poem.

SOURCE

Lee, Dennis. “Worldly.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Eds. Donna Bennet and Russel Brown. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. 868-869.

The Cyclicality of Creativity as Depicted in Mackay's “Twinflower”

The speaker/poet in Don Mackay's “Twinflower” is “working on the same old problem,/how to be both/knife and spoon” (32-34). This is, admittedly, a vague, metaphorical statement – what does it mean to be a knife or a spoon, anyway? – but what it does certainly suggest is a sense of duality, a motif which continually comes up in the poem (even found in the title). Mackay sets up a number of paralellisms to explore this duality. Through these, he ultimately indicates that poets – and humans on the whole – have a duty to be both assertive and passive in turn, specifically in the act of naming, because creativity is a cyclical process.

One of the intriguing comparisons Mackay establishes in this poem is between Carolus Linnaeus and God. Linnaeus is a creator, said to have “devised” a “system” (51). Like the Word of God found in the Bible, Linnaeus' words are also found in a book – “the field guide” (39) – which evidently has authority, for others, like the speaker, turn to it. Significantly, the system Linnaeus has created is one of words – “binomial Latin names” as the editors note under the poem. Other writers (Layton in his poem “The Fertile Muck,” for example) have made the association between the human creation of a system of words (a poem, a story, etc.) and divine creation. To broadly employ a term popularized through Tolkien's “On Fairy Stories,” Linnaeus is a “sub-creator;” in “Twinflower,” he is depicted taking a Godlike role in creating (or sub-creating) an authoritative system.

If Linnaeus is associated with God, then the twinflower takes the role of humankind. Like the human race, which, according to the Bible, is created in God's “image” (Authorized King James Version, Genesis 1:26), the twinflower joins Linnaeus “in his portrait” (54), thus partaking in its creator's image. The flower is also given Linnaeus' name, just as God gives man his likeness. The speaker writes that, linked by a name shared with its creator, the flower “rises in [its] tininess” (55). Similarly, throughout history, a connection with God has given men and women, communally and individually, a sense of greatness. For example, the early notion of the divine right of kings based the supreme authority of monarchs on their supposed divinity. More generally, one can argue that religious faith gives people a sense of their own immortal importance in the face of chaos and death.

Thus, Mackay draws a parallel between the relationship between God and humanity and the relationship between Linnaeus and the twinflower. However, this set-up is significantly blurred for a number of reasons. Firstly, although we could say the twinflower represents humanity, Linnaeus is also, literally, a human; though he creates a system of words, this is a human act. Furthermore, just as one may argue that Linnaeus, in Godlike fashion, names and defines the flower, one could also argue that the flower defines Linnaeus: after all, the poet remembers Linnaeus through his interaction with the flower; it is because of the flower that Linnaeus exists in the poem at all (this argument runs similarly to the argument that it was not God who created us in his likeness, but we who created God). As such, one cannot set up a system of parallel representation in which Linnaeus is clearly God. Rather, I think, both Linnaeus and the flower may be seen as representative of humankind; supportive of this idea is the fact that the two share a name and are found in the same portraits, indicating that their identities are intertwined. Following this line of interpretation, Linnaeus represents the assertiveness of humankind – that quality which leads to demarcation, systemization, imposition of some authority over nature – while the twinflower represents receptiveness (in the sense that the flower is receptive to the name it is given).

Let me turn, here, to consideration of one final parallel which Mackay establishes: that between Adam and the poet. Mackay indicates the association between the two by having both engaged in the same activity: looking at the twinflower. One might note that God, in the passage about Adam, takes the voice of an editor, demanding words in a hurry, drawing Adam away from his idleness (similar to how “Murry demands more cantos” in P. K. Page's “Kaleidoscope”). Adam is, in a sense, the first poet, the first to use human speech. What Mackay highlights in this passage about him, however, is not his giving of names, creating words, but his receptivity – things “came into his head” (21) – suggesting that creativity is linked to passivity. This is suggested again in the highly imaginative description of the twinflower the speaker/poet gives when he accidentally – that is, passively – comes upon it: “a shy/hoister of flags, a tiny lamp to read by” (35-36). Thus, creativity depends on a person's ability to receive words, just as the twinflower receives its name.

If poetry requires receptivity, it also certainly requires assertiveness in the way of naming and creating a system of words which demarcates reality. However, like many postmodernists, Mackay notes the limits that this requirment places on poets/humans. The flower in the poem is given the name Linnaea Borealis “to live by in the system [Linnaeus] devised” (51) – bringing to mind the question of what that flower is out of that system. Similarly, what is the flower beyond its metaphoric definition as “a tiny lamp?” (36). As a solution to the issue of the inherent imprecision of language, Mackay indicates the necessity of the constant revision of words – of recognizing that, despite the “note of certainty” (43), the assignment of a word to something does not constitute “the end” (44) of its naming. In fact, the poem begins with an instance of such revision, with the poet reconsidering and rejecting a word, “spirit” (2), which has been given a definition as “the muscle we long with” (2).

By beginning his poem as such, Mackay demonstrates that poetry and creativity require reconsideration of established words. To this end, receptivity – the pause Adam makes before he gives a name – “matters” (25). Language, however, is assertive by nature. Words demarcate reality – in deed, this is precisely the reason reconsideration is constantly necessary. In other words, creativity is a cyclical processs in which one fluctuates between being a receptive spoon – a “hollowed” instrument (“spoon”) – and an assertive, inevitably deconstructive knife.

Works Cited

Authorized King James Version Bible. Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Google Books. Web.

Mackay, Don. “Twinflower.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in Englih. Eds. Donna Bennett and Russell Brown. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. 907-908.

Page, P.K. “Kaleidoscope.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Eds. Donna Bennett and Russell Brown. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. 529-531.

"spoon, n.". OED Online. March 2012. Oxford University Press. 3 April 2012

The "All-Inclusive Metaphor" of P.K. Page's "Kaleidoscope"

The end of P.K. Page's poem, "Kaleidoscope," reads like an invitation as she impels us to reconsider the analogy she has drawn: "Through [the kaleidoscope] – see/...the perfect, all-inclusive metaphor" (71-73). What is the metaphor she has lain out? What is it that the speaker sees through the "celestial kaliedoscope" (28)? To be quite frank, she sees everything – the world, its people, and, generally, the state of things.

At a literal level, through the kaleidescope, the speaker views the world of objects and, significantly, it is entirely transformed. “Pots and pans [become]...leaves and flowers” (51-52); a leaking faucet drips “diamonds [and] stars” (54); even “square roots” (49) come alive. In brief, the mundane becomes marvellous. People are also seen differently through the kaleidoscope. In the first section of the poem, Byron sees his lover's palms as “sand dollars” (6) and then “petalled stars” (9); her mouth transforms into flowers, her naval into “shells and pearls” (17), and so on.

Notably in this first section, Page continually mentions the number four: Byron's lover's mouth becomes “four hearts...to kiss and kiss and kiss/and kiss a fourth time” (10-14); shortly after, “her naval...[quadruples] for him” (16-18). The number immediately evokes a variety of things – theseasons, the elements, the bodily humours, et al. – which are deemed to be in a state of constant change (for example, the seasons cycle; the proportion of humours within a body are unfixed). It is possible, then, that Page is suggesting that people, like “multiple Terese” (31), are ever-going through motions of “shift and flux and flow” (36). Perhaps this is why Page chose to allude to the Romantic poet, Lord Byron: he was known to be a temperamental man (Stillinger 611).

Through the kaleidoscope, then, one sees a changed view of the ordinary world - it becomes extraordinary. One sees also the multiplicity and mutability of others. In the final stanza, the speaker mentions a final aspect of what the kaleidoscope reveals: "each single thing is other-/all-ways joined/to every other thing" (62-64). The kaleidoscope presents her with a vision, that is, of the interconnectedness of things about her, the abstract blending of entities.

If the shifting, beautiful, interweaving shapes it shows represent the world, human nature, and interconnected humanity, what could the kaleidoscope itself metaphorically signify? One might see the kaleidoscope, as it involves seeing, as a symbol of perception. I venture further, however, that the kaleidoscope symbolizes a particular kind of perception - one which lets the perceiver see the world about him or her as the kaleidoscope does, as beautiful, changing, and interconnected.

I venture that the kaleidoscope is a symbol of poetic perception. This explains the allusion to Lord Byron, the "arch Romantic" responsible for the creation of the Byronic hero (Stillinger 610) - responsible, that is, for popularizing a character that is defined neither by good nor evil but an interplay of both; it is as though Byron had a kaleidoscopic vision of human nature which recognized its multiplicity.

Later in Page's poem, she writes,

My eye falls headlong
down this slender tube,
its eyebeam glued
to shift and flux and flow. (34-37)

By writing thus in first person and present tense, Page creates the effect that what she is relaying is happening immediately. Of course, we are prone to read this passage as though the "slender tube" denotes the kaleidoscope (and it certainly does, at some level), but, literally, what is she doing in the moment of writing those words but writing? Thus the "slender tube," the "cylinder" (39) with which she is "interdependent/paired in serious play" (42-43) just as plausibly refers to a writing utensil - a pen or pencil - and the things which happen - the transformation of her surroundings into beauty and the realization she gains that "nothing is what it seems" (60) - are a result of her poetic/kaleidoscopic perception of the world.

In conclusion then, Page's poem is, indeed, an "all-inclusive metaphor!" The kaleidoscope and what is seen through it not only metaphorically convey a vision of the world and humanity as changeable, beautiful, and interconnected, but also a vision of vision itself, of how to view the world, and a vision of the poet as visionary.

WORKS CITED

Page, P.K. "Kaleidoscope." An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Eds. Donna Bennet and Russel Brown. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. 512. Print.

Stillinger, Jack and Deidre Shauna Lynch. "George Gordon, Lord Byron." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed.Vol. D. Eds. Jack Stillinger and Deidre Shauna Lynch. New York: Norton, 2006. 607-611. Print.

The Butterfly and the God - Artistry in Layton's "The Fertile Muck" and "Butterfly on Rock"

Irving Layton's “Butterfly on Rock” and “The Fertile Muck” concern themselves primarily with the same issue. In “The Fertile Muck,” the speaker asks “How to dominate reality?” (25); in “Butterfly on Rock,” the poet contemplates the “desire/to be a thing alive” (7-8). In both pieces, that is, Layton ponders how to bring significance to mere existence. He explicitly provides two answers - “Love is one way;/imagination another” (25-26) – and the latter of these he brings to the forefront and focus of each of these poems.

In “Butterfly on Rock,” Layton explores the concept of the creative artist through the metaphor of a butterfly which settles on a rock, thereby making “manifest” (8) the lifeless object's yearning. He employs this metaphor, as well, in “The Fertile Muck,” where he describes insects as having a poet's “crafty eyes” (8). The image of the butterfly is evocative. Butterflies connote beauty and fancifulness – qualities which may be attributed to the artist or his craft – but, above all, they represent transformation. Layton suggests, then, that imagination is transformative; it has the power to “extend...rooms...without cost” (“The Fertile Muck” 19) – to transform, and transcend, what is.

Layton is, however, not content with settling on this earthy, delicate representation of the poet. In “The Fertile Muck,” for example, though “the winged insects...wear [his] crafty eyes” (7-8), they are no “better off” (7) than the empty wind. Perhaps butterflies are simply too common for Layton, too much a part of the “bleak forest” (“Butterfly on Rock” 10) he desires to escape. Layton does not see the butterfly as the ideal image of the poet because it is fragile; it can be destroyed or confined in “moth-proofed cupboards” (“Fertile” 17), its “irregular footprint” (“Fertile” 22) erased.

Being thus discontent with the fragility connoted by the butterfly, Layton elevates the poet further, to the status of a god. For instance, in “Butterfly on Rock,” it is not until the speaker most epically brings his “hand down on the butterfly” (14) that the rock actually comes alive, so to speak; it is the poet's hand which achieves the miraculous. In “The Fertile Muck,” Layton writes,

There are brightest apples on those trees
but until I, fabulist, have spoken
they do not know their significance
or what other legends are hung...
on their black boughs. (1-5)

The image of the tree and its legendary fruit is allusive: it brings to mind, for instance, the golden apples of Greek mythology, or the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. By putting his speaker in the position of the “fabulist” (2) then, Layton not only conveys that a poet is a mythmaker in a dual sense. The poet is a creator, an artist, drawing from the “fertile muck” of his mind and surroundings, and, like the religious Creator, he makes life meaningful.

While Layton, then, associates himself as an artist with the butterfly, evidently he is not satisfied with a purely natural symbol. In both of the poems in question, he chooses to represent his poetic expression as Godlike. He shows staunch - indeed, almost arrogant - conviction in the power of the creative artist - but perhaps Layton in his time, unlike the Romantic poets in theirs, though he is inspired by it, simply feels no complete reassurance in or by nature. Nature is death, “shattered porcupines...in [a] bleak forest” (“Butterfly” 9-10). To feel secure in his vocation - to bring significance to his art and thereby his own existence - Layton must, as he does, envision the poet - himself - as indestructible, Godlike.

WORKS CITED

Layton, Irving. “Butterfly on Rock.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Eds. Donna Bennet and Russel Brown. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. 512. Print.

---. “The Fertile Muck.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Eds. Donna Bennet and Russel Brown. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. 508-509. Print.

Tension in Crawford's "Canada to England"

Isabelle Crawford’s “Canada to England” is, in a word, tense. Crawford continuously attempts to reconcile two divergent concepts: while she writes positively of Canada’s progress, she also develops a fairly Romantic view of an ideal past. At once, then, Crawford looks favourably towards the past as well as the future.

The clearest manifestation of this tension is in the poem’s nature imagery. Although Crawford writes that “Nature’s self/Is led, glad captive...And our... God...smiles on the deed” (21-25), earlier in the poem she likens nature to “Samson yet unshorn” (7). These metaphors conflict: God would not “smile” at Samson’s hair (symbolic of his spiritual devotion) being cut. Furthermore, the author depicts nature as sublime: she speaks of the “wild roar” (4) and the “solitary might” (8) of the Canadian wilderness. By describing nature thus as frightful or awe-inspiring, Crawford further associates nature with God, and therefore complicates our understanding of the poem’s positive view of progress upon which God supposedly “smiles.”
Crawford continues to develop the tension of the past-future dichotomy through her references to spirituality and culture. Allusions to old, “uncivilized” spiritualities are frequently and rather erratically blended with Biblical references; the first stanza, for instance, refers to Samson as well as “Ambrosial-breathing furies” (15). Even England – the pinnacle of progress in the poem – is referred to as the “Warrior of the Seas” (1), a tribal title. The various, seemingly haphazard cultural and religious allusions further create tension within the poem between the past (as represented in older cultures/spiritualities) and the civilized future (as signified by Christianity).

The title of the poem, “Canada to England” can be read in at least three ways. Literally, the poem is a direct message from Canada to England. At another level, the poem outlines Canada’s progress as a nation towards becoming a cultivated and civilized land, the exemplary of which is England – that is, the poem describes the transformation of “Canada to England.” It is interesting to note, also, that, although Canada’s growth into a country like England is progress or movement forward, in emulating England, Canada is also looking backwards at its roots. The tension of the poem, reflective of the tension and awkwardness of a growing nation as it is simultaneously pulled in various directions, works with each of these interpretations.

SOURCE

Crawford, Isabella Valancy. “Canada to England.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Ed. Donna Bennett and Russell Brown. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. 188-90. Print.

Thoreau as Emerson’s Philosophical Equivalent

The 19^th-century philosophical and literary movement of Transcendentalism emphasized three things: a Romantic notion, tinged with Asian beliefs, of the interrelated relationship between nature, divinity, and humankind; a faith in intuition, by way of passive perception; and, lastly, an interest in “the quintessential American concept” of individuality (Introduction xxv). Ralph Waldo Emerson, as a foremost figure, if not the founder, of American Transcendentalism, is a champion of these three tenets, of course. More uncertain is the extent to which Henry David Thoreau adopted the views of Emerson, who was “the most important influence and friendship in [Thoreau’s] life” (Henry David Thoreau 826). A comparative reading of the pivotal works of these two authors – Nature and “Self-Reliance” by Emerson; Walden and “Resistance to Civil Government” by Thoreau – indicates a few differences between the two. Most notably, Thoreau demonstrates a far greater preoccupation with contemporary societal issues and the immediate world about him. However, in the larger scope of each author’s ideas, these differences are minor; Thoreau’s conception of Transcendentalism is effectively equivalent to Emerson’s philosophy.

To begin with, Thoreau shares many of Emerson’s views of nature. For instance, as John Ronan and Sherman Paul before him have noted, in Walden, Thoreau demonstrates the four uses of nature – “commodity,” “language,” “beauty,” and “discipline” – which Emerson outlines in Nature (Ronan 155). Paul summarizes it thus (as quoted by Ronan):

Like Emerson in Nature [Thoreau] began with the prudential, rising through the progressive uses of nature to spirit. Indeed, most of Emerson’s treatise was embodied in Walden: “Commodity” in “Economy”; “Nature” and “Beauty” in “Sounds” and “Solitude”; “Language” in “Brute Neighbours”; “Discipline” in “Reading.” “The Beanfield,” and “Higher Laws”... (155)

Of the four, “Discipline” is the most significant to both Emerson and Thoreau. Emerson states that “the happiest man is he who learns from nature” (514). Similarly, Thoreau states that his purpose in spending time in the woods around Walden Pond is to “learn what [nature] had to teach” (892).

To Thoreau, nature’s lessons regard “the essential facts of life” (892). To Emerson, the greatest lesson to procure from nature is that “of worship” (514). Herein, a divergence between the two transcendentalists becomes apparent. Although both Emerson and Thoreau agree in the importance of nature as a discipline, Emerson’s primary concern is the discovery of “a religion by revelation” (492). He turns to nature for such revelation of spiritual knowledge because, as he states, “in the woods, we return to...faith” (494). On the other hand, Thoreau shows a greater interest in contemporary “life” (892). In the chapter “Economy,” his nature imagery consistently relates to or is representative of society. For example, Thoreau uses a metaphor describing philanthropic men as plants used in tea-making to express his disagreement with charity:

Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. (884)

In “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” as another case in point, Thoreau envisions all humanity as ants that “live meanly” (892). Thus, while Emerson is interested in nature for its perceived ability to connect him to God, for Thoreau, nature’s essential lessons are about life, people, and the issues faced by Western society.

This is not to say, however, that Thoreau does not share in Emerson’s view of nature as divine. Walden is ripe with allusions to a higher power. Thoreau’s description of his cabin in the woods, for example, connotes divinity in its references to godly figures and heavenly music:

This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. (889)

He goes on to state “Olympus is but the outside of the Earth everywhere” (889) relating the divine in the subject of Mount Olympus, with “the outside...everywhere” (889) – that is, nature. Elsewhere, Thoreau writes, “In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But...God himself culminates in the present moment,” suggesting his belief in what Emerson calls the “perpetual presence of the sublime” (895). Thus, although Thoreau most clearly depicts nature as a metaphor for life conveying messages regarding specific issues of his time, he also recognizes and refers to the inherent divinity in his surroundings. Therefore in their views of nature, Emerson and Thoreau are not especially divergent. Although Emerson is more frequently explicit in stating his spiritual beliefs, both he and Thoreau express an opinion of nature as an extension of a higher power, capable of departing to its observant student a greater understanding of himself and the world about him.

In addition to their respective understandings of nature, Emerson and Thoreau also do not differ in the manner in which they propose to observe and intuit nature; both advocate a method of receptiveness. Passivity, a vital aspect of this method, is exemplified in this well-known passage from Emerson’s Nature:

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. (494)

The phrase “all mean egotism vanishes” epitomizes the notion of absolute passivity – being, without any assertion of one’s being. The transparency (rather than opacity or translucency) of the infamous transcendental eye-ball also alludes to the concept of passive existence; the eye-ball is all but nonexistent. At the same time, the passivity described by Emerson is one which allows exceptional observation: Emerson “[sees] all” (494). As Kristen Bennett details in “Translating Transcendentalism: a Transcontinental Revelation of Emersonian Enthusiasm,” the transcendental emphasis on a perceptive passivity was inspired by the Kantian notion of a priori knowledge, or intuition, filtered through European Romanticism, particularly through the figures of Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle (33). Bennett writes,

Carlyle will maintain that the subconscious generates Creation, and is, via inward reflection, revealed to the conscious self through subliminal inspiration. Ergo, when one consciously strives to achieve revelation, it will only be a manufactured version, (33) thus explaining the emphasis placed by transcendentalists on absolute passivity in anticipation of intuition.

Thoreau partakes in transcendental passivity during his stay at Walden Pond. Through the first two chapters, he advocates a non-assertive existence in the repetition of “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity” (892) and praise of his own minimalistic lifestyle for “the leisure...thus secured” (876). Author David Robinson labels Thoreau’s stance as one of “dynamic passivity” (21), a term which neatly sums up the transcendentalist approach to intuiting nature. Thoreau’s desire to “‘receive [his] life as passively as the willow leaf that flutters over the brook’” (Robinson 21) is another aspect of Transcendentalism which he shares with Emerson.

As with the appreciation of nature as a bearer of truth as well as the passive approach to nature, Thoreau does not radically differ from Emerson on the third fundamental tenet of transcendentalism: self-reliance and assertion of one’s individuality, following intuition. In Walden, he aspires to “live deliberately” (892), and thereby set himself apart from “the mass of men [who] lead lives of quiet desperation” (847). In “Resistance to Civil Government,” while allowing that the installation of democracy is “a progress toward a true respect for the individual” (844), he maintains that” a government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice” (830) as “there is but little virtue in the action of masses of men” (832). Thus, Thoreau is a champion of individual thinking and non-conformity, putting him in alignment with Emerson, who declares, “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist” (534). Thoreau also shares Emerson’s belief in non-consistency, as evidenced by his agreement, in Walden, with the Confucian line “Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again” (891). If there is any difference in the issue of self-reliance and independence between the two men, it is akin to the difference between them in regards to their connection to nature (discussed above); Emerson deals abstractly with the ideals of non-conformity and non-consistency whereas Thoreau is deeply concerned with actual contemporary experiences such as the cause of abolition in America, the Mexican War, and the poll tax. That said, however, the ideas which underlie Thoreau’s actions in these matters – among them a belief in non-conformity and confidence in one’s intuitions – are aligned with Emerson’s thoughts.

Thoreau’s conception of Transcendentalism is, thus, considerably similar to Emerson’s philosophy in regards to those ideas and beliefs which are most commonly associated with the movement. Emerson and Thoreau both share a view of nature as divinely inspired with knowledge of the world; they each believe in the need to intuitively grasp the lessons of nature, through a method of “dynamic passivity” (Robinson 21); finally, they believe in following these intuitions with conviction and self-assurance. The only divergence between the two authors as evidenced by the literature is that Emerson is theoretical, while Thoreau, concerned with the application of his ideas, is experiential and empirical. That being said, Thoreau does not significantly re-envision Emerson’s fundamental ideas regarding nature, intuition, and self-reliance. His philosophy is, therefore, Transcendentalist in the Emersonian mould.