Conversely, the likes of Wordsworth and Blake use a
confined scope to view larger matters; so to speak, filling up a teacup in a
storm. Wordsworth takes on the ‘spots of time’ (The
Prelude) of
specific images and words that Wordsworth associates with childhood, like his employment of the constant repetition of words ‘earth’, ‘being’,
‘forms’, and ‘image’ in Wordsworth’s The Prelude which ‘spake to me
rememberable things’ that an adult
can vaguely recall, but only a child can see; with Blake, of all the many
characters and circumstances he could draw upon for his poetic inspiration in
18th-Century Britain, he chooses to focus upon the figure of a
child, a Chimney Sweeper. In ‘Innocence’ he paints a bleak portrait of a
labouring orphan, representing one of multitudes, for whom the image of ‘thousands
of sweepers…locked up in coffins of black’, rescued by an angel with a ‘bright
key’ who releases the sweeper boys to be free and run wild in an idyllic
afterlife of green plains and ‘clouds and sport in the wind’ provides the only solace
to his harsh life. Blake contains his commentary on the Industrial Revolution
and its repercussions to a wholly ‘innocent’ perspective, a child’s perspective.
Even in the ‘Experience’ poem, though there is participation by Blake’s
authorial voice of inquiry (‘Where are thy father and mother? Say?’), the poem,
much like Wordsworth’s ‘We Are Seven’, hands the poem’s denouement to the child’s
voice.
This
fixation upon specific, sometimes
incoherent, moments in boyhood renders a fixation with the intimate that fuels
Wordsworth’s poetry even when he moves onto less nature-based, more societal
matters. In the 10th Book: ‘Residence in France and French
Revolution’, upon hearing of Robespierre’s death, he chooses to internalise his
feelings rather than immediately paint the larger picture: he describes how ‘great
was my glee of spirit, great my joy In vengeance, and eternal justice, thus/ made
manifest’, before then moving onto the bigger images of ‘they who with clumsy desperation
brought Rivers of blood’ have been punished, and finally. universalises the
French Revolution by stating that ‘earth March firmly towards righteousness and
peace’ as a result of this event. In these passages he gives the scene such
mellifluity as akin to the childhood passages of The Prelude. Where he does provide a specific contrast, though, is
in the context of this mellifluity. While in his childhood phases the poetic
voice relished the “exhilaration of the skating, the vitality of the
verbs, ‘gleaming’, ‘sweeping’, ‘spinning’, ‘wheeling’, the narrative push, the cheerfulness”,[1] Book 10 opens with the melancholic ‘fading’ of ‘a
beautiful and silent day’. The focus is on feelings of ‘disappointment and
dismay’; though there remains a hopeful ‘confidence…for the better cause’, the
opening lines are suspended in a more subdued, solemn energy than before.
Clearly with maturity comes quietude in the same way
youthfulness implies exuberant energy; the idealism of his younger years seems
to have been tempered by an awareness that the ‘sovereign voice (that) subsists
within the soul’ is more often than not, ‘earnest and blind, against the stern
decree’. Towards the end of Book 10, the childlike momentum of idealism is
regained as ‘uneasy bursts of exultation’ Wordsworth imagines how ‘the glorious
renovation’ of justice and liberty in France may be achieved. Ending this
section with ‘wantoness of heart’ and memories of his ‘former days’ with ‘schoolboys
hastening to their distant home’, Wordsworth hearkens back to days of old for
the energy to fuel his radicalism. The perspectives of precision remain, as
there is a distinct, if not always clear-cut, contrast between the perspectives
of child Wordsworth, which take the images, smells, sights and other sensations
of Wordsworth’s youth, and by ‘blending and interchange turn sensation
into experience, an experience of joy that will in future years spread around
the mature man’s thoughts in an affective tone’[2]; and the adult Wordsworth
who with ‘a weight of ages did at once descend/Upon my heart; no thought
embodies, no/Distinct remembrances, but weight and power, --/ Power growing
underweight’ (VIII 552-555).
There is an altogether different sort of
childishness to Pope’s The Rape of the
Lock; the fickle antics of many of its human characters outside of the
sensible, thoughtful Clarissa, all verge upon and quite often, do dip into, the
juvenile. Belinda’s preoccupation with her appearance is depicted by her
toiletries being ‘in mystic Order laid—everything is detailed’ down to the most
minute little information that it all becomes, quite frankly, a bit ridiculous.
Her shallow obsession with all that is aesthetic, aided by her sylphs, spreads
over to many of the other characters bar Clarissa who ‘alone possesses the sense
to discern that “frail beauty must decay” (V .25)’.[3] Throughout
the poem little things are viewed greater than the sum of their parts; most
famously, perhaps, the scissor as a ‘two edg’d weapon’ which as a ‘fatal engine
clos’d’. At ‘the meeting points the sacred hair dissever/ From the fair head,
for ever, and for ever!’. Pope can be seen as parodying epics like Paradise Lost and The Odyssey by, like those texts, amplifying every aspect of a
scene into detailed, vivid descriptions, only here the intent is not to awe,
but to amuse, generating a very specific vision of events by merging these
classical litotes with contemporary jargon. For example, Canto IV’s ‘Cave of
Spleen’ uses the 18th-Century term for ‘female hysteria/wit’, the
diagnosis of excessive vanity and pretension, and allegorises it into an
underworld not unlike that of Homer’s.
At the poem’s end, none of the characters seem to
learn a lesson. Though Belinda does in a sense, transform through the poem by
changing from a ‘pious maid’ (Canto I) to a ‘fierce’ (Canto V), her fickleness
remains consistent, her perspective of the world unchanging, her main
preoccupation still the restoration of her lock of hair. The object of her
anger is directed through a very precise outlet, and going back to Pope’s whole
‘storm in a teacup’ schematics, his satire, focused ‘on describing impressive
forms of behaviour that have been emptied of their traditional content without
adapting to proper modern values’[4],
remains perceptively attuned to the fickleness of all this conflict. With the ‘deadly
bodkin’ as a threatening weapon and characters cursing each other as ‘insulting
foe (s)’, and the lock of hair itself becoming ‘such a prize no mortal must be
blest’ and ‘obtain’d with guilt, and kept with pain’, Pope gets the last laugh
in a long line of laughs by raising the lock of hair up to such a ridiculous
standard of glory, firmly placing the whole tale in the context of his
perspective as an omniscient observer who sees all and mocks all. Upon cutting
off a lock of hair, the ‘villain’ Baron, who sees locks of hair as ‘trophies of
his former loves’, sees the lock as a ‘glorious prize’, only to have it snatched
away by the poem’s conclusion, existing far beyond the mortal lives of all our
characters. By the time Belinda’s ‘tresses shall be laid in dust’ and the Baron
deceased, the latter will be a forgotten memory, and the lock ‘the Muse shall
consecrate to fame…’midst the stars inscribe Belinda’s name’—but the playfulness
of Pope’s authorial voice belies a more serious undertone: his authorial
perspective is the only one that can see how Belinda’s foolhardy vanity can
ruin her posterity, by leaving her remembered in history as one who made
mountains out of molehills.
[1] Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations:
Selected Prose 1968-1978, London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1984, p. 67
[2] Robert Langbaum, The
Evolution of Soul in Wordsworth’s Poetry, PMLA, LXXXII, (May 1967), p.265-272
[3] John Trimble, ‘Clarissa's Role in The Rape of the Lock’, Texas
Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Winter 1974), p. 673
[4] Ralph Cohen, Transformation in The Rape of the Lock, Eighteenth-Century
Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Spring, 1969), pp. 209-210
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