Wandering, Milton and Goethe. The Meeting of Tradition and the Contemporary World in Wordsworth's Poetry

What do the Various Manifestations of the Wanderer in

Romantic Poetry owe to Literary Tradition as well as to the

Impact of Goethe's Poetry?

The poems that pose the subject of discussion in this article allow themselves to be

understood as manifestations of the Wanderer for more than one reason. Most contain a

form derived from the verb to wander, sometimes in particularly prominent settings. The

Rime of the Ancient Mariner does not contain the word wanderer but a consideration of the

poem's import and themes evokes references to "the Wanderer" and "the Wandering Jew" in

a noted work of literary criticism by G.H. Hartman. The very mention of the wandering

Jew, Cain, a pilgrimage and the Prodigal Son - all closely associated with treatments of the

wanderer motif - implies a recall of tradition. It remains to be shown to what extent the

Romantic poems alluded to elements found in the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Daniel

Defoe and Edward Young by the very use of a word derived from the verb to wander.

The English Romantic poets were not only subject to the power of native tradition. They

were deeply impressed by works written by a dominant figure in the domain of

contemporary German literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had promoted the

word Wanderer to a place of honour in German poetry.

I anticipate a number of objections to the thesis I am proposing.

In terms of dictionary definitions Wanderer in German and wanderer are not synonymous.

The world wanderer might be taken to represent little more than a vague blanket term, a

mere convention. My answer to such objections resides in Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of

language and the application of this theory to the task of textual criticism by Jurij Tynjanov.

De Saussure differentiated between langue and parole, respectively language as a closed

system in dictionaries and grammar books and articulated language as expressed in specific

unique utterances. The unique quality of words in poetry is further enhanced by their being

an indispensible part of an integral unity Tynjanov invoked de Saussure's distinction

between the synchronic and diachronic axes of language when arguing that a word in verse

is "coloured" by the author's dual awareness of the part certain words have played in

literary tradition and of the new significance the same word derives from contemporary

life.. Let us see how this confluence of factors is demonstrable in the following works due

for consideration.

From Goethe's Der Wanderer to the Wanderer in Wordsworth's

Excursion

As Jonathan Wordsworth demonstrates in his monograph The Music of Humanity

Coleridge mediated a knowledge of Goethe's works to Wordsworth, not least by referring

him to The Wanderer, a translation of Goethe's dramatic poem by William Taylor of

Norwich. "The Wanderer" provides the model for the vagrant character portrayed in The

Peddler and this in turn emerges in the dramatic speaker named the Wanderer in The

Excursion. Thus Jonathan Wordsworth argues that the figure of the Wanderer in The

Excursion reflects Wordworth's recognition of the potential that lay in the symbolic value of

Goethe's Der Wandrer.

The Wanderer in The Excursion served Wordsworth's needs in much the same way that the

figure of the same name had served Goethe's. Both poets contended with the same anxiety

arising from a conflict between their underlying wish to bare their souls and their fears of

the exposure that would follow. Unlike Goethe, who managed the transition from extreme

reticence to self-confidence, Wordsworth withheld The Prelude from the prying eyes of the

world until the closing years of his life. In the meantime, The Excursion marked the closest

Wordsworth ever came to revealing anything about his personal experiences during

childhood and youth. The figure of Wanderer, whose name provides the heading of the first

book in The Excursion, evolved from earlier representations of a sage who engaged

strangers in wayside conversations and provided them with items of local history that

included the sad memories of a distressed wife and mother, a character that had been the

central figure in The Peddler and The Ruined Cottage. It seems that the germinal

association of an old man who eventually became the Wanderer sprang from Wordsworth's

childhood memory of one James Patrick, whom Wordsworth occasionally met in the Lake

District. As though to obliterate even this trace of a personal record, Wordsworth

transformed the old man into the Wanderer in The Excursion, who becomes transmogrified

into a Scotsman with a penchant for Burns's poetry who tells passers-by juicy items of local

history. One of these concerns the sad story of a certain Margaret who was left destitute by

her husband. The figure of a poor widow who roams the countryside appears in the poem

"The Evening Walk," the first version of which was written as early as in 1789. This figure

evolved into Margaret, whose name, coincidentally or not, is closely related to Gretchen, a

diminutive form of Margaret, in Goethe's drama Faust ein Fragment. This was published in

1790, in time to play some role in the creation of Margaret in The Ruined Cottage, The

Peddler, and eventually in "The Wanderer," the first book of The Excursion. Of course the

Margaret who appears in The Excursion did not commit infanticide though this theme is the

concern of another poem by Wordsworth, "The Thorn."

In wider terms, both Goethe and Wordsworth, indeed Goldsmith and Gray before them,

lamented the passing of the idyll evoked by country cottages and evocations of the golden

age like the one subject to Saturn's somnolent and benign influence in the minds of the

Augustan poets. It is of interest to note that while Robert left Margaret a parting gift of

"money in gold and silver," just after deserting her of all times, in the final version of the

story of Margaret as told in The Ruined Cottage the deserting husband left his spouse a

much more glamorous "bag of gold," in line with some fairy tale or perhaps, more to the

point, with the jewellery that Faust left in the casement of Gretchen's cottage home. It is

also something of an anomaly that Wordsworth changed the names of figures in The

Borderers from Margaret and Robert to Eleanor and Eldred respectively. Why was

Wordsworth so edgy about any mention of Margaret? Wordsworth's habit of chopping and

changing apparently minor details of this kind stems most probably from the urge some

poets have to hide their tracks, being subject perhaps to what Harold Bloom called "the

anxiety of influence." 1 Wordsworth's often repeated theme of the separation of family

member though abandonment, death or otherwise arguably stems from such losses in his

own life, particularly his separation from Anne Vallon and his daughter as well as the death

of his brother John in 1805. In his early works passages containg the verb to wander were

usually associated with gothic obsessions with death, sin and decay. Wordsworth's

hypersensitive avoidance of any intrusion into his privacy prevented him from publishing

The Prelude until near end of his life. The closest Wordsworth came to uncovering

memories of his formative experiences during his childhood is intimated in lines found in

The Pedlar and later in The Excursion, Book the First, 126-136, which I now quote:

1 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York, 1970).

He, many an evening, to his distant home

In solitude returning, saw the hills

Grown larger in the darkness, all alone

Beheld the stars come out above his head,

And travel's through the wood with no one near

To whom he might confess the things he saw.

So the foundations of his mind were laid,

In such communion, not from terror free,

And yet a child, and long before his time

He had perceiv'd the presence and the power

Of greatness, ......

"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth

"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" Viewed in the Light of J. Tynjanov's Discussion of

"The Word in Verse"

One difference between a gardener‟s comments on daffodils over the neighbour‟s fence and

Wordsworth's description of these flowers in "I wandered lonely as a cloud" resides in the

fact that the poem is part of a literary tradition and therefore invites comparison with other

poems addressed to the same theme. Frederick A. Pottle considers this poem in the light of

tradition in an article entitled "The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth." 2 He

2 Frederick A. Pottle, "The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth," Romanticism

and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1970), 273-287. Originally in Yale

Review.Vol. (Autumn 1951).

notes with reference to "I wandered lonely as a cloud":

Ever since 1807, when Wordsworth published this poem, daffodils have danced and

laughed, but there is nothing inevitable about it. The Greek myth of Narcissus is not

exactly hilarious; and even Herrick, when he looked at daffodils saw something far

from jocund.

Even after 1807 a reference to daffodils in poetry may still retain an element of solemnity

admixed with religious mysticism, as the final strophe of A. E. Housman's "The Lent Lily"

makes clear:

Bring baskets now, and sally

Upon the spring's array,

And bear from hill and valley

The daffodil away

That dies on Easter day.

The daffodils described in "I wandered lonely as a cloud," whatever their mythical and

traditional associations, recall a real event in Wordsworth's life and personal experience.

Pottle ponders whether a recognition of this fact can contribute to an evaluation of

Wordsworth's poem, thus broaching one of the most contentious issues in literary criticism:

What is the relationship between poetry and "external" factors in the domains of a poet's

biography and historical setting? Wishing to clarify the nature of this relationship, Pottle

cites the entry in Dorothy's journal telling of the occasion when she and her brother

suddenly came across the daffodils, the abiding impression of which is captured in "I

wandered lonely as a cloud." Pottle attaches great importance to divergences between the

description of the daffodils recorded in the journal and Wordsworth's poetic vision of the

flowers, for these, according to Pottle, enable a critic to ascertain the scope of the

imagination‟s particular sphere of operation in treating material drawn from sense data and

experienced events.

Pottle notes two highly significant divergences between Dorothy's and her brother's

descriptions of daffodils in "I wandered lonely as a cloud." First, the poem conveys the

point of view of a solitary speaker beside a lake. The discrepancy between the descriptions

of daffodils in poem and journal entails a polarity between the "solitariness" of the speaker

and the "sociability" imputed to the crowd of daffodils, endowed as they are, both in poem

and journal, with the human attributes of joy and the ability to laugh and dance. A further

discrepancy between poem and journal concerns implications of word choice. While in

Dorothy's account there is a reference to a "wind" that animated the scene she described, the

poem assigns vital power to a "breeze." Dorothy's journal leaves no doubt that the April day

on which she and her brother were impressed by the sight of daffodils was overcast and far

from spring-like in any positive sense.

Despite certain misgivings about Wordsworth's choice of the word "breeze," Pottle

concedes that the mildness it implies is fully consistent with the positive, indeed triumphant,

mood engendered by the poem. According to Pottle the "simple" joy evinced by the

daffodils reveals the workings of the imagination as it transmutes raw experience and the

emotions it arouses into one "simple emotion." Adducing evidence from "The Leech

Gatherer" and other poems, Pottle argues that Wordsworth's imagery rarely incorporates an

exact record of particular memories. Indeed, he calls into question whether the poem owes

any intrinsic quality to the memory of an actual incident. For him the poem is essentially the

product of the simplifying and unifying operation of the imagination, and as such poses "a

very simple poem."

Is “I wandered lonely as a cloud“ as simple as Pottle suggests? I find grounds for the view

that the poem is far from simple in any unqualified sense. For reasons I shall now adduce,

one may trace a certain ambiguity in the "simple" joy attributed to the daffodil encountered

by the speaker during his walk besides a lake.

Pottle himself establishes that the poem contains a juxtaposition of contrasting elements in

noting the polarity of "solitariness" and "sociability." With reference to a similarity in the

appearance of the daffodils and the nebulous aspect of the Milky Way, Pottle intimates a

further contrast or polarity associating the earthbound and the celestial or, on the temporal

plane, day and night. Our sense of the poem's complexity may be much enhanced if we

reflect on the effects produced by the set of contrasts that inform the poem. Let us consider

these interlocking contrasts in greater detail. An antithetic relationship between the

earthbound wanderer and the cloud to which he compares his motion poses the first

intimation of the opposition between the earthly and celestial.

The cloud establishes a reference to things of nebulous appearance, and hence a

classification that subsequently embraces the visual effects of the daffodils, specks of light

reflected by the lake, and the Milky Way. The strophe containing the reference to the Milky

Way poses a later addition to the poem's original three strophes. However, this addition

reinforces a contrast implicit in the poem as it originally stood, a contrast rooted in the

distinction between two modes of consciousness, that of the mind exposed to the intrusion

of sensations from the external world and that of the mind creating its own images in

dreams and dreamlike conditions. In other words, we are dealing here with modes of

interaction between the conscious and unconscious. The wanderer experiences two visions

of daffodils, those seen in a natural environment, and those perceived by his mind in

"pensive mood."

Only the daffodils independently created in the poet's mind should fully express "pure joy"

according to the logic of Pottle's arguments, as only they have undergone the full process of

ingestion effected by the simplifying and unifying power of the imagination. If this is not

the case, why should the speaker distinguish between the vision of daffodils perceived by

the inward eye and the daffodils which the speaker saw when out walking? A number of

Wordsworth's works contain lines implying that immediate visual perception entail a sense

of discomfort at a time before the mind is able to assimilate new sense impressions. Even in

"I wandered" Wordsworth's choice of words suggests that the speaker suffers the intrusion

of an invincible, albeit joyful, invasion appearing as a "host" in the (military) formation of

ten thousand. While an element of threat is at most implied in "I wandered lonely as a

cloud," the military connotation of "host" in biblical English is fully explicit in the opening

of another of Wordsworth's poems, "To the Clouds":

Army of Clouds! Ye winged Host in troops.

Frederick Pottle's discussion of "I wandered lonely as a cloud" reveals a high degree of

sensitivity to the implication of particular words found in the poem, notably "breeze,"

"dance" and "daffodil" with the latter‟s power of evoking the myth of Narcissus. It is in

some ways odd that Pottle makes no reference to the verb "wandered" despite its strategic

position in the first line of the poem. We noted earlier the near invisibility of verbs in

comparison to substantives. A linguist might explain this phenomenon as the result of the

verb's diffuse influence on the stream of discourse. Be that as it may, in the process of

considering the occurrence of "wandered" in the light of its position, meaning and structural

function, I now hope to complement and amplify Pottle's arguments and insights respecting

"I wandered lonely as a cloud." Taking a leaf from Dante's four-level approach to

interpreting a text and setting the word "wandered" at the centre of the four contextual

planes proposed above , let us consider the word at four levels of significance, namely:

First, what does "wandered" mean in the light of its immediately recognisable context?

Second, how does the word function as an element in the poem viewed as an aesthetic

construct?

Third, what is the word's significance as an index of Wordsworth's development both as

a private individual and a poet?

Fourth, how does the word relate to poetic tradition and the "allegorical" aspect of the

poem?

In the following four sections (1-4), these questions will be addressed in the order given

above.

1. Romantic poets occasionally chose the verb to wander in statements which made

disparaging reference to the works of their contemporaries, though they themselves

accorded the word high significance in their own works. In Don Juan there is a reference to

Juan as a youth who "wandered by glassy brooks, / Thinking unutterable things." These

words, found in the 19th stanza of the first Canto, are followed in the next stanza by a

reference to Wordsworth:

He, Juan (and not Wordsworth), so pursued

His self-communion with his own high soul.

I can imagine that Byron, when writing these lines, had "I wandered lonely as a cloud" in

mind, as they point to two essential aspects of "wandering" in that poem: namely physical

movement and the heightened state of consciousness that attends such movement. Some

proponents of literary theory see poetry as the product of a purely mental process, which

leads them to deny with the zeal of the ancient Gnostics any living and reciprocal ties

between poetry and physical, historical or biographical reality, but if we ignore or belittle

the physical nature of the motion referred to in the poem, we will make little sense of the

essential contrast that lies at the heart of the poem, namely that which emerges when we

compare the effects of physical perception with the power of the mind to produce its own

images autonomously.

For all his mockery of Wordsworth "wandering," Byron's use of the verb to wander betrays

his concern with the same fundamental relationship between the inner world of thought and

imagination and the outer world that intrudes into a traveller's consciousness through the

channel of sensory perception. As the poetry of both Byron and Wordsworth shows, the

experience of unexpected sights or other sensations could induce feelings of vulnerability,

which in turn prompted the quest for a countervailing influence, some process of the mind

capable of ingesting elements of extraneous origin. The experience of physical motion and

travel, as we know, will always tend to enhance a person's awareness of the exterior

environment. This normal enhancement was heightened further in the Romantic period. As

M. M. Bakhtin has pointed out, the poetry of Byron was subject to the process of

"novelisation." 3 The novel is that genre which in its nature thwarts any attempt to impose a

hierarchical structure upon it, even when influencing that most traditional of genres, poetry.

The typical proclivity of Wordsworth and Byron to grasp some apparently unimportant

object or incident and invest this with universal significance finds a precedent in Jean-

Jacques Rousseau‟s Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire and Laurence Sterne‟s A

Sentimental Journey, in both cases the author‟s final work. It would seem from this that we

are dealing here with a general literary rather than a purely poetical phenomenon in

Romantic verse and its immediate precursor, the literature of sensibility.

2. We may understand "wandering" in terms of structure and principles of organisation that

govern the development of the poem. Set at the beginning of the poem, the words "I

wandered" function as a leitmotif introducing both the poem's theme, i.e. subject matter, and

the "wandering" process that emerges from a study of the poem's aesthetic achievements as

revealed in its images in their immediate verbal environment. In the German poetry of the

same period this leitmotif is announced officially in the titles of celebrated poems. One of

these lends itself to comparison with "I wandered lonely as a cloud" with particular regard

to the implications of the initial position of words referring to "wandering": Wilhelm

Müller's poem "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" ("Wandering is the Miller‟s Joy") - a

poem that will be considered in due course. According to its immediately comprehensible

meaning, "Wandern" refers to the act of roaming in a rural setting, just as "wandered" does

3 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin Tx., 1981).

in Wordsworth's poem. However, from the first line on, it gains ever wider references and

associations with movements in objects and natural phenomena exemplified by the turning

of millstones and the flowing stream that causes their turning, with the final effect that

"wandering" emerges as the vital principle in all nature. This widening of associations is

reinforced by a repetition of "Wandern" (formally justified by the use of a refrain).

In "I wandered lonely as a cloud” the verb to wander also accumulates ever greater

meaning, but not as a result of any verbal repetition. Its widening of meaning is produced

by the poet's use of similes with all their effects and structural repercussions. In the first

simile (located in the words "as a cloud"), the speaker likens himself to a cloud, as he and

this object are both solitary and in motion. We may infer from this comparison that just as

the cloud is moved by a "breeze," some correspondent breeze impels the speaker's

wandering. This breeze then assumes the aspect of a universal dynamic principle of the

mind and poetic imagination. Hence the parallel between the daffodils "fluttering in the

breeze" and the daffodils created in the poet's heart, which "dances with the daffodils."

The second simile in the poem compares the appearance of the daffodils encountered by the

speaker to the stars of the Milky Way. How - in view of the fact that the stanza containing

this simile was added to the original poem of three stanzas - can this poem pose an integral

element of the entire poem? The objection I anticipate is surmountable if the simile can be

shown to enhance and develop motifs and characteristics of the poem in its original form.

The reference to the Milky Way adds strength to the motif established by words evoking the

image of something nebulous: (cf. "cloud," "host" and dancing "waves"). The reference to

the stars of night points to a duality, already implicit in the original poem, that inheres in the

contrast of daylight vision and the images produced by the mind at times of repose. Though

the speaker does not sleep when experiencing the vision of daffodils that flash before his

inner mind, his state of consciousness resembles that of the dreamer. The motif of the

"night-wanderer" can be found in both English and German poetic traditions. We recall the

words of Puck in A Midsummer-Night's Dream. "I am that merry wanderer of the night."

Let us now return to Frederick Pottle's assertion that "I wandered lonely" is "a very simple

poem." It may appear to be very simple. The similes it contains apparently conform to the

typical use of language in non-literary usage, yet, at a deeper level they imply contrasts and

antitheses rooted in the unconscious and the imagination. Similarly, the reference to "a

poet" in the third strophe might be taken as a commonly encountered expression like, "If

only an artist could paint this landscape." At a deeper level, however, it points to

Wordsworth's fundamental concern with the operation and nature of the poet's imagination.

3. From the following lines in The Borderers (1795) it is apparent that the associations of

the verb to wander were not always positive and evocative of joy:

No prayers, no tears, but hear my doom in silence

I will go forth a wanderer on the earth,

A shadowy thing, and as I wander on

No human ear shall ever hear my voice

As contradictory as the verb's associations with death and joy in the exercise of the

imagination may seem, its range of significance embraces these antipodes in the works of

William Shakespeare and those of other authors for reasons discussed earlier in reflections

based on the common etymology of the verbs to wander and wandern. In Wordsworth's

case the positive or negative valorisation of the verb to wander corresponds to the general

state of mind in which he found himself at different stages of his life and artistic

development.

At the time of his writing The Borderers, he was still experiencing a dark night of the soul

precipitated by his disillusionment with the course of the French Revolution. At that time he

was subject to the influence of Friederich Schiller's Die Räuber ("The Bandits"), a drama

that portrays a world torn apart by the titanic fury of those exercising the wrong kind of

freedom. The play reflects the spirit of Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress"), through

which both Goethe and Schiller passed in the early phase of literary development. In

Goethe's highly influential novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers ("The Sorrows of Young

Werther") Werther's reference to himself as a "Wanderer" ominously points forward to his

social isolation and ultimate death.

"I wandered lonely as a cloud" marks the apogee of Wordsworth's poetic achievement. At

the time of its composition Wordsworth had overcome the weaknesses of his early works

and the lugubrious mentality that they evince. In the same period we find no anticipation of

the diminution in poetic powers and final atrophy of the imagination that later overcame

Wordsworth. "I wandered lonely as a cloud" marks the attainment of a balance and

harmony of mind wrested from the tension between daytime awareness and the influences

of subconscious proclivities. The attainment of this harmony involves the ingestion of

images originating in the involuntary reception of what is perceived by the senses. The

equilibrium we perceive in poem was preceded by - perhaps predicated on - a period when

Wordsworth became familiar with contemporary German literature and philosophy as this

was mediated to him by T. S. Coleridge. According to Jonathan Wordsworth, the poet was

deeply impressed by a translation of Goethe's poetic dialogue entitled "Der Wanderer,"

which he read no later than 1798 4. Professor L. A. Willoughby notes in his article "The

Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry" that "Der Wandrer" (1771-1772),

though posing one of Goethe's earliest treatments of the "Wanderer" image, attests to his

ability to objectify the image without suppressing every trace of his individual personality.5

4. It has been noted earlier in this discussion that Frederick Pottle contrasts the elegiac

undertones of Herrick's description of daffodils with the triumphant and joyful emotions

evoked by Wordsworth's description of these flowers. Daffodils recall a tradition that

includes the story of Narcissus in Greek mythology. We have also seen that Housman

intertwines the Greek classical myth with Christian folklore in his image of the daffodil that

dies on Easter Day (in common usage daffodils are called "Osterglocken" ("Easter Bells")

in countries where German is spoken). I will argue in this section that the very use of the

verb to wander likewise implies and reflects a confluence of biblical and classical

traditions. I also hope to establish that the word is coloured - to use a term that is much

favoured by the Russian Formalist linguist and critic J. Tynjanov 6 - by a contemporary

influence stemming from Goethe and a diachronically mediated influence stemming from

Milton, that poet who consciously merged classical and biblical or Hebraic elements in his

epic poetry. A close analysis of certain passages in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained

shows that the verb to wander is contextually associated to both the classical motif of the

"wandering" Muse and to the biblical motif of the wanderings of Israel described in the

book of Exodus and the cognate period of Christ's wandering in the Judean wilderness,

events commemorated by the festivals of Passover and Lent. This nexus of associations is

4 Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, (New York and Evanston, 1969). 5 L. A. Willoughby, "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry,"Etudes

Germaniques, 1951, 3, Autumn 1951.

6 Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse," translated into English by M. E.

Suino, Readings in Russian Poetics, ed. Ladislav Matejka & Krystina Pomorska, (Ann

Arbor, 1978). .

implicit in the opening lines of Paradise Lost, in which the collocation of the words "Muse"

and "Horeb" (Sinai) knit together references to the Muse, the Holy Spirit and the immediate

sequel of the flight of the Israelites from Egypt (commemorated by the Jewish Festival of

Pentecost).7 In Paradise Regained Milton mirrors the traditional view, upheld by Dante and

inscribed in the Church calendar at Lent, that the wanderings of Israel allegorically

represent the earthly life and ministry of Christ,8 the forty days of temptation recalling the

forty years of Israel's wandering in the wilderness of Sinai. In keeping with this tradition the

title of Housman's "The Lent Lily” conflates the associated symbolism of Lent, Easter and

daffodils). Alluding to a passage in Paradise Regained, Keats taps the same traditional

sources when uniting the theme of vernal renewal and that of a pilgrimage leading through a

wilderness:

And now at once, adventuresome, I send

My herald thought into a wilderness -

There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress

My uncertain path with glee.

Endymion 1, 58-61.

Here is an echo of Milton's line "And Eden raised m the wilderness" in Paradise Regained

1,7. The association of vernal renewal and pilgrimage occurs a little later in Endymion in an

allusion to the evocation of spring in "The Prologue" of The Canterbury Tales.

We now consider a further instance of Milton's influence on a work by a Romantic poet,

and one that is directly relevant to a discussion of "I wandered lonely as a cloud." Again we

consider a poetic evocation of spring combined with an allusion to the story of the flight of

7 The Festival of Weeks (Hebr.: Shavuot) or Pentecost marks the end of the counting of

omer (cuttings of harvest crops in the spring harvest), and became linked by tradition with

the Giving of the Law at Mount Sinai. Philo of Alexandria closely associated this event

with a manifestation of divine inspiration symbolised by the finger of fire that inscribed the

tablets of the Law. The Christian sequel to Pentecost reflects the Christian belief that the

Holy Spirit supersedes the literal stipulations of the Law. 8 Both in Il Convivio (The Banquet) and the Letter to Can Grande della Scala, Dante

referred to the "allegorical" level of the story of the biblical exodus at which Dante

discerned a prophecy concerning Christ's life and work of redemption.

the Israelites from Egypt. The opening lines of the first book of Wordsworth's The Prelude

refer to a flight from "a house of bondage" and a "wandering cloud" that should guide the

poet on his future journey. Here we discover obvious allusions to the flight from Egypt in

the Bible and the pillar of cloud guiding the Israelites by day.

To understand the deep significance of "the gentle breeze," at the beginning of The Prelude

we should consider these words in the light of Milton's dedication to the Holy Muse that

inspired Moses at Mount Horeb (we note the intertwining of both biblical and classical

strands) at an analogous position in Paradise Lost. The verbal triad that consists of

"breeze," "wandering" and "cloud" finds a parallel in the words "wandered," "breeze" and

"cloud" in "I wandered lonely as a cloud." We often note in criticism that verbal patterns

recur and suggest underlying modes of thought influenced by the operations of the

unconscious. Here we may recall that Wordsworth composed "I wandered lonely as a

cloud" during a period of active preparation for The Prelude of 1805. While The Prelude

contains a specific reference to passages in Milton's works, "I wandered lonely as a cloud"

contains no literary allusions at all. Here, the very order of words in the poem implies

antitheses that accord with a mythical-religious frame of comprehension. To make this

assumption is to be no bolder that Frederick Pottle when he discusses the myth of Narcissus

in connection with Wordsworth's description of daffodils in "I wandered lonely as a cloud."

Indeed, in their profound implications “the daffodil” in Housman's "Lent Lily" and the

daffodil in folklore share an affinity with the implications of to wander in poetic tradition,

for the flower and the verb pose the meeting-point of classical and Biblical traditions. The

event which prompted the writing of "I wandered lonely as a cloud" occurred on the eve of

Good Friday (Good Friday fell on 16th April, 1802), yet a further reason to suppose that the

sight of daffodils described in the poem was bound up with the thought of Easter in

Wordsworth's mind.

If we were to follow Housman's lead and place an ostensibly religious construction on the

daffodils in "I wandered lonely," I think we should emphasise their triumphant, perhaps

"Pentecostal," aspect in view of the all-pervasive influence of the breeze and the almost

flame-like appearance of the flowers. This is not to say that we should place the poem in the

tradition of religious mystical poetry, for, as this discussion of "wandering" has indicated,

words mark an intersection of traditional and contemporary influences. In the case of "I

wandered lonely as a cloud" the traditional influence is predominantly Miltonic, the

contemporary, Goethean. Subject to this dual influence Wordsworth combined traditional

religious insight with the then modern insights of psychological and aesthetic philosophy.

The recall of a pilgrimage is explicit in The Prelude and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, while

it is but suggested by the ordering of simple sounding words in "I wandered lonely as a

cloud.."

The poem might also be understood as a quest to overcome the rift between the worlds of

inner and outward reality announced in the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, and its traumatic

after-effect so palpably reflected in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It is noteworthy that

the word "breeze" signifies the vital powers of the imagination in both "I wandered lonely"

and Coleridge‟s ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, however different these poems are

in theme. In Coleridge's narrative a "breeze" fills the sails of the mariner's doomed ship only

when he perceives sea serpents moving by the light of the moon. Like Wordsworth's

dancing daffodils the serpents combine beauty and motion, both of which attributes were

seen as virtuous in their own right by the poets of the age. In fact, these virtues exercise a

mutual benefit. Beauty alone might, as the legend of Narcissus suggests, bring entrapment

and a deathlike stasis. Motion without some corrective might lead to frenzy and self-

dissipation. It is "the breeze" which makes the daffodils in Wordsworth's celebrated poem

"dance." In poetic tradition "dancing" is not always positive in connotation. We need only

think of the Dance of Death. However, in Wordsworth‟s poem "dancing” motion

counteracts the stasis implied by the daffodil's mythical import. This image implies

therefore a balance of beauty and motion. While it is evident that Romantic poems lie

outside the category of formal religious poetry, I find no reason to accept view that they

possess no religious message, as Hartman and others argue. Here it is relevant to consider

the basic implication of poetic "wandering” as a quest to reconcile apparently irreconcilable

opposites and antitheses, a quest based on the assumption that at a higher level than that at

which such opposites appear irreconcilable, harmony and reconciliation can be achieved.

"Wandering" defies the strict separation of internal truth and external reality. "The way"

described in poems about wandering, is part of the life of individual experience. How one

can come to any different conclusion when consider "wandering" in works of Milton,

Goethe and Wordsworth - and for Keats, "truth" and "life" are indivisible in "beauty."

The Miltonic Background of Don Juan by Lord Byron

I: The Worst of Sinning

All eminence, and distinction, lies out of the beaten road; excursion, and

deviation, are necessary to find it, and the more remote your path from the

highway, the more reputable; if, like poor Gulliver (of whom anon) you fall

into a ditch, on your way to glory.

Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition

My way is to begin with the beginning;

The regularity of my design

Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning.

Lord Byron, Don Juan

A Contrast of a Structural and Narrative Implication of the Same Word

"Ironic, of course," remarks Frank D. Connell, the Editor of a critical selection of Byron's

poetry, 9 with reference to the lines in Don Juan cited above. But "ironic" in what sense? If

irony consists in saying one thing and meaning another, we might understand the lines to

imply that "wandering" and "the beginning" are closely linked in the author's mind.

Possibly, but why is the statement so obviously ironic? No definition of "wandering"

according to a dictionary points unequivocally to a connection between "wandering" and

references to origins. Let us consider which of the usual meanings of "wandering" "fits the

context" of the lines from Don Juan cited above."Wandering" here is not to be understood

in the sense of physical motion. In terms of the word's immediate contextual setting it refers

to what the speaker ostensibly intends to avoid, a failure to present certain items of subject

matter in an orderly and strictly chronological manner.

The speaker announces his intention of beginning his account of Juan's life by informing his

readers about Juan's parentage in a manner consistent with "the regularity of his design."

Even so, it is remarkable that he disparages "wandering" as "the worst of sinning." As

9 Byron's Poetry, A Norton Critical Edition (New York, 1978).

though even the most censorious of preceptors would go so far as to discern in some badly

organised term paper evidence of gross moral turpitude! It is not out of the ordinary for a

person to use "wandering" as a synonym for immoral behaviour or, in a different context, as

a reference to incoherent or illogical self-expression. Byron, however, contrasts both these

meanings of "wandering" within the space of the three lines of verse cited above. In so

doing he displays the poet's proclivity to play with words. Is this merely indulging in a

triviality? Let us consider the word "wandering" within the context of Don Juan. Are there

other passages in this work in which "wandering" is associated with "sinning" or

"beginning"?

A reference to "sinning" suggests some item of epic content. Sinning implies the existence

of sinners and sinners form the basis of a story. There in are hints pointing to the nature of

the story in question. The connection of beginning with parentage could pose an allusion to

mankind's first parents, and there is a notable passage in Don Juan which includes several

occurrences of the verb to wander and explicit allusions to Milton's version of the story of

Adam and Eve. The verb to wander (in declined form) occurs three times in the passage

describing the shore-side walk taken by Juan and Haidée, the prelude of their sexual and a

spiritual union ("Canto the Second" The first line of stanza CLXXXII).

The words "And forth they wandered, her sire being gone" imply that the young couple

took advantage of the temporary absence of paternal surveillance. The lovers' walk with its

sequel recalls Milton's version of the events that led to Adam and Eve falling from grace, a

connection that becomes explicit from what we read at the end of the eighty-ninth stanza,

for here it is asserted that first love is "that All / Which Eve has left her daughters since the

Fall." In the ninety-third stanza we find reference to "our first parents." Like them Juan and

Haidée ran the risk of "being damned for ever." Consciously or unconsciously (in my view

probably the former), Byron was influenced by Milton's use of to wander in a passage in

Paradise Lost in which there is an altercation between Adam and Eve about Eve's yielding

to what Adam terms her "desire of wandering." Eve reminds Adam of this choice of words

referring to her "will / Of wandering, as thou call'st it" (IX. 1145,1146). Shortly we shall

consider another passage revealing Milton's particular interest in the word to wander.

Byron not only betrays interest in that aspect of Milton's description of Eve's walk though

Paradise that concerns "sinning," which for Byron inevitably had a strong sexual

connotation. Byron's reference to "sinning" is at one level little more than a puerile jibe at

certain attitudes towards sexual mores. Byron's description of Haidée and Juan walking

along the shore also captures that sensuous and even voluptuous element in the Miltonic

description of a walk that culminated in Eve's emotional a seduction by the serpent (who

approaches his quarry with a mariner's skill). Both Milton's description of Eve's walk and

Byron's treatment of the scene culminating in the lovers' union of Haidée and Juan inculcate

a sense of unity expressing a sublimated form of sexual or libidinal energy, perhaps of a

kind that psychologists of the Freudian or Jungian schools believe to be the mainspring of

all human creativity. Miltonic influence in the respect just indicated also leaves a trace in

the final passage in Shelley's Epipsychidion describing a walk that leads to a lovers' union.

Significantly, this passage is introduced by the verb to wander.

Let us consider another way in which "wandering" and "beginning" are related to each other

in Don Juan, and indeed in Byron's other long poem incorporating his travels. An

occurrence of the verb to wander is juxtaposed to a reference to the Muse in the Dedication

to Don Juan and again in the first strophe of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. In the eighth

stanza of the Dedication, the speaker refers to himself as one "wandering with pedestrian

Muse" in contrast to Southey depicted as one seated on a winged steed. In the tenth stanza

the evocation of Milton is not merely hinted at, for the speaker alludes to a passage in

Paradise Lost in which there is a clear reference to Pegasus and "wandering" conflating the

word's associations with poetic inspiration and disorientation.

Up led by thee

Into the Heav'n of Heav'ns I have presumed,

An Earthly Guest, and drawn Empyreal Air,

Thy temp'ring, with like safety guided down

Return me to my Native Element

Lest from this flying steed unrein'd, (as once

Bellephoron, though from a lower Clime)

Dismounted, on th'Aleian Field I fall

Erroneous, there to wander and forlorn (VII.12-20)

Again, as in the dispute between Eve and Adam, the word "wander" is foregrounded, here

in a brief exercise in comparative philology. Milton recalls the original meaning of

"erroneous" in the light of its derivation from errare in Latin (to stray, to wander).

Similarly, Aleian means "land of wandering" in Greek. In this passage Milton seems to

anticipate the crisis in modern poetry centring on the nature of poetic inspiration and the

identity of the poet.

From a Puritan's point of view it was perhaps somewhat risqué of Milton to have identified

the Holy Spirit as the Heav'nly Muse in the opening lines of Paradise Lost. In that context

Milton could hardly dwell on the feminine qualities of the Muse, and only hints at this in his

reference to the Spirit brooding "dove-like" over the "vast Abyss" from which Creation

came into being. The dove is of course an established symbol for the Holy Spirit. Milton

was not in any case strictly orthodox on the question of the Trinity and the personal or non-

personal nature of the Holy Spirit.10

The conflation of the biblical Holy Spirit and the

classical Muse springs from Milton' overall strategy of merging Hebrew and classical

traditions, and the mental orientations they typify, when creating Paradise Lost.

Contexts in Poems that Belong to a Cycle: "London" by William

Blake and "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" by Wilhelm

Müller

In English and German both to wander and wandern refer to physical motions that typically

reflect the wanderer's state of mind. "I wandered lonely as a cloud", among the most

celebrated poems about "wandering", refers to a specific physical excursion. Where this is

not the case in other poems concerned with the same theme, they at least reveal some aspect

of a wanderer's mentality. In examining two poems under discussion we shall consider how

William Blake's imagination captures moments of vision and the emotions they arouse.

These tell us little about a journey as such, an itinerary or a destination, but they imply some

encounter between an observer and an object or scene that strikes that observer as

wonderful or novel. I recall the etymological affinity of to wander and wandern with verbs

10 William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex, Cambridge (Mass. and London, 1983), 150,

151.

meaning to turn (wenden, to wend). The poem captures in words a psychological turning

point involving not only enhanced awareness of external objects but also of a universal

principle, perhaps an aspect of a higher self" While the process of wandering entails

exposure to intense images and visual impressions in the first case we shall study, Wilhelm

Müller's "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" is infused by the musicality of rhythmic

repetition and dynamic development. Significantly, it contains no reference to the lyrical

"I". Wandering - or the effect produced by the verbs "to wander" and "wandern" - integrates

the imagistic or musical principles that certain critics would understand as the essential non-

verbal aspects of poetry, compared to which the reference of words to matters in the world

of external reality are of little account.

Comparing "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and "London", one becomes aware that the

verbs to wander and wandern imply not only certain reciprocal relationships but also the

very principle of reciprocity itself. We differentiate here between two kinds of vision, one

engendered by physical perception, the other by the inner vision of the mind detached from

physical sensation. William Blake distinguished between "cold earth wanderers" and "the

mental traveller" in recognition of the duality that underlies poetry and poetic "wandering".

Both physical travel and dreaming provide the optimal conditions for memorable and

intense visions and images, but poets, whether they adopt the stance of a "cold earth

wanderer", like Wordsworth, or of a "mental traveller", like Blake, are neither travelling or

dreaming in the strict sense of these terms when they create poetry. Though the cold earth

wanderer and mental traveller differ in their approach to the same reality, they share a goal

in illuminating the relationship between the inner mind and external realities. Both the cold

earth wanderer and mental traveller differ from the systematic and abstract thinker in that

the former reveal the view point of an individual in specific situations as though exposed to

the uncertainly of moment-to-moment experience - hence the sense of novelty, and

expectation inculcated by poetic renditions a wanderer's experience.

In the eighteenth century, poets became more self-conscious about themselves and their art;

and one result of this new consciousness was a close association of the poetic imagination

with what Goethe, and later the German Romantic school, called the "Wanderer". By the

same token, these poets drew a close parallel between the poetic work and a journey or

pilgrimage. The text is not about a journey. It is a journey. With the loss of assurance in the

inspiration bestowed by the Muse, the poets became increasing aware of the pitfalls that

awaited poets on their "uncertain journey" (as Keats put it in Endymion) through the

medium of language. The identification of "text" and ajourney to an appointed goal at least

held a promise that the unity of the text would contain all the stresses and aberrations

associated with the process of verbal articulation.Blake's "London" and Wilhelm Müller's

"Das Wandern ist des Müller's Lust"

If one undertakes to compare a poem written by an English Romantic and one by a German

counterpart, it will be by no means immediately apparent why the resultant choice should

fall on Blake's "London" and "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust"? `Is this choice not a

rather haphazard one in view of fact that the poems are completely different in tone and

content? Blake's poem presents London in a very somber light as the scene of human

degradation while Wilhelm Müller's is a vigorous, almost jaunty, song praising the joys of

roving in an idyllic rural setting. Despite these differences, let us explore areas of common

ground such as they are and evaluate their significance. First both poems enjoy great

popularity and fame. However lugubrious in tone, "London" belongs to the most well

known. II would even venture to assert that with "Jerusalem" and "Tiger" it belongs to

Blake's top three. There can be no doubt that "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" is not

only the most well known of Wilhelm Müller's poems. It is one of the most celebrated

poems in Germany thanks to Schubert's musical setting of the poem as Lied. Second, both

are a part of a cycle of poems or songs. In Blake's case the poem is included in Songs of

Innocence and Experience and in Müller's, in Die Schöne Müllerin. The inclusion of any

poem in a greater work throws open an interesting question, especially if one insists that a

poem is a unique object subject to its own internal structural logic and consistency. We will

note that poems considered in the light of their participation to a greater whole, reveal facets

that are often overlooked when the poem is viewed in isolation. This is particularly true of

"Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" as the mill described in the poem will prove to be at the

scene of the main character's death, itself the result of an unhappy love relationship..

Germany, of course, is renowned for its Wanderlieder.. The word "Wanderer" appears in

the titles of celebrated poems by Goethe, who started the trend of giving the word an

unprecedented eminence, and by German Romantic poets such as Hölderlin and

Eichendorff.. The reasons for this phenomenon are too complex to be properly discussed

here. Suffice it to say that the word, though previously charged with religious and mystical

significances, became the accepted term addressing the modern self-conscious and

consequently anguished poet, whose very raison d'être seemed to be in question in the new

secular age.

It might seem to some that the word served merely as a convenient label by which to

identify the typical posture and partial self-dramatization of poets at the historical juncture

we are considering, but such a glib assumption is challengeable, as the words wander and

wandern, like all words in fact (as many linguists would concur), are not fixed lexical terms

but integral parts of the works to which they belong, sharing their singularity. The very

affinities shared by Goethe and the German Romantics gave rise to differentiations of

attitude and even to acrimonious contentions.

The English Romantic poets were also subject to Goethe's influence, particularly Coleridge

and Wordsworth but less obviously so than in the case of their German counterparts,

though two very well-known poems in English do include the verb to wander in their first

line, namely "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and "London". The words "I wandered" and "I

wander" set the tone for the poems that follow. In the English tradition words derived from

to wander have had a strong profile even from Anglo-Saxon times. The Bard, whom Goethe

called "the greatest wanderer of all" gave prominence to the word in A Midsummer Night's

Dream for Puck announces "I am that merry wanderer of the night". A Midsummer Night's

Dream, Act II, Sc. 1 Milton resoundingly concludes Paradise Lost with a reference,

charged with biblical and theological implications, to the "wandering steps and slow" of

Adam and Eve when entering the domain of experience and history. Shakespeare and

Milton reflected on the nature of wander as a word of philological interest, as shown by the

lines: 'T may be, again to make me wander thither. /'Wander', a word for shadows like

myself The Passionate Pilgrim XIV In Paradise Lost Eve reminds Adam of his use of the

word "wandering" by referring to her "will / Of wandering, as thou call'st it" (IX. 1145,1146

Yet as with the German poets of their age, the English Romantics were imbued, indeed

plagued, by the same sense of isolation and alienation as that which afflicted young Goethe

and the German Romantics. Indeed. Geoffrey Hartmann applies to the Romantic poets the

designation of "the Wanderer" or " the Wandering Jew "in his essay entitrled "Romanticism

and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness"11

11

'In: Romanticism and Consciousness Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New

York, 1970)..

"London" - (Printed Version, 1794)

I wander thro‟ each charter‟d street,

Near where the charter‟d Thames does flow

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man.

In every Infants cry of fear.

In every voice, in every ban.

The mind-forg‟d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackning Church appalls.

And the hapless Soldiers sign

Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro‟ midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse

Blasts the new born Infants tear

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

The journeys and excursions described in William Blake's poetry are (or seem to be) of a

quite different order from those encountered in Wordsworth's poetry. Blake's poetry does

not depict natural scenes in the familiar or realistic mode. Blake's eye perceived what the

poet understood as the spiritual realities that underlie the world of common experience.

Following precedents set by Dante and Milton, his long poems express the author's concern

for the spiritual progress of mankind from its myth-shrouded beginnings to the ultimate

advent of the New Jerusalem.

William Blake and Goethe, however much they differed in many obvious respects, shared

the belief that, in its ultimate manifestation, mankind's "wandering" journey through history

and experience meant progress in the act of striving to unite polarities and contrasts. Like

Goethe, Blake conceived of inferior kinds of wandering manifested by those who only

represent a partial aspect of wandering in its most comprehensive and inclusive sense.

In "The Mental Traveller" there is a reference to "cold earth wanderers," whom the speaker

disparagingly contrasts with "the mental traveller" as one who is free to move through time

and space without encumbrances, even in reverse sequence. This reference seems to

constitute an allusion to the depictions of travel and movement found in "The Lyrical

Ballads" by Wordsworth and Coleridge.

However, is the cleft between Blake's depictions of a traveller's experience and those of the

Lakers' so fundamental as it might first appear? Or did both Blake and Wordsworth seek to

illuminate the same fundamental relationship, though their approaches to it were from quite

opposite directions, revealing the difference of stance between poets who represent

travelling realistically and those who choose to represent "dreamlike journeys"? In both

kinds of journey, the realistic and more obviously symbolic or mythical modes of

representation merge, making an absolute division between them appear questionable.

As "wandering" was for Goethe and the Romantics a synonym for poetry and the poetical

imagination, we will be in a stronger position to assess similarities and differences between

Blake and Wordsworth as poets if we compare two celebrated poems introduced by a

declined form of the verb "to wander."

Blake's visions do not reveal any escapist refusal to confront the realities of the world, but

rather manifest an acute awareness of social and political conditions. To make a

comparison, Dante's The Divine Comedy is as much concerned with his contemporary

society as it is with realities beyond temporal reality.

"London" belongs to Songs of Experience, and within a yet broader context, to The Songs

of Innocence and Experience. A comparison between the draft version of 1792 12

and the

12 Working Draft of “London“ (ca. 1792): underlined words are delete, replacing words are

in Italics. The wording of the draft is as follows:

"I Wander thro each dirty street / Near where the dirty Thames does flow/ And see in every

face I meet / Marks of weakness marks of woe END OF STROPHE In every cry of every

man/ In every voice of every child every infants cry of fear/ In every voice in every ban/

The german mind forgd links I hear manacles I hear END OF STROPHE

printed version of 1794 reveals significant alterations giving pointers to the poem's deep

levels of significance.

In the printed version "chartered street" and "chartered Thames" replaced "dirty street" and

"dirty Thames." Perhaps the motive of pollution that runs through the poem did not need

any reinforcement by the Repetition of "dirty." The choice of "chartered" for the printed

version reflects a fundamental shift in attitude towards the nature of freedom. Before the

Romantic period freedom was understood as a system of privileges graciously bestowed on

subjects by a monarch or member of the nobility. The formulation "German forged" in the

draft version poses an unfriendly allusion to George III and the Hanoverian dynasty. The

substitution of "see" by "mark" in the printed version, effects what J. Tynjanov referred to

as "lexical coloration." The reader becomes conscious of the potential universal implication

of the word "mark" over and above its specific meaning in any particular context. The word

"wintry," substituted by "midnight" in the printed version intimates the negative aspects of

wandering with sin and disorientation. The reference to winter gives occasion for a

consideration of the "mythical" or season-oriented aspects of "wandering," winter being a

universal symbol of death and frozen mental conditions. Reasons for considering wandering

within a mythical and seasonal frame pose the subject matter of discussion in a following

section of this study.

While "I wandered" in Wordsworth's poem is set in the past tense, implying a division

between past and present, London begins with the verb set in the present tense. This implies

that the poem concerns timeless realities unbounded by references to any particular

incident.

Blake's "London," far from expressing the feelings of elevation and joy that characterise "I

Wandered lonely as a cloud," presents a dismal picture of London as a symbol of fallen

But most How the chimney sweepers cry / Blackens oer the churches Every blackening

church appalls / And the hapless soldiers sigh / Runs in blood down palace walls. END OF

STROPHE But most the midnight harlots curse/ From every dismal street I hear/ Weaves

around the marriage hearse / And blasts the new born infants tear. END OF STROPHE

AND THEN RECASTING OF FINAL LINES: But most from every thro wintry streets I

hear / How the midnight harlots curse/ And blasts the new born infants tear NEW LINE

And hangs smites the marriage hearse NL But most the shreaks of youth I hear NL But most

thro midnigh."

humanity. The poem reveals the most negative sense of "to wander," that namely that

associated with the Fall and its consequence, for it focuses attention on Man's almost total

loss of moral freedom and on acts of violence typified by the murder committed by Cain.

Particular irony attaches to the fact that the "free" city of London that had enjoyed the

privileges and "liberties" vested in its charter should symbolise such mental and spiritual

bondage.

As a born Londoner, Blake had every opportunity of roaming through the streets of London,

yet it is doubtful that he should ever have experienced an occasion when every face he saw

betrayed "marks of woe." The concept of universality, here the universal condition of fallen

Man, informs the poet's vision. It is not here a question of the speaker inferring a general

truth from the appearance of particulars but of a general truth, or what is perceived as such,

revealing itself in a highly select aggregation of appropriate images.

Images indicating pollution are strikingly frequent, particularly in the working draft of the

poem in which "dirty" held the place of "chartered." An association of physical pollution, in

the form of soot and the shedding of blood, with moral corruption in high places, in

"church" and "palace," is effected by the imagery of the third stanza. The choice of the word

"blights" in the fourth strophe reinforces the poem's theme of pollution with the implication

that venereal diseases wreak vengeance on the respectable who indulge in what they

outwardly condemn. The threefold repetition of "mark(s)" in the first strophe (in the draft

"And see" stands in the place of "And mark." in the printed version) is not only consistent

with the combined motifs of pollution and lost freedom but also introduces a biblical note

into the poem through the word's evocation of the mark of Cain in Genesis and the mark of

the Beast in the Book of Revelation. The vision of the poem then comprehends the history

of mankind from its origins until the end of its unregenerate condition in the last days. Cain

was not an eternal nomad but the founder of city civilisation according to the Bible. The

appearance of the youthful harlot in the final strophe implies that London and the Babylon

of the Apocalypse are one.

Is the vision informing the poem then one of unmitigated despair offering no glimpse of

Babylon's divine counterpart, Jerusalem? To wander bears, even in this poem, implications

which are not entirely negative. The speaker is a witness. He refers to himself only when

stating "I see," "I mark," "I hear" and "I meet." He perceives people but does not interact

with them. The identity of the speaker is inferable only from the manner and scope of his

perception, which is searching penetrating and ubiquitous. The Wanderer might be

described as a kind of divinely appointed secret agent like Bandelaire's flaneur. The words

"I mark" may be taken to mean "I record" as well as "I notice": The mystic eye scans

London and witnesses its iniquities. The poem contains hints that judgement will be visited

on London not as a result of a purely external event but of what is already stirring in

London itself. The speaker hears or sees representatives of professions which do society's

dirty work in various ways, whether chimney sweeping, soldiery or prostitution. Though the

point is not so clearly made as in Auguries of Innocence, the victims of oppression will

prove the instruments of their oppressors' undoing. The chimney-sweeper's cry reproaches

the Church for its blindness to social injustice, the hapless soldier's sigh threatens violence

to the Palace where war plans are forged. The poem's reference to "the youthful harlot's

curse" alludes to the often involuntary inveigling of young girls into prostitution, an

institution which Blake believed was the inevitable consequence of marriages enforced by

law.

"London" belongs to a cycle of poems, and in so doing cannot be treated as a totally

enclosed or self-sufficient work. It allows itself to be elucidated through comparisons with

other poems, in the first place those sharing the general title Songs of Innocence and

Experience. From this basis we can proceed relatively smoothly to considering the yet

wider circle that encompasses Blake's works in general. The procedure of progressively

widening the contextual vista centred in a specific poem or poetic passage will be applied

several times in the course of subsequent discussions, a procedure which accords with

linguistic theories that assert that "the word" marks the intersection at which different levels

of this word's significance meet and interact. While no discovery of external facts about the

author and his or her times can objectively add to, or detract from, the text, it may alter our

perception of what is in the text, often by corroborating what a reader intuits when reading

it. I have suggested in the case of "London" that the poet's vision offers an element of hope.

If we consider the poem in the context of the collection of poems to which it belongs -The

Songs of Innocence and Experience - we may infer that it does not reveal Blake's all

embracing conception of London but only a conception of its most negative aspects. A

different picture of London is shown by "Holy Thursday," a poem telling of almsgiving to

the poor children of London. Innocence and experience are two contraries, which in Blake's

view together form the prerequisite for moral progress. We may see the work in a wider

context still, namely as an anticipation of Blake's future works including Milton and

Jerusalem. In these the association of words or symbols signalled by the words "harlot,"

"Babylon" and forms of the word to wander become explicit, while in "London" they are

but barely inferable.

.& and thou 0 Virgin Babylon, Mother of Whoredoms, Shalt bring Jerusalem in thine arms

in the night watches; and No longer burning her a wandering Harlot in the streets Shalt give

her into the arms of God your Lord & Husband.

Milton Plate 3320-23

Conclusions and Perpsectives

For those who are fixated by the expection that words in poetry are restricted by definitions

in a dictionary the present discussion must seem confusing and contradictary. How can the

same word introduce a poem expressing the joy of one suddenly overcome by a heightened

vision of daffodils and another poem conveying a profound sense of the depravity of the

human condition? How again can the same word indicate an awareness of the associative

power of Goethe's Wanderer with its enunciation of a new phase of poetry and yet recall its

import in Paradise Lost. This a mere blanket term could never achieve. The problem

dissolves once we regard words in poetry as the meeting point of the two axes of language,

the synchronic or comtemporary axis and diachronic or historic axis. The apparent

diffusiveness of the word wander qualities it as a preferred word in the lexis of poets. Such

words as screwdriver or gantry with their narrow reference to certain objects, necessary as

they are to a technician, have yet to make inroads into the area of poetic diction.

"Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" by Wilhelm Müller

Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust,

Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust, das Wandern.

Das muß ein schlechter Müller sein,

dem niemals fiel das Wandern ein,

das Wandern.

Vom Wasser habens wir's gelernt, vom Wasser.

Das hat nicht Rast bei Tag und Nacht,

ist stets auf Wanderschaft bedacht,

das Wandern.

Da sehn wir auch den Rädern ab, den Rädern:

Die gar nicht gerne stille stehn,

die sich mein Tag nicht müde sehn, die Räder.

Die Steine selbst, so schwer sie sind,

die Steine.

Sie tanzen mit den muntern Reihen,

und wollen gerne schneller sein,

die Steine.

O Wandern, Wandern, meine Lust,

o Wandern!

Herr Meister und Frau Meisterin,

Laßt mich in Frieden weiter ziehn,

und wandern.

To wander is the miller's joy, to wander. „Twere a bad miller indeed who never spared a

thought for wandering. Water taught us how to wander, water, which knows no rest by day

or night but has a mind ever set on wandering. We catch it from the mill wheels, too, the

mill wheels, which cannot bear to be at rest but never tire throughout my day. Even the

millstones, heavy as they are, dance a sprightly roundelay, and want to turn yet faster.

Wandering, wandering, is my joy. Master and Dame, let me continue on my way in peace,

and wander.

."Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust," like "I wandered as lonely as a cloud" apparently

suffers from the great popularity it enjoys in as far as its 'simplicity' discourages critics from

being willing to discover a deep level of significance. Perhaps it is only if we look at the

poem within the context set by the Die Schöne Müllerin, the cyle of songs within which it is

set, that is more profound strains will be heard, To consider a poem in the light of the cycle

of poems to which it belongs may sometimes give one cause to deepen one's sense of the

poem's seriousness when popular interpretations suggest otherwise.

Wilhelm Müller belongs to the German Romantic movement during its terminal phase. This

is not to say that the quality of his poetry is necessarily inferior to that of other Romantic

poets. In my view "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" belongs to that class of poetry,

which appears beguilingly simple, even naive, yet which harbours unsuspected profundity

and subtleties. The title refers at the primary level to "the miller," yet implies a reference to

the poet himself, Wilhelm Müller. Is this apparently jaunty poem in the folk-song tradition

about the nature of the poet and the poet's identity?

Müller's poem is the first in a cycle of so-called Lieder in the cycle of poems entitled Die

schöne Müllerin, (The Miller's fair Daughter), published in 1820. The poem originated

during a three-year period of gestation produced by the experience of co-operating with

other young poets and songsters who were then composing "Rollengedichte" ("role poems")

at meetings in the Berlin house of one F.A. Stegermann, a well-situated Prussian official

during the winter of 1816/17. This genre was greatly influenced by contemporary Italian

opera as well as by strong patriotic undercurrents. On the surface, the poems contained in

this cycle conjure up a seemingly uncomplicated idyll of unspoilt rural life but this picture

is not quite as ingenuous as it seems. Each song represents the point of view of a dramatic

character playing a part as though a character in a play or opera. The story told by the cycle

proves tragic, however jaunty the mood in the opening song, "Das Wandern ist des Müllers

Lust." The dramatic person assigned to this song, a wandering miller's apprentice, finally

drowns in the waters beside the mill the movement of which he celebrates in his first song.

The miller's daughter spurns his overtures of love and bestows her affections on his rival in

love, a young huntsman. The souring of the young apprentice's emotional state is reflected

in his change of attitude to the colour green, which first evokes feelings of spring but later

becomes associated in his mind with garishness and poison.

The sublime evocation of a place of final rest for the weary wanderer echoes Goethe's

treatment of the theme of the wanderer's return to a hut, the symbol of a final solace.

Müller's own name predestined him to play the role of the miller's apprentice. In fact,

during the later stage of the cycle's composition, the role found a poignant corollary in

Müller's emotional commitment to one by the name of Luise Hensel, a young poetess, who

resembled the miller's daughter in rejecting Miller's ardent feelings of love.

The rural idyll presented in the cycle also reflected an idealization of native German values

and the hope that they would soon help to mould a new united and free German nation.

However, as the Romantic Movement entered its dying years, a deepening sense of

pessimism was seeping in. Such is intimated in Müller's "Der Lindenbaum," beautifully set

to music and song by Franz Schubert. The speaker recalls the linden-tree beside the fountain

outside the gateway of his childhood home but finally describes his vain attempt, as a

distraught and wind-swept "wanderer," to return to the linden-tree of hallowed memory. In

the wider historical context surrounding the poem, we trace the despair which attended

Romanticism in its final throes, its demise being precipitated not so such by the after-effects

of foreign occupation as by the stiffing oppression of Metternich's system. .

In some ways Müller was German Romanticism's Byron, for both he and Byron embraced

the cause of Greek independence and both died at a comparatively young age. Though his

philo-Hellenism was more pronounced than that of his contemporaries, with the possible

exception of Friedrich Hölderlin, he typified a longing shared by other German writers and

poets, including Goethe and Schiller, that a new age would usher in Greece on German

soul, marrying the best of the ancient Greek heritage with the best in what was hoped would

become a united and free German nation. This hope is reflected in the very title of Goethe's

epic poem Hermann und Dorothea, telling of the encounter and subsequent marriage of two

young fugitives caught up in the disruptions caused by the invasion of French military

forces during the Revolutionary wars. Goethe's idealization of a symbiosis merging ancient

Greece and his contemporary world is anticipated in "Wandrers Sturmlied" and possibly

even in the Shakespeare Speech, in which Prometheus merges with a figure derived from

native folklore. The motifs of the miller's apprentice and the fair daughter of a miller find a

precedent in Goethe's writings. The opposition of "wandering" and the wanderer's goal of

rest and peace are evident both in the poetry of Goethe and the songs of Wilhelm Müller.

Even the figure of a tragic "romantic" wanderer goes back to Goethe's early Sturm und

Drang period of writing. Is the death of the lovelorn apprentice perhaps an expression of a

poetological concern related to an awareness of the volatile or fluid aspect of a "musical"

aspect in poetry? Literary references to drowning in Romantic - and post-Romantic

literature (viz. Grillparzer's Der Arme Spielmann ("The Poor Musician") - imply the self-

dissolution of the artistic process. .

The Motif of the Wandering Jew in Shelley's Poetry

Evocations of the Wandering Jew pervade, one might say haunt, Romantic poetry,

sometimes where explicit references are made to the figure, sometimes where unmistakable

allusions are made to it or sometimes where it blends with other motifs arousing notions of

a cursed wanderer, as with Cain, with the Flying Dutchman or even with the notion of le

poète maudit. We shall examine Shelley explicit reference to the Wandering Jew alias

Ahasuerus in Queen Mab and, in the following section, Coleridge's more elusive

evocations of the figure.

The legend of the wandering Jew gained or regained prominence at three periods of history:

in the thirteenth century: in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries; and in a period the

beginning of which was marked by the publication of Bishop Percy's Reliques, an anthology

of traditional poems and verses which had often exercised a wide appeal to contemporary

audiences. This collection included a broadside (a printed text circulated to the public)

dating from 1670 with the title of "The Wandering Jew." This versified account of the fate

of the Jewish cobbler doomed to wanderer on the face of the earth as his punishment for

taunting Jesus Christ when suffering on the Cross heralded a figure or motif that would

exert an immense appeal to the imagination not only of Coleridge and Shelley but also to

that of many a writer in the nineteenth century, reaching its highpoint in the Romantic

period and enjoy an afterlife that has lasted to the present day.

The three phases of development reflect differing historical situations. The legend had its

origins in a period that saw rising hostility to Jews fostered in great part to the decline of

Christendom's sway in the Holy Land and the attendant insecurity of the Jews once

deprived of their protected status as the servants and financiers of imperial courts.

The basic story relating to a figure that would later be called the Wandering Jew was

documented in "Flores Historiarum by Roger of Wendover in 1228. According to this story

an Armenian archbishop on a visit to St. Albans in England told the resident monks that

once in Armenia he had encountered a man, Cartaphilus by name, who had allegedly

shown contempt for Jesus when carrying the cross by saying "Go on quicker," whereupon

Jesus answered "I go, but thou shalt wait till I come." Matthew Paris repeated the story in

his history later in the thirteenth century. A similar tale circulated in Italy in the fifteenth

century though the living witness of the Crucifixion bore the name of Johannes Buttadeus

and was believed to have actually struck Jesus.

The legend seems to have gone underground until the end of the sixteenth century when

the printed pamphlet or broadside came into its own as an instrument that served the needs

of propaganda and public entertainment in times unsettled by religious and social tensions.

The wandering Jew then acquired the name of Ahasureus for a reason that is not altogether

clear as it was the name of the king of Persia as portrayed in the Book of Esther. If any

one year pinpoints the return of the Wandering Jew to Europe it was 1602, for it was then

that story of Ahasverus appeared in a pamphlet entitled "Kurtze Beschreibung und

Erzählung von einem Juden mit Namen Ahasverus" ("Short Description and Account of a

Jew named Ahasverus"). The name of its author was given as Christoff Crutzer though we

have no other record of such a name. This version of the legend told of a shoemaker whose

sin of taunting Jesus on the way to Calvary incurred the punishment of his being an

immortal wanderer on the face of the earth until Christ's Second Coming. The legend then

spread like wildfire in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. In Germany, Holland and

Scandinavia the central figure became known as the eternal Jew in keeping with the

German der ewige Jude, while in France the same figure was known as le juif errant, which

probably underlies the expression the Wandering Jew in English.

What proved to become the most influential English version of the legend was published

between 1670 and 1696 in the form of a pamphlet or broadside introduced by the words:

"The Wandering Jew or Shoomaker of Jerusam, who lived when our Saviour Christ was

crucified, and appoynted by him to love untill his comming again,"13

Its power of influence

was held back for almost a century - until "The Wandering Jew" appeared in Bishop

Percy's Reliques.

By the eighteenth century the term Wandering Jew had lost its edge as a piece of anti-

Semitic invective and come to symbolize psychological conditions and attitudes, chief

among them, suppressed and gnawing fears and psychological anguish. The rise of the

Gothic novel augmented the association of the Wandering Jew with nightmarish monsters

thrown up by the as yet barely understood subconscious layers of the mind. The figure of

the Wandering Jew played a part in The Monk: A Romance, a Gothic novel written by

Matthew Gregory Lewis and published in 1796. S. T. Coleridge read the novel and

absorbed its contents regarding the Wandering Jew. The novel's treatment of this motif

impressed Coleridge sufficiently to leave traces of its influence in The Rime of the Ancient

Mariner. Furthermore, the notion of an immortal man was current in the latter half of the

eighteenth century as shown by the rumour that a suave French nobleman by the name of

the Count de Saint Germain was an immortal who had acquired a vast amount of learning

from his being an eye witness of historical events from the year dot. To boot, the idea that

the Wandering Jew had a lot to say about major events was not lost on an English versifier

in the seventeenth century who made the wandering Jew the speaker who tells of all the

coronations he has personally witnessed since 1066.14

Broadside Ballads (Edition Bod630, between 1670 and 1696; Edition Bod656, c 1650) at: 13

ine from the Bodleian Library. Onl

http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/search/title/wandering%20jew 14

See in electronic archive of the Bodleian Library, Oxford: The wandring Jew[s] chronicle

or, [the old his]torian his brief declaration maid [sic] in a mad fashion of each coronation

that pass'd in this nation [s]ince William's invasion for no great occasion but meer

recreation to put off vexation. To the tune of, our prince is welcome out of Spain. 1674

..

As the the solid narrative core of the medieval legend fell apart, its constituent elements

fragmented in accordance with its various associations with concepts such as isolation,

rejection, dogged persistence and aching despair, the ruling ideas that played on the minds

of the Romantic poets, most notably of Byron and Shelley and Coleridge.

The image of the Wandering Jew merged with similar figures condemned to unrelenting

suffering or to await the day of divine judgment, Cain, the flying Dutchman, Faust.and Don

Juan to coalesce in composite transfigurations such as the monster of Frankenstein and the

Ancient Mariner, the sinister figures in Baudelaire's "Les Sept Veillards" and Dorian Gray.

The import of the Wandering was not entirely negative, to Goethe's mind at least as his

unfinished work Der Ewige Jude reveals, for the figure is turned into an allegory supporting

the Christian belief in redemption and becomes identified with Jesus Christ. In Coleridge's

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner elements derived from the legend of the Wandering Jew

coalesce with those that bring to mind the positive aspects of wandering associated with the

Prodigal Son, penitents and pilgrims. Thus the Mariner became a composite figure that

embodies the tensions and polarities within the mind and the poetic imagination

Ahasuerus in Shelley's Queen Mab

The Fairy waved her wand

Ahasuerus fled

Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist,

That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove,

Flee from the morning beam:

The matter of which dreams are made

Not more endowed with actual life

Than this phantasmal portraiture

Of wandering human thought.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab, VII, 267-275.

As we noted earlier, Geoffrey H. Hartman saw in the Ancient Mariner a transfiguration of

the Wandering Jew. According to this critic's analysis the Mariner or Wandering Jew

epitomizes the modern poet in the process of striving to make the transition from self-

consciousness to the imagination. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner does not contain the

word wanderer but it does contain a word associated with the legend of the Wandering Jew,

namely "cross," which draws attention to itself as a word with deep symbolic significances

through repetition in a manner noted by J. Tynjanov. As we are still in a section of this book

that is based on a logocentric survey of works in which the verb to wander is found, I leave

a discussion of the Rime to the beginning of SectionV and address works in which the verb

to wander is present.

In Queen Mab the association of "cross" and "wander" is evident in lines recalling the

incident to which the curse placed on Ahasuerus is attributed in the early legend. An

examination of these lines within the context of Queen Mab in its entirety demonstrates

what J. Tynjanov termed "lexical coloration," i.e. when a number of different meanings of a

word become apparent simultaneously,. In Queen Mab the association of the Crucifixion

and "wander" is evident in these lines recalling the curse placed on Ahasuerus in the early

legend.

But thou shalt wander o'er the unquiet earth. (VII, 182).

The next time the word "wander" occurs in Queen Mab (see the lines VII, 267-275 quoted

at the top of this section) the immediately apparent sense of the word conforms to current

usage, as in the case of one saying "my mind was wandering." To this extent the previous

association "wandering Jew" is supplanted or - in Tynjanov's terms "displaced" - by a sense

associating Ahasuerus with a mental phenomenon, a state of mind akin to that expressed in

the works of an entire generation of poets that included Goethe and the Romantics in that

process Harold Bloom has identified as the "internalization of the quest romance."

Wanderers, particularly wanderers of biblical or religious origin (Cain, the Pilgrim, the

Prodigal Son), came to exemplify what we would now call psychological phenomena,

particularly those influenced by the operation of the subconscious. Indeed, in Jungian terms,

Ahasuerus is a symbol of nothing less than the repressed consciousness of Western man.

In the case we have just considered we note a contrast between the traditional and (from

Shelley's point of view) modern associations of the verb "to wander." We note this contrast

when taking account of the progression noted in the process of reading the text, for the

reference to "wandering" thought follows the occurrence of the verb referring to the curse

imposed on Ahasuerus at Calvary.

We appreciate the new significance of "wandering" not only from considering the aspect of

textual progression, which is an "internal" phenomenon. By comparing occurrences of the

verb to wander in poems by all Romantic poets we gain corroboration of the fact that the

verb to wander reflects a new recognition of a collective and contemporary psychological

phenomenon affecting the poetry of an entire generation of writers. There is no radical

separation of the word's "internal" and "external" scope of reference, a point constantly

emphasized by J. Tynjanov and other exponents of Russian Formalism.

Wandering Revealed in Literary Treatments of Allegorical and Mythical

Archetypes

The archetypal Wanderer harbours two antithetical figures, the outcast wanderer

represented by Cain and the Wandering Jew and the homebound wanderer represented by

the pilgrim and the Prodigal Son. We shall soon consider whether these figures merge in

the central person presented in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. A close examination of

words based on the verb to wander in Daniel Defoe's novel entitled Robinson Crusoe

reveals in what way a discussion of the Prodigal Son is relevant to an appraisal of Defoe's

famous story, which evinces certain proto-Romantic elements/

Robinson Crusoe Cast as the Prodigal Son

The ancient wanderers Gilgamesh, Ulysses and Aeneas were not only poets and spiritual

philosophers but also those with a social and political mission. Their wandering furnished

them with the experience and education necessary for their practical role. References to

wandering become pronounced in literature at times of strenuous searching for a sure

foundation when the stability and sustainability of existing hierarchies is in doubt. Daniel

Defoe lived in such a time. As a dissenter he must have been well aware that the Glorious

Revolution of 1688 marked the demise of the ideal of divinely appointed government, for

William III had at best a tenuous title to the throne of England. His succession involved

horse trading and a vague appeal to the popular will. Let us consider his most celebrated

work with this historical background in mind.

As the "editor" of the second version of Robinson Crusoe (1720) Crusoe remarks (I place

in bold print words that appear especially significant

the story, although allegorical, is also historical… In a word, the

Adventures of Robinson Crusoe are one whole scheme of a real life of

eight and twenty years, spent in the most wandering desolate and

afflicting circumstances that ever man went through.

Three words in this citation are of particular interest from the point of view taken in this

study. As "history," Crusoe's story describes in plausibly realistic terms the experience of a

man who was forced to survive almost thirty years of isolation from European civilisation.

The "allegorical" character of the story is not made explicit. The word "wandering" acquires

a negative tone by its juxtaposition with "desolate" and "afflicting." The negative

connotations of the word suggest disorientation and a punishment for sin or folly. The

uncertainties surrounding these references to "allegory" and "wandering" may be clarified if

we inspect occurrences of the verb to wander in the story itself.

In the opening paragraphs of Robinson Crusoe the verbs to ramble and to wander are

associated with "thought" and "inclination" in a manner that is fully consistent with

common usage. The third paragraph opens with the words: "Being the third son of the

family and not bred to a trade, my head began to be filled very early with rambling

thoughts." The fourth paragraph contains a sentence in which Crusoe states that he had no

reason other than "a mere wandering inclination" for leaving his native country. Although

any verb of motion may acquire a metaphorical meaning in whatever form of language,

some have become linked by usage with such notions as digression, deviation, transgression

and so on. To ramble does not conventionally imply a moral judgement. When referring to

thought or speech, it suggests that one or the other of these is logically disconnected or

lacking in purposeful direction. The connotative range of to wander finds no parallel in

other verbs of motion such as to ramble, to stray, to digress, to transgress, to roam, etc. The

juxtaposition of "wandering inclination" and "leaving my father's house" obviously recalls

the strong biblical associations of the word to wander with the wilderness journey of the

Israelites, the parable of the Prodigal Son and other well-known motifs. A reference to

"father's house" recurs in the story, pointing to the central significance of the figure of the

Prodigal Son. In one way this is strange, as Crusoe returns to England long after his parents'

death. If we take Crusoe's father to be a figure representing the patriarchal order of

established society rather than Crusoe's progenitor, the reason for Crusoe's being likened to

the Prodigal Son becomes understandable. Cut off from the civilisation of his native land,

Crusoe must establish a new social order based - let us say - on the Protestant work ethic.

Certainly the novel's social and political implications were immediately grasped by the

reading public in England and on the continent of Europe, and those writers who were

prompted by Defoe's novel to write their own Robinsonnades dwelt more on the idea of

establishing a new civilisation than on that of Crusoe's isolation and loneliness and on the

theme of isolated individual endeavour. Crusoe's sense of guilt and fear aroused by his

crossing what he felt to be a forbidden threshold might also by understood as the indirect

expression of feelings known to Defoe himself, for we may imagine that it was not without

great trepidation that the author, approaching the age of sixty, ventured for the first time

into the realm of pure novelistic fiction.

Robinson Crusoe begs comparison with a poem by William Cowper and Jonathan Swift's

account of the travels of hapless Gulliver. William Cowper's poem "The Solitude of

Alexander Selkirk," like Robinson Crusoe, takes its departure from an idea sparked by a

real event and an autobiographic account based on this, the involuntary long residence of

Alexander Selkirk, a sailor and adventurer, on a remote island off the Pacific coast of South

America. However, the perspectives that inform the novel and the poem are entirely

different, for in the poem the speaker is a lone thinker who compares the tardiness of

physical motion, lightning included, to the instanteous motions of the mind. It is a sad poem

in a certain way, for though the speaker is "a monarch" of all that he surveys, he is also a

prisoner, and I surmise that the isolation told of in the poem is akin to Cowper's personal

sense of isolation that at times bordered on insanity. To use a term later coined by William

Blake, the speaker is a "mental traveller" free from the sequence of time in the physical

universe.

Gulliver's Travels wriiten within the same time span as Robinson Crusoe poses a contrast

with Robinson Crusoe in a different way from the one just considered. It imitates the modes

of vision and association that typify dreams and, though a biting and insightful satire

revealing an acute percepion of the contemporary political scene in England, it explores the

inner realm of the mind so far as to attain a prophetic quality. Michael Foot, once the leader

of the Labour Party and also one of the most astute commentators on Gulliver's Travels,

discerned in the loadstone described in Part III, Chapter 2, a premonition of the nuclear

bomb and its MADness. The work poses a conscious refution of the optimism implicit in

Robinson Crusoe based on the hope of social renewal through individual enterprise.

Gulliver, the gullible one at the start of his travels, becomes a wise misantropist at its end.

Like any "cold earth wanderer" on the physical plane (again to cite William Blake),

Gulliver learns from experience. Descriptions of travels and wanderings, mental or

physical, realistic of fantastic, are subject to commonly shared formative principles and

concern the same fundamental question concerning the relationship between the conscious

mind and the subconscious, even when approached from opposite avenues.

In later decades the Romantics did not invent the parameters in which they described

travels and wandering, these ranging between elements derived from the Grand Tour of

Continental Europe, country walks and flights of the mind transcribed into an imaginary

journey, for all these are common to poets and writers from Defoe and Swift, via James

Thomson, Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper and Laurence Sterne to Wordsworth, Byron

and Keats. At some point writers crossed a line. On the one side writers still felt themselves

in some way committed to the prevalent society that surrounded them, and on the other,

writers were enthused and horrified by the freedom and isolation of their newfound

Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner Interpreted as a Wanderer by G.

Hartman despite the Absence of the Word Wanderer in the Poem

In what sense may the Ancient Mariner be meaningfully described as a “Wanderer”?

This question might strike one as odd in view of the fact that the word wanderer appears

nowhere in the text of this poem. Even so, no less notable a critic that Geoffrey H. Hartman

has described the Ancient Mariner as “the Wanderer” or “Wandering Jew.”15

If we agree

15 Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-consciousness,"' Romanticism and

Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1970), 46 - 56.

that every poem must be treated within the context of literary tradition, the fact that the

poem elicits the critic‟s use of the word “Wanderer” carries with it an authority we should

not lightly dismiss. The word “Wanderer” has both a centrifugal and centripetal aspect. In

one sense of the word a wanderer deviates from a path or itinerary. In another sense he finds

his goal intuitively in a journey of self- discovery. Cain and Ahasuerus are wanderers who

have lost their bearings. The Prodigal Son or the Pilgrim discover their destination through

a process of trial and error according to the established educational principle of “learning by

doing," Thus, the apparent contradiction posed by two distinct kinds of wanderer is capable

of resolution if we admit that a higher form of “wandering” subsumes and transcends its

lesser or partial aspect. Let us then consider Coleridge‟s Ancient Mariner in the light of the

centrifugal and countervailing centripetal implications that inhere in the word “Wanderer,"

The Fusing of Archetypal Figures associated with the Wanderer

The concept of wandering has roots in religious thought concerning divine power, guidance

and punishment. Wandering might therefore be defined with reference to its traditional

connections with the wandering figures of the Bible, legend and classical mythology. In the

course of time these have blended together in western literature. Geoffrey H. Hartman`s

opinion that the motif of the Wandering Jew underlies the figure of the Ancient Mariner,

Cain and other wanderers in Romantic literature is intuited rather than supported by detailed

evidence or argument in his Essay ''Romanticism and Consciousness''. Viewed historically,

the legend of the Wandering Jew is a post-biblical invention inspired by the Church's

negative attitude to Jewry. It echoes nevertheless the motif of exile from the Promised Land

and the biblical motif of wandering incorporating the figure of Cain (the biblical Cain was

not only a wanderer in a pejorative sense but the founder of civilisation).

If a study of the wandering motif is to be based on what on might term a vocabulary of

traditional wandering figures derived from the Bible, mythology and legend, what tests are

to be applied to ensure the appropriate categorisation of ''Wanderer'' figures in Romantic

literature? The entire exercise of categorising and labelling types of wanderer figures will

prove to be of little value unless the phenomenon of ''introversion'' is taken into account.

Throughout the development of literature, and particularly at periods of great historical

change, the factor of ''introversion'' plays a major role in influencing the manner in which

writer treated culturally transmitted material. In the Romantic Period this factor noticeably

influenced the manner of radically recasting wandering figures derived from periods subject

to a predominant religious influence. Originally this story of Lutheran inspiration served to

illustrate the dire consequences of transgressing against religious injunctions. Faust sold his

soul to the Devil and went to Hell; there is little in the manner of the narrator's treatment of

the story to suggest that anyone should feel sorry for him. Marlow's Faustus, though he also

goes to Hell in the end, acquires the dignity of a tragic hero. Goethe's Faust, who avoids

Hell altogether, becomes the hero of a divine comedy. Changes in the evaluation of content

lead to formal changes in the story itself.

To the extent that ''transgressing,'' albeit as the prerequisite of repentance, is a synonym of

''wandering'' in one of its principal senses, Goethe's Faust reflects the new positive

significance with which Goethe and the Romantics invested the word ''Wanderer'' and all

that became associated with it in their minds. Faust, like the Ancient Mariner, becomes the

Prodigal Son. However, if Faust and the Ancient Mariner is a Cain or Ahasuerus turned

Prodigal Son, in what sense can he be identified with the former? In a poetic context a

figure such as Coleridge's Mariner is not a flat personification of an idea (though a poem

may take its inception from a germinal idea).

It incorporates a nexus of associations the development of which may often be traced back

to earlier works by the poet. For this reason it may prove enlightening to consider how the

motif of the wanderer as exemplified in the figure of Cain had found expression in one of

Coleridge's works written before he composed The Ancient Mariner. In the "Prefatory

Note" of The Wanderings of Cain, Coleridge recalls Wordsworth's thinly veiled

dissatisfaction with the Second Canto of The Wanderings of Cain, which they had agreed to

write in collaboration.

I hastened to him (Wordsworth) with my manuscript- that look of

humorous despondency fixed on his almost blank sheet of paper, and

then its silent mock-piteous admission of failure struggling with the

sense of the exceeding ridiculousness of the whole scheme - which broke

up in a laugh and The Ancient Mariner was written instead. 16

Is the connection between the abandonment of this joint project and genesis of The Rime of

16 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Prefatory Notes on The Wanderings of Cain," 1828. The

words cited are found at the end of the first paragraph of the "Prefatory Note."

the Ancient Mariner merely coincidental? The following evidence suggests that the

Wanderings of Cain and The Ancient Mariner are thematically related and that the latter

was born of Coleridge's failure to complete the former. This being so, The Rime of the

Ancient Mariner may be directly associated with the word ''to wander,'' not only to the idea

of wandering. Cain and his son Enos in The Wanderings of Cain stray onto a dismal plain

not unlike the infernal sea described in The Ancient Mariner. Here they encounter a

“Shape“ embodying the spirit of Abel. It is as a ''Shape'' that the ship bearing Life-in-Death

first appears to the Ancient Mariner (line152). Cain, like the legendary Wandering Jew,

vainly wishes for his own death. Coleridge's Cain, incorporating attributes of the Wandering

Jew, anticipates the Ancient Mariner, who combines characteristics of both Cain and

Ahasuerus, in as far as his cruel slaying of an innocent creature is analogous to Cain‟s

fratricide He commits an act of sacrilege like Ahasuerus in the medieval legend. The motif

of the Crucifixion is evoked by a repetition of the word ''cross'' in association with the

albatross and its death (of ''At length did cross an Albatross'' in line 63, ''With my cross-

bow/ I shot the Albatross'' in lines 81 and 82). The image of Death-in-Life and Death

playing dice for possession of the dead also underlines this motif. The conventional

symbolism associated with Cain and Ahasuerus accounts for much, but not everything, that

happens in the story told in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Both Cain and Ahasuerus are

traditionally eternal wanderers with no prospect of finding their destination. The Ancient

Mariner differs from them in that he is finally released from the curse that has befallen him

and "returns to his own country." He incorporates the figure of the returning wanderer

preeminently represented by Ulysses and the Prodigal Son. In both cases, "wandering"

finally proves a beneficial experience. Its punitive function is outweighed by its ultimate

rewards, the widening and enrichment of experience and the education that derives not from

theory and precept but from subjection to the process of trial and error. The Wanderer sets

out a fool, a prey to folly and its consequences. He becomes wise, even sly, like Ulysses, as

a consequence of his exposure to experience. As we may conclude from the stories of Saul

and Ulysses, wandering in the biblical and Greek classical traditions establishes the prior

condition for the Wanderer's enjoyment of a favoured status accompanied by power and

responsibility.

In that story which reveals the most generous attitude to wandering, the Prodigal Son betters

his elder brother, who never ventures from his father's house, to become fit to take

possession of his patrimony. Understood as the Prodigal Son, the Ancient Mariner seems to

gain few tangible benefits from his harrowing experiences. These, however, allow him to

grow spiritually and morally and give him an authority that the reluctant hearer of his story

cannot withstand. The wedding guest becomes a „„sadder and wiser man.‟‟ while the

Ancient Mariner, in becoming a prophet - implicitly a poet - reveals a truth, evident in many

great works of literature, that the traveller's misfortune is the narrator's opportunity.

Wandering journeys in biblical tradition constitute a paradox. On the one hand, we may

infer from them that wandering, especially long periods of wandering such as that of the

Israelites in the desert of Sinai, is the consequence of transgression or the erring proclivities

of the human heart. On the other, the experience of wandering ultimately proves beneficial,

for it supplies the opportunity of moral growth and education \ and may even secure much

greater benefits than those attained by "elder brothers" adhering to the path of rectitude.

A similar paradox attaches to adventure stories with no overt claim to carrying moral

lesson. Adventure stories commonly tell of exciting events set in motion by an unforeseen

misfortune which thrusts the unwary traveller into a domain he would not have voluntarily

entered. As both a moral allegory and adventure story, Robinson Crusoe presents a double

paradox. However much Crusoe laments what he considers to be his ''sinful'' urge "to

wander," he, both as man of action and a narrator, derives immense benefits from his

misfortune. As the narrator of his adventures, Crusoe embodies the figure of the wanderer-

speaker with its ancient precedents in such figures as Ulysses and Moses (in rabbinical

tradition Moses is not only seen as a participant in the events described by the Pentateuch

accounts but also as the (human) author of the narrative itself, a Levite, a divinely inspired

poet; indeed, some of the most lyrical passages in the Pentateuch are attributed to Moses as

dramatic speaker).17

The greater part of the Odyssey is occupied by passages attributed to

Ulysses as the principal dramatic speaker in the text. The most ''fantastic'' or improbable

events referred to in the body of the text are those which Ulysses himself relates. The world

described by Ulysses is primarily a mythical world occupied by such beings as the Cyclops

and Circe. Prolonged, uninterrupted, monologues reveal patterns similar to those informing

dreams and dreamlike states of mind. Travellers (inside and outside literary context) are

known for their ''tall stories,'' the absolute veracity of which may be called into question if

moral criteria are applied, hence the highly ambivalent status of the wanderer-speaker as

17 Luther noted the lyricism of the song of Moses and the Israelites in the fifteenth chapter of

Exodus. Psalm 90 is traditionally attributed to Moses.

witness, entertainer and suspected liar (viz. the miles gloriosus in classical times and the

Baron von Münchhausen). He is thus alienated from society, set apart from fellows,

burdened by the exceptional nature of what he has to tell and the compulsion to recount his

story. Both as a poet-visionary and as a traveller he is an outsider.

Dualism and Dichotomies in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The metaphor equating the poet with an alienated traveller finds its basis both in

unawareness of the effects travel may have on an individual's psychology and in the picture

of the believer as an alien travelling homeward in the Bible and religious writings (cf. I

Peter; 2,11). The poet like the believer is conscious of a fundamental divide between the

physical world and a transcendent reality beyond it. Baudelaire's concept of the duality

between ''Spleen'' and ''Ideal'' is greatly influenced by the concept of the duality between the

flesh and the spirit in religious thought (cf. 2 Corinthians; 4,16,5,10). Fundamentally the

same duality underlies ancient mythical accounts of demigods wandering the earth. In The

Epic of Gilgamesh the exact proportions of the hero's divine and human constituency are

given.

O Gilgamesh, lord of Kullab, great is thy praise. This was the man to whom all

things were known; this was king who knew all countries of the world. He was

wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days

before the flood. He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour,

and returning engraved on a stone the whole story. When the gods created

Gilgamesh they gave him a perfect body. Shamash the glorious sun endowed

him with beauty, Adad the god of the storm endowed him with courage, the

great gods made his beauty perfect, surpassing all others. Two thirds they made

him god and one-third man. 18

The Ancient Mariner incorporates aspects and characteristics of the archetypal wanderers of

antiquity. Like them he is subject to the overriding influence of higher powers often

identified as the planets in the original sense of the word (the seven wanderers - the sun, the

moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn). The movements of the ''cold earth

wanderers'' participate in cosmic movement. As the following quotation makes clear,

18The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated in English by N.K. Sanders (Harmondsworth: Penguin

Classics, 1960), 59.

Gilgamesh's mother holds Shamash (the Sun) accountable for her son's impulse to wander:

O Shamash, why did you give this restless heart to Gilgamesh, my son; why did you

give it? You have moved him and now and now he sets out on a long journey to the

land of Humbaba, to travel an unknown road and fight a strange battle 19

In no reading of The Ancient Mariner can one overlook the relationship between the

Mariner, the Wanderer, and the higher powers represented by the sun, moon, the albatross

and the wind. This relationship forms what can be pictured as a vertically oriented polarity

between the horizontal plane of the earth and the region of the sky, which, together with the

many polarities and parallels contained in the poem, contributes to its dense and complex

structure. The slaying of the albatross, which combines associations with Christ, the Holy

Spirit, and the poetic genius in one symbol, signals the loss of the modern (sentimental)

poet's sense of being harmoniously at one with his source of inspiration. With no certainty

of an objective correlative to the Wanderer's innate divinity, the Mariner is exposed to the

heady and terrifying experience of solipsistic isolation. What brings him (or rather

Coleridge) the means of breaking out of his despair and isolation is the discovery of the

mind's inherent objectivity in thought, language and poetic expression. On a symbolic level,

the Mariner experiences a transition from death to a new life. In this light we should

consider another aspect of the Mariner's affinity with the archetypal wanderers of antiquity.

The Mariner, like Gilgamesh, Ulysses and Aeneas, enters the nether realm of death. The

sun, traditionally a symbol of life and regeneration, represents stasis and death in

Coleridge‟s poem. Apollo, the sun god, was not only the god of poetry in classical myth,

but also the bringer of pestilence. The colours displayed by Life-in-Death, red, yellow and

white, carry associations both with the sun and the plague. In a manner consistent with a

long poetic and religious tradition the sea in The Ancient Mariner combines associations

with death and the renewal of life, as in the story of the Flood and the exodus of the

Israelites through the Red Sea.

In Goethe's ''Wanderers Sturmlied'' the central symbol of water is supported by allusions to

the (classical) deluge myth. Water, traditionally a symbol of God's creative power becomes

an image symbolising the flow of poetic utterance in the poetry of Goethe and the

Romantics. The association of death and water, implicit in biblical accounts of the Flood

19 Gilgamesh., 73.

and the drowning of Pharaoh's men in the Red Sea, is evident in passages in Shakespearean

drama. The nightmarish element in The Ancient Mariner is also found in Clarence's dream

in Richard III. In Ariel's song describing the skull and skeletal remains of drowned man, the

relics of death appear as things of beauty. The idea of an aesthetic transformation of death‟s

destructive and deforming effects later finds fuller expression in Baudelaire's ''Le Mauvais

Moîne.“ In The Ancient Mariner the nightmarish quality pervading the poem belies the fact

that the events described in the narrative reflect Coleridge's success in achieving as

aesthetic resolution of the tensions to which he was subject when writing the poem. The

outward events The Ancient Mariner formally devolve on moral issues. He commits a sin

and incurs guilt. However, the course of events referred to in The Ancient Mariner do not

reveal the outworking of justice according to any normally recognised criteria.

One critic is noteworthy in his attempt to explain the poem's apparent illogical nature.

Edward E. Bostetter points out in his essay "The Nightmare World of 'The Ancient Mariner'

," the subtitle given to the poem in the edition of The Lyrical Ballads published in 1800 was

''A Poet's Reverie''.20

In the eighteenth century the reality of the unconscious mind was

becoming recognised as a principle governing not only general human psychology but also

the process of literary creation. The use of imagery and symbolism in poetry reflected this

change, with the result that the poem resists reduction to tidy explication or exegesis. While

polysemy is a characteristic of poetry in all ages, a new awareness of the nature and

operation of the subconscious mind affected the formal organisation of poems such as The

Ancient Mariner. The attempts to imitate the synthesising operation of the mind in creating

images during dreams or dreamlike mental conditions encouraged what might be termed a

thickening or clustering of poetic imagery. Over and above their function of recalling ideas

and stimulating a mental picture, images assume a function analogous to that of motifs in

music - that is, they are to be appreciated as elements of structure, uniquely defined by their

context within the organic whole constituting a poem. The free mode of musical association

often characterises literary works concerned with the liberation of mind and spirit from

subjection to the exigencies of the material world, and with the ultimate freedom associated

with the idea that physical death releases the soul from its material limitations.

To the extent that death is considered to be both the ultimate negation of physical life and

20 Edward E. Bostetter, "The Nightmare World of "The Ancient Mariner" in: Other Poems,

ed. Alan R. Jones and William Tydeman (Tiptree, 1973), 185 - 199.

the passage to spiritual liberation and fulfilment, it is a negation that affirms its apparent

antithesis. The concept of wandering with its manifold associations with death, transition,

interrelated movements of mind and body, etc., implies not only epic subject matter but also

a principle of organisation, the one identified by Goethe in his theories concerning polarity

(viz Steigerung), which at once poses and reconciles contraries. German Romanticism was

inaugurated by Friedrich Schlegel's call for a new form of poetry, which he referred to as

Universalpoesie, that was to reconcile Classicism with modernity.21

William Blake also

strove to reconcile dualities, though in a manner that accorded with religious mysticism

rather than by a frontal intellectual assault.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is typically Romantic in expressing an intense concern

with polaric relationships. Primarily for this reason it is characterised by a strong ironic

element exemplified in what is probably the most celebrated line in the poem: ''Water, water

everywhere / Nor any drop to drink.'' (121,122). The motif of polarity is enhanced by

reference to the geographic poles and the ''Polar Spirits'' (Gloss to lines 393 - 405).

A number of the polaric oppositions found in the poem are based on tradition. Traditional

symbols are treated so as to accord with the aesthetic purposes of a Romantic poet. Just as

the sun carries predominantly negative associations, the moon. the token of Celestial

Mary‟s healing influence, carries those that are unambiguously positive. (Lines 292 -296).

The figure of Mary as intercessor is assigned an analogous role in the depiction of Faust's

entry into Heaven at the end of the dramatic action in Faust Part II. Those who directly

associate the use of symbols originating in religious traditions with confessions of faith

should enquire why two Protestant poets should award Mary such great significance. In The

Ancient Mariner the Queen of Heaven and Death-in-Life form an antithetic pair analogous

to that formed by Circe and Penelope in The Odyssey or the Whore of Babylon and the

Bride of the Lamb in the Book of Revelation.

The Return of the Prodigal Son, or the Poet's quest to Reconcile Polarities and

Tensions

The Rime of the Ancoient Mariner is a poem which contrasts antipodes and opposites,

while at the same time inducing a number of such antitheses to merge into one figure or

21 Friedrich Schlegel, 116th "Athenäum"-Fragment. 1798 – 1800.

symbol. For this reason it is impossible to equate the Mariner with the Wandering Jew or

the figure of Christ alone, though elements connect with both are part of the Mariner's

composition. The figure of Ahasuerus is itself highly ambivalent, for Ahasuerus is a co-

sufferer with Jesus. In Goethe‟s poetic fragment ''Der Ewige Jude'' the Wandering Jew is

little less than a transfiguration of Jesus. As we noted elsewhere, the poets of the Romantic

period freely availed themselves of religious symbols identifying Jesus with the poetic

imagination, Mary with the poet's anima or true identity and the Passion with the process of

literary and poetic creation.

Of all wanderer figures, the Prodigal Son is perhaps the most inclusive - and therefore the

most apt - designation of the Ancient Mariner. Remembering that The Ancient Mariner

reveals Coleridge's desire for an aesthetic rather than a purely intellectual resolution of the

tensions to which he was subject when writing the poem, as in his life generally, we will

note some striking similarities between the language of the New Testament and that of

Plotinus when referring respectively to the Prodigal Son and Jupiter. In his treatise ''On the

Intellectual Beauty'' Plotinus refers to Jupiter as one who returns to his father's house.

The vision has been of God in travail of a beautiful offspring, God engendering a

universe within himself in a painless labor and -rejoiced in what he has brought

into being, proud of his children - keeping all closely by him, for the pleasure he

has in this radiance and in theirs. Of this offspring - all beautiful, but most

beautiful those that have remained within - only one has become manifest

without; from him (Zeus, sovereign over the visible universe), the youngest

born, we may gather, as from some image, the greatness of the Father and of the

brothers that remain within the Father's house 22

We need not here broach questions concerning Plotinus's indebtedness to the concept of

Christ as the visible expression of the Father. It is enough to note that the striking

convergence of New Testament verbal imagery and that of Plotinus was recognised by

European thinkers and poets from the age of the Renaissance onwards and was fully

consistent with a symbiosis of the biblical and Greek classical images concerning the

22 From the English translation of The Enneads, revised by B.S. Page, 1956, "On the

Intellectual Beauty" reprinted in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New

York: Harcourt Brace Vovanovich, 1971), 112.

movement of persons and objects.

Both Plotinus in ''On the Intellectual Beauty'' and Dante in ''The Letter to Can Grande della

Scala'' identified the goal of the soul's journey the union of the soul with its divine source

and ground of being, God or ''the One.'' Though Dante identifies the beatific vision, the

consummation of the Christian pilgrimage journey, with a supreme expression of beauty,

Plotinus equated the Good and the Beautiful in a manner that orthodox religious minds

might consider questionable, if not outright dangerous. The Plotinian notion that the act of

contemplation creates an ontological unity embracing the contemplator and the

contemplated finds an obvious parallel in what John Keats termed "negative capability" and

other expressions of Romantic strategies to comprehend some relationship between the poet

represented as observer and the objects of his contemplation.

Let us now consider the figure of the Ancient Mariner as an expression of poetic

"wandering" motivated by an impulse to reconcile contraries and resolve the conundrum of

the Wander-Poet"s dual identity rooted in the poet's - here Coleridge's - biography and the

process of creating poetry. In terms of symbols derived from religious traditions, how is the

figure both Ahasuerus and the Prodigal Son? And if the Ancient Mariner is in some sense

the Prodigal Son, in what sense has he gained? If we equate gain with any purely tangible

benefits enjoyed by the Mariner at the end of the poem, we might suppose, very little. As

Edward E. Bostetter points out, the Mariner himself finally remains alienated from the

world and society and produces alienation in those he meets. As a repentant sinner he shows

few signs of joy, any more than Coleridge did, qua private individual with a drug addiction

problem, but as a poet at least his affinity with the Prodigal Son, sustained and guided the

flow of poetic expression, not only as a means of self-directed therapy. In a parallel

instance, David Holbrook treats ''Fern Hill'' as an expression of Dylan Thomas'

psychological ''schizoid'' condition.23

Writing' “Fern Hill'' did not secure any lasting cure of

Thomas' mental ailment, but is it any less great a poetic achievement for that? The gain,

whether we are speaking of ''Fern Hill'' or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the poetic

achievement itself. A great hindrance to an objective critical approach to The Ancient

Mariner stems from the very wealth of extra-literary topics and themes that are readily

associated with it - e.g. neoplatonic philosophy, Calvinist theology, the effect of drugs on

the consciousness, and so on. However interesting and enlightening a discussion of such

23 David Holbrook, The Code of Night (London: Athlone Press, 1972).

topics may be, it does not itself provide a basis for assessing The Ancient Mariner as a

poetic achievement. Bostetter goes so far as to deny the possibility that the poem is at all

accessible to logical analysis. The density and complexity of the poem‟s imagery and

structure render the work intractable to paraphrase. Thus he rejects Warren‟s contention that

the poem derives its unity from the neoplatonic concept of ''One Life'.' 24

This, Bostetter

concedes, furnishes the ''moral tag'' which Coleridge gave to The Ancient Mariner, but in

his view, the ostensible message of the poem is belied by poet's nightmare vision of a world

become the playground of malign forces. Bostetter departs from objective or internal

criticism when he inveighs against the allegedly unfair dealings of God with human beings

or takes to task the ruling power in the universe as presented in The Ancient Mariner, when

speculating whether the Mariner has gained at the end of his harrowing experience. He

writes:

The Mariner's act may have been a sin, but it made him important to God and men

alike; in this sense he was rewarded rather than punished.25

One can hardly do justice to the power and mystery of The Ancient Mariner if one treats the

poem as one that is ''about'' a great idea or „„about‟‟ the Mariner. Coleridge's choice of

theme was determined by the need to create a poem ''of pure imagination.‟‟ as Bostetter puts

it, - "to wrest beauty from the raw material afforded by nightmare visions and

hallucinations." Here it is important to consider the incident that marks the turning-point of

the poem, which is reached when the Mariner in a trancelike state (''unaware''), blesses the

water snakes he sees by the light of the moon. The aspects of the swimming snakes that

deeply affect the Mariner are their motion and their beauty. The motion of the snakes

symbolises and epitomises the principle of motion both in external nature and in the poetic

mind. As earlier discussions have suggested, Goethe, Schiller and the Romantics equated

motion with a vital force in nature and all life. Beauty meant for Schiller and Keats the

reconciling principle that should - and finally would - reconcile humanity's moral and

aesthetic strivings. The Mariner's visual encounter with the water snakes poses the

counterpoint of his act of killing the albatross, an act that likewise sprang from

subconscious impulses. It is ironic that snakes should provide the Mariner with the occasion

at which he was granted relief from the curse that had befallen him and his crew, in view of

24 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with Essay by Robert P.Warren (New York,1946).

25 "The Nightmare World.," 193.

the role ascribed to the Serpent in the story of Eden, though Moses had brazen serpents

raised in the wilderness as a means of curing those about to die from snakebite. An allusion

to this incident recorded in the Pentateuch will not appear out of place if we accept The

Ancient Mariner as the product of a merging of basic allegorical journeys rooted in biblical

and ancient Greek writings.

To conclude my argument, the "Wanderer," incorporating and merging the motifs of

Ahasuerus and the Prodigal Son, reflects not only Coleridge's concern with the Ancient

Mariner as a dramatic character, his psychological make-up, etc., but also, and perhaps

more fundamentally, the very processes that mould and inform the poem in its entirety.

Rilke came as close as did any other writer we have considered to establishing a clear

connection between the figure of the Prodigal Son and the artist's quest to mould language

aesthetically in the last pages of Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge ("The

Sketchings of Malte Laurids Brigge"). The figure of the Prodigal Son is here a metaphor

that illuminates the process of artistic creativity. The artist's ''return to God'' is not to be

understood in purely religious terms, as when it is applied to descriptions of mystical

experience. It entails the labour involved whenever artists and poets express an inward

vision in a external medium thanks to - not despite of - the latter's resistant nature. For

Auguste Rodin the medium was stone in the figure of the Prodigal Son pleading to God at

the gate of Hell. In the poet's case this medium is language. (See the conclusions drawn by

Hans Dietrich Borchert, a critic concerned with the figure of the Prodigal Son in Rilke in:

''Das Problem des Verlorenen Sohnes'' bei Rilke).26

26 Hans Heinrich Borcherdt, "Das Problem des 'Verlorenen Sohnes bei Rilke;" Worte und

Werte / Bruno Markwardt zum 60. Geburstag, ed. Erdmann and Alfons Eich.