Professor David Peimer
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake: A Taster From Three Greats

Professor David Peimer - Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake: A Taster From Three Greats

- So today we are going to dive in and have a taster of three of the greats. And I use the word taster, obviously, thoughtfully, because with, you know, these three, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, we all studied them at school, I’m sure, I’m sure many participants have studied, you know, university at various times or read them and, you know, have a fair knowledge. So this is really just meant as a taster of, you know, to complete in a sense, the cycle of the Romantics. First was Shelley, Keats, Byron. and now we look at actually the forerunners to Shelley, Keats and Byron who came a little bit before them, Blake, Coleridge and, and Wordsworth. And the reason for doing a taster is because of course, I mean one could spend months just on one of these without question. So it’s in the spirit of summer, in the spirit of looking at the Romantics overall, this particular group, their similarities, their differences, and to have a taste. And then we can, you know, dive into detail, you know, later, perhaps later after the summer or in our own time, as we’ve discussed, you know, maybe go into some of these much more depth later. So I’m going to start with just a little bit, I’m going to start with Blake and this time I’m going to spend, slightly different to last week, I’m going to spend more time on the actual poems that these guys wrote and a little bit less time on their lives, although where it’s appropriate, bring it in, of course, especially with Blake and Coleridge, because they had by far the most, I suppose, active and engaging lives. Wordsworth was much more detached and isolated in a sense. So this is Blake, and when he’s living of course, 1757, 1827, I think the crucial, huge, historical event is, as we all know, the French Revolution happening just before the beginning of the 19th century in the late 1700s.

And this is what they’re all living through. It’s what Byron, Keats, Shelley also are referring to. And what these three are, in a sense, either reacting to or disillusioned by or inspired by, then disillusioned. But England under enormous fear and threat of Napoleonic attack, Europe being conquered by Napoleon. The disillusion of obviously Napoleon taking over, effectively establishing military dictatorship after the French Revolution. And of course, perhaps as profoundly before that, the reign of terror, of Robespierre and the others, and the guillotine of so many of the aristocrats in the upper class and others, you know, any dissidents really. So it’s in that context. We have to, I think imagine living in such fertile and terrifying and inspiring times when there are so many ideas up for grabs. So many possible ways that history and these societies can go, in particular England for these guys, Blake’s great line, which I know I keep referring to, but it is such an important line of his from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. “Without contraries, there is no progression.” They are not just Romantic in a naive, you know, let’s enjoy the daffodils, Wordsworth, let’s just naively and maybe even sentimentally romanticise looking at a few flowers and you know, et cetera. I think they are much more engaged and much more aware of the massive historical times they’re living in. In England, obviously France and Europe and themselves as individuals. What’s also being, you know, opened up in England after Rousseau, the social contract and the Enlightenment.

There’s some disillusion with the Enlightenment ideas. So it’s English Romanticism and Blake. He is against injustice of all kinds, in particular, slavery, racism, poverty and corruption. And what he and others would’ve seen as institutionalised, organised religion, you know, where it’s all about subservience to a celestial deity as opposed to the belief in the actual content and meaning of the religions. I think that’s really, really important how they respond in all these ways to that. Couple of pictures before we go into a bit more on Blake As we all know, he worked in a printing shop, which he set up, but also he drew an enormous amount. Don’t have time to go to many of the drawings, just one or two. This is one of his drawings, Europe supported by Africa and America. Just to notice, obviously Europe is in the middle and that’s with a pearl necklace around her neck. And then obviously there’s Africa, the darker skinned individual, and then the America on the other side, the lighter skinned young woman and both America and Africa are wearing bracelets. Are they meant to be almost as harnesses or not? Are they echoing chains? You know, what’s he trying to suggest here? And I think he would, from what I can gather in reading about this particular engraving of his, he was trying to find ways to represent equality in his own times. We have to see it through the eyes of his own times that he’s living. We can’t, I don’t think, see it through, or it’s not fair to Blake to see it, you know, how we might in terms of stereotype and contemporary times. I think it’s maybe naive, but it’s a genuine attempt to see an idea of equality for his times.

This is another one of his drawings, of course, the obvious references to religion, God. But what’s also interesting to me is the influences of the sciences, ‘cause these are in a way Renaissance minds. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, they’re interested in science, biology, developments in technology, obviously literature, poetry, Milton, Shakespeare and so many others. But they are, let’s say they are full minds, they are not so specialised as we have today. You know, where one would specialise usually in just one aspect of one thing and follow that all the way. You know, these are minds which are roaming and raging from religion to philosophy, to politics to business, to exploration, to shipbuilding and so on. So the bottom is a sense, a very carefully worked out diagram, you know, of the right angle. So it’s a linking of Newtonian physics, influencing, shall we say, the image of a God. And then of course this is one of his other drawings. And this is interesting because, it’s a hanging from the rib of black slave 'cause he was strongly anti-slavery, Blake. So he’s trying to show it, obviously it’s got, you know, Christian connotations and others of the crucifix, but in a very, very different way. And hangings even, you know, the positioning of the tortured and body in pain and agony and the suffering of the slaves and how the body is twisted and turned in the moment of hanging and killing. So all the time trying to find something, you know, to how to comment on his society and what they’re going through. This is another one of his, “The Ghost of a Flea”, which is meant to be, you know, partly, is that the devil? Isn’t it? Is it just ghostly darker forces, irrational forces in humankind, not only the devil or, is it Caliban from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest?” It’s so many different possible meanings for Blake. I don’t think we can pin it to one. And why the word “flea”, you know, what about it is, you know, suggestive of that, the parasite, the blood sucker, et cetera. You know, is it the devil, isn’t it?

Those are obvious connotations, but I think there are deeper ones which we can play with for a long time. So to give you an idea of this guy’s, what I really want to do through some of these images is an idea of this guy’s imagination and creativity. 'Cause in the end, Blake, for me symbolises three things within the broad Romantic tradition of England at the time of literature and poets. He symbolises a strong individuality, he will not conform to, he’s religious and he’s devoutly religious or strongly religious I should say. But he will not conform to any institutionalised religion. He’s religious in terms of the belief in Christianity. There’s the sense of the individual. There’s secondly, the sheer creativity of the guy. He never stopped being creative, always finding what we might call surrealist or semi-surrealist images and poetry, poetic images and words as much as visual. He’s so creative and I think one of the reasons he’s loved so much today, he’s so creative, so imaginative and individualist and in our very automated, mechanised, I suppose, tending towards, you know, AI under bureaucracy of almost Kafkaesque proportions and bureaucracy and paperwork and endless. He is pushing such a creativity and imagination and individuality. Those are the three qualities I see the most in this guy, William Blake. And I think it’s why he resonates so powerfully today. That sense of the individual speak his mind, say what he wants, paint the pictures, whether he sells or not. The sheer creativity from the visual level to the literary, to his interest in so many of these things that I’ve mentioned and celebration of the imagination. Those three.

And that would tie in to Blake’s reaction to the Enlightenment, which obviously tries to put rationalism and empiricism at the top of the tree. Rationalism and empiricism most important in the Enlightenment, rational way of organising society, human affairs, human relationships, and understanding human interaction on a very personal level as well as a societal level. But what for me, Blake would do is put imagination at the top, and the energy of the passions, you know, rather than rationalism. And I think that distinguishes him from the trajectory of the Enlightenment. There’s an independent spirit ultimately. And I think we can see the artists, we can see entrepreneurs, we can see so many people who go out there, you know, to follow their own path, their vision. I think, you know, in Shelley had the phrase “To free the imagination from reason. That owl winged faculty of calculation.” The owl, the bird, “The owl winged faculty of calculation.” It’s a lovely phrase of Shelley’s from one of his essays that he talks about to free the imagination from rationality. Wordsworth, I think in a sense, has a longing in the poetry for a harmony with nature. Blake has a desire to be free from nature. He wants to see humans as they are in his times. He wants to see the dark foreground, “the dark ground of the passions” as he called it, together with the light of beauty, joy and celebration and happiness. But also the dark. “Without contraries there’s no progression.” There’s always both sides of the coin. Whereas I think Wordsworth is maybe the most nostalgic, possibly of them all. He’s a longing for nature. But I don’t think he’s naive as I’ll come to later. Blake, nature was not his topic, like it was much more with Wordsworth. For Blake, it was the human in society. Very much. Northrop Frye wrote the most interesting book, “Fearful Symmetry” the really interesting and wonderful Canadian scholar on Blake.

And he said, for Blake, “The writer is neither a watcher nor a dreamer. The writer swallows life.” And I think he captures it, Northrop Frye in that phrase about Blake. We can imagine the passion of swallowing, hungry, looking forward, the passions of life everywhere. Blake was largely unrecognised in his own lifetime, which is interesting to know. And of course he’s absolutely huge in our times. A lot of the scholars and other writers of his times considered him mad. And I use that word thoughtfully. Really, they saw him as off his tree and used the word mad 'cause they didn’t quite understand, they couldn’t pigeonhole and fit him anywhere. Because I think of such a strong individualist and imaginative streak. Of course, he has a certain nationalism in the poem “Jerusalem”, which we’ll look at. There’s a certain Romanticism we’ve mentioned, you know, together with these other qualities. He was a committed Christian, but hostile, as I said, to organised institutionalised religion. And of course the French and American revolutions were the two, the pivotal moments of history in these guys’ lives. And of course the disillusion that comes with the reign of terror, even before Napoleon. After his death, at the time of his death, he’d only sold 30 copies of the collection of poems that we know of today called “Songs of Innocence and Experience”. So very few people read him, or even knew he existed. You know, it’s later that he gets taken up so hugely. It’s the authoritarianism of religion that he’s against, not only institutionalised, but the authoritarian.

It’s that sense of an imperial controlling celestial deity. That’s what he’s against. Opposed to the so-called or meant to be loving. You know, as we see in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, the devil is actually the hero who’s rebelling against an imposter type authoritarian deity. And it’s very similar to what I was talking about with Milton in “Paradise Lost” and the role of Satan that Milton saw. So there’s that connection. Milton going back in the 1600s, which they all refer to, of course, you know, these three I’m looking at today. And then of course some example. And his attacks on this institutionalised religion was shocking at the time. It freaked people out in societies as we can imagine over 200 years ago. And you know, we also have just one or two examples. He wrote, you know, the “Proverbs of Hell.” And I’ll just give you one taster as I’m giving you tasters today. This is from Blake. “Prisons are built with stones of law. Brothels are built with bricks of religion.” Imagine writing that, even today. But imagine writing it 200 years ago. I mean it’s so provocative. Together with this individualist streak, to me, what Blake does in the end, which is why I think they called him mad, he designs his own mythology, which is religious, it’s imaginative, it’s poetic, it’s visual. It’s bringing in all these sort of Renaissance qualities, scientific and all these things together. He’s also a printer. So he knows about the business and science of printing, even though he was a very bad businessman. This is what he wrote in “Jerusalem”, one of the great poems, in the essay, sorry, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s system. My business is to create.” And I think that phrase sums it all up. And that’s the spirit, maybe some see Nikolai Tesla, you know, many, many others we can see in different realms of human activity. But it was to create all the time. With Christianity, he also was vehemently against the suppression of natural desires, the passions.

In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, he talks about “energy is called evil. It is from the body. So why is reason called good and only from the soul?” He’s against these simplistic polemic, the simplistic binary set up by certain interpretations of Christianity. He also talks about in “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, “that God will torment man in eternity for following his energies, his passions.” Why is it that the Christian God torments man for eternity because he’s following his passions? Passion for knowledge, passion for learning. Even passion for disobedience. Why? For non-conformity? Why is it a God that has chosen to punish? And his wonderful phrase that I’ve always loved. “Energy is eternal delight.” So memorable. For him, the body is not distinct in a simple polemical way from the soul. The body is an extension of the soul. He wrote, “abstinence sows sand all over. The ruddy limbs and flaming hair, but desire plants beauty there.” It’s desire. Never forget the cover of Bob Dylan’s album “Desire”. It’s desire, it’s the passions for life. It’s Eros. It’s a life-giving energy. So, you know, he also, he wrote essays in favour of free love, critical of marriage laws of his day, against traditional Christian notions where chastity was a virtue, why? Endless questioning which he puts in his poetry. You know, when we’ll look at “The Tyger”, we’ll see. So many of his social political statements, they’re often shown in a mystical, symbolic way in the creativity of his poetry, as we’ll see. Wordsworth, he also had of course visions, which we all know about and painted and wrote, which is one of the reasons he was also called mad.

But interestingly, Wordsworth interestingly wrote about Blake’s visions in this way. I’m quoting. “Blake was mad. But there is something in the madness of this poor man which interests me far more than the sanity of Lord Byron or Walter Scott.” Fascinating Wordsworth, the man of cool detachment, daffodils, the Lake District in England, writing all that sees something else in that so-called insanity of Blake that interests him far more. 1911, the Encyclopaedia Britannica wrote “William Blake, much that he wrote is wanting in the quality of sanity.” 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Jung wrote an interesting little comment about Blake. “Blake is a tantalising study, but his fantasies are an artistic production. They’re not an unconscious process.” Trying to carefully distinguish between Jung’s semi-scientific or scientific approach to the processes of the unconscious. But he’s recognising that as an artistic way of being, you know, the creativity. Of course their influence is so huge. The fifties, the beat poets, the sixties Ginsburg, Dylan, Jim Jarmusch’s fantastic film. Anybody watches it from years ago called “Dead Man”, Music by Neil Young and with a very young Johnny Depp. It’s a remarkable film about America and exploration and conquest and all the rest of it. It’s just brilliant. And one main character is called William Blake. Okay, I’m going to move on to some of the poetry now. And first of all, “Jerusalem”. “And did those feet in ancient times Walk upon England’s mountain green And was the holy lamb of God, On England’s pleasant pastures seen? And did the contenance divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark satanic mills? Bring me my bow of burning gold. Bring me my arrows of desire. Bring me my spear, o clouds unfold. Bring me my chariot of fire. I will not cease from mental fight. Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green and pleasant land.”

One of the great iconic poems of all time that we know only so well. “The dark satanic mills” we can never forget. “Chariots of fire”, we all know the movie, but let’s look at it. It’s that questioning spirit again that I spoke about earlier. “Did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountain Green? Was the Holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen?” He starts questioning, you know, which is questioning Christianity, questioning God, questioning the Bible, religion. Did it actually ever come to this land, to England? Was Jerusalem built here? And then it hits us in the eighth line ‘cause he’s very fond of the four line stanza. In the fourth line it absolutely comes like a knife to the stomach “among these dark satanic mills.” We all know that phrase so well, it’s almost a cliche today, but when you find it in the rhythm, it’s better. People will read it far better than me. But we find that suddenly he punches us in the gut, you know, on the eighth line. And then he changes rhythm completely. Okay, we are in these dark satanic mill, one line, the industrial revolution. What’s coming, what’s going to happen? You know, we can imagine the smog, the smoke, the chimneys. You know, we can imagine the filth, the disease where people are living, you know, lack of sanitation, diseases, everything. “Bring me my bow of burning gold. Bring me my spear.” It’s almost an incantation of rhythm. A calling, you know, but quite different from Biblical type calling. It’s individualist. “I will not cease the mental fight nor shall my sword sleep till we have built,” you know? Yeah. And then the flip. England’s got a green and pleasant land, but there ain’t any kind of Jerusalem.

It’s dark satanic mills. So it’s playing with the contraries. He’s playing with oppositions, of the darkness of daily life. Sociologically, the terrible horrific dark Satanic mills and everything going with the horrors of the industrial revolution. And then there’s the dream with a little bit of Christian influence. But Jerusalem is many metaphors. It’s not only religious, I think. You know, it’s also, it’s bring me my bow, my arrows. It’s got to be a fight to bring in some other, it’s got to be a passionate fight to bring in some kindness, some caring of society, not just exploitation. Okay, I want to go onto “The Chimney Sweeper” 'cause I think this is a really underrated poem and I think it’s so, so good. And there are a couple of ideas from this fantastic book by Camille Paglia, the for me, remarkable, brilliant American feminist writer. And she wrote this book on, she chose, you know, 40 odd of her favourite poems and fascinating insights. “The Chimney Sweeper”. “When my mother died I was very young And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry, weep, weep, weep. So your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep. There’s little Tom Dacre who cried when his head That curled like a lamb’s back was shaved. So I said, hush Tom, never mind it. For when your head’s bare, you know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair. And so he was quiet and that very night As Tom was a sleeping, he had such a sight That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned and Jack Were all of them locked up in coffins of black. And by came an angel who had a bright key, And he opened the coffins and set them all free. And down a green plain leaping, laughing they run and wash in a river and shine in the sun. They’re naked and white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind. And the angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy, he’d have God for his father and never want joy. So Tom awoke and we rose in the dark.

And got with our bags and our brushes to work, though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm. So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.” It’s full of the contraries. It’s full of contradictions. The same theme going all the way through. Play the opposites all the time. Set up the one and subvert it, et cetera. The Romantic writers, you know, would glorify childhood. Some of the lesser writers, not Blake, Wordsworth or these others, Coleridge, as a state of innocence. So this is written in the same year as the French Revolution is taking place. And he combines the Romantic cult of the child with the radical new politics that is happening just across the English channel. It’s a boy sweep, it’s not Blake, who speaks. In the other poem it’s much more Blake that speaks, in “Jerusalem”. So it begins, so Blake shift responsibility onto the miserable life of exploitation, you know, of “when my mother died I was very young”, of the sweeper, the little chimney sweeper boy himself. It’s the little boy speaking to us. So we are not imagining this poem through the poet. The narrator. We are imagining through the little boy. And that changes us completely. The responsibility comes onto us because it’s a little boy’s voice that is meant to be narrating. And he opens immediately. “My mother died when I was very young. My father sold me while yet my tongue.” Sold? Slavery? Chimney sweeper, mother died young, disease, whatever. Two lines, what? We get the undeserved misfortune this little boy’s living in. And of course he says “sweeps”. He’s meant to be saying “could scarcely cry, weep, weep, weep.”

He’s meant to be saying sweep, sweep, sweep. 'cause they would walk around London, “sweep, sweep, sweep,” you know, looking for job, looking for work to earn a penny or two. “So your chimneys I’ll sweep and in soot I’ll sleep.” The rhyme is deceptive. It feels light, but it’s so dark inside it. It’s exploitation made more atrocious. Has he been sold into slavery or not? You know? And of course we imagine these little chimney, these little guys going up these filthy chimneys, getting diseases of lungs, respiratory diseases, deformity of limbs and bones, everything. You know, the health risks huge of such a filthy job. Chronic throat, the lung problems we could imagine. “Sweep, sweep, sweep, they cry.” “weep, weep, weep” is how it came out. And of course it’s weep for the society. It’s weep for London for what’s going on. The dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution. The flip side of it. The other side, of course, is remarkable inventions, remarkable scientific advancement of human society. It’s a thundering indictment of the kind of society that he sees, 'cause again, he’s doing it through the little child. He implicates the reader in everything about the poem. Because again, it comes through that boy’s voice. And that’s such an important, we call it the voice of the narrator and here it is a little boy. And he, the little boy seems to be resigned. And that’s deceptive lightness of tone seems a resigned quality. You know, “There’s little Tom Dacre cried when his head, That curled like a lamb’s back of his”, Christian reference, “was shaved.” His head was shaved? “So I said, hush Tom, never mind it, when your head’s bare, you know, the soot cannot spoil your white hair.” So suddenly age, it’s like a camera zooming right out. And the little boy’s aged, 'cause it’s white hair, it’s not a little boy’s hair. He’s mixing metaphor all the time, Blake.

And the invisible army of chimney sweeper boys running around, filthy, dirty, sick, disease, lungs, everything in that image, you know, “the soot cannot spoil your white hair.” That’s all he talks. So he was quiet that very night. This is the dream. He was sleeping “Such a sight. Thousands of sleepers, all locked in coffins of black.” What an image. You know, you read it and you can’t, you know, you can’t ignore it anymore. And then the dream, what is his dream? Had a key “opened the coffins, set them free.” The dream is just little boys who can run on a green field and laugh and run. That’s it. And wash in a river. That’s the dream of boyhood? That’s the height of boyhood. What’s the poet really trying to tell us here? You know, where are the parents? Sold and dead, or the parents nonexistent. Little kids have to fend for themselves completely. What society have we set up? Is he saying to London of his own time, 200 years ago, what society has been set up that these little kids have to do this firstly, and there’s no hint of a parental role, but there is a parent. There’s the absent boss, there’s God, there’s the Father. So the figures of authority are the figures of control or abandonment. The father, the angel. “If you are a good boy, you have God for your father and never want for anything.” So if you’re a good boy, you behave, okay. But if you don’t, you know what will happen. It’s a classic warning of the authoritarian, whether it’s a God figure, or whether it’s the boss or the overseer or whoever in work and in the job. We obviously have references to the lamb, Christian references. And you know, those are pretty obvious in all of them.

But the poem for me, it’s playful and seems light, but it’s got such a powerful sort of cracking effect to wake us up, from the playfulness of childhood in the light verse to suggest the opposite. It goes horribly wrong. You know? You’ll get your reward in heaven as well. You know, as long as you please God, you do what we tell you. You know, keep going up the chimneys, get sick, die young. Bottom line. And the little kids are optimistic. Little boys grab their bags off they go jaunting, you know, banter and all that. So do your duty and you need fear no harm. Do your duty. Not what’s good for you or right for you as a little kid, but do your duty. Go to work, go to sleep, stay in the workhouse and that’s it. And your deliverance will be death and possibly a one-way ticket to heaven. Okay, that’s “The Chimney Sweeper”. This is from the original. Blake did his own drawings and engravings around it as well. Can see all the colour and the non-color. You know, how he plays in so many different ways. This is so original for his times, for me, I think. And, you know, the visions and a bit of the madness that they accused him of as well. Okay, then I want to look at this poem, “London”. I think it’s quite a neglected poem, but I think it’s so powerful. “I wander thro’ each charter’d street.” Chartered, so chartered is a word of business. To organise, to commercialise. It’s still used today, I’m going to charter the boat, I’m going to charter whatever. “I wander thro’ each charter’d street,” Everything is organised, commercialised, planned. “Near where the charter’d Thames” Even the river is chartered, ‘cause you got all the little ships, well not so little, but the masts of the ships, they’re all, everything commercialised, organised. So the river is even, “where the charter’d Thames does flow, "And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.” You know, we see, from, it’s not the beautiful, you know, rivers and sweet streets and all the rest of it.

It’s very, very different. That’s what I see on people’s faces. “And every cry of every man in every infant’s cry of fear, in every voice, in every ban, the mind forged manacles I hear.” It’s iron grip on the mind. it’s a policing of the mind. It’s gripped like an iron octopus around the brain. You know, you don’t have a choice. You can cry. You can have an infant fear, a voice, you know, you can have marks of woe, but there’s no choice, fit to this massive image of exploitation or die. And then he comes on, he hits us hard. “How the chimney sweepers cry”, back to the chimney sweeper, “Every blackening church appals.” So he moves us out from the chartered streets. He moves us from the ordinary man, the little infant. So it’s not only in business, it now goes into the Church. So all the organs of authority, the state, the Church, business, the Church, “every blackening church appals,” and now the military “And the hapless soldiers sigh Runs in blood down palace walls.” He goes to the top of the tree, to the palace, to royalty, you know, walls of blood. I mean, he takes us, he goes right in. And then I think like a camera zooms right out for a big long shot. We see the whole picture in three verses. “But most through midnight streets I hear How the youthful harlot curse Blasts the newborn infants tear And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.” Of course, the prostitute in the end, everybody’s prostituting themselves. You know, in this period of London at the time, everybody is involved in exploitation. Everybody’s prostituting themselves, selling their soul to the devil in Goethe’s “Faust”, everybody’s making a deal with the devil for money or for status or advancement or power, whatever. That’s what Blake is seeing in London Town, you know, and “Blights with plagues the marriage hearse.”

Marriage, there should be the carriage and celebratory and all of that. What is it? So I think it’s a very different kind of sense of where are the moral values of Christianity? Where are the moral values of a society when this is what you know, he sees. What I also like is that it’s a combination of very visual and very aural type of poetry this. He’s inciting our senses of the visual and the aural through this as well. And of course, the rhythm of the poetry and the deceptive, I suppose almost deceptive seeming simplicity of the rhymes and the lines, but it’s not actually. Then I want to show here “A Poison Tree.” I’m just taking a few lines from some of these others very quickly and we’ll move on to Coleridge. Taster today. “I was angry with my friend. I told my wrath, my wrath did end.” So I was pretty furious with my buddy, told him and okay. “I was angry with my foe. I told it not, my wrath did grow.” It’s almost like a Japanese haiku, this poem. But it burns into our imagination. It crystallises in so few words. Less is more always. So few words, great. I told my friend I was angry. Forgot about it. We carried on living, but I was my foe, which is the hard one, really. My wrath did grow. So what happens, it starts to eat the soul. And that’s the poison tree, obviously going back to the Adam and Eve reference and so on. It starts to eat within, because I didn’t tell my foe, I was pretty pissed off with him or her. So my wrath did grow and started to eat me up from the inside. Well, it’s a play on the Garden of Eden and the tree, he’s inverting, subverting it.

And you know how he’s playing with the God image in that as well. Always the contraries looking for a progression, always, you know, playing the dark and the light, the opposites. “The Little Black Boy.” This is from a longer poem, which is vehemently against slavery. “My mother bore me”, from the imagined voice of a little black child. “My mother bore me in the southern wild”, and the reference obvious, “And I’m black, but oh, my soul is white. White as an angel is the English child. But I am black as if bereaved of light.” I mean, look at the language, the simplicity, apparently, of the four lines. And we get it immediately, you know that he is subverting this simple stereotype of black versus white, superior, inferior of his own time, 200 years ago and slavery. Who’s superior, who’s inferior, the racial prejudice, et cetera. There it is in four lines, but it’s inverted and played with death, light, angels, religion. Bringing it all in to make the reader wake up. And then of course, one of the favourites of all of us. “Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” It’s again, it’s Blake questioning. It’s that questioning, individualist spirit I mentioned right earlier. It’s so powerful in the rhythm of the poem.

Not many poets do it where they play with questions all the time. “In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat. What dread hand? And what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp. Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears” What an image! “And water’d heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Everything, Christianity, God, authority of God, the creator, the maker, you know, originator of everything absolutely thrown into question. “Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye.” So in other words, by making it a question he doesn’t alienate and just make it a simplistic attack on the authority of religion and God. He’s questioning, which provokes us to question, “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Did he who made this make thee? and we can go on and on with so many more. And there’s such a rhythm. You know, I think it’s inspiring. It’s astounding. It’s terrifying. It’s delighting. It gives us a richer sense of life. And that’s what I think Blake also does. Is he naive? I don’t think so. He’s questioning, provoking all the time. It’s creative. And he’s intentionally trying to fire up our blood. The passions that I mentioned earlier, through the rhythm. Challenging us to be individuals and take a risk. Question, ask, find out, whatever. Okay, Mr. Coleridge to go on to.

And I’m just going to look briefly at “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Seeing as there isn’t enough time today, I’ll pick up on Wordsworth maybe next week. We’ll see how it goes. Coleridge, you know, when one reads again “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan” the two main poems that we all know so well, or remember, it’s easy to forget just how strange, how surreal, way before the word surreal even existed, Coleridge and Blake actually was. How captivating, haunting these poems are. Why are so many set at night? I mean, England is going out and conquering the world. The ships are going out. The conquest, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, okay, the reign of terror, Napoleon dictatorship, et cetera. You know, all of this has been happening, but they lead a massive expansion, technological advances, industrial revolution, all this stuff is going on. At the same time, there’s always the dark ground that Blake called it. Why do his external landscapes dissolve into inner dreams? What’s going on with Coleridge here? Before the word psychology is really used, unconscious, all of that, way before. One answer is, of course he was, you know, he was addicted to opium. So is he just a lyrical junkie? Is this all just drug-induced hallucination? Well, let’s look at these two poems. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan”. The one is seemingly mad hallucinations of a paranoid sailor on a ship who stops some guests going to a wedding and he demands that they listen and tell the story. Ridiculous as a premise for a long poem. And the other “Kubla Khan” is of the erotic and sexual fantasies of a Mongolian warlord. I mean, who’s this guy to just choose these two, take a whole lot of opium and write poems that we still read 200 years later.

Coleridge in his own life was incapable of domestic stability. He abandoned his wife, his three kids in 1804, he travelled restlessly for 12 years, worked and lived in Malta, in Sicily, Italy, London, the Lake District in England, London again. If we just say it’s all, you know, drug induced, opium induced. I think it’s a pretty feeble explanation because many others were drug addicts, were and still are, who haven’t produced anything like this. Coleridge is thrown out of university, he’s thrown out of the army. He was discharged under, the word being insane. The same that Blake was accused of. He failed in his careers in journalism, in the Church. Said, what does he do? He met William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy in 1797 and became a poet. Coleridge, like Blake, wanted to explore, to me, the extreme states of mind and feeling. It’s a reaction to the Enlightenment. To the rationalism of the Enlightenment, to empiricism. Science must be put first for society to progress, survive. It’s a reaction for the poets anyway. And explore the dark groundwork of our nature. Fascinated by the way imagination works, same as Blake. Again, same as Blake, it’s the imagination at the top of the tree. Not other human qualities. It was Coleridge who invented the phrase, “It’s a willing suspension of disbelief.” We go to a play, watch a movie, watch a TV piece, even on the internet, whatever. We have a willing suspension of disbelief. It’s Coleridge’s phrase. It’s brilliant and it is used every day in every university or many, so many places around the world 200 years later. For me, poetry for Coleridge, poetry was not about uncontrolled hallucination, it was an act of supreme intention and attention. It’s very different. He wrote a great definition in a letter, definition of poetry in 1802, wrote to a friend, quoting, “A great poet must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert, the eye of a North American Indian, tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest.

And the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child. That’s the poet.” I mean this is complete surrealist, drug induced madness, but brilliant. It’s like Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row.” I don’t know, so many of the others that we can think of 'cause they’re all influenced by these guys. 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume of poetry called “The Lyrical Ballads”, which really in a way became later recognised as the beginning of Romanticism in English poetry and literature in England, 1798. So “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, as I said, they’re on their way, the guests are on their way to a wedding, they want to get to a wedding. And along comes this grizzled sailor, stops them and demands they listen to his story. I mean, it’s a ridiculous premise for the beginning of a really long poem. I’m just going to read a little extracts and talk about them as we go through. “The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea.” Well look at that opening. “We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea.” “White foam flew.” He talks about the ice that the ship encounters, First the ice floats by. This is not from the poem. Then the ice is mast high, then the ice is green as emerald and then the ice morphs into a floating prison. It just jumps and moves. It’s so surreal, before the word surrealism is even thought of. Then back to the poem. “And through the drifts the snowy cliffs Did send a dismal sheen: The ice was all between. The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound!” “It creaked and growled and roared and howled Like noises in a swound”, the ice was all around. It was here, it was there, everywhere. It feels so contemporary, the rhythm, the ice everywhere.

We feel it, we are right inside it with the mariner telling his story. Of course, Coleridge loves repetition and rhyme. “Alone, alone, all alone, alone. Alone on a wide, wide sea.” There’s another phrase, “The sky and the sea. And the sea and the sky lay like a load on my weary eye.” It’s so evocative. It’s I guess almost like a pop song or a jazz song today. You know, it’s making rhyme and rhythm that just burns into our imagination. And of course the famous, famous lines, “Water, water everywhere.” Look at the repetition. It works. “And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink!” I mean here at once it goes in, got the rhyme. We can hum it any time. The vision of the mariner’s helpless vessel. It’s stuck without a wind. What’s his image? Coleridge? “As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.” That’s it, for a ship that’s stuck with no wind. If we think of how far fetched the Mariner’s adventures become, why do we buy into this poem? Why do we buy this story, yet we can’t help be sucked in. There’s something about the rhythm of the language and the poetry. I think he really knows how to write a narrative, how to write a story and tell a story. We are back to ancient storytelling. We’re back to Homer and the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey”, the ancient story, back to Dante of the 1200s and “The Inferno”. We are back to ancient storytelling and rhythms and language and poetry to captivate the audience listening. Listening, not just reading. The main character who recounts everything. Of course, you know, is locked in conversation with us. This is like a demented mariner, demented, grizzled sailor.

Think of Hemingway, “The Old Man and the Sea.” Of course he read this and knew it only too well. W.B. Yeats saw Coleridge as a mystic tormented by his Christianity, tormented by the authority of God and religion. And it’s an unreconciled debate that plays out throughout the poem, that was Yeats’s interpretation, which is interesting, I don’t necessarily agree with it all, but it’s an interesting insight. Is the albatross Christ? Well, who knows? It’s certainly an innocent and it brings hope. The way the mariner must literally wear the sins around the neck. It’s Christian, but it’s also an Eastern idea of karma. You know, wear it around the neck. It’s a shocking moment. So the ship is marooned at sea, there’s no wind. And albatross comes and this mariner shoots the albatross. It’s the one pivotal moment in the whole story. But a whole long poem is written about that, one pivotal moment in just the plot, you know, of the story. It comes out of nowhere, this albatross and it comes as kind. Is it a Christ-Like figure, isn’t it? Is it just, you know, a mythical creature from Homer, the ancient Greeks, whatever, who knows? It comes out of nowhere. The sailor goes against the will of all his shipmates 'cause the shipmates love the albatross. They like it. Picks up a gun and shoots it and then, you know, has to carry it around his neck. They adore it, he’s going against them all. Why? What does this mean in a poem? What does this mean in a story? Well, what are we trying to, what’s this guy trying to tell us? What I think it is, is that we, going back to Blake and the passions and the emotions, the feelings, we need to express our desires. Back to Blake, we need to express desires and passion. See where it leads us.

Not delegate authority to a God above, the celestial, authoritarian deity. And that creates an uncertain moral compass. Because if God does not give us the moral rules of again, of life and society, who does? Who chooses? It’s relativity beginning. It’s an uncertain moral compass of society. Who chooses? Who says what’s right, what’s wrong? Who says what’s the truth? What’s a lie? Who says what’s moral and what’s immoral? If we follow the passions. But if we don’t follow the passions and we just do everything to obey, you know, the authoritarianism of religion and a godlike figure, then what are we? We are caught in that dichotomy. And that’s what Yeats means. We are caught in that eternal battle between, you know, free choice perhaps, and received rules. Follow our passion. And the passion is to kill the albatross. Okay, just want to do it. Take a chance, but there’ll be consequences. And then the mariner has to learn wisdom. The consequences of what he’s done is to learn what it is to become wise in the way that Odysseus has to learn in “The Odyssey” what it is to be cunning, to be wise, to outthink everybody else, in Homer’s great poem. The mariner is compelled. He goes on. “Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched With a woeful agony, Which forced me to begin my tale; And then it left me free. Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: and till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.” I have to tell it. I’m compelled, I can’t stop. People need to tell their tales to rid themselves of the illusion of their lives. We need to tell our stories. The mariner needs to tell the tale of something terrible that he did. He survived, but nobody else did. His shipmates all die. He’s got to tell it, not only to release the guilt and the shame, but he’s got to tell it, so he reminds himself of what he learned and the wisdom so that maybe others can learn as well. It’s a melodramatic voyage to the haunted extremities of the mind. “Heart of Darkness” by Conrad follows similar psychological journey. But of course it’s up a river, it’s not out at sea.

What’s the appeal to the reader? Well, W.H. Auden, Auden wrote about this poem as a traumatic experience is also an opportunity that we’ve been waiting for. So that we see that life actually is a serious matter. Ah, it’s an opportunity, this trauma. Because trauma becomes an opportunity in W.H Auden’s interpretation of the poem. The poem tells of the horror of getting lost at sea, getting lost in life. Thrown drastically off course. We’ve all been thrown off course in life. But it says, not only is this unavoidable that we are all going to get lost in life and got to find our way back to our own purpose and you know, meaning in life. But it’s essential for growth into wisdom. And that, for me, is the ultimate meaning of this remarkable poem. The horror of getting lost in life, on our own voyage of life, thrown off course drastically. Make a decision, which is disastrous, to shoot the albatross or whatever decisions we make. But it’s unavoidable, because we are human. We’re going to make decisions like that. And they are essential for growth and wisdom. Finally, the curse is broken. The albatross drops from the mariners’ neck like lead into the sea. Again, that’s Coleridge creating that phrase “dropped like lead.” Of course, it’s a Romantic path. It’s a Romantic path to salvation, to wisdom, to understanding, to insight, maybe redemption. Like Homer at the end, we are all on a voyage. Everyone who hears the tale needs to depart from listening to the mariner sadder and wiser. And that’s what we can learn from this little poem, this long poem. Same as the ancient Greek, same as, you know, poems in the Bible and elsewhere, I would argue. Okay, I’m going to stop here and I’m going to pick this up for next week. “Kubla Khan” and I’m going to pick up Wordsworth definitely and start with some of Dickens as well. But I just think it’s too rich to not, and this was meant to be a taster and I got a little bit carried away, but at the same time, I think it’s irresistible and how they, for me, echo and resonate and are so contemporary for us in a way, these guys. Okay, so I’m going to hold it here and thank you. And we can take some questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Bernard. I was in the church that Blake was married in last night in St. Mary’s, in Chelsea. Oh, old beautiful church right on the Thames. Fantastic. It was also Turner’s church and Benedict Arnold was buried there. Oh I didn’t know. Interesting, Bernard. Thank you.

Sylvia. This is Blake. God is man and exists in us and we in him, imagination or the human eternal body in every man. Always thought that Blake approaches a cabalistic view, the divinity in man, that’s fascinating. Hope you well and wonderful to hear from you in Buenos Aires and hope you are well there. That’s fascinating, Sylvia. Hadn’t thought of that. the Cabalistic view, could well be.

Dennis, to put Blake in the cultural perspective of his time, born the year after Mozart dies the same year as Beethoven. Fascinating. I love it. Thank you lockdown. Thank you everybody, ‘cause these connections are surrealist and brilliant.

Karen, perhaps in the first drawing by Blake the American is an indigenous American, also enslaved. Hence the darker colour. That’s really interesting 'cause you’re right, Europe is whiter and is the whitest skinned, the American isn’t. Great point.

Karen, Sylvia, the German philosophers. Yeah, and of course these guys went, Coleridge went with Wordsworth to Germany, which I’m going to talk about when I talk about Wordsworth. Coleridge loved it and he went off to university, studied it, he learned German, he translated some German. Wordsworth got homesick and went back to the Lake District, you know, but Coleridge stayed. Yes and the German philosophers were, they were an extraordinary era of just intellectual and poetic. And I guess just an openness and a ravishing of minds.

Avril, Northrop Frye was professor of English at Victoria College, the University of Toronto. My husband was a student in the fifties. Fantastic. So, you know, he wrote that book, “Fearful Symmetry” on Blake. And it’s still for me, one of the best on Blake.

Karen. In the fifties, a British comedy called “The Green Man”, George Cole’s main character is called William Blake. I didn’t know, a vacuum cleaner salesmen. That’s great. Great. I love these satirical, irreverent, you know, playfulness with it.

Q: Mavis. In “The Chimney Sweeper”, is he saying there’s no way to escape from your destiny?

A: I think he’s drawing the analogy from, he’s trying to zoom right in with the little boy and then take, you know, sort of do a large panning shot of the society. And I think he wants to bring in what society do we create when little kids have to do this and suffer in the way they do? And there’s no parental figure in that poem except sort of abstract God, the boss and a dead mother and absent father, there’s no other parental figure.

Ron. No wait, sorry, let me go back here.

Sylvia, “Tyger, tyger”. 12 rhetorical questions make the reader think about the metaphor of a tiger or any living creature or man. He was a genius born. Absolutely. And it’s such a simple and profound device. Turn it into a question. You know, one doesn’t have to make an attacking polemic. One just turns the poetry into a question and immediately everything opens and the poem becomes very different. Bob Dylan does it sometimes. John Lennon and some of the other great for me, you know, use that same device, it’s so powerful.

Sylvia. Coleridge and Blake delved into the unconscious through poetry, anticipating Freud. Yep. I think absolutely. And what we would call maybe the surreal today. Coleridge with the aid of opium. But I don’t think it’s the reason for the poems. Certainly not. Otherwise so many other drug addict, you know, people who have addiction would also be able to write. Ron. Would you not agree that it was mysticism or maybe Christian mysticism which Blake was engaged in contrast to the empiricism of Enlightenment. Yeah, I think all of them were fascinated by mysticism. And I think also with the return of sailors from all different parts of the world, the British empire and sailors and ships going out, you know, we can imagine coming back with endless stories about Africa, about Asia about South America, America, wherever, not only conquest and trade, but stories about creatures and fruits and foods and vegetables and, you know, we can imagine the firing of the imagination, which I think is very similar to Shakespeare’s time. You know, at the cusp of the end of the 1500s, beginning of the 1600s when the very first group of explorers and ships are going out to the new world and new worlds all over, coming back with so many stories. I think it’s an extraordinary opening of the mind time 'cause cultures are opening and exploring and discovering, yes, conquering and colonialism and imperialism, but it’s also, it’s feeding in so many images, ideas, foods, tastes, smells, colours, clothing, people’s culture, everything.

Sankly. Remember that silly Tommy Steele song “Water water everywhere.” Yeah, top of the pops in Joburg. Absolutely. Rita, “The ghost of the flea” is now permanently etched in the dark recesses of my unconscious. Well that very title “The Ghost of the Flea.” I mean, what on earth does it really mean? Does it mean anything? Does it matter? It mobilises our imagination, I think, Rita.

Great point. Gail, thank you. Yeah, I’m definitely going to save the rest of Coleridge. We’ll look at “Kubla Khan” and Wordsworth next week and we’ll start with some Dickens as well. I didn’t want to over. They’re just, these guys are just too rich.

Barbara. Thank you. Thanks. That’s kind.

Della. Blake’s “Jerusalem”. Is he giving credit to high moral code that emanated from Jerusalem? Yeah. Sorry, this is just Katya. Oh, suppose he refers to Jesus, definitely the Christianity without realising that Jesus quotes of course from Judaism. Absolutely. But I think these guys would absolutely know the Old Testament as well as the New Testament. I mean I think they were so, you know, deep inside reading all of it so well. And trying to find their own individual voice within that, 'cause their reaction was to the authoritarianism of it. I think that was the, you know, besides the meaning of, you know, these images of, you know, an apple, the tree, a garden, you know, all that stuff.

Okay, so thank you very much everybody, and hope you have a poetic evening and lovely Sunday everywhere around and have a great time and thank you again. Take care.