The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (No. 66))

THE INVENTION OF EVENING Lyric poetry has long been considered an art form of timelessness, but Romantic poets became ...

Author: Christopher R. Miller

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THE INVENTION OF EVENING

Lyric poetry has long been considered an art form of timelessness, but Romantic poets became fascinated by one period of time above all others: evening, the threshold between day and night. Christopher R. Miller investigates the cultural background of this development in the tradition of evening poetry, which ranges from the idyllic settings of Virgil to the urban twilights of T. S. Eliot, and especially ﬂourished in the works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats. In fresh readings of familiar Romantic poems, Miller shows how evening settings enabled poets to represent the passage of time and to associate it with subtle movements of thought and perception. His investigation leads to new ways of reading canonical works, and of thinking about the kinds of themes which may be evoked by lyric verse. Christopher R. Miller is Associate Professor of English at Yale University.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM

General Editors Professor Marilyn Butler University of Oxford

Professor James Chandler University of Chicago

Editorial Board John Barrell, University of York Paul Hamilton, University of London Mary Jacobus, University of Cambridge Claudia Johnson, Princeton University Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara Susan Manning, University of Edinburgh Jerome McGann, University of Virginia David Simpson, University of California, Davis This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging ﬁelds within English literary studies. From the early 1780s to the early 1830s a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again by what Wordsworth called those ‘‘great national events’’ that were ‘‘almost daily taking place’’: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, industrialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad, and the reform movement at home. This was an enormous ambition, even when it pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion, and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbett and Hazlitt; poetic form, content, and style by the Lake School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of response or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those notions of ‘‘literature’’ and of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern scholarship in English has been founded.The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing ﬁeld of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, this one will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere. For a complete list of titles published see end of book.

William Hogarth, Evening. Reproduced by permission of the British Museum.

THE INVENTION OF EVENING PERCEPTION AND TIME IN ROMANTIC POETRY

CHRISTOPHER R. MILLER

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521123495 © Christopher R. Miller 2006 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2006 Reprinted 2008 This digitally printed version 2009 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Miller, Christopher R., 1968– The invention of evening: perception and time in romantic poetry / Christopher R. Miller. p. cm. – (Cambridge studies in Romanticism; 66) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 13: 978 0 521 86382 7 (hardback) ISBN 10: 0 521 86382 1 (hardback) 1. English poetry – 19th century – History and criticism. 2. Time in literature. 3. Perception in literature. 4. Romanticism – England. 5. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834 – Criticism and interpretation. 6. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850 – Criticism and interpretation. 7. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822 – Criticism and interpretation. 8. Keats, John, 1795–1821 – Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series. PR508.T56M55 2006 821´.040933–dc22 2006011419 ISBN 978-0-521-86382-7 Hardback ISBN 978-0-521-12349-5 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Frontispiece : William Hogarth, Evening

page iv

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction 1 The pre-history of Romantic time 2 Coleridge’s lyric ‘‘moment’’ 3 Wordsworth’s evening voluntaries 4 Shelley’s ‘‘woven hymns of night and day’’ 5 Keats and the ‘‘Luxury of twilight’’ 6 Later inventions

1 14 48 81 112 145 177

Notes Bibliography Index

204 248 259

vii

Acknowledgements

This project began with an attempt to explain the peculiar power of a two-word phrase in the last stanza of Keats’s ode ‘‘To Autumn’’: ‘‘and now.’’ In one grammatical stroke, it seemed to take in the events of the passing season (with the backward glance of its conjunction) and to situate the poem in an ongoing present (with its hovering adverb). And now, over a decade later, it is with the feeling evoked by that cumulative phrase that I wish to thank the people who have meant the most to the writing of this book. I began thinking about the Autumn Ode in a seminar taught by Helen Vendler, and her work – as both generous mentor and exemplary critic – has had a profound inﬂuence on my own. Jim Engell, meanwhile, gave me inexhaustible bibliographic help and advice on all things Coleridgean and Wordsworthian. I would also like to thank my Amherst College professors David Soﬁeld and Bill Pritchard, who taught me modern American and British Romantic poetry, respectively; and Vincent Cheng, who introduced me to the study of lyric (and the pleasures of browsing the Norton Anthology) in a summer school course at the University of Southern California in 1985. I am grateful to my Yale friends and colleagues Leslie Brisman, David Bromwich, Paul Fry, and Sandy Welsh for commenting on various parts of my manuscript in progress; and to Nigel Alderman, Bill Deresiewicz, Ann Gaylin, Pericles Lewis, Tom Otten, Nicole Rice, Elliott Visconsi, and Ruth Bernard Yeazell for their friendship, intellectual company, and encouragement. Gabrielle Starr has been a sympathetic but rigorous reader since graduate school; and I have been fortunate in her friendship and that of her husband, John Harpole. I do not have space enough to acknowledge all of my friends outside of academia, but among them I would like to thank Ted Loos and David Matias in particular. Several people at Cambridge University Press have shepherded this book from the twilight limbo of the manuscript to the daylight of viii

Acknowledgements

ix

publication: Linda Bree, its earliest advocate; Jim Chandler, who supported its publication in the Romanticism series; Maartje Scheltens and Liz Davey, who oversaw its production; Sue Dickinson, who provided meticulous copy-editing; and two anonymous readers, whose comments helped me in revising the introduction and conclusion. My discussion of Anne Finch’s poetry in chapter 1 appeared, in somewhat different form, in Studies in English Literature 45:3 (Summer 2005), 603–23; and I thank the editors for permission to reprint parts of that article here. I am also grateful to the editors of the Journal of English and Germanic Philology for the opportunity to publish my early thoughts on Coleridge’s conversation poems (JEGP 101:4 [October 2002]). This book was begun on a Mellon dissertation fellowship at Harvard and completed on a Morse Junior Faculty fellowship at Yale; and its publication has been assisted by a grant from Yale’s Hilles Fund. The British Library and the Tate Museum gave permission to reproduce Hogarth’s ‘‘Evening’’ and Constable’s ‘‘Church Porch,’’ respectively. Finally, I am grateful for the love and support of my parents, Bob and Karen Miller, my brother Rob, the Friedman family, and my wife Natalie Friedman, with whom conversing I forget all time. Our son Noah was born just as I was making the ﬁnal edits of these pages, and though he cannot take credit or blame for them, he represents to me the ever-present ‘‘now’’ of future readers, and the promise of days and evenings to come.

Introduction

And now let us go out on the terrace, where ‘‘droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,’’ while the evening star ‘‘washes the dusk with silver.’’ At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.

Oscar Wilde, ‘‘The Decay of Lying’’ (1891)1

Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic manifesto is famous for its assertion that painters taught us to see sunsets and fog; but it is no less notable for its parting remark that poets gave us the language of twilight. The evening hour – no longer day and not yet night – has been the preeminent time of lyric utterance since the Romantic era, the period invoked when Wilde’s alter ego Vivian quotes from Blake’s sonnet ‘‘To the Evening Star.’’ An anthology of poems set at this threshold would include, to name only a few, Gray’s ‘‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,’’ Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, Shelley’s ‘‘Adonais,’’ Whitman’s ‘‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,’’ Eliot’s ‘‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’’ Stevens’ ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’’ and Bishop’s ‘‘At the Fishhouses.’’ If, as Wilde says, evening is useful primarily for illustrating the words of poets, it is remarkable that so many poets have found uses for this time of day, above all other times. This book proposes a variety of reasons for why this should be so. It deﬁnes the poetry of evening as a genre through which to articulate several properties of lyric, including the location of a self in an environment, the representation of temporal lapses, the dynamic between the continuous ﬂux of the world and aesthetic closure of poems, and the intersection of private and public forms of time. I study these properties through readings of both canonical and lesser-known Romantic lyrics, as well as their eighteenth-century precursors; and I conclude by tracing new inﬂections of twilight in Victorian and early twentieth-century poetry. As a genre of temporal experience, evening is, like all genres, diffuse around the edges – descending from afternoon, deepening into night. As a literary 1

2

The Invention of Evening

kind, however, the poetry of evening has a distinctly recognizable set of family resemblances: key-words, symbolic sites, presiding spirits and deities, moralizations, perceptual plots, and so forth. It will be the work of this book to identify these afﬁnities and the poetic dialogue in which they participate: on the nature of the poet’s work in relation to other forms of labor and recreation in the world, on the apprehension of time’s passage and the temporal dimension of art, on historical change, on experiences of the beautiful and the ordinary, on pastoral nostalgia and urban realities. The implication of Wilde’s remark is that evening is not simply a given and immutable fact but rather a poetic invention; and I mean this word in both its common sense and its deeper etymology, both the deliberateness of formal creation and the serendipity of coming upon or ﬁnding. Evening, that is to say, is a natural phenomenon that had to be discovered, named, and valued – as occasion of beauty, as moment of pastoral calm, as time of religious observance, as end of a day’s work. The conclusion of Wilde’s essay nicely illustrates this point: the coming of twilight is represented as an interruption, a natural event that supervenes upon a conversation about artiﬁce; but it is also a deliberate gesture with a literary history behind it. Indeed, Vivian ends the dialogue with his friend Cyril in the manner of Virgil’s Eclogues, a locus classicus of evening poetry: he remarks that day has passed into dusk while the pair were deep in conversation. The innovation of the Eclogues, as Erwin Panofsky once observed, was to represent an ordinary diurnal event as both a pretext for ending and as a moment worth lingering over.2 In essence, Wilde’s dialogue represents an Edwardian version of the Virgilian colloquy: it begins in the otium of afternoon (when shepherds retreat from the heat and have conversations and singing-contests) and ends at twilight (when they must fold their ﬂocks and head home).3 Since Cyril begins by urging Vivian to stop reading and enjoy the afternoon al fresco, it is apt that when the latter ﬁnally agrees to go outside, he ﬁguratively carries his poetry with him.4 Wilde refers, without historical speciﬁcity, to ‘‘the poets,’’ but Virginia Woolf more speciﬁcally identiﬁes evening as a recent invention. In a witty digression on Renaissance iconography, she notes in Orlando (1928) that this time of day was not sufﬁciently appreciated by the Elizabethan world in which her narrative begins: The brilliant amorous day was divided as sheerly from night as land from water. Sunsets were redder and more intense; dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our crepuscular half-lights and lingering twilights they knew nothing. The rain fell vehemently, or not at all. The sun blazed or there was darkness. Translating

Introduction

3

this to the spiritual regions as their wont is, the poets sang beautifully how roses fade and petals fall. The moment is brief, they sang; the moment is over; one long night is slept by all.5

This is a signiﬁcant mimetic shift – a change that we can see in comparing two well-known sonnets, two centuries apart. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, twilight serves as a trope for the penultimate and transitory: ‘‘In me thou seest the twilight of such day, / As after sunset fadeth in the west, / Which by and by black night doth take away, / Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest’’ (5–8).6 In Wordsworth’s sonnet, ‘‘It is a beauteous evening,’’ on the other hand, this moment becomes an occasion of utterance – directly perceived rather than metaphorically invoked.7 The present-tense experience of evening is virtually unheard of in Elizabethan lyric, with the notable exception of Spenser’s ‘‘Epithalamion,’’ in which the eager bridegroom marks the passage of time as he awaits the arrival of his beloved. While Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote sonnets about time and mutability, Wordsworth and his predecessors in the eighteenthcentury sonnet revival often situated themselves in a particular time; and the impersonal construction of Wordsworth’s opening declarative, ‘‘It is’’ – common to expressions of time and weather – reﬂects this change.8 Under Northrop Frye’s archetypal terms, Wordsworth’s sonnet typiﬁes the eighteenth-century era of ‘‘Sensibility’’ and its new emphasis on ‘‘process’’ rather than ‘‘product’’; it takes part in a literature that represents its own ﬂuid conditions of becoming, as in the epistolary mode of Richardson’s novels, the digressive and self-referential frolics of Tristram Shandy, and the time- and space-speciﬁc tours of landscape poetry.9 In terms of cultural rather than speciﬁcally literary change, Wordsworth’s solemnized setting can also be read as a nostalgic reaction against the secularization of time, in which the canonical hours of prayer gave way to the clock-reckoning of modernity. The de-sanctiﬁcation of time long predates Wordsworth’s poem, of course, but it was registered with particular acuity in the Romantic era. Two brief examples will illustrate this point. In his Letters from England (1807), Robert Southey, posing as a Spanish visitor by the name of Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, remarked on the absence of holy markers in everyday English life. ‘‘Here are no vespers to unite a whole kingdom at one time in one feeling of devotion,’’ the homesick Don reports, and ‘‘if bells are heard, it is because bellringing is the popular music.’’10 Percy Shelley makes a similar observation in the guise of a visitor to Italy in his conversation poem ‘‘Julian and Maddalo.’’ The two titular characters – thinly veiled alter egos of the poet and his friend Byron – have a conversation while a vesper-bell calls the

4

The Invention of Evening

inmates of a Venetian madhouse to evening prayer. Their act of passive listening marks the two as outsiders (non-Catholics and non-believers), but in metaphorical terms, the bell also tolls for them. In Maddalo’s improvised psychomachia, the knell of parting day becomes a mental vespers calling believers and skeptics alike: ‘‘the soul, / Hung in a heavenillumined tower, must toll / Our thoughts and our desires to meet below / Round the rent heart and pray’’ (123–6).11 By situating a lyric at evening, the poet often self-consciously articulates the strangeness of his or her vocation in relation to other ways of being in the world: while other people’s work is ending, the poet’s has just begun. The writing of poetry is fundamentally an invisible, mental form of labor, and evening constitutes a temporal marker of that work – a crux between experience and reﬂection, and between the self and the world of ongoing events. Milton’s Penseroso, who conceives of poetic apprenticeship as an inspired insomnia while the rest of the world sleeps, is the archetypal ﬁgure for this kind of temporal reckoning, and his descendants include Gray’s churchyard elegist (who disregards the curfew-bell while weary villagers heed it), Cowper’s sofa-bound philosopher, Smith’s melancholy wanderer, and Wordsworth’s alter ego William, who in ‘‘The Tables Turned’’ urges his studious friend to come outdoors to enjoy the ‘‘ﬁrst sweet evening yellow.’’ Wordsworth’s invitation is hardly the naı¨ve escape from culture into nature that it purports to be. Eighteenth-century poets had long drawn on the descriptive and temporal vocabulary of Paradise Lost; and as Dustin Grifﬁn has noted, Milton’s twilight set-pieces were widely imitated.12 Moreover, Wordsworth’s evening walk had already been copiously mapped by the eighteenth-century discourse of the Picturesque in painting, amateur sketching, and locodescriptive poetry. In essence, the Picturesque promoted a way of viewing the natural world as site of connoisseurship, in which material things (hills, trees) and ephemeral phenomena (clouds, sunsets) became aesthetic experiences subject to rubrics and critiques. In the most practical terms, the end of the day, with its softened light and lengthened shadows, was considered the best time for drawing or painting landscapes. Evening was also symbolically signiﬁcant as a genre of time and human experience. As one of the four compass-points of the day, it has an iconographic history stretching back to classical Greece and Rome; and, as art historian Sean Shesgreen has noted, the allegorical representation of these times enjoyed a revival in Dutch and Flemish points du jour of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which depicted typical activities

Introduction

5

and offered verse inscriptions on mortality, transience, and the cycle of labor and rest.13 In these images, Evening is often represented by a pastoral scene and presided over by Hesperus, the grandfather of the Hesperides – quasi-deities who live in the perpetual twilight of the West, guarding the Isles of the Blessed and their inaccessible apples. Invoked in Virgil’s Eclogues as a herald and arch-shepherd, Hesperus is traditionally represented as a herdsman. In the eighteenth century, however, the mythological apparatus of deities and the generic conventions of pastoral were targets of satire; and when Hogarth undertook a points du jour series in The Four Times of the Day (1738), he chose pointedly urban settings and represented the temporal divinities as ordinary Londoners. In his ‘‘Evening,’’ home-bound shepherds are replaced by a bedraggled family (husband, wife, baby, and two quarrelsome children) returning from a hot summer day of grimly determined recreation at Sadler’s Wells – a suburban pleasure-ground that falls decidedly short of an Arcadian idyll.14 The prose equivalent of this scene can be found in the work of Hogarth’s friend Henry Fielding, who frequently deﬂates a grandiose temporal description with a comic translation, as in this passage from Joseph Andrews (1742): Now the rake Hesperus had called for his breeches, and having well rubbed his drowsy eyes, prepared to dress himself for all night; by whose example his brother rakes on earth likewise leave those beds, in which they had slept away the day. Now Thetis the good housewife began to put on the pot in order to regale the good man Phoebus, after his daily labours were over. In vulgar language, it was evening when Joseph attended his lady’s orders.15

Long before Wordsworth disavowed ‘‘poetic diction,’’ Fielding was making fun of it in his novels. Even before the announced drop into the demotic, the ‘‘vulgar’’ has made its presence known, in the depiction of Hesperus as rake, a foil to the homebody Phoebus and the nuptial god Hymen, who lights the way to the marriage-chamber of newlyweds. Fielding’s set-piece – mock-epic in its analogical prolixity and mockpastoral in its replacement of the bucolic with the urbane – exempliﬁes a satirical or anti-idyllic strain in the evening tradition that I will be tracing in the following chapters, particularly in the last. While evening has been represented in painting as a discrete time of day, it has been valued in the temporal art of poetry as a process, a participle as well as a noun: derived from the Old English verb aefnian, the word denotes the coming of even. (‘‘Even,’’ which survives in such words as ‘‘eventide’’ and ‘‘evensong,’’ is cognate with the Modern German Abend.) The older, participial sense of the word has become obsolete in

6

The Invention of Evening

common usage, but it has had a kind of twilight afterlife in lyric poetry. The etymology of ‘‘twilight’’ is itself instructive: the preﬁx ‘‘twi’’ denotes two-ness (the phenomenon of both dawn and evening skies), but as the OED suggests, it might also indicate the tween-ness of this intermediate period. The poetry of evening overlaps with the poetry of night, of course, but I mean to preserve a fundamental distinction between the two. A nightpoem such as Donne’s ‘‘Nocturnal upon St. Lucies Day’’ is set in the dark middle of things, a moment in which time seems to stand still; in contrast, its counterpart in the Romantic era, Coleridge’s Dejection Ode, is set at the cusp between day and night, and the lapse of time is registered in signiﬁcant ways.16 Evening represents the transitional, and the frequent ‘‘now’’ of evening poetry is not so much a single moment as a passage, a ﬂowing of past into present: Collins’ ‘‘Now air is hushed,’’ Cowper’s ‘‘Now stir the ﬁre’’; Wordsworth’s ‘‘And now . . . the picture of the mind revives again’’; Keats’s ‘‘And now with treble soft / The red-breast whistles’’; Eliot’s ‘‘And now the lighting of the lamps.’’17 By studying the temporal form of evening poems, I offer a corollary to M. H. Abrams’ inﬂuential spatial model of the ‘‘greater Romantic lyric.’’ In Abrams’ narrative of poetic evolution, the potentially endless line of eighteenth-century topographical poetry was turned into a compact circle: the speaker of such poems as ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ and ‘‘Frost at Midnight’’ begins in a speciﬁc place, ‘‘departs’’ through memory or imagination, and ‘‘returns’’ to the establishing scene with changed awareness of his place in the world.18 Abrams’ identiﬁcation of this procedure helps us to see certain Romantic poems as solving the aesthetic problem of landscape poetry that Samuel Johnson called a ‘‘want of method’’ – that is, the failure to give coherent narrative and perceptual order to ‘‘appearances subsisting all at once.’’19 As Abrams suggests, Wordsworth and Coleridge solved this problem by internalizing the locodescriptive idiom as a mental movement. Such a virtual excursion frequently has a temporal dimension, and this has everything to do with how and why the speaker returns to the opening scene. In ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,’’ for instance, Coleridge’s vicarious walking-tour takes place in the lapse of afternoon into evening; and in ‘‘Tintern Abbey,’’ Wordsworth traverses an internally imagined span of time, from the afternoon of his opening salutation to the imaginary moonlight of his prayer for his sister. Through Abrams’ helpful rubric, we can see that in ‘‘Fears in Solitude,’’ for instance, Coleridge does ‘‘return’’ at the end, but this form of closure is motivated partly by the natural and symbolic fact that it is getting dark. The notion

Introduction

7

of the greater Romantic lyric, as Abrams’ honoriﬁc suggests, applies to only a handful of exemplary lyrics; and by articulating a poetics of evening, I wish to offer a way of understanding the afﬁnities between poems that ﬁt Abrams’ rubric (such as Coleridge’s conversation poems) and poems that do not (such as Keats’s Autumn Ode), and between canonical Romantic lyrics and their predecessors. Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘‘chronotope’’ gives us a helpful way of thinking about evening as a temporal form and about the relation between lyric and narrative. In Bakhtin’s deﬁnition, the chronotope is a hybrid form of ‘‘space-time,’’ a place in a story (such as a road or a parlor) in which time is made palpable.20 Though he applies this term primarily to novels, Bakhtin allows its relevance to lyric, particularly in reference to what he calls the ‘‘bucolic-pastoral-idyllic’’ chronotope – a feature common to both poems and novels of the eighteenth century, when ‘‘the problem of time in literature was posed with particular intensity.’’21 Bakhtin pays more attention to topos than chronos; that is, he identiﬁes certain characteristic sites of narrative action (the parlor, the roadway) but has little to say about the speciﬁc time in which action transpires. In the realm of lyric, however, I wish to focus on the other side of the equation – the time (and even duration) of poetic utterance more than the spot in which it takes place. I call evening a chronotope for several reasons: it is associated with typical spatial sites, including the bower, the hilltop, the ﬁeld, the graveyard, and the shoreline; it is a literary topos originating in pastoral and epithalamium; and it is a liminal period in which a lapse of time becomes acutely perceptible. In traditional ideas of genre, time is the medium of narrative, whether dramatic, epic, or novelistic; and timelessness – a suspension or pause – is the condition of lyric. I propose, however, to show how evening poetry registers increments and lapses of time; and in this way, I offer a set of qualiﬁcations to the general claims about lyric made by Sharon Cameron in Lyric Time. Cameron proposes that if plot is the soul of Aristotelian tragedy, the moment is the soul of lyric.22 There is a fundamental truth to this statement, but it more accurately applies to the main subject of Cameron’s study – the poems of Emily Dickinson, with their frequently expressed desire to escape or nullify earthly temporality – than to those of Dickinson’s predecessors. I wish to show that the temporal features that Paul Ricoeur attributes to narrative – the Augustinian dialectic of expectation, memory, and attention, and the Heideggerian sense of being-in-time – can be equally ascribed to the Romantic lyric.23 Indeed, in a revealing aside, Cameron acknowledges that ‘‘Romantics often frame

8

The Invention of Evening

their lyrics in narrative settings,’’ and thus demonstrate ‘‘a resistance to full temporal disembodiment’’ (217). This can be stated more forcefully: not only did the Romantics resist ‘‘full temporal disembodiment,’’ they signally registered temporality – the movement of speech and thought, the Heraclitean ﬂow of the world. The exception noted by Cameron was addressed by Paul de Man in his famous commentary on Wordsworth’s Lucy poem, ‘‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.’’ In de Man’s reading, a timeless realization – the poet’s knowledge of mortality – is formally extended ‘‘along the axis of an imaginary time.’’24 A single moment is elaborated, as if in stop-action photography, as a grammatical shift from past (‘‘A slumber did my spirit seal’’) to present (‘‘No motion has she now’’). Countering a perceived tendency among critics to value symbol (atemporal fusion of subject and object) over allegory (temporal sequence), de Man asserts that the poem is not so much a verbal icon as a formal construction of thought. The iconic brevity of Wordsworth’s two-stanza poem makes de Man’s claims about lyric time particularly striking; but I will argue that these claims can also be applied to Coleridge’s conversation poems, whose dynamic evening settings reﬂect the temporality of thought and utterance, and to the poems of Shelley and Keats that follow in their wake.25 The subject of evening poetry has received fairly scant attention in Romantic criticism, with the notable exception of two essays by Geoffrey Hartman: one on the ‘‘ﬁckle and minor genre’’ of the evening-star poem; and the other on the ‘‘Hesperian’’ mode of Collins’ ‘‘Ode to Evening’’ and its successor, Keats’s ode ‘‘To Autumn,’’ which depart from the rhetoric and procedure of the sublime Pindaric ode or cultic hymn. In Hartman’s reading, evening in these two odes represents a poetic ‘‘ideology’’ of the calmly descriptive over the feverishly epiphanic, the gradual over the sudden.26 I wish to extend the reach of Hartman’s ﬁndings by aligning this ideology with a popular nocturnal sensibility associated with the sonnet revival of the 1780s and 90s (what is understood, in terms of literary periodization, as Sensibility, tout court); and by tracing a poetic lineage that runs from Virgil’s Eclogues to Wallace Stevens’ ‘‘The Man on the Dump’’ and beyond – that is to say, from the time when evening is poetically discovered as formal principle and aesthetic experience to a historical moment when it is acknowledged as an outworn but still useful setting and trope. Every poem, as T. S. Eliot argued in ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’’ changes the tradition in which it participates; likewise, every new genre-name or formal description ought to effect a similar realignment.

Introduction

9

This book seeks to accomplish that task in the ﬁrst chapter by tracing a poetic genealogy from the closural moments of Virgilian pastoral, to the descriptive set-pieces of Paradise Lost, to lyrical elaborations of those scenes in the eighteenth-century works of such poets as Finch, Gray, Collins, Cowper, Smith, Bowles, and Blake. In the next four chapters, I show how a poetics of evening is elaborated in the work of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats; and in this way, I describe several important afﬁnities among them. For the most part, my discussion follows the chronology of each poet’s career, both to show how each begins by borrowing the nocturnal idiom of his predecessors, and to examine the ways in which each revisits archetypal twilight settings in their later work – Coleridge in the Dejection Ode, Wordsworth in the ‘‘Evening Voluntaries,’’ Shelley in ‘‘Adonais,’’ Keats in ‘‘To Autumn’’ and ‘‘The Day is Gone.’’ The question of why evening became the emblematic time of lyric can be answered, as I have suggested, with reference to large-scale historical and cultural changes: the secularization of canonical time and its metaphorical afterlife in poetry; the emergence of the poet as independent artist who deﬁnes his or her use of that time in relation to other, simultaneous activities in the world; the obsolescence of the curfew, and the attendant valuation of evening as a moment for tarrying rather than for seeking domestic safety; the aesthetic discourse and fashion of the Picturesque. These factors are important for establishing a background for this literary tradition, but I intend mainly to pursue the question of ‘‘Why evening?’’ by studying the deliberate uses that poets made of it, and the formal shapings that it enabled. The poetic uses of evening, in all their variety and complexity, will be explored in the chapters to follow, but they can be brieﬂy summarized here. Evening serves as an occasion of perceptual adjustment, in which the faculty of vision yields to aural acuity and imaginative fancy or introspection; as an interval in which time – particularly the temporality of thought and utterance – is intensely felt and recorded; as a threshold of pastoral closure to be observed or exceeded; as a conventional site of beauty (the picturesque) and sensibility (the meditative or melancholy); as a time of both subtle change (in the phenomenal world) and stasis (in the poet’s desire to linger); as a narrative crux between the day just passed and the ‘‘now’’ of lyric attention; and as a moment in which poetic reﬂection becomes a tertiary act between secular rest and sacred worship. Studies of British Romanticism of the past two decades have typically posed their questions with reference to political, social, and intellectual

10

The Invention of Evening

history. While this book makes reference to these currents, it is more fundamentally concerned with what might be called a small lyric quantum of history – the moment in which a poet registers his or her own temporality and historicity, thinks about the artistic representation of time, imagines the ongoing events of the world. In its early phase, the turn to History was often announced as a corrective to or replacement of strictly literary or formalist inquiry.27 The ardor of that announcement has long since cooled, but it is nevertheless worth stating my book’s implicit polemic: a claim that questions of form, genre, literary tradition, and aesthetic ambition continue to be worth asking; an assertion of the continuing vitality of (for lack of a better term) close reading; a demonstration of the premise that poems, as Wallace Stevens once said, are made out of other poems; a reminder that not all interpretive questions can be helpfully answered with reference to historical events or contexts – that poetry (and the dialogue among poems) itself constitutes a discourse that cannot always be adequately explained with reference to other discourses. My approach to form in Romantic poetry responds, in complementary ways, to Stuart Curran’s Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986) and Susan Wolfson’s Formal Charges (1997).28 Against the notion that Romantic poets were ‘‘anti-form,’’ Curran shows how they adapted preexisting models (including the sonnet, the pastoral, and the romance). Following Curran’s analysis of Romantic pastoral as representational topic (the life of shepherds or rustics) and as symbolic space (the idyllic retreat), I focus on the pastoral construction of time, speciﬁcally the interval from afternoon to evening, in which the duration of labor, thought, and utterance is manifested. Wolfson, meanwhile, has shown, in the wake of New Historicist challenges, how formalist inquiry continues to be an indispensable critical practice. In essence, she does so by offering models of how it can be done – illuminating the thematic and biographical signiﬁcance of such formal matters as Coleridge’s use of simile and Keats’s vexed engagement with sonnet structure. As Wolfson’s study reafﬁrms, studies of form and context ought peacefully to coexist and intersect.29 Indeed, to study the form of evening poems, particularly their capacity to represent time and perceptual ﬂux, is to see how this form is implicated in biographical or historical narratives. Wordsworth’s ‘‘Beauteous Evening’’ sonnet is a case in point. When we read this poem under the thematic and formal headings of ‘‘landscape’’ and ‘‘sonnet’’ we see the familiar Petrarchan volta animating a movement from the descriptive to

Introduction

11

the personal; but when we recognize it as an evening poem we see how Wordsworth adapts a stock descriptive idiom to a speciﬁc historical context. The underlying occasion is Wordsworth’s 1802 reunion with his French lover Annette Vallon and their daughter in Calais, but this event is framed (or veiled) by a thoroughly familiar mise-en-sce`ne borrowed from the poetry of Sensibility – namely, a shoreline at dusk: It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquillity; The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea: Listen! the mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder – everlastingly. Dear Child! dear Girl! That walkest with me here, If thou appear untouch’d by solemn thought, Thy nature is not therefore less divine: Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year; And worshipp’st at the Temple’s inner shrine, God being with thee when we know it not.30

The poem’s incantatory adjectives – ‘‘beauteous,’’ ‘‘calm,’’ ‘‘free,’’ ‘‘holy,’’ ‘‘quiet’’ – summarize the range of meaning that had accrued to evening in eighteenth-century poetry and aesthetics. In the terms of the Picturesque, it is inherently ‘‘beauteous’’; and in the poetic vocabulary of Sensibility, it is typically ‘‘calm’’ and ‘‘free’’ in implicit contrast with prior states of turmoil or constraint. The speakers of eighteenth-century evening poems are typically ‘‘free’’ to wander and reﬂect, but that adjective had a complex meaning for an Englishman visiting France during the Peace of Amiens. Evening thus represents a pause within a larger narrative: in historical terms, it is the respite of a truce writ small; and in personal terms, it signiﬁes the brevity of Wordsworth’s visit. In the poet’s turn to address his young daughter, the typical act of adjusting one’s vision to gathering dusk gains new poignancy: it results not only in a more acute sense of sounds but also in a startling acknowledgement of another person’s presence. The acts of hearing the ‘‘mighty Being’’ and seeing the ‘‘dear Girl’’ are intertwined; and in Wordsworth’s uneasy, providential rationalization, the former must ultimately watch over the latter. By marking the time as both inherently ‘‘holy’’ and ﬁguratively ‘‘quiet as a Nun,’’ Wordsworth registers the religious signiﬁcance of Vespers (rendered obsolete in post-revolutionary France) even as he asserts his

12

The Invention of Evening

own secular prerogative to declare this moment holy – that is, separated from the rest of the day. In this temporal observance, Wordsworth also implies the theological signiﬁcance of evening as a sabbatarian time. This meaning is intimated in the heaven that ‘‘broods o’er the Sea,’’ in echo of Milton’s trope for the creative agency of God that ‘‘Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss’’ (PL 1.21).31 Wordsworth’s evening thus recalls the Genesis account of Creation, in which God parts light from darkness and so creates the earthly day, which begins at evening (‘‘So evening came, and morning came; it was the ﬁrst day’’). In the traditional Jewish structure of time, the weekly commemoration of God’s rest begins at Erev Shabbat – ‘‘erev,’’ like the English ‘‘eve,’’ indicating both a discrete time and a penultimate moment, and ‘‘shabbat’’ literally meaning ‘‘cessation.’’32 Wordsworth’s sonnet, then, observes a kind of cessation (of work or travel) the better to register the unceasing movements of the world. An evening setting thus thematizes the rest implicit in lyric utterance, the act of thinking or speaking rather than engaging in other forms of activity. By studying the poetics of evening, I hope to make several contributions to the critical discourse on Romantic poetry and the mimetic capacities of lyric: to elaborate on the notion of a ‘‘Hesperian’’ ethos as deﬁned by Geoffrey Hartman; to identify a temporal dimension to the ‘‘greater Romantic lyric,’’ and thereby complicate M. H. Abrams’ classiﬁcation; to extend the reach of Dustin Grifﬁn’s remarks on the inﬂuence of Paradise Lost and ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ on a later nocturnal mode; to suggest, following Paul de Man’s characterization of allegory, the ways in which lyric can be read in narrative terms; to propose, in light of Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s classic study of poetic closure, further ways of thinking about the shape and telos of lyric poetry33; to describe, following Marshall Brown’s study of ‘‘preromanticism,’’ a continuum of lyric topos and idiom from mid-eighteenth-century to high Romantic lyric – to see, in other words, vestiges of Sensibility in the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats34; and to extend Stuart Curran’s study of Romantic appropriations of genre by identifying a persistent pastoral trope in lyrics that would not be generically classiﬁed as pastoral. As I have begun to suggest, evening is a dialectical phenomenon – poetically measured as a transition from diurnal to nocturnal activities and perceptions, as a contrast between poetic composition and other forms of work, as a slippage between a pastoral ideal of beauty and tranquility and the actual conditions of thought and utterance. The depictions of evening scenes in Hogarth and Fielding exemplify such a

Introduction

13

dialectic, in that they translate a pastoral and mythological topos into distinctly urban and modern contexts; and they depend on the knowledgeable viewer’s or reader’s appreciation of the interplay between pastoral ideal and urban reality. After the Romantic era, this Augustan anti-pastoral strain returned with particular intensity; and what had traditionally been an affair of the countryside was often displaced to the city. As Wilde’s and Woolf’s comments suggest, evening had become, by the dawn of the twentieth century, a familiar literary genre of experience – an eminently poetical setting and idea, and even a bit of a cliche´. In my ﬁnal chapter I offer case-studies in post-Romantic evening poetry – exemplary lyrics by Tennyson, Eliot, and Stevens. Evening remains an occasion of beauty, but it is often self-consciously recognized (and even mocked) as such. Wordsworth declares, ‘‘It is a beauteous evening,’’ without a hint of anxiety about borrowing a poetic convention, as if none had lived before him; but his successors could not recapitulate this moment with the same originary serenity. Eliot’s famous opening sally in ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’’ might be considered the quintessential twentieth-century rewriting of Wordsworth’s sonnet: in its pointed juxtaposition of sunset and operating table in an emblem of recumbency, it vehemently sets out to make evening new. The parodic twilight lyricism of Eliot’s early poems can be contrasted with Stevens’ more thoroughgoing effort of reinvention. I read ‘‘The Man on the Dump’’ and ‘‘Evening without Angels’’ as key texts in this effort – a poetic reimagination of what it might be to say that evening is, in Wordsworth’s terms, both ‘‘beauteous’’ and ‘‘holy.’’ I conclude this book by reading ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’’ as a version of the greater Romantic lyric with afﬁnities to an earlier temporal poetics. It is through an understanding of earlier forms of lyric time that we can appreciate what Stevens means by taking an ‘‘ordinary’’ evening as his theme; and it is in acquainting ourselves with Stevens’ engagement with his poetic predecessors that we perceive the poignancy of the late epithalamic address to an interior paramour in which making a mental ‘‘dwelling in the evening air’’ is pronounced, with ineffable poise, ‘‘enough.’’

chapter 1

The pre-history of Romantic time

In 1746, William Collins and Joseph Warton each wrote odes to evening, which they intended to publish in the same volume.1 Of the two lyrics, only Collins’ is remembered and anthologized today, but the joint nature of these poets’ efforts – parallel hymns to a single time of day – is nevertheless a notable fact of literary history. By late century, many other poets had joined the chorus: William Cowper devoted the fourth book of The Task (1785) to describing a winter evening; Charlotte Smith, William Lisle Bowles, and other poets of Sensibility wrote numerous twilight sonnets in the 1780s and 90s; a Cambridge undergraduate named William Wordsworth composed a long topographical excursion entitled An Evening Walk (eventually published in 1793); and in 1796, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had been a few years behind Wordsworth at university and admired An Evening Walk, published a volume of poetry inspired by the pensive nocturnal settings of his predecessors. Evening became the emblematic time of lyric utterance in the eighteenth century, and it will be the work of this chapter to suggest how this came about. What did it mean for Collins and Warton to write odes to Evening? I wish to begin by suggesting that to offer a hymn to Evening was to make a statement of poetic vocation – to describe what Collins called ‘‘the Poetical Character.’’ At the end of the day, when other people have ﬁnished their work, the poet self-consciously announces the beginning of a different kind of labor – the invisible and silent activities of listening, watching, and thinking – all expressed in the trope of receiving the presiding deity’s tutelage. Of course, as James Thomson’s popular poem The Seasons had demonstrated in abundant meteorological detail, any time of day at any phase of the turning year was worthy of descriptive attention. What made evening special to Collins and others, however, was that its liminality crystallized an idea of the ephemeral, the peculiarity of a momentary lyric utterance. For Thomson, all times pleased alike; but for Collins, the deﬁning poetic gesture was to choose one above all others, 14

The pre-history of Romantic time

15

and then to personify that time as a ﬂeeting female muse who might stand still long enough to be captured in language. In essence, evening in eighteenth-century poetry became an aesthetic occasion, as Kant deﬁned the word in his Critique of Judgment – that is, a sensory experience that informs or underlies a cognitive idea of beauty or pleasure. It was also often hallowed as a quasi-religious moment: a time of solitary meditation instead of orthodox prayer; a typological reminder of God’s separation of light from darkness; an occasion for reﬂection on the shortness of human days; a sabbatarian pause. As Joseph Addison remarked in one of his essays on ‘‘The Pleasures of the Imagination,’’ an important component of beauty is the pleasure of variety or change, and evening is a perfect illustration of the principle: ‘‘We no where meet a more glorious or pleasing Show in Nature, than what appears in the Heavens at the rising and setting of the Sun.’’2 Not only ‘‘pleasing’’ but also empirically engaging: evening aptly demonstrated the color-spectrum of Newtonian optics, as Thomson suggests in his ‘‘Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton.’’ Here, the poet spends an evening on Greenwich Hill in order to afﬁrm, at sunset, ‘‘How just, how beauteous the Refractive Law’’(124).3 For Thomson and others, the ideas implicit in this time of day were beautiful as well as true, divinely given and humanly perceived. Evening also became the locus of a new artistic attention to the phenomenal world, in the theory and practice of the Picturesque. In his inﬂuential Observations, Relative Chieﬂy to Picturesque Beauty (1786), William Gilpin suggests that evening is the ideal time for sketching, just as twentieth-century cinematographers would later recognize it as the ‘‘magic hour’’ for ﬁlming. In Gilpin’s terms, it offers a pleasant chiaroscuro rather than harsh visual extremes; it is ephemeral and thus to be savored and recorded while it lasts; and it refreshes rather than fatigues the eye.4 Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory was preoccupied with bodily response, the stimuli to eye and ear; and so the ocular moderation of evening light was no small thing. If, under Edmund Burke’s rubric, abrupt shifts between bright light and utter darkness were instances of the Sublime, then the gradual fading witnessed at evening was an example of the Beautiful.5 The aesthetic notions that I have brieﬂy mentioned here suggest a few ways of accounting for the appeal of evening to eighteenth-century writers, but the literary precedent of Milton’s temporal poetics looms even larger. It is perhaps conceivable that if Paradise Lost had not been invented, Collins would have constructed an ode out of evenings borrowed from epithalamium and pastoral, but Milton interpreted those poetic modes for

16

The Invention of Evening

Collins and his successors. Paradise Lost offered a fund of temporal description; and later poets drew copiously from it. Even William Gilpin, when he wished to describe an evening in the Lake District, found himself quoting lines from Paradise Lost: ‘‘If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet, / Extend his evening beam.’’ For evoking a ﬂeeting effect of light he could not have chosen a better passage: originally, it appears in a simile that describes the hushing effect that Satan’s speech has on the assembled multitudes in hell, where no earthly twilight can ever be enjoyed. Gilpin’s allusion proves Oscar Wilde’s mischievous point about art and life: evening was useful for illustrating quotations from poets. I intend, then, to trace a poetic genealogy of evening, beginning with the Eclogues of Virgil, who was once credited by Erwin Panofsky with having ‘‘discovered’’ this time of day.6 For Virgil, evening was both useful and beautiful: it was the moment when shepherds had to leave off their songs in colloquies to fold their ﬂocks and head home, thus giving a pretext for the poet himself to end; and it was a time to savor, if only brieﬂy. Although the Eclogues cannot properly be classiﬁed as lyric, the arrival of evening frames the shepherds’ songs and colloquies as forms of specialized, temporally bounded utterance akin to lyric: a free play of mind (debating, singing, conversing) that must give way to an act of domestic responsibility (gathering ﬂocks, heading home); a reverie inevitably interrupted by changes in the ever-turning world. The advent of evening might be said to naturalize the poet’s arbitrary decision to conclude, but it does not effect a resolution so much as what Paul Alpers has called a ‘‘suspension.’’7 In the attempt to reconcile the necessarily limited duration of human song or utterance with earth’s diurnal course, there remains a sense of unﬁnished business, or a reluctance to end. In short, evening in the Eclogues manifests a tension between poetic form and mimetic reality – a tension whose ramiﬁcations would continue to be felt in later generations of English lyric poetry. In a long westward translatio studii, the Virgilian evening would reappear in the eclogues of The Shepheardes Calendar, the conclusion of ‘‘Lycidas,’’ the descriptive setpieces of Paradise Lost, and the meditative settings of eighteenth-century lyrics; and in each manifestation, it is subtly changed.8 One of the most important changes was the transformation of evening from threshold of closure into a point of poetic departure, an end into a beginning – but a beginning that nevertheless bears the ghostly trace of ﬁnal things. It is this change and its ramiﬁcations in eighteenth-century lyric that I wish to explore: the symbolic crossing of the shepherd’s rest and the poet’s work.

The pre-history of Romantic time

17

the singer in the shade: some versions of virgil Four of Virgil’s ten Eclogues end at evening: shepherds, lost in conversation, look up to see lengthening shadows, gathering mists, and a rising planet – empirical reminders that time has slipped away. It is notable that Virgil’s Latin had no precise equivalent for what is denoted by our English word; instead, the name of the evening ‘‘star,’’ Hesperus, became virtually synonymous with its appearance in the western sky – a pagan name that lingers behind the canonical hour of Vespers. While the torpid heat of noon provides the pretext for pastoral otium,9 evening heralds its end; the pastoral interval begins with a search for shade (umbra) and ends in dusky shadows (umbrae). In Greek mythology, Hesperus gathers in the light that has been scattered over the earth,10 and Virgil’s shepherds accordingly take this event as the sign to gather their ﬂocks for the night. In a preface to his translation of Virgil, John Dryden cites the ﬁrst Eclogue as ‘‘the standard of all pastorals’’ for the spatial and temporal stationing of its opening and closing movements: ﬁrst, ‘‘a Shepherd with his ﬂock around him, resting securely under a spreading Beech,’’ and ﬁnally, ‘‘[a]nother in a quite different Situation of Mind and Circumstances, the Sun setting, the Hospitality of the more fortunate Shepherd, &c.’’11 The setting sun does provide a distinct scenic backdrop; but more importantly, it serves as a means of closure (by cutting off a conversation) and rondure (by echoing the opening scene). The poem begins in the cooling shade of afternoon (lentus in umbra), a symbol of Tityrus’ good fortune as seen from the exilic perspective of Meliboeus, whose lands have been expropriated by Augustus. It ends in the deeper shadows of night, the emblematic word umbra modulating in nuance from rest to sleep, from temporal dilation to sudden cessation: et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant / maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae (‘‘Even now the housetops yonder are smoking and longer shadows fall from the mountain heights’’).12 The invocation of evening ends a conﬂict between privilege and deprivation that has no simple resolution. This impasse takes on special poignancy in the second Eclogue, in which Corydon hails evening as the end to his lament over his estrangement from Alexis. Even as he invokes this metaphorical endpoint, he knows that his own sorrow cannot be contained by the arbitrary boundary represented by the sunset. The heat of the sun might be on the wane, the shepherd laments, but there is no limit to the hot pang of unrequited love (me tamen urit amor: quis enim modus adsit amori?). In yet another way, the arbitrariness of evening as

18

The Invention of Evening

endpoint is registered in the sixth Eclogue. Here, the gods themselves regret that Hesperus calls Silenus away from his song. Dryden’s translation acutely renders the tension between the inward reverie of song and the external mandates of temporal progress: And now the setting Sun had warned the swain To call his counted cattle from the plain; Yet still the unweary’d Syre pursues the tuneful Strain, Till, unperceiv’d, the Heavens with Stars were hung, And sudden Night surpriz’d the yet unﬁnish’d Song.13

The grammatical balance of the couplet poises the singer’s persistent ‘‘still’’ against the temporal boundary of ‘‘till.’’ In the midst of lyric utterance, the singer is oblivious to the goings-on of the outside world – the progress of sun and stars – until his song is ‘‘surpriz’d’’ by the seemingly sudden arrival of night. It is ﬁtting that nightfall signals the end of the tenth and ﬁnal Eclogue, where it coincides with the poet’s own resolution to conclude his pastoral efforts. The setting sun does not here surprise the shepherd out of his song; rather, Virgil pointedly ends the poem in propria persona, after Gallus’ lament over the loss of Lycoris’ love. ‘‘Your poet, goddesses, has sung enough,’’ he says, ambiguously referring both to Gallus and to himself.14 Here, the gathering shadows – emphasized by the ominous triple-iteration of umbra (solet esse gravis cantantibus umbra, / iuniperi gravis umbra; nocent et frugibus umbrae) – suggest that both shepherd and ﬂock ought to retire for the night. It is not exactly clear how the shades ‘‘weigh heavily’’ on the singer, but Dryden offers an eminently practical account in his translation: ‘‘Now let us rise; for hoarseness oft invades / The singer’s voice, who sings beneath the shades.’’ In his reference to the night’s chilling darkness, Dryden subtly implies a vocational form of laryngitis – the occupational hazard of overtaxing one’s voice in the lesser genre of pastoral. Indeed, the tenth Eclogue has been traditionally understood as Virgil’s farewell to pastoral. Here, ﬁnally, the arrival is more of a welcome event than a surprise; in literary retrospect, it seems like a beacon toward the greater labors of the Aeneid. Within the shepherds’ world, the mimesis of time, acutest at the vanishing of daylight, indicates pastoral responsibility, the limits of communal song, and the necessary end of all things; and from the perspective of the poet, it reﬂects a deliberate artistic design, the shaping of a ﬁctive day of utterance and the stage of a career. In his emulation of Virgil’s model of poetic apprenticeship in the Shepheardes Calendar, Spenser imported the pastoral principle of closure

The pre-history of Romantic time

19

into English tradition. Nearly every month of the cycle ends at evening, sometimes with the distinctly English inﬂection of inclement weather or chilling dews. The conclusion of ‘‘June’’ is typical of this dampening effect: But now is time, I gesse, homeward to goe: Then ryse ye blessed folks, and home apace, Least night with stealing steppes does you forsloe, And wett your tender Lambes, that by you trace.15

Throughout the Calendar, sunset provides a convenient excuse for the shepherds to leave off, especially here, where Hobbinol says that he could listen longer to Colin’s despair over Rosalind if he did not have to fold his sheep. In Spenser’s droll rendering of Corydon’s potentially endless lament in Virgil’s second Eclogue, evening enables a defense against lengthy and self-indulgent grief. The most famous English version of a Virgilian evening appears in ‘‘Lycidas,’’ and it is notable that Milton adopts the pastoral chronotope as eloquent catharsis rather than comically arbitrary gesture. In counterpoint to the violent interruption that begins the poem – the premature shattering of young leaves – the concluding sunset effects a gentle return to the cycle of night and day after the stasis of mourning: Thus sang the uncouth swain to th’ Oaks and rills, While the still morn went out with Sandals gray; He touch’t the tender stops of various Quills, With eager thought warbling his Doric lay: And now the sun had stretch’t out all the hills, And now was dropped into the Western bay; At last he rose, and twitch’t his Mantle blue: Tomorrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new. (186–93)16

This conclusion echoes both an earlier reminiscence within the poem and Virgilian tradition itself. At the outset, the speaker recalls the days when he and Lycidas would drive their ﬂocks until ‘‘the Star that rose, at Ev’ning, bright, / Toward Heav’n’s descent had slop’d his westering wheel’’ (30–1); and at the end, we are reminded that this diurnal period has been given over to mourning instead. In other words, elegiac utterance is bounded by the same temporal arc as sheep-herding, from ‘‘day star’’ to evening star; it is an alternative form of labor. A thorough student of pastoral tradition, Milton conﬂates features of all four of Virgil’s evening Eclogues: the et iam of the ﬁrst; the limited grief and redemptive labor of the second; the third-person retrospective framing of the sixth and tenth; and the lengthening shadows of the ﬁrst

20

The Invention of Evening 17

and second. Of his borrowings, Milton’s use of the phrase ‘‘and now’’ is the most signiﬁcant for the temporal shape of the poem. Milton not only faithfully renders Virgil’s et sol crescentis decedens duplicat umbras, he also subtly reﬂects the overlapping senses of iam in his use of the pluperfect: ‘‘now,’’ but also ‘‘already.’’ In the temporal pivot of et iam, Tityrus bridges the afternoon of utterance and the evening of cessation. The shadows are not born with his perception; they have been lengthening while he was oblivious to them, deep in conversation with Meliboeus. Milton’s ‘‘now’’ echoes this note of belated awareness; and, following the tenth Eclogue, it mediates between the perception of the uncouth swain and the consciousness of the poet who looks ahead to poetic pastures beyond the pastoral. From the perspective of the one, it gives a modus to the duration of grief (and now the day is over); from the perspective of the other, it signiﬁes a phase in a career (and now to move on). Milton’s most complex imaginative engagement with the poetics of evening had yet to be written. marking time in eden Both the Shepheardes Calendar and ‘‘Lycidas’’ follow the temporal scheme of the Eclogues in making nightfall a deﬁnitive end; neither poem exceeds this limit. In the narrative complexity of Paradise Lost, however, evening becomes a symbolic threshold of lingering – between darkness and light, earthly time and eternity, continuation and closure. Milton scrupulously marks narrative time throughout the poem, but he invokes evening – as both event and metaphor – more often than any other time of day.18 Descriptions of morning or noon would serve equally well as reminders of God’s creation of time, but evening has special importance. It serves as pastoral background to epic action, as marker of divine restrictions both before and after the Fall, as temporal dilation, as emblem of transition, and as epithalamic threshold. Evening is both a sensory experience and a self-consciously quoted Virgilian time; and it is a moment to be both enjoyed (as dilatory repose) and heeded (as reminder to sleep). In Patristic commentary, as Patricia Parker has noted, evening represents the interval between God’s separation of light from darkness and the creation of the sun, when some angels refused to look toward the eternal day to come and instead turned inward and sank into eternal night.19 Milton translates this crisis to a nocturnal scene in heaven, when Satan begins his rebellion ‘‘[s]oon as midnight brought on the dusky hour / Friendliest to sleep and silence’’ (PL 5.667–8). Indeed, every evening in

The pre-history of Romantic time

21

the poem betokens God’s ﬁrst parting of light from darkness, its pied beauty a sign of the creation of variety out of originary unity. In narrative terms, it binds together pivotal moments of creation, fall, and redemption: it is the setting for the Filial Power’s return to heaven (7.579–87), Satan’s arrival in Eden (9.48–57), and the Son’s return to Eden as postlapsarian intercessor (10.92–7). Before the Fall, Parker suggests, evening is the ‘‘image of the pendency or poised innocence of Eden,’’ and afterwards, ‘‘the crucial middle or twilight zone of history and of choice’’ (328). Evenings in Paradise Lost, before and after the Fall, have a distinctly pastoral inﬂection; and the marking of time’s passage is important in both phases of the narrative. I wish to argue that Milton adopts the Virgilian poetics of time not merely to represent a life of pastoral ease but rather to articulate a sense of responsibility, temporal limitation, and divine regulation. In his study of Renaissance conceptions of time, Ricardo Quinones suggests that before the Fall in Paradise Lost, ‘‘time was not felt; it held no urgent pressure, was no commodity for which the individual was responsible.’’20 This is true in the sense that prelapsarian time is devoid of the menace associated with the Renaissance iconography of Mutability. Even before the Fall, however, time is shaped by divine mandates for labor and rest, for human and angel alike. Both Raphael and Michael arrive on earth with a time-sensitivity reminiscent of Virgilian or Spenserian shepherds, and interrupt their instruction of Adam with abrupt reference to the ﬂeeting hour. Both Adam and Eve, meanwhile, express a desire to prolong their evenings. The tension between continuation and closure in Virgil’s Eclogues, then, is magniﬁed in Paradise Lost. No Sabbath is observed in prelapsarian Eden – no time is yet holier than any other – but Adam and Eve answer, sometimes reluctantly, to a sabbatarian necessity of nocturnal rest. As an exemplary pleasure of earthly existence, evening serves as a point of reference within the cosmic scale of Milton’s narrative, a human measurement among the disparate realms of Chaos, Eden, and Heaven. After the rebel angels’ banishment, a parodic simile relates the effect of Satan’s rousing speech to the clearing of a cloudy sky at twilight (PL 2.492–5), an experience never to be enjoyed in this forsaken realm. As when his arrival in Eden is later likened to an urbanite’s visit to the countryside, Satan is mocked by a pastoral idyll he cannot possess. If evening appears only in parodic metaphor in hell, it exists as a kind of Platonic form in heaven. It is the curvature and revolution of the earth

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The Invention of Evening

that create twilight, but even without these physical factors, there is an ideal evening in heaven – a magic-lantern show that never ends in total darkness. It might seem strange that eternal light would cast shadows, but if heaven contains all good things, then Virgilian umbrae must be among them. As Joseph Summers has noted, the celestial evening represents the attribute of God’s dynamism as Milton deﬁnes it in The Christian Doctrine.21 It is meant, as Raphael explains, ‘‘for change delectable, not need’’ (5.629) – with the implication that on earth, twilight is both a necessary function of the turning world and a beacon of rest that answers to the physical capacities of Adam and Eve. As in the Horatian prescription for poetry, the Edenic evening both delights and instructs. This dual function is crystallized in the long scene of Book 4 in which Adam and Eve end their day and prepare for rest. In generic terms, a pastoral afternoon slides into an epithalamic vigil, and the crux of this succession is marked by a nuptial masque heralded by the announcement, ‘‘Now came still Ev’ning on . . . ’’ (4.598 ff.). Here, Evening is a master of revels leading a procession of ‘‘Twilight gray,’’ Hesperus with his ‘‘starry host,’’ and ﬁnally the maternal queen-Moon who protectively throws her ‘‘silver mantle’’ over the darkness – an antitype to the ﬁgure of Night in The Faerie Queene, who is anathematized as ‘‘foule Mother of annoyance sad, / Sister of heavie death, and nourse of woe’’ (iii.iv.55).22 Geoffrey Hartman has cited this passage as the epitome of a ‘‘pure’’ hymn to the Evening Star lacking the darkling anxiety of the ‘‘interlunar moment’’ that he traces in poetic successors such as Akenside’s ‘‘Ode to the Evening Star.’’23 Indeed, as Dustin Grifﬁn has noted, this set-piece was later imitated by eighteenth-century poets24 – a point to which I will return. Despite the serenity noted by Hartman and Grifﬁn, this scene is troublingly framed by the narrative that precedes and follows it: Satan’s arrival in Eden and Adam and Eve’s discussion of the necessity of sleep. Before this moment, Milton’s pastoral – and postlapsarian – simile for this intrusion recalls the tacit danger that impels Virgil’s shepherds to fold their ﬂocks and end their song: as a ‘‘prowling wolf’’ watches ‘‘where shepherds pen thir Flocks at eve,’’ so does Satan stalk ‘‘God’s fold’’ (PL 4.183–92). The implication is that Adam and Eve are both sheep and shepherds – vulnerable to attack but ultimately responsible for their own protection. But they are also bride and groom, and the set-piece description of the celestial procession that ensues invokes classical epithalamium, in which Hesperus, the evening star, lights the path of the couple to their marriage bed.

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Eve, however, is supremely unaware of this poetic tradition, and thus interprets the stars as fascinating objects rather than as divine reminders to retire: ‘‘But wherefore all night long shine these, for whom / This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes?’’ (4.657–8). Essentially, she poses a question of aesthetic economy: is this a waste of beauty if we do not stay out to enjoy it? In this way, twilight becomes the occasion of a debate – the nocturnal inversion of an aubade. While lovers in a dawn poem ask, ‘‘Why must we rise?’’ Eve implicitly asks, ‘‘Why must we sleep?’’ Adam responds that ‘‘[m]illions of spiritual creatures walk the earth / Unseen’’ (4.677–8) and perceive what they both miss during sleep; but this answer can offer only limited solace to one who wishes to be awake to everything. We do not know whether Adam’s explanation satisﬁes Eve, since the conversation ultimately yields to ‘‘the rites / Mysterious of connubial love’’ (4.742–3). But this inquiry is disturbingly answered by the dream that she has that night and recounts to Adam the next morning. Here, the earlier epithalamium is transposed by the Satanic voice in her ear into an adulterous serenade: Why sleep’st thou Eve? now is the pleasant time, The cool, the silent, save where silence yields To the night-warbling Bird, that now awake Tunes sweetest his love-labor’d song. (5.38–41)

Satan’s nocturne cleverly picks up where the evening epithalamium had left off – in the midst of the moon’s reign, when Adam broke in with his reminder about bedtime. The stately past-tense ‘‘now’’ of the earlier setpiece (‘‘Now came still Ev’ning on’’) becomes a present-tense ‘‘now’’ of lyric attention. In an appeal to both curiosity and vanity, Satan answers Eve’s suspicion that the celestial light-show is wasted if not seen, and he even reimagines the stars as eyes that raptly gaze at Eve’s stellar beauty (‘‘Heav’n wakes with all his eyes, / Whom to behold but thee’’). Night itself becomes an animate being, a shadowy face to meet Eve’s own. We might conclude that Eve represents the aesthetic spirit of evening against Adam’s ethical construction of daytime – that she asserts kairos (integrative, multilayered time) over chronos (clock-time).25 And yet Adam sounds remarkably like his spouse in his colloquy with Raphael in Book 5, expressing the same resistance to temporal limits, and the same curiosity. Raphael’s visit, like Satan’s intrusion, is structured by a timeline from afternoon to twilight; but Raphael has received explicit instructions from God to converse with Adam ‘‘half this day’’ (5.229) and promptly depart. The two visitors are associated with different

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archetypes: while Satan is the pastoral wolf, Raphael is the pastoral guest. Like Tityrus, Adam offers Raphael afternoon hospitality; but the angel stipulates that his stay cannot last long: ‘‘lead on then where thy bow’r / O’ershades; for these mid-hours, till evening rise / I have at will’’ (5.375–7). After Raphael has ﬁnished narrating the war in heaven, Adam wants to hear the history of the earth; and after insisting that there is enough time (‘‘the great light of day yet wants to run / Much of his race’’ [7.98–9]), he ﬁnally acknowledges that this conversation might have to go into overtime, ‘‘and sleep list’ning to thee will watch, / Or we can bid his absence, till thy song / End, and dismiss thee ere the morning shine’’ (7.98–100). At ﬁrst, Adam had invited Raphael ‘‘[t]o sit and taste, till this meridian heat / Be over, and the Sun more cool decline’’ (5.369–70); but now, in the excitement of new learning, he bids sleep stay away till his ‘‘song’’ is over. While the ﬁrst ‘‘till’’ refers to the daily cycle of the world, the second ‘‘till’’ gestures to the indeterminate duration of angelic instruction. More pointedly than Eve, then, Adam wants to insist that evening need not be a boundary but rather a threshold of nocturnal lingering. Just as he said he would, however, Raphael leaves promptly at sunset, or what he conscientiously calls ‘‘my signal to depart’’ (8.632). Even in prelapsarian Eden, human desire can be corrected, and daily time is felt to have rules and limits. It is apt that on the last day in Eden, after the Fall and a long insomniac night of bitter recrimination, lamentation, and atonement, evening appears only as a pastoral metaphor rather than as an actual event. In the morning, Michael appears on the western horizon as if he were a sunset; his postlapsarian visit seems to end the day before it has begun, in a foretaste of the swift, mortal days to follow. (Conversely, in Adam’s awed perception, Raphael had seemed ‘‘another morn / Ris’n on mid-noon’’ [310–11]; and indeed, this moment marks a new day in his understanding.) Finally, the scene of Expulsion is linked by analogy to the emblematic close of Virgilian pastoral, and to the necessity of agrarian work after Adam and Eve’s pleasant husbandry26: The Cherubim descended; on the ground Gliding meteorous, as evening mist Ris’n from a river o’er marish glides, And gathers ground fast at laborer’s heel Homeward returning. (12.628–32)

Milton might conceivably have set the Expulsion at evening, but instead, he invokes this time only in metaphor.27 By this gesture, he

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signiﬁes a rent in time’s fabric, the beginning of human history after the Fall. As metaphor rather than as immediate experience, the scene also echoes the earlier analogy between the effect of Satan’s speech and a moment of twilight calm. That pastoral trope is parodic, since there are no evenings in hell; this one, however, is prophetic, in that it bridges the time between the Fall and the world of pastoral and georgic poetry. It invokes the terrestrial shades of Virgil’s tenth Eclogue, without the celestial token of the evening star. Before this conclusion, evening in Eden has been a literal event; but in the ﬁnal analogy, it marks a literary form of experience, a genre yet to be invented. Milton’s earlier descriptions of Edenic evenings implicitly borrow from Virgil, but the ﬁnal analogy makes the borrowing explicit; it looks ahead to a poetry that would express its own longings for Edenic rest. la penserosa: anne finch’s reverie Milton wrote ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ (1631) long before Paradise Lost, but in thematic terms, the poem represents a lyric sequel: an answer to Eve’s curiosity about the night, and a resumption of Adam and Eve’s ‘‘solitary way,’’ just past that metaphorical sunset. In its idealization of nightwandering and its elaborate deﬁnition of the melancholic disposition, ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ can be considered the proto-lyric of the eighteenth-century poetry classiﬁed under the heading of ‘‘Sensibility.’’ Indeed, the poem centrally concerns sensibility itself: an ethos or way of feeling that arises from both innate disposition and conscious choice. As a deliberate counterpoint to ‘‘L’Allegro,’’ the poem preﬁgures a major trope of Sensibility: the declaration of a preference in contrast to some other way of being in the world. When Milton’s successors declare, in effect, ‘‘I love to wander abroad at dusk and listen to the melancholy nightingale,’’ they deﬁne their habit, implicitly or explicitly, against daylight pleasures. Such a declaration involves a preference for pensive solitude, and yet it aligns the speaker with a group of enthusiasts sharing similar dispositions. In this way, eighteenth-century poems of evening sensibility are statements of both personal feeling and generalized sentiment. Before Milton’s ‘‘smooth-shaven green’’ became populated with other poets seeking nocturnal solitude, however, the Penseroso was truly alone. If Virgil discovered evening, Milton developed and extended it into an all-night vigil, a perpetual twilight of cloistered mental exertions and spiritual devotions. As a poem celebrating darkness, it counters the traditional demonization of Night that Milton parodies when he has the

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Allegro describe Melancholy as born ‘‘[o]f Cerberus and blackest midnight’’ (2). While the Allegro respects the diurnal rhythms of Virgilian eclogue, the Penseroso ﬂaunts his deﬁance of them. Whereas the Allegro listens to the lark singing at evening ‘‘[f]rom his watch-tow’r in the skies,’’ the Penseroso wishes to take this aerial vantage for himself: ‘‘Or let my lamp at midnight hour, / Be seen in some high lonely Tow’r’’ (85–6). In essence, ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ stakes out a tertium quid between two poetic genres of evening, pastoral and epithalamium: it begins at the time of day when Virgilian shepherds leave off, and it resolutely insists on solitude rather than conjugal companionship. Like its successors, ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ is animated by gestures of dilation. When morning arrives, the speaker hopes to preserve his darkness in a moveable feast of seclusion – ﬁrst in a bower of pastoral romance, then in a church and hermitage of Christian devotion. Planning a night of study and undetected wandering, he rejects the involuntariness of sleep and dreams in favor of a willed reverie. He seeks a realm governed not by arbitrary markings of time but rather the syntax of achievement, Where I may sit and rightly spell Of every star that heaven doth shew, And every herb that sips the dew, Till old experience do attain To something like prophetic strain. (170–4)

Milton’s construction of ‘‘until’’ crystallizes a wish-fulﬁllment, the dissolution of ordinary divisions of time. It represents a wish to burst the bounds of day and night and transform the patient work of days into a prophetic knowledge beyond time – if only within the jussive frame of fantasy, and without angelic tutelage. The Edenic evening of Paradise Lost and the postlapsarian nocturnal vigil of ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ thematically intersect in Anne Finch’s ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ (1713). The poem presents a fantasy of night-wandering, its time-line framed by one long and complex subordinate clause beginning with the phrase, ‘‘In such a Night, when every louder Wind / Is to its distant Cavern safe conﬁn’d’’ (1–2).28 A litany of elaborative whens ﬁnds completion in a petitionary predicate at the end: ‘‘In such a Night let Me abroad remain, / Till Morning breaks, and all’s confused again.’’ In this temporal arc, Finch mimics Milton’s evening-to-dawn fantasy of scholarly devotion, but she focuses more on sensory absorption of the nocturnal world than on the humoural disposition associated with it.

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Indeed, Finch’s departure from her predecessor is evident in the opening lines: Milton’s artiﬁcial gesture of banishment that begins ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ – ‘‘Hence vain deluding Joys’’ – becomes the natural conﬁnement of wind to some aeolian haven. Wordsworth, the poem’s most famous admirer, praised Finch for introducing fresh images of ‘‘external nature,’’ of which he saw very few between Milton and Thomson.29 He was also clearly impressed by Finch’s nocturnal setting, because he cites two neoclassical night-pieces for disparagement – ‘‘the style in which Dryden has executed a description of Night in one of his Tragedies [The Indian Emperor], and Pope his celebrated moonlight scene in the Iliad.’’ The idea that anyone might ﬁnd these lines beautiful bafﬂes Wordsworth: ‘‘Strange to think of an enthusiast, as may have been the case with thousands, reciting those verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of absurdity!’’ (74). Still stranger to imagine legions of English noctambulists marching into moonlit ﬁelds to chant Dryden and Pope; but the implication of Wordsworth’s scenario is that anyone undertaking the experiment would soon see the superiority of the night sky to the painted ﬁrmament of Augustan poetry. Mimetic ﬁdelity aside, these passages also differ from ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ in that they are scenic backdrops to dramatic or epic action, or what George Puttenham called ‘‘chronographia’’ in his sixteenth-century taxonomy of rhetoric.30 The description in Finch’s poem stands on its own – a precursor to later eighteenth-century lyrics. The innovative signiﬁcance of the ‘‘Nocturnal Reverie’’ as a night poem has long been recognized31; but I would like to cast new light on Finch’s lyric by considering it as a fantasy of deliberately crossing the pastoral threshold of evening. Most obviously, the poem revises ‘‘Il Penseroso’’: insofar as she identiﬁes herself as an anonymous ‘‘Lady’’ on the title page of her Miscellany Poems on Several Occasions (1713), Finch implicitly adopts the role of La Penserosa.32 Beyond this connection, I wish to argue that the poem functions as a witty, gender-inﬂected version of pastoral and as a revisitation of nocturnal scenes in Paradise Lost. With reference to pastoral, the poem deliberately crosses the twilight threshold at which shepherds must fold their ﬂocks, and thus presents a dusky mirror-image of noontime otium. With reference to the Miltonic poetics of sleep and consciousness, the poem echoes and revises Eve’s famous dream of nightwandering.33 Finch certainly knew the pastoral writings of her contemporaries, as well as their Virgilian source. Jacob Tonson, who published several of

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Finch’s pastoral poems in his miscellanies (as well as those of Pope and Ambrose Philips), had also published translations of the Eclogues by various writers in his Miscellany Poems of 1684 (of which Dryden had contributed the fourth and ninth) and Dryden’s Works of Virgil in 1697, which included all ten of the Eclogues. In her ‘‘Pastoral Dialogue between Two Shepherdesses,’’ Finch offers a gender-variation on Virgil’s ﬁrst eclogue. The sober-sided Silvia, in the role of the homebody Tityrus, invites her ﬂirtatious friend Dorinda to noontime rest. In Virgilian pastoral, the afternoon is a time for male shepherds to lament the absence of companions or lovers, and Finch inverts this tradition by showing two shepherdesses in disagreement over what that absence means.34 Whereas Silvia welcomes this time as a vacation from suitors, Dorinda sees it more anxiously as a withdrawal from public esteem – an obligatory waiting-period before the evening’s revels. Against Silvia’s suggestion that various male invitees will be otherwise occupied (conﬁned by ague, wounded by a ‘‘malicious Bough’’), Dorinda insists on leaving at dusk; and the dialogue ends over the question of whether a pensive swain is pining for the latter. While Silvia insists that he loves Chloe instead, Dorinda retorts that Silvia is merely jealous and Chloe poor competition – ‘‘next thyself decay’d, / And no more a courted Maid’’ (65–6). It is only here, at the end of the dialogue, that the age difference between the two becomes acute: the implied onset of evening lends symbolic urgency to Dorinda’s desire to join the revels, and poignancy to Silvia’s sense of her own vanished youth. In Virgilian fashion, evening functions as a diurnal arbiter between two irreconcilable positions, and a keenly felt index of passing time. When Silvia begins to reminisce about her past, Dorinda curtly interrupts her with reference to the hour: Oh, hold! that Tale will last, Till all the Evening Sports are past; Till no Streak of Light is seen, Nor Footstep prints the ﬂow’ry Green. What thou wert, I need not know, What I am, must hast to show. (71–6)

The couplet-balance between ‘‘thou wert’’ and ‘‘I am,’’ between knowing the past and showing the present, rests on the temporal fulcrum of evening. The poem ends in an impasse between two irreconcilable views: Finch can gently mock both the sedentary complacency of the elder and the vanity of the younger. The difference in situation between Tityrus and

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Meliboeus is an unbridgeable gap between exilic wandering and domestic ease, but the difference between Silvia and Dorinda is a function of age rather than circumstance. Notably, Dorinda invokes evening in prospect rather than as a sudden occurrence. In the Eclogues, the arrival of dusk comes as a mild surprise that jolts shepherds out of their reveries, but in Finch’s dialogue, it is deliberately constructed as a symbolic passage from youth to age. In effect, Finch appends a coda to Virgil’s pastoral time-line by projecting a period of ‘‘Evening Sports’’ instead of the customary act of folding ﬂocks and heading home. In light of Finch’s play with Virgilian tradition, the ‘‘Nocturnal Reverie’’ is remarkable in several ways. Next to the ‘‘Pastoral Dialogue,’’ it appears not merely as a night poem tout court, but rather as a fantasia on transcending the pastoral limits of dusk. It proposes a new version of the evening revels anticipated by Dorinda: not the ﬂirtatious merrymaking of shepherds and shepherdesses, but the pleasure of a solitary walker. Indeed, Finch envisions a world from which shepherds have momentarily disappeared and pastoral supervision has been suspended – ‘‘[w]hen nibbling sheep at large pursue their food, / And unmolested kine rechew the cud’’ (33–4). In the ‘‘Pastoral Dialogue,’’ Finch shows us a new aspect of pastoral otium by representing two female perspectives on it; and in the ‘‘Nocturnal Reverie,’’ she introduces another wrinkle into the tradition by imagining the shepherds’ withdrawal through the ﬂock’s perspective. In Finch’s witty inversion, pastoral protection looks like constraint, and the absence of human supervision signiﬁes a bestial version of evening sports: ‘‘Their short-lived Jubilee the creatures keep, / Which but endures, whilst tyrant-Man do’s sleep’’ (36–7). Finch’s reverie, then, envisions a form of revelry – the original meaning of the Old French word, from the verb rever. It was in the seventeenth century that the word acquired its sense as a cognitive state with afﬁnities to the reˆve, or dream. The ‘‘Nocturnal Reverie’’ plays on both senses, proximate and distant, of its title: it is a wide-awake dream of night-revels, and it posits the mental state of reverie as a form of recreation. The word ‘‘reverie’’ – still an exotic importation in 1713 – has important bearing on the volitional nature of the poem. Classifying modes of thought in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke distinguished reverie from such deliberate mental actions as recollection and contemplation: ‘‘When Ideas ﬂoat in our mind, without any reﬂection or regard of the Understanding, it is that, which the French call Reverie; our language scarce has a name for it . . . .’’35 By calling her poem a reverie, Finch mediates between wide-awake deliberateness and pure sensory drift. The word implies a stream of sensory impressions, but

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Finch organizes them with a lucid syntax of wakeful observation. In this way, she makes the best of her own insomnia – a symptom of ‘‘spleen,’’ about which Finch wrote a celebrated poem associating her condition with the fallen state of humanity.36 As several critics have noted, Milton’s Protestant example of biblical interpretation set a precedent for other poets; and Finch indeed conceived of Eden and the Fall by her own lights.37 In her witty ‘‘Invocation to Sleep,’’ she asks for the kind of prelapsarian rest that Adam effortlessly enjoyed before he woke to ﬁnd Eve; but in the ‘‘Nocturnal Reverie,’’ she echoes Eve’s nocturnal dream instead. Here, Finch invents a lyric self that mingles Miltonic inspiration with pure empirical curiosity. Indeed, the opening of the poem recalls the sensory immersion of Satan’s serenade: the ‘‘still waking’’ (4) Philomel, the ‘‘mysterious face’’ (8) of heaven thinly veiled by clouds, and the alert lyric ‘‘now’’ (‘‘When freshen’d grass now bears itself upright’’ (11), ‘‘Whilst now a paler Hue the Foxglove takes’’ (15)). Moreover, in its equation of freedom with the nocturnal, Finch’s poem recalls Eve’s dream, with its Miltonic allegory of errancy and dalliance. The ‘‘Nocturnal Reverie’’ is scattered with hints of vagrancy – the human ‘‘Wand’rer’’ (6), the roving nightingale, the clouds that ‘‘give place’’ (7) to the moon or ‘‘thinly veil’’ (8) it, the ‘‘scatter’d glow-worms’’ (17), the night-odours that ‘‘uninterrupted stray’’ (22) and the sheep grazing ‘‘at large’’ (33). The act of night-wandering is fraught with danger for Eve, far less so for Finch. In her dream, Eve is led astray by Satan’s voice: ‘‘I rose as at thy call, but found thee not,’’ she tells Adam, ‘‘To ﬁnd thee I directed then my walk’’ (5.48–9). At the beginning of Finch’s reverie, however, this crooked path is immediately corrected by Philomel, who, ‘‘hollowing clear, directs the wanderer right’’ (6); and that moment of guidance is later repeated in the vignette of a mother partridge that calls to her ‘‘straggling Brood’’ (36). Finch, then, pointedly raises the possibility of getting lost only to dispel it. This dynamic of danger and safety is particularly evident in the speaker’s momentary fear: When the loos’d Horse now, as his Pasture leads, Comes slowly grazing thro th’ adjoining meads, Whose stealing Pace, and lengthen’d Shade we fear, Till torn-up Forage in his Teeth we hear. (29–32)

Some critics have called this frisson a touch of ‘‘gothic’’ horror,38 but the literary lineage of the passage can be more precisely deﬁned as pastoral and Miltonic. In her momentary dread, Finch evokes the subtle menace

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of a pastoral evening: the predator that stalks the ﬂocks, as well as the lengthening shadows that threaten the Virgilian shepherd who stays out too late. As Milton’s pastoral conceit suggests, Satan is, from a fallen perspective, a wolf stalking ‘‘God’s fold.’’ Before the Fall, however, Adam and Eve live in perfect harmony with all animals, to the extent that Eve feels no trepidation at the stirrings of the serpent’s approach: ‘‘shee busied heard the sound / Of rustling Leaves, but minded not’’ (9.518–19). The world of ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie,’’ on the other hand, is a postlapsarian Eden: despite her relaxation, the speaker is on the qui vive, and despite her enjoyment of the natural world, she fails to recognize one of its inhabitants. Like other potential errors in the poem, however, this one is soon corrected: what had sounded like a predator turns out to be a contented herbivore, and the specter of violence is displaced onto inanimate ‘‘forage.’’ The speaker’s changing perception of the horse represents the perceptual adjustments of the poem in little: it is a moment of frightening Fancy amended by Judgment. It is also an emblem of pure gustatory enjoyment, in that both poet and animals are ruminating – savoring the scenery in their own ways. The poet’s communion with the natural world, however, lasts only as long as night itself; and the arrival of dawn is akin to the closural sunset in Virgilian eclogue: When a sedate Content the Spirit feels, And no ﬁerce Light disturbs, whilst it reveals; But silent Musings urge the Mind to seek Something, too high for Syllables to speak; Till the free Soul to a compos’dness charm’d, Finding the Elements of Rage disarmed, O’er all below a solemn Quiet grown, Joys in th’ inferior World, and thinks it like her Own: In such a Night let Me abroad remain, Till Morning breaks, and All’s confus’d again; Our Cares, our Toils, our Clamours are renew’d, Or Pleasures, seldom reach’d, again pursu’d. (39–50)

Finch’s grammatical sequence of ‘‘until’’ sets this cyclical time-line: the mind seeks till the soul attains a ‘‘composedness,’’ but only till morning breaks. The ﬁrst moment in the sequence involves an elevation that momentarily enables the ‘‘free soul’’ to look down ‘‘o’er all below.’’ Finch’s peculiar prepositional phrase suggests that the soul has attained something ‘‘too high for Syllables to speak,’’ and that it dwells hierarchically above the

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‘‘inferior world’’ of matter. But the phrase also implies an aerial perspective: it makes a summary gesture of taking in the whole nocturnal landscape at a glance, reminiscent of Eve’s dream of soaring above the ‘‘earth outstretched immense.’’ In a poem whose descriptive efforts are sponsored by moonlight, the valedictory perspective is that of the moon itself. The moon ‘‘reveals’’ the sublunary world by her own softer glow, but when the sun’s ‘‘ﬁerce light’’ returns, she can no longer see her reﬂection in the earth’s waters, and confusion reigns again. The second iteration of ‘‘until’’ announces that rude awakening; in effect, it represents a temporal inversion of the end of Virgil’s sixth eclogue, in which, as Dryden puts it, the ‘‘unweary’d Syre’’ sings until ‘‘surpriz’d’’ by ‘‘sudden Night.’’ The ‘‘Nocturnal Reverie’’ certainly merits attention, under Wordsworth’s rubric, as a nature poem, but it is still more interesting as a witty, gender-inﬂected version of Virgilian pastoral and Miltonic sleeplessness. It begins at the time when Virgil’s eclogues end; it responds to Eve’s nocturnal curiosity by pushing beyond the divinely prescribed limit of her day; it transforms a night of insomnia into a reverie of sensory pleasure; and it turns the pastoral carpe diem motif into a carpe noctem. The higher faculty of rationality is excluded from Locke’s deﬁnition of reverie, but in her own formally shaped version of reverie, Finch knew precisely what she was doing. ordinary evenings: collins, gray, and cowper The temporal limitation implicit in Finch’s ‘‘Nocturnal Reverie’’ is even more acutely felt in William Collins’ ‘‘Ode to Evening’’ (1748), which celebrates twilight’s brief interim rather than night’s longer reign. Unlike Milton’s address to Melancholy or Finch’s free-ﬂoating reverie, its presenttense utterance is simultaneous with the nocturnal phenomena it describes; and this feature alone makes it an important precursor to Romantic lyrics. The poet both addresses Evening and situates himself in a particularly temperate one; he hovers between ode and idyllium, both praising and describing.39 In the Miltonic gesture of offering a hymn to Evening, Collins explores the implications of addressing an ephemeral time of day rather than an embodied temperament such as Melancholy. By invoking his deity as scenic background, natural tutor, and temporary audience, the poet mingles twilight wandering with vocational urgency: If aught of Oaten stop, or Pastoral song, May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest Ear, Like thy own solemn Springs,

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The pre-history of Romantic time Thy Springs and dying Gales, O nymph reserved, while now the bright-hair’d sun Sits in yon western Tent, whose cloudy Skirts, With brede ethereal wove, O’erhang his wavy Bed: Now Air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed Bat, With short shrill Shriek ﬂits by on leathern Wing, Or where the Beetle winds His small but sullen Horn, As oft he rises ’midst the twilight Path, Against the Pilgrim borne in heedless Hum: Now teach me, Maid composed, To breathe some soften’d strain, Whose Numbers, stealing through thy darkening Vale, May not unseemly with its Stillness suit, As, musing slow, I hail Thy genial loved Return!

(1–20)40

In its syntactic dilation, the sentence recalls Finch’s reverie, luxuriantly postponing the completion of the opening premise.41 In the long stretch between subject and predicate, Collins praises even while he rhetorically awaits instruction, in an interim suggested by the ﬁnal two lines of the sentence: ‘‘As, musing slow, I hail / Thy genial loved Return!’’ To follow the path of this sentence is to appreciate the ingenuity of Collins’ delay. With blithely ﬂexible phrasing, Collins turns adverbial background (‘‘while now the bright-hair’d sun / Sits in yon western Tent’’) into exclamatory foreground (‘‘Now Air is hushed’’). Amid the stillness, the bat’s ‘‘short shrill Shriek’’ and the beetle’s ‘‘small but sullen Horn’’ signify the randomness and abundance of nature; but they also serve as deliberate emblems. The beetle’s ‘‘heedless Hum’’ intimates the poet’s own vocational uncertainties about his skill, his audience, and his place in the world. In its more successful nocturnal navigation, the ‘‘weak-eyed Bat’’ represents Collins’ own adaptation to darkness: if the nightingale traditionally ﬁgures the poet as singer, the bat represents the poet as perceiver. The Latin word for ‘‘bat,’’ vespertilio, means ‘‘evening wanderer,’’ as Ovid reminds us in the tale of the daughters of Minyas, who are transformed into bats at twilight – a transitional moment that is itself a kind of metamorphosis. In these bestial alter egos, Collins preﬁgures the rapport between poet and nature that his Romantic successors would more fully elaborate. Through his wish to ‘‘breathe some soften’d strain,’’ he unites oaten stop and voice, music and words, in one act of suspiration – which also comes as

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inspiration from Evening’s own springs and dying gales, and as echo of her ‘‘breathing tresses’’ (42). Collins strives to approximate the music of nature, but since evening is already soothed by her own choric breezes, the poet’s ambition to join the performance seems touchingly redundant. If Collins is a self-consciously belated writer in a post-Miltonic era, then the urgency of his address is doubly signiﬁcant – both in the limited period of one evening and in the span of literary history.42 The ‘‘Ode to Evening’’ has a more pointedly vocational tenor than the ‘‘Nocturnal Reverie’’ or even ‘‘Il Penseroso.’’ Finch’s wanderer desires the dilation of evening for the sake of untethered sensory experience and a release from diurnal constraints, and Milton’s persona projects his extended nocturnal retreat toward hermitic devotion rather than poetic song, but Collins sees a more overtly tutelary signiﬁcance in his setting. With a humility that mirrors Evening’s own epithetic meekness, he offers his praise tentatively: it is a curious ode that begins with the phrase, ‘‘If aught.’’ In this transitory meeting between shyly tentative poet and chaste nymph, the Ode is, in essence, an epithalamium without consummation. The fragility of this moment is made more acute by setting the poem on a particular evening rather than in the hypothetical twilight typical of ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ and ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie.’’ And yet by hailing Eve’s ‘‘genial loved Return,’’ Collins registers both ﬁckle brevity and reliable recurrence. From the still point of ‘‘now,’’ the poem temporally expands to the nightly allegorical masque of Eve’s attendant spirits, through the cyclical round of the seasons, and ﬁnally to the promise of perpetuity in which Eve’s praise will be sung. The ‘‘Ode to Evening,’’ then, is patterned on a kind of double-time: it occupies both one ﬁnite twilight in which the poet can see and address his subject and the endlessly extrapolated evenings beyond his ﬁnite existence. Evening is both the experienced phenomenon of a ﬁctive lyric moment and an event independent of individual perception; and while it always returns, the poet does not. In the deictic immediacy of the ﬁrst half of the poem, the speaker is intensely present; but in the temporal dilation of the second half, he disappears.43 In this hymn to a time of day, Collins cannot help invoking the ghost of Time the destroyer, a revenant from Renaissance allegories of Mutability. A masque of seduction and assault depicts the seasonal waxing and waning of Evening: Spring bathes her breathing tresses, Summer sports beneath her lingering light, Autumn ﬁlls her lap with leaves, and Winter rudely rends her robes. This drama is asymptotic, however, since Evening can never be destroyed, much less violated; she can only be curtailed.

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Within this seasonal progress, Summer stands out from its siblings: it is the only personiﬁcation that neither adds nor subtracts but merely sports. It is, in other words, a veiled alter ego for the poet himself – or rather, for human perceivers who savor the long evenings of an English summer. In effect, the seasonal masque foreshadows the disappearance of the speaker himself, who is mortal in a way that Evening is not. Last stationed in the sheltering hut that ‘‘views’’ evening scenes in inclement weather, he is nowhere to be found at the end; but the same ‘‘Sylvan Shed,’’ standing in for him, frames the ﬁnal gesture of praise: So long, sure-found beneath the Sylvan Shed, Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lip’d Health, Thy gentlest Inﬂuence own, And hymn thy fav’rite Name! (49–52)

Implicit in this envoy is the Shakespearean trope of memorializing (‘‘So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’’), but without the Shakespearean claim for the longevity of the poem. Collins’ family of quasi-personiﬁed abstractions, dwelling under one roof, substitute for an individual speaker, who had always seemed somehow belated (hurrying to keep up with a vanishing moment) or redundant (adding a poetic song to the soundscape of nature). In the end, personiﬁed virtues sing hymns to another personiﬁcation, Evening, long after any particular singer has left the scene. In the decades after Collins’ Ode, the scenario of this perpetual hymn was fulﬁlled as literary fashion. Evening became the quintessential time of the meditative lyric; its palette of tints and shadows provided the new colors of rhetoric, and its Miltonic robes and veils dressed the poet’s thought in quasi-religious sobriety. The moment of pastoral closure became a point of departure, in a transformation epitomized by Gray’s ‘‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’’ (1751): The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

(1–4)44

In the crossed paths of lyric speaker and plowman at dusk – two literary traditions passing in the night – Gray traces a symbolic intersection between the material labor of the ﬁeld and the invisible work of poetic thought, work that takes perceptual form in the implied effort of reading gravestones in the gathering darkness. The ‘‘parting’’ of day, herd, and

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plowman serves as fugal counterpoint to the speaker’s activity, which is to stay behind and to reﬂect – to ‘‘cast one long lingering look behind’’ (88). Both Collins’ Ode and Gray’s Elegy are modern in their site-speciﬁc adaptation of classical lyric genres – in the domestication of Hesperus as an English Evening, in the bestowal of funerary eulogy on anonymous English villagers. And yet as poetic genre-paintings, both cast a lingering look behind. Collins is trying to write a new cultic hymn, but we can better appreciate the resolutely old-fashioned gesture of deifying a time of day when we remember that Fielding was mocking such descriptive setpieces in his novels, as in this scene in Tom Jones, published in 1749, just three years after the Ode: The shadows began now to descend larger from the high mountains: the feather’d creation had betaken themselves to their rest. Now the highest order of mortals were sitting down to their suppers. In a word, the clock struck ﬁve just as Mr. Jones took his leave of Gloucester; an hour at which (as it was now midwinter) the dirty ﬁngers of night would have drawn her sable curtain over the universe, had not the moon forbid her, who now, with a face as broad and as red as those of some jolly mortals, who, like her, turn night into day, began to rise from her bed, where she had slumbered away the day, in order to sit up all night.45

With its direct translation of the Virgilian pastoral trope (et sol crescentis decedens duplicat umbras), its solemn iteration of ‘‘now,’’ its fancy epithets and divine attributes (‘‘feather’d creation,’’ ‘‘sable curtain’’), the passage mocks the language of the Eclogues, Paradise Lost, and Collins’ Ode. Even as he translates his conceit into the plain English of novelistic discourse, Fielding can’t resist extending the trope, turning the moon into a nocturnal reveler or prostitute. In the clash between poetic description and the deﬂation of the ordinary, Fielding’s set-piece eminently deﬁnes what Bakhtin means by polyglossia in the novel – its parallel or multiple languages of conversation or description. It also suggests that people in the middle of the eighteenth century might measure their evenings by something other than the arrival of Hesperus and his starry train. More to the point, the narrator’s modern clock-reckoning echoes the vernacular of the chronicler whom Fielding had roundly mocked: Pamela, with her hour-by-hour reports to her parents. In essence, Fielding ostentatiously demonstrates his ﬂuency in both languages of time-keeping, the iconographic and the boringly numerical. It is in the spirit of Fielding’s playful hovering between poetic description and novelistic mimesis that we ought to read the ‘‘Winter Evening’’ section of Cowper’s The Task. It is easy to appreciate the

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poem’s descriptive catalogue of homey pleasures, especially since it makes Ease its central topic; but this popular late-century poem seems far more shrewdly inventive when considered as a variation on the eveningtemplates of Gray’s Elegy and Collins’ Ode. The crossed paths of homebound laborer and Gray’s wandering lyric speaker are inverted at the outset of ‘‘The Winter Evening,’’ and this variation has direct bearing on the poetic persona that Cowper invents: a pastoral ﬁgure with an eye on the larger world.46 In the opening scene, a postman – cousin to Gray’s weary plowman – rides through the chilly twilight delivering mail, while the indoor poet peruses the just-delivered newspaper. The evenings of Gray’s Elegy and Cowper’s descriptive sketch are separated by a distinct historical divide. While Gray’s pastoral twilight could belong to any time, Cowper’s pointedly represents an idea of modernity; it is the difference between reading headstones in the gloaming and scanning a newspaper by ﬁrelight. The textual medium of the newspaper, which condenses the world’s daily activities into a ‘‘folio of four pages,’’ allows Cowper to situate himself between the postman, who is ‘‘careless what he brings’’ and the seeker of urban amusements, ‘‘who with shining face / Sweats in the crowded theater’’ (42–3). By setting his poem speciﬁcally at evening, Cowper registers an awareness of what else is happening at that moment – the messenger’s fatiguing work, the theater-goer’s differently taxing play. A cousin of the elegist who pauses to consider the simple epitaphic ‘‘annals of the poor,’’ Cowper moralizes on the vanities of the busy world in the course of reading reports of world affairs, parliamentary debates, and London entertainments; far from the madding crowd by choice, he is content to use the ‘‘loop-holes of retreat’’ – the verbal apertures of articles and advertisements – ‘‘to see the stir of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd’’ (89–90).47 The evening trope of perceptual adjustment to darkness (hearing or fancying rather than directly seeing) here ﬁnds a fresh and startling form in the act of reading a newspaper by a domestic ﬁre. The Task, as any reader of the poem knows, begins as a playful ode to the sofa and the contemplative life that it represents; and ‘‘The Winter Evening’’ extends the conceit by rewriting Collins’ ‘‘Ode to Evening’’ as a set of leisurely invocations to two deities – white-bearded Winter and matronly Evening. (The poem begins with the mock-epic invocation, ‘‘I sing the sofa,’’ but the true model for Cowper’s bagatelle is the eighteenth-century sublime ode.) Part of the delight of this seasonal sketch lies in its witty play with the formal procedures of Collins’ ‘‘Ode to Evening.’’ Rather than catching the strain of the beetle’s ‘‘small but sullen

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Horn,’’ Cowper begins by hearkening to the post-horn’s noisy blat (‘‘Hark! ’tis the twanging horn o’er yonder bridge’’ [1]); rather than depicting a Miltonic pageant in which Evening majestically arrives in a ‘‘shadowy car,’’ he pictures Winter drawn by a sledge (‘‘thy throne / A sliding car, indebted to no wheels’’ [125–6]); rather than making ceremonial overtures like Collins’ humble request for tutelage ‘‘Now teach me, Maid composed’’), he makes the practical demands of household management (‘‘Now stir the ﬁre, and close the shutters fast’’ [36–7]), in order to ‘‘welcome peaceful ev’ning in’’ (41), as if it were a visitor dropping by rather than a presiding deity; and rather than imagining refuge in Collins’ generalized ‘‘Sylvan Shed,’’ he depicts a room cozily furnished with sofa, pier-glasses, hearth, lamps, and reading material. Cowper’s innovation, then, is to write a thoroughly domestic evening poem; and it is through the symbolic threshold of the home that he can mediate between the diurnal business of the world and the pleasures of intimate conversation, between the fascination with urban modernity glimpsed in newspapers and the idealization of rural retirement accentuated by the mufﬂing effects of winter snow. Evening poems since ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ are typically driven by compensatory gestures – the replacement of sight with insight, perception with memory – and Cowper’s is to bring the evening indoors. That is, the severe cold (speciﬁcally the harsh winter of 1783–4) and early darkness are imaginatively converted into blessings. In Collins’ seasonal masque, Winter rudely rends chaste Evening’s robes, but in Cowper’s pointedly benign version, the season is a kinder and gentler tyrant: though it hastens the sun to the rosy west, it believes in ‘‘[c]ompensating his loss with added hours / Of social converse and instructive ease’’ (4.134–5) and ‘‘gath’ring, at short notice, in one group, / The family dispers’d by day-light and its cares’’ (4.136–7); and its temporal partner, Evening, bestows the gift of ‘‘Composure’’ (4.260). Cowper knows that winter evenings quickly pass into long winter nights, but he ﬁnds a surrogate sunset in the ‘‘parlour twilight’’ (4.278) of the ﬁre-glow cast on walls and mirrors. Evening – a quiet, modest, and shy visitor – is asked to come in and stay awhile; through this hospitality, she is renamed ‘‘The Winter Evening,’’ with all of the accoutrements and daily rituals attending that title. The temporal ﬁction of Collins’ Ode is that the poet must receive instruction and praise his deity during the brief reign of Evening, but Cowper’s sofa-bound speaker defuses that tenor of urgency. Indeed, Cowper describes a state of relaxed reverie contrary to Collins’ attitude of

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alert attention; it is an ‘‘indolent vacuity of thought’’ (4.297) brought on by the act of gazing into the embers. In this way, the poet suggests, ‘‘I lose an hour / At ev’ning’’ (4.302–3); but the idea of losing time in the sense of ordinary diversions also implies an act of making time. In his fancy, the poet has ‘‘a waking dream of houses, tow’rs, / Trees, churches, and strange visages, express’d / In the red cinders’’ (4.287–9), and in his memory, he keeps an afterimage of the earlier evening: ‘‘I saw the woods and ﬁelds, at close of day, / A variegated show’’ (4.311–12). Cowper’s description of the reverie of ‘‘a soul that does not always think’’ surely inspired his successors in their own evocations of trance-states – particularly Coleridge, as many readers of ‘‘Frost at Midnight’’ have noticed. For this reason, Cowper has often been considered a pre-Romantic, but his connection to mid-century poets like Gray and Collins is equally important. ‘‘The Winter Evening’’ is, in essence, a thoroughly domesticated ‘‘Ode to Evening.’’ In his ceremonial invocation of Evening, Collins aspired to the sublimity of sacred poetry, as if the ode were a form of prayer; but Cowper, in his sotto voce way, dissociates the two. Collins ends his poem by expressing gratitude to Evening for the blessings of ‘‘Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lip’d Health,’’ but Cowper pointedly leaves Evening aside to acknowledge a different divinity: ‘‘And God gives to ev’ry man / The virtue, temper, understanding, taste, / That lifts him into life; and lets him fall / Just in the niche he was ordain’d to ﬁll’’ (4.789–92). In a poem that imagines newspaper-articles as metaphorical ‘‘loop-holes,’’ that ‘‘niche’’ might denote not only one’s station in life, but also the poem the reader now holds, in precisely the kind of evening moment that Cowper describes. the ‘‘shadowy hour’’ of sensibility As Cowper’s poem abundantly demonstrates, what had seemed a menace to the singer in Virgil’s tenth Eclogue became in the eighteenth century an ideal condition for poetic utterance. Poets of Sensibility – Mary Robinson, Anna Seward, Mark Akenside, Helen Maria Williams, William Lisle Bowles, and Charlotte Smith, among others – embraced this isolating darkness. As its root suggests, the term ‘‘Sensibility’’ denotes a capacity for intense feelings – particularly melancholy, love-longing, regret, and nostalgia. It also involves a set of shared aesthetic preferences, including evening walks, nightingales, sunsets, churchyards, breezes, shadows. Williams’ sonnet ‘‘To Twilight’’ (1786) typiﬁes this ethos. In an argument reminiscent of the binarism of ‘‘L’Allegro’’ and ‘‘Il Penseroso,’’

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the poem declares the ‘‘pensive’’ spirit’s preference for evening over morning, one Hour over another: Yet dearer to my soul the shadowy hour, At which her blossoms close, her music dies – For then, while languid nature droops her head, She wakes the tear ’tis luxury to shed.

(11–14).48

The meanest ﬂower that blows gives thoughts whose depths are disclosed by tears. In this perceptual and emotional balance, the somnolence of the world awakens the poet’s spirit; and the fading of diurnal pleasures is compensated by a ‘‘luxury’’ of sadness, a lachrymal analogue of evening dews. The word ‘‘luxury’’ aptly represents the tenor of Sensibility, in its voluntariness and surfeit of feeling: melancholy reﬂection, like twilight itself, is avidly sought; and sadness becomes an exquisite pleasure. This pleasure depends in part upon the speaker’s solitude and sense of separation from the madding crowd who ‘‘court the morning still’’ (5); but it is, of course, available to anyone. I love to think sad thoughts at twilight, the speaker says to her audience, but so, too, might you. The popularity of evening lyrics in the latter half of the eighteenth century can be attributed in large part to the inﬂuence of Milton. The nocturnal, pastoral-themed set-pieces of Paradise Lost provided a descriptive vocabulary; and the manifesto-like statement of ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ inspired an ethos of pensive withdrawal. If Romanticism is ‘‘spilt religion,’’ in T. E. Hulme’s famous phrase,49 it inherited the secularized trappings of worship represented by ‘‘Il Penseroso’’: Melancholy’s appearance as ‘‘pensive nun, devout and pure’’ (31), the nightingale’s ‘‘evensong’’ (64), the retreat to ‘‘the studious cloister’s pale’’ (156), the ‘‘full-voiced choir’’ chanting ‘‘anthems clear’’ (162–3). In this tradition, eighteenth-century nocturnes served as a lyrical, private form of vespers. Thomas Warton’s ‘‘Pleasures of Melancholy,’’ for instance, paid the ultimate homage to Milton’s religious tropes by virtually plagiarizing from the end of ‘‘Il Penseroso.’’50 Such borrowing suggests the pervasive inﬂuence of Milton, as well as Warton’s own imaginative limitations; but it is not likely that the later poet thought he was fooling anybody. Rather, Warton’s allusions constitute a kind of second-order devotion – worshipping at the shrine of Milton’s Penseroso, who in turn devoted himself to Melancholy. Many eighteenth-century evening poems also hearkened to an idealized, pre-Christian past, an enchanted England of sylvan fairies and druidic rituals. In his own ‘‘Ode to Evening,’’ Joseph Warton celebrates a time of day when dryads, having retired from the noon heat, ‘‘[r]eturn to

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trip in wanton evening-dance’’ (11). In this thematic vein, the ‘‘darkling pilgrim’’ of one of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets falls into a twilight reverie of ‘‘[f]air visionary Nymphs that haunt the shade, / Or Naiads rising from the whispering sedge’’ (Sonnet 75, 10–11).51 In a vocational mode, Smith also frequently imagined the apparitions of poetic predecessors. Stationed on the banks of the Arun River at evening, she fantasizes that she might encounter ‘‘Pity’s own Otway,’’ and ‘‘hear his deep sighs swell the sadden’d wind’’ (Sonnet 32, ‘‘To Melancholy,’’ 10– 11). Elsewhere, she pays tribute to Collins in similar fashion: in echo of her predecessor’s ambition to soothe Evening’s ‘‘modest ear,’’ she suggests that the ‘‘evening wind’’ carries Collins’ music to ‘‘Fancy’s ear’’ (Sonnet 45, ‘‘On leaving a part of Sussex,’’ 9–12). Fancy, an emblematic faculty of Sensibility, goes hand in hand with Evening: as twilight represents a softer afterimage of the day, Fancy recreates past experience in ﬁner tones; and the darkening of sight is compensated by the revived powers of the mind’s eye. In her ‘‘Ode to the Nightingale’’ (1789), for instance, Mary Robinson associates evening with nostalgic recollection: ‘‘When to my downy couch remov’d, / Fancy recalled my wearied mind / To scenes of Friendship left behind, / Scenes still regretted, still belov’d!’’ (47–50).52 The echo of the ‘‘Ode to Evening’’ is unmistakable: where Collins imagined Fancy and Friendship joining in hymnal praise of Evening, Robinson puts these abstractions into a troubled psychomachia in which Fancy wistfully recalls Friendship. A similar structure of recollection governs many of the poems in Bowles’s Fourteen Sonnets Written During a Tour (1789), which were framed as jottings in an anonymous traveler’s memorandum-book. Like Keats’s allegorical ﬁgure of ﬂeeting Joy, Bowles’s pilgrim seems to have his hands ever at his lips bidding adieu: several of the sonnets begin with the departure from some place at twilight. Nothing becomes these pastoral English spots like the leaving of them. Like their predecessors, the poets of the eighteenth-century sonnet revival were preoccupied with time, and evening is particularly suited to this species of meditation. It is a liminal period when temporal lapses are most acutely felt; it is a moment of tranquility that enables pensive reﬂection; and it is a penultimate phase of the day allegorized as a pivotal time in life – as in Smith’s description of a friendship as a lunar light that persists through ‘‘Life’s long evening’’ (Sonnet 28), and Bowles’s welcoming of ‘‘life’s peaceful evening’’ (Sonnet 13). Shakespeare and his contemporaries invented conceits about time without any necessary reliance on temporal setting; but poets such as Smith and Bowles often

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stationed themselves in an evening setting and moralized upon it. The ﬁrst of Bowles’s Fourteen Sonnets (1789), ‘‘Written at Tinemouth, Northumberland, after a Tempestuous Voyage,’’ exempliﬁes this mimetic turn toward the time and duration of lyric utterance: As slow I climb the cliff’s ascending side, Much musing on the track of terror past, When o’er the dark wave rode the howling blast, Pleas’d I look back, and view the tranquil tide, That laves the pebbled shore; and now the beam Of evening smiles on the grey battlement, And yon forsaken tow’r, that time has rent. The lifted oar far off with silver gleam Is touch’d and the hush’d billows seem to sleep. Sooth’d by the scene, ev’n thus on sorrow’s breast A kindred stillness steals and bids her rest; Whilst the weak winds that sigh along the deep, The ear, like lullabies of pity, meet, Singing her saddest notes of farewell sweet.

It is as if fragments of Shakespeare’s sonnets on mutability had been conﬂated into a lyric occasion, the metaphorical become literal: ‘‘Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, / So do our minutes hasten to their end’’ (Sonnet 60); ‘‘When sometime lofty towers I see down razed’’ (Sonnet 64); ‘‘In me thou seest the twilight of such day, / As after sunset fadeth in the west’’ (Sonnet 73). Typically, the speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnets has no immediate pretext for his utterance other than a disposition toward thoughtfulness. When he likens the advance of time to tidal oscillations, he draws on a fund of poetic imagery and empirical observation, without the necessity of standing on the shore. When he summons the remembrance of things past to the sessions of sweet silent thought, he describes a periodic activity without any particular mnemonic catalyst. In contrast, Bowles’s sonnet depends upon its experiential situation: the speaker falls into a pensive mood precisely because he has just emerged from a perilous journey, because it is evening, and because he is struck by reminders of mutability – the ruined tower, the receding oar, the stilled ocean. Between Shakespeare’s syntax of the habitual and Bowles’s aesthetic of immediacy lies the rise of the novel, with its convention of epistolary reportage and the Richardsonian emphasis on writing ‘‘to the moment’’; and with its narrative frame of travel, the Fourteen Sonnets might be subtitled, after Laurence Sterne, ‘‘A Sentimental Journey.’’53 If Bowles wished to approximate the novel’s effects of narrative immediacy, he had a readily adaptable medium in the lyric conventions of evening. Indeed, the ﬁrst

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sonnet of his sequence exempliﬁes the characteristic syntax of the evening poem: it is poised on the adverbial still point of ‘‘now,’’ between disaster averted and sleep to come. Within this horizon of experience, the act of looking back is a literalized gesture of recollection: gazing at the disappearing ship, the speaker recalls his recent past. It is a temporal gesture that would appear, with numerous inﬂections, in the work of poets to come. blake’s nurses and the work of lyric In tracing a literary history of evening, I have described a series of translations – the absorption of the Virgilian hour of pastoral closure into the narrative of Paradise Lost, and the expansion of Milton’s descriptive set-pieces into a later lyrical idiom. I turn ﬁnally to William Blake’s ‘‘Nurse’s Songs’’ in the Songs of Innocence and Experience to show their synthesis of these traditions: their distillation of Virgilian and Miltonic pastoral, their invigoration of contemporary sonnet-cliche´s about time and mutability, and their response to the poetic trope of evening prayerfulness. The ‘‘Nurse’s Songs’’ have not previously been considered as taking part in these traditions, but by reading them in this way, we can see them as lateeighteenth-century poetic commentaries on a popular lyric topos. Were it not for its balladic form and anapestic rhythms, the ﬁrst stanza of the Nurse’s Song of Innocence might be mistaken for the opening of an eighteenth-century evening meditation. The ﬁrst four lines could plausibly set the scene for a summoning of poignant memories, but the next stanzas complicate that poetic donne´e: When the voices of children are heard on the green And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast And everything else is still. Then come home my children, the sun is gone down And the dews of night arise Come, come, leave off play, and let us away Till the morning appear in the skies No no let us play, for it is yet day And we cannot go to sleep; Besides in the sky, the little birds ﬂy And the hills are all coverd with sheep. Well well go & play till the light fades away And then go home to bed

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While the Virgilian shepherd’s song ends at evening, the Nurse’s song takes that threshold as its subject; unlike Gallus’ goats at the end of the tenth Eclogue, the children talk back when they are called home. In Blake’s dialogic imagination, the ambiguity of twilight occasions a conﬂict between the atemporal reverie of children’s play and the timeboundedness of adult responsibility. Darkness has begun to fall, but birds and sheep remain at large in sky and ﬁeld: the children identify with the animals, but the punctilious Nurse takes her cue from the sun. By an anhedonic syllogism, she deduces that when the day becomes tranquil, then it must be time to come away. This temporal syntax differs markedly from that of the petitionary ‘‘Ode to Evening’’ (‘‘when thy folding-star arising shows / His paly circlet . . . Then lead, calm vot’ress’’). Two very different vocations are at stake: Collins’ speaker calls forth the wraithlike Evening as poetic muse; but Blake’s Nurse calls the children under her care; one is deﬁning a poetic task, while the other is simply doing her job. Blake’s poem, in other words, functions as both art-song and as sociologically recognizable form of work. The post-Miltonic evening poem typically expresses a desire for temporal dilation, an extension of nocturnal pleasures; and Blake develops this wish with a subtle sequence of statement and modulation. Syntactic echoes plot the course of the nurse’s thought: while the ﬁrst ‘‘then’’ cuts short the nurse’s reverie, the second ‘‘then’’ extends the charmed twilight of playtime. The construction of ‘‘until’’ undergoes a similar revision: while the ﬁrst ‘‘till’’ imposes the period of sleep (‘‘Till the morning appear’’), the second sets a new limit to evening (‘‘till the light fades away’’). The nurse ﬁrst gives an order that includes both herself and her charges (‘‘let us away’’), but the children respond with a plea that includes only themselves (‘‘let us play’’). Both Milton’s Penseroso and Finch’s wanderer in ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ make formal petitions to remain abroad at nightfall – to Melancholy and to an unspeciﬁed power, respectively. The nursery-world setting of the Songs of Innocence naturalizes this poetic trope into a practical request: the children have no choice but to ask permission from a parental surrogate. The innovation of the ‘‘Nurse’s Song’’ is evident not only in its play with pastoral convention and Miltonic variations but also in its implicit response to the conventional pieties of the children’s verse of Isaac Watts.55 Blake’s most well-known social critique of the Wattsian model of Christian ﬁlial duty appears in the chimney-sweeper poems; but in less

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dire terms, the children of the ‘‘Nurse’s Song’’ can be seen as subverting Watts’s prescription for evening rest and prayer. While evening lyrics of the eighteenth century typically cultivated an air of devotional meditation, Watts’s ‘‘Evening Song’’ in the Divine and Moral Hymns was actually intended as a prayer that children would utter at bedtime: And now another day is gone, I’ll sing my Maker’s praise; My comforts every hour make known His providence and grace. But how my childhood runs to waste! My sins, how great their sum! Lord, give me pardon for the past, And strength for days to come. I lay my body down to sleep; Thou wilt be with me still, And thro’ the hours of darkness keep Me safe from ev’ry ill. With cheerful heart I close my eyes Since thou wilt not remove; And in the morning let me rise Rejoicing in thy love.56

The child ideally meant to assume the lyric ‘‘I’’ of the poem is selfregulating; he or she has thoroughly internalized Christian teachings and voluntarily goes to bed, dutifully moralizing the signiﬁcance of the day’s end. Blake particularizes this teaching in the ﬁgure of the nurse and undermines it through dialogic form: the ending of day is not a voluntary act but a struggle – between youth and age, play and duty, atemporality and Time. In contrast to the quiescent univocality of the ‘‘Evening Song,’’ the ‘‘Nurse’s Song’’ of Innocence contains three lyric voices: the nurse’s inner thoughts; the audible voice in which the nurse calls her charges home and subsequently revises her command; and the voice of the children, which is both described as a scenic element (‘‘laughing is heard on the hill,’’ ‘‘all the hills ecchoe`d’’) and rendered as speech (‘‘No no let us play’’). If the poem is truly the nurse’s song, the speaker performs a fugal composition: she does the evening in different voices. In Blake’s transformation of the ‘‘Nurse’s Song’’ of Innocence into the idiom of Experience, this multivocal performance disappears. The children are heard only at a distance, without quotation; and their playful

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shouts grade into conspiratorial whispers. The perspectives of the nurse and the children never overlap in a moment of shared enjoyment, and the whole poem can be read as a bitter internal monologue rather than a dialogue of give-and-take: When the voices of children are heard on the green And whisperings are in the dale, The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind, My face turns green and pale. Then come home my children, the sun is gone down, And the dews of night arise; Your spring & your day are wasted in play, And your winter and night in disguise.

In their opening stanzas, both poems invoke affective states typical of eighteenth-century evening lyrics – tranquility in the Song of Innocence, nostalgia in the Song of Experience. In the latter, the nurse’s disposition is an exaggeration of nocturnal sensibility, an internalized evening scene: the sickly greenness of envy and regret demonically reﬂects the pastoral green of the children’s world, and the involuntary welling-up of memories kinesthetically rhymes with the rising night-dews. The sense of passing time traditionally associated with evening is understandably more acute for the nurse than for the children. Her bitter Urizenic sermon on mutability and deceit, however, is not portable wisdom; it will one day be proven on the pulse of the children’s own experience, but not now. The scolding about the wastefulness of play sounds uncannily like the rigorous self-criticism exercised by Watts’s child: ‘‘But how my childhood runs to waste! / My sins, how great their sum!’’ In Watts’s normative world, the adult teaching on mutability is successfully transferred to the child; but in Blake’s world of dialogic struggle, it is not. By ascribing the Wattsian moralization of night and day to a disillusioned governess, Blake gives generalized sententiae an experiential context. The relation between the two Nurse’s Songs, then, can be described as a difference in structure, mood, and lyric voicing – all of which can be subsumed under one primary distinction: the Song of Innocence savors the evening, and the Song of Experience looks only to night. Whereas the ﬁrst represents twilight as a temporal threshold to be negotiated, the second represents it as an absolute boundary, with no in-between. In the Song of Innocence, it is not the Nurse’s voice that ends the poem but the aftereffect of the children’s voices. In its movement from the laughter

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of children on the hill to the celebratory echoing of that sound in the last line, this lyric epitomizes the poetics of evening – by virtue of its aural landscape and its dilation of sound. This echo serves as an apt ﬁgure for the poem’s structure of call-and-response. Moreover, it is itself a literary echo of Virgil’s sixth Eclogue: the extension of Silenus’ songs from the resounding valleys to the heights of Olympus. It bespeaks a deep reluctance, either human or divine, to hear the music end.

c h ap t e r 2

Coleridge’s lyric ‘‘moment’’

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s descriptions of his lyrics are famous for their deﬁance of traditional generic categories: ‘‘Effusion,’’ ‘‘Conversation Poem,’’ ‘‘A Poem which affects not to be Poetry,’’ ‘‘Sermoni propriora’’ (‘‘more suited to colloquial speech’’). These can be interpreted as the disclaimers of an unassuming poet, but also as the covert assertions of a theorist of organic form. Whatever hint of apology might once have attended the word ‘‘conversation’’ has faded away, ﬁrst in G. M. Harper’s canonical identiﬁcation of a handful of lyrics as conversation poems,1 and more recently in the valorization of their skeptical and dialogic strategies as forms of Romantic irony.2 The poems that affected to formlessness have been credited by M. H. Abrams with founding the formal procedure of the ‘‘greater Romantic lyric,’’ in which a solitary speaker stations himself in a particular place, ﬁguratively departs in a reverie of recollection or anticipation, and ﬁnally ‘‘returns’’ with a new sense of his situation.3 Abrams cogently identiﬁed the way that the Romantic lyric abstracted the excursions of eighteenth-century topographical poetry into mental movements; but I wish to show that in Coleridge’s conversation poems, this form has a temporal as well as spatial dimension. Many critics have noted the processual and dynamic nature of Coleridge’s poems, but I mean more speciﬁcally to articulate their temporal and perceptual grammar. Far more than Wordsworth, Coleridge registers complex, wayward, ephemeral thoughts and sensations in time. ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ and ‘‘The Nightingale’’ begin at sunset and end in symbolic forms of darkness; the climax of ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’’ coincides with a sunset; the political reﬂections of ‘‘Fears in Solitude’’ end at nightfall; and the poet’s ruminations in the Dejection Ode begin with a long gaze at the evening star and end with the midnight onset of a storm. This environmental awareness suggests the sensibility of someone easily distracted, a poet acutely aware of the peculiarity of poetic utterance. More profoundly, these poems represent an exception to the 48

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idea of lyric as an atemporal form. It may be, as Sharon Cameron has suggested, that the single moment is the soul of lyric,4 or that lyric constitutes a moment; but for Coleridge, the ‘‘moment’’ as perceived is a complex manifold: How opposite to nature and the fact to talk of the ‘‘one moment’’ of Hume, of our whole being an aggregate of successive single sensations! Who ever felt a single sensation? Is not every one at the same moment conscious that there coexist a thousand others, a darker shade, or less light, even as when I ﬁx my attention on a white house or a grey bare hill or rather long ridge that runs out of sight each way . . . And what is a moment? Succession with interspace? Absurdity! It is evidently only the licht-punct in the indivisible undivided duration.5

In Coleridge’s conversation poems, evening offers not only a picturesque setting but a form for precisely this sort of duration. It reconciles individual perception with the phenomena of the world, and it affords a temporal frame in which to imagine parallel events, or the simultaneous perceptions of two different people. In claiming that the highest achievement of English Romantics was their ‘‘humanization of the Miltonic Sublime,’’ Harold Bloom has lamented that Coleridge never fully accomplished this project. ‘‘More than the other ﬁve great Romantic poets,’’ he argues, ‘‘Coleridge was able, by temperament and by subtly shaded intellect, to have given us a High Romantic Eve, a total humanization of the tenderest and most appealing element in the Miltonic Sublime.’’6 Coleridge did, however, give us a High Romantic evening – a translation of crepuscular scenes in ‘‘Il Penseroso,’’ ‘‘Lycidas,’’ and Paradise Lost. In his temporal poetics, he gestures to the continuous existence of the world independent of any perceiver. The activities of rapt sensory absorption, abstract meditation, or lyrical utterance seem to have no measurable duration; and by giving them a time-line of sorts, he represents poetry as taking place within the phenomenal world – an utterance or meditation shaped by the ﬂux of perceptions. For Coleridge, then, lyric is not an atemporal moment but rather a succession of ideas (thoughts and images) by which the mind’s time is registered – what Locke memorably called ‘‘the Duration of our selves.’’7 contrapuntal melodies: ‘‘the eolian harp’’ Coleridge was steeped in the ruminative, nocturnal idiom of such popular late eighteenth-century poets as William Lisle Bowles and Charlotte

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Smith, as his Poems on Various Subjects (1796) abundantly attests.8 The sonnet-revival of the 1790s offered a set of conventions that he could imitate, a language in which to become ﬂuent.9 Parody is a close relative of mimicry, however, and only a year after the publication of his debut volume, Coleridge satirized the donne´es of his predecessors in a sonnet that he published in the Monthly Magazine under the pseudonym of ‘‘Nehemiah Higginbottom’’: Pensive at eve, on the hard world I mused, And my poor heart was sad; so at the Moon I gazed, and sighed, and sighed; for ah how soon Eve saddens into night! mine eyes perused With tearful vacancy the dampy grass That wept and glitter’d in the paly ray: And I did pause me, on my lonely way And mused me, on the wretched ones that pass O’er the bleak heath of sorrow. But alas! Most of myself I thought! When it befel, That the soothe spirit of the breezy wood Breath’d in mine ear: ‘‘All this is very well, But much of one thing, is for no thing good.’’ Oh my poor heart’s inexplicable swell!10

Here is an omnium-gatherum of motifs from the poetry of Sensibility, which Coleridge had so recently raided in writing his effusions: the stock vocabulary (‘‘pensive,’’ ‘‘breezy,’’ ‘‘tearful’’), the affective setting (‘‘eve saddens into night,’’ ‘‘heath of sorrow’’), the occult visitations, the locus of feeling in the ‘‘poor heart.’’ What is strikingly Coleridgian about this spoof is its inherent selfcritique. In a sonnet that satirizes a dreary univocality of sentiment, the poet cannot help lapsing into a dialogic mode – cannot, in other words, write an entirely straight-faced (or single-voiced) parody. At the moment when some literary ghost (Thomas Otway, perhaps) would typically visit the sad poet, it is the spirit of ﬂatly colloquial reproach that intrudes instead. The phantom bears a family resemblance to a ghost that Coleridge once jokingly reported meeting as a Cambridge undergraduate: the shade of Thomas Gray, who admonished him to ‘‘write no more verses – in the ﬁrst place, your poetry is vile stuff.’’11 Without going so far as Gray’s vocational discouragement, the genius loci voices Coleridge’s own sense of limitations – of his poetic abilities, of the sonnet form, of the idiom of Sensibility. By professing sadness while leaving its cause unspeciﬁed, Coleridge follows an affective convention, but the subtle joke of the sonnet is that his perplexity is explicable: it is the dilemma of a poet

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struggling against the pitfalls of poetry that he once earnestly imitated. In effect, Coleridge turns the ﬁgure of the pensive twilight wanderer into a poet who aspires to write an original evening lyric at the end of the eighteenth century. He places himself in a poetic setting with nothing interesting to say. In light of the poetry that Coleridge mocks, ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ represents a striking innovation: it substitutes the music of a humanmade instrument for the sound of a breeze, nightingale, or revenant; and it treats that sound not so much as the conﬁrmation of a mood as the occasion for metaphysical speculation. The poem is most often characterized as a ﬂawed precursor to the conversation poems that followed a few years later; but it should also be read in the context of its predecessors. Long before its promotion to the status of conversation poem, ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ ﬁrst appeared as one of thirty-six ‘‘Effusions’’ in Coleridge’s 1796 Poems. In particular, the effusion ‘‘Written in Early Youth, the Time, An Autumnal Evening,’’ which Coleridge wrote as an undergraduate, can be read as a direct precursor to ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ by virtue of its narrative of perceptual adjustment and mimesis of passing time. More to the point, both the autumn effusion and ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ draw out the epithalamic signiﬁcance of evening: if they express a nocturnal sensibility, it is not vague melancholy but rather erotic desire.12 Like Wordsworth’s An Evening Walk (1793), which Coleridge had read and admired, the autumnal evening effusion concerns the replacement of the visible world with imaginative vision – in this case, the fantasy of a paramour.13 In this fantasy, Coleridge eroticizes the polite devotional gesture of the ‘‘Ode to Evening.’’ Collins had hoped to soothe the ear of ‘‘chaste Eve’’ with a song as sweet as her own ‘‘dying gale’’; and through the Ovidian idiom of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Coleridge reimagines this modest simile as metamorphosis: When twilight stole across the fading vale, To fan my Love I’d be the Evening Gale; Mourn in the soft folds of her swelling vest, And ﬂutter my faint pinions on her breast! (63–6)

Such musings could proceed interminably, but what brings them to a close is the plot of evening perception that would determine the course of later conversation poems. While the effusion begins in the artiﬁce of ordering Fancy to quit its sunset ﬂights, it ends with the speaker bereft of all props, staring at a darkened sky. In an associative syntax typical of later

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poems, Coleridge suggests that the world has been growing dark in the course of his reﬂections: Scenes of my Hope! The aching eye ye leave Like yon bright hues that paint the clouds of eve! Tearful and saddening with the sadden’d blaze Mine eye the gleam pursues with wistful gaze: Sees shades on shades with deeper tint impend, Till chill and damp the moonless night descend. (101–6)

It is a particularly Virgilian form of closure: like Corydon in the second eclogue, Coleridge regards nightfall as a natural terminus to his lament; and like Virgil himself in the tenth eclogue, he alludes to the menace of chilling ‘‘shades.’’ This pastoral trope is mediated by an eighteenthcentury allegory of perception: like the ‘‘aching’’ eye that gazes into the darkness, the inner eye that has conjured images of a dream-Maiden and scenes of childhood grows weary of the effort. The poem’s ending is thus motivated by both literal and ﬁgurative dusk – both ocular and imaginative fatigue. Read in relation to this juvenile effort, ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ appears to rise from the ashes of that fatigue. In essence, Coleridge uses the affective and descriptive conventions of the earlier poem as a foil to his metaphysical speculations; he echoes the vocabulary of melancholy evening meditation in stylistic counterpoint to the rhapsody that follows. The poem has been amply studied as a dialectic of ideas – corporeal sensation vs. metaphysical speculation, enlightenment necessitarianism vs. orthodox belief – but I wish to show it in dialogic relation with the earlier effusion and the tradition of Sensibility that it represents.14 In ‘‘The Eolian Harp,’’ Coleridge writes a different kind of evening poem; and to appreciate its innovation, we must attend to matters of formal procedure and idiom as much as philosophical content. While he ended the earlier effusion with ‘‘tearful and saddening’’ eyes (103), Coleridge now delegates that lachrymal display to the dusky clouds that are ‘‘[s]low saddening round’’ (7). Kathleen Wheeler reads this phrase as ‘‘a humanizing qualiﬁcation that, in the context of the beauty of twilight, suggests a close association of deep delight and pain.’’15 This is an elegant formulation, but it misses Coleridge’s play with poetic cliche´ – a trope that he parodies outright in the Higginbottom sonnet when he sententiously remarks on ‘‘how soon / Eve saddens into night.’’ The mood of the clouds is belied by the meditation that follows, which is anything but sad. Similarly, in addressing his ﬁance´e as ‘‘My pensive Sara,’’ Coleridge imposes a subtle

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division of labor: by hailing her with an epithet that he uses to satiric effect in his Nehemiah Higginbottom parody, he delegates to her the role that he once assumed himself. In contrast to his sober-sided wife, Coleridge becomes a cheerful speculative philosopher. The langue of nocturnal meditation is thus resuscitated in the parole of Coleridge’s conversational idiom; descriptive convention is charged by a reality-effect of immediate observation and casual remarks. Like his poetic predecessors, Coleridge moralizes the scene, but does so as if the symbolism were suddenly occurring to him: after noting the jasmine and myrtle that surround his cottage, he adds the parenthetical remark, ‘‘Meet emblems they of innocence and Love!’’ (5); and after hailing the evening star (a ﬁxture of the nocturnal idyllium) he adds an aside about its brightness – ‘‘such should Wisdom be’’ (8). In observance of the trope of perceptual adjustment, he notes, with characteristic speciﬁcity, ‘‘scents / Snatch’d from yon bean-ﬁeld’’ (9–10); and he remarks on the silence as if it were a startling discovery rather than a poetic convention (‘‘and the world so hush’d!’’ [10]). If the turn from outer scene to inner vision required the ceremonial aid of Fancy in the earlier effusion, the central symbol of the eolian harp simply appears in the stream of blank-verse observations; the same breeze that has brought the scent of bean-ﬁelds generates the random notes of the lyre. At the moment in which a nightingale might be expected to break the stillness, the sound from a human artifact arises instead, in an offhand parataxis: And that simplest Lute, Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark! How by the desultory breeze caress’d, Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover, It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs Tempt to repeat the wrong! And now, its strings Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes Over delicious surges sink and rise. (12–19)

Coleridge here revisits the fantasy of his earlier effusion, turning the idea of metamorphosis (becoming a breeze that caresses a dream-maiden) into a metaphor (breeze is to lute as lover is to maid). In his new conjugal situation, the poet need not imagine himself as a breeze; rather, he implicitly likens the breeze to himself. More important, the syntax of analogy enables an effect of simultaneity that Coleridge would pursue in several later poems: the coincidence of thought (or utterance) and perception, and the notion that poetry takes

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place – and time – within the phenomenal world.16 It is not merely that the play of wind on harp is conceptually akin to the caress exchanged between lover and beloved; the two events occur in the same moment, just as the poet’s thoughts coincide with a gradual darkening in the autumnal evening effusion. In a still more elaborate chain of similes, Coleridge likens his thoughts both to a visual phenomenon he witnessed earlier in the day and to the randomly generated music that he now hears: And thus, my Love! as on the midway slope Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon, Whilst through my half-clos’d eye-lids I behold The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main, And tranquil muse upon tranquillity; Full many a thought uncall’d and undetain’d, And many idle ﬂitting fantasies, Traverse my indolent and passive brain, As wild and various as the random gales That swell and ﬂutter on this subject Lute! (34–43)

If the visual yields to the aural in the perceptual plot of evening poetry, here Coleridge represents an interpenetration of the two senses, an imaginative association of the diurnal and nocturnal. The analogy between a recent memory (noon repose) and present experience (evening reverie) introduces a synesthetic equation of light and sound, which Coleridge later ampliﬁed in his famous emendation of 1817, in which he observes ‘‘[a] light in sound, a sound-like power in light’’ (28). While he begins the poem with the trope of hearing music in compensation for the darkness of a ‘‘saddening’’ sky, he comes to imply that nothing is lost if sound and light are interchangeable, if everything is part of a universal rhythm. In a strange prescience of twentieth-century scientiﬁc concepts, Coleridge represents a symbolic and even material correspondence among oscillatory waves of thought, sound, light, and water. In short, the traditional moralization of evening (darkness as sadness or loss) is nulliﬁed by a recuperative synesthesia. ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ seems awkward in comparison with the graceful rondure of later poems such as ‘‘Frost at Midnight’’ and ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’; but the poem should not only be held to the standard of later efforts but also understood in the context of earlier poetry.17 Read as an evening effusion, the conclusion of ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ looks signiﬁcantly different: it is brought to an end not by a moralized dusk, but rather by a disapproving opinion. At the same time, Coleridge alludes to a ﬁgurative darkness when he refers to his thoughts as ‘‘[d]im and unhallowed’’ (51),

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in retraction of his earlier analogy of them to the sparkling ocean. While evening does not explicitly lapse into night in the poem, it does so implicitly, in the penumbral narrative that Coleridge suggests when he pays obeisance to God, ‘‘[w]ho with his saving mercies healed me, / A sinful and most miserable man, / Wilder’d and dark’’ (61–3). In this memory of his earlier solitary self, Coleridge recalls the ending of his earlier effusion, in which he ﬁnds himself alone and all but bereft of sight. In Coleridge’s symbolic darkness, a Christian trope – the valley of the shadow of death, the Dantean selva oscura – replaces the secular closure of nightfall. In the course of the poem, Coleridge makes two compensatory gestures: against the literal darkening of the world, he asserts the consolations of memory (of noontime repose) and imagination (of analogies between thoughts and phenomena); and against a ﬁgurative darkness, he declares a faith in Christian salvation – in a soul that persists through all seemingly random movements of mind. Coleridge’s autobiographical narrative of spiritual crisis and redemption echoes that of the ﬁrst effusion in the series, a eulogistic sonnet to Bowles in which the young poet thanks his predecessor for giving solace ‘‘when the darker day of life began, / And I did roam, a thoughtbewilder’d man!’’ (6–7).18 In many ways, ‘‘The Eolian Harp,’’ the penultimate effusion, revises the terms of this sonnet and tells a new story. Instead of praising Bowles’s ‘‘soft strains,’’ Coleridge now hearkens to the eolian harp’s ‘‘soft ﬂoating witchery of sound’’; rather than comparing the effect of Bowles’s poetry on the ‘‘wavy and tumultuous mind’’ to God’s ‘‘plastic sweep’’ on the ‘‘darkness of the unform’d deep’’ (12–14), he proposes the metaphor of nature as ‘‘organic harps’’ that are swept by ‘‘one intellectual breeze’’ (45–7); and instead of expressing gratitude to another poet, he ﬁnds orthodox salvation in God and the comforts of domesticity. If the metaphor of God’s creation of the world ex nihilo exceeded the modest scope of Bowles’ sonnets, Coleridge salvages it to describe the larger workings of nature and mind. Rather than developing a single, uniﬁed sentiment in fourteen lines (the achievement that he once praised in Bowles’s sonnets), Coleridge makes a virtue of multiplicity in ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ – ‘‘sequaceous’’ notes of thought and emotion rather than the one-note tune of a melancholy twilight. how to write a nightingale poem: two views To write an evening poem about an eolian harp was to revise the terms of Collins’ ‘‘Ode to Evening’’: to interpose the sound of a human-made

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musical instrument in an otherwise natural aural setting; to turn the breeze into a metaphor not merely for poetic inspiration but rather for the animating spirit of nature itself; in short, to write as a philosopher seeking an apt ﬁgure for the mind rather than as a poet seeking vocational inspiration in the proper hymning of a nature-deity. To write an evening poem about a nightingale, on the other hand, was to borrow both a conventional setting and a conventional topic; and Coleridge’s consciousness of this literary matrix is richly registered in ‘‘The Nightingale,’’ which ﬁrst appeared in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads and in many ways anticipated Wordsworth’s critique of ‘‘poetic diction’’ in the 1800 Preface to that volume. What Wordsworth announced in prose – avoidance of abstraction and allegorical personiﬁcation in the desire to keep his readers in the presence of ‘‘ﬂesh and blood’’ – Coleridge declares here in verse, in asserting the reality of an encounter with a nightingale free from literary mediation. In his genealogy of an attenuated poetic convention, he traces the melancholy cult of Philomel across three poetic generations: Milton as originator in ‘‘Il Penseroso’’; ‘‘many a poet’’ who ‘‘echoes the conceit’’; and the ‘‘youths and maidens most poetical’’ who ‘‘must heave their sighs / O’er Philomela’s pity-pleading strains’’ (35, 38–9). So passes the glory of a trope, from classical myth to English bard, and from post-Miltonic poets to merely ‘‘poetical’’ devote´es.19 ‘‘The Nightingale’’ elaborates on an effusion from the 1796 volume entitled ‘‘To the Nightingale’’ – a poem similar to ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ in its celebration of the poet’s marriage to Sara Fricker in the fall of 1795.20 From the perspective of a cottage in Somerset, Coleridge has the luxury to observe a literal and ﬁgurative distance between himself and the urban bachelor-poet who invokes a nightingale without direct experience of one: Sister of love-lorn Poets, Philomel! How many Bards in city garret pent, When at their window they with downward eye Mark the faint lamp-beam on the kennell’d mud, And listen to the drowsy cry of Watchmen (Those hoarse unfeather’d Nightingales of Time!), How many wretched Bards address thy name, And hers, the full-orb’d Queen that shines above. But I do hear thee, and the high bough mark, Within whose mild moon-mellow’d foliage hid Thou warblest sad thy pity-pleading strains. O! I have listen’d, till my working soul, Waked by those strains to thousand fantasies, Absorb’d hath ceas’d to listen! (1–14)

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In these ﬁrst fourteen lines, Coleridge writes a blank-verse approximation of a Petrarchan sonnet: precisely where the volta ought to be, he turns from mocking imitative bards to asserting his own authentic experience, on the familiar grammatical pivot of ‘‘but.’’ In this assertion, Coleridge adopts not only the form but also the attitude of the anti-Petrarchan sonneteer – the poet who asserts his sincerity by mocking the conventional language of praise. His nightingale is akin to Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, for in praising its song, he asserts its natural superiority to the artiﬁcial ‘‘delicious airs / That vibrate from the white-arm’d Lady’s harp’’ when love-pangs heave her ‘‘breast of snow’’ (19–20, 22). The true Dark Lady, however, turns out to be Sara Fricker herself: just as Shakespeare’s speaker loves hearing his mistress speak more than listening to music, Coleridge asserts the superiority of Sara’s voice – the medium of homely conversation – over the tuneful strains of sonnet-maidens or nightingales. Coleridge describes three separate moments of utterance in the course of the poem: the urban poets’ invocation of nightingale (‘‘How many wretched Bards address thy name’’ [7]); his own authentic paean to the bird (‘‘Therefore oft, / I hymn thy name’’ [15]); and ﬁnally Sara’s calling of him, ‘‘[w]hen breathing the pure soul of tenderness, / She thrills me with the Husband’s promis’d name!’’ (25–6). By referring to this act of betrothal, Coleridge gives a conjugal twist to the ceremonial gesture of the ‘‘Ode to Evening,’’ in which Collins imagines that abstract virtues like Fancy and Friendship will sing hymns to Evening’s ‘‘fav’rite Name’’ (52). Like Collins, Coleridge begins his poem with an act of odal naming, but he ends with a gesture that differs markedly from that of Collins’ conclusion: the voicing of an ordinary proper name and the conferral of a domestic role. Though this effusion is not classiﬁed as a conversation poem, it asserts a fundamental value of this Coleridgian form: the sotto voce pleasures of domestic intimacy over full-throated poetic praise. In light of this earlier poem, the critical thrust of ‘‘The Nightingale’’ seems more pronounced. It resists the melancholy signiﬁcance of twilight even more pointedly than ‘‘The Eolian Harp,’’ in that it marks the utter absence of sunset, evening star, and moon, as well as their affective connotations: No cloud, no relique of the sunken day Distinguishes the West, no long thin slip Of sullen light, no obscure trembling hues. Come, we will rest on this old mossy bridge! (1–4)

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It is as if the phrases, ‘‘sunken day,’’ ‘‘sullen light,’’ and ‘‘obscure trembling hues’’ were quotations from the evening scenes of other poems; and the tactile particularity of the adjective ‘‘mossy’’ serves as terrestrial contrast to these airy descriptions. The negative construction constitutes a reality-effect of descriptive ﬁdelity, an insistence on telling the truth about one’s surroundings rather than supplying a conventionally beautiful backdrop – darkness rather than glimmering twilight, jauntiness rather than melancholy, society rather than solitude. Coleridge coined the term ‘‘Conversational Poem’’ for ‘‘The Nightingale’’ and later altered it to ‘‘Conversation Poem’’; but the original adjective is more apt, since it denotes a style of utterance rather than an actual dialogue. The primary sense of the term is that of social colloquy, but it also suggests the poet’s ongoing dialogue with himself and with poetic tradition. Tellingly, Coleridge hears the nightingale in almost the same moment that he hears his own voice: And hark! the Nightingale begins its song, ‘Most musical, most melancholy’ bird! A melancholy bird! Oh! idle thought! In nature there is nothing melancholy. (12–15)

This is an act of literary criticism dramatized as a mental double-take: Coleridge implicitly recalls his own invocation of the ‘‘most musical, most melancholy’’ bird in ‘‘To the Nightingale’’ (17), which in turn alluded to Milton’s original epithet in ‘‘Il Penseroso.’’ In the effusion, Coleridge mocks poets who would patch together nightingale odes with the hand-me-downs of poetic convention, but he does not dispense entirely with literary mediation: in hailing the bird by borrowing from Milton, he adopts a rhetorical strategy from the poetry of Sensibility – a way of placing oneself within a poetic community of feeling, a selfidentiﬁcation as literary enthusiast. The implication of ‘‘To the Nightingale’’ is that it is permissible to invoke Philomel if you have actually heard the nightingale’s song ﬁrst-hand. In ‘‘The Nightingale,’’ however, Coleridge rejects the trope entirely, and he does so in the manner of a soliloquy: the act of reﬂexively quoting a phrase, overhearing himself saying it, and assessing its truth. It is precisely this turn that Keats later makes in his own nightingale poem when he repeats the word ‘‘forlorn,’’ ﬁrst uttering it as a melancholy formula and then as a sharp chastisement to himself. In compensation for the cloudy occlusion of moon and stars, the entire second half of the poem is devoted to the recollection of three lunar

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images: a chorus of bright-eyed nightingales singing in ‘‘moon-lit bushes’’; a scene in which a ‘‘most gentle Maid’’ (probably Dorothy Wordsworth) listens to that chorus; and a moment when Coleridge’s infant son Hartley does not stop sobbing until he is brought outside to see the moon. In effect, the lunar light of memory substitutes for direct perception of the moon, just as a remembered moment of noontime repose overlaps with the nocturnal present in ‘‘The Eolian Harp.’’ In Coleridge’s synesthetic imagination, sound exerts a visual pressure, in that the birdsong ‘‘[stirs] the air with such a harmony, / That should you close your eyes, you might almost / Forget it was not day!’’ (62–4). The exercise of closing one’s eyes makes an apt emblem for the vignettes involving the gentle Maid and Hartley Coleridge; each is a perceptual drama of disappearance and reappearance, and an aspect of the poet’s search for solace within darkness. In the ﬁrst, the moon vanishes behind wind-driven clouds, and when it emerges, a grove of momentarily sedentary nightingales reawaken into song; in the second, the moon is effectively invisible until the child sees it. In a poem that begins with a reﬂection on the problem of perceiving the world through rote poetic formulas, it is apt that Coleridge ends with a scene of preverbal sensation. Though Hartley is ‘‘capable of no articulate sound,’’ he ‘‘knows well / The evening-star’’ (92, 97–8) – ‘‘knows’’ it, of course, with a purely sensory connaissance, without the term ‘‘evening-star’’ and all of its mythical and poetic associations. Similarly oblivious to nightingale-poems, Hartley ‘‘would place his hand beside his ear, / His little hand, the small foreﬁnger up, / And bid us listen!’’ (94–6). In this speculation, Coleridge not only visualizes what his son would do if he were here, he interprets what that act would signify. If the opening invitation, ‘‘Come, we will rest on this old mossy bridge!’’ (4), naturalizes the formal invocations of such poems as ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ and the ‘‘Ode to Evening,’’ Hartley’s vague hand-motion represents a still more radical version of this gesture. By implication, the ﬁnest experience of evening would be entirely innocent of the conventions of evening poems; it would be pure gesture rather than inherited language. In effect, the poem asks how to write an evening poem about a nightingale, and it offers several possible answers: imitating the example of melancholy nocturnes; abandoning poetry and surrendering to the impulses of nature; and recapturing the preverbal joy of infancy. There is a fourth possibility, and that is to write a conversation poem in which these responses are set in a dialogic relationship – to register one’s own awareness of writing within a lyric tradition. Hartley’s

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vague hand-motion, then, points to a horizon of possibility beyond ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ and its successors, to evening poems yet to be written. the perceptual grammar of ‘‘this lime-tree bower’’ Unlike the effusions and conversation poems I have considered, ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’’ is not set at twilight; rather, it arrives at this time of day in the course of its utterance, so that evening seems more like a surprise than a deliberately invoked convention. It is not the declaration of a nocturnal ethos in the tradition of ‘‘Il Penseroso,’’ but rather a lyric shaped by the temporal mimesis of ‘‘Lycidas’’ and Paradise Lost. Here, Coleridge writes a poem about circumstances beyond his control – the laming of his foot by a pot of scalding milk and his friends’ momentary desertion of him; and in this way, he is able to liberate himself from the consciousness of scenic artiﬁce that he acknowledges in ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ and ‘‘The Nightingale.’’ He begins with neither a ‘‘saddening’’ sky nor a rejection of atmospheric sullenness, but rather with an immediate, seemingly unguarded exclamation of disappointment and self-pity: Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost Beauties and feelings, such as would have been Most sweet to my remembrance when age Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! (1–5)

The metaphor of imprisonment is a comically hyperbolic expression of this feeling; but it also aptly dramatizes the situation, typical of Coleridge’s poetry, of a lyric speaker ﬁxed in one place and time and thinking about the world beyond.21 It also echoes a trope common to Enlightenment theories of consciousness and poetic notions of Fancy – the faculty that, in Thomas Warton’s phrase, ‘‘mid the dungeon’s solitary gloom, / Can dress the Graces in their Attic pall.’’22 In his famous series of essays on ‘‘The Pleasures of the Imagination,’’ Joseph Addison proposes this metaphor, in a carceral variation on Locke’s metaphor of the mind as camera obscura: We cannot, indeed, have a single image in the fancy that did not make its ﬁrst entrance through the sight; but we have the power of retaining, altering, and compounding those images, which we have once received, into all the varieties of picture and vision that are most agreeable to the imagination; for by this faculty a man in a dungeon is capable of entertaining himself with scenes and landscapes more beautiful than any that can be found in the whole compass of nature.23

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We might wonder why Coleridge cannot be content, in the manner of Addison’s prisoner, with simply recalling prior walks to the roaring dell. When he comes to imagine his friends’ walk, Coleridge does precisely that; but his original complaint expresses a deeper unease – a sense of the impossibility of being in two places at once, and a heightened awareness of the ephemeral. Chaﬁng against all forms of mediation – of memory, of language, of imagination – Coleridge has what Milton’s Satan calls an ‘‘[u]nspeakable desire to see’’ (PL, 3.662). More precisely, as the phrase ‘‘beauties and feelings’’ implies, he has an insatiable desire for experience, with all of the cognitive and affective dimensions that this term entails. He’s seen the dell before, but he wants to be there again now, accompanied by those who are visiting it for the ﬁrst time. Coleridge’s sense of loss, in other words, differs from Wordsworth’s: a year later in ‘‘Tintern Abbey,’’ Wordsworth would articulate the loss of a way of seeing the world, but Coleridge here laments the loss of experience itself. If Wordsworth measures his life in stages of perceptual growth, Coleridge makes a fraction of a day, with its minute quanta of observation, stand for larger ideas about loss and gain. Coleridge ﬁnds some compensation for loss in borrowing the spatial idiom of the eighteenth-century walking tour; and he reinvigorates this idiom by framing the tour as an act of imaginative surmise. Various critics have commented on the pictorial language of the poem; in particular, Anne Mellor has persuasively described the progression of descriptive modes, from the picturesque (the shadowy dell) to the sublime (the all-encompassing sunset).24 I wish to focus on the temporal dimension of that progression: the sun is not only a symbol of the sublime but also an index of passing time. To see how Coleridge both appropriates and modiﬁes the picturesque mode, we can compare the poem to a passage of the Spring eclogue of James Thomson’s The Seasons, in which the poet similarly describes a scene from which he is absent – a hypothetical ramble that his friend and patron Lord Lyttelton might take through his estate. The itinerary, with its descent into a ‘‘Dale / With Woods o’erhung’’ past a ‘‘rough cascade’’ (909–12) and reemergence upon a hill whose ‘‘bursting prospect spreads immense around’’ (951), preﬁgures the imagined walk in Coleridge’s poem.25 The two poets’ speculations differ markedly in function, however. Thomson politely suggests possible pastimes for his patron, and his own ability to participate in the activities is irrelevant; but Coleridge bitterly laments his absence from the scene. His condition at the outset is that of the lover as described by Roland Barthes: ‘‘It is the other who

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leaves, it is I who remain. The other is in a condition of perpetual departure, of journeying; the other is, by vocation, migrant, fugitive; I – I who love, by converse vocation, am sedentary, motionless, at hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot.’’26 The plot of the poem brings about the reconciliation of this disconsolate sense of immobility and deprivation with an ethos of imaginative transcendence; and the dynamic process of this plot gives new vigor to the generic form of landscape description. This plot can be tracked through several successive moments, each with its own distinct temporal syntax. The word ‘‘now’’ marks several of these moments, and its effect can be contrasted with that of Collins’ repeated ‘‘now’’ in the ‘‘Ode to Evening,’’ where it joins the temporal particularity of ongoing phenomena with the moment of voluntary poetic utterance: ‘‘while now the bright-hair’d sun / Sits in yon western Tent’’; ‘‘Now air is hushed’’; ‘‘Now teach me, Maid composed.’’ Collins’ ‘‘now’’ presumes a coincidence of speech and description, which Coleridge imagines but cannot take for granted. The ﬁrst time that the adverb appears in ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower,’’ at the beginning of the second verse-paragraph, it heralds a new access of faith in that simultaneity. Here, it marks the transition from a hypothetical, generalized picture of the dell to an immediate description of the walking tour: ‘‘Now, my friends emerge / Beneath the wide wide Heaven’’ (21–2). In the poet’s growing speculative conﬁdence, the present-tense narrative ascends to the timeless suspension of the imperative. In effect, Adam and Eve’s morning hymn of praise to God in Book 5 of Paradise Lost (‘‘wave your tops, ye pines’’ [193]; ‘‘Join voices all ye living souls’’ [197]) is modulated into an ode to evening, an undoing of the divine ﬁat lux. Ah! slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun! Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb, Ye purple heath-ﬂowers! richlier burn, ye clouds! Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue Ocean! (32–7)

The surmise of what Lamb might be doing at this precise moment yields to an outright assertion of will, what Coleridge called ‘‘a repetition in the ﬁnite mind of the eternal act of creation in the inﬁnite i am.’’27 Coleridge’s imperatives join inner vision to external events, past observation to present phenomena, word to world. Beyond this brief epiphany, however, the poem registers a fundamental tension between

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remembering and noticing, between language and vision. The complexity of the ‘‘moment’’ that concerned Coleridge in his notebook entry is nowhere more evident than in ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower.’’ As he memorializes Lamb’s walking tour in words, the poet is at the same time absorbing the accessible scene around him; and the simultaneity of these two mental activities is registered at the beginning of the second verseparagraph. Though Coleridge begins with a present-tense lament, he moves almost imperceptibly into the present perfect and imperfect when he turns to acknowledge his immediate surroundings: A delight Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad As I myself were there! Nor in this bower, This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark’d Much that has sooth’d me. Pale beneath the blaze Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch’d Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov’d to see The shadow of the leaf and stem above Dappling its sunshine! (43–51)

In the earliest extant version of the poem, copied in a letter that he sent to Robert Southey in July 1797, Coleridge had described this moment in the simple present: ‘‘Nor in this bower / Want I sweet sounds or pleasing shapes.’’28 The grammatical change in the published revision marks a signiﬁcant turn: after narrating the walk in the present, Coleridge pauses to say in the imperfect what has been going on around him all the while. This temporal double-take reveals two simultaneous layers of experience: Lamb’s presumed sight of the leafy dell and Coleridge’s awareness of the transparent foliage around him.29 The sun-dappled leaves, in their breezedriven rhythm of the transparent and opaque, imply a metaphor of the mind to rival that of ‘‘The Eolian Harp.’’ Coleridge’s acknowledgment of his own location is borne on a coordinating conjunction common to the spatial movements of landscape poetry: ‘‘nor.’’ In Cowper’s The Task – a poem whose relaxed blank verse Coleridge famously praised as ‘‘divine Chit-chat’’ – the conjunction reﬂects an effort of expansive praise: Nor less attractive is the woodland scene Diversiﬁed with trees of ev’ry growth Alike yet various. (1.300–3)

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The Invention of Evening . . . and the lime at dewy eve Diffusing odors: nor unnoted pass The sycamore.

(1.317–19)30

These are the classical symmetries of equal-opportunity tribute, of encyclopedic embrace. Cowper’s ‘‘nor’’ is catalogic and atemporal, linking items in a descriptive limbo in which everything waits to be appreciated in its turn. Coleridge’s ‘‘nor,’’ on the other hand, is perspectival and temporal; it enables the poet’s acknowledgment of the proximate things he suppressed by daydreaming of a distant experience. Whereas Cowper states a generalized credo of variety – ‘‘No tree in all the grove but has its charms, / Though each its hue peculiar’’ (1.307–8) – Coleridge comes to this realization through a perceptual process: ‘‘No waste so vacant, but may well employ / Each faculty of sense.’’ In effect, Coleridge takes a circuitous path to the inaugural twilight moment of Collins’ ‘‘Ode to Evening.’’ Turning from past-tense recollection to present-tense description, he ﬁnally arrives at Collins’ enunciatory ‘‘now’’: and a deep radiance lay Full on the ancient ivy which usurps Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass Makes their darkest branches gleam a lighter hue Through the late twilight: and though now the bat Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters, Yet still the solitary humble-bee Sings in the bean-ﬂower! (52–9)

This temporal threshold would seem to be an ideal moment to end the poem, but Coleridge presses beyond this point, once more returning – until the last line – to the past tense. My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook Beat its straight path along the dusky air Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing (Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light) Had cross’d the mighty Orb’s dilated glory, While thou stood’st gazing; or, when all was still, Flew creeking [sic] o’er thy head, and had a charm For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom No sound is dissonant which tells of Life. (68–76)

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In its grammatical ﬂux, the poem might be compared to a letter written piecemeal in different places – ﬁrst in the dell, and later in retrospect. Ultimately, the poet removes himself from the stream of phenomena with one ﬁnal change of tense, to the habitual present – a tense that encompasses both what is past and what is yet to come, and implicitly joins the dispositions of both poet and addressee. In a poem about elapsed time and overlapping spaces, the word ‘‘still’’ links moments and places together. An indispensable word in Coleridge’s poetry, it mediates between consciousness and the world, description and meditation, oblivion and awareness, the temporal and the eternal. In ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower,’’ the poet imagines that his friends wander down to ‘‘that still roaring dell, of which I told,’’ where ‘‘yellow leaves / Ne’er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still, / Fann’d by the water-fall’’ (9, 14–16). Coleridge was obviously conscious of the word’s resonance here, because he added it twice in his revision of the original draft of the poem: ‘‘same rifted dell’’ (7) becomes ‘‘still roaring dell’’ (9); and the lines, ‘‘plumy ferns for ever nod and drip / Spray’d by the waterfall,’’ (9–10) become ‘‘yellow leaves . . . yet tremble still / Fann’d by the water-fall’’ (14–16). Later, as the sun sets and the swallows fall silent, ‘‘[y]et still the solitary humble-bee / Sings in the bean-ﬂower!’’ (58–9), while the rook, ‘‘when all was still, / Flew creeking o’er thy head’’ (73–4). Each iteration of the word has a different nuance. As an adverb applied to the sound of the dell, it refers to the persistence of the world in the absence of the poet’s immediate perception, and it connects two moments – the present and some prior time when Coleridge visited the spot. With the trembling yellow leaves and the humming bee, the word becomes a term of contrastive persistence: though the leaves are too sequestered to feel the wind, they are nevertheless rufﬂed by the waterfall; and despite gathering darkness and silence, the bee still sings. Like the ﬂuttering ember in ‘‘Frost at Midnight,’’ the leaves and the bee might be called ‘‘companionable forms,’’ emblems of Coleridge’s thought within a quiet space. Coleridge’s temporal adverb also bears the adjectival sense of ‘‘quiet’’ or ‘‘unmoving,’’ and it is in this sense that the poem ends – ‘‘when all was still’’ (73). In its Old English etymology, ‘‘still’’ ﬁrst meant ‘‘motionless’’ and later evolved into the adverbial sense of persistence or continuation. This change reﬂects the translation of the spatial (an unmoving thing) into the temporal (a thing or state that stays constant through time), the static into the inertial. In poetic usage, the word often expands to mean ‘‘constantly’’ or ‘‘invariably’’; in this sense, discrete intervals of observation disappear, as the word gestures toward the permanent or eternal.

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When Coleridge imagines the ‘‘still roaring dell,’’ he suggests both that the water falls as it did when he last saw it, and that it always falls, world without end.31 The temporal dynamics of ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’ can be summarized as a ratio of two adverbs, ‘‘now’’ and ‘‘still’’: the ‘‘now’’ of ﬂeeting phenomena and conscious attention, and the ‘‘still’’ of the world’s persistence, the Berkeleyan anima mundi. With its ‘‘now’’ of natural description, the temporal frame of the poem recalls the liminal narrative of ‘‘Lycidas’’: both begin at some indeterminate daylight hour but end at sunset. Framing the shepherd’s dirge, Milton retrospectively gives the elegy a chronology, from its inception when ‘‘the still morn went out with Sandals gray’’ (187) until sunset: ‘‘And now the Sun had stretch’t out all the hills, / And now was dropt into the Western bay’’ (190–93).32 Milton’s ‘‘now’’ represents a return to the diurnal rhythm of the world after a seemingly atemporal dirge; and Coleridge’s adverb functions similarly in marking a turn to the immediate surroundings of the bower (‘‘and now the bat / Wheels silent by’’ [56–7]), and then to the receding rook (‘‘Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light’’). The rook’s homeward path echoes the valediction of ‘‘Lycidas,’’ in which the elegist’s call to the archangel Michael to ‘‘[l]ook homeward’’ (163) gives a Christian inﬂection to the closural device in several of Virgil’s eclogues: the call to fold the sheep as a formal mandate to end pastoral song. The rook’s ﬂight is also a microcosm of the poem’s perceptual drama: the appearance and disappearance of an object as an effect of the perceiver’s limited perspective. Like Lamb’s walk, the bird’s entire trajectory can only be guessed at or, more forcefully, ‘‘deemed.’’ Its ﬂight is both distant and proximate, belatedly noted and immediately audible; and the repetition of ‘‘now’’ imparts a verbal Doppler effect in registering the seen and heard movement of a body through space. For both Coleridge and Lamb, at somewhat different times, the rook is visible and then invisible; and the vagueness of Coleridge’s ‘‘now’’ includes both perspectives. Like Milton in ‘‘Lycidas,’’ Coleridge underscores the act of poetic utterance as having a duration; and he treats it at different times as both a present event and a moment in the recent past. In ‘‘Lycidas,’’ there is a temporal arc from the immediacy of ‘‘Yet once more, O ye laurels’’ to the coda of ‘‘And now the Sun had stretch’t out all the hills’’; and in ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower,’’ there is a similar progress from the lament, ‘‘Well, they are gone,’’ to the retrospective blessing of the last rook. The asymmetrical chronology of ‘‘Lycidas’’ suits the work of mourning: ﬁrst, grief knows no calendar, and the repeated words of lamentation (‘‘once

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more,’’ ‘‘dead’’) represent a momentary exemption from limitations of time and verbal economy; it is only in retrospect that mourning can be given a coherent narrative shape and endpoint. The evening plot of ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’ accentuates its elegiac preoccupation with temporary and permanent disappearance. When Coleridge observes the absence of friends ‘‘whom I never more may meet again, / On springy heath’’ (6–7), he intimates a loss deeper than that of the ‘‘beauties and feelings’’ of an hour; and the solar narrative he invokes at the end recalls the apotheosis of ‘‘Lycidas.’’ If his friends have disappeared over his visual horizon, the descent of the sun betokens their return, and tomorrow the healed poet might join them in walks to fresh pastures new, or at least the springy heath of Somerset. an evening jeremiad: ‘‘fears in solitude’’ In 1798, Coleridge published a poem whose title might well have served as a subtitle to ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’: ‘‘Fears in Solitude.’’ More political sermon than conversation, the poem proceeds through several oratorical phases: a litany of Britain’s sins (its support of slavery, its bureaucratic corruption, its sacriﬁce of its young to war, its cynicism and venality); a brief prophetic interlude in which an ‘‘all-avenging Providence’’ is imagined to bring retribution for these sins; a forestalling of this possibility in the call to arms against an ‘‘impious’’ France; a protest against the persecution of political dissidents as enemies of the state; and a preemptive disclaimer in which the poet declares his love for his country and its sweet natural inﬂuences. Though the speech marks a thematic departure from earlier conversation poems, it is framed by a familiar situation: the poet speaks from a pastoral bower and ends his meditation at sunset in a turn toward home. ‘‘Fears in Solitude’’ is thus perhaps the most peculiar of Coleridge’s conversation poems, an evening jeremiad. The question I propose to explore, then, is this: of what use is the temporal form and setting of evening to this oratory? Paul Magnuson has argued that the ‘‘shaping spirit’’ of the poem is a function not only of Coleridge’s creative genius but also of the larger social discourse that it enters; and with this reading in mind, I would like to turn back to the issue of formal shaping – the ways in which the perceptual syntax and procedure of earlier conversation poems are shaped to a new occasion and purpose.33 It might be tempting to regard the scene of the poem – a dell in Somerset not far from the poet’s cottage – as an apolitical frame for an ideologically charged speech. In Virgilian tradition, however, the shade of

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pastoral retirement has always been tinged with implications of exilic nostalgia, political dissent, or utopian longing; and so it is in ‘‘Fears in Solitude.’’34 Here, the stillness of the scene is a vacuum abhorred by the poet’s imagination; it is more vexing than conventionally soothing. Coleridge’s characteristic statement of qualiﬁed repose might be paraphrased in the phrase, ‘‘I could be at peace except’’ – except that my friends are enjoying a walking tour without me, except that I cannot help thinking of my past and my child’s future, except that I am haunted by fears for my country. The lonely dell of Coleridge’s meditation functions not merely as an uncomplicated escape from society but also, as in ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower,’’ a symbol of it. In the course of ‘‘Fears in Solitude,’’ Coleridge registers the etymological resonance of his title: while he ﬁnds temporary solitude in his withdrawal from the larger world, the British nation – hailed (twice) as ‘‘my Mother Isle’’ (175, 182) and as a ‘‘most magniﬁcent temple’’ (195) – enjoys a false sense of invulnerability. Just as ‘‘This LimeTree Bower’’ revises its metaphor of imprisonment, ‘‘Fears in Solitude’’ complicates its idea of isolation in suggesting that no man – by extension, no country – is an island entire to itself. Coleridge’s ‘‘small and silent dell’’ (2) is thus a microcosm of England’s ‘‘divine / And beauteous island’’ (193–4); and the ‘‘[s]weet inﬂuences’’ (21) of the present moment constitute a synecdoche of the poet’s life in his native country – ‘‘[a]ll sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts, / All adoration of the God in nature’’ (187–8). The frame of pastoral retirement, then, has a signiﬁcant bearing on the political sermon that it contains: it echoes the literary tradition of withdrawal from which the poet speaks; it represents in little the nation of England and the vulnerability of its island security; it serves as a utopian counterpoint to the societal ills that the poet decries; and it constitutes the literal and metaphorical ground on which the speech is uttered. This last implication represents a particularly pointed disclaimer: the intimation that rather than betraying England, the poet’s speech organically issues from the country’s beneﬁcent ‘‘inﬂuences.’’ The dissenter is the truest patriot. In ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower,’’ the mimesis of passing time underlies a preoccupation with the simultaneous perceptions of two people under the same setting sun; similarly, in ‘‘Fears in Solitude,’’ Coleridge places himself in an idyllic spot where ‘‘[t]he level sunshine glimmers with green light’’ (11), but imagines that ‘‘[e]ven now, perchance, and in his native isle: / Carnage and groans beneath this blessed sun!’’ (39–40). In both poems, Coleridge implicitly asks a Berkeleyan question – ‘‘What is the

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world when I do not perceive it?’’ – and imagines what he cannot see. In 1797, it is a pleasant excursion that Charles Lamb takes over ‘‘hilly ﬁelds and meadows’’; but in 1798, in the wake of the French invasion of Switzerland, it is the strife that ‘‘may now be stirring / This way or that way o’er these silent hills’’ (34–5). The ‘‘now’’ of both poems is not simply the suspended ‘‘now’’ of lyric utterance, but rather an adverb of synchrony, of disparate events and perceptions within a single moment. In Coleridge’s syntax of speculation, the imagination of this simultaneity expands into a scenario of apocalyptic conﬂict. The ‘‘what-if ’’ impulse that animates the philosophical musings of ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ informs Coleridge’s question of what might happen to England if God is just: ‘‘And what if all-avenging Providence, / Strong and retributive, should make us know / The meaning of our words’’ (125–7). And just as Coleridge draws back from his metaphysical speculations in ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ with an acknowledgment of Sara’s pious disapproval, he cancels the scenario of retribution with a turn toward formal prayer (‘‘Spare us yet awhile, / Father and God!’’ [129–30]). The setting of ‘‘Fears in Solitude’’ is particularly noteworthy for the vaguely hypothetical manner in which Coleridge describes it. It is a place where a generalized ‘‘humble man’’ (14) might ﬁnd repose: Here he might lie on fern or withered heath While from the singing lark (that sings unseen The minstrelsy that solitude loves best), And from the sun, and from the breezy air, Sweet inﬂuences trembled o’er his frame; And he, with many feelings, many thoughts, Made up a meditative joy, and found Religious meanings in the forms of Nature! And so, his senses gradually wrapt In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds, And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark, That singest like an angel in the clouds! (17–28)

This is a recapitulation of the scene of pastoral reverie in ‘‘The Eolian Harp,’’ presented as wistful possibility rather than as immediate reality. It is as if Coleridge were quoting from the earlier poem in order to announce the thematic departure that he makes, under the pressure of historical events, in this one. The sound of the lark, like the music of the eolian harp or the nightingale, has the potential to draw the poet into a reverie; but it is only a momentary promise. Coleridge begins the poem by describing the dell as a place where a sky-lark might sing (‘‘O’er stiller

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place / No singing sky-lark ever poised himself ’’ (2–3); and it is only in his brief odal apostrophe that he asserts that it is a place where a lark does sing, at this lyric moment (‘‘And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark’’ [27]). Coleridge’s emblematic word of persistence, ‘‘still,’’ carries several implications: that the poet hears the lark’s song even while lapsing into a daydream; that he has continued to hear the lark’s song from the moment he began the poem; and that he hears the bird now as in his earlier days, despite changes in himself and in the world. In this hypothetical reverie, Coleridge engages in the conventional act of listening to birdsong at twilight. In ‘‘The Nightingale’’ he does so in order to declare his freedom from conventions of melancholy meditation; but in ‘‘Fears in Solitude’’ he does so to profess a sadness derived not from the inscrutable depths of feeling that he mocks in ‘‘The Nightingale’’ but rather from the speciﬁc occasion of fear for his country’s peril, both from without (the French invasion) and from within (societal ills). While nothing in nature is melancholy, there are abundant reasons for that emotion in the world of human affairs: My God! It is a melancholy thing For such a man, who would full fain preserve His soul in calmness, yet perforce must feel For all his human brethren – O my God! It weighs upon the heart, that he must think What uproar and what strife may now be stirring This way or that way o’er these silent hills. (29–35)

In a complex act of sympathy, Coleridge expresses pity for a man who is consumed in worry over his fellow human beings (pointedly not just fellow citizens). As in the literature of Sensibility, emotion is here mediated by a narrative archetype: the poet’s sadness over his situation is intensiﬁed by the contemplation of it as a sad story, as if it were someone else’s predicament. And so, in a broader sense, it is: any person of feeling, Coleridge suggests, would have these thoughts and fears. By virtue of his generalized third-person syntax, Coleridge defends himself against charges of narrow egotism or unpatriotic sentiment by situating his fears and protestations in that quintessential organ of Sensibility, the human heart. The idiom of evening melancholy is hybridized with reﬂections on national destiny: here, the poet suggests, is something genuinely to be pensive about. The song of the lark, unlike the song of the nightingale, exists not to be turned into metaphor, but rather to be nostalgically invoked and then

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forgotten; it tells us what the poem might have been under a happier set of circumstances. The lark performs ‘‘the minstrelsy that solitude loves best’’ (19), but it is not therefore a companionable form for the poet, whose solitude sponsors a more dissonant form of utterance. In the moment of listening to the song, Coleridge must, in the mode of Miltonic prophesy, turn these notes to tragic. The brief apostrophe to the lark thus yields to an accusatory address to the poet’s imaginary audience (‘‘Oh! my countrymen! / We have offended very grievously’’ [41–2]), a fervent prayer to God (‘‘Spare us yet awhile, / Father and God!’’ [129–30]), and a panegyric to the motherland (‘‘O native Britain! O my Mother Isle!’’ [182]), and ﬁnally a newly homesick address to the poet’s dwelling (‘‘And now, beloved Stowey! I behold / Thy church tower’’ [221–2]). In effect, the lark, a ﬁgure for one kind of lyric utterance, is symbolically replaced by a trope characteristic of the sermonic discourse that supplants it: the allegorical ‘‘owlet Atheism,’’ whose blindness to the ‘‘glorious sun in Heaven’’ is analogous to the unbeliever’s numbness to the presence of God. By the end of the poem, the actual lark has vanished, leaving only the afterimage of a breeze in its wake: in concluding, the poet hopes that his fears for his country will ‘‘[p]ass like the gust, that roared and died away / In the distant tree’’ (200–1). In this conclusion, Coleridge registers an awareness that time has passed in the course of his speech. Unlike the owl, he is aware of the symbolic and sensory presence of the sun: it unites the perception of the near (the little dell) and imagination of the distant (the invasion of England’s shores), and in its descent, it gives the poet a natural pretext to end. In the involuntary seclusion of the lime-tree bower, Coleridge saw the sunset as a token of his friends’ return to him; and in the voluntary hiding-place of the dell, he sees it as a reminder that he must return to his family. Like the extended farewell of ‘‘The Nightingale,’’ the poet’s homeward movement happens in stages, as if suggesting a reluctance to resume domestic responsibilities: But now the gentle dew-fall sends abroad The fruit-like perfume of the golden furze: The light has left the summit of the hill, Though still a sunny gleam lies beautiful, Aslant the ivied beacon. Now farewell, Farewell awhile, O soft and silent spot! On the green sheep-track, up the heathy hill, Homeward I wind my way; and lo! recalled From bodings that have well nigh wearied me,

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The arrival of evening is a welcome event, as it is in ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower.’’ The poem begins in a generalized pastoral retreat, and it is only in the end, in the movement toward home, that Coleridge describes his surroundings with spatial and temporal immediacy; and in the traditional sensory balance of evening lyrics, he remains poised between plenitude (of smell) and absence (of light). There is a Coleridgian dynamic of contrasts at work here: just as the poet becomes acutely aware of the lime-tree bower only after he has imaginatively transported himself beyond it, he recognizes a beloved place after having spent time away. In the beginning of the poem, the idea of simultaneity involves the thought of a foreign invasion; but in the end, it involves the domestic fact of the ongoing life of the poet’s family; in syntactic terms, the ‘‘even now’’ of dire speculation is replaced by a ‘‘now’’ of sensory absorption in the natural world. As in Virgilian pastoral, the onset of evening frames an utterance – the poet’s oratorical exertions – as a full day’s work; and Coleridge suggests as much when he refers to ‘‘bodings that have well nigh wearied me’’ (211). He is ‘‘recalled’’ from these dark thoughts by an act of sentimental recollection – the remembrance of familial duties. The poet pauses on a twilight threshold between the secluded dell he has left behind and the home to which he must return; and his pause echoes the dilatory evening moment in Paradise Lost when Satan ﬁrst approaches Eden. In the grand prospect that Coleridge contemplates – the ‘‘mighty majesty / Of that huge amphitheatre of rich / And elmy ﬁelds’’ (PL 216–18) – he borrows Milton’s conceit for Paradise: ‘‘Cedar and pine, and branching palm, / A sylvan scene; and, as the ranks ascend, / Shade above shade, a woody theater / Of stateliest view’’ (4.139–42). In the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge later praised this passage for its theatrical metaphor; and he echoes it here perhaps for the luxuriance of its vespertinal suspension.35 Indeed, when he inhales the ‘‘fruit-like perfume of the golden furze’’ (204), Coleridge recalls the bounty of Milton’s Eden, where fruits of ‘‘golden hue’’ grow in profusion and ‘‘gentle gales / Fanning th[e]ir odoriferous wings dispense / Native perfumes’’ (PL 4.148, 156–8). Notably, the most sumptuous description of Eden in Paradise Lost is given from the perspective of an outsider, Satan; and the prospect of Stowey and its environs is beheld by one who has made himself a temporary outsider – a wanderer who has spent an afternoon away from home, a

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poet acutely aware of his political heterodoxy yet anxious to prove his familial and national loyalty. The air of Eden ‘‘inspires / Vernal delight and joy, able to drive / All sadness but despair’’ (PL 4.154–6), and the air of Somerset exerts a similar effect. It is precisely despair that afﬂicts Satan, but Coleridge professes a less absolute and more contingent form of sadness, one that can be dispelled by the natural inﬂuences of an evening walk, and the hope for societal reform. Coleridge’s metaphor of the amphitheater is notable not only for its Miltonic resonance but also for its intimation of an audience for the poet’s speech. All of the conversation poems posit an auditor, a companion whose interpolated or implied response ranges from the critical (Sara Fricker) to the sympathetic (Charles Lamb) to the oblivious (Hartley Coleridge in ‘‘Frost at Midnight’’); but nowhere is the ﬁctive audience more ambitiously imagined than in ‘‘Fears in Solitude,’’ where Coleridge addresses his fellow Britons.36 Though the theatrical prospect in ‘‘Fears in Solitude’’ ‘‘seems like society’’ (218) because it gives the mind a ‘‘livelier impulse and a dance of thought’’ (220), it cannot substitute for the human society of readers who might respond to the poem, nor for the microcosmic society of family to which the poet ultimately returns. Coleridge acknowledges as much when he concludes the poem by professing himself ‘‘grateful that, by nature’s quietness / And solitary musings, all my heart / Is softened, and made worthy to indulge / Love, and the thoughts that yearn for human kind’’ (229–32). The adjective ‘‘solitary’’ reiterates the isolation that has inspired the poet’s anxieties over what he cannot know, but it also betrays the simple fact that the evening jeremiad has been heard by no one. In effect, the phrase ‘‘solitary musings’’ casts poetic utterance as a therapeutic activity that ‘‘softens’’ (231) as well as ‘‘wearies’’ (211) – a form of both sentimental reﬂection and strenuous labor. This, then, is the pastoral (and georgic) inﬂection of the evening conclusion: the poet has put in a day’s work. By attending to the formal and stylistic features of ‘‘Fears in Solitude,’’ I have hoped to offer a complement to Magnuson’s historical reading of the poem. As a mimesis of passing time, the pastoral evening invoked at the end of the poem performs a complex set of functions: it marks a kind of activity (rapt listening) that must be abandoned in favor of more strenuous political intervention; it naturalizes the decision to end the sermon; it represents that speech as labor that absorbs the poet’s time and from which the poet must eventually rest; it recalls the aureate plenitude of Eden and represents the poet’s heightened sensitivity to the abundance of his own surroundings; and it symbolizes a dilatory threshold between

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the recent past (solitary musings in the dell) and the immediate future (the return to familial responsibilities). As in ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ and ‘‘The Nightingale,’’ Coleridge plays in alert ways with the conventional situation of listening to music at twilight. Through the vehicle of the sort of reverie that usually attends this scene, he launches into an entirely different sort of meditation, in which generic melancholy is converted into apocalyptic fear and political protest. The evening closure of the poem represents a rejuvenating release from the strain of this meditation, but not a total resolution. The worst fears expressed in the poem will indeed prove to be as insubstantial as the passing breeze, but in a moment of provisionally secure repose, Coleridge registers an awareness that the winds of historical change continue to blow. ‘‘and still i gaze’’: the duration of thought in ‘‘dejection’’ Like ‘‘Fears in Solitude,’’ the Dejection Ode begins with a wistfully invoked evening scene. Just as Coleridge imagines listening to a lark at twilight in tonal contrast to his political distress, he describes an act of gazing at the evening star in counterpoint to spiritual and erotic vexation. The Dejection Ode has usually been read as a response to Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode; but I would like to show how it can be read in dialogue with Coleridge’s earlier evening poems.37 It is tempting to imagine that Coleridge deliberately begins his poem where Wordsworth leaves off, at sunset; but at the time that Wordsworth read the ﬁrst four stanzas of his work-in-progress, the valedictory ‘‘sober colouring’’ of the ﬁnal stanza had yet to be conceived. As we have seen, Coleridge had already written several evening poems, so when he places himself in an attitude of gazing at the western sky at dusk, he essentially repeats an emblematic gesture from his own poetic past. Even without reference to this past, the gesture is legible as a sign of the poet’s inability to feel joy commensurate to the intellectual apprehension of beauty in the evening sky’s ‘‘peculiar tint of yellow green.’’ The poet’s ennui involves a disjunction between language and feeling – the kind of alienation that Hamlet registers when he describes the night sky as a ‘‘majestical roof fretted with golden ﬁre’’ that nevertheless seems to him ‘‘a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.’’38 Coleridge’s blank evening gaze has a still more complex meaning when considered in relation to earlier poems. In particular, it can be juxtaposed with passages from Coleridge’s juvenile sonnet ‘‘To the Evening Star’’ (‘‘with ﬁxed eye I

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gaze / Till I, methinks, all spirit seem to grow’’) and the Nehemiah Higginbottom sonnet (‘‘so at the Moon / I gazed, and sighed, and sighed’’): All this long eve, so balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green: And still I gaze – and with how blank an eye! (27–30)

When Coleridge says in the Dejection Ode, ‘‘and still I gaze,’’ he refers primarily to the continuation of a single evening’s vigil, but that adverb of persistence intimates a longer poetic history of nocturnal skywatching. In the Ode, the act of gazing represents an effort to recover, as if by mesmeric association, the kind of aesthetic and emotional response represented in the sonnet ‘‘To the Evening Star.’’ The paradox of this gesture is that it invokes the pensive twilight scene that Coleridge had mocked in his satirical sonnet, a scene that typically mingled beauty and sadness in equal measure. Like the Higginbottom poem, the Dejection Ode is repetitious in its sighing and gazing; it displays the sort of ‘‘doleful egotism’’ that the poet had once criticized in the Biographia; it represents the passage of evening into night as coinciding with dark and sad thoughts; and it describes a melancholy of mysterious origin. In other words, the Ode is rooted in the poetry of Sensibility; and Coleridge here becomes a Penseroso in spite of himself, the ﬁgure of nocturnal melancholy he had once mocked. And yet when Coleridge describes a ‘‘grief ’’ that ‘‘ﬁnds no natural outlet, no relief, / In word, or sigh, or tear’’ (23–4), he negates a major premise of Sensibility – that emotion can be mediated by language and sympathetically shared by a community of readers. It is well known that the ﬁnal version of the Dejection Ode suppresses a primary source of that grief: the poet’s despair over his marriage and pining for Sara Hutchinson. In a revisionary process that Jack Stillinger has likened to Ezra Pound’s editorial pruning of The Waste Land, Coleridge condensed an amatory, confessional epistle to Hutchinson into a philosophical ode on the imagination.39 Much is gained by this change, but what is lost is the dramatic context of Coleridge’s evening gaze: in the epistle, this act seems more like a form of purposefully nostalgic recovery than an unmotivated reverie. In his typically associative manner, Coleridge originally linked the present occasion of poetic utterance to two evening memories: his adolescent fantasy of ‘‘sky-gazing in ‘ecstatic ﬁt’ ’’ while some inaccessible Maiden looked upon the same scene (62); and his actual experience of sitting by the hearth with the Hutchinson sisters

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in a frankly intimate embrace. The ﬁrst memory repeats the fantasy of surrogate contact that Coleridge elaborated in his sonnet ‘‘To the Evening Star,’’ in which he expresses the chaste wish to ‘‘gaze awhile’’ on both star and maiden before the latter quits the ‘‘scene of earthly toil’’ and is translated to the celestial sphere.40 In the context of Coleridge’s doomed love for Sara Hutchinson, this association of the evening star with chastity and wisdom takes on darker overtones of loneliness and renunciation. The second memory revises the conjugal scene celebrated in ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’: whereas Coleridge once alluded to the touch of his ﬁance´e’s cheek on his arm, he now recalls an intimate evening spent with the Hutchinson sisters, Sara and Mary, when Sara placed her hand on his brow – ‘‘[e]ven as my own is now’’ (106). The speciﬁcity of this physical gesture is typical of the deictic language of epistolary ﬁction, but it also exempliﬁes the Coleridgian syntax of analogy, through which two different moments may be aligned. In ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower,’’ he bridges the distance between himself and Charles Lamb through precisely this sort of analogical equation, but in the verse letter he expresses a deep skepticism about such imaginative remedies: These lifeless Shapes, around, below, Above, O what can they impart? When even the gentle Thought, that thou, my Love! Art gazing now, like me, And see’st the Heaven, I see – Sweet Thought it is – yet feebly stirs my Heart! (52–7)

The idea of simultaneous perception as surrogate form of intimacy, which had animated Coleridge’s juvenile reverie of gazing on the evening star and the philosophical meditation of ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower,’’ is here dismissed as a pleasant but ineffectual fantasy. And yet so persistent is the effort to revive former ways of seeing and feeling through recollection and repetition that Coleridge cannot conclusively discount the solacing notion of Sara’s simultaneous perception of the night sky: ‘‘Those dear Eyes, that see / Even now the Heaven, I see / There is a Prayer in them! It is for me – / And I, dear Sara – I am blessing thee !’’ (95–8). As an adult, he recapitulates his schoolboy reverie. The internal conﬂicts of the poem are qualiﬁed by the very nature of a letter as provisional or contingent utterance: it is a form of private communication, a series of spontaneous thoughts without editorial revision, and an inscription originating in a speciﬁc time and place. The speciﬁcity of the poem’s original title – ‘‘A Letter to – April 4, 1802.

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Sunday Evening’’ – implies as much, and in a passage that he later deleted, Coleridge makes a further time-sensitive disclaimer: No! let me trust, that I shall wear away In no inglorious Toils the manly Day, And only now & then, and not too oft, Some dear & memorable Eve will bless Dreaming of all your Loves & Quietness. (139–43)

The verse letter is thus framed as a Sabbath evening meditation, a temporal eddy of melancholy thoughts in counterpoint to the linear progress and ‘‘manly’’ diurnal toil of the working week. Indeed, Coleridge had expressed the notion of poetic utterance or meditation as a kind of extravagance in earlier conversation poems – in the shift from philosophical speculation to conjugal sobriety in ‘‘The Eolian Harp,’’ and in the pastoral return to domestic duty in ‘‘Fears in Solitude.’’ The qualiﬁcation of the verse letter as a temporary, even unmanly, indulgence in self-pity is purged when the poem becomes an ode; but the notion of it as the utterance of a single evening remains. As Gene Ruoff has observed in his account of the epistolary lineage of the poem, verse letters ‘‘pay particular attention to the environmental circumstances of their composition.’’ The same, for that matter, can be said more generally of Coleridge’s conversation poems.41 Without disputing Ruoff’s point about the afﬁnities of Coleridge’s verse letter to Ovid’s Heroides, I would note that the poem’s attention to environmental circumstances – particularly the visible passage of time – is not speciﬁc to the epistolary lyric; it is, rather, another aspect of the poetics of evening that I have been tracing in Coleridge’s lyrics. Even after Coleridge’s emendations, the Dejection Ode retains its fundamental time-line: from the twilight gaze, to the later arrival of the anticipated storm, to an insomniac midnight prayer. In French, as John Ashbery reminds us, weather is ‘‘le temps, the word for time’’42; and indeed, the meteorological change in the Dejection Ode represents a temporal lapse, which in turn indicates a gap in the poet’s attention to the outside world. As in earlier conversation poems, the act of thinking and speaking temporarily blots out the surrounding environment. After predicting ﬁerce winds at the beginning of the Ode, the poet misses the precise moment of their coming, and when he banishes his ‘‘viper thoughts’’ at the beginning of the seventh strophe, he acknowledges as much: ‘‘I turn from you, and listen to the wind, / Which long has raved unnoticed’’ (96–7). The participle ‘‘unnoticed,’’ without the explicit

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agency of a perceiver, aptly suggests Coleridge’s trance-state. In the revised version of the poem, the precise antecedent to the phrase ‘‘viper thoughts’’ is lost: a scenario in which Sara Hutchinson falls gravely ill and Coleridge feels powerless to come to her aid. Nevertheless, what remains is the implication that the poet must rouse himself from a kind of stupor.43 The act of uttering the poem would not last from twilight to midnight, of course, but the epistolary act of writing it would. In essence, Coleridge’s turn to the weather suggests the duration of thought itself – a silent, invisible, and continuous activity anterior to the writing (or speaking) of the poem. Coleridge ends the poem by noticing the lateness of the hour and offering a prayer for Sara Hutchinson. The act of blessing had been a closural gesture in ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’ and ‘‘Frost at Midnight,’’ but in the Dejection Ode, it has a subtle undersong of renunciation. When Coleridge says, ‘‘May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling / Silent as though they watched the sleeping earth’’ (131), he echoes the youthful fantasy in the ‘‘Autumnal Evening’’ effusion of becoming the ‘‘Spangled Skies’’ that watch his Love ‘‘with a thousand eyes’’ (69–70). But instead of metamorphosis, he imagines only a wan metaphor of protection: it is only as if the stars watched the sleeping earth; meanwhile, Coleridge’s own restless vigilance can cure nothing. In praying for Sara’s sleep, Coleridge recognizes that his perennial fantasy of simultaneous perception has its limits: if he begins the poem with the consolatory idea that his friend is looking at the same sunset, he ends several hours later by expressing the hope that at least she has gone to sleep. The Dejection Ode diverges in many respects from the characteristics of the evening poem that I have been tracing. In the darkening world of earlier poems, Coleridge observes a compensatory perceptual adjustment to new stimuli: the smell of the bean-ﬁelds, the throbbings of an eolian harp, the song of a nightingale, the ﬂutter of bird wings, the drone of bees. A similar sequence structures the Dejection Ode – the vision of an evening sky replaced by the sound of an eolian harp sobbing in the winds of an approaching storm – but the act of listening brings none of the delight or consolation that it does in earlier lyrics. In previous poems, the apprehension of elapsed time animates some change, such as the anticipated return of friends, a rejuvenated sense of the world, or a softening of indignation; but the time spanned by the Ode instead represents a period by which to measure the absence of any change of mood at all. Coleridge begins the poem by placing an insupportable symbolic weight on the expectation of a storm as renovating force, and when it arrives in the

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midst of his ruminations, it necessarily disappoints him. The poet is restless to pass from his present-tense observation of calm (‘‘This night, so tranquil now’’ [3]) to a vivifying state of agitation (‘‘And oh! that even now the gust were swelling’’ [15]); but when it comes, the ‘‘now’’ of the storm-driven eolian music signiﬁes vexation rather than relief. At the beginning of this chapter, I distinguished between evening as a static backdrop for melancholy utterance and evening as a temporal poetics informed by Miltonic narrative. Both forms are present in the Dejection Ode: twilight is a standard of aesthetic response by which the poet measures his numbness, and it passes away while he continues his reﬂections. The spiritual stagnation that Coleridge laments is rendered in his gaze at the evening sky. In the past, such a gaze had a renovating inﬂuence: in ‘‘Frost at Midnight,’’ where a gaze inaugurates the poet’s schoolroom reveries (‘‘So gazed I, till the soothing things I dreamt / Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolongued my dreams!’’ [34–5]); and in ‘‘This LimeTree Bower,’’ where the poet ‘‘gaze[s] till all doth seem / Less gross than bodily,’’ and the rook crosses the sun while Charles simultaneously stands ‘‘gazing.’’ In the ‘‘Hymn before Sun-Rise, in the Vale of Chamouni,’’ the gaze is an act of odal devotion: ‘‘O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee, / Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, / Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer / I worshipped the Invisible alone’’ (13–16). In all of these passages, the emblematic syntax of ‘‘gaze until’’ suggests a replacement of sight with insight, the material with the metaphysical. The succor of the gaze vanishes, however, in the Dejection Ode: ‘‘And still I gaze – and with how blank an eye!’’ (30). Stripped of its hopeful adverb ‘‘until,’’ the verb ‘‘gaze’’ lacks an ultimate goal; it is instead held indeﬁnitely in thrall of the Coleridgian ‘‘still.’’ The once-reassuring sense of persistence in the adverb now describes endless vexation. It is partly on such syntactic nuances that the mental drama of Coleridge’s ﬁnest poems depends. For all of the seeming ease of the conversation poems, Coleridge was always acutely conscious of adopting the role of a poet: aware of borrowing an idiom of twilight pensiveness, aware of lyric utterance as an event in time. His greatest poetic achievement was the subtlety with which he conceived of lyric as a temporal process of thought. In studying these poems, I have been concerned with evening as a medium for this process. In Coleridge’s earliest poetry, evening is an affective atmosphere inherited from eighteenth-century poetry, but over time, it is reﬁned into a grammar of perception – a stationary pause ramiﬁed into a complex set

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of overlapping moments. In the time-lines of conversation poems such as ‘‘The Nightingale,’’ ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower,’’ ‘‘Fears in Solitude,’’ we see the aesthetic effort to reconcile lyric form with the continuum of what Coleridge called the ‘‘numberless goings-on of life’’; and in each case, closure is naturalized as a homeward movement at nightfall. In the Dejection Ode, however, this attempt betrays a particularly intense strain, in that its temporal interval cannot be made to coincide with a revival of the spirit. And yet if such a renovation is to happen at all, Coleridge knows that it will occur in a moment not unlike this one. This evening, then, serves as a place-holder for a time when he will look at the world with new eyes. Coleridge’s characteristic mimesis of temporal elapse and lyric immediacy acquires its keenest poignancy here. While the poem presents a hopeful prototype of change, it is haunted by an implicit question that the experience of a particular evening cannot answer: if not now, when?

c h ap t e r 3

Wordsworth’s evening voluntaries

Evening is the time when new feelings – and new poets – are born. In her sonnet ‘‘To Twilight’’ (1786), Helen Maria Williams celebrated the hour that ‘‘wakes the tear ’tis luxury to shed,’’1 and the next year, William Wordsworth took up this idea in his ﬁrst published poem, ‘‘On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress’’ (1787). In an entirely imaginary scene, he describes the poet’s outpouring with a metaphor borrowed from Williams’ own sonnet: her tears manifest inner virtues that shine in ‘‘misery’s midnight hour,’’ just as ‘‘the soft star of dewy evening’’ emerges to ‘‘cheer the wand’ring wretch with hospitable light’’ (9–14). In Wordsworth’s sonnet, as in Williams’, evening serves as a ﬁgure for latency and compensation: a new light-source replaces the sun, and what was invisible or repressed in the diurnal world of social interaction emerges, therapeutically, in the solitude of dusk. In this vein, the 1798 Lyrical Ballads includes two twilight poems that assert the poet’s peculiar imaginative work: ‘‘The Tables Turned,’’ subtitled ‘‘An Evening Scene,’’ in which Wordsworth represents himself as a scholar of nature who counsels his studious friend to quit the day’s literary labors to savor the ‘‘ﬁrst sweet evening yellow’’; and ‘‘Lines written near Richmond, upon the Thames, at Evening,’’ in which he eulogizes the famous celebrant of Evening, William Collins, by imagining himself drifting in a boat, listening to the water dripping from his suspended oars. In that act of attention, the young novice echoes his predecessor’s poem even as he pauses to hear the aftereffects of his own exertions. Evening, then, represents a pause in which a new kind of work takes place – the act of listening and thinking. Many years later, in The Prelude, Wordsworth seems to dismiss the nocturnal melancholy of this poem when he describes his youthful preference for twilight as ‘‘[a] treasured and luxurious gloom of choice / And inclination mainly’’ (6.176–7); indeed, his adjective echoes, in a pejorative key, the affective ‘‘luxury’’ that Williams had celebrated in her sonnet. And yet, as I will 81

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argue, the vocational tenor of these early poems would persist in later works, from An Evening Walk (1793) to the ‘‘Evening Voluntaries’’ of the 1830s. The dynamic twilight scenes of Coleridge’s poems typically reﬂect the duration of utterance and thought, but Wordsworth’s settings usually serve more strongly narrative purposes – to organize and integrate longer spans of time, to connect a present evening to a past or future one, to relate one person’s experience to another’s. In An Evening Walk, Wordsworth purports to recount ‘‘the history of a poet’s evening,’’ and it is fair to say that a study of the poet’s later inventions of evening can give us a history of the poet’s career. Indeed, as I have suggested in my reading of the ‘‘Beauteous Evening’’ sonnet, evening settings frequently crystallize Wordsworth’s sense of being in historical time, not just a single suspended moment; and this fact is nowhere more evident than in The Prelude, in which the continuities of narrative and the pauses of lyric overlap and intersect. Through readings of a set of exemplary poems, both well-known and obscure, this chapter focuses on the imaginative ways that Wordsworth adopted a topic and idiom. I begin by arguing that ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ is an evening poem without any obvious indications of being one – speciﬁcally, that it incorporates the perceptual and temporal language of An Evening Walk into a new register of cognition. I next take up a lesser-known poem that Wordsworth wrote for his brother in order to show how the poet revises Coleridge’s tropes of evening closure and simultaneous perception in ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower.’’ Here and in the innovative pastoral narrative of ‘‘Michael,’’ I wish to show how Wordsworth articulates the temporal dimension of work, both physical and mental, pastoral and poetic. The function of evening as a category of experience and as a form of narrative structure is nowhere more complex than in The Prelude, where the growth of the poet’s mind is reﬂected in a series of evening scenes – from the twilight reveries of early childhood to an adult apprehension of the sober metaphorical coloring of sunset. In the twilight of his own career, Wordsworth wrote a series of ‘‘Evening Voluntaries,’’ and I conclude with these, in order to explore the continuing viability of evening as a lyric form and subject. In short, I wish to show that the evening scene serves deeply nostalgic and conservative purposes. In Coleridge’s Dejection Ode, the twilight setting functions as an aesthetic baseline by which the poet measures his engagement with the world; and Wordsworth’s evening poems of the 1830s work in a similar way – as both a wistful invocation of earlier poetry and as a poetic medium for the

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poet’s turn toward orthodox Anglicanism. While eighteenth-century evening lyrics often followed ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ in adopting the tropes of religious devotion, Wordsworth here expresses a more earnest form of piety, and asserts a capacity for aesthetic response in the midst of distress. It is through understanding the tradition of evening poetry and Wordsworth’s own part in it that we can better appreciate these late lyrics. revision and abstraction: an evening walk and ‘‘tintern abbey’’ Ever since Keats imagined Wordsworth lingering in a ‘‘Chamber of Maiden Thought’’ before exploring life’s darker passages, readers of ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ have seen the poem as a kind of threshold: between the impersonal description of the juvenilia and the autobiographical revelation of The Prelude, between the eighteenth-century diction of topographical surveys and moral sententiae and the Romantic idiom of sensation and thought.2 F. W. Bateson once remarked that the poem reﬂects a ‘‘relapse into subjectivity’’ and a departure from ‘‘socially conscious poetry’’3; and Marjorie Levinson has made a similar observation in arguing that the poem effects a ‘‘suppression of the social’’ and an ‘‘omission of the historical.’’4 Levinson’s reading has inspired several critical responses, and rather than reproducing them, I wish to change the focus of inquiry, from matters of historical reality to the mimetic work by which that reality is represented – from one set of facts (social upheaval, personal distress) to another (literary conventions).5 Levinson suggests that Wordsworth overlooks the abbey itself because it was a reminder of the dissolution of monasteries during the Reformation and, by association, the turmoil of the French Revolution. But Wordsworth’s silence on this point more plausibly reﬂects generic innovation rather than deep psychological repression: the choice not to write a ruins-poem set at twilight. It is the choice, in other words, not to follow the model of John Dyer’s ‘‘Grongar Hill’’ (1726), which offers a mutability-sermon occasioned by the poet’s brief stay on the mountaintop at ‘‘purple ev’ning’’ (2) and the sight of a ruined Welsh castle. In ‘‘Tintern Abbey,’’ Wordsworth writes a poem of sentimental return reminiscent of pilgrimage-sonnets by William Lisle Bowles and Charlotte Smith, but forbids himself their pensive nocturnal atmospherics. Indeed, the poetics of evening would seem incompatible with the sociable occasion of Wordsworth’s poem: twilight is a ‘‘luxury’’ typically savored alone (a notable exception being Coleridge’s nuptial poem, ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’).

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It has been suggested that Wordsworth wrote ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ in a spirit of competitive dialogue with ‘‘Frost at Midnight’’ and thus chose a scenic counterpoint to the dark nocturnal weather of Coleridge’s poem6; but he is more clearly departing from the affective and allegorical conventions of eighteenth-century lyrics. He is also revising himself. A year before he wrote the poem, Wordsworth had already composed a fragmentary evening version of a similar occasion: Yet once again do I behold the forms Of these huge mountains and yet once again Standing beneath these elms I hear thy voice Beloved Derwent, that peculiar voice Heard in the stillness of the evening air, Half-heard and half created.7

‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ does not retain this setting, but it represents an abstraction of the evening poem; more speciﬁcally, it revisits the premise and scenic nostalgia of An Evening Walk. Together, these poems form a chiasmus of separation and reunion: Wordsworth begins the earlier poem by lamenting his distance from Dorothy but imaginatively bridges it through the account of a walk and the reverie of future cohabitation; and he begins the later lyric by marking his return to a cherished spot with Dorothy but ends by contemplating a time when he can no longer hear her voice. The central activities of An Evening Walk – pausing to listen within a gathering darkness, summoning mental images in the failure of external vision – suggest a Wordsworthian plot in embryo: an allegory of imaginative compensation, of the mind’s search for what will sufﬁce. In ‘‘Tintern Abbey,’’ that plot is distilled into a new register of cognition. An Evening Walk is actually a collage of several different walks in the Lake District that Wordsworth took during his university summer vacation, but the time-frame enables him to condense them into the narrative of a single excursion: a sustained act of perceptual adjustment to a darkening world, from sunset to moonrise, and the imagination of parallel or future evening scenes.8 Amid the poem’s descriptive sprawl, the outlines of ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ can be traced: the time-line of a nocturnal vigil, the alternate activities of dilatory wandering and embowered meditation, and the ultimate prayer for an extension of these nocturnal devotions in a permanent dwelling.9 As a way of bridging the distance between brother and sister, and the indeterminate time before their hoped-for reunion, Wordsworth ﬁnds (and offers) solace in delivering an epistolary report on ‘‘the history of a poet’s evening’’ (52).10 Years later, the poetic circle would

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be closed when Dorothy took to reading ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ to her brother in the evenings.11 Several assumptions are built into Wordsworth’s synoptic phrase. As a ‘‘history,’’ the poem narrates a series of events and perceptions; it gives structure and purpose to several hours’ experience in one person’s life; and it promises to make moral sense of that experience. By giving a history of a poet’s evening, Wordsworth declares a vocation and implies that poets might experience evening in more interesting or imaginative ways than other people do. He offers the sermonic lesson that ‘‘[t]he idle tale of man is found / Depicted in the dial’s moral round’’ (37–8); but though his own stroll might seem idle, he redeﬁnes it as a work of attention. That work begins when he abandons the afternoon otium of a shady covert to begin his walk, at the pastoral moment when the shepherd thinks of ending his day: ‘‘But now the sun has gain’d his western road, / And eve’s mild hour invites my steps abroad’’ (87–8).12 The lapses of time represented by such passing phenomena, punctuated by the adverb ‘‘now,’’ naturalize the poet’s arbitrary transitions. In this narrative of sensory restlessness, there is always something to be intensely beheld before it disappears. By implying the uniqueness of a poet’s evening, Wordsworth not only claims special imaginative capacities but also acknowledges a privilege, or ‘‘luxury.’’ Evening might be a time of calm reﬂection for a poet, but it does not necessarily serve that purpose for everyone. In this awareness, Wordsworth imagines a ﬁgure that would haunt him throughout his career: a female vagrant with her children. Alan Liu has argued that this interlude reﬂects a tension between the ‘‘hidden urgency of story’’ and the tranquility of ‘‘the locodescriptive moment.’’13 The real tension, however, is not between narration and description, but rather between two different experiences of evening – the poet’s and the vagrant’s. It is important to keep in mind that Wordsworth does not actually meet or see the vagrant: after describing a scene of cozy domesticity of a swan and her offspring, he imagines how it might appear to an itinerant woman deserted by a husband who has long ago left to ﬁght in the war against the American colonies. Wordsworth’s description of the vagrant is not so much a story as an act of sympathetic visualization. It is an exercise of Fancy on which evening poetry thrives, a way of seeing in the dark. What follows is an evening poem within an evening poem – a dark double of the poet’s own walk. In essence, Wordsworth adopts the conventions of eighteenth-century evening poetry – pensive thoughts, twilight hauntings, perceptual allegories – and gives them the inﬂection of mild selfchastening; he writes a reﬂexive evening critique.

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The episode of the vagrant represents, in little, the plot of the poem as a whole, from afternoon to nightfall; and Wordsworth constructs this parallel as a sobering counterpoint to his own comfortable moralization of the day’s swift passage. The vagrant experiences the landscape as source of afﬂiction and temporary shelter; only the poet gets to see it as a paysage moralise´. The woman ﬁrst appears seeking some shady covert, at precisely the moment of afternoon repose in which the poem originates. At this moment, Wordsworth begins by recalling his youth when ‘‘wild Impatience, panting upward, show’d / Where tipp’d with gold the mountain-summits glow’d’’ (35–6), but the vagrant sees no such prospect when she ‘‘eyes through tears the mountain’s shadeless height; / And bids her soldier come her woes to share’’ (252–3). At night, she ﬁnds a fragile solace in staring at the moon and teaching her children to ﬁnd diversion in the light of glow-worms, in a gesture of perceptual adjustment typical of evening poetry. This is cold comfort, however, in comparison with the poet’s vision of the moon as emblem of Hope: ‘‘Even now she decks for me a distant scene, / (For dark and broad the gulf of time between) / Gilding that cottage with her fondest ray, / (Sole bourne, sole wish, sole object of my way . . . )’’ (345–8). This gesture rewrites the poet’s dilatory excursion as a single-minded ‘‘way’’ toward a reunion with Dorothy, and the gathering darkness as the intervening period before that event. For Wordsworth, the evening walk thus symbolizes the indeterminate time he must wait before he can rejoin his sister; for the female vagrant, this evening might be her last. While the woman’s children make their mother’s breast their ‘‘death-bed’’ (300), the poet imagines a Dove Cottage avant la lettre, where he and Dorothy will live ‘‘[t]ill our small share of hardly-paining sighs / (For sighs will ever trouble human breath) / Creep hush’d into the tranquil breast of Death’’ (419–21). The end of the vignette of the female vagrant, in which the woman’s children die of exposure, has struck readers as strangely abrupt for the way that it immediately yields to an idyllic description, a catalogue of ‘‘sounds that mingle from afar’’ (301).14 It is indeed an awkward transition, but also a thematically and structurally apt one: the episode trails off in the same way that the poem itself does: in a catalogue of random nocturnal sounds. An Evening Walk ends, as Collins’ ‘‘Ode to Evening’’ begins, in an act of listening in the dark. Notably, it is an act that registers a wider range of sounds than Collins’ idyll: both the human ostinato of a tolling clock, a ferryman’s oar, and a forge-hammer, and the random animal dissonance of horse, owl, and ‘‘lonely hound.’’15

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In a never-published 1794 revision of the poem, Wordsworth extended this concluding scene in a way that further complicated the poet’s response to Collins’ ode.16 On his way home, the poet now pauses by a peasant cottage – like the episode of the vagrant, a chastening counterexample to the moonlit retreat that he had envisioned for himself and his sister: – The lake is left behind – my homeward feet Wind through this narrow valley’s deep retreat. – Who now, resigning for the night the feast Of Fancy, Leisure, Liberty, and Taste, Can pass without a pause the silent door, Where sweet Oblivion clasps the cottage poor . . . (769–74)

In naming the quartet of blessings that have sponsored his imaginative rambles – ‘‘Fancy, Leisure, Liberty, and Taste’’ – Wordsworth revises Collins’ list of Evening’s attributes – ‘‘Fancy, Friendship, Science, roselip’d Health.’’ Instead of addressing Evening as a deity that sheds its beneﬁcent glow on his endeavors, he suggests that the poetic experience of evening is contingent upon other blessings, namely – in the political context of the 1790s – leisure and liberty. While the cottage and its dwellers are momentarily sealed up by Oblivion, Wordsworth represents himself as the sole perceiver in a sleeping world, a poet following the urgings of curiosity rather than the diurnal round of work and rest. The imaginative invention of the female vagrant and the peasant cottage suggests the existence of other journeys and destinations in the world. In this context, ‘‘the history of a poet’s evening’’ takes on subtler shades of meaning: an evening as perceived by a poet is not necessarily shared by others; and a history of past perception can offer only a speculative glimpse into an uncertain future. ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ does not recount the history of an evening but rather creates a crepuscular moment that will be remembered as signiﬁcant in the personal histories of both the poet and his sister. In this new effort, Wordsworth’s aesthetic ambitions have changed. Rather than making the world vivid in language, Wordsworth is now more interested in describing the workings of consciousness: the ways the mind represents past experience to itself in abstract or symbolic terms; the sense that the intelligibility of the world is only partial and provisional; the strange awareness of having lived to ﬁnd oneself in a particular place and time. Instead of imagining a female vagrant, Wordsworth takes only ﬂeeting notice of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods; and rather than

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pointedly contemplating the condition of homelessness as chastening social counterpoint, he turns the ideas of dwelling and transience into a metaphor for the construction of memory. In short, rather than asking what this scene might look like to another perceiver, he ultimately imagines a scene from which he will one day be absent. The descriptive language of An Evening Walk persists in new formations, however. Though ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ registers no objective passage of time in the course of its utterance, it is shaped by a subliminal evening sequence: afternoon otium beneath a ‘‘dark sycamore’’ (10); the tracing of persistent gleams in the mind’s reviving picture of the world and in the ‘‘shooting lights’’ of Dorothy’s eyes; and the imagination of a time when Dorothy walks beneath the moon alone.17 In An Evening Walk, the adverb ‘‘now’’ functions as a descriptive transition, and in Coleridge’s conversation poems, it marks the temporality of thought or utterance; but in ‘‘Tintern Abbey,’’ it inaugurates an internal occasion of thought rather than a visual interruption of it.18 It appears only once in the poem, and crystallizes its occasion: And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. (58–65)

While the ubiquitous ‘‘now’’ of An Evening Walk links one descriptive moment to another and registers the passage of time, the ‘‘now’’ of ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ intimates something more complexly layered: a time in which the present moment is reconciled with the past, even as it is borne into the future. It is a temporal fulcrum that means both ‘‘now that’’ and ‘‘henceforth’’ – the grammatical index of a deeper personal history. Whereas An Evening Walk describes a perceptual acuity amid a fading landscape, ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ concerns the persistence of memory through time. In essence, the conventional beauty of sunset is condensed into an ineffable ‘‘sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns’’ (95–7); and the visible light of ‘‘eve’s last gleam’’ reappears as metaphorical ‘‘gleams of half-extinguished thought.’’ This moment of revival is a metaphorical twilight, an internal mingling of light and dark, waxing and waning. When the landscape

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ﬁnally goes dark in An Evening Walk, Wordsworth laments the loss of visual diversions (‘‘Stay! Pensive, sadly-pleasing visions, stay! / Ah no! as fades the vale, they fade away’’ [385–6]) but ﬁnds affective gains in ‘‘a sympathetic twilight’’ (381–8). The sentimental formula of the ‘‘sadlypleasing’’ in An Evening Walk – the moralized lingering over departed things – acquires a new dimension in ‘‘Tintern Abbey.’’ Wordsworth’s attempt to reconcile a dormant memory with the present moment produces an emotion mysteriously described as ‘‘somewhat of a sad perplexity.’’ The qualiﬁer suggests only an approximation of feeling, and the Latinate word for the mind’s twists and folds hints at a deeper relation between thought and emotion.19 Meanwhile, the compensatory act of listening that animates An Evening Walk is transformed into an abstract metaphor of development: For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. (88–93)

The movement from the visual (‘‘look on’’) to the aural (‘‘hearing oftentimes’’) occurs, almost imperceptibly, in a peculiar syntactic breach. Rather than contrastively naming the phase that succeeds ‘‘thoughtless youth,’’ Wordsworth associates his present state with the ongoing, participial act of hearing.20 The phrase ‘‘still, sad music of humanity’’ (91), verbally condenses the sort of sounds represented in An Evening Walk – the dissonance of thumping forge and baying hound, the somnolent silence of laborers’ cottages. In the earlier poem, the word ‘‘music’’ intimates a twilight realm of enchantment; but in ‘‘Tintern Abbey,’’ it signiﬁes a broader, more naturalistic sampling of sounds, both urban and rural. In this deceptively simple metaphor, ‘‘music’’ implies a sense of order or harmony intuited by the perceiver; but the genitive ‘‘of humanity,’’ implies the random and the innumerable. Levinson suggests that Wordsworth’s famous phrase ‘‘drowns out the noise produced by real people in real distress’’;21 but really, it summarizes those sounds – just as the phrase ‘‘hours of weariness’’ (27) distills the poet’s sojourns in Paris and London, and the phrase, ‘‘weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world’’ (39–40) alludes to the frictions of social existence. In essence, the phrases, ‘‘still, sad music’’ and ‘‘weary weight’’ are synoptic; they are, as Wordsworth says of our thoughts in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads,

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‘‘representatives of all our past feelings.’’ It is certainly worth proposing historical referents for these phrases, but it is equally important to appreciate the suggestive power of poetic language as a cipher for a variety of experiences – Wordsworth’s, Dorothy’s, ours. When Wordsworth turns to address Dorothy midway in the poem, the evening tropes of visual and aural persistence are united in her: ‘‘in thy voice I catch / The language of my former heart, and read / My former pleasures in the shooting lights / Of thy wild eyes.’’ The word ‘‘catch’’ was a particularly acute verb of perception for Wordsworth, more effortful than hearing, and almost physical in its suggestion of grasping, holding, and keeping. In the ﬁnal published version of An Evening Walk, he added the word to describe a similar attentiveness to the evanescent: the lines, ‘‘All air is, as the sleeping water, still, / List’ning th’ ae¨rial music of the hill,’’ are changed to, ‘‘Air listens, like the sleeping water, still / To catch the spiritual music of the hill.’’ This heightened aural receptivity is combined in ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ with a subtler cognitive process: Wordsworth both hears Dorothy’s voice and interprets it as a reminder of what his own once communicated. An Evening Walk ends with a moonrise, which represents Hope itself (‘‘Yet does she still, undaunted, throw the while / On darling spots remote her tempting smile’’), and in ‘‘Tintern Abbey,’’ this lunar personiﬁcation is, in effect, replaced by the human presence of Dorothy: ‘‘Oh! yet a little while / May I behold in thee what I was once’’ (119–20). In the later poem, the moon is never directly perceived but only imagined in the poet’s prayer for his sister’s future. It becomes an emblem of cautious hope without irritable grasping after allegory: Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain-winds be free To blow against thee: and, in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! (134–46)

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This passage might be read as an imitation of Coleridge’s benediction for his son in ‘‘Frost at Midnight’’; but it should also be understood as a revisitation of the scenario that Wordsworth imagined at the end of An Evening Walk. In the allegorical vocabulary of the earlier poem, the lunar rays of Hope show the lonely poet a ‘‘distant scene’’ of sibling domesticity; but in ‘‘Tintern Abbey,’’ the moon functions neither as the vehicle of a paysage moralise´ nor as a convenient narrative turn, but rather as a token of the cyclical present and the indeterminate future. In contrast to Wordsworth’s fantasy of cohabitation in An Evening Walk, the prayer in ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ invokes home only as metaphor – as ‘‘mansion’’ of the visible and ‘‘dwelling-place’’ of the aural. The idea of dwelling appears three times in the poem, but never in a securely domestic context, always in penumbral forms instead: the ‘‘vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods’’ (20), the impenetrable ‘‘dwelling’’ of ‘‘something far more deeply interfused’’ (96–7), and the ‘‘dwelling-place’’ of Dorothy’s mind (141). Though Wordsworth does not pay the kind of sociological attention to the ‘‘vagrant dwellers’’ that we have seen in An Evening Walk, the idea of homelessness haunts the poem in other ways: for all its deictic speciﬁcity (‘‘these waters,’’ ‘‘these steep and lofty cliffs,’’ ‘‘this season’’), the poem treats the cherished spot as memory more than as physical resting-place, an experience ever to be recalled.22 Wordsworth’s prayer, then, makes an apt coda to the domestic scenario envisioned in An Evening Walk: it expresses a desire for remembrance rather than residence. In this envoy, the phrase, ‘‘solitary walk,’’ represents an ultimate act of abstraction: it summarizes the evening pleasures of merely circulating; it echoes the exilic overtone of Adam and Eve’s ‘‘solitary way’’ out of Eden (PL 12.649); and it sends Dorothy alone into the world, on an evening walk of her own. time lost and found: a poem for john wordsworth I have read ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ as an abstraction of An Evening Walk in order to argue that its temporal and perceptual features need to be understood as more than a response to ‘‘Frost at Midnight,’’ as inﬂuential as that poem undoubtedly was. I turn to a lesser-known poem in Wordsworth’s ‘‘Poems on the Naming of Places’’ as an evening lyric that responds in complex ways to another conversation poem by Coleridge, ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.’’ In studies of the dialogue between Coleridge and Wordsworth, ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’ has been read as a corrective to the cautionary tale of the hermit in ‘‘Lines Left upon a Seat

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in a Yew-Tree’’ ; but the poem I now take up has not been previously considered as participating in this exchange.24 I will call this untitled lyric ‘‘John’s Grove’’ for its gesture of naming a spot in Grasmere after Wordsworth’s brother, who came for a visit before rejoining the merchant ship that he commanded. It might be subtitled, ‘‘This Fir-Tree Bower My Refuge,’’ for its distinct echoes of Coleridge. In its attribution of a memory to a place, ‘‘John’s Grove’’ can be read as a Romantic nature-inscription as Geoffrey Hartman has deﬁned it: a free-standing lyric that aspires to the condition of site-speciﬁc epitaph or memorial.25 Unlike its counterparts, however, the poem ends not with the discrete ceremony of naming but rather with the tribute of visiting the spot in the evenings after John has returned to sea. This ﬁnal gesture, as I will show, echoes and revises the climactic evening moment in ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower.’’ Wordsworth, in fact, read an early version of his poem to Coleridge in 1800, and an 1802 entry in Dorothy’s journal suggests that the Coleridgian conclusion of the poem was added later, after some creative struggle.26 In my previous chapter, I argued that the evening setting of ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’ represents the duration of thought and utterance and allows a mediation between two different perceptions; and in ‘‘John’s Grove’’ it serves similar purposes, but to different effect. By comparing the two poems, I wish to show a Wordsworthian conception of time that markedly differs from that of Coleridge’s poem: the experience of habit and repetition.27 As a meditation on forms of vision, ‘‘John’s Grove’’ makes a ﬁtting postscript to the dialogue between ‘‘Lines Left upon a Seat in a YewTree’’ and ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower.’’ It tells a Wordsworthian story of amended perception, of habitual activity interrupted by surprise: in the winter, the poet ﬁnds convenient afternoon shelter in a little ﬁr-grove, but as the weather grows warmer, he forgets about it, until the spring day when he returns to ﬁnd a ‘‘hoary pathway traced between the trees,’’ a token of humanity akin to the footprints that Crusoe discovers on his island. In deducing that the author of this ‘‘easy line / Along a natural opening’’ is his brother, Wordsworth realizes that whereas he had felt the spot to be too constricting, John found it perfectly amenable after spending long months of pacing a ship’s deck. In allegorical terms, then, the poem illustrates the moral of ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’: ‘‘No plot so narrow, be but nature there.’’ In the temporal ﬁction of Coleridge’s poem, the arrival of evening is simultaneous with the poet’s utterance, but in ‘‘John’s Grove,’’ Wordsworth describes a deliberate gesture of commemoration, a regular

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twilight visit. Where Coleridge characteristically registers the oscillations of consciousness within a discrete time-frame, Wordsworth describes an act of meditation as methodical as his brother’s pacing. The brief moment of mutual perception that Coleridge imagines he shares with Charles Lamb is extended into a habit of feeling and thought. In the narrative of the poem, the wintertime convenience of visiting the ﬁr-grove becomes a routine ultimately abandoned. After a new discovery, however, that routine is renewed as a memorial gesture in which another person’s daily habit can be contemplated: And while I gaze upon the spectacle Of clouded splendour, on this dream-like sight Of solemn loveliness, I think on thee, My Brother, and on all which thou hast lost. Nor seldom, if I rightly guess, while Thou, Muttering the verses which I muttered ﬁrst Among the mountains, through the midnight watch Art pacing thoughtfully the vessel’s deck In some far region, here, while o’er my head, At every impulse of the moving breeze, The ﬁr-grove murmurs with a sea-like sound, Alone I tread this path; – for aught I know, Timing my steps to thine; and with a store Of undistinguishable sympathies, Mingling most earnest wishes for the day When we, and others whom we love, shall meet A second time, in Grasmere’s happy Vale. (94–110)

In ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower,’’ Coleridge socializes his gaze by imagining that Charles Lamb stands ‘‘as I have stood, / Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round / On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem / Less gross than bodily’’ (38–41).28 Similarly, Wordsworth’s solitary gaze opens into a prospect of companionship rather than solitude. On the other hand, its temporal syntax involves the simultaneity of ‘‘while’’ rather than the extremity of ‘‘until’’: Wordsworth gazes at the same time as he thinks of his brother, not until the scene becomes transmuted into something still ﬁner. Wordsworth says to his brother, in effect: while I gaze upon this scene I think about you, who are probably pacing the ship’s deck and reciting my poetry; and while I hear the breeze in the trees, you probably hear a similar sound right now at sea. While Wordsworth borrows Coleridge’s idea of simultaneous perception at sunset, then, he replaces the Coleridgian notion of spiritual

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communion with a more literal act of sympathetic imagination – a translation from land to sea, from poet to sailor. With the luxury of physical proximity, Coleridge can speculate that he and Lamb have seen the same rook, but Wordsworth must mediate between his experience and his brother’s through an analogy between the terrestrial and the oceanic: echoing Coleridge’s phrase, ‘‘o’er thy head’’ (in the description of the rook’s ﬂight-path), he describes the sound of the wind in the ﬁrtrees as ‘‘sea-like.’’ Similarly, the poet’s idle evening gaze corresponds to the sailor’s vigilant midnight watch; and the ratio between these terms reﬂects both two time-zones and two forms of work. Although the gaze and the watch have distinctly different purposes, Wordsworth sees them as complementary ways of seeing. It is John’s habitual pacing in the grove, conditioned by long midnight watches at sea and his own ‘‘watchful heart’’ (81), that has led the poet to a new appreciation of the spot. The adjective ‘‘watchful’’ redeems the monotony of John’s shipboard midnight watch; and the poem suggests an afﬁnity between poetically attuned watchfulness and the ordinary watches of daily life, between sudden inspiration and habitual action. Like ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower,’’ ‘‘John’s Grove’’ is structured by a pastoral time-line from afternoon to evening, but to different effect: whereas Coleridge uses it as temporal counterpoint to his passing thoughts and sensations, Wordsworth adapts it to repetitive activities: pacing in a grove or on a ship, composing verses, visiting a favorite spot. It is a difference that reﬂects the two poets’ temperaments: while Coleridge’s characteristic temporal mode is the spontaneous and immediate, Wordsworth’s is the habitual and the mnemonic. The discovery of the path in the grove occurs in the moment of repose in which An Evening Walk and ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ both originate, when the poet ﬁnds himself one April day ‘‘[b]y chance retiring from the glare of noon’’ (46). Wordsworth’s realization that his brother has been here (‘‘Pleasant conviction ﬂashed upon my mind’’ [58]) corresponds to the moment in ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’ when Coleridge joins Lamb’s walk in spirit: ‘‘A delight / Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad / As I myself were there!’’ (43–5). Like Coleridge, Wordsworth ends the poem with an evening scene, but it is an evening of ritual memorialization – an adult’s version of the child’s sunset visits to her siblings’ graves in ‘‘We Are Seven.’’ As in the moment of recognition in ‘‘Tintern Abbey,’’ in which the picture of the mind revives again, Wordsworth’s ‘‘now’’ indicates not a change of external light but rather a change in consciousness, a conditioning by habit: ‘‘and now / I love the ﬁr-grove with a perfect love’’ (86–7).

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The idea of lost time haunts both ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’ and ‘‘John’s Grove.’’ Coleridge begins by lamenting that he has ‘‘lost / Beauties and feelings, such as would have been / Most sweet to my remembrance’’ (2–4); and when Wordsworth says of the ﬁr-grove, ‘‘Full many an hour / Here did I lose’’ (32–3), he uses more than a casual ﬁgure of speech. Not only has he lost time in the ordinary way that we think of daydreaming, he has also irrevocably missed moments that he might have spent with his brother. He compensates for this loss not through the sort of Berkeleyan epiphany that unites Coleridge and Lamb in an act of perception underwritten by God, but rather through an act of sympathetic imagination and deliberate pilgrimage. The dramatic ﬁction of ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’ is that its utterance is simultaneous with the evening it describes, whereas the frame of ‘‘John’s Grove’’ is an integration of several times – time ‘‘lost’’ in the grove, time regained there in memorial returns, and time anticipated in a future reunion. The pastoral time-line from afternoon to evening can offer a form of lyric closure; but as in Virgil’s Eclogues, the sunset does not accomplish a total resolution. In ‘‘John’s Grove,’’ the evening plot involves precisely the sort of suspension that Paul Alpers has noticed in the endings of the Eclogues – only a tentative expectation of John’s long-anticipated return from the sea rather than an actual homecoming. That expectation was ultimately shattered by the death of John at sea in 1805, and a footnote indicates that sad fact. ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’ ends with a variation on the Virgilian motif of the home-bound return, when the rook that beats ‘‘a straight path along the dusky air / Homewards’’ (69–70) preﬁgures Charles Lamb’s return and Coleridge’s departure from the bower. A different path structures the end of ‘‘John’s Grove,’’ its shape traced by Wordsworth’s commemorative pacing in the grove – winding rather than straight, recursive rather than teleological. It is the habitual marking of time while the poet waits for his brother to make his own more circuitous and less certain path toward home. the star and the lamp: forms of labor in ‘‘michael’’ The mimetic horizon of Virgil’s Eclogues and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar extends no further than evening: the shepherds speak of heading home, but we do not follow them there. Wordsworth imaginatively crosses that threshold in ‘‘Michael.’’ Many critics have read the poem as an innovative version of pastoral (it ﬁrst appeared in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads with the pointed subtitle, ‘‘A Pastoral Poem’’), but I wish to

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explore an aspect of the genre that has not been sufﬁciently noticed: the representation of pastoral time as a measure of work accomplished and life lived, and evening as the unit of that measurement.29 Indeed, the signiﬁcance of the poem as a commentary on pastoral is crystallized in the name of Michael’s cottage: it is called ‘‘The Evening Star’’ because of the ‘‘constant light’’ (136) it sheds at night from its position above the valley. Traditionally, the appearance of the star is a signal to fold the ﬂocks for the night; but the so-called ‘‘star’’ in ‘‘Michael’’ betokens the succession of one form of work (pastoral) by another (georgic) – and the notable participation of a woman, Michael’s wife Isabel, in that later work. The symbol of this work is the lamp that gives the cottage its name. It has been reasonably suggested that Wordsworth’s meticulous attention to this ‘‘aged utensil’’ (115) and its years of service represents the poem’s ethos of private industriousness30; but it also gives a celestial symbol a humble, tangible referent. Behind the public reputation of the cottage as local beacon and stellar name, there is a domestic interior: Early at evening did it burn – and late, Surviving comrade of uncounted hours, Which, going by from year to year, had found, And left the couple neither gay perhaps Nor cheerful, yet with objects and with hopes, Living a life of eager industry. And now, when Luke had reached his eighteenth year, There by the light of this old lamp they sate, Father and Son, while far into the night The Housewife plied her own peculiar work, Making the cottage through the silent hours Murmur as with the sound of summer ﬂies. This light was famous in the neighborhood, And was a symbol of the life That thrifty Pair had lived. (117–31)

The lamp is a material manifestation of lived time – ‘‘aged,’’ like Michael himself, but still hard-working. Like the evening star of Virgilian eclogue and Miltonic narrative, it also cyclically tells the time: it burns ‘‘early at evening,’’ just as its celestial namesake appears ﬁrst in the night sky; but Wordsworth’s pointed addendum, ‘‘and late,’’ reminds us that these shepherds do not cease their work at the usual hour. The temporal clause, ‘‘And now, when Luke had reached his eighteenth year,’’ recalls the closural et iam of Virgilian tradition, but it is completed by an anticlimactic predicate of habitual activity (there they sat). Unlike its pastoral

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archetype, this ‘‘star’’ does not signify closure, but rather the period during which Luke has become a full participant in the working life of the cottage. It will later be revealed that this is the time when Luke must take up a trade in London to help his father out of debt, but this meaning is deferred as the narrator traces a retrograde path from age eighteen back to infancy (‘‘while he was a babe in arms’’ [153]), and then forward to early childhood (‘‘ere yet the Boy / Had put on boy’s attire’’ [159–60]), to ﬁve (179), to ten (194), and ﬁnally back to eighteen (205). It is as if the narrator were about to announce Luke’s departure, and then retreated from the inevitable in order to build up a fuller sense of the shared life of father and son; he postpones the narrative of signiﬁcant events to dwell a little longer in the description of mundane life. In the mimetic convention of Virgilian eclogue, a single day of labor and repose is the standard temporal unit, and evening is its limit; in the narrative of ‘‘Michael,’’ however, Wordsworth represents longer spans of lived time, of the days of routine work that make up years, and the years that make up a life. When Wordsworth describes the lamp as ‘‘a symbol of the life / That thrifty Pair had lived’’ (130–1), he pointedly asserts an organic, local emblem in counterpoint to a literary archetype. In fact, the real evening star never appears; there is only a cottage that goes by that name. This star is not associated with the Hymeneal torch of epithalamium: it represents not the promise of marital bliss and procreation but rather ‘‘a life of eager industry,’’ a mental world of ‘‘objects’’ and ‘‘hopes.’’ It is, in effect, an inversion of the traditional epithalamic beacon – not a blessing on the matrimonial life to come, but a material sign of a life already shared. The lamp represents in little the narrator’s attention to the temporality of the story, which becomes especially acute in the disruption of daily routine wrought by the family’s ﬁnancial crisis. Michael proposes the idea of Luke’s city employment to Isabel ‘‘[t]wo evenings after he had heard the news’’ of his obligation to repay a debt (227); for ﬁve days afterwards, Isabel is ‘‘restless morn and night’’ (284–5), and for two of those nights, she notices her husband’s troubled sleep; at noon on a restful Sunday, she urges Luke not to leave; and on the following evening, Michael brings Luke to the pile of stones to tell him of his plans for the sheepfold and to say farewell. This last meeting at twilight recalls the closure of Virgilian pastoral, with its reluctance to end and its sense of the unﬁnished or unsaid: ‘‘And to the house together they returned / – Hushed was that house in peace, or seeming peace, / Ere the night fell’’ (423–5). The dash typographically renders the sober walk home, and the understated qualiﬁer, ‘‘or seeming peace,’’ lends psychological depth to the poetic

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trope of vespertinal stillness. This is a mature version of Wordsworth’s solemn pause at the door of the ‘‘cottage poor’’ in An Evening Walk. In a poem that elsewhere represents both thoughts and conversations, the silence is palpable. This lacuna preﬁgures the conclusion of the poem, which reminds us that for all of its naturalistic details of lived experience, the story is a mediated report of long-past events, as fragmentary as the heap of stones. Rather than following Michael to the sheepfold, we are left with a local rumor of those visits: ‘‘ ’tis believed by all / That many and many day he thither went, / And never lifted up a single stone’’ (464–6). On his last evening with Luke, Michael had made a gesture of memorialization similar to the address to Dorothy in ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’: ‘‘When thou art gone away, should evil men / Be thy companions, think of me, my Son, / And of this moment’’ (405–7). His subsequent returns to the spot are akin to Wordsworth’s pilgrimages to the ﬁr-grove in memory of his brother; but these visits lack the reassuring sense that Luke might be in telepathic sympathy with his father, somewhere ‘‘beyond the seas’’ (447). The poem itself can be read as a narrative completion of the unﬁnished sheepfold: what looks like a ruined structure is reinterpreted as a token of persistent hope. Like the cottage lamp, the sheepfold is invested with more than ordinary signiﬁcance, but the two things differ in one signiﬁcant respect: while the narrator insists on the enduring material presence of the ‘‘ragged heap of unhewn stones,’’ he imagines the lamp into being through the inspiration of a name, ‘‘the Evening Star.’’ As we discover at the end, the cottage itself has long since been demolished by ‘‘a stranger’s hand’’ (475), its site ploughed into arable land. As a purely visualized object, the lamp stands for the imaginative work that has enlarged a tale ﬁrst heard in the narrator’s youth into the poem we now read. Considering the poem as a result of labor, Marjorie Levinson has described it as the conversion of ‘‘raw materials’’ of people, places, and things into a usable product31; but this metaphor misses the fact that the materials are not so much found objects as images, thoughts, and feelings revolved in the narrator’s mind over many years. The idea of industrial production, in other words, does not adequately account for the immeasurable thought that goes into the writing of a poem, or the reader’s response to it. It is Michael’s work – continuing past the appearance of the Evening Star, enabled by a cottage lamp – that better shadows forth the poet’s own efforts. It is, after all, the Evening Star – the name of Michael’s cottage and the symbol of poetic inspiration and desire – that the two share.

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As the narrator implies in the prologue, the poem represents the culmination of a long engagement with ‘‘a history / Homely and rude’’ (34–5) that ﬁrst touched his feelings as a child.32 His ﬁrst hearing of the tale represents an early moment in the cultivation of his capacity to imagine and care about the lives of other people, living and dead, real and ﬁctive. What has changed in the time since this ﬁrst hearing is the narrator’s capacity to imagine his way into the tale. Presumably, the child did not register the details of the cottage lamp, the anguished conversation between Michael and Isabel, Isabel’s unvoiced hopes for Luke, or Michael’s speech to his son. It is the mature poet who sees and hears these things, and organizes them into a narrative that complicates the simpler pastoral conception of time. While the child ﬁrst hearing the story might have been struck by the sadness of the son’s parting with his father, the man – a poet who has known his own days and nights of solitary work – would likely be moved by reports that Michael spent whole days at the sheepfold without adding a single stone. It is the imagination of the adult that elucidates the meaning of the lamp: as resonant pastoral trope, as emblem and marker of passing time, as symbol of domestic life. In fact, as Wordsworth’s later notes reveal, the ‘‘Evening Star’’ was not the house in the original story, but rather a cottage located elsewhere in the valley.33 Before anything else, it was a name whose inﬂuence, like the light of a real star, would take some time to be felt. telling the time in the prelude The perceptual, affective, and symbolic signiﬁcance of evening that I have so far described in Wordsworth’s poems is vitally present in the encyclopedic scope of The Prelude. Time, of course, is the great subject of this poem; and one of its most widely recognized insights is the Kantian notion that time is an a priori intuition, not a thing inhering in objects.34 The Prelude – in its recursive narrative turns, its negotiation between the private life of the spirit and the public record of historical events, its ﬂux between memory and present utterance, its moments of atemporal reverie – everywhere implies that there is no such thing as objective time or chronology. I do not mean to reproduce the characterizations of temporality that have been made by previous critics; rather, I wish to show the ways in which the chronotope of evening shapes Wordsworth’s poem. I have elsewhere described the twilight settings of Romantic poetry as versions of the descriptive set-pieces in Paradise Lost – that is, lyric formations of a

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narrative device. In The Prelude, on the other hand, such scenes do have a narrative function; they invite us to make structural comparisons in understanding the signiﬁcant stages in the ‘‘growth of a poet’s mind.’’ We can better understand that growth by identifying several distinct categories of evening experience in the poem: the atemporal playtime of early childhood, the twilight fancies of later childhood, the pensive nocturnal sensibility of late adolescence, and the adult apprehension of what Wordsworth calls in the Immortality Ode the ‘‘sober coloring’’ of the world. In tracing this mental growth, Wordsworth describes not only his coming into self-consciousness as a being separate from the world, but also his acute awareness of the literary meditation of experience. The dynamic contrast between forms of evening experience is particularly acute in Book 1. The ﬁrst words of the poem are framed as an utterance that takes place on an exhilarating afternoon of inspiration that subsides into a quiescent twilight; and this unit of time becomes a temporal metaphor for poetic labor. In a poem that begins with an imaginative crisis of inspiration, evening serves as a fraught threshold – between rest and movement, wise passiveness and poetic exertion, daylight and darkness. The ﬁrst two verse paragraphs of the poem – what Wordsworth called its ‘‘glad preamble’’ (7.4) – are framed as a hopeful noontime paean to inﬁnite possibility that lapses into a pastoral retreat to a ‘‘green shady place’’ (1.62), which the poet does not leave ‘‘till the sun / Had almost touched the horizon’’ (1.86–7).35 In placing himself at this familiar juncture, Wordsworth signals a thematic departure: the poet of An Evening Walk would have been content to catalogue the ‘‘Aeolian visitations’’ (1.96) he encounters on his nocturnal excursion; but the more ambitiously autobiographical poet now ﬁnds his lyric harp suddenly ‘‘defrauded’’ (1.97), the ephemeral night-music ‘‘dispersed in straggling sounds, / And lastly utter silence’’ (1.96–9). In effect, the concluding soundscape of An Evening Walk – enchanted ‘‘music,’’ a diminuendo of nocturnal noises, silence – is here rendered as psychomachia; it is an attempt to recapture fading inspiration rather than the descriptive recording of nightfall. Wordsworth had given narrative closure to An Evening Walk through a literal movement toward home and an aspirational turn toward some future domestic reunion with his sister; and in the retrospect of The Prelude, he echoes this turn in representing this day of vocational declaration and frustration as a step in his progress toward home – a conﬂation of Racedown in 1795 and Grasmere in 1799. It is not only movement toward a destination that Wordsworth represents, but rather

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time well spent, as his georgic metaphor suggests: ‘‘So, like a home-bound labourer I pursued / My way beneath the mellowing sun’’ (1.101–2). The analogy casts what might otherwise seem like a holiday of glad wandering as a form of work, or what Keats would have called a ‘‘diligent indolence’’; and it compensates for a diurnal weariness with the expectation of a later mental harvest. Wordsworth had begun his preamble with a reference to the expulsion of Adam and Eve in his declaration, ‘‘The earth is all before me’’ (1.14); and at the end of the day, he echoes Milton’s closing image of evening mist that ‘‘gathers ground fast at the laborer’s heel / Homeward returning’’ (PL 12.631–2) – an adumbration of postlapsarian work ahead. The temporal ambiguity at the end of Paradise Lost – morning disrupted by the illusory sunset of archangelic radiance, departure juxtaposed with a conceit of homeward return – is reﬂected in the symbolic evening of The Prelude, which indicates an end and a potential beginning. The ﬁrst day of The Prelude thus represents the temporal complexity of the poem in little. It frames a present-tense lyric utterance as an event in the past; it conﬂates two different homeward journeys over the interval of several years; it superimposes on an ordinary evening the interconnected tropes of the cessation of georgic labor and the expulsion from Eden; and it represents a pause between time lost and redeemed, between mental work in progress and poetic completion. The childhood memories that Wordsworth goes on to recount serve as antidotes to this time-haunted opening scene. Both are evening episodes – of boat-stealing and ice-skating – and both involve staying out late, losing track of time, and resisting the centripetal pull of domestic comforts. Here, time is felt as physical movement and material change rather than as numerical or symbolic abstraction. As summer and winter scenes, they embody what Wordsworth calls ‘‘[t]he faces of the moving year’’ (1.561), and both represent a landscape in metamorphosis: the boy ﬂoats on water in its liquid form and skates across it in its frozen state. In the skating episode, Wordsworth ignores the ‘‘summons’’ of the cottage windows that blaze through the twilight (1.428), the tolling village clock, and the disappearance of the ‘‘orange sky of evening’’ (1.446). The boy’s experience of stopping his ﬂight and watching the illusory movement of his surroundings, ‘‘as if the earth had rolled with visible motion her diurnal round’’ (1.459–60), exempliﬁes the poetics of evening: a dilation of time, and an acute sense of the persistent phenomena of the world in darkness. Two evening episodes in Book 5 represent the inevitable confrontation with death that follows this period of glad animal movement: the

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episodes of the Boy of Winander and the drowned man. The ﬁrst episode consists of two intertwined evening scenes: what might be called the naı¨ve (the boy’s encounter with the owls) and the sentimental (the young Wordsworth’s pilgrimage to the boy’s gravesite). In essence, the Winander Boy who blows ‘‘mimic hootings’’ to the owls represents an untutored version of Collins’ speaker in the ‘‘Ode to Evening,’’ who asks to be taught to ‘‘breathe some softened strain’’ (16) as soothing as the deity’s own natural music. The perceptual form of evening, both aural and visual, is epitomized in this episode: the ‘‘lengthened pause / Of silence’’ (5.379–80) followed by a heightened sensitivity to sounds within that silence; and the persistence of the ‘‘visible scene’’ that enters the boy’s mind ‘‘unawares.’’36 If the Winander Boy represents a naı¨ve version of Collins’ odal celebrant, the young Wordsworth who visits the boy’s grave is Gray’s pastoral elegist: And through that churchyard when my way has led On summer evenings, I believe that there A long half hour together I have stood Mute, looking at the grave in which he lies! Even now appears before the mind’s clear eye That self-same village church. (5.394–9)

Wordsworth’s silent musing represents a self-conscious version of the Boy’s pause of silence, and it manifests the latent implication of death in that ﬁrst pause. Momentarily mute himself, the living boy contemplates what he would later recognize as a mute inglorious Milton: the personiﬁcation of an earlier phase of his own life, and a chastening example of unfulﬁlled expectations. Finally, the older poet’s present-tense recollection within the ‘‘mind’s clear eye’’ represents the ultimate distillation of that ﬁrst ‘‘visible scene’’ into conscious memory. The episode of the drowned man similarly begins at dusk with an act of perceptual adjustment – an ocular counterpart to the Winander boy’s intense listening: Twilight was coming on, yet through the gloom Appeared distinctly on the opposite shore A heap of garments, as if left by one Who might have been there bathing. Long I watched, But no one owned them; meanwhile the calm lake Grew dark with all the shadows on its breast,

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And, now and then, a ﬁsh up-leaping snapped The breathless stillness. (5.435–42)

A sensory memory is here framed as an evening set-piece in the tradition of the stately procession in Paradise Lost: ‘‘Now came still evening on, and twilight grey / Had in her sober livery all things clad’’ (PL 4.598–9). Sober livery, indeed: the pile of clothes, seen intensely through the gloom, is a terrestrial analogue of the celestial beacons of traditional evening descriptions. In his wait to see the clothes reclaimed, the nine-year-old Wordsworth hears ﬁsh leaping from their native element into an otherwise ‘‘breathless stillness’’ – registers, unwittingly, an aural imprint of the man’s drowning. The audible scene, we might say, enters the boy’s mind ‘‘unawares.’’ In its eerie soundscape, the episode of the drowned man recalls the vignette of the female beggar in An Evening Walk: when the boy looks upon the twilight scene, the man is already dead, just as the beggar has already died in the poet’s imagination when he turns to catalogue the sounds of evening. This simultaneity is mediated by narrative sequence: the story of the beggar’s death is followed by a serene twilight set-piece, and the discovery of the man’s drowning is preceded by a similar scene. Both sequences are informed by the notion that death is a natural phenomenon amid the innumerable phenomena of the world. The relative awkwardness of the episode in An Evening Walk is partly a function of order: nothing easily follows from the distressing tale of the beggar, whereas the revelation of the man’s drowning arises organically from a nocturnal vigil, in which description foreshadows the death to be revealed. Like the unﬁnished ‘‘heap of unhewn stones’’ in ‘‘Michael,’’ the ‘‘heap of garments’’ intimates a human intention; both remnants wait to be gathered up and given form – a form, ﬁnally, that can be found only in poetic narrative. Recounted in a section of The Prelude devoted to the subject of early education, the episode of the drowned man ostensibly demonstrates the notion that books were a kind of second nature to Wordsworth, a medium in which he lived; but this is surely no less true of the adult poet. Two images in the episode – the heap of clothes and the body of the drowned man – have the quality of vivid memories. But did the young Wordsworth really watch the clothes on the previous evening and hear the sounds of ﬁsh, or has the adult poet arranged two images into a symbolic plot of evening perception? It is impossible to know, of course; but Wordsworth’s metaphorical implications are clear from a passage that follows. The temporal structure of this episode – a twilight of uncertainty,

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then a ‘‘plain tale’’ (5.443) revealed in the light of day – is transformed into a conceit for a liminal state of consciousness, a threshold between childhood absorption in imaginative ﬁctions and an adult apprehension of the world: that dubious hour, That twilight when we ﬁrst begin to see This dawning earth, to recognise, expect, And in the long probation that ensues, The time of trial, ere we learn to live In reconcilement with our stinted powers. (5.511–16)

Twilight, as Wordsworth’s metaphor reminds us, is a phenomenon of dawn as well as dusk. In its dual senses, the word conﬂates the boy’s evening vigil with the dawn of discovery, mystery with recognition. The ambiguity of this time of day aptly represents the maturation that Wordsworth describes: a loss that is also a gain, a sadness mingled with a kind of elation. The second half of The Prelude is almost entirely devoid of the sort of evening scenes scattered throughout the ﬁrst half. When Wordsworth does describe a twilight moment in the later books, he does so in oblique reference to what such scenes had once meant to him. For instance, in recalling his ﬁrst visit to France in the ﬁrst ﬂush of revolutionary optimism, he describes a celebration ‘‘beneath the evening star’’ (6.370). He relates the vignette, however, as an older poet looking back on a youthful disposition to ‘‘tender melancholy / And fond conceit of sadness’’ (6.366–7), and as a self-conscious observer rather than wholehearted participant. Into the ‘‘late hours / Of darkness’’ (6.371–2) the young revelers prolong their dancing despite the chiding of ‘‘grey-haired lookers on’’ (6.373). In their obliviousness to the passing hour, they resemble the boy who kept skating into the night, unmindful of the lighted windows of home. Indeed, the festival is akin to a childhood reverie – a moment of seeming timelessness before the historical tragedy to come. Evening becomes a still more acute measure of change in the passage recounting the poet’s ﬂight from France in 1792 and brief sojourn on the Isle of Wight. Wordsworth here records a twilight scene as backdrop for England’s declaration of war on France and subsequent military preparations: there I heard, Each evening, pacing by the still sea-shore, A monitory sound that never failed, –

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The sunset cannon. While the orb went down In the tranquillity of nature, came That voice, ill requiem! Seldom heard by me Without a spirit overcast by dark Imaginations, sense of woes to come, Sorrow for human kind, and pain of heart. (10.322–30)

That the word ‘‘sunset’’ modiﬁes ‘‘cannon’’ tells us of the dissonant world in which Wordsworth ﬁnds himself. A disturbing counterpart to the unheeded village clock in the skating episode, the cannon tells the poet, with clock-like regularity, the historical time. In his ‘‘glad preamble,’’ Wordsworth had looked hopefully ahead to a diurnal rituality of poetic utterance, ‘‘[m]atins and vespers of harmonious verse’’ (1.45); but here, evensong is modulated into a ‘‘requiem.’’ In a subtle cognitive progression, it is ﬁrst a ‘‘monitory sound,’’ then a ‘‘voice,’’ and ﬁnally an internal ‘‘sense’’ of future woes; and the sinking of the sun is tallied by a darkening of the spirit. In its frequent narrative iterations, then, evening functions in The Prelude as an index of change. In light of Wordsworth’s disparagement of his youthful preference for ‘‘luxurious glooms,’’ any later evening scene might bear special scrutiny. Ideally, such a scene should not merely rehearse a poetic convention of description and mood; it should be an unsought-for moment, involving an element of surprise or aesthetic rejuvenation. This is precisely the character of a twilight moment at the beginning of Book 7, in which Wordsworth looks back at the preamble of his poem and the lapse of ‘‘six changeful years’’ (7.1) since its occasion of utterance. In chronological terms, it is the most recent scene in the poem – a happening of the day before – and thus notable for what it says about the poet’s present perceptions. In the summer of 1804, Wordsworth has taken a hiatus from writing the poem, ‘‘Partly from voluntary holiday,’’ as he tells Coleridge, ‘‘And part through outward hindrance’’ (7.17–18); but now, as autumn turns to winter, he feels a new access of inspiration, quickened by an experience of the night before. ‘‘After the hour of sunset yester-even, / Sitting within doors between light and dark’’ (19–20), he hears a ‘‘choir’’ of migratory robins, and takes it as an invitation to go outside and join them, ‘‘unscared by blustering winds’’ (30): Thereafter, as the shades Of twilight deepened, going forth, I spied A glow-worm underneath a dusky plume

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Autumn, twilight, blustery winds, a pensive mood: the scene reads almost as a checklist of the conventions that Wordsworth had attributed to the extravagances of youth – the ‘‘gloom of choice.’’ It differs, however, in one important respect. The birdsong and glow-worm are not deliberately chosen; rather, they seem to choose the enervated poet. To describe these creatures as coming on an ‘‘errand’’ is to credit the poet’s own greeting spirit, of course; but Wordsworth also means to tell a story of serendipity, of unbidden renovation. The perceptual outlines of the episode recall those of An Evening Walk: the world fading into darkness, a sound subsiding into silence, a persistent lingering of one last light – visual and aural phenomena that ‘‘touch’’ the poet into a new feeling. This vignette of freshened perception thus has the double effect of recording a shock of mild surprise and conﬁrming something already familiar in the poet’s symbolic lexicon. The Boy of Winander has grown up and now speaks to the birds in formal apostrophe rather than in mimic hooting: ‘‘Ye heartsome Choristers, ye and I will be / Associates, and, unscared by blustering winds, / Will chant together’’ (7.29–31). Whereas a long silence bafﬂed the boy, the adult poet knows how to ﬁnd another token of encouragement when the birds have stopped singing: the glow-worm’s errant, late-season luminosity, and a tallying sense of renewed poetic purpose. The glow-worm’s ‘‘clear shining’’ stands in for the evening star, and the metaphorical hermit’s taper draws the poet’s thoughts deeper into the terrestrial woods, away from the ﬁrmament of conventional symbols. It is worth keeping in mind that this episode is speciﬁcally addressed to Coleridge, who had written about his own dejection in an evening setting two years earlier. Rather than describing an attitude of desperate gazing on the evening star, Wordsworth narrates a parable of aesthetic surprise – paradoxically, within a familiar template of evening perception. In this way, he afﬁrms that he is still a lover of twilight, albeit not in the same way that he was in his childhood. Coleridge had his doubts that he could

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ever escape from despair though ‘‘outward forms,’’ but Wordsworth, at least provisionally, insists that he can. Nevertheless, the crisis of imaginative response that this episode represents does not simply go away; and in concluding, I will consider Wordsworth’s effort to revive a poetics of evening after he had passed his creative peak. The ‘‘holy time’’ that he once hailed in his sonnet on a ‘‘beauteous evening’’ takes on new meaning in this late phase. late vespers Thirty years after the glow-worm epiphany recounted in The Prelude, Wordsworth was still making poetry of serene twilight settings, in a series of lyrics that he ﬁrst published under the heading of ‘‘Evening Voluntaries’’ in Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems (1835). These poems might indicate that he still had the capacity to be moved by scenes he had ﬁrst written about in his youth; but they also betray the exhaustion of a lyric topos and the waning of imaginative powers, as if twilight itself were the image of faded greatness. The ﬁrst poem in the series rehearses a familiar catalogue of ‘‘the village Church-clock’s iron tone’’ (10), a retiring shepherd, a ﬂitting bat, the ‘‘soft music’’ (26) of a stream, and the sound of an oar heard as ‘‘a last token of man’s toilsome day’’ (32). It seems like a lost fragment from An Evening Walk – and this is precisely the point: these poems reﬂect the nostalgia of an increasingly conservative poet disturbed by cultural change – the incursion of the railroad into the Lake District, the growth of urban centers of industry, the Reform Bill of 1832. By this time, Wordsworth had embraced orthodox Anglicanism; and the title ‘‘Evening Voluntaries’’ reﬂects this turn in its metaphor of lyric utterance as Church ritual. In a religious sense, the voluntary is a piece of organ music played in the course of services; and in a broader, secular sense, it is any musical piece performed spontaneously and ad libitum, often as a sort of prelude. Both meanings are relevant to these poems, in that they often invoke the divine Power behind evening scenes, but do so through the archetypal lyric situation of a speaker wandering abroad at his own will. As Wordsworth later explained in the Fenwick Notes, the idea of the ‘‘Evening Voluntaries’’ originated with a poem he wrote about a walk to the Rectory of Moresby, where his son John had a living.37 In a postscript to the 1835 volume, the poet laments that ‘‘hundreds of thousands of our fellow-countrymen, though formally and nominally of the Church of England, never enter her places of worship, neither have they communication with her ministers.’’38 The ‘‘Evening Voluntaries’’

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represent a familiar form of nature-worship rather than explicitly advocating church-attendance, but Wordsworth saw his poems as lyric complements to his prose argument: ‘‘the state of mind which some of the foregoing poems may have produced in the reader will dispose him to receive more readily the impression the author desires to make, and to admit the conclusions he would establish.’’ In this way, the ‘‘Evening Voluntaries’’ represent not so much an alternative to Evensong as a meditative walk that might ﬁguratively lead the reader to the church door. This new religious purpose ﬁnds an amenable idiom in the poetics of evening: the perceptual adjustment to a darkening world, the sabbatarian cessation of labor, the attentive listening to the voices of nature, the intimation of God’s parting of light from darkness, the invocation of a ‘‘holy time.’’ While these late poems repeat many of the themes and motifs of eighteenth-century evening lyrics, they do so with a revisionary inﬂection. In ‘‘By the Sea-Side,’’ for instance, Wordsworth describes the twilight calm after a storm in terms reminiscent of Bowles’s sonnet written ‘‘after a Tempestuous Voyage’’; but whereas Bowles’s traveler rests in a ‘‘kindred stillness’’ mirroring the ‘‘hush’d billows’’ that ‘‘seem to sleep,’’ Wordsworth wishes that this slumber would be replaced with prayer. ‘‘Yet oh!’’ he exclaims, ‘‘How gladly would the air be stirred / By some acknowledgment of thanks and praise’’ (22–3) – something akin to evening prayers raised in other lands, from the Mediterranean warmth of ‘‘vesper lays / Sung to the Virgin’’ (24–5) to the austerity of Norwegian hymns and ‘‘Lutherian harmonies’’ offered with ‘‘punctual care’’ (32). Wordsworth’s concern for the comparative distress of the Anglican Church becomes evident in the conclusion, when he looks homeward to the Cumberland coast: Hush, not a voice is here, but why repine Now when the star of eve comes forth to shine On British waters with that look benign? Ye mariners, that plough your onward way Or in the haven rest, or sheltering bay, May silent thanks at least to God be given With a full heart; ‘our thoughts are heard in heaven!’ (33–9)

Almost thirty years after the death of his brother John, the idea of surviving a tempest at sea still haunts the poet; and the submission to a ‘‘new control’’ announced in the ‘‘Elegiac Stanzas’’ is reafﬁrmed. In their travels, the English mariners aptly stand for what Wordsworth identiﬁes

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in his postscript as the ‘‘tens of thousands of the unhappy outcasts who grow up with no religion at all.’’ But if the sailors are literally and spiritually adrift, Wordsworth implies that they might at least perform a semblance of prayer in their private meditations, just as he had once imagined that his brother approximated a form of lyrical reﬂection on the high seas. If words without thoughts never to heaven go, thoughts themselves might. Despite his distress over declining church attendance, it was the Miltonic model of edenic Vespers – open-air, unmediated, and spontaneous – that chieﬂy appealed to Wordsworth. It is this ideal that the poet articulates in ‘‘Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty’’: Time was when ﬁeld and watery cove With modulated echoes rang, While choirs of fervent Angels sang Their vespers in the grove. (9–12)

This passage might seem to promise a lament over the fallen state of present worship, but the poet insists instead that this angelic rite could not be more sublimely moving than the present moment: ‘‘this silent spectacle – the gleam – / The shadow – and the peace supreme!’’ (19–20). In place of an angelic hymn, then, Wordsworth supplies his own. Echoing Collins’ Ode, he apostrophizes Evening, but then offers an implicit critique of such secular devotion: Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal Eve! But long as god-like wish, or hope divine, Informs my spirit, ne’er can I believe That this magniﬁcence is wholly thine! (33–6)

The turn from nature-worship to religious piety recalls Adam’s instinctual reverence of the Creator in Paradise Lost: in his ﬁrst moment of waking consciousness, he addresses the sun, but immediately recognizes that ‘‘some great Maker’’ (8.278) has created him and all that he beholds. The original title of the poem, ‘‘Evening Ode,’’ suggests this afﬁnity to Collins. Moreover, its resonance with Wordsworth’s own Immortality Ode is unmistakable. While the earlier ode ends at the threshold of a symbolic, generalized sunset, the later one begins on a speciﬁc evening, and pointedly alludes to the ﬂeetingness of the hour. In light of Wordsworth’s earlier lyrics, this temporal frame is notably Coleridgian in its lyric immediacy. Where once he represented the course of his life in

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abstract phases from morning to evening, Wordsworth now lingers in the present moment. When he invokes the time when angels sang vespers in Eden, he echoes the pastoral retrospect of childhood in the earlier ode, but with a difference: rather than lamenting the loss of a ‘‘visionary gleam,’’ he suggests that the sun’s last gleam on this ‘‘silent spectacle’’ is vision enough. Whereas the lost gleam of the Immortality Ode seemed to be entirely suprasensual, the gleam of the later Evening Ode appears visibly in the sky, as if the metaphorical ‘‘sober colouring’’ of adulthood had been reinterpreted as a momentary spectacle: ‘‘Such hues from their celestial Urn / Were wont to stream before mine eye, / Where’er it wandered in the morn of blissful infancy’’ (61–3). For once, then, something. More pointedly than in the glow-worm epiphany of The Prelude, Wordsworth attributes this sudden access of feeling and spiritual renovation to the ‘‘Dread Power’’ behind the spectacle; but it is only a passing moment, tinged with a Wordsworthian distrust of appearances. The traditional symbolism of evening as a time of fading vision and ascendant Fancy takes on new poignancy in the poet’s tentative effort to ﬁnd lasting meaning in the ephemeral: Oh, let Thy grace remind me of the light Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored; Which, at this moment, on my waking sight Appears to shine, by miracle restored; My soul, though yet conﬁned to earth, Rejoices in a second birth! – ’Tis past, the visionary splendour fades; And night approaches with her shades. (73–80)

The concluding couplet brings down an awkwardly brusque curtain on this momentary glimpse of the divine, but it does so in the way that the umbrae of Virgilian eclogue force shepherds to end their song. In this way, Wordsworth’s abrupt closure recalls the couplet in Dryden’s translation of the tenth Eclogue, ‘‘Now let us rise; for hoarseness oft invades / The singer’s voice, who sings beneath the shades.’’ Earlier in the poem, the intimation of divinity is represented as both visible sunlight (‘‘gleam’’) and penumbral afterimage (‘‘shadow’’); and the symbolic timelapse of the poem is registered in the gradation from shadow to shades, vision to blindness. Wordsworth wrote this poem in 1818 and later added it to the ‘‘Evening Voluntaries,’’ but in many ways it anticipates the religious sobriety of its later counterparts. By the time he wrote his poems

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at Moresby, the prayer he once offered for Dorothy in ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ had been sadly inverted: his sister had begun alarmingly to deteriorate in body and mind, and it was he who would be taking the ‘‘solitary walk’’ at dusk. If Wordsworth’s preference for twilight was once a function of ‘‘youth’s contentedness,’’ it would come to represent a willed effort of aesthetic and spiritual renovation. What was once a ‘‘gloom of choice’’ became, with a stoic sense of purpose, an ‘‘evening voluntary.’’

chapter 4

Shelley’s ‘‘woven hymns of night and day’’

Yeats once suggested that among Shelley’s symbols, the most important were the Morning Star and Evening Star – the planet Venus in its dual guises.1 As Phosphor and Hesperus, this ‘‘star’’ betokened celestial persistence and cyclical rebirth; and in its brightness and primacy in the night sky, it signiﬁed love, beauty, liberty, desire, and wisdom. According to Yeats, it expressed ‘‘that Intellectual Beauty which was to Shelley’s mind the central power of the world.’’ True enough, and yet the star is never actually mentioned in the ‘‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.’’ Rather, evening itself, not its celestial attribute, appears in the poem, twice; and it ﬁgures prominently in Shelley’s poetry, as both symbol and setting, abstract metaphor and sensuous experience. Shelley inherited the chronotope of evening from the pastoral idiom of Virgil (whose tenth eclogue he translated) and its permutations in Milton, Collins, Gray, Coleridge, and Wordsworth; and in the process, he translated it into his own symbolic vocabulary.2 He did not do so all at once, of course. An early unpublished poem called ‘‘The Sunset’’ can be read as an allegory of coming late to this poetic tradition: it tells the story of a frail youth who dies in his sleep, a few hours after remarking to his lover that he has missed seeing the sunset. While the youth misses something that happens every day, the ambitious poet faces the challenge of describing an event that has already been profusely appreciated in verse. At this early stage, Shelley has no new colors to add to the poetic archive of sunsets, so he approximates Miltonic description instead: ‘‘There now the sun had sunk, but lines of gold / Hung on the ashen clouds, and on the points / Of the far level grass and nodding ﬂowers’’ (12–14).3 In ‘‘A Summer Evening Churchyard,’’ which appeared in the Alastor volume of 1816, he begins by putting Collins’ Miltonic personiﬁcations through their nocturnal paces: ‘‘pallid Evening twines its beaming hair / In duskier braids around the languid eyes of Day,’’ and ‘‘Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men, / Creep hand in hand from 112

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yon obscurest glen’’ (3–6). Shelley’s epithet ‘‘unbeloved’’ disingenuously implies that the poet is a lone devotee of the pleasures of silence and twilight, instead of an adherent to a poetic sensibility. These two poems might be dismissed as tardy pupils of the eighteenthcentury Graveyard School; but in tandem, they point toward Shelley’s abiding use of evening as a symbolic threshold and marker of time. ‘‘A Summer Evening Churchyard,’’ a ﬁrst-person lyric meditation, indulges a fantasy of death as a twilight portal of sorts, mild as the evening in which the poem is set; and ‘‘The Sunset,’’ a third-person narrative of absence and death, describes an experience of looking to the past (the missed sunset) and anticipating the future (the next evening). The grammatical difference between the two poems reﬂects a metaphysical one: while the ﬁrst poem registers the perception of a sunset, only the second can observe the death of that perception amid the continuous phenomena of the world. For the temporal concerns of these and Shelley’s other evening poems, an epigraph might be borrowed from ‘‘To a Sky-Lark’’: ‘‘We look before and after, / And pine for what is not.’’ Throughout Shelley’s poetry, from ‘‘Alastor’’ to ‘‘Adonais,’’ evening has both lyrical and narrative signiﬁcance: it functions as both a pregnant pause and an index of passing time; it is a fulcrum between ‘‘before’’ and ‘‘after.’’ Shelley often echoes the evenings of his predecessors, but in deliberately revisionary ways, and in this chapter I examine the relationship between several exemplary poems and their precursors: ‘‘Alastor’’ and Paradise Lost; the ‘‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’’ and Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode; ‘‘Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills’’ and Coleridge’s ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’’; ‘‘Adonais’’ and ‘‘Lycidas.’’ It is a peculiar fact of Shelley’s ﬁnest evening poem, ‘‘Adonais,’’ that it spans the course of two evenings rather than one; and by attending to the poet’s imaginative engagement with lyric time, I seek to explain why this might be so.

lyric time in ‘‘alastor’’ In its twinned ﬁgures of questing Poet and recording Narrator, ‘‘Alastor’’ conﬂates the youth of ‘‘The Sunset’’ with the meditative speaker of ‘‘A Summer Evening Churchyard.’’ It is as if the youth had risen from his bed the next morning and left his former life behind, abandoning a lover and taking on a vocation and a quest; no longer content with sunsets, he seeks a vision that transcends them all.4 At the outset of his doomed

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grand tour, the Poet stands in a moonlit temple and gazes in rapt abstraction until he beholds ‘‘[t]he thrilling secrets of the birth of time’’ (128); and at the end he dies watching the moon disappear below the horizon, his life compactly summarized by the Narrator as ‘‘a dream / Of youth, which night and time have quenched for ever’’ (669–70).5 Together, these moments represent a Shelleyan preoccupation with the inevitable victory of Time over the individual’s intuition of it. In his trance, the Poet sees through the phenomenal world into a transcendent realm of ‘‘secrets,’’ but in death, he watches the bare moon, the visual manifestation of earthly time – as if that were the open secret he’d missed all along. Between these two moments, the Narrator frequently marks the passage of time – especially toward the end, when he scrupulously traces the last two days of the Poet’s life. In Tilottama Rajan’s reading, this chronographic attention distinguishes the poem as narrative rather than lyric: whereas lyric ‘‘concentrates on a single spot of time,’’ or constitutes, in Sharon Cameron’s phrase, a ‘‘suppression of temporality’’ altogether, narrative inserts the subject into ‘‘a temporal and historical world’’ by virtue of ‘‘its conﬁguration of space as something inhabited by others and time as something that continues beyond the moment of speech.’’6 Walter Benjamin’s famous remark about the act of storytelling applies to Shelley’s narration in ‘‘The Sunset’’ and ‘‘Alastor’’: it involves a fundamental curiosity about endings, particularly death.7 The temporality of ‘‘Alastor’’ is not the exclusive property of either poetic genre, however. The mixed genealogy of the evening scenes of the poem tells us as much: they can be traced to narrative set-pieces in Paradise Lost and their mutations in eighteenth-century lyric. The evening scenes in ‘‘Alastor’’ serve both narrative and lyric purposes: they give temporal shape to the Poet’s quest, and they are emblematic moments of lyric consciousness. The bulk of the poem is devoted to profuse scenic description, but there is little indication that the questing Poet registers the beauties and sublimities of his journey. One strikingly Miltonic setpiece demonstrates this ennui. As a demonic boat autopilots the Poet through whirlpools and tempests, evening arrives over his head, literally and ﬁguratively: Evening came on, The beams of sunset hung their rainbow hues High ’mid the shifting domes of sheeted spray That canopied his path o’er the waste deep; Twilight, ascending slowly in the east, Entwin’d in duskier wreaths her braided locks

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Shelley’s ‘‘woven hymns of night and day’’ O’er the fair front and radiant eyes of day; Night followed, clad with stars. On every side More horribly the multitudinous streams Of ocean’s mountainous waste to mutual war Rushed in dark tumult thundering, as to mock The calm of spangled sky. (333–44)

We can read this passage, under Rajan’s rubric, as a narrative feature – the advancement of time as the Poet hastens toward his doom; but in its Hesperian pause, it is also an emblematic moment of lyric attention. Traditionally, evening is a time of meditative repose, but here that privileged moment is swallowed up by the crashing sublimity of the Poet’s deathward quest. In effect, the scene echoes and revises the epithalamic procession in Paradise Lost that begins, ‘‘Now came still Ev’ning on, and Twilight gray / Had in her sober Livery all things clad’’ (4.598–9); and in its latent eroticism, it recalls the less sober ﬁgures of Collins’ ‘‘Ode to Evening’’ – the ‘‘bright-haired sun’’ wearing ‘‘cloudy skirts, / With brede ethereal wove’’ (5–6), and Eve drawing her ‘‘gradual dusky veil’’ over the world (40). Milton’s description serves as background to Adam and Eve’s conjugal idyll of nocturnal rest, and Collins’ scene represents the union of the poet with his dusky interior paramour.8 Shelley’s set-piece, however, is a scenic backdrop without a foregrounded act: the Poet has no rendezvous and utters no evening hymn. In borrowing Collins’ eroticized idiom of evening, Shelley intimates a ghostly afterimage of the Arab Maiden whom the Poet has earlier encountered on his journey. The Poet had the experience but missed the meaning: having ignored the Maiden in waking life, he belatedly encounters a version of her in a dream. When Collins’ odal speaker hails Eve’s ‘‘genial loved return,’’ he welcomes a daily recurrence; but when Shelley’s Poet sails beneath the tresses of evening, he encounters a return of the repressed dream-maiden, with ‘‘[h]er glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil / Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare, / Her dark locks ﬂoating in the breath of night’’ (176–8). Shelley’s trope of intensiﬁcation and interweaving (‘‘entwin’d in duskier wreaths’’ [138]) suggests a human coupling that the Poet will never ﬁnd on his quest; and in the end, it is only his own face, beheld in a moment of narcissistic reﬂection, that recalls the meeting of Twilight and the radiant eyes of day: ‘‘His eyes beheld / Their own wan light through the reﬂected lines / Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth / Of that still fountain’’ (469–72). By invoking the evening of Milton and Collins as ironic counterpoint, then,

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Shelley implies several forms of absence – of calm lyric meditation, of nuptial harmony, of erotic encounter. Neither purely lyric nor purely narrative, Shelley’s evening scene represents an intersection of the two modes: a poetically allusive occasion of lyric attention imbued with the narrative history of a quest. It is not only the mimesis of time that gives the passage its narrative quality but also its iterative function: it repeats the Poet’s dream-vision and magniﬁes the motifs of weaving and entwining that appear throughout the poem. Repetition, as Peter Brooks has observed, is the ‘‘binding’’ element of narrative that allows us to understand the end in relation to the beginning; it is based on the perception not only of resemblance but also of difference – a ‘‘variation in time.’’9 Unlike the Bildungsroman hero that Brooks studies, however, Shelley’s Poet neither narrates his own story nor comes to any integrative awareness of these repetitions; that work is undertaken by the Narrator and completed by the reader who perceives such patterns. It is we who see that the liaison between Twilight and Day belongs to a series of such ﬁgures that suggest the physical intimacy that the Poet has missed: the swan that ‘‘twine[s] her downy neck’’ with her mate’s (282); the ‘‘meeting boughs and implicated leaves’’ that weave twilight over his path (426–7); the vines that ‘‘twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs / Uniting their close union’’ (444–5); and the ivy that ‘‘clasp[s] / The ﬁssured stones with its entwining arms’’ (578–9). Everything in nature is intertwined – all but the solitary ﬁgure who wanders through it. This is no country for prematurely old men. Since these ﬁgures of weaving and entwining also represent the act of poetry-making itself, they remind us not only of the Poet’s inability to ﬁnd the human embodiment of his vision but also of his failure to produce monuments of unageing intellect, to ﬁnd his way into ‘‘the web of human things’’ (719). In counterpoint to the Poet’s fruitless silence, Shelley sees the world itself as possessing its own oblivious eloquence: ‘‘and mighty Earth / From sea and mountain, city and wilderness, / In vesper low or joyous orison, / Lifts still its solemn voice’’ (692–5). It is apt that he describes earth’s diurnal course as a cycle of utterances – the evening sobriety of vespers and the daylight jubilance of orisons. As in the invocation, in which the Narrator expresses the hope that his strain will harmonize with the ‘‘woven hymns / Of night and day’’ (48–9), Shelley recalls Milton’s prelapsarian Eden, in which morning and evening are associated with forms of natural, spontaneous prayer. Adam and Eve’s matinal and vespertinal hymns are repetitive rituals, but without the anxiety over

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monotony that would attend such habitual practice after the Fall. Neither Shelley nor the Poet enjoys this unmediated and uncomplicated relation to the world, and Shelley’s Miltonic borrowings remind us of this fact.10 By borrowing an emblematic scene from Milton, then, Shelley invokes a mythical time when evening could always be hymned anew, without the hint of death or the exhaustion of repetition. As Shelley’s Miltonic trope of orisons and vespers suggests, there is an intimate connection between time and lyric in ‘‘Alastor’’ – between the passing day and the hymnal observance of it. Ultimately, the Narrator’s lyric lament, in which he yearns for a time-reversing Medean potion to revive the Poet, yields to the mature sense that the revolutions of the earth are themselves a kind of lyric utterance to be appreciatively heard. sober colourings: the ‘‘hymn to intellectual beauty’’ In the ‘‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’’ Shelley puts the restless questing of ‘‘Alastor’’ into an autobiographical frame and replaces its elegiac lament with an odal prayer. In essence, he revisits the developmental pattern that the narrator of ‘‘Alastor’’ describes in his prologue: a youthful period of occult fascination with the boundaries of life, followed by a mature harmony between his own songs and the rhythms of the earth. In the Hymn, these periods are associated with two different metaphors of evening. As many readers have noted, Shelley’s conclusion, with its conceit of evening as a time of serene maturity, has a tincture of the ‘‘sober colouring’’ of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, the archetypal poem of reconciliation between childhood and adulthood, past and present selves.11 But this ﬁnal image also revises an evening trope that appears at the beginning of the Hymn, and this represents a telling difference from Wordsworth’s poem: whereas the Ode traces an arc from the dawn of childhood to the dusk of maturity, the Hymn moves from twilight to twilight.12 In the opening invocation, Shelley likens the inconstant emanations of an ‘‘unseen power’’ to the transitory ‘‘hues and harmonies of evening’’ (8) – a phrase of enchantment closer in spirit to the romantic atmosphere of Wordsworth’s An Evening Walk than to the philosophical twilight of the Immortality Ode. In the ﬁnal stanza, however, Shelley modulates this analogy into the promise of something more lasting, when he asks for a permanent boon: The day becomes more solemn and serene When noon is past – there is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

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For Shelley, autumn and evening – images of the penultimate – represent latency, an invisible promise made visible in the fullness of time. The ‘‘hues and harmonies of evening,’’ which had signiﬁed the inconstant and elusive in the ﬁrst stanza, deepen into the hope for a persistent state of serenity, symbolized here by the ‘‘harmony’’ and ‘‘lustre’’ of the autumnal sky – an equilibrium between light and dark, summer and winter, the no-longer and the not-yet. What is merely a ﬂeeting simile in the beginning of the poem becomes an extended analogy at the end. Without actually placing himself in a speciﬁc time or metaphorically announcing a premature entrance into the autumn of life, Shelley anticipates a phase of philosophical maturity. From the experiential perspective of summer, it seems as if autumn will never arrive (‘‘As if it could not be, as if it had not been!’’); and from the perspective of youth, Shelley’s anticipated serenity seems similarly unattainable. Evening, then, has complex signiﬁcance in the Hymn – as an image of the elusive and ephemeral that is transformed into a symbol of the permanent and attainable, and as a time of ﬂoating ‘‘harmonies’’ of romantic enchantment modulated into a ‘‘harmony’’ of opposites. It serves as both the scene of the poet’s encounters with the gothic sublime (seeking ghosts through the ‘‘starlight wood,’’ communing with the dead) and the emblem of a more sober phase of life. Beyond the obvious similarity to the image of evening in Wordsworth’s Ode, I want to compare the recapitulatory function of this trope at the end of each poem: the signiﬁcance of evening changes, from beginning to end, in each poem, but in different ways. At the end of the Ode, Wordsworth reiterates the diurnal cycle that he celebrated in the beginning, but with a new awareness of its signiﬁcance: I love the Brooks which down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripped lightly as they; The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

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Is lovely yet; The Clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality. (194–8)

These successive phases of the day mean different things: the morning, Wordsworth says, is as lovely to me now as it was when I was a child; but the evening takes on a new and solemn aspect, now that I see the morning as a metaphor for birth, and now that I have an empirical knowledge and deeper understanding of death. There is an apt asymmetry in the syntax of these phases: the adjective ‘‘lovely’’ echoes the childlike vocabulary of approval represented in the beginning of the poem (‘‘And lovely is the Rose’’), but it has no exact equivalent in the experience of the setting sun. The clouds at sunset are not purely lovely or sad but rather take on a sober coloring in the consciousness of one who has been sobered. Since there is no sunset in the beginning of the poem (only a dawn and a selfdelighting moon), we might say that evening constitutes a new category of experience when it appears at the end. If it is registered by the Wordsworthian child at all, it is as a period of dilation or reverie, as in the charmed twilight of playtime described in The Prelude; but in the adult perspective of the Ode, it intimates closure as much as indeﬁnite deferral. Though Shelley follows Wordsworth in associating evening with sobriety, he avoids the intimation of mortality. We see this difference in poetic temperament and outlook in the ways that each poet invokes the idea of keeping watch. Wordsworth’s ﬁgure of the ‘‘eye / That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality’’ recalls many biblical passages in which the act of keeping watch takes the form of military and civic vigilance, both literal and metaphorical. In the pastoral context of the Ode, the phrase has special resonance with the evening of the Nativity: ‘‘And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the ﬁelds, keeping watch over their ﬂock by night’’ (AV, Luke 2:8).13 In Paradise Lost, Milton combined military and pastoral shadings of the word in referring to ‘‘the Cherubim / That kept their watch’’ over Eden at night. Both soldiers of heaven and keepers of the pastoral space of Eden, they nevertheless cannot ensure the absolute protection of their domain; rather, in Milton’s vision of human agency, the angelic watch must be complemented by Adam and Eve’s own ‘‘ﬁve watchful senses.’’ For Milton, keeping watch is both a human and a divine activity; but for Wordsworth, who does not share his predecessor’s supreme faith in a deity, it is the act of staying at a deathbed and contemplating mortality. It is a watch kept by the poet himself, and,

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as the generalized ‘‘eye’’ implies, by his predecessors and successors. Like the angelic surveillance of Eden or the pastoral protection of sheep, it is an activity of mindful attention rather than omnipotent protection: the eye can bear witness to man’s mortality but cannot intervene against it. Shelley, too, invokes the idea of keeping watch, but not in the sense of pastoral care, moral vigilance, or divine protection; rather, it is in the sense of the Miltonic Penseroso’s insomniac habits. In the occult dabblings of his youth, the ‘‘phantoms of a thousand hours’’ that Shelley has summoned forth have ‘‘outwatched’’ with him the ‘‘envious night’’ (64, 67), in imitation of the Penseroso’s fantasy of staying in a ‘‘high lonely tower’’ where he might ‘‘outwatch’’ the never-setting constellation of Ursa Major. For Shelley, the night is ‘‘envious’’ (from invidere, to look upon with malice) because he returns its gaze and refuses to respect it as a temporal limit, just as he refuses to accept death as an insuperable end; like the Penseroso, he out-stares the night into the next day’s dawn. Whereas the Wordsworthian watch is a sober attendance upon death, the Shelleyan vigil is a willed wakefulness meant to postpone or transcend it. For Wordsworth, evening looks different because he has had lifealtering experiences and because he has come into new powers of imagination; for Shelley, evening represents an anticipated difference because he has seen it through Wordsworth’s eyes. In this translation, evening takes on a distinctly Shelleyan cast: what Wordsworth describes as an habitual act of perception – the adult apprehension of sadness in the setting of the sun – becomes in the Hymn a mythical time. If dawn is an emblem of the soul’s origin in the Immortality Ode, evening is a symbolic projection of the soul’s destiny in the Hymn. By ‘‘immortality,’’ Wordsworth implies the Platonic mythology of the preexisting soul, but offers no corresponding mythology of the afterlife. Shelley, on the other hand, has kept an insomniac watch over graves and indulged in fantasies (albeit skeptical ones) that death is a state of dreaming; and so he forestalls the question of immortality and imaginatively hovers between origin and end. He envisions a perpetual state of becoming without the ironic narrative postscript of ‘‘The Sunset’’ or ‘‘Alastor,’’ a suspended autumnal evening without the faintest hint of a winter night. ‘‘a darker day’’: measuring history on the euganean hills Like the ‘‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’’ ‘‘Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills’’ (1819) ends at evening – an evening that is both symbolic

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and mimetic: it betokens the harmony envisioned in the Hymn and it indicates the duration of Shelley’s utterance. The temporal ﬁction of the poem is that it lasts from dawn to dusk, and this schema gives structure to what amounts to a long discursive counterpart to ‘‘Ozymandias.’’ Both are ruins-poems: one about a decaying Venice as viewed across the Lombard plain, the other about a crumbled desert monument as described by an anonymous traveler from an antique land. ‘‘Euganean Hills’’ will never be as widely taught or admired as Shelley’s memorable sonnet: it does not achieve the imagistic compression of the two vast and trunkless legs of Ozymandias’ statue, the incantatory power of the king’s conﬁdent inscription, the silent rebuke of those lone and level wastes. In other words, the poem seems too long, but its length is fundamentally related to its theme: Shelley not only meditates on Time but also registers the temporal shape of his thoughts. The scrupulously observed phases of a single day intersect with longer historical periods: the poet’s own life, the turbulent past and present of Venice and Padua, and the slow processes of geologic change. Two imaginative inventions structure ‘‘Euganean Hills’’: the allegorical narrative of a mariner’s doomed voyage and the lyric ﬁction of a passing day. The voyage described in the ﬁrst two verse-paragraphs has been interpreted as Shelley’s virtual exile from England, and the mariner’s death as the end of a life left behind.14 This narrative intersects with the poet’s lyric situation in a conceit informed by geological history: on the premise that some mountains were once submerged in the primordial sea, Shelley imagines his hill as an island-refuge on the ‘‘waveless plain of Lombardy’’ (91); and the day of his visit is itself an oasis in time as well as space, a momentary pause. The temporal scheme of the poem accentuates this sense of ephemeral pleasure, the awareness that one cannot stay on the hilltop indeﬁnitely. In the last verse-paragraph, Shelley imagines that this spot is a moveable feast, that another refuge waits for him on ‘‘the sea of Life and Agony’’ (336); and the brief tranquility of his evening on the hill is thus translated into a permanent Hesperian idyll. The meta-narrative of the mariner’s journey, then, is not merely an extraneous frame; it is linked, at both ends of the poem, with the diurnal movement of Shelley’s lyric utterance. The dual topoi of the poem – island and hilltop – have important eighteenth-century precursors. As an allegory of survival after shipwreck, ‘‘Euganean Hills’’ recalls Robinson Crusoe, in which island solitude enables spiritual reﬂection; and as a work of topographical description, it emulates the neoclassical form of the hilltop poem, in which an aerial vantage-point enables a literally and ﬁguratively lofty perspective. In

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effect, Shelley’s poem inverts the pattern of Defoe’s narrative: while Crusoe comes to read his experience metaphorically, Shelley begins with an island-metaphor and then applies it to his experience. Crusoe mournfully names his new home the ‘‘Island of Despair’’ and sees it as a ‘‘prison,’’ but after reading Scripture, he learns to understand captivity in a Christian sense, and makes a virtue of his isolation – reads it, in a Puritan vein, as part of a providential design.15 As Michel de Certeau has remarked, Crusoe’s transformation of nature into a place of his own is begun by the act of keeping a diary ‘‘in which he can master time and things, and thus to constitute for himself, along with the blank page, an initial island in which he can produce what he wants.’’16 Like Crusoe’s calendrical notches in a tree, these prose entries spatialize time into traveled ground. Shelley’s poem frames the natural world in a similar way: like a journal entry, it records the passage of an ordinary day, and its notations of the sun’s progress give structure to a long and loosely associative meditation. The important generic difference is that it does so in the present tense of lyric utterance rather than in the retrospective summation of narrative. If, as Leopold Damrosch has suggested, Crusoe’s journal-keeping is a novelistic approximation of lyric inwardness, then Shelley’s lyric utterance conversely ﬁnds a narrative context in its allegorical frame.17 In other words, an atemporal, generalized myth of a doomed mariner encloses a temporal, particularized lyric uttered by a poet. As a hilltop poem in octosyllabics, Shelley’s poem bears a distinct resemblance to another eighteenth-century literary monument, John Dyer’s ‘‘Grongar Hill’’ (1726). The two poems share more than metrical form: both are meditations on ruins (a Welsh castle and the city of Venice, respectively), and both are temporally bounded by what Dyer calls ‘‘purple ev’ning’’ (2). Like the statue of Ozymandias or the slowly sinking towers of Venice, the castle in Dyer’s poem occasions a moralization on the fall of the mighty: Yet time has seen, that lifts the low, And level lays the lofty brow, Has seen this broken pile complete, Big with the vanity of state; But transient is the smile of fate! A little rule, a little sway, A sunbeam in a winter’s day, Is all the proud and mighty have Between the cradle and the grave. (84–92)

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In the impersonal construction, ‘‘time has seen,’’ Dyer grammatically renders the cyclical vision of Time itself in a way that anticipates Shelley’s conception: the alliterative actions of lifting the low and leveling the lofty are framed by the repeated predicate, ‘‘has seen’’; and the adjectival balance of the phrase ‘‘broken pile complete’’ reﬂects both present decay and past perfection. The repetition of the word ‘‘level’’ as a verb of mutability reminds us of the subtle valence of the word in ‘‘Ozymandias’’: the sands are both topographically level and destructively leveling. (In fact, a phrase of Dyer’s description echoes in ‘‘Ozymandias.’’ The last line of Shelley’s sonnet – ‘‘The lone and level sands stretch far away’’ – recalls Dyer’s description of the setting of the moldering towers: ‘‘Gaudy as the op’ning dawn, / Lies a long and level lawn’’ [65–6].) ‘‘Grongar Hill,’’ like ‘‘Euganean Hills’’ after it, is a hymn to the sun, a poem about the pleasures and moral implications of vision. For Dyer, a painter himself, the sun is an artist who gilds and paints in ‘‘all the hues of heaven’s bow’’ (46), in aesthetic work completed by the perceiver, the ‘‘Silent Nymph, with curious eye’’(1). Its position in the sky indicates the progress of the poem, from the moment of the opening invocation (‘‘Now, while Phoebus riding high / Gives lustre to the land and sky’’ [11–12]) until the valedictory end, when the poet regards the fading twilight prospect while it lasts: ‘‘See on the mountain’s southern side, / Where the prospect opens wide, / Where the evening gilds the tide; / How close and small the hedges lie!’’ (114–17). The ghost of a pun intimates this time of day, when the speaker exults, twice, ‘‘Now, ev’n now, my joys run high’’ (137, 145, emphasis supplied): the poet remains cheerful even when he must leave the summit in the day’s last light, and even after he has been brooding over the mutability of all things. As pensive evening reﬂections become part of a conventional eighteenth-century literary sensibility, the contrastive tenor of that ‘‘even’’ comes to seem disingenuous: we might suspect that Dyer’s joys run ‘‘high’’ especially when he is engaged in his saddest twilight thoughts, especially at the pivotal moment when he must trade the heights for the level plainness of terrestrial things. There is an implicit connection in ‘‘Grongar Hill’’ between the ﬂeetingness of the poet’s stay on the hill and the ephemeral nature of all human creations, between the dailiness of observation and the longer temporal calibrations of history – a connection manifested in Dyer’s sermonic ﬁgure for the reign of the mighty as ‘‘a sunbeam in a winter’s day.’’ The sunbeam, then, functions as both a cautionary emblem and the energy that drives this intensely visual poem. Against the hubristic gesture of building castles, Dyer posits the creative but ephemeral act of looking

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at a world that is ‘‘[e]ver charming, ever new’’(103). What separates the mighty from the poet is a matter of moral perspective, the practice of a wise passiveness: ‘‘O may I with myself agree, / And never covet what I see’’ (129–30). In ‘‘Euganean Hills,’’ the temporal markers in ‘‘Grongar Hill’’ are elaborated into a structure of consciousness – the diurnal progress of Shelley’s meditation. Shelley has learned the lyrical uses of this timescheme from Coleridge’s conversation-poems, especially ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower,’’ in which the setting of a passing day delineates a mental process in time and naturalizes its conclusion. While Coleridge explains the circumstances of his conﬁnement in the bower in a prefatory note, Shelley alludes to his troubles in the allegorical frame-narrative in the ﬁrst two verse-paragraphs. In both poems, these narrative situations are born into lyric utterance with a monosyllabic interjection. Just as Coleridge’s emphatic ‘‘Well!’’ reﬂects exasperation at the predicament already described in the prose preface, Shelley’s ‘‘Aye’’ at the beginning of the third verse-paragraph refers to the preceding narrative: Aye, many ﬂowering islands lie In the waters of wide Agony. To such a one this morning was led My bark by soft winds piloted – ’Mid the mountains Euganean I stood listening to the paean With which the legioned rooks did hail The sun’s uprise majestical; Gathering round with wings all hoar, Through the dewy mist they soar Like grey shades, till th’eastern heaven Bursts, and then, as clouds of even Flecked with ﬁre and azure lie In the unfathomable sky. (66–79)

An homage to ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’ is encoded in this sunlit ﬂock of rooks, freshly migrated from Coleridge’s poem. Indeed, Shelley’s dawn resembles Coleridge’s dusk, in that the birds dapple the sky like ‘‘clouds of even.’’ In Shelley’s beginning is his end – the evening in which he will conclude his meditation. In a poem of seemingly spontaneous observations of natural phenomena, it is curious that Shelley begins the day of his utterance with retrospective narration. That is, he describes his ﬁrst moment of attention in the past tense – ‘‘I stood listening’’ – and does not station himself in the present until the fourth verse-paragraph, when

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the sun has climbed higher in the sky, and Poseidon ‘‘now paves’’ Venice ‘‘[w]ith his blue and beaming waves’’ (98–9). Why this ellipsis between dawn’s twilight and morning’s brightness? Like Coleridge before him, Shelley here registers the duration of lyric utterance: the act of thinking about the voyage of his alter ego, represented in the ﬁrst two verseparagraphs, takes time; it occurs as the rooks are ascending, and when Shelley turns from allegorical narrative to the naturalistic observations, the birds have already passed overhead. The lapse between the time represented by the synoptic ‘‘I stood listening’’(100) and the exclamatory moment of ‘‘Lo! The sun upsprings behind’’ corresponds to a similar moment in ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower.’’ After hailing the sunset in the suspended present of the imperative (‘‘richlier burn, ye clouds!’’), Coleridge, addressing Charles Lamb in the past tense, imagines that the last of a ﬂock of rooks crossed the sun ‘‘while thou stood’st gazing’’ (73). Coleridge’s change of tenses grammatically reﬂects the mind’s retrospective ordering of a day after it has passed, in a fantasy of simultaneous perception within a single privileged moment. These two moments can be distilled into the statement, ‘‘Now I behold the sinking sun, even as you were watching it from another perspective.’’ Similarly, Shelley says, in effect, ‘‘Then I was lost in dark thoughts, but at the same time I was also aware of the rising sun.’’ This is one of several forms of simultaneity that ‘‘Euganean Hills’’ registers. Just as Shelley imagines parallel possibilities for his own fate – disastrous shipwreck vs. serendipitous salvation – he regards the scene before him with a bifocal vision. When he looks at Venice, he sees a city that is both outwardly beautiful in the morning sun and inwardly decaying under the depredations of Napoleonic rule. It is both a shimmering palace and a future necropolis: ‘‘Sun-girt City, thou hast been / Ocean’s child, and then his queen, / Now is come a darker day, / And thou soon must be his prey’’ (115–18). The lyric ‘‘now’’ that earlier marked the rising of the sun over Venice becomes an historical ‘‘now’’ of epochal change, as it does later when Shelley addresses the university town of Padua as a city similarly ruined by empire: ‘‘In thine halls the lamp of learning, / Padua, now no more is burning, / Like a meteor, whose wild way / Is lost over the grave of day’’ (256–9). There are thus two forms of the lyric present tense in the poem – that of the world of passing phenomena and that of the world of historical upheaval. The bright day of Shelley’s topographical observations intersects with the ‘‘darker day’’ of the poet’s prophetic vision.

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While Shelley ends his own utterance on a tranquil evening, he imagines a future evening when Venice is submerged beneath the waves, and turns the moment of pastoral closure into a gothic phantasm: The ﬁsher on his watery way, Wandering at the close of day, Will spread his sail and seize his oar Till he pass the gloomy shore, Lest thy dead should, from their sleep Bursting o’er the starlight deep, Lead a rapid masque of death O’er the waters of his path. (134–41)

In a grimly witty variation on the setting of Gray’s Elegy, the plowman’s ‘‘weary way’’ becomes the ﬁsherman’s ‘‘watery way’’; and the dead, far from mute and uncomplaining, rise up to haunt the home-bound laborer. We have seen in ‘‘Alastor’’ how Shelley pointedly transplants an epithalamic evening set-piece from Paradise Lost into the narrative of a desperate, solitary quest; and the evening scene here functions as a similarly ironic counterpoint. Like the poem itself – an expatriate’s rendering of an English hilltop-poem – Shelley’s quotation of Gray functions as a sophisticated form of translation: from pasture to ocean; from English village to European city; from the silent, anonymous dead to unquiet gothic revenants; from the private memorialization of elegy to the larger-scale haunting of history. In his preoccupation with simultaneity, Shelley acknowledges that his vision of the Venetian lagoon as graveyard is not necessarily shared by others: Those who alone thy towers behold Quivering through aerial gold, As I now behold them here, Would imagine not they were Sepulchres, where human forms, Like pollution-nourished worms, To the corpse of greatness cling, Murdered, and now mouldering. (142–9)

The ‘‘now’’ of scenic observation (‘‘As I now behold them’’) overlaps with the ‘‘now’’ of prophecy (‘‘Murdered, and now mouldering’’), but not necessarily with the ‘‘now’’ of other people’s consciousness.

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The lyric defense against solitude and solipsism is apostrophe, and it is in the ‘‘now’’ of his address to Tyranny that Shelley most strenuously asserts his prophetic vision.18 Lamenting that the lamp of learning has been extinguished in Padua, Shelley nevertheless declares that sparks from the ‘‘antique light’’ kindle intellectual brushﬁres elsewhere in the world: ‘‘O tyranny, beholdest now / Light around thee, and thou hearest / The loud ﬂames ascend, and fearest: / Grovel on the earth; aye, hide / In the dust thy purple pride!’’ (280–4). Like the implied reader in ‘‘Grongar Hill’’ who is invited to observe ‘‘how close and small the hedges lie,’’ Tyranny is a purely notional viewer; the apocalyptic conﬂagration, like the vision of a ruined and submerged Venice or the sound of the skylark, is witnessed by the poet alone. On the diurnal time-line of the poem, this rhetorical climax appropriately occurs in the middle of the day: ‘‘Noon descends around me now: / ’Tis the noon of autumn’s glow, / When a soft and purple mist / Like a vaporous amethyst . . . / Fills the overﬂowing sky’’ (285–8, 293). Earl Wasserman has described this crux as a ‘‘timeless transﬁguration,’’ a moment of transcendent perfection, but I would suggest the opposite.19 Noon is not so much an abstract symbol here as the temporal marker of thought, and an allusion to the Virgilian time of pastoral repose: by alluding to the passing hour, Shelley gives himself an excuse to rest from his exertions. If he undergoes a transﬁguration, it is only the fever-pitch of his prophetic rage – not a timeless moment but rather a function of time, a passing mood of the mind. It both signiﬁes the highest pitch of the poet’s fury and signals the falling away from it: noon descends, swiftly, into the calm of evening. Through the vehicle of external observation and internal association, the ‘‘purple pride’’ of tyrants (284) dissolves into the ‘‘purple mist’’ of the overﬂowing sky (287), as if Shelley’s rage had been stilled into a hazy sun-blindness, as if the jeremiad against tyranny had been a dream both sparked and quenched by outside stimuli – the heat of noon, the cooling shadows of afternoon. Like the ‘‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’’ ‘‘Euganean Hills’’ ends in an autumnal evening, which is both a phase of the passing day and part of Shelley’s symbolic imagination – an ordinary evening in Lombardy and a charmed twilight in some Hesperian refuge. If the rook-haunted dawn gave Shelley thoughts of evening, then the advent of evening turns his thoughts back to the dawn in which he began, and the frame-narrative that preceded it. The diurnal progress of the poem not only represents the waxing and waning of the poet’s thoughts, it registers the passing of experience into memory. As if the whole poem had lasted a day, Shelley

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looks back at the beginning of his lyric utterance as a moment in the past, already a part of his personal history: Noon descends, and after noon Autumn’s evening meets me soon, Leading the infantine moon, And that one star, which to her Almost seems to minister Half the crimson light she brings From sunset’s radiant springs: And the soft dreams of the morn (Which like winged winds had borne To that silent isle, which lies ’Mid remembered agonies, The frail bark of this lone being) Pass, to other sufferers ﬂeeing, And its antient pilot, Pain, Sits beside the helm again. (320–34)

In the beginning of the poem, Shelley suggests that ‘‘soft winds’’ (69) – as opposed to the ‘‘tempest ﬂeet’’ (11) that dooms the mariner – have guided him to this hilltop spot. But at the end, he allegorically construes these winds as ‘‘the soft dreams of the morn,’’ then compares this mental impulse of dreaming to the physical force of ‘‘winged winds.’’ It is the prevailing breeze of an idea – part of a larger weather-system of what Shelley elsewhere calls Power – that has swept him onto his island, not the God or Providence of Crusoe’s theology. The anticipatory dream of watching the sunrise from the hill brought the poet here; and in retrospect, the experience now seems like a dream, just as the poet’s earlier troubles are now ‘‘remembered agonies.’’ The dreams of morning, however, are always shadowed by their alternative, the nightmare that Shelley describes in the frame-narrative: ‘‘that sleep / When the dreamer seems to be / Weltering through eternity’’ (16–18). It is not thought alone, of course, that ensures the poet’s safe arrival at this island or any other future refuge; but Shelley is not willing to attribute his survival to divine intervention. Nevertheless, a quasiprovidential faith resides in the imperative refrain that symmetrically frames the poem: Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of Misery. (1–2)

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Other ﬂowering isles must be In the sea of Life and Agony. (335–6)

Or else what? The alternative possibility is almost tautological: ‘‘Or the mariner, worn and wan, / Never thus could voyage on’’ (3–4). True enough: if we have no places of refuge, we are doomed. In the poem’s contrapuntal interplay of utopian hope and apocalyptic fear, these statements of volition grammatically echo darker statements of destruction and decay. Venice ‘‘must’’ one day be the Ocean’s ‘‘prey’’ (117–18), and ‘‘Men must reap the things they sow, / Force from force must ever ﬂow, / Or worse’’ (231–3). This, then, is the impasse syntactically registered by the poem: the tension between the fateful ‘‘must’’ of inexorable change and the volitional ‘‘must’’ of the poet’s desire. If the allegory of the doomed mariner is an expression of dread, Shelley’s revision of it at the end is animated by precisely this sort of desire. Like Coleridge’s solitary respite in ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’ and ‘‘Fears in Solitude,’’ Shelley’s isolation on the hilltop has afforded both a comforting escape from the world and an anxiety over one’s ultimate separation from it. In ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower,’’ Coleridge had contemplated the momentary departure of his friends – ‘‘[f]riends whom I never more may meet again’’ (6), as he puts it in playfully dire terms – as a token of death. Similarly, Shelley’s narrative of the mariner’s voyage, which terminates in ‘‘the haven of the grave’’ (26), leads to a question about the reunion with loved ones after death: ‘‘What, if there no friends will greet; / What, if there no heart will meet / His with love’s impatient beat . . . ?’’ (27–9). In the end, Shelley revises the symbolic terms of the allegory, as the question of the next world is modulated into a question about the continuing life in this one: if he cannot afﬁrm the existence of an afterlife, he can at least imagine that fellow ‘‘sufferers’’ or ‘‘spirits’’ wait for him in an earthly utopia, another ﬂowering isle in the ‘‘sea of Life and Agony’’(336) Finally, the diurnal structure of the poet’s ﬂeeting observations becomes simultaneous with the atemporal realm of myth. Throughout the poem, the adverb ‘‘now’’ has punctuated moments of attention and mediated between Shelley’s perception and that of other people, and at the end, it links the immediate sensory world with the dream-world of attendant spirits: ‘‘even now, perhaps, / On some rock the wild wave wraps, / With folded wings they waiting sit / For my bark, to pilot it / To some calm and blooming cove’’ (338–42). Meanwhile, the narrow question of the poet’s own survival expands into a vision of the survival of

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human civilization, as Shelley imagines that a bower of pastoral retirement for him and his circle becomes a ‘‘healing Paradise’’ for everyone: ‘‘and soon / Every sprite beneath the moon / Would repent its envy vain, / And the earth grow young again’’ (370–3). It is easy to hear the phrase ‘‘beneath the moon’’ as a formulaic rhyme with ‘‘soon,’’ but in the temporal scheme of the poem, it also brings a symbolic signal of closure. The poet has stayed on his summit into the evening hour, and now the moon rising over the hills glimmers through his prophetic scene like light through a scrim. Rather than repeat the poem’s syntax of immediate observation and say, ‘‘Lo! the moon upsprings behind,’’ Shelley allows the lunar light to insinuate itself more subtly into his concluding vision. It is not the fatal moon that coincides with the death of the Poet’s perception in ‘‘Alastor’’ but a prospective light, something evermore about to be. a double-evening elegy: mourning in ‘‘adonais’’ In accordance with Shelley’s famous description of ‘‘Adonais’’ as ‘‘a highly wrought piece of art,’’ many readers of the poem have attended to its features of pastoral elegy.20 What they usually overlook, however, is the poem’s highly wrought manipulation of time: whereas the duration of ‘‘Lycidas’’ is represented as a single day, ‘‘Adonais’’ spans the course of two, and each of its successive evenings echoes the Virgilian closure invoked by Milton. The poem begins in the immediate aftermath of Keats’s death, with the elegist’s noontime invocation to Urania and her train to weep the latest loss of a poet; but the day passes without her arrival, and it is not until the second day that the deity, followed by mortals including Byron and Shelley himself, arrive in Rome to pay their respects. In an elegy that focuses as much on the world of living poets as much as on a single dead one, this binary structure is apt: if the ﬁrst evening concerns the death of Keats, the second one preﬁgures Shelley’s own death. ‘‘Adonais’’ might thus be called a double-evening poem; and this temporal wrinkle is signiﬁcant both in the context of Shelley’s poetry and within the genre of elegy. In the history of this genre, we might trace a poetic dialogue on temporal form: Milton’s pastoral day, Gray’s evening walk, Shelley’s two-day ceremony of mourning, Tennyson’s seventeenyear record of meditations. Within this dialogue, ‘‘Adonais’’ looks back to the compact rondure of ‘‘Lycidas’’ and anticipates the dilatory progress of In Memoriam. While Milton self-consciously borrows the temporal shape of Virgil’s Eclogues, Shelley quotes and modiﬁes Milton’s interpretation, writing a commentary on a commentary.

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If, in Peter Sacks’s formulation, elegy performs what Freud called the work of mourning, then that work can often be measured in time. Elegy represents this invisible mental labor not only in the tropes of strewing ﬂowers and weaving garments but also in temporal markers.21 Ellen Lambert has suggested in Placing Sorrow that the mimetic space of pastoral elegy is indispensable to the work of mourning – a site in which an individual loss can be contemplated amid the continuity of earthly life.22 As Lambert’s attention to the representation of natural rhythms implies, time is a signiﬁcant coordinate to be plotted along the curve of mourning: the duration of utterance, the length of grief, the memory of the dead person, and the place of the poem within a larger historical tradition of elegies stretching back to Bion’s ‘‘Lament for Adonis’’ and Moschus’ ‘‘Lament for Bion.’’ We can invoke the idea of ‘‘placing,’’ in other words, in both its spatial and temporal senses. The brief textual space of an elegy enacts the longer temporal span during which grief begins to wane and the loss itself can be situated in the past: by the end of an elegy, the mourner typically reaches a new state of mind, a different emotional state from that of the beginning (if not an outright catharsis or consolation). In elegiac tradition, ‘‘Lycidas,’’ with its compact one-day scheme, epitomizes this temporal plot; and Donne’s ‘‘Nocturnall upon St. Lucies Day,’’ with its stubborn gesture of stopping time altogether, represents its antitype. In the latter, the disconsolate speaker imagines the hour of his grief ﬁxed permanently at midnight, on the darkest day of the year. Resisting the typological connection between sun and Son, the calendrical proximity to the date of the Nativity, and the solstitial anticipation of longer and warmer days, the speaker stays ﬁxed in a single moment of despair. Milton, on the other hand, deﬁnes a period of mourning through two temporal archetypes: the pastoral model of a day of labor, from dawn to dusk, and the Christian typology of the diurnal cycle as token of resurrection. Two points on the pastoral clock take on new meaning in this context of loss: the noon hour of drowsy repose becomes the occasion for loud lament, and the Hesperian signal to fold sheep serves as a pretext to cease mourning. In turn, this closure at sunset is reinterpreted as the sermonic emblem for the death and apotheosis of Lycidas, ‘‘sunk low, but mounted high’’ (172). Milton’s ending, ﬁnally, magniﬁes two ideas implicit in Virgil’s evenings: ﬁrst, that if sorrow has no modus, or natural boundary, an external limit can be arbitrarily imposed by the division of day and night; and second, that the end of the day, as in the tenth Eclogue, signiﬁes the end of a poetic apprenticeship in the pastoral. In its

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symbolic dusk, ‘‘Lycidas’’ thus makes an end of several different things – a day, an utterance, a period of grief, a phase in a career. ‘‘Adonais,’’ however, borrows pastoral tropes but does not purport to be a pastoral utterance. Writing in the putative middle of his career, Shelley does not imitate Milton’s veiled vocational announcement; and yet he does accomplish a Miltonic disappearing-act of sorts. Throughout much of the poem, he remains nearly invisible – like the skylark, a voice more than a body. It is only toward the end, in his description of the Protestant cemetery in Rome, that Shelley gives the poem a naturalistic setting; but it is at this moment that he expresses the desire to transcend this experiential horizon. While Milton invokes Virgilian closure to take his leave of the poem, Shelley does so to take his leave of the sublunary world. This desire for departure has sometimes been construed as a suicidal impulse, but I would describe it rather as an intense and insatiable curiosity about the limits of human consciousness, about the ‘‘outside’’ of ordinary perception of time and space. ‘‘But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart,’’ Urania laments, speaking for both gods and the mortals who invent them. Urania’s trope aptly suggests a Shelleyan frustration with limitations, but it is an inadequate metaphor, since time is not an external entity to which one can be bound. Shelley’s elegy, building upon the temporal structure of ‘‘Lycidas,’’ can be read as an extended meditation on how to conceive of time. If Milton adapts pastoral convention to Christian theological assurance and vocational ambition, Shelley adapts it to metaphysical speculation. In mimetic terms, the two-day span of ‘‘Adonais’’ suggests a condensed narrative of Keats’s demise: a virtually solitary death followed by gradually spreading news of it. In psychological terms, these two days also represent stages of denial and acceptance: on the ﬁrst day, the Shelleyan fantasy of reanimation is still possible – the idea that Keats, like the enchanted sleepers in Endymion, might be awakened from a long dream; but on the second day, the poet belatedly visits the grave. In a poem concerned not only with the mortality of the body but also with the longevity of poetry, this duration encompasses a period of uncertainty over Keats’s – and by implication, Shelley’s – legacy. In the ﬁrst stanza, Shelley conﬁdently predicts that Keats’s ‘‘fate and fame shall be / An echo and a light unto eternity’’ (8–9); but on the dawn of the second day, Echo herself has fallen silent with grief, and it is not until the very end that the poet is elevated to the celestial sphere of the evening star, Vesper among a throng of stelliﬁed bards. It takes time, both diegetic and experiential, to reach an afﬁrmation of Shelley’s opening claim of immortality. The mode

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of ‘‘Adonais,’’ then, is that of uncertainty and temporization, ﬁrst in the nocturnal vigil over Keats’s body, and then in the long wait for Urania’s arrival at the gravesite. Shelley might have begun with a walk through the cemetery, in the vein of Gray’s Elegy, and proceeded with a mental departure from and return to this spot, in the manner of the greater Romantic lyric. Instead, the poet’s self-stationing is delayed and then allegorically masked: Shelley ﬁrst appears as an anonymous mourner whom his own poetic mother, Urania, fails to recognize; and it is only at the very end of the poem that he is constituted as a stationed lyric ‘‘I,’’ and then only in the expressed desire to leave the scene entirely. These, then, are a few of the ways in which the two-day form of ‘‘Adonais’’ can be interpreted: as a binary representation of the poet’s death and the elegist’s own intimations of mortality; as a narrative of Keats’s death and funeral; as an uncertain lacuna in the process of poetic immortalization; as a delayed acknowledgment of death; as a pointed revision of the cathartic diurnal cycle of ‘‘Lycidas’’; and as a modest deferral of the poet’s appearance on the scene. Within these various forms of succession, each day constitutes a distinct phase. In both, Shelley describes a swift passage into twilight and then lingers there. The strange accelerations of perceived time reﬂect the shocking prematureness of the young poet’s death, which Shelley emphasizes in the prose preface to the poem, in enshrining the myth of Keats as mortal victim of predatory critics: The savage criticism on his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel of the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgements from more candid critics, of the true greatness of his powers were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inﬂicted.

The grammatical collision of the verbs ‘‘originated’’ and ‘‘ended’’ aptly compresses the narrative of Keats’s illness into simple cause and effect, and the phrase ‘‘ended in’’ connotes the dual sense of literal sequence (agitation, then rupture) and teleology (critical barbs meant to draw blood). In this brief chronology, the ensuing consumption cannot be amended by the succeeding praise; time’s arrow cannot be reversed, the predatory critics’ attacks cannot be retracted. The ﬁrst day of ‘‘Adonais’’ accentuates this irreversibility. Shelley begins by calling mourners to lament the loss of Adonais, while ‘‘the vault of blue Italian day / Is yet his ﬁtting charnel-roof ’’ (59–60), but he acknowledges the ﬁctiveness of this urgency in the swift lapse of day into evening. The noonday sky is a ‘‘ﬁtting’’ charnel-roof in the related senses

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of being both thematically appropriate and spatially suited: it is apt that the sky forms a sepulchral dome over one whose thoughts ranged so widely, especially when it appears that the dead person might wake at any moment to resume his movements beneath it. In the spatialized timelapse of Shelley’s architectural conceit, however, the limitless blue vault quickly turns into a ‘‘twilight chamber’’ – the house, in the riddle of Shakespeare’s gravedigger, that lasts till doomsday. And yet the poet’s death does not seem real to the ‘‘passion-winged Ministers’’ (74) who attend the body; and the twilight of their vigil reﬂects this ambiguity. These apparitions have sometimes been construed to represent Keats’s poems, but to do so is to miss the subtlety of Shelley’s invention.23 The wraith-like vestiges of the poet’s working brain reﬂect Shelley’s preoccupation with the question of whether any spark of the mind survives the body: ‘‘Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone which knows / Be as a sword consumed before the sheath / By sightless lightning?’’ (177–9). In the repetition of the verb ‘‘to know,’’ Shelley articulates the crux of his dilemma: if everything that we know can strictly be said to change rather than die, then what of mind that knows these things? Is human consciousness (or soul) an immaterial, incorruptible entity, or is it, like evenings and ﬂowers, a temporary arrangement of matter? Shelley associates the lingering of these vestiges of Keats’s mind with the threshold of evening, in a pastoral conceit borrowed from the closure of both Virgil’s Eclogues and ‘‘Lycidas.’’ Whereas the end of the day in the latter poem coincides with the end of the elegist’s dirge, in ‘‘Adonais’’ it signiﬁes the cessation of Keats’s poetic creation. Instead of assuming the persona of a shepherd, Shelley indirectly refers to Keats as one, in a metaphor for the poet’s thoughts and dreams as ﬂocks that have lost their home and guardian: O, weep for Adonais! – the quick Dreams, The passion-winged Ministers of thought, Who were his ﬂocks, whom near the living streams Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught The love which was its music, wander not, – Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain, But droop there, whence they sprung; and mourn their lot Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain, They ne’er will gather strength, or ﬁnd a home again. (73–81)

At the close of Virgil’s tenth Eclogue, Gallus concludes his song with the call to his ‘‘well fed’’ goats to return to their fold; but in ‘‘Adonais,’’ the dead poet’s thoughts have no place to return, and no source of

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sustenance. The memory of Keats’s published poems will be invoked on the following morning, when lost Echo ‘‘feeds her grief with his remembered lay’’ (128), but a different sort of hunger is represented in the desertion of the poet’s mental ﬂocks. In the intimacy of the twilight chamber, before he celebrates the public poet, Shelley pays tribute to the living man – that part of Keats that is irrevocably lost, the unknowable mental source of the poems that Shelley has read. Keats himself had represented the material production of poetry as the harvesting of his teeming brain in his sonnet ‘‘When I Have Fears,’’ and as horticultural work in the ‘‘Ode to Psyche.’’ Like Keats’s georgic conceit, Shelley’s version of pastoral is purely cognitive: though the word ‘‘ﬂocks’’ and the idea of their feeding at streams invokes the conventions of pastoral elegy, the metaphor characteristically deﬁes visualization. Shelley’s description of the ﬂocks as ‘‘passion-winged’’ and ‘‘kindling’’ renders them as cherubs or incendiary sparks rather than as sheep: Keats’s thoughts either feed at the stream of his spirit or kindle from brain to brain, their element either water or ﬁre. This inconsistency aptly suggests the ambiguous nature of the soul that preoccupies Shelley in this poem. In the ‘‘Ode to the West Wind,’’ the ‘‘winged seeds’’ that lie like corpses in their wintry bed will rise as the sweet buds of spring to be driven, ‘‘like ﬂocks to feed in air,’’ into the azure of a pastoralized sky, as if they were the visible hues envisioned by the ‘‘dreaming earth’’ (7–11). But in Shelley’s conceit in ‘‘Adonais,’’ thoughts are not like seeds, and do not take part in an endless material cycle of renewal; the once-dreaming poet is not like the ever-dreaming earth. By lamenting the loss of the poet’s thoughts and dreams rather than taking comfort in the books that survive, Shelley recalls the poet manque´ of ‘‘Alastor,’’ who dies without having translated his poetry of the mind onto the page. There is a ﬁgurative, if not literal, truth to this, in that Keats never fully realized his most ambitious plans for ‘‘The Fall of Hyperion,’’ a poem that Shelley praises in his preface to ‘‘Adonais.’’ But Shelley also intimates a deeper truth about the composition of all poetry. In the Defence of Poetry, his metaphor of the mind in creation as a fading ember suggests that the writing of any poem is a kind of controlled entropy, the approximation of a Platonic ideal. The description of the poet’s ‘‘Ministers of thought’’ as dying ﬂocks thus renders the metaphor in the Defence into the idiom of pastoral elegy; Keats’s actual death, in other words, represents the end of the fading ember’s deathward movement, and an historical instance of the ever-frustrated poetic promise lamented in ‘‘Alastor.’’

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What is still more poignant about Shelley’s metaphor of the poet’s thoughts as ﬂocks is that before they disappear entirely, they momentarily become shepherds themselves, custodians of the body that once nourished them: for a time, they keep nocturnal watch over the poet. A procession of these spirits visits the poet’s body, and the phenomena of nightfall are reﬂected in their ministrations: the rising of the moon in the ‘‘moonlight wings’’ that fan the poet’s body, the dews of nightfall in the tears they shed, and the Evening Star in the ‘‘lucid urn of starry dew’’ they use in the lustral preparation of the body. The last minister washes the poet’s limbs ‘‘as if embalming them’’ – in the dual sense of that participle: readying for burial or applying a restorative salve (91–2). It is an apt pun, for in this dimly lit chamber, the illusion that the poet yet lives is still possible. The waning light of evening thus represents both the death of the body and the growing consciousness of that death. There is a twilight of both body and mind, a threshold between two states, and the visitation of the last ‘‘Splendour’’ coincides with an utter darkness: ‘‘And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath/ Of moonlight vapour, which the cold night clips, / It ﬂushed through his pale limbs, and past to its eclipse’’ (106–8). Traditionally, elegists acknowledge the belatedness, even futility, of their utterance, and Shelley does so in the grammar of his description of these ministrations. Under the ﬁction of lyric immediacy, he begins by describing the evening vigil in the present tense, but after the ﬁrst Splendour’s attempt to revive the poet, he intervenes, in ironic past-tense, to note the futility of the effort: And one with trembling hands clasps his cold head, And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries; ‘‘Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead; See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, Like dew upon a sleeping ﬂower, there lies A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain.’’ Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise! She knew not ’twas her own; as with no stain She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain. (82–90)

As in the quotational ending of ‘‘Lycidas,’’ there is a counterpoint between present utterance and retrospective qualiﬁcation, between naı¨ve mourner and knowing poet. In this way, the ﬁrst day of ‘‘Adonais’’ recapitulates the single day of ‘‘Lycidas,’’ from noon to evening – recapitulates and, in Shelleyan fashion, moves beyond, as the nocturnal mourners disappear and Morning comes to weep tears of dew. Shelley

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echoes the vespertinal conclusion of ‘‘Lycidas’’ only to imply that it marks the end of nothing, and that on the morrow the woods and pastures are not new. There is never a temporal point d’appuie in Shelley’s elegy, as there is in Milton’s elegy; while the ﬁrst day of the private vigil runs into the following morning of public grief, the second day ends in the imperceptible lapse of dawn into a symbolic night of endless centrifugal movement. The swift lapse of time on the ﬁrst day preﬁgures a still more disorienting leap on the second. On this spring morning, Urania rises from her sleep ‘‘like an autumnal Night, that springs / Out of the East, and follows wild and drear / The golden day’’ (199–201). The time is out of joint, and the revolving year seems to have spun out of control, as the grief-stricken Spring begins to impersonate Autumn. But it only seems so: a few stanzas later, the world reappears in its aspect of vernal renewal, as if nothing had happened: Through wood and stream and ﬁeld and hill and Ocean A quickening life from Earth’s heart has burst As it has ever done, with change and motion, From the great morning of the world when ﬁrst God dawned on Chaos. (163–7)

Shelley acknowledges the description of sympathetically mourning Nature as a ﬂeeting elegiac trope, a passing mood of the mind rather than a movement of the world. Time, then, assumes two forms in the poem, the affective and the natural. In the past-tense allegorical narrative of mourning, spring seems like autumn and day like night; but meanwhile, in the habitual present-tense statement of cyclical process, the seasons pass imperturbably, as they always have. In ‘‘Lycidas,’’ diurnal time is subordinate to eternity, the pastoral solar cycle to the Christian narrative of resurrection, the setting sun to the Sol Invictus; but no such redemptive patterns structure the temporal scheme of ‘‘Adonais.’’24 In Shelley’s elegy, night passes into morning without any symbolic demarcation, and the persistence of lachrymal dew reminds us that the last tears have not yet been shed. For Milton, earthly change has an end in apocalyptic transformation; but for Shelley, it is an endless process, without a narrative stopping point. Whereas Milton’s idea of time is informed by the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles, Shelley’s is shaped by Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, a poetic elaboration of Epicurean philosophy in which the poet had a life-long interest.25 For Lucretius, the true name of Time is Change, and all temporal events are ‘‘accidents of

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matter and of the places where they happen’’ (Copley, 11–12). The universe comprises matter and void, rather than matter and spirit; and matter itself is composed of irreducible atoms, which, like the riddling speaker of Shelley’s ‘‘The Cloud,’’ can change conﬁgurations but never die. In this view of nature, the arrival of evening and the event of Keats’s death are temporary states of matter witnessed in their passage to other states.26 The twilight vigil over the poet’s body thus marks the beginnings of such a transformation, at the time of day in which the change of light and atmosphere is traditionally most acutely perceived. In the inﬁnite history of an atom, however, this day – and even the life span of the poet – is an inﬁnitesimal period. Death, like time, is an accident of matter, and is really no ending at all, since there is no deﬁnitive and ﬁnal change in anything. The two-day narrative of ‘‘Adonais’’ thus forms the empirical ground of Shelley’s Lucretian meditations on time; it is a way of placing the inﬁnite and eternal into a human frame of perception. The poet both thinks about change and perceptually registers it in descriptions of the passing day. In the diurnal course of the poem, he witnesses both the cyclical waxing and waning of daylight and the curve of his own thoughts and feelings, the mutability of inner and outer phenomena: Alas! That all we loved of him should be, But for our grief, as if it had not been, And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me! Whence are we, and why are we? Of what scene The actors or spectators? Great and mean Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow. As long as skies are blue, and ﬁelds are green, Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow. (181–9)

Traditionally, the ritual purging of grief is precisely the point of elegy, but in the anti-consolatory vein of ‘‘Adonais,’’ it occasions a new lament on the mutability of sorrow. In Shelley’s conception of time, change is a form of amnesia: in his seasonal conceit in the ‘‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’’ the ‘‘harmony’’ (74) in autumn is invisible in summer, ‘‘as if it had not been’’ (77); and in the same syntax of erasure in ‘‘Adonais,’’ the living presence of Keats disappears ‘‘as if it had not been,’’ as does the sadness over that disappearance. The repetition of the word ‘‘grief ’’ in the stanza above enacts the mutability of human consciousness: grief appears ﬁrst to survive the death of the loved one, but it, too, wanes in due course – or

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rather, disappears in the individual but remains in the aggregate. In the course of the stanza, Shelley asserts, in succession, that grief is what survives the death of the loved one, that it dies with the mourners, and that it is as constant in the world as night and day. Shelley’s analogy for this process – the cycle of evening, night, and dawn – renders in miniature the temporal plot of the poem itself; and it reminds us, once again, that these moments are not symbolic stopping-points or tokens of redemption, that the word ‘‘tomorrow’’ is not the hopeful word that it is in ‘‘Lycidas’’; it is another day of mourning rather than a temporal deixis bright with promise. In both elegies, the mimesis of passing time, like the elegiac tropes of weaving and ﬂower-strewing identiﬁed by Peter Sacks, indicates the work of mourning. The temporal demarcations of evening, noon, and morning correspond to the spatial idea of the funeral procession as Sacks deﬁnes it: a way of putting the survivors into life-afﬁrming motion, of ‘‘ensuring a sense of progress and egress, of traversing some distance’’ (19). And yet in the implicit equation of time and change in ‘‘Adonais,’’ the sense of psychic ‘‘distance’’ in the ﬁgures of passing time is not at all assured: Shelley blurs the boundary between the realms of the living and the dead by witnessing the rule of Mutability in both. In the conventional mode of consolation, we might say that Time heals all wounds; but in the radical Shelleyan mode, we would say that we are time. Shelley’s rhetorical questions – ‘‘Whence are we, and why are we? Of what scene / The actors or spectators?’’ (184–5) – exemplify the conceptual problem of representing time, in their conﬂation of inside and outside, agency and observation. Such questions are given a tentative and not wholly satisfactory answer in the ‘‘Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills,’’ in the allegory of a journey on the Sea of Misery that terminates in an island haven. The literary predecessor of Shelley’s lone mariner, Robinson Crusoe, poses strikingly similar questions to his journal: ‘‘What is this earth and sea, of which I have seen so much? Whence is it produced, and what am I, and all the other creatures, wild and tame, human and brutal, whence are we?’’ After his spiritual conversion, however, he arrives at a providential answer to these questions that Shelley pointedly refuses. The Lucretian answer, as opposed to the providential one, is that we are accidents of matter and place, that all discriminations of beginning and ending are arbitrary and provisional; and in his most agnostic and skeptical mode, Shelley intimates as much. The temporal structure of ‘‘Adonais,’’ then, implies not an integrating myth of origin or end but rather pure repetition: to paraphrase Shelley’s

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echoic formula, day wakes day to sorrow. By this term, I have in mind J. Hillis Miller’s deﬁnition of narrative forms of repetition: the Platonic, in which all things in the world are iterations of original archetypes, and the Nietzschean, in which one thing seems to repeat something else (rather than an ideal form) but slightly differs from it.27 The day that frames ‘‘Lycidas’’ exempliﬁes both forms: it is both the repetition of a pastoral archetype and a day made different by the event of the allegorical shepherd’s death. Meanwhile, the death itself is an iteration of Death, another occasion for mourning (‘‘Yet once more’’ [1]), and yet utterly unique (‘‘For Lycidas is dead . . . and hath not left his peer’’ [8–9]). Each of the two days in ‘‘Adonais’’ repeats Milton’s pastoral day, but with a difference: after the end of the ﬁrst, morning comes without a cathartic change; and at the end of the second, morning does not come at all. Within the poem, the second day repeats the ﬁrst; but the two days can also be seen as different ways of describing the same funeral vigil. On the ﬁrst, Shelley situates the body in a purely notional tomb in ‘‘that high Capital, where kingly Death / Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay’’ (55–6); but in the end he locates it (and himself) in the Protestant cemetery in ‘‘Rome, at once the Paradise, / The grave, the city, and the wilderness’’ (433–4) – not an allegorical palace, but a real place of graves and houses, piazzas and ﬁelds, a site in which life goes on amid ruins. In this progression, Shelley’s focus turns from the body of the dead poet to the world at large, the personiﬁed ‘‘eternal Hunger’’ that waited to devour Keats metamorphoses into what Robert Frost called the slow smokeless burning of decay: ‘‘And grey walls moulder round, on which dull Time / Feeds, like slow ﬁre upon a hoary brand’’ (442–3). These two days constitute different ways of keeping watch over man’s mortality: the ﬁrst is akin to the necromantic vigil that the young Shelley keeps in ‘‘A Summer Evening Churchyard’’ and the ‘‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’’ and the second is more akin to the sober vision of Gray’s Elegy or Wordsworth’s Ode. The two days, then, are temporally successive yet simultaneous within the imagination, superimposed layers of description. This synchronic effect is accentuated by Shelley’s use of the lyric present tense in each case: the urgent imperative to Urania on the ﬁrst day (‘‘Come away! / Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day / Is yet his ﬁtting charnel-roof !’’ [58–60]); and the directions, both to other mourners and to himself, on the second (‘‘go to Rome . . . Go thou to Rome . . . Here pause’’ [424, 433, 451]). As we have seen, the urgency of Shelley’s summons on the ﬁrst day is belied by the change to past-tense narration, which

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registers the ﬁnality of the poet’s death and the futility of the ministering spirits’ attempts to reverse it. But no such grammatical change undermines the immediacy of the ﬁnal stanzas. This is the crepuscular moment in which the poem is uttered – a moment deﬁned not by traditional descriptions of sunset or twilight but rather a series of present-tense statements about an evening of the mind: A light is past from the revolving year. (472) The soft sky smiles, – the low wind whispers near. (475) The Light whose smile kindles the Universe . . . now beams on me, Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality. (478–86) The soul of Adonais, like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the eternal are. (494–5)

In the literal terms of seasonal sequence, the ﬁrst statement would seem to advance the time of the poem from spring to the sympathetic autumn of mourning. In Shelleyan phenomenology, however, it need not be autumn on the calendar; rather, the moment just after the vernal equinox betokens a fading, just as noon marks a descent into evening. The passing of this light from the year is analogous to Wordsworth’s lament in the Immortality Ode over the loss of a visionary gleam; but as in the Ode, this loss is compensated by an imaginative gain, the eternal Light of the universe. This illumination syntactically revises the closure of ‘‘Lycidas’’: while the et iam of Milton’s sunset ends the shepherd’s dirge (‘‘And now the sun had stretch’t out all the hills’’), the ‘‘now’’ of Shelley’s Light is ongoing (it ‘‘now beams on me, / Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality’’ [485–6]). At the end of the ‘‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’’ Shelley borrows the evening hues of Wordsworth’s Ode to represent a state of anticipated maturity; but here he pointedly revises his predecessor’s terms: the Light does not take on a sober coloring in the gathering clouds; rather, it burns them all away. In ‘‘Alastor,’’ Shelley describes the death of the Poet as a corporeal evening; and in ‘‘Adonais,’’ he again imagines the body as a cloud at sunset, but apocalyptically sees through it. Here, the sober coloring of Wordsworth’s evening is akin to the ‘‘dome of manycoloured glass’’ that ‘‘stains the white radiance of Eternity’’ (462–3); twilight is an earthly illusion to be dissolved. The Shelleyan language of evening serenity (the smile of the ‘‘soft sky,’’ the whispers of the ‘‘low wind’’) is modulated into a more urgent language of purgation: the Light that smiles also burns, the winds that whisper also tear asunder.

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The most complex emblem of this symbolic evening is the smile, a lingering afterimage of several facial expressions that appear throughout the poem. It should be understood not as an antitype to Wordsworthian sobriety, but rather as an epitome of the pied beauty of ‘‘Adonais’’ – its mixture of sorrow and serenity, malevolence and benignity. We see it in the countenances of Pleasure and Death, both visitors to the gravesite. So grief-stricken is the ﬁrst ﬁgure that she arrives ‘‘blind with tears, led by the gleam / Of her own dying smile instead of eyes’’ (114–15). In this version of the Keatsian cohabitation of Joy and Melancholy, the smile, like the Shelleyan fading ember, preserves a memory of a former intensity. In turn, the waning of pleasure into grief is reversed when Death arrives to mock Urania’s apostrophe to the dead poet: ‘‘‘Leave me not!’ cried Urania: her distress / Roused Death: Death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress’’ (224–5). Here, distress provokes a smile, and the chiasmus of ‘‘Roused Death: Death rose’’ allegorically suggests that excessive grief can be a killing force. It is not Death alone that smiles at distress, however, but also the mourners who witness Shelley’s extravagant outpouring: ‘‘All stood aloof, and at his partial moan / Smiled through their tears; well knew that gentle band / Who in another’s fate now wept his own’’ (298–300). On Death, the smile might seem menacing, but here it becomes a gently selfironizing gesture, a way of mocking the self-pity at the root of Shelley’s sympathy for a fellow misunderstood poet. The ambiguity of the smile in the poem is crystallized in Shelley’s aphorism, ‘‘On the withering ﬂower / The killing sun smiles brightly’’ (286–7). Here, a verbal echo once again accentuates Shelley’s dual conception of mutability: the seemingly redundant doubling of participial action – withering and killing – phrases the death in both intransitive and transitive terms, as both natural process and active villainy. At the end of ‘‘Lycidas,’’ the heavenly saints wipe the tears forever from the newly risen shepherd’s eyes; but the analogous affective gesture that lingers at the end of ‘‘Adonais’’ is more elusive. In describing the cemetery where Keats is buried, Shelley refers to his own son’s gravesite, ‘‘[w]here, like an infant’s smile, over the dead, / A light of laughing ﬂowers along the grass is spread’’ (440–1); and this terrestrial image is mirrored in ‘‘Heaven’s smile’’ (449), and in the twilight atmosphere that glows with a ‘‘Light whose smile kindles the Universe’’ (478). In the mutability-sermon from ‘‘Grongar Hill,’’ the smile is an emblem of ephemeral good fortune (‘‘But transient is the smile of fate!’’); at the end of ‘‘Adonais,’’ however, it is a less allegorically legible, more sphinx-like

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expression, akin to the ‘‘azure smiles’’ of a disembodied pair of eyes that beckon the Poet of ‘‘Alastor’’ in the gloom of his last conscious moments. In the course of ‘‘Adonais,’’ then, the smile is changed from the melodramatic sneer of Death to something closer to the Cheshire Cat’s grin – the intimation of a riddle about to be solved, or a peace that passes understanding. Especially in the biographical light of Shelley’s death at sea, this ﬁnal vision of an ocean voyage beyond the horizon might be interpreted as expressing a suicidal impulse; but it is really no more suicidal than the Shelleyan voyage that Yeats imagines in ‘‘Sailing to Byzantium,’’ at the end of which the poet’s anima will be unfastened from the ‘‘dying animal’’ of his body and gathered into the artiﬁce of eternity. Just as the apocalyptic evening of ‘‘Adonais’’ revises the symbolic terms of the sunsets that end ‘‘Lycidas’’ and the Immortality Ode, it also represents a reimagination of crepuscular moments in Shelley’s earlier poems. In particular, Shelley abandons the myth of the edenic bower that waits for his spirit’s bark at the end of ‘‘Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills.’’ He also rewrites the moment of the Poet’s death in ‘‘Alastor.’’ In the earlier poem, Shelley describes not only the dissolution of the Poet’s body but also the gradual waning of perception, which corresponds to the disappearance of the moon over the horizon. The fragility of the body is horrifying enough to Shelley, but it is the death of consciousness that disturbs him even more. In the narrative mode of ‘‘Alastor,’’ Shelley can trace the Poet’s death to the end; but in the suspended lyric present of ‘‘Adonais,’’ he cannot do the same for himself. Whereas the dying Poet of ‘‘Alastor’’ keeps his eyes ﬁxed on the disappearing moon, Shelley makes the soul of Adonais his celestial beacon, and the difference is signiﬁcant: the latter is not a star, but ‘‘like a star,’’ a ﬁgure revolved in the surviving poet’s mind, not a light from without. Throughout my reading of ‘‘Adonais,’’ my premise has been that the two-day structure of the poem has signiﬁcant implications both for Shelley’s poetry and for the poet’s relation to his predecessors. The ﬁrst evening constitutes a pointed response to ‘‘Lycidas,’’ insofar as it does not make an end but is rather followed by a morning of continuing grief. The temporal crux of Shelley’s elegy, in other words, is an illusory stoppingpoint, a seeming end that is really a middle. Meanwhile, the ﬁnal evening makes an end, but one that complicates the exemplary Virgilian closure of ‘‘Lycidas.’’ In Milton’s elegy, the sinking sun constitutes an external interruption of song, but in ‘‘Adonais,’’ it is entirely internal and symbolic: not a sunset but a burning away of the clouds of materiality, not the

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rise of Hesperus but a constant star-like presence. At the end of Shelley’s elegy, evening represents an end of sorts, but it is also an image of continuing, of the persistence of the poet’s consciousness: while Shelley counsels himself and his readers to ‘‘pause’’ at the gravesite, he is already farther aﬁeld in his imagination. In the ‘‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’’ and ‘‘Euganean Hills,’’ Shelley had echoed the Wordsworthian sober coloring of evening as a token of serenity, but in ‘‘Adonais,’’ the closural twilight provides an occasion to depart rather than to rest. It is a call that later poets will hear. When Tennyson’s Ulysses notes the lateness of the hour, he takes it as a signal to embark on a new journey: ‘‘The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: / The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep / Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, / ’Tis not too late to seek some newer world’’ (54–7).28 This is a striking echo of Shelley’s evening impulse: ‘‘The soft sky smiles, – the low wind whispers near: / ’Tis Adonais calls!’’ (475–6). And at the end of the ‘‘Song of Myself,’’ it is in Whitman’s invitation to the reader to wander with him at dusk past the pale of his own poem: ‘‘Listener up there! What have you to conﬁde in me? / Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening, / (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.).’’29 If Shelley adopted the poetic lexicon of evening from his predecessors, he passed it on, richly revised and annotated, to those who followed.

c h ap t e r 5

Keats and the ‘‘Luxury of twilight’’

John Keats once suggested in a letter to his publisher that the ideal poem ought to have an effect on the reader as gradual and subtly modulated as the passing of a day: ‘‘the rise the progress, the setting of the imagery should like the Sun come natural too [sic] him – shine over him and set soberly although in magniﬁcence leaving him in the Luxury of twilight.’’1 This chapter explores the implications of that axiom in Keats’s poems; but I would ﬁrst like to consider what the poet meant by his metaphor. Notably, Keats represents lyric as a dynamic, temporal process rather than as a static thing; and as an event in the reader’s mind as much as in the poet’s. By likening the lingering effect of that event to ‘‘the Luxury of twilight,’’ he implies that poetry ought to provide sensory as much as intellectual delight: both the dilatory pleasures of a walk at dusk and the contemplation that might attend such a walk. Keats favored the word ‘‘luxury,’’ and its particular resonance for him can be discerned in his marginalia to Paradise Lost, where he noted in Milton a kindred ‘‘passion for what is properly the sense of ease and pleasure poetical Luxury,’’ but added that his predecessor ultimately ‘‘devoted himself rather to the Ardours than the pleasures of Song.’’2 The evening descriptions in Paradise Lost represent precisely this sort of ‘‘poetical Luxury,’’ and Keats underlined most of them, including the famous set-piece beginning ‘‘Now came still evening on’’ (PL 4.596–609), and the ﬁnal passage of the poem, with its analogy to the evening mist at the laborer’s heels (PL 12.628–49).3 If Keats’s ‘‘Luxury of twilight’’ does not exactly suggest a Miltonic degree of ardor or strenuous prophecy, it nevertheless implies a balance: luxus (sumptuous abundance) tempered by the waning of lux; the ‘‘sober’’ in counterpoint to the ‘‘magniﬁcent.’’ What is most striking about Keats’s axiom is that its metaphor contains a grain of literal truth: many of Keats’s poems are situated in some form of twilight, and we can trace the poet’s own rise and progress in his use of this chronotope. I begin with several of Keats’s earlier lyrics to show how 145

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the poet borrowed the idiom of pensive evening meditation from the poetry of Sensibility. The phrase ‘‘Luxury of twilight’’ indicates an afﬁliation with this popular late eighteenth-century idiom, exempliﬁed by Helen Maria Williams’ sonnet ‘‘To Twilight’’ (1786), which hails the ‘‘shadowy hour’’ that ‘‘wakes the tear ’tis luxury to shed.’’ The idiom of pensive evening meditation, exempliﬁed by Williams’ sonnet, gave Keats a way of declaring his poetic ambition as an aesthetic disposition; and the act of listening at twilight functioned as a conceit for poetic apprenticeship. Keats’s metaphor for the ﬁgure a poem ought to make would be more fully realized in the odes. In particular, the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ represents a lapse of time in the crescendo and diminuendo of birdsong and in the replacement of imaginary daylight with a sudden perception of darkness; and it ends in a twilight suspension between waking and dreaming. As if Keats had written out his axiom in three stanzas, the ode ‘‘To Autumn’’ tracks the progress of the sun and ends at dusk. Among the odes, these two most closely resemble each other: both represent the passage of time through the ephemeral phenomena of outdoor settings; and both end with a lyric ‘‘now’’ – an adverb of immediate attention and utterance not to be found in the other three odes. Other odes meditate on the theme of time (‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’’) or recapitulate past events in relation to a present resolve (‘‘Ode to Psyche,’’ ‘‘Ode on Indolence’’); but only the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ and ‘‘To Autumn’’ so acutely represent the temporality of lyric perception, thought, and utterance. Both of these poems have been amply considered in dialogic relation with Keats’s other odes, but I propose to offer a new perspective by reading them as forms of evening poetry under the rubrics I have developed in the course of this book. I conclude with a sonnet written later in the fall of 1819, ‘‘The day is gone,’’ which I read as a coda to the Autumn Ode and as a revisitation of Keats’s earlier evening poems. The ‘‘luxury of twilight’’ in which Keats apprenticed under the shadow of Paradise Lost and its eighteenth-century penumbrae does not fade away in the mature lyrics; it assumes new forms. standing in the churchyard In Keats’s mythological imagination, as Walter Evert has observed, evening is the time when Apollo ﬁnishes the dutiful labors of the sun and takes up the pleasurable work of lyric.4 The early ‘‘Ode to Apollo’’ (1815) alludes to this idea: ‘‘The dying tones that ﬁll the air, / And charm the ear

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of evening fair, / From thee, great God of Bards, receive their heavenly birth’’ (45–7). After hailing a series of Apollo’s devotees – Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Tasso – Keats imagines the god’s song as the sounds of evening, a poetry of nature that underlies the poetry of literary history. Evert treats this passage as typical of the poet’s own symbolic vocabulary, but the trope of evening’s attentive ear is hardly speciﬁc to Keats, but rather borrowed from Collins’ ‘‘Ode to Evening.’’ In this scene of listening, classical mythology (Apollo) is harmonized with a more recently invented myth of nature (Evening). Keats borrows this idiom of evening perception when he states, tentatively, his vocational longing in two sonnets of 1816, ‘‘Oh! how I love on a fair summer’s eve’’ and ‘‘How many bards gild the lapses of time.’’ These are professions of sensibility more than poetic ambition, or rather, descriptions of the poetic temperament as a sensibility – a ﬁne response to the hues and sounds of evening, and a capacity for deep feeling. To articulate Keats’s relation to the poetry of Sensibility, I propose one of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, entitled ‘‘To Melancholy,’’ as a precursor, a compendium of characteristic themes and motifs: When latest Autumn spreads her evening veil, And the grey mists from these dim waves arise, I love to listen to the hollow sighs, Thro’ the half-leaﬂess wood that breathes the gale: For at such hours the shadowy phantom pale, Oft seems to ﬂeet before the poet’s eyes; Strange sounds are heard, and mournful melodies, As of night-wanderers, who their woes bewail! Here, by this native stream, at such an hour, Pity’s own Otway methinks could meet, And hear his deep sighs swell the sadden’d wind! O Melancholy! – such thy magic power, That to the soul these dreams are often sweet, And soothe the pensive visionary mind! 5

Many features of the post-‘‘Penseroso’’ nocturne are gathered here: the melodious breezes, the Miltonic personiﬁcation of Autumn veiled by evening mists, the declaration of aesthetic preference (‘‘I love to listen’’), the emotionally charged atmosphere (‘‘hollow sighs,’’ ‘‘sadden’d wind’’), the speaker’s disposition (‘‘the pensive visionary mind’’). As a deﬁnition of temperament, the sonnet represents a surplus economy of feeling in which Melancholy brings pensive thoughts of ghostly presence to soothe the already pensive speaker: this is an affective ‘‘Luxury of twilight.’’

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Identifying herself as a poet with a susceptibility to night-visions, Smith expresses her relationship to a predecessor (Thomas Otway, who had lived in her native Sussex) in terms of listening and feeling. Harold Bloom’s Oedipal archetype of the ‘‘anxiety of inﬂuence’’ does not adequately account for the poetry of Sensibility, which makes an explicit and unanxious point of mediating emotion through literary quotation.6 Smith contemplates Otway not solely for his poetry but also for the biographical example of his death in poverty and obscurity – as Smith herself alludes to her own woes in several poems.7 As the apostrophe at the twelfth line implies, the poet’s evening has been a kind of dream sponsored by Melancholy, but it is not a dream from which the poet ever explicitly awakes: the boundary between the speaking self and the ghosts it encounters, between perception and imagination, is as shadowy as Autumn’s ‘‘evening veil.’’ Like ‘‘To Melancholy,’’ Keats’s early sonnet on ‘‘a fair summer’s eve’’ declares a preference (‘‘how I love’’) and turns, in the binarism of its Petrarchan form, from the sensory pleasures of the scene to the affective experience of contemplating predecessors: Oh! how I love, on a fair summer’s eve, When streams of light pour down the golden west, And on the balmy zephyrs tranquil rest The silver clouds, far – far away to leave All meaner thoughts, and take a sweet reprieve From little cares: – to ﬁnd, with easy quest, A fragrant wild, with Nature’s beauty drest, And there into delight my soul deceive. There warm my breast with patriotic lore, Musing on Milton’s fate – on Sydney’s bier – Till their stern forms before my mind arise: Perhaps on the wing of poesy upsoar, – Full often dropping a delicious tear, When some melodious sorrow spells mine eyes.8

Even as Keats follows Smith in his blending of evening setting and invocation of a poetic predecessor, he more distinctly follows (and revises) Gray’s Elegy in his choice of ghostly visitants: rather than imagining the life of mute inglorious Miltons and village Sydneys, he contemplates the originals. And yet, in the manner of Smith, he summons the memory of Milton not so much for his poetry as for the moving example of his life. There is an uneasy balance here between the heart (the sense of warmth in the breast) and the mind (the contemplation of ‘‘stern forms,’’ as if

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Milton and Sydney were busts in a gallery). As a reader, Keats is soothed, but as an aspiring poet he is chastened. If this summer evening sonnet includes its own self-critique, the ultimate judgment was rendered in Keats’s decision not to include it in the 1817 Poems. The more overtly vocational statement of ‘‘How many bards gild the lapses of time,’’ which did appear in this maiden volume, can be read as a corrective to its unpublished counterpart, in that it represents the twilight pause as productive reverie rather than as emotional indulgence. In this stance, Keats invokes evening as metaphor rather than as naturalistic setting, as if to acknowledge it as a self-consciously borrowed trope. Rather than wandering abroad at twilight, he tellingly stations himself indoors, in the foregrounded act of thinking about evening. Here, the binary Petrarchan structure enables a turn from the writing desk to a metaphorical twilight: How many bards gild the lapses of time! A few of them have ever been the food Of my delighted fancy, – I could brood Over their beauties, earthly, or sublime: And often, when I sit me down to rhyme, These will in throngs before my mind intrude: But no confusion, no disturbance rude Do they occasion, ’tis a pleasing chime. So the unnumber’d sounds that evening store; The songs of birds – the whisp’ring of the leaves – The voice of waters – the great bell that heaves With solemn sound, – and thousand others more, That distance of recognizance bereaves, Make pleasing music, and not wild uproar.

Here, Keats naturalizes his poetic predecessors into a tranquil scene reminiscent of Collins’ ‘‘Ode to Evening,’’ as if Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton had replaced the music of breezes, beetles, and bats.9 While the metaphor of twilight music integrates the bards of the past into a serenely generalized landscape, Keats cannot help evoking particular post-Miltonic ancestors – both Collins and Gray. In effect, he stands in the shadows of Gray’s churchyard, with its far-off pastoral sounds punctuated by a tolling bell, which in turn echoes the aural landscape of Milton’s Penseroso, who hears ‘‘the far-off Curfew sound, / Over some wide-water’d shore, / Swinging slow with sullen roar’’ (74–6). It is both a space of natural music and a cemetery of poetic ghosts. Like the villagers in Gray’s poem who ‘‘kept the noiseless tenor of their way’’ and stayed ‘‘far from the madding crowd,’’ Keats remains in a kind of nocturnal isolation, away

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from ‘‘wild uproar.’’ The evening idiom of Collins’ Ode and Gray’s Elegy thus affords him a way of temporarily situating himself as an emerging poet on the scene of literary history – at the edge of a metaphorical churchyard, listening very hard. Keats knew, then, that to place himself in a pensive evening setting was to make a vocational statement. It could be invoked as both metaphor and perceptual reality, the time of sublime Apollonian devotion and a moment of lingering in the conventionally beautiful. In an 1816 verse epistle to his brother George that he wrote on holiday in Margate, Keats playfully and somewhat ruefully registers this awareness. With its atmospheric catalogue of zephyrs, clouds, stars, and moon, the scene is thoroughly conventional; but Keats uses it less as a descriptive end in itself than as a hopeful backdrop for greater visions – what he vaguely calls ‘‘the revelries, and mysteries of night’’ (64). Like Virgilian pastoral, the poem ﬁnds convenient closure at sunset, with an excuse as practical as the shepherds’ need to fold their sheep: Keats cannot see to ‘‘scribble’’ after the light has faded from the sky. This ﬁnal nod to the sunset jokingly swerves away from sublimity: ‘‘Why westward turn? ’Twas but to say adieu! / ’Twas but to kiss my hand, dear George, to you!’’ (141–2). Instead of invoking Apollo’s realms of gold, Keats’s rhetorical question gestures to a mundanely geographical location. In his ﬁnal stationing in the actual, Keats tentatively arrives at a nature poetry divested of mythological trappings, a westward gaze that preﬁgures the evening of the Autumn Ode. In a letter to his friend J. H. Reynolds in the spring of 1818, Keats gave a name to the evening luxury that he had been describing in his poems: a ‘‘delicious diligent Indolence.’’ Like the opposing energies of ‘‘luxury’’ and ‘‘Ardour’’ in Keats’s characterization of Paradise Lost, the ‘‘diligent’’ and ‘‘delicious’’ are counterpoised. If Keats had earlier shed a ‘‘delicious tear’’ over Milton, here he declares his own version of a Miltonic work ethic, and expands upon it in a sonnet included in the letter, ‘‘O thou whose face hath felt the Winter’s wind.’’ In this verbal translation of a thrush’s song in springtime, Evening serves as sole appreciative listener, and by implication, a justiﬁcation for the poet’s solitary labors: O fret not after knowledge – I have none And yet my song comes native with the warmth O fret not after knowledge – I have none And yet the Evening listens – He who saddens At thought of Idleness cannot be idle, And he’s awake who thinks himself asleep.

(9–14)10

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Keats had depicted himself in the evening sonnets of 1816 as actively listening, but here he hearkens back to Collins’ ﬁgure of Evening, whose ‘‘modest ear’’ might be soothed by the poet’s hymn. If Evening listens to Keats, however, it is no less true that Keats has been paying close attention to its appearance in predecessors’ poems. ‘‘tender is the night’’: sensibility and the ‘‘ode to a nightingale’’ Barely a year after his letter to Reynolds, Keats elaborated his conceit of listening to the thrush into the dramatic situation of the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale.’’ While the Ode is nominally set at midnight, I propose to read it as an oblique evening lyric – in its scene of listening, its act of perceptual adjustment, and its temporal poetics – with an affective lineage in the poetry of Sensibility. By one account, the midnight setting is itself a poetic ﬁction: according to Charles Brown, at whose Hampstead house Keats was staying in the spring of 1819, the Ode was begun after a morning spent sitting under a plum tree and listening to a nightingale that had built its nest nearby.11 Brown’s anecdote, with its image of an inspired poet composing outdoors on sibylline scraps of paper, gives us the kind of origin-story that Keats himself had imagined for classical myths in his 1817 poem, ‘‘I stood tip-toe.’’ It is possible that Brown likewise simpliﬁes the genesis of the Ode and exaggerates the spontaneity of its composition; but he nevertheless reminds us that the poem is shaped by a deliberate temporal narrative. It might originate in both empirical experience and literary knowledge, and in both diurnal and nocturnal meditations, but Keats chooses to set the poem at night – and, moreover, to forestall acknowledgment of this temporal setting until the fourth stanza.12 The most obvious reason for Keats’s choice is that the dark middle of the night is more thematically suitable to a meditation on mortality and suicide; but in relation to the earlier evening poems I have considered, it is notable that Keats avoids mentioning sunset or twilight. In this elision, he follows the example of Coleridge’s conversation poem, ‘‘The Nightingale,’’ which establishes the authenticity of its nocturnal setting by marking the absence of the visual and affective donne´es of evening poetry: ‘‘No cloud, no relique of the sunken day / Distinguishes the West, no long thin slip / Of sullen light, no obscure trembling hues’’ (1–3).13 Similarly, Keats represents conventional aspects of evening poetry through what I would call quotational distancing – marking them as

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forms of possible experience rather than as immediate perceptions. A few years after writing a sonnet declaring his love of taking a stroll on ‘‘a fair summer’s eve,’’ Keats relegates this idyllic time to the temporal extremity of the poem, the imagined point at which musk-roses ferment into ‘‘the murmurous haunts of ﬂies on summer eves’’ (50). From the temporal perspective of early spring, this season is anticipated as an idyll akin to the nocturnal entertainment that Milton’s Allegro imagines (‘‘Such sights as youthful poets dream / On summer eves by haunted stream’’ [129–30]); and yet it is also an intimation of decay. Like these notional eves, the celestial progress of Queen-Moon and starry fays, inspired by Milton’s famous set-piece in Paradise Lost (‘‘Now came still evening on’’), is the result of surmise – ‘‘haply’’ they are gathered in their heavenly throne room – rather than direct perception. The pivotal statement, ‘‘But here there is no light’’ is akin to Coleridge’s notice of the absence of ‘‘obscure trembling hues’’: an index of authentic, immediate experience, a realityeffect in contrast with conventional poetic scene-setting. If Brown’s account of the poem is correct, it is apt that before Keats acknowledges the midnight hour in the fourth stanza (‘‘tender is the night’’), he indulges in the daylight fantasies of ‘‘country green’’ and ‘‘sunburnt mirth’’ and locates the nightingale in a setting that might be either diurnal or nocturnal – a ‘‘melodious plot / Of beechen green, and shadows numberless’’ (8–9) somewhere in ‘‘the forest dim’’ (20). This atmospheric ambiguity might preserve a trace of the morning origins of the poem; but beyond mimetic ﬁdelity, it reﬂects the atemporal nature of reverie. The shadows of this space are not so much indications of nocturnal setting as images of the illusory and insubstantial; and they are ‘‘numberless’’ because cast by a dense network of leaves and branches multiplied beyond the poet’s empirical grasp, like the ‘‘numberless goings-on of life’’ beyond Coleridge’s window in ‘‘Frost at Midnight.’’ In a stanza in which the poet has just told the precise time of his swoon – ‘‘one minute past’’ – the word ‘‘numberless’’ intimates the enormity of the world outside his immediate perception. This penumbrally dim setting is akin to Keats’s conception in the ‘‘Ode to Psyche’’ of the mind as a bower constructed by ‘‘shadowy thought’’ (65), a space that contains both the memory of a daylight dream-vision of Cupid and Psyche and the prospect of solitary devotion in ‘‘the midnight hours’’ (45), a neural forest of ‘‘branched thoughts’’ (52) that preserves the experience of ‘‘wander[ing] in a forest thoughtlessly’’ (7). The ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale,’’ then, begins where the ‘‘Ode to Psyche’’ ends: in a kind of mental twilight.

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The two-part process of having a dream-vision and resolving to preserve it in memory and verse, which structures ‘‘Sleep and Poetry’’ and the ‘‘Ode to Psyche,’’ is condensed in the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ into a continuous meditation, without external indication of the time of beginning or ending. In the vein of Coleridge’s conversation-poems, Keats realizes a poetry of present-tense perception, in which he need not register the distinction between having an experience and writing about it. No longer does he self-consciously describe the act of writing and the scene of poetic inspiration: to listen to the nightingale is necessarily to think about poetry, without the mediation of propositional language.14 Insofar as the Ode concerns music, it pertains to poetry; but it is also Keats’s ﬁrst nocturnal lyric that does not explicitly address the subject of poetic vocation. Unlike the ‘‘summer’s eve’’ sonnet, it indulges in no ‘‘delicious tear’’ or ‘‘melodious sorrow’’ over the example of Milton; instead, it contemplates the nightingale’s purely happy ‘‘melodious plot of beechen green,’’ and as John Hollander and others have noticed, it incorporates echoes of Milton without overt acknowledgment.15 The act of intense nocturnal listening, which Keats had used as a trope for the harmony between the divine and the natural in the ‘‘Ode to Apollo’’ and the rapport between himself and poetic predecessors in ‘‘How many bards,’’ takes on dual implications here. It is both to hear the pure animal sound of the bird and to think of the human strains of requiems and anthems, serenades and romance-narratives. It is, ﬁnally, to imagine the sounds of the world that continue after one has ceased to exist. The poem thus extends the evening conceit of ‘‘How many bards’’ to its inevitable conclusion: if he earlier stood in a virtual churchyard of mingled ancestral voices, Keats now imagines himself as a funerary ‘‘sod,’’ deaf to the nightingale’s song. The ‘‘great bell’’ that tolled the knell of departing day in the sonnet becomes a metaphorical antidote – the sound of the poet’s own voice as wake-up call. The ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ can be read with reference to three models of nocturnal lyric: the fantasized vigil of ‘‘Il Penseroso,’’ the pensive evening mode of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, and the perceptual plot (aural, visual, olfactory, temporal) of Coleridge’s conversationpoems. The poem has been considered primarily in its relation to the other odes, but by reading it in the way I propose, we can see that it inherits both Milton’s poetry and the conventions of Sensibility, and that it is a midnight poem that represents the temporal lapse and perceptual adjustment associated with the evening poem. As a midnight poem, the Ode echoes and revises the nocturnal vigil of ‘‘Il Penseroso.’’ Milton

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represents melancholy as a happy choice, a willed sensibility, and a form of poetic apprenticeship; but Keats represents his feeling of heartache as an involuntary, barely describable emotion. This difference – between volition and unbidden experience – has several ramiﬁcations. Whereas the Penseroso imagines being entertained by a dumb-show sponsored by ‘‘gorgeous Tragedy / In sceptered pall’’ (97–8), Keats uses a similar processional trope – the ideational parade of palsied age and specter-thin youth – to describe the world of suffering that he wishes to escape. Phrased in the abstractions of personiﬁcation-allegory, the Keatsian procession functions as memento mori rather than pleasing diversion, as scene of ordinary afﬂiction rather than artistically shaped narrative. Keats famously said of Milton, ‘‘Life to him would be death to me’’16; and the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ literalizes this statement by envisioning the melancholy, solitary life of the Penseroso as a kind of death. In the beginning of ‘‘Il Penseroso,’’ Milton’s speaker, outdoors, imagines the nightingale’s music as ‘‘evensong’’ calling him to nocturnal devotions (64); and in the end, he visualizes the indoor sanctuary of a ‘‘studious Cloister’s pale’’ (156), with a ‘‘full-voiced Choir’’ (162) singing ‘‘Anthems clear, / As may with sweetness, through mine ear, / Dissolve me into ecstasies, / And bring all heaven before mine eyes’’ (163–6). Keats adopts the Penseroso’s voluptuary language of religious transport into his own idiom of easeful death. He literalizes the idea of dissolution, revises the ‘‘anthems clear’’ into a ‘‘high requiem,’’ pushes ecstasis to its extremity, and holds the prospect of heaven in agnostic suspension: Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain – To thy high requiem become a sod. (55–60)

Ensconced in his ‘‘mossy cell,’’ the Penseroso hopes his systematic study of nature (‘‘every star that heaven doth shew, / And every herb that sips the dew’’) will lead to transcendence (‘‘something like prophetic strain’’); but Keats’s enumeration of fading and dying ﬂowers in his outdoor bower leads earthwards to the ultimate vision of himself as a ‘‘sod,’’ without hope of apotheosis.17 The sobering prospect of becoming a ‘‘sod’’ – that grimly funny Anglo-Saxon counterpoint to the solemn Latin ‘‘requiem’’ – recalls a

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similar joke Keats had made in ‘‘Sleep and Poetry’’ about the prospect of poetic failure, in which he wittily alludes to a line in ‘‘Il Penseroso’’: If I do fall, at least I will be laid Beneath the silence of a poplar shade; And over me the grass shall be smooth shaven; And there shall be a kind memorial graven. (277–80)

The manicured lawn covering the dead poet’s grave is the ‘‘smoothshaven green’’ of the Penseroso’s nocturnal walk (66), and by invoking this terrain, Keats mockingly implies a premature resting-spot in his allegorical journey: if he dies while still apprenticing in the landscape of the beautiful, he will be aptly buried in a pretty simulacrum of a pastoral retreat, at the base rather than on the heights of Parnassus. In the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale,’’ on the other hand, the chilly awareness of mortality cannot be so formulaically thrown off; if there is a corresponding gesture, it is the shock of the word ‘‘forlorn.’’ If the nightingale’s song has lulled Keats into his death-fantasy, it is the sound of his own inner voice that brings him out of it. That twice-uttered word ‘‘forlorn’’ has been linked by John Hollander to a passage in Paradise Lost (Adam’s imagination of life without Eve in ‘‘these wild Woods forlorn’’ [9.910]), but it should also be read as an affective emblem of the poetry of Sensibility. In her ‘‘Ode to the Nightingale’’ (1789), Mary Robinson describes a withdrawal into solitude that resembles the exilic sadness of Ruth in Keats’s Ode: ‘‘Forlorn my poignant pangs I bore, / Alone in foreign realms to weep’’ (32–3).18 Similarly, in her Elegiac Sonnet ‘‘To Hope,’’ Charlotte Smith, perhaps recalling Milton, uses the word in apostrophizing her subject: ‘‘O Hope! thou soother of sweet human woes! / How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn?’’ (1–2). The aptness of the adjective is conﬁrmed when Hope refuses to come: within the narrow space of a sonnet, Smith enacts the drama of an eighteenth-century sublime ode, beckoning a personiﬁed abstraction and witnessing its oblivious retreat (‘‘Enchantress! come, and charm my cares to rest: – / Alas! The ﬂatterer ﬂies, and will not hear!’’ [7–8]), and ﬁnally exchanging it for the more certain patronage of Death (‘‘Come then, ‘pale Misery’s love!’ be thou my cure, / And I will bless thee, who, tho’ slow, are sure’’ [13–14]). This oscillatory pattern of hope and despair, attraction and repulsion, anticipates Keats’s vexed relation to the Nightingale; but it is perhaps a sign of the sonnet’s structural limitations that whereas Smith resigns herself to the certainty of death under the closural pressure of the couplet, Keats, in the dramatic ﬂexibility of

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odal stanzas, comes to a sudden, sharp awareness of mortality and then emerges from the other end of his fantasy of easeful death, into a new feeling hinted at by the word ‘‘forlorn.’’ The poetry of Sensibility, as several scholars have pointed out, is based on the idea of emotion articulated through literary mediation; and Smith’s frequent poetic quotations – her phrase ‘‘pale Misery’s love’’ is pointedly borrowed from Shakespeare – exemplify this. In this respect, the difference between Keats’s poetry and that of his immediate predecessors is the difference between echo and outright quotation (the latter mode can be found in the looser associative rhythms of Keats’s letters rather than in the poetry). In the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale,’’ the word ‘‘forlorn’’ echoes Milton while taking on the resonance of the pensive poet’s solitude as ampliﬁed by Smith. Moreover, Keats’s repetition of the word amounts to a form of self-quotation, a species of mediation associated with Sensibility: the poet’s feeling of loneliness, shadowed by the ultimate isolation of death, is made more acute by the utterance of a word, and the contemplation of oneself as a sadly forlorn ﬁgure. The word is ﬁrst uttered as part of an epithetic formula (‘‘faery lands forlorn’’ is akin to ‘‘my haunts forlorn’’ or ‘‘wild Woods forlorn’’), then isolated as exclamation – heard as the pure sound of the poet’s voice as much as a speciﬁc verbal meaning. As a register of feeling, the Ode most strongly evokes the affective vocabulary of Sensibility in its mysterious description of the night as ‘‘tender’’: Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. (35–40)

The emotional contours of the poem can be traced from the zerodegree of ‘‘drowsy numbness’’ to the momentary solace of ‘‘tender’’ to the desolation of ‘‘forlorn.’’ From the Latin tenerum (‘‘delicate’’) the word ‘‘tender’’ indicates both tactile softness and physical weakness or vulnerability; but it also connotes sentiments of love and care. It is a verbal crux of the poem, in that it suggests two kinds of feeling – the affective (the ache of the heart, the longing for easeful death) and the perceptual (the smell of soft incense, the feel of breezes). Both kinds of sensation are fundamental to the plot of the evening poem, with its characteristic emotions (serenity, melancholy, wistfulness) and its acts of attentive listening, gazing, or smelling.

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Charlotte Smith, who wrote several nightingale-poems, favored the word ‘‘tender,’’ and we can look to her poetry to gauge the emotional valences that Keats inherits. Smith uses it to denote both the passive capacity for feeling and the active inspiration of sympathy. In her sonnet ‘‘To a nightingale,’’ an interpretation of Petrarch’s sonnet to the nightingale (‘‘Que rosigniuol che sı` soave piagne’’), she articulates the affective signiﬁcance of the Philomela myth: ‘‘Poor melancholy bird – that all night long / Tell’st to the Moon thy tale of tender woe; / From what sad cause can such sweet sorrow ﬂow, / And whence this mournful melody of song?’’ (1–4). Here, Smith translates the nightingale’s ‘‘sweet’’ weeping into a ‘‘tender’’ tale. In her sonnet ‘‘To Hope,’’ she invites her addressee to come ‘‘[i]n smiles and softness drest, / Like the young Hours that lead the tender Year’’ (5–6), at once invoking youthful vulnerability, fragility, and naı¨vete´. In her translation of Petrarch’s famous sonnet on his ﬁrst sight of Laura, tenderness is ultimately a property of the poet’s own heart, the verbal locus of all sentiment: ‘‘What wonder then those beauteous tints should move, / Should ﬁre this heart, this tender heart of mine!’’ (7–8); ‘‘Yet tho’ thy charms, thy heavenly charms should fade, / My heart, my tender heart could not escape’’ (11–12).19 Here, the phrase, ‘‘tender heart’’ comes from Smith’s own affective lexicon; it has no counterpart in the original sonnet. The implication of Smith’s usage is that a tender tale (the myth of Philomel) can move a tender heart, which can, in turn, produce a poem that will move other readers or listeners with similar sympathies. Keats might have described his own heart, following Smith, as ‘‘tender,’’ but instead, he makes his boldest statement of emotion in the astonishingly direct ﬁrst line: ‘‘My heart aches.’’ It was customary for poets of Sensibility to speak of their hearts, but usually with a decorum of reticence, a structural delay in the revelation of sorrows. Keats’s statement is utterly naked in the simplicity of its spondee, and without any explicit thematic connection to the nocturnal setting. Alternately, Keats might have applied the word ‘‘tender’’ to the nightingale’s song or the tale it tells, but at this point, he hears a sound that is entirely happy and devoid of narrative content; and as many readers have noted, he does not allude to the myth of Philomela. Keats used the word ‘‘tender’’ even more frequently than Smith, but in his handling, it often takes on the extra charge of the sensual or erotic, as if in etymological memory of its material and corporeal basis. In ‘‘The Eve of St. Agnes,’’ an expectant Porphyro waits by Madeline’s bedside, listening for the sound of her breathing ‘‘[t]o wake into a slumberous tenderness’’ (247) – that is, to

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pass from the arrhythmic, agitated respiration of her evening devotions to the regular, barely perceptible breathing of deep midnight sleep. Unable to wake Madeline by his whispers, Porphyro takes up a lute, and ‘‘in chords that tenderest be,’’ plays his troubadour song (290–2). The repeated idea of tenderness tells the story of Porphyro’s scheme to reenact the arc of Adam’s dream: it is as important for him to wait for Madeline’s entry into vulnerable dormancy as it is to wake her out of it with a tender (emotionally affecting, softly played) song. As the new year in Smith’s sonnet ‘‘To Hope’’ is tender because barely begun and full of possibility, so is the love between Porphyro and Madeline, as it is between Cupid and Psyche in the ‘‘Ode to Psyche,’’ who behold each other ‘‘[a]t tender eyedawn of aurorean love’’ (20). All of these meanings are alive in Keats’s use of the word in the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’: the night is both passively soft and actively caressing; it possesses both aesthetic and ethical dimensions, both human and nonhuman properties.20 In a famous interpretive debate over the poem, Keats’s exclamation has been read in two ways, depending on whether its punctuation is heard as a full stop or as a pause: ‘‘I am already with you, and the night is tender,’’ or ‘‘Already with thee the night is tender, while with me it is still a time of leaden-eyed despairs.’’21 Most readings of this crux, however, have overlooked the multiple valences of the word ‘‘tender.’’ The night is ﬁrst tender with respect to the bird, in that its silence ‘‘yields / To the night-warbling bird,’’ as Satan puts it in his serenade to Eve (PL 5.39–40). In the celestial personiﬁcation of the night sky, its sentimental tenderness is manifest in the Queen-Moon attended by her starry fays. In its gentle breezes and ‘‘soft incense,’’ the night yields to the poet’s exploratory touch; and the poet imagines reciprocally giving himself up to the night in the vaguely erotic wish ‘‘to cease upon the midnight with no pain’’ (56) – an extreme version of the devotional wish in the ‘‘Ode to Psyche’’ to ‘‘make a moan / Upon the midnight hours’’ (44–5). Ultimately, Keats’s fantasies of nocturnal tenderness – the vaguely human qualities of softness, vulnerability, sympathetic care, erotic contact – are as fragile and ephemeral as the night itself. In the temporal sense of Smith’s ‘‘tender Year’’ and Cupid and Psyche’s ‘‘tender eye-dawn,’’ the night in the fourth stanza is still young and full of promise; but in the seventh stanza, after his anticipation of the months ahead, Keats knows it to be ‘‘passing.’’ In its momentary tenderness, the night promises quasihuman companionship, while the poet becomes increasingly aware of the gap, unbridgeable by apostrophe, between himself and the bird. By the

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end, whatever humanity the word ‘‘tender’’ suggests will be drained away by the image of magic casements in the eerily depopulated space of ‘‘faery lands forlorn’’ (70). Though it is possible to construe the exclamation ‘‘Already with thee!’’ (35) as referring only to the nightingale’s experience of the night, it is still more important to see the multiple ways – sensory, affective, erotic – in which the night soon becomes tender for the poet, and ﬁnally leaves him feeling bereft. It is also important to hear how the ambiguous pause of the exclamation-mark accentuates the echo of the poet’s wish to ‘‘leave the world unseen, / And with thee fade away into the forest dim’’ (19–20). Throughout the poem, Keats listens to himself as much as to the bird – in his repetitions of ‘‘away,’’ ‘‘fade,’’ and ‘‘forlorn’’ – and so it is entirely conceivable that he would modulate the phrase ‘‘with thee’’ from wish to premature fulﬁllment. In a similar verbal sequence, the phrase ‘‘fade away’’ in the second stanza is intensiﬁed in the third as ‘‘Fade far away’’ – and ﬁnally in the fourth as the command, ‘‘Away! away!’’, as if in imitation of Echo’s own caudal sentences. At the moment that Keats distills his wish to ‘‘fade away’’ into a one-word imperative, however, the bird is already inaccessibly elsewhere; and it simply remains to conﬁrm this remoteness in the ﬁnal stanza, as if ‘‘adieu’’ were the ﬁnal, iambic echo of ‘‘away.’’ Whether Keats ecstatically insists that he has already joined the nightingale or wistfully laments that the night is already tender for the bird, the word ‘‘already’’ registers the poem’s sense of passing time. In either interpretation of the phrase, the adverb marks a temporal lapse; it reminds us that the night has inevitably advanced since the poet began his utterance, the minute that the clock on his narcotic reverie began to tick. The ﬁrst temporal marker of the poem is purely internal and ﬁgurative: Keats feels as though he had ‘‘emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk’’ (3–4). In this conceit, the poem begins ﬁguratively not in the midnight depths of Hades, but rather in medias res, in a sort of free-fall toward the underworld. The chronometric speciﬁcity of the metaphor lends an urgency to this narcotic fall, as if an antidote must be quickly found to reverse what a minute has accomplished. The ﬁction of spontaneous utterance in this ode, with its exclamation of surprise and unanswered question, owes much to the soliloquy-like idiom of Coleridge’s conversation-poems.22 These poems provide a template for the mimesis of lyric temporality, the duration of poetic utterance; and the nightingale ode resembles this model in the ‘‘now’’ of

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its conclusion. After the limbo of the poet’s reverie, which seemed induced by an opiate imbibed ‘‘one minute past,’’ the ‘‘now’’ of the nightingale’s song brings the poet back into phenomenal time. The ode takes place in the middle of the night, but, like ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,’’ it adopts the closural gesture of the evening poem, the Virgilian et iam. Just as the shepherds in the Eclogues and the pastoral elegist in ‘‘Lycidas’’ look up from their song to see the setting sun, Keats comes out of his reverie to witness the nightingale’s departure, already in progress: Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep In the next valley glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep? (75–80)

As something that fades, the nightingale’s song is analogous to the sunset of pastoral temporality. As requiem, the nightingale’s singing can be imagined to possess the intentional structure of artistic creation, with a thematic arc and deliberate harmonic resolutions; but as continuous sound, it has neither narrative shape nor natural endpoint.23 The bird could keep singing, and in fact does: the song seems to end only because the bird itself ﬂies away. Rather than the rising or setting of the sun, it is the whim of the nightingale that allows Keats’s own song to come to an end. In fact, the bird’s growing distance from the poet coincides with a series of echoic iambs: ‘‘Away! away!’’ (31), ‘‘forlorn . . . Forlorn!’’ (70–1); ‘‘Adieu! adieu!’’ (75). The ﬁrst doublet makes of the bird’s capricious movement a necessity, a command given in the conﬁdence that the poet himself might follow; the second recognizes the unbridgeable spatial and temporal gap between poet and nightingale; and the third gives closure to a departure that was always implicit in the word ‘‘away.’’ The distinction between ‘‘farewell’’ and ‘‘adieu’’ has been blurred in common usage, but it is worth noting that the ﬁrst salutation is traditionally given to a departing person, and the second is given by the departing person to the one staying behind. It is the difference, in other words, between ‘‘Fare you well on your journey’’ and ‘‘I commend you to God.’’ Throughout his poetry, Keats prefers the traveler’s salutation, and here it is especially appropriate, since the poet takes his leave of the nightingale’s song and the fantasy it represents, while he recognizes that there is still life left to live.

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In aurally tracking the trajectory of the nightingale’s departure – meadows, stream, hill-side, valley-glades – Keats spatializes time and wakens himself into a new awareness of it. In his earlier surmise, the darkling poet began in an olfactory guessing of ﬂowers but extended his catalogue into a seasonal future of fast-fading violets and coming muskroses; but in this last act of imagination, he remains within the realm of immediate sounds, and the perceivable attenuation of the nightingale’s music. After imagining where the nightingale’s song has been heard in the past, Keats refrains from speculating about future auditors, for he has already reached the endpoint of such musings in the contemplation of his own death, the ultimate scenario in which the nightingale is heard by anyone else but him. Like ‘‘Sleep and Poetry,’’ the Ode ends in the cessation of a nocturnal reverie; but the poet does not make an overt gesture to compose these thoughts into a poem.24 The ﬁction of the Ode is that it is a spontaneous act of thought; rather than resolving to go off and write his dream down, he asks what kind of dream this has been. The trope of evening perception thus ﬁnds fresh dramatic form in the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale,’’ a form that enables the effect of what Keats called, in reference to Shakespeare’s sonnets, ‘‘ﬁne things said unintentionally.’’ It is a form that recalls the intimacy and seeming spontaneity of Keats’s earlier verse-epistles and reﬂects the temporal immediacy and perceptual plot of the Coleridgian conversation-poems. In this way, the volitional scenarios of ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ (listening to a nightingale’s ‘‘even-song,’’ watching the moon, seeking a secluded spot) are represented in the Ode as forms of immediate experience; and a voluntary sensibility (melancholy, solitude, pensiveness) is transformed into an involuntary, difﬁcult-to-describe emotion. In its very ﬁrst line, the poem makes its boldest emotional sally with the statement, ‘‘My heart aches,’’ and then essays a more precise description and qualiﬁcation of this feeling, a feeling that changes in the course of the poem’s utterance. The representation of feeling in the Ode, as I have argued, owes something to the vocabulary of Sensibility; and this lineage is nowhere more evident than in Keats’s use of the word ‘‘tender.’’ It is a word that connotes a feeling (softness, vulnerability, eroticism), an act of perception (olfactory, tactile), and a fullness of time (the night is young, and then felt to be passing away). In earlier poems, the idea of listening to the sounds of evening had served as a ﬁgure for the harmony between the natural and divine (the ‘‘Ode to Apollo’’), the soothing inﬂuence of poetic predecessors (‘‘How many bards’’), and the comforts of a productive indolence (‘‘O thou

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whose face hath felt the Winter’s wind’’). The ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ complicates all three of these equations: the vision of a lunar deity is distanced as wistful surmise, ‘‘heaven’’ as merely the source of occasional breezes; the virtual churchyard of ancestral voices becomes a solitary gravesite; and the assurance of an audience is replaced by intense selflistening and self-questioning. The effect of present-tense perception and utterance in the Ode is particularly acute in the context of the earlier sonnet on the thrush’s song. The thrush’s cheerful paradoxes about the productivity of indolence are undone in the Ode: while the thrush says that the spring is a ﬁgurative harvest-time, the speaker of the Ode anticipates instead the inevitable slide of early-spring freshness into latesummer torpor and decay, without metaphorical interpretation; while the thrush insists that ‘‘he’s awake who thinks himself asleep,’’ the speaker asks, without the hope of a reply, ‘‘Do I wake or sleep?’’ Rather than making statements of appearance-vs.-reality, Keats here represents a lyric consciousness that hovers between two possibilities: a mind that moves temporally forward (toward summer) and backward (toward biblical history and romance-narrative) and questions the nature of consciousness itself; a mind, ﬁnally, that contemplates its own extinction. Without the hypotactic deliberation embedded in the sonnet-structure of ‘‘When I have fears,’’ the thought of death is represented more as a stab of recognition than as a composed meditation – an unbidden, transitory feeling in time sharpened by a lyric ‘‘now.’’ We will see this ‘‘now’’ used as a similar marker of aural perception in ‘‘To Autumn,’’ but with a distinctly different temporal nuance. disappearing acts: the autumn ode When Keats likened the reader’s experience of a poem to the rise, progress, and setting of the sun, he was, in effect, prescribing a formula for what would become the ode ‘‘To Autumn.’’ With its lack of an explicit lyric ‘‘I,’’ or a single perceiver stationed in time and space, the poem really does enact a day for the reader to experience in imagination. The ‘‘I’’ of lyric poetry has been conceived in two basic ways: as a self overheard in utterance, meditation, or prayer; or as an identity-conferring pronoun. As readers, we either hear the poem or become it (or perhaps do both). If the second conception is literally true in terms of voice or consciousness, it has varying degrees of psychological or formal truth, depending on the poem in question. The self that declares ‘‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense,’’ is different from the self that never emerges

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from behind the odal epithet, ‘‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.’’ As Keats’s letters from Winchester attest, the Autumn Ode reﬂects the experience of Keats’s walks in the countryside. The poem might be subtitled, in Wordsworthian terms, ‘‘An Evening Walk’’; and yet the walker is implied rather than represented, an unhoused, ﬂoating consciousness rather than the restless, ambulatory perceiver of topographical poetry.25 The two-part narrative of the ‘‘Ode to Psyche’’ (recounted dream-vision followed by hymnic devotion) is simpliﬁed into an immediate encounter in the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale,’’ but the Autumn Ode represents something else entirely, a scene whose moment of utterance cannot be deﬁnitively ascertained. Under a familiar evolutionary narrative of pre-Romantic poetry, the purely descriptive landscape poem of the early eighteenth century develops into the meditative-descriptive lyric of the late eighteenth century. But if Wordsworth exempliﬁes this progression by rewriting An Evening Walk as ‘‘Tintern Abbey,’’ Keats inverts it: his early ‘‘I stood tiptoe’’ blends locodescription with speculation about the natural origins of mythology; but his ﬁnal ode presents a landscape devoid of a reﬂective speaker, a wholly phenomenal world only liminally mediated by a quasimythological presence. Not only does the poem resist familiar literary periodization, it also eludes two of the most heuristically powerful concepts of Romanticism, both articulated by M. H. Abrams: the formal category of the ‘‘greater Romantic lyric,’’ in which the speaker stations himself in space, wanders spatially and temporally through recollection or anticipation, and ﬁnally returns to the outer scene with a new clarity of understanding; and the cultural construct of Natural Supernaturalism, through which this lyric form incorporates elements of a deeply ingrained Christian mythos – the ﬁnite biblical plot of beginning, middle, and end; the sudden moment of epiphany; the drive toward apocalyptic revelation; and the faith in progress animated by a hidden, providential author.26 The sonata-form of exposition–development–recapitulation aptly describes the trajectory of the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ but not ‘‘To Autumn,’’ which lacks this teleology of departure and return.27 Instead, the poem expands in a series of concentric circles from cottage grove to stubble-ﬁeld to evening sky, ending without petition or adieu, without a hint of apocalypse or divine redemption. Lacking both of the structural ideas codiﬁed by Abrams, the Ode nevertheless resolves the aesthetic difﬁculty of topographical description memorably articulated by Samuel Johnson when he qualiﬁed his praise of Thomson’s The Seasons by noting that it suffered from ‘‘want of method.’’ In an era when readers usually

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evaluated poetic description for its mimetic accuracy, Johnson made an astutely formalist observation that in landscape poetry there was no easy way of organizing ‘‘many appearances subsisting at once.’’28 Thomson partially resolves this aesthetic challenge by structuring the movement of ‘‘Autumn’’ as a walk, pointing sights out as he goes along (‘‘the pure Dorsetian downs . . . / Here rich with harvest, and there white with ﬂocks!’’ [657–9]), with occasional reminders of his progress (‘‘And, as I steal along the sunny wall’’ [673]).29 When the model of a pastoral ramble grows tiresome and the poet shifts his scene to the vineyards of the South, he scrupulously attributes the visit to ‘‘fancy’s rapid ﬂight’’ (683). Keats, on the other hand, refuses to restrict himself to a literalized tour; and by virtue of the seasonal and diurnal progress of the poem, he never faces the problem of describing ‘‘appearances subsisting at once.’’ Instead of an explicit excursion-narrative, the poem is based on a progression of three distinct spaces: the concentrated materiality of the ﬁrst stanza, the georgic expanse of the second, the aerial dispersion of the third. In artistic terms, each stanza suggests a different kind of painting: the still-life of fruit and blossoms; the genre paintings of Autumn’s characteristic activities; and the paysage of a stubble-ﬁeld at sunset. The outdoor setting of the ﬁrst stanza contains several indoor spaces – a vinewrapped cottage, a grove of apple-trees, gourds, hazel shells, and the clammy cells of the beehive. The cottage itself is built by an architecture of implications, existing only by the shape of what surrounds it (thatcheaves, clinging vines, cottage-trees). In contrast to these indoor enclosures, the elements of the third stanza are entirely houseless, dispersed. This space, to use Heidegger’s description of the upward glance, ‘‘spans the between of sky and earth’’; and Keats pointedly uses the word ‘‘skies,’’ not heaven.30 In the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale,’’ the breezes blown to the embowered poet come ‘‘from heaven’’ (39); and in the ‘‘Ode on Melancholy,’’ a ﬁt of dejection falls ‘‘[s]udden from heaven, like a weeping cloud’’ (12). In both cases, heaven is as much a mythical realm as a meteorological phenomenon – respectively, the throne room of the Queen-Moon and the shrine of Melancholy, with its ‘‘cloudy trophies.’’ In the Autumn Ode, however, the word ‘‘heaven’’ would be incongruous; the air in which the swallows gather is closer to the virtual space of the ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’’ with its sacriﬁcial heifer ‘‘lowing at the skies’’ (33). To use the word ‘‘skies’’ rather than ‘‘heaven’’ is to refuse intimations of divinity; instead of an Apollonian golden lyre, it is a ﬂock of swallows that appears in this airspace – a swarm of aerial dots that represent one last afterimage for an eye adjusting to the gathering

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darkness of an autumn evening. Dwelling in aerial and earthly realms, they make the sky, in Wallace Stevens’ phrase, acutest at its vanishing. The plot of the evening poem involves precisely this sort of vanishing. It typically represents an act of sustained perception, the sharpening of sensory acuity in a darkening world; it is a narrative of both dilation (lingering in the temporal indeterminacy of twilight) and closure (the visual cues of sunset or moonrise). In this sense, the Autumn Ode can be read as an evening poem par excellence – but with the qualiﬁcation that it features no stationed perceiver, no ﬁgure akin to the Wordsworthian persona of An Evening Walk. The speaker of the Ode, like a Miltonic angel, is all ear and all eye, a sensorium that registers seasonal change.31 Instead of inventing Thomsonian perceivers, he describes scenes of perception – conspiring, thinking, seeking, gazing, listening. In each stanza, activities of mind and world intersect; and the season’s growth is even conceived as a kind of thinking. In the ﬁrst stanza, two forms of consciousness converge – Autumn’s active conspiracy and the bees’ indolent susceptibility to that conspiracy. A tension of inﬁnitives builds in the activities of Autumn’s plot (to load and bless, to bend and ﬁll, to swell and plump), a tension grammatically relieved by the last two lines of the stanza: ‘‘Until they think warm days will never cease, / For Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells’’ (10–11). It is an adverbial construction of duration and release, of desire and fulﬁllment, that recalls the aspirational syntax of ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ – the concluding petition for a ‘‘Mossy Cell, / Where I may sit and rightly spell / Of every Star that Heaven doth shew, / And every Herb that sips the dew; / Till old experience do attain / To something like prophetic strain’’ (169–74). Keats’s version of this moment brings the hermit’s vision of monastic retirement outdoors and naturalizes it: the ‘‘Mossy Cell’’ is verbally dispersed into the ‘‘moss’d cottage-trees’’ (5) and the bees’ ‘‘clammy cells’’ (11) ; and the mental act of devotion (‘‘spelling’’ stars and herbs) becomes the biological process of ripening. Keats spells the bounty of autumn, but if he attains ‘‘something like prophetic strain,’’ it is something closer to description than to divine revelation. In the prophetic strain of ‘‘Sleep and Poetry,’’ the poet uses the construction of ‘‘until’’ to express a willed epiphany, to ‘‘kneel / Upon some mountain-top until I feel / A glowing splendour’’ (49–51); and in ‘‘When I have fears,’’ he stands alone to ‘‘think / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.’’ In the Autumn Ode, on the other hand, he inverts the latter construction of ‘‘think / till,’’ to portray the season as scheming to prolong the ﬂowering ‘‘until [the bees] think warm days shall never

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cease’’ (10) This rondure of thought would seem to present a perfect place to stop; or if something were naturally to follow, it might be some contrastive statement commenting on the bees’ deception. Instead, in the stanza’s spirit of excess, the limbo of inﬁnitives yields to the accomplishment of the present-perfect: ‘‘For Summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.’’ Against the dreaminess of things not yet realized, Keats inserts the declarative counterpoint of real time elapsed: summer has ended, and today is the ﬁrst day of fall. The second stanza features a hypothetical wanderer in search of Autumn (‘‘whoever seeks [thee] abroad’’) who watches her in the act of reaping and gleaning; and in a symbolic doubling of this act, Autumn herself engages in a similar act – sitting in reverie on a granary ﬂoor, watching the work of a cider press. Autumn is, to borrow Michael Fried’s concept of painterly perspective, a ﬁgure of absorption – one who draws the viewer’s attention into the scene by the example of her own gaze; and she might be said to represent Keats’s own utter absorption in his poem.32 In the third stanza, Autumn is invited to ‘‘think’’ not on the songs of spring (as the bees think perpetually of summer) but rather to take solace in a chorus of birds, lambs, and gnats. At this moment, it might be said, in the phrasing of Keats’s sonnet on the thrush, that ‘‘Evening listens,’’ or that Autumn, in the consolatory consideration of what remains behind, hears all of this as she disappears from the landscape. The temporality of the poem is no less complex than its scenes of perception. Its three stanzas are constructed on the principle of a dual time scheme: both the seasonal progression of what Harold Bloom has called ‘‘pre-harvest ripeness, late-harvest repletion, and post-harvest natural music’’ and the passage of a single day in autumn.33 If we imagine the poem to be uttered in a single time and place, we can reconcile these two temporal frames by imagining the speaker as a wanderer who pauses in a stubble-ﬁeld both to contemplate the scope of the season and to chart the diminished landscape; in this way the lyric speaker is essentially a consciousness that integrates present and past, day and season, perception and memory.34 This would involve a reading of the poem as a species of greater Romantic lyric, in which the ‘‘now’’ of the third stanza refers to the time of utterance – the moment when the poet acknowledges that time has passed and allows his hymn to end with the close of the day.35 To gauge the temporality of the Autumn Ode, we can compare its enunciatory ‘‘now’’ with that of ‘‘Lycidas,’’ the ‘‘Ode to Evening,’’ and ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’’; we can, in short, read the Ode within a tradition of evening poetry.

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Among critics who have articulated the time-scheme of the Autumn Ode, Geoffrey Hartman has most compellingly described it as an evening poem, with its ‘‘Hesperian’’ ideology of the descriptive rather than the epiphanic, the gradual process of fading rather than the sublime plunge into sudden darkness.36 Hartman has suggested that the mists of the ﬁrst stanza indicate a ﬁgurative if not a literal twilight; but this idea is not absolutely necessary to establish the Ode as an evening poem, and I would argue instead that it is liminally organized along the pastoral timeline, repeatedly articulated in Paradise Lost, of morning, noon, and evening – the cycle of earthly creation and the incremental measure of Adam and Eve’s time in Eden. In this conception, the mists of the ﬁrst stanza are the ‘‘mists and exhalations’’ of Adam’s aubade, and the drowsy reaper of the second stanza indicates the afternoon repose of pastoral tradition, the time that Milton represents as the occasion of Adam’s symposium with Raphael, with its feast of effortlessly harvested delicacies.37 A comparison of the ﬁnal version of the poem with an earlier draft suggests the attention Keats paid to these temporal markers. Originally, the second stanza included the line, ‘‘While bright the Sun slants through the husky barn’’; but in the interest of descriptive and syntactic economy, Keats transposed this scene-setting to the end: ‘‘While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day.’’38 In this revision, the sun moves from the afternoon brightness of the second stanza to the muted evening palette of the third. In Miltonic terms, this temporal lapse represents the span from Satan’s afternoon arrival in Eden when ‘‘the Sun more glad impress’d his beams / Than in fair Evening Cloud’’ (PL 4.150–1) to the moment when Satan, ‘‘still in gaze,’’ awakens from his edenic reverie just as ‘‘the Sun / Declin’d was hasting now with prone career / To th’ Ocean Isles, and in th’ascending Scale / Of Heav’n the Stars that usher Evening rose’’ (PL 4.352–5). It is this long, seemingly atemporal gaze that we see in Autumn’s watching of her own harvest. Although the second stanza suggests the hour of pastoral repose and the third stanza signals the vespertinal end of labor, Keats avoids the familiar markers of Miltonic or Virgilian closure: no evening star or moon appears; no shadows lengthen the hills; no shepherd arrives to drive the ﬂocks home; no farewell gesture is made; and the word ‘‘evening’’ never appears, as it does in the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ (‘‘summer eves’’) and the ‘‘Ode on Indolence’’ (‘‘evenings steeped in honied indolence’’). Instead, a constellation of participles – soft-dying, sinking, gathering – imparts, almost subliminally, a sense of gradual closure. The Autumn Ode also abandons the pastoral idiom of churchyard meditation, with its

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distant tolling bell. In ‘‘How many bards gild the lapses of time,’’ Keats likens the ‘‘unnumbered sounds that evening store’’ to the ‘‘pleasing chime’’ of ancestral poets; and in the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale,’’ he turns the sound of his own utterance into a tolling bell; but no such human sound, literal or ﬁgurative, enters the landscape of the Autumn Ode. Autumn’s ‘‘music’’ lacks any trace of art or culture, and it proceeds without a stationed odal celebrant to perceive it. The aural setting of the third stanza recalls the ‘‘Ode to Apollo’’ and its trope of an Evening that listens to the sounds of nature; and in many ways the Autumn Ode elaborates the trope as it appears in Collins’s ‘‘Ode to Evening.’’39 The apostrophized subjects of the two poems are similar: as particular times, both must end; as personiﬁed presences, both must disappear; and within their respective cycles, both are penultimate events. Helen Vendler has noted that Keats’s Autumn is ‘‘the one expansive natural symbol which, if it were not transient, would not be itself – a season’’ (283).40 I would add that Evening is another: not explicitly invoked, but implicitly present throughout the poem. Since Evening and Autumn constitute both deity and atmosphere, Collins and Keats both invoke and describe, mediating between ode and idyllium, the vocative and the visual – Collins favoring the former and Keats the latter. At the outset, Keats echoes Collins’ mixture of invocation and description: odal epithets of the ﬁrst two lines (‘‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun’’) yield to the weight of harvest bounty, so that the ceremony of praise, like Autumn’s own reaping tasks, is dreamily half-forgotten. But whereas Collins’ epithets for Evening (‘‘chaste Eve,’’ ‘‘nymph reserved,’’ ‘‘maid composed’’) are discrete units unconnected to descriptive elaboration, Keats’s one epithet (‘‘close bosom-friend’’) expands through the participial energy of ‘‘maturing’’ and ‘‘conspiring’’ to ﬁll an entire stanza. The Autumn Ode never completes its address with a customary imperative (e.g., ‘‘teach me,’’ ‘‘hear me’’). In this descriptive delay, Keats follows Collins, who also dilates his overture with a leisurely immersion in phenomena; but unlike his predecessor, Keats never gives a predicate to his opening invocation. Instead, the second stanza consists of naturalistic description, a catalogic response to the question, ‘‘Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?’’ (12). Keats’s refusal to complete the odal formula of invocation-and-petition gives the poem an elliptical shape, the beginning a recognizable ode, the end drifting into nature poetry. In personifying a time that is both ephemeral and cyclically returning, both Collins and Keats face the conceptual challenge of representing an

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end that only appears to be a death. Collins carries out the allegorical implications of his conceit by imagining Evening as a chaste maiden whose robes are rudely rent by winter’s ravages, a ﬁgure of time who sympathetically merges with the space of the mutable landscape. In his poem on ‘‘Fancy,’’ Keats had similarly described winter as a time ‘‘[w]hen the night doth meet the Noon / In a dark conspiracy / To banish Even from her sky’’ (22–4). If Night and Noon plot to eliminate Evening from the winter day, then by analogy, Summer and Winter conspire to banish Autumn, with Summer swelling its bounty inevitably toward a Winter bier; and by the time we reach the bare stubble-ﬁelds of the end, they have succeeded in the yearly coup. While this is certainly the outcome of the poem, Keats does not in fact describe it in exactly these allegorical terms. Instead, Autumn momentarily defends herself in her own version of a conspiracy, by plotting with the sun to prolong the time of fruition and fool the bees into thinking it will last forever; her imagination presses back against the encroaching seasonal reality. No villains lurk in the Autumn Ode, however: the conspiracy to fool the bees is benign and never results in a rude awakening; and the ultimate disappearance of Autumn in the third stanza can be attributed to no malevolent force.41 The only hint of a conﬂict resides in the momentarily nostalgic question, ‘‘Where are the songs of spring?’’ If the bees were led to think warm days will never cease, Autumn herself is now consolingly asked to think of her own music. Keats’s answer to the question involves imaginative compensation rather than blame. Rather than suffering the ravages represented in Collins’ Ode, Autumn simply disappears. In effect, the active ﬁgure of Autumn merges, in the transitional afternoon period of gazing, into the receptive ﬁgure of Evening who simply listens to the natural music in ‘‘O thou whose face has felt the winter wind,’’ before she is banished from the winter scene altogether. What I have called the dual temporality of the Autumn Ode – its integration of seasonal progress and diurnal time – recalls the structure of Collins’ poem, which represents both one crepuscular moment of praise and whole seasons of twilight. Collins begins his ode in the mimetic ﬁction that he is addressing Evening at evening, and thus has only this brief moment to welcome her. His invocation consists of a series of scene-setting clauses: ‘‘while now the bright-haired sun / Sits in yon western tent’’ (5–6); ‘‘Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat . . . ﬂits by’’ (9–10); ‘‘Now teach me, maid composed, / To breathe some softened strain’’ (15–16). Here, the sunset serves as visual backdrop and temporal signal for the speaker’s address, while the repetition of

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‘‘now’’ imparts the effect of observed reality, the fortuity of everyday phenomena.42 In contrast, Keats’s clausal sequence of while/then/now appears at the end of an odal address rather than at the beginning, and it sets in motion a series of phenomena without placing the poet in the foreground: Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too – While barre`d clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue: Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river-sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourne; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. (23–33)

Both poets begin their sequence by offering forms of musical comfort to their deities; but whereas Collins hopes to sing with the accompaniment of pastoral sounds, Keats leaves the natural music of evening to itself. Collins’ ‘‘while’’ forms the panoramic backdrop for his moment of poetic instruction; but Keats’s ‘‘while’’ provides the visual context for an aural landscape in which the poet himself is invisible. If it is to be found anywhere in the Ode, a trace of the poet’s presence can be located in the ﬁnal deictic phrase, ‘‘and now’’ – the characteristic gesture of the evening poem. Whereas Collins’ reiterated ‘‘now’’ is invocatory, Keats’s is valedictory, and thus closer to the twilight conclusion of the shepherd’s dirge in ‘‘Lycidas’’: And now the sun had stretch’t out all the hills, And now was dropped into the Western bay; At last he rose, and twitch’t his Mantle blue: Tomorrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new. (190–3)

Unlike the ‘‘now’’ of this sunset, the ‘‘now’’ of landscape poetry such as Thomson’s The Seasons does not mark the speciﬁc time of the speaker’s utterance so much as it punctuates discrete phenomena; it is a rhetorical device that implies succession where there is really only simultaneity. In the Autumn Ode, the valence of Keats’s ‘‘and now’’ lies between the Virgilian-Miltonic and Thomsonian senses: it is a phrase of both closure and continuation; it plausibly marks both an act of perception and

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utterance and a phenomenon within a stream of phenomena; it is both particular and abstract. Like the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale,’’ ‘‘To Autumn’’ ends with a charting of sound in space, but whereas the fading of the nightingale’s song is relative to the stationary poet, the ‘‘now’’ of the robin’s musical entrance exists independent of any auditor. If we imagine ‘‘To Autumn’’ as uttered by a speaker in a particular time and place, Keats’s ‘‘and now’’ is a mimesis of time as it ‘‘really’’ passes; but if we read the poem as a representation of phenomena not framed by a particular perceiver, the phrase gestures beyond the poet’s own consciousness. While the ‘‘now’’ of the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ coincides with the poet’s imagination of his own death as a conceptual endpoint, the ‘‘now’’ of the ode ‘‘To Autumn’’ transcends it.43 Without explicitly saying adieu, as he does in the sunset scene of the epistle to his brother, Keats invents a subtle form of farewell in the ﬁnal stanza of the Autumn Ode. In that earlier poem, the sunset serves as a Virgilian pretext for closure; but in the Ode, it also functions as a kind of afterimage. After appearing through mists as Autumn’s close bosomfriend, the sun is manifest in the third stanza only through clouds. In essence, the three-dimensional fullness of fruit and blossoms is abstracted into an aerial scrim of color; the literal burgeoning of the earth lingers as the ﬁgurative bloom of the sky. The OED attests to the singularity of Keats’s transitive use of the word ‘‘bloom,’’ giving it ﬁrst-use status: ‘‘To give a bloom to; to colour with a soft warm tint or glow.’’44 In the ﬁrst sense of the deﬁnition, the clouds would add a bloom to the sky like the powdery residue on fruit (as in the ‘‘bloomy grapes’’ of ‘‘I stood tip-toe’’); in the second sense, the clouds glow with colored light. In other words, the deﬁnition suggests both opacity and luminescence; and in the ﬂickering evanescence of the day’s last light, in which the sun shines through bars of clouds, the blending of the two senses is appropriate. In a further process of abstraction, the tactile values of the ﬁrst stanza return as the ﬁgurative sunset ‘‘touch’’ of the third. The description of clouds that ‘‘touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue’’ echoes the syntax of the ﬁrst stanza (‘‘bless / With fruit,’’ ‘‘bend with apples,’’ ‘‘ﬁll . . . with ripeness’’ [3–6]) but applies it to the purely visual. ‘‘Touch has a memory,’’ Keats says in an anguished late poem to Fanny Brawne, and the third stanza of the Ode serves as perceptual memory of the dwindling season and fading day.45 When Keats wanted to represent lingering in the face of inevitable departure, he often thought of the imaginary warmth of a touch, and offered the gesture of a handshake or farewell wave. In the

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closing lines of his verse letter to George, for instance, he kisses his hand to him; and in an early verse letter to Charles Cowden Clarke, he explains the circumstance of his epistle: ‘‘Yet, as my hand was warm, I thought I’d better / Trust to my feelings, and write you a letter’’ (103–4). (This corporeal deixis would be repeated, with a posthumous frisson, in ‘‘This Living Hand.’’) It has been several days since Keats has seen Clarke, but at the end of the poem, he imaginatively stages their last parting and extends his writing hand in a mimesis of the intimacy he wishes to accomplish in his poetry and letters: ‘‘Again I shake your hand – friend Charles, good night’’ (132).46 The Autumn Ode translates this parting of companions into the processes of the natural world: whereas sun and earth embrace in the beginning of the poem, the clouds in the end ﬁguratively touch the earth with color, a last imprint of the setting sun. The notion of intellectualized contact, of compensatory ‘‘touch,’’ had recently struck Keats as he wrote a long letter to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana. Even as he seeks to bridge the ocean that separates them by describing his strolls through the Winchester countryside, Keats chastens himself with the reminder that ‘‘[o]ur bodies every seven years are completely freshmateriald [sic],’’ so that, ﬁnally, ‘‘in seven years the same hands cannot greet each other again,’’ and both brothers will be physically different people when next they meet.47 In a typically consolatory double-take, however, Keats decides that ‘‘[a]ll this may be obviated by a wilful and dramatic exercise of our Minds towards each other.’’ The Epicurean atomism of the world is superseded by a purely mental act; and the Autumn Ode makes a similar intervention. The phenomena in both ﬁrst and last stanzas of the poem are contained by acts of consciousness: the feast of the ﬁrst dwells within the act of ‘‘conspiring’’ to make the bees think of endless summer days; and the sounds and sights of the third emerge within the dilation of a consolatory thought (‘‘Think not of them, thou hast thy music too’’ [23]). Appropriately, the act of conspiring is rooted in a corporeal metaphor, while the contemplation of music is purely mental: when Autumn conspires at the height of her powers, she can be said to breathe a perceptible inﬂuence over the landscape (in mists, in warm breezes); but when she pauses to think during her waning days, she is engaged in an entirely inward, silent activity. The silences of the Autumn Ode are especially striking in light of Keats’s earlier evening poems. The poem represents the pleasure of an evening walk without saying, in effect, ‘‘O how I love on a fair autumn’s eve’’; it catalogues the phenomena of a day without saying, ‘‘Many are the wonders I this day

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have seen’’; and it describes an evening setting without turning it into a metaphor for something else. ‘‘holinight’’ It is tempting to end a study of Keats’s evening poetry with the universally acknowledged perfection of the Autumn Ode; more recently, however, the less-than-perfect poems that Keats wrote after this presumed endpoint have received critical attention as a foil to odolatry. In her study of form in the Romantic lyric, for instance, Susan Wolfson examines Keats’s vexed relation to the sonnet in several poems about Fanny Brawne written after the Autumn Ode.48 I conclude with one of these, ‘‘The day is gone,’’ for a somewhat different purpose: to consider Keats’s postautumnal engagement with the poetics of evening – one that harks back to several of the poet’s earlier evening lyrics. In relation to the Ode, the sonnet is notable for being set after sunset, and for turning the nocturnal setting into an overt metaphor for parting and loss. If the Virgilian shepherd looks up from his song to see the sun already declining, Keats here begins in the awareness that it has disappeared entirely: The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone! Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast, Warm breath, light whisper, tender semi-tone, Bright eyes, accomplish’d shape, lang’rous waist! Faded the ﬂower and all its budded charms, Faded the sight of beauty from my arms, Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise, Vanish’d unseasonably at shut of eve, When the dusk holiday – or holinight – Of fragrant curtain’d Love begins to weave The woof of darkness, thick, for hid delight; But, as I’ve read Love’s missal through to-day, He’ll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.

Time is a perennial subject of sonnets, but the representation of the passing time of utterance is seldom attempted within such a compact form. This, then, is the formal difference between the temporal amplitude of the Autumn Ode and the temporal summary of ‘‘The day is gone,’’ between the present participle of seasonal process and the past participle of departed things: going vs. gone, fading vs. faded. In choosing the Shakespearean form, Keats applies the idiom of the evening poem to the procedure of the Renaissance blazon: an enumeration of the Dark

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Lady’s charms as already vanished, like light from the sky. In fact, the logic of the blazon is pressed to its extreme: the departed paramour is all parts, and never becomes a grammatical subject; she is the holographic image of a woman, akin to Collins’ ever-vanishing, ‘‘chaste Eve.’’ Whereas the ‘‘Ode to Evening’’ and the ode ‘‘To Autumn’’ trace a present-tense perceptual process, the sonnet comprises a retrospective catalogue of lost perceptions: sight (‘‘beauty,’’ ‘‘whiteness’’), sound (‘‘sweet voice,’’ ‘‘whisper,’’ ‘‘tender semi-tone’’), and touch (‘‘shape,’’ ‘‘warm breath,’’ ‘‘warmth’’). Like Collins, Keats invokes the epithalamic signiﬁcance of evening when he refers to the hymeneal ﬁgure of ‘‘fragrant curtain’d Love’’ weaving an arras of darkness for the privacy of ‘‘hid delight.’’ The poet’s rueful recognition of this new nocturnal regime appears in the joking revision of ‘‘dusk holiday’’ into the coinage of ‘‘holinight.’’ The transposition reminds us of the sacred dimension of the preﬁx; but at this point, there are two forms of holinight – the hallowed epithalamic time of lovers and the long devotional midnight of the hermit. In his astringent couplet, Keats takes on the latter role, with the Byronic ﬂippancy that he occasionally adopts in ‘‘Lamia.’’ Like Milton’s Penseroso, Keats makes a virtue of his solitary evening devotions, but it is only a mockvirtue, performed of necessity rather than desire: to fast is to do without the vanished woman, and to pray is to beg either for her return or for a stoic resignation to her absence. In Keats’s devotional conceit, the act of reading in Love’s missal suggests the frustrations of literary meditation – of reciting Petrarchan conventions rather than feeling the nearness of a body. Unlike the Penseroso, Keats does not consider these studious rites as an adequate substitute, and does not wish them to continue past nightfall; he asks for sleep rather than nocturnal alertness, oblivion rather than curious wandering. In ‘‘The Eve of St. Agnes,’’ Madeline fasts, prays, and retires early in the hope that she will have a dream-vision of her future husband; but Keats practices similar devotions to be exempt from such visions.49 Like Keats’s earlier evening sonnets, ‘‘The day is gone’’ can be described as a poem of Sensibility, in its nocturnal melancholy and its sensory and affective vocabulary. Its allegory of the departed day is never made explicit in the Autumn Ode, where the central female ﬁgure both vanishes and witnesses the vanishing, and where no one is ultimately present – neither lover nor wandering poet – to mourn the loss. That keyword of wistful sensibility, ‘‘tender,’’ is not to be found in the Autumn Ode, either: its rare affective terms – ‘‘wailful’’ and ‘‘mourn’’ – are associated with the sound of its tiniest participants, the gnats. It is in the

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interpretive harvest of such small details – the oozing of the cider press, the soft dying of the day – that the poem yields an allegorical foreshadowing of the poet’s own death. In light of ‘‘The day is gone,’’ the Ode reveals a subtle trace of Keats’s feelings about Fanny Brawne – his reconciliation to a life without her, his growing fondness for solitary twilight walks under chaste Dian skies. Three poems that Keats wrote in the fall of 1819 – the Autumn Ode, ‘‘Lamia,’’ and ‘‘The day is gone’’ – feature a female ﬁgure (a season, a demonic changeling, a lover) who inevitably disappears; and each disappearance is, to varying degrees, represented as a natural process of mutability. In particular, Autumn is remarkably similar to Lamia, who reluctantly prepares the wedding banquet where she knows she will be discovered and banished (conspiring ‘‘how to dress / The misery in ﬁt magniﬁcence’’ [2.115–16]), then withdraws as if she were evening itself (‘‘Approving all, she faded at self-will, / And shut the chamber up, close, hush’d and still’’ [2.142–3]), and ﬁnally disappears under the withering stare of Apollonius. There is great pathos in this disappearance, even though Lamia is not human and does not really die. What is ultimately mourned, then, is the vanishing of Lycius’ interior paramour, the failure of a mental ideal to be permanently joined with physical reality. The phenomenological narrative of concentration and dispersal in the Autumn Ode can be traced in the plot of ‘‘Lamia.’’ Even as she seeks to sequester Lycius in her palace, Lamia wishes she could live in his heart and realizes that she cannot. ‘‘Where am I now?’’ she wonders aloud, ‘‘Not in your heart while care weighs on your brow: / No, no, you have dismissed me; and I go / From your breast houseless – ay, it must be so’’ (2.42–5). The ﬁrst stanza of the Ode features surrogate indoor spaces, but the poem ultimately represents a similar condition of houselessness. Lycius’ indignant reply to Lamia anticipates the close-bosoming movement and tropes of intensiﬁcation in the ﬁrst stanza of the Autumn Ode: Why will you plead yourself so sad forlorn, While I am striving how to ﬁll my heart With deeper crimson, and a double smart? How to entangle, trammel up and snare Your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there Like the hid scent in an unbudded rose? (49–54)

Just as Lycius strives how to ﬁll his heart with Lamia’s deeper crimson, Autumn conspires how to load and bless the vines with fruit; and the labyrinth of soul represents a human analog to the bee-cells that hoard

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summer’s honey. Both Lycius and Autumn thus attempt to prolong the ephemeral, to preserve the intensity of a love or a season. Finally, however, the scent of the rose cannot be pent up but must be diffused upon the air, as Lamia disappears and the light of an autumnal day blooms and fades. In her brief incarnation as a woman, Lamia might be called a person, but she is also akin to a personiﬁcation like Collins’ Evening: she cannot die, really, but she is imagined as subject to ravishment, ruin, destruction. In the Autumn Ode, the dying of the day and the disappearance of the season herself are quieter versions of the dissolution of Lamia or Collins’ Evening. In the evening of ‘‘To Autumn,’’ a human death can be considered as a natural event, like a day or season; and conversely, the end of a day can be invested with the pathos of a human death. It is perhaps this hovering on the threshold of a metaphor, between one form of ending and another, that Keats had in mind when he thought that in the future he should like to leave his reader in a ‘‘Luxury of twilight.’’

c h ap t e r 6

Later inventions

In 1930, a thirteen-year-old aspiring writer published her ﬁrst poem, entitled ‘‘Eventide,’’ in a magazine called American Childhood: When the sun sinks behind the mountains, And the sky is besprinkled with color, And the neighboring brook is peacefully still, With a gentle, silent ripple now and then; When the ﬂowers send forth sweet odors, And the grass is uncommonly green, And the air is tranquilly sweet, And children ﬂock to their mothers’ sides, Then worry ﬂees and comforts preside For all know it is welcoming evening.1

Where Gwendolyn Brooks grew up, in Chicago, there were no mountain sunsets or purling streams, but she invented an idyll out of the language of poems she had undoubtedly read in anthologies. With its pastoral scene of children ﬂocking to their mothers, the poem recalls Blake’s ‘‘Nurse’s Song,’’ in which a governess calls home her reluctant wards at twilight; and in the sabbatarian mood shared by children and adults, it echoes Longfellow’s famous designation in ‘‘The Children’s Hour’’ of the time ‘‘[b]etween the dark and the daylight’’ when children invade their father’s study and summarily end the day’s work.2 In beginning my last chapter with this twentieth-century poem, I have gone far ahead of the post-Romantic history I wish to examine, but the anachronism of this choice has a point: the young Brooks was herself being anachronistic – imitating a descriptive and affective idiom from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry. The mature Brooks, however, realized that the poetics of evening had to change. In a poem from the 1940s called ‘‘Hattie Scott’’ (subtitled ‘‘the end of the day’’), we see how the earlier evening idiom might be revised in new contexts – postRomantic, urban, African-American. Most strikingly, the theme of poetic 177

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and pastoral labor implicated in the tradition of evening poetry is given a fresh treatment. Fifteen years after her ﬁrst derivative effort, Brooks redescribes what she had once called ‘‘welcoming evening.’’ Here, the perspective belongs to a weary domestic, one of many ﬁgures who appear in A Street in Bronzeville (1945). The point is not to describe an evening sensibility available to all, but rather to show a stubbornly particular point of view: It’s usually from the insides of the door That I takes my peeks at the sun Pullin’ off his clothes and callin’ it a day. ’Cause I’m gettin’ the dishes done About that time. Not that I couldn’t Sneak out on the back porch a bit, But the sun and me’s the same, could be: Cap the job, then to hell with it. No lollin’ around the old work-place But off, spite of somethin’ to see. Yes, off, until time when the sun comes back. Then it’s wearily back for me.3

As an evening poem, Hattie’s lyrical monologue is remarkable for its unsentimental refusal of the aesthetic and affective values dutifully exempliﬁed by ‘‘Eventide’’: no beauty and no rest. The sunset is glimpsed from a perspective of indoor conﬁnement; and the pleasant lingering typically associated with evening (here, porch-sitting or ‘‘lollin’ around’’) is rejected as a frivolous postponement of the working day’s end. Brooks’s most brilliant revisionary stroke is to imagine the sun, whose setting calls Virgilian shepherds home, as just another working stiff. And yet it is no ordinary worker: when the sun ‘‘calls it a day,’’ it does so with a vocative authority unlike anyone else’s; it is the ﬁat lux incarnate, and it ‘‘calls’’ in more than one sense – naming the day as complete, declaring its own work ﬁnished, calling people home. The sun’s disrobing might be seen as an erotic prelude to the solemn arrival of a Miltonic evening, and as Hattie peeks at the show, she gets a proleptic thrill: if the sun has called it a day, she will soon get to second that motion. Tomorrow to fresh pastures new; or, in Brooks’s disenchanted language of the solar cycle, ‘‘it’s wearily back’’ for Hattie and her distant soul-mate; and neither is necessarily pleased about it. By reading ‘‘Hattie Scott’’ as taking part in the genre of evening poetry, we can see that Brooks was not only inventing a sociologically distinct persona and demotic idiom but also reworking a lyric topos. It is fair

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to say that Brooks, who knew her T.S. Eliot, invented the evening perspective of Hattie Scott in full awareness of herself as an Individual Talent modifying Tradition. In doing so, she was also taking part in a counter-tradition: the mock-pastoral that we have seen in Hogarth’s Times of the Day, Fielding’s descriptive set-pieces, and Blake’s Nurse’s Songs. Hogarth satirically adapts Renaissance iconography to refreshingly modern and familiar settings; Fielding rejects an outmoded poetic diction while ﬂaunting his facility with it; Blake reimagines the Virgilian idyll as an affair of children rather than sheep, and the pastoral space as a greensward somewhere on the south bank of the Thames; and Brooks resituates her childhood idyll in a city of adult responsibilities and concerns. Each of these artistic acts of telling the time involves forms of translation, and the replacement of temporal abstraction with historical particularity. In much the same way that Fielding turns the chaste moon into a prostitute and Hesperus into a rake, Brooks makes the sun a daylaborer in Chicago – not so much for Fielding’s satirical purposes as for an enlargement of the mimetic range of lyric utterance, a ﬁrst-person account of the ordinary occupations that Whitman had sung about in the previous century. ‘‘Hattie Scott’’ takes part in a long tradition of evening poetry in its fundamental concern with work and time. In concluding this book, I take as a basic premise a suggestion that Robert Langbaum made about generic innovation in his study of the ‘‘poetry of experience’’: if the Romantics sought to translate the generalized descriptive idiom of eighteenth-century landscape poetry into more dramatically particular situations and settings, then their successors continued that effort in new ways.4 (Hence the dramatic monologue, a stylized version of the greater Romantic lyric – a crisis-poem in quotation marks.) When Coleridge lamented a disjunction between intellectually seeing and spiritually feeling the beauty of the evening scene in the Dejection Ode, he anticipated a post-Romantic condition. The personal crisis of numbed perception in the act of gazing at the western sky can be seen as anticipating a larger challenge of literary innovation. Poets after Coleridge and Wordsworth might see and feel an evening as beauteous, calm, and free, but how would they write about the experience in a fresh way? We have already seen how Brooks revises – implicitly criticizes – an inherited topos; and at the outset, I would outline a few deliberate strategies by which evening as traditional lyric scene might be modulated or even parodied through some form of ‘‘extraordinary perspective.’’ The prototypical solitary, nocturnal walker might be replaced with a dramatic or mythical character distinctly different from the poet. The values or

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feelings conventionally associated with twilight might be distorted: sabbatarian rest as torpor or boredom, leisurely dilation as purgatorial delay, twilight sadness as pathological mourning. In a parodic mode, the pastoral chronotope of evening might be transposed into an urban or otherwise dystopian context. Finally, the experiential scene of evening might be abstracted into a theme for meditation or a symbol of consciousness; one might self-consciously write a poem about evening rather than an evening poem tout court. The full range of post-Romantic evening poetry exceeds the scope of this chapter; but I would like brieﬂy to discuss three poets who illustrate the tendencies I have just outlined: Tennyson, Eliot, and Stevens. Various forms of demonic exaggeration or parody often attend post-Romantic conceptions of twilight; but in the following case studies, I wish to show how evening continues to be a viable poetic category – as lyric form of perception, as verbal emblem of longing, and as privileged time of utterance and reﬂection. the evening poem in quotation marks If Tennyson was, to use Harold Bloom’s term, ‘‘belated’’ with respect to his immediate predecessors, then we can better understand this vexed relationship through the evening tradition as it appears in his poetry.5 Even before Wordsworth published his poetically conservative, recapitulatory ‘‘Evening Voluntaries’’ in 1835, Tennyson was adopting twilight scenes as self-consciously quoted poetic moments – exaggerated specimens of lyricism rather than the kind of naturalized responses represented in such poems as Wordsworth’s ‘‘beauteous evening’’ sonnet or Coleridge’s ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower.’’ Whereas Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley had all apprenticed by writing twilight idyllia drawn from the idiom of Sensibility, Tennyson adopts a markedly different stance. In terms of literary innovation, it is not possible for him to write a meditative poem in which he wanders abroad at nightfall savoring the breezes and scents, the harmonies of nightingale and drowsy beetle, the celestial progression of evening star and moon. Instead, evening becomes a consciously manipulated trope, a mediated experience, a backdrop always seen through the frame of literary history. I would like to examine Tennyson’s quotational strategies in three exemplary lyrics: ‘‘Mariana’’ (from the 1830 Poems Chieﬂy Lyrical ); ‘‘The Lotos-Eaters’’ (from the 1832 volume); and ‘‘Ulysses’’ (from the 1842 volume).6 In each case, I will show how the values of temporal dilation and delay traditionally associated with evening become magniﬁed – often to hyperbolic extremes – in these lyrics.

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‘‘Mariana’’ can be read as a nightmarishly exaggerated version of an eighteenth-century lyric of nocturnal melancholy. An attentive student of Sensibility, Tennyson borrows the conventional association of eveningdew with lachrymal effusion and turns it into an endless condition without relief: Mariana’s tears fall ‘‘with the dews at even,’’ but also ‘‘ere the dews were dried’’; and in truth, she cannot look upon the heavens at either morn or eventide. Given this picture of unrelieved suffering, the narrator’s remark in the ﬁnal stanza that Mariana despises evening in particular might come as a surprise: but most she loathed the hour When the thick-moted sunbeam lay Athwart the chambers, and the day Was sloping toward his western bower. Then, said she, ‘I am very dreary, He will not come,’ she said; She wept, ‘I am aweary, aweary, Oh God, that I were dead!’ (77–84)

It might otherwise seem that the perpetually depressed Mariana hates all times of day equally. Indeed, her extreme agitation throughout the diurnal cycle constitutes a vehement rebuttal to famous hymns of seasonal and temporal catholicity: Eve’s declaration to Adam in Paradise Lost, ‘‘All seasons and their change, all please alike’’; Coleridge’s prayer for his son in ‘‘Frost at Midnight,’’ ‘‘Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee’’; and Wordsworth’s blessing on his sister in ‘‘Tintern Abbey,’’ ‘‘Let the moon shine on thee in thy solitary walk.’’ Why, then, would Mariana despise evening in particular? If she does hate it above all other times, she might do so for reasons that Romantic poets, in the tradition of Milton, valued it: its temporal dilation, its becalmed, breathless pause. It is precisely at this moment of heightened sensitivity to change – particularly the compensatory replacement of daylight sights by twilight sounds – that Mariana feels so aggrieved. The diurnal threshold at which the passage of time is acutely felt thus becomes a way of marking an unbearable succession of days. Internally, nothing changes, and externally, Mariana’s lover never arrives; whatever other atmospheric nuances can be observed outside her window are of no interest. The time of day that has traditionally heralded either a closure or a point of departure does not inaugurate either of these things here. More subtly, the narrator’s designation of evening as Mariana’s least favorite time constitutes a demonic inversion of the traditional privileging of it as special or holy. It may be that Mariana suffers from a constant state of

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boredom, but the narrator’s temporal syntax plays a kind of poetic joke: in parodic counterpoint to the enunciatory ‘‘now’’ of earlier evening lyrics, there is only a ﬁnal, anticlimactic ‘‘then’’ to punctuate a lament that Mariana makes at all times, in all seasons. The sense of meaningless repetition or time-sickness in ‘‘Mariana’’ is made acute by its pointed borrowing of an earlier temporal idiom. As in Coleridge’s Dejection Ode, evening in ‘‘Mariana’’ serves as a touchstone of the beautiful – a moment of the day that should soothe but only vexes. This contrast between conventional and actual response is enacted in the stanzaic structure: eight lines of descriptive narration and four lines of the title character’s weary refrain. The narrative parts of each stanza give us the sense of movement and change, the cycle of day and night, in counterpoint to the dreary continuo of Mariana’s invariable lament: ‘‘I am aweary, aweary, / I would that I were dead!’’ Tennyson, then, refracts the nocturnal conventions of his predecessors through the prism of an incurable malaise. It is as if he were writing a compendium of motifs from other poems to indicate the kind of poem that this is not. The dusk-to-dawn vigil of Milton’s Penseroso becomes an endlessly tormenting dream, and the convention of the contemplative evening walk becomes an emblem of pointless wandering ‘‘without hope of change, / In sleep she seem’d to walk forlorn / Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn’’ (29–31). The bat that punctuates the stillness of Collins’ ‘‘Ode to Evening’’ becomes an annoyance not worth regarding from Mariana’s curtained window; and the twittering swallows of Keats’s Autumn Ode metamorphose into a sparrow on the roof whose chirping cacophonously merges with the indoor, mechanical sound of the slow clock ticking.7 ‘‘The Lotos-Eaters’’ makes a hedonistic counterpoint to the anhedonic ‘‘Mariana’’ – another way of representing a sense of time unarticulated by milestones or motifs of closure. In essence, whereas the ﬁgure of Mariana is anti-evening, Ulysses’ torpid crewmen and their island hosts are staunchly pro-evening: they have found a dwelling in ‘‘a land / In which it seeme`d always afternoon’’ (3–4). While Mariana cannot appreciate the beauty of her surroundings, the Lotos-Eaters are exquisitely sensitive to them, to their endless distraction. If Mariana hates the pregnant hour of the slanting sun because it reminds her that her whole life is one interminably long moment of suspension, the Lotos-Eaters love this time precisely because of its dilatory nature. They sing their choric song when ‘‘the charme`d sunset linger’d low adown / In the red West’’ (19–20); and it is this emblematic moment that marks the difference between what they were and what they have become. This is traditionally the time for the

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laborer to head home from his day of toil, but that signiﬁcance is doubly subverted: the Lotos-Eaters have not done a shred of work on this day or any other since they came to the island, and home in any case is just a distant memory. Their song says as much: ‘‘Our island home / Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam’’ (44–5). Rather than serving as beacon of closure, the setting sun seems to stand still, only to be absorbed into an ongoing reverie when the men imagine that consciousness itself might be like this twilight that never seems to fade: ‘‘To dream and dream, like yonder amber light, / Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height’’ (102–3). The deictic gesture to ‘‘yonder’’ sunset indicates a moment in which Virgilian shepherds would end their song; but these singers are utterly oblivious to the signal. In this perfect equilibrium between the amber light of day and the internal twilight of the mind, there is no possibility of cathartic closure of the sort we ﬁnd in ‘‘Lycidas,’’ where the setting sun reminds the pastoral elegist to end his dirge. It is precisely this pastoral trope – along with its Romantic incarnations – that informs the temporal structure of ‘‘Ulysses.’’ The mimetic question of whether an ancient Greek sailor would put to sea at nightfall, as Ulysses proposes, has been answered by Dwight Culler in allegorical terms: the nocturnal journey signiﬁes a ‘‘voyage into Death.’’8 Since Tennyson wrote the poem soon after Arthur Hallam’s death in 1833, this symbolic resonance is unavoidable; but I would argue that the twilight ending of ‘‘Ulysses,’’ like that of ‘‘Adonais,’’ need not be construed solely in these ultimate and deﬁnitive terms. In echo of the chiasmus between outwardbound poetic speaker and homeward-turning laborer in Gray’s Elegy, Ulysses declares his intention to begin his voyage when domestic-minded Ithacans are thinking of bed. The historical matter of nautical custom, in other words, is overlaid by the literary tradition of meditative lyric speakers situated at some liminal extremity – in a bower, at a shoreline, or outside of a village, usually at dusk. In ‘‘Ulysses,’’ however, this chronotope becomes a boundary to be crossed: rather than expressing contentment in this mode of stationary, twilight reverie, Tennyson’s speaker articulates a gnawing restlessness. And yet, like the ﬁgures in Waiting for Godot who make a crepuscular resolution to depart after long talking, Ulysses goes nowhere; and he might in any case be speaking only to himself. The symbolic signiﬁcance of a nocturnal voyage as deathward journey is worth considering, but the true literary inventiveness of the poem lies in its adoption of evening as quintessential time of lyric reﬂection. This is a solitary twilight meditation that aspires toward oratory (if only there were an audience) and ﬁnally toward the replacement of

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thought and speech by action (if only Ulysses’ will were not limited by circumstances beyond his control). Evening appears in two forms in ‘‘Ulysses,’’ the metaphorical and the actual. As a trope, it signiﬁes an ever-inaccessible Hesperian realm ‘‘whose margin fades / For ever and for ever.’’ In a poem such as Wordsworth’s An Evening Walk, the literal fading of the day necessitates a sharpening of perception, a new acuity of vision and hearing; but in ‘‘Ulysses,’’ a mythical form of fading stands for all that recedes beyond the speaker’s grasp. It is only toward the end of the poem that the actual twilight is acknowledged; and it comes, as it does to Virgil’s shepherds, as a shock of mild surprise – the interruption of a reverie. In light of pastoral tradition and its Romantic manifestations (as in Coleridge’s conversation-poems), it is striking that this interruption does not herald a movement toward home. If anything, Ulysses stations himself in time and space only to declare his desire to be elsewhere. First, he contemptuously gestures to ‘‘this still hearth’’ and ‘‘these barren’’ crags, in parodic inversion of Wordsworth’s cheerful deixis of sentimental return in ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’; then he introduces his son; and ﬁnally he looks to his waiting vessel and realizes that night is coming on.9 The moment of Virgilian closure, then, becomes the occasion for departure, in a string of atmospheric declaratives reminiscent of the end of ‘‘Lycidas’’: ‘‘The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: / The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs: the deep / Moans round with many voices’’ (54–6). Both Mariana and the LotosEaters are obsessed with their immediate surroundings, but Ulysses only belatedly acknowledges his time and place; and it is in this moment of stationing that he articulates the urgency of leaving it all behind. It is ﬁtting that one of Tennyson’s last poems should be an evening poem – a poem he wrote after recovering from a serious illness. Tennyson insisted on his deathbed three years later that this valedictory lyric be placed at the end of all subsequent editions of his poetry – a request that has ever since been honored. The poem is ‘‘Crossing the Bar’’ (1889), with its allegorical movement from ‘‘[s]unset and evening star’’ to ‘‘[t]wilight and evening bell, / And after that the dark’’ (1, 9–10). Unlike ‘‘Mariana’’ or ‘‘The Lotos-Eaters,’’ the poem conceives of evening as the sign of an endpoint rather than as an interminable limbo; and unlike ‘‘Ulysses,’’ it gestures not toward an immediate approach of nightfall, but rather toward some metaphorical twilight in the indeterminate future (‘‘when I put out to sea’’). The possibility that Ulysses is speaking only to himself becomes more acute in light of this late poem, in which the speaker truly cannot bring anyone along on the journey. Here, Tennyson does not

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mediate his lyric utterance through some mythical ﬁgure but rather delivers it very nearly in propria persona. He becomes Ulysses, we might say, and the Hesperian locus of his destination takes on Christian signiﬁcance. I have said that evening in Tennyson’s earlier poems is a deliberately quoted literary moment – a poetic afterimage of twilights from Virgil, Milton, and the Romantics. In ‘‘Crossing the Bar,’’ evening is given a further inﬂection: the emblematic pastoral twilight of homeward movement is crossed with the Pauline metaphor, ‘‘For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face’’ (1 Corinthians 13:12). In effect, Tennyson substitutes the word ‘‘evening’’ for the dusky ‘‘glass’’; and thus he writes a moving postscript to a long engagement with a complex – and only seemingly exhausted – poetic tradition. eliot and the twilights of modernism If evening was to be a viable setting and subject in the poetry of the twentieth century, it had to be, as Brooks’s poem reminds us, made new. By the end of the nineteenth century, twilight had itself entered its own twilight of poetic depletion. To give a brief example of this condition, I cite the poetry of Edward Dowden, eminent commentator on Shakespeare and biographer of Shelley, who favored evening settings strongly derivative of his Romantic predecessors. The sonnet-like idyll, ‘‘In the Twilight’’ (1878), for instance, is set in a city, but it follows a familiar vespertinal path. The speaker walks ‘‘along the city’s edges grey,’’ brooding over ‘‘plots and plans, and counterplans and plots’’ (3–4), utterly oblivious to ‘‘the darkening autumn day,’’ until the evening star wakes him from his torpor: ‘‘I let thy beauty make me great; / What though the black night come’’ (11–12).10 In essence, the poem transposes the perceptual narrative of Wordsworth’s ‘‘Night-Piece’’ (1798) – in which a lone, downcast traveler is cheered by the moon’s emergence – to a nominally urban locale. Within this context, the allegorical plot of surprise acquires a new signiﬁcance – that of discovering an ancient celestial symbol above a modern city. Indeed, amid the growing haze of ‘‘light pollution’’ above the city after Dowden’s time, the bright evening star would become not only the ﬁrst but also one of the only clearly visible astral bodies in the night sky. In its own modest way, Dowden’s lyric represents an attempt to translate an older poetic idiom into a new context; under a Romantic rubric of invention, it might be classiﬁed as an effort of Fancy – a simple dislocation of a plot of evening perception from country to city. A few

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decades later, T. S. Eliot, inspired by Baudelaire, would conceive of this dislocation in richer and more complex ways. One of the most wellknown evenings of twentieth-century poetry is surely the crepuscular setting of ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’’ (1917).11 It is easy to see Prufrock, in his ruminations on the ‘‘decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse’’ (48), as a version of Dowden’s distracted speaker, with his regressive ‘‘plots and plans, and counterplans and plots’’; but Eliot pointedly withholds the epiphanic relief that Dowden readily supplies. In ‘‘Prufrock,’’ as in Eliot’s other evening poems, Hesperus never rises; and no resolution is found, unless it is in the jarring interruption of the reverie in a ﬁgurative drowning. Whereas Dowden tepidly transposes the Romantic plot of evening perception to an urban locale, Eliot vigorously reinterprets a lyric donne´e. I began this book by suggesting that Wordsworth’s ‘‘It is a beauteous evening’’ synthesized the values and associations that evening had acquired in the eighteenth century. Nearly a century later, ‘‘Prufrock’’ performs a similar function in that it echoes and revises the Romantic poetics of evening embodied in Wordsworth’s sonnet. Like Wordsworth’s poem, it represents an evening walk and addresses an auditor; but the walk winds through unsavory urban streets, and the auditor might be a Freudian fragment of the speaker himself. Whereas Wordsworth likened the hush of evening to the quietness of a nun, Eliot invents a simile that both repeats and mocks that quiescence: in a trope reminiscent of Metaphysical conceits and suggestive of Imagism, he famously compares evening in its supine extension across the sky to ‘‘a patient etherised upon a table’’ (3). Beyond exerting an aesthetic shock-effect that we now associate with Modernism, the image bears an internal resonance between surgical anaesthetic and the ‘‘ether’’ of the evening sky, while it draws upon a poetics of evening personiﬁcation. Twisting Collins’ conception of a cyclically returning, ever-chaste and elusive goddess, Eliot imagines evening as a thing whose corners can be licked by a feline tongue of yellow city fog, a creature stroked by mysterious ‘‘long ﬁngers’’ and calmed into torpor or sleep. In its personiﬁed essence, the evening bears more than a passing resemblance to Prufrock himself: dilatory, hovering, everreturning, fading away. If evening was typically associated with the positive value of melancholy in the poetry of Sensibility, it becomes aligned in Eliot’s poetry with the neutral state of boredom – a condition unthinkable in the Romantic lyrics I have examined thus far.12 In effect, the traditional sigh of tranquility, rest, or nostalgic recollection is modulated into a Byronic yawn.

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As we know from Christopher Ricks’s exhaustively annotated edition of Eliot’s juvenilia, the ﬁrst draft version of the poem was entitled ‘‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’’ in allusion to the Pervigilium Veneris – a lover’s hymn from the Latin Anthology, purportedly sung on the eve of the spring festival of Venus.13 This local reference gives us a better idea of why the poem might be called a ‘‘love song,’’ but its evening setting ought to be understood within a larger poetic tradition. The temporal frame of ‘‘Prufrock’’ is not so much an all-night vigil as a hovering on a twilight threshold, punctuated by the refrain, ‘‘There will be time.’’ Even as he expresses the evening ethos of interminable lingering, the speaker situates himself in a moment when the lapse of time is most acutely felt; and the temporal construction of this moment as a ﬂeeting aperture in the day (‘‘while the evening is spread against the sky’’) is not far from the brief enunciatory threshold of Collins’ Ode (‘‘while now the bright-hair’d sun / Sits in yon western Tent’’ [5–6]). But whereas the crepuscular pause had signiﬁed sabbatarian rest, odal devotion, and spiritual rejuvenation to Collins and Wordsworth, it is framed as debilitating procrastination in ‘‘Prufrock.’’ Evening, as the operating-table metaphor might imply, becomes associated with a sort of pathology. Three other poems in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) feature evening settings, all pointedly urban: ‘‘Preludes,’’ ‘‘The Boston Evening Transcript,’’ ‘‘Portrait of a Lady.’’ All four descend from the Parisian tableaux of Baudelaire, who virtually created the genre of urban evening walk in ‘‘Le Cre´puscule du Soir.’’14 It is here that Eliot learns the juxtaposition of the beauty and serenity of twilight with tawdry and menacing images of the city: Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel; Il vient comme un complice, a` pas de loup; le ciel Se ferme lentement comme une grande alcoˆve, Et l’homme impatient se change en beˆte fauve. O soir, aimable soir, de´sire´ par celui Dont les bras, sans mentir, peuvent dire: Aujourd’hui Nous avons travaille´!

(1–7)15

[It comes as an accomplice, stealthily, the lovely hour that is the felon’s friend; the sky, like curtains round a bed, draws close, and man prepares to become a beast of prey. Longed for by those whose aching arms confess: we earned our daily bread.]

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The epithetic dissonance between ‘‘soir charmant’’ and ‘‘ami du criminel,’’ the animation of night as predator, and the corresponding metamorphosis of man into beast – these are the elements of Eliot’s own poetics of evening. In his conceit of evening as wolf, Baudelaire translates a pastoral element of nocturnal danger into a scene of urban menace, and echoes a French idiomatic expression for the betweenness of twilight, ‘‘entre le chien et le loup’’ (between dog and wolf ). In marking the disjunction between fatigued laborers and the restless, insomniac speaker, he echoes the chiasmus in Gray’s Elegy between the weary plowman who heads home and the reﬂective elegist who lingers abroad. While a country churchyard functions as the quasi-pastoral chronotope for Gray’s meditation on the common fate of humanity, a hospital serves that purpose in Baudelaire’s crepuscular reverie: Recueille-toi, mon aˆme, en ce grave moment, Et ferme ton oreille a` ce rugissement. C’est l’heure ou` les douleurs des malades s’aigrissent! La sombre Nuit les prend a` la gorge; ils ﬁnissent Leur destine´e et vont vers le gouffre commun; L’hoˆpital se remplit de leurs soupirs. (29–34)

[This is the hour to compose yourself, my soul; ignore the noise they make; avert your eyes. Now comes the time when invalids grow worse and darkness takes them by the throat; they end their fate in the usual way, and all their sighs turn hospitals into a cave of the winds.]

The ‘‘charming’’ soir has turned into a smothering Nuit, and the soothing breezes of poetic tradition become the sighs of dying hospital patients, gathered into one common abyss. In a further symbolic wrinkle, the naturalistic fact of these patients’ suffering becomes, in ‘‘Prufrock,’’ an imagistic shock-effect – a metaphor that wittily conjures evening tranquillity even as it surprises the reader by its strangeness. ‘‘Le Cre´puscule du Soir’’ can thus be read as a post-Romantic evening lyric; and Eliot himself, long after he had ﬁrst absorbed Baudelaire’s poetry, made a similar suggestion in a 1930 essay in which he identiﬁed his predecessor as ‘‘inevitably the offspring of Romanticism, and by his nature the ﬁrst counter-Romantic in poetry.’’16 In particular, he identiﬁes Baudelaire’s poem ‘‘Le Guignon’’ as a French version of Gray’s Elegy. As Eliot remarks, ‘‘Baudelaire gave to French poets as generously as he borrowed from English and American poets.’’ Like many observations

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in this revealing essay, the homage can be read as a veiled selfdescription: Eliot himself borrowed from American, English, and French poetry; and he, too, might be described as a counter-Romantic who modulated, rather than entirely abandoning, the conventions of his predecessors. Eliot suggests that ‘‘every poet’s stock of imagery is circumscribed somewhere’’; and while Baudelaire’s repertoire of prostitutes, cats, and corpses ‘‘has not worn very well,’’ the poet ‘‘gave new possibilities to poetry in a new stock of imagery of contemporary life,’’ and elevated that imagery ‘‘to the ﬁrst intensity.’’ A similar statement might be made about the poems of Eliot’s ﬁrst volume: if their devices of fog, smoke, newspapers, and streetlamps now seem like atmospheric mannerism, they nevertheless revitalized the poetics of an evening walk. Eliot’s poems ask to be read not only with reference to ‘‘Cre´puscule du Soir’’ or the Pervigilium Veneris, but also, under the synchronic rubric of ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’’ within a larger tradition of evening lyrics. For Eliot, the word ‘‘evening’’ is an inherently poetic word that echoes traditional associations with serene meditation and valedictory nostalgia – associations that are always given a plangent foil. ‘‘Preludes,’’ for instance, begins with a counterpoint between an abstract poetic time and the consciousness of a clock-watching urban worker: ‘‘The winter evening settles down / With smell of steaks in passageways. / Six o’clock’’ (1–3). Like Collins’ odal deity, Eliot’s evening is both a setting and a quasihuman ﬁgure: the action of ‘‘settling down’’ describes both the fall of darkness on a city and the relaxation of those who heed its call. Lyrical description is balanced against novelistic reality-effect – ‘‘winter evening’’ against ‘‘six o’clock’’ – in an echo of Henry Fielding’s counterpoint between an elaborate hesperean set-piece and the curt translation, ‘‘In a word, the clock struck ﬁve.’’ Most strikingly, Eliot borrows the temporal syntax of Virgilian eclogue – the et iam of the setting sun and lengthening shadows, and applies it to a muddily Swiftian city shower and the surrogate light of gas lamps: And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps. (5–13)

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What had once been the lyric adverb of temporal suspension and rapt attention appears within a succession of anticlimactic events: now a cloudburst, then the usual lamps. When Coleridge wished to mock the urban poet who wrote of nightingales, he depicted a similar scene – the view from a garret window of ‘‘the faint lamp-beam on the kennell’d mud’’ (4), and the cry of watchmen, ‘‘those hoarse unfeather’d Nightingales of Time’’ (16). If pacing watchmen replace the natural cycles of birdsong in Coleridge’s poem, the clock, the workday schedule, and the regularly delivered evening newspaper serve that function in Eliot’s. Unlike Coleridge’s nightingale-poem, however, ‘‘Preludes’’ does not present a pastoral foil to the urban setting; rather, it adapts an older descriptive syntax to the phenomenal world of the city. In my reading of Keats’s Autumn Ode, I suggested that the ‘‘now’’ of the ﬁnal stanza (‘‘and now with treble soft / The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft’’ [31– 2]) could be construed as both particular (stationing a speaker in time and space) and general (describing ongoing events), both closural and continuous; and the opening of ‘‘Preludes’’ can be read in a similar way, in that it implies a perceiver but describes the unremarkable, cyclical activities of a city at dusk. Like Keats’s adverb, Eliot’s ‘‘now’’ is selfsufﬁcient; it does not serve as background to an event of utterance or consciousness; it does not provoke a mental movement toward memory or anticipation. Completing a temporal circle, ‘‘Preludes’’ ends on the following evening, in what might be called a twilight of the spirit, a conﬂation of the darkening sky and the self: ‘‘His soul stretched tight across the skies / That fade behind a city block, / Or trampled by insistent feet / At four and ﬁve and six o’clock’’ (iii. 1–4). In that participle ‘‘stretch’d,’’ Milton’s Virgilian description in ‘‘Lycidas’’ of lengthening shadows takes on a darker resonance of physically tense weariness; and the insistent time-keeping of the clock again replaces pastoral rhythms. It is the regularity of newspaper-delivery that marks time in ‘‘The Boston Evening Transcript.’’ Superﬁcially, the poem might be interpreted as bluntly contrasting Cousin Harriet’s mundane ritual of newspaperreading with the speaker’s comparative sophistication: poised on the threshold of his cousin’s house, the speaker hovers between the drudgery of a social visit and a fantasy that the city street might lead him into a sparkling world of Gallic witticisms: The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript Sway in the wind like a ﬁeld of ripe corn. When evening quickens faintly in the street,

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Wakening the appetites of life in some And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript, I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning Wearily, as one would turn to nod goodbye to La Rochefoucauld, If the street were time and he at the end of the street, And I say, ‘‘Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript.’’

The poem is more than a satire of daily ritual, however; it is also a reverie on the word ‘‘evening.’’ Notably in such a short poem, the name ‘‘Boston Evening Transcript’’ is mentioned three times, in addition to the single word ‘‘evening’’ in the ﬁrst line. This repetition becomes a kind of mantra that reﬂects Cousin Harriet’s daily ritual, a secular form of Vespers. It also represents a comic progression from langue (a world of people who read the newspaper) to anticlimactic parole (the speaker’s destined announcement). Instead of hailing evening, like Collins’ odal celebrant, the speaker announces the arrival of the evening paper. To borrow Paul Vale´ry’s categories of ordinary and poetic language, I would suggest that there are two shadings of the word ‘‘evening’’ here: the lyrical sense that I have already alluded to, and the mundane sense of the regularity promised in the newspaper’s title. On the one hand, evening ‘‘quickens faintly in the street,’’ and beckons the speaker to other realms; on the other, it ceases to be a meaningful word in itself and is absorbed into a verbal unit, a brand name. There is both an interior, ineffable experience of evening and an ofﬁcial evening ‘‘transcript’’ of the day’s events. A dream of evening’s romance lies dormant within the familiar banner of a newspaper. In their naturalistic deﬂation, Eliot’s urban evenings recall the parodic mode of Augustan mock-pastoral; and yet they are often tinged with something like a genuine yearning. The several poetic senses of evening that I have articulated come together most poignantly in the tryst between the young man and the typist in the ‘‘Fire Sermon’’ section of The Waste Land. The episode occurs at the ‘‘violet hour’’ – an epithetic coinage whose hue suggests the conventionally picturesque and lyrically beautiful. In his notes to the poem, Eliot cites a fragment from Sappho about ﬁshermen returning at nightfall as the source for his reference to ‘‘the evening hour that strives / Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea’’ (220–1). But, like many of Eliot’s notes, this one tells only part of the story. The moment also has a distinctly pastoral inﬂection reminiscent of the opening of Gray’s Elegy: ‘‘The plowman homeward plods his weary way, / And leaves the world to darkness and to me.’’ Like Gray’s elegist, the omniscient narrator, Tiresias, marks the time when workers – sailors, typists, house agent’s

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clerks – cease their labors. Just as Gray’s pastoral elegist imagines the lives of the anonymous village dead, Tiresias wanders London at nightfall and contemplates its inhabitants as if they were already dead. Despite the distancing effect of Tiresias’ narration, the episode is a closely observed representation of the routine of an urban evening that far surpasses any in the Prufrock volume, and it is surely informed by Eliot’s own work experiences in the time since he ﬁrst began writing his evening sketches of Boston and Paris. In Eliot’s parodic conception, the valedictory signiﬁcance of ‘‘the sun’s last rays’’ is here mockingly subverted: the sunset is registered only in its effect on the typist’s undergarments hung out to dry; and its ﬁnal light and warmth are feebly extended in the lighting of the stove. After the joyless sex act is over, the young house agent’s clerk homeward plods his weary way – ‘‘ﬁnding the stairs unlit’’ as he stumbles out of the apartment. The episode thus traces a subtle temporal arc, from sunset to utter darkness – both described in the cramped indoor context of an urban apartment. This progress recalls the temporal mimesis of Spenser’s ‘‘Epithalamion,’’ even as Eliot speciﬁcally invokes the famous refrain of the ‘‘Prothalamion,’’ ‘‘Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.’’ Spenser’s poem, spoken by the bridegroom, observes the onset of the nuptial evening and ends the following dawn; but Eliot’s cruelly parodic version – which decidedly does not celebrate the Protestant ideal of married love – lasts not even half as long. Indeed, the anticipatory sequence of processual nows in the ‘‘Epithalamion’’ (‘‘My love is now awake’’ [92], ‘‘Come now ye damzels’’ [96], ‘‘Now is my love all ready forth to come’’ [110]) is collapsed into the desolate last words of the typist: ‘‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over’’ (52). This, then, is Eliot’s post-Romantic poetics of evening, ﬁltered through the sensibility of Baudelaire; and after the potential beauty of the ‘‘violet hour’’ is drained away by the shabbiness of the typist’s assignation, it is given an apocalyptic overtone at the end of the poem, with Eliot’s prophetic vision of cities crumbling in ‘‘the violet air’’ (215), and ‘‘bats with baby faces in the violet light’’ (379). Here, the violet hour turns violent: the very hue of the sky might be the refractive effect of smoke and dust, and the emblematic creature of night-wandering – the bat that ‘‘ﬂits by on leathern wing’’ at the beginning of Collins’ ‘‘Ode to Evening’’ – becomes a ﬁgure of menace. In a peculiar and haunting way, the twilight of the ﬁnal section of The Waste Land evokes something of the spirit of older evening poetry: it is a threshold, a site of destruction and potential renewal, of ambiguous endings and beginnings – and Eliot’s enigmatic

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statement suggests this: ‘‘Only at nightfall, aetheral rumours / Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus’’ (415–16). Only when the trials of the day are over, in other words, does a fantasy of rejuvenation take shape; but even this scenario – the restoration of a deposed autocrat, not the mythical healing of a ﬁsher-king – fails to provide a thoroughly comforting resolution. Eliot’s evenings in Prufrock and in The Waste Land are quintessentially modernist in several ways: the symbolic association with exhaustion and ennui, both personal and historical (the ﬁn de sie`cle anxieties of the new century); the surprising juxtaposition of the traditionally lyrical with the naturalistic; and the displacement of a pastoral trope into pointedly urban settings. Around the same time of these poems, Jean Toomer found a different way to make evening new – in effect to displace the pastoral into a new pastoral setting, the American South. In ‘‘Georgia Dusk,’’ ﬁrst published in 1922 and collected in Cane (1923), Toomer writes an evening ode for African-American laborers. Its opening stanzas – with their sequence of declaratives in elegiac quatrains, its personiﬁed pageant of sky and sun, its marking of the work-day’s end, its catalogue of sounds – evoke the settings of Gray and Collins, with a difference: The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue The setting sun, too indolent to hold A lengthened tournament for ﬂashing gold, Passively darkens for night’s barbecue, A feast of moon and men and barking hounds, An orgy for some genius of the South With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth, Surprised in making folk-sounds from soul-sounds. The sawmill blows its whistle, buzz-saws stop, And silence breaks the bud of knoll and hill, Soft settling pollen where plowed lands fulﬁll Their early promise of a bumper crop.

(1–12)17

The Georgian genius loci – something like Pan with a harmonica, or a Dionysian poet with cane liquor – is ‘‘surprised’’ in making new musical idioms – worksongs and spirituals – out of the soul’s urgings; and it is implicitly delighted by the translatio studii of a Virgilian and British Romantic idiom into an African-American context. Indeed, the presiding spirit’s astonishment registers the poet’s own deliberate cultural translations – the conversion of a solitary evening hymn into a communal

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cookout, the counterpoint between the Miltonic pageant of ‘‘ﬂashing gold’’ and the preparations for a barbecue. Toomer’s reference to the barbecue has a locally particular, naturalistic effect similar to the smell of steaks in passageways in Eliot’s ‘‘Preludes’’; and yet its overall purpose is different, in that the barbecue is not only a slightly surprising word within a lyrically descriptive context but also the name for a ritual that Toomer’s poem celebrates. At the same time, there is a darker undersong to this evening lyric: the ‘‘barking hounds’’ might as easily belong to a lynch-mob; and the barbecue smoke, rising into the night air as the ‘‘blue ghosts of trees,’’ might hint at more sinister conﬂagrations. Toomer’s poem, ﬁnally, represents an un-ironic attempt to write an authentically American evening lyric and to ﬁnd new beauty in old tropes. The concluding stanzas are an odal synthesis of Collins’ ambition to sing a hymn to Evening and Whitman’s elegiac ‘‘carol’’ at the edge of an American swamp in ‘‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’’: Their voices rise . . the pine trees are guitars, Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain Their voices rise . . . the chorus of the cane Is caroling a vesper to the stars . . . O singers, resinous and soft your songs Above the sacred whisper of the pines, Give virgin lips to cornﬁeld concubines, Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs. (21–8)

It was only late in his poetic career that Eliot used a pastoral evening scene in the mode of Toomer’s lyricism, without parodic mediation. In the opening of ‘‘East Coker,’’ in The Four Quartets, Eliot adopts a chronotope reminiscent of Gray’s Elegy – a ﬁeld beyond a village, toward the end of a day: In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls Across the open ﬁeld, leaving the deep lane Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon, Where you lean against a bank while a van passes, And the deep lane insists on the direction Into the village, in the electric heat Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone. The dahlias sleep in the empty silence. Wait for the early owl.

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A familiar pastoral cadence is registered in the temporal syntax of ‘‘now’’: this is the drowsily sultry otium of Virgilian eclogue, and in the absence of a conversational companion, the speaker falls into a solitary reverie. Instead of a weary plowman, it is a van that passes the immobile speaker, and the lane, too, insinuates a homeward return to the village; but like Gray’s elegist, the speaker remains resolutely outdoors. It is only here in the shade and fading light that his historical dream-vision can take shape, and an evening of the present lapses into a midnight revel of the distant past. Like Gray reviving the memory of the anonymous villagers, Eliot summons an image of long-dead rustics, his own English ancestors; and in echo of Gray’s sermonic emblem of the paths of glory that lead to the grave, he ultimately falls into his own litany of death: ‘‘O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, / The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, / The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters’’ (3.1–3). The Four Quartets has been seen as Eliot’s most strongly Romantic poem, and this afﬁliation is particularly acute in the pastoral evening chronotope of ‘‘East Coker.’’18 It is a fundamentally conservative poetic idiom that reﬂects the poet’s theme of returning to ancestral origins: in other words, it is not only the pointedly archaic diction of the country revel (‘‘The association of man and woman in daunsinge, signifying matrimonie’’) that signiﬁes the historical but also the scenic frame of the poem itself, which hearkens to the meditative-descriptive idiom of the greater Romantic lyric. At the same time, the poem departs from the temporal and spatial speciﬁcity of ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ or ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’ in its cyclical conception of time, sponsored by the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. The setting is ﬁrst invoked in an indeﬁnite article (‘‘an open ﬁeld,’’ which might once have been the site of a house and in the future become the location of a factory), then a deﬁnite article of immediate experience (‘‘Across the open ﬁeld’’), and ﬁnally a demonstrative that points to the site of an historical reverie (‘‘In that open ﬁeld’’). Amid this temporal stream, the pastoral ‘‘now’’ serves as a momentary crystallization of perception reminiscent of an earlier lyric tradition. In his own advancing years, Eliot has come to resemble the title ﬁgure of ‘‘Portrait of a Lady,’’ who ﬁnds in ‘‘these April sunsets’’ a rejuvenating souvenir of her

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‘‘buried life’’ (51–2). It is an older Eliot who is capable of including both past and future, nostalgic memory and ongoing experience, in one temporal statement: ‘‘There is a time for the evening under starlight, / A time for the evening under lamplight / (The evening with the photograph album).’’ When Eliot anticipates a reader’s objection that he is ‘‘repeating / Something I have said before,’’ he implies the refrain from Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun. But to compare the poetics of evening in ‘‘East Coker’’ with the urban scenes of Eliot’s early poetry is to see the poet saying something new – or, rather, something very old that hauntingly returns, to borrow Emerson’s phrase, with a certain alienated majesty. ‘‘what remains at evening’’: stevens’ inventions of farewell Throughout this book, my premise has been that evening is a literary invention; and in the twentieth century this fact has been nowhere more acutely registered than in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. For Stevens, it was part of an ongoing meditation on perception and the forms of time. Like Eliot, Stevens imagined evening in urban or suburban settings, but in a less obviously parodic mode. The evenings of Prufrock and Other Observations and The Waste Land are generated by a dissonance between an older poetic register (pastoral, epithalamium) and the gritty particulars of modern life; and while that dissonance is present in Stevens’ poetry, it is less important than the ﬁnding of a new language – elemental, spare, abstract – for an experience of the ordinary. If Eliot in his earlier years was an anti-Romantic, then Stevens, as George Bornstein asserts, always aspired to be a ‘‘new Romantic’’ – a poet who scrupulously differentiated between an outmoded style and a vital current in poetry.19 Far more extensively than Eliot, Stevens sought ways of writing a post-Romantic evening lyric, in the exhaustion of a ‘‘twilight overfull / Of wormy metaphors’’ (‘‘Delightful Evening’’). No other poet of the twentieth century cared as much as Stevens did about the renovation of the evening star as poetic symbol. In one of many reﬂections on the theme, Stevens’ philosophical alter ego Professor Eucalyptus proposes, in a Shelleyan vein, that to re-create is ‘‘to say of the evening star, / The most ancient light in the most ancient sky, / That it is wholly an inner light’’ (‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’’ xxii).20 For Stevens, evening was often the occasion for reﬂection on forms of depletion or disappearance: the obsolescence of a poetic language for the beautiful, the loss of the sacred. In this way, the Romantic plot of

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perceptual adjustment is repeated in a new key: the fading of the world into darkness became a trope for the Stevensian mental exercise of diminution and subtraction. The archetypal spokesperson for this exercise is the title ﬁgure of ‘‘The Man on the Dump’’ (1942). In many ways, the poem resembles Eliot’s early urban nocturnes: it features a parodic juxtaposition (a moon rising over a city trash-heap); it describes the advent of evening in comically deﬂating terms (‘‘Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up’’); and it associates the passage of time with the printing of newspapers – the jour with the journalistic (‘‘Days pass like papers from a press’’). And yet ‘‘The Man on the Dump’’ is not so much a naturalistic cityscape in the manner of Eliot’s ‘‘Preludes’’ as a meditation on how to write a twentieth-century evening poem. The dump of the title is both an actual place, in the site-speciﬁc tradition of the greater Romantic lyric, and a purely metaphorical heap of outworn poetic devices. In this way, Stevens’ landscape is both grittily naturalistic and pointedly allegorical: the moon rises over its own discarded images and attributes, even as it illuminates a pile of tires that one might actually ﬁnd on a dump. The ﬂatly monosyllabic word ‘‘dump,’’ in its related senses as site of trash disposal and term of contempt, is of distinctly American inﬂection, and thus suits a poem preoccupied with the fate of a post-Romantic and postBritish poetry. In the archaic sense of the word, a ‘‘dump’’ (usually pluralized) is both a state of melancholy and a song about such a state, but Stevens’ poem is decidedly not sad; for all of its concern with disjecta membra, the poem is not a dejection ode. Evening poetry has always involved forms of imaginative compensation and perceptual adjustment, and accordingly, the Man on the Dump notices the effect of lunar grisaille in the ‘‘elephant colorings of tires.’’ In its dual function as ﬁgurative and literal place, the dump encodes a visual pun: after rejecting the ‘‘trash’’ of outmoded poetic devices, one ﬁnds beauty in actual trash – the poetic material of where one happens to be. No plot so narrow, to paraphrase Coleridge, be but poetry there. Unlike the bereft speaker of the Dejection Ode, the Man on the Dump can gaze at the sky and ﬁnd consolation there: while the bare evening star in its lake of cloudless blue could not rekindle Coleridge’s engagement with the world, it is precisely an aesthetic of such reduction – the nakedness of the moon in an ‘‘empty sky’’ perceived by someone who is ‘‘merely oneself’’ – that Stevens embraces. ‘‘The freshness of night has been fresh a long time,’’ Stevens observes in a curious paradox. The word ‘‘fresh’’ is immensely important in Stevens’ lexicon, and here, I take the poet to suggest two things: that the

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advent of evening has long been welcomed as a refreshment after the work of daylight; and that this fact has been poetically celebrated in ever-new ways. Whether night will continue to be ‘‘fresh’’ in a poetic sense is the open question of the poem. More subtly, Stevens allows that the ‘‘freshness of night’’ is both an immediate sensory experience and a poetic topos. The death of one god may be the death of all, in Stevens’ familiar maxim, but the literary demise of Cynthia and Hesperus does not mean that evening itself does not continue to be savored for its beauty or tranquility, with or without new language for that sense. In addressing the question of how to write a twentieth-century evening poem, then, Stevens offers several answers: to write in a mode of comic deﬂation; to insist on the naturalistic authenticity of the urban, the ugly, and the American; to reject the ‘‘trash’’ of outdated poetic tropes and images; and to ﬁnd, in a compensatory aestheticization reminiscent of ‘‘The Snow-Man,’’ a new beauty after renunciation. Stevens’ poetic strategy thus involves a double-movement of renunciation and assertion. ‘‘Evening Without Angels’’ exempliﬁes this strategy. While Collins nominated himself as solitary votary of Evening, Stevens begins by irritably rejecting this priestly role: Why seraphim like lutanists arranged Above the trees? And why the poet as Eternal chef d’orchestre? Air is air. Its vacancy glitters round us everywhere. Its sounds are not angelic syllables But our unfashioned spirits realized More sharply in more furious selves. (1–7)

Even as he rejects the hallowing of evening, however, Stevens posits the Heraclitean non-image of the air itself – without boundary or articulation, always in motion, forever new. This is in effect the still, enunciatory moment of Collins’ Ode (‘‘Now air is hushed’’ [9]) rendered as abstract statement about the natural element of aspiration and inspiration; it dispenses with Collins’ device of asking a deity for tutelage (‘‘Now teach me, Maid composed, / To breathe some soften’d strain’’ [15–16]) to assert the centrality of human audition and human speech. As its title suggests, the poem is concerned with the loss of the sacred or holy: an evening not only devoid of the Renaissance accoutrements of angels but also of a Sabbath, an Evensong, or even a nature deity. While

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the idea of air – always a potent symbol in Stevens’ poetic idiom – might suggest this absence, the poem turns it into a presence: not a vacuum but an element in which the animating force of human consciousness has its being. Even without mythological trappings, evening is inseparable from its affective coloring – part of a mental rhythm, a cadence in a fugal composition of mind and world. It is: Desire for rest, in that descending sea Of dark, which in its very darkening Is rest and silence spreading into sleep. . . . Evening, when the measure skips a beat And then another, one by one, and all To a seething minor swiftly modulate. (24–9)

This is Stevens’ way of expressing the Kantian notion of time as human intuition, the indispensable condition of consciousness; and for a poet, time takes form as music. Rather than raising a hymn to Evening, then, Stevens imagines evening as a hymn in itself, typographically scoring the vespertinal cadence with ellipses. Evening constitutes, in Bergson’s terms, a rhythm of perception. The symbolic implications of evening in Stevens’ poetry are most richly developed in the late work, ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’’ (1950). By the nature of its title, the poem recalls the site-speciﬁc greater Romantic lyric even as it asserts the generality of its occasion. Indeed, the poem theorizes its absence of speciﬁcity in the premise of the second canto, in a deictic gesture that turns inward: ‘‘Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves.’’ If so, then they are Impalpable habitations that seem to move In the movement of the colors of the mind, The far-ﬁre ﬂowing and the dim-coned bells Coming together in a sense in which we are poised, Without regard to time or where we are. (2.5–9)

In effect, Stevens elaborates the idealist implications of ‘‘Tintern Abbey,’’ in distinctly Wordsworthian language. If memory serves ‘‘a dwellingplace / For all sweet sounds and harmonies’’ (141–2) in Wordworth’s philosophy, then consciousness itself is the impalpable dwelling for Stevens. Whereas Wordsworth describes a solace taken in the recollection of a place, Stevens makes no distinction between present and past, here

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and there: what Wordsworth describes as the exilic state of living in ‘‘lonely rooms and a’mid the din / Of towns and cities’’ (24–5) becomes in Stevens’ poem a permanent condition. If, under Langbaum’s premise, the lyric that descends from the neoclassical tradition of ‘‘local poetry’’ has been engaged in a search for an ‘‘extraordinary perspective’’ (of setting, occasion, or speaking persona), then Stevens’ poem inverts that search into an abstraction of the ordinary. It is important to understand the resonance of the phrase ‘‘ordinary evening’’ in this poem. Frequently, the word ‘‘ordinary’’ carries the vaguely pejorative sense of the humdrum or boring, but in this context, it has a meaning closer to its root sense of the regular or customary. The occasion of the poem, then, is not analogous to the symbolically laden Sunday morning of Harmonium, but rather any twilight, perhaps in the middle of a working week. The experience of the repetitive and the cyclical is at the heart of this poem, and its spokesperson is ‘‘a ﬁgure like Ecclesiast’’ who ‘‘chants in the dark / A text that is an answer although obscure’’ (19.17–18) – a ﬁgure, that is, who declares that there is a time for everything, and that there is nothing new under the sun. Wordsworth was capable of designating a poem as ‘‘Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty,’’ and he could deem an otherwise ordinary evening as special or sacred by the fact and sentiment of his utterance; but Stevens avoids both claims of signiﬁcance. To understand the peculiar gravitational pull that the word ‘‘evening’’ exerts on the meaning of the poem, we might compare the effect of an alternative title: ‘‘An Ordinary Day in New Haven.’’ This slight alteration would suggest a series of events from morning to dusk, a set of social interactions, a mimetic realm verging on the novelistic. ‘‘Evening’’ offers an entirely different set of meanings: the meditative rather than the narrative, the crepuscular afterimage rather than the illusion of presence – in Stevens’ symbolic palette, ‘‘private gray’’ rather than ‘‘public green’’ (xix). Localized to an American city in the mid-twentieth century, evening also suggests the end of a day’s work, when the mind, previously occupied by the business of earning a livelihood, turns toward other things. But unlike the speaker of Baudelaire’s ‘‘Cre´puscule’’ (and the Eliotic speakers who followed in this tradition), Stevens’ persona does not remark on a difference between himself and workers who have accomplished a day’s work. Here, we do not see quite the same divide between pensive ﬂaˆneur and ‘‘ordinary’’ laborers that we see in Baudelaire’s ‘‘Cre´puscule’’ or Eliot’s Prufrock. When Stevens says, ‘‘We descend to the street and inhale a health of air / To our sepulchral hollows’’ (8.2–3), he

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describes a form of pleasure taken in a democratic social space – an evening walk that anyone might take. The central consciousness of the poem is that of an ordinary urban resident – more speciﬁcally, an older man. While the Man on the Dump faced the poetic task of renovating or replacing the poetic conventions of evening, the later poet confronts the inescapable association of dusk with mortality. The poet of ‘‘An Ordinary Evening’’ is haunted by the ﬂeeting; and the lyric intersection between a particular evening of utterance and the cyclicality of evening that is serenely negotiated in such poems as Wordsworth’s ‘‘It is a beauteous evening,’’ and Collins’ ‘‘Ode to Evening’’ is felt as a temporal ache in Stevens’ poem. Stevens cannot permit himself the same ﬁction of lyric immediacy – cannot align the ‘‘now’’ of poetic utterance with a higher, abstract order of time. Rather than making a statement akin to Wordsworth’s ‘‘It is a beauteous evening,’’ he reﬂects on the elusiveness of such moments, a constant phenomenon of disappearance that Augustine memorably described in his great meditation on time in the Confessions. At once, Stevens registers a sense of the newness in each moment and articulates an older man’s feeling of weariness behind that sense: Among time’s images, there is not one Of this present, the venerable mask above The dilapidation of dilapidations. The oldest-newest day is the newest alone. The oldest-newest night does not creak by, With lanterns, like a celestial ancientness. Silently it heaves its youthful sleep from the sea – The Oklahoman – the Italian blue Beyond the horizon with its masculine, Their eyes closed, in a young palaver of lips. And yet the wind whimpers oldly of old age In the western night. (16.1–12)

If there is no image of ‘‘this present,’’ Stevens hauntingly approximates one at the end of the canto with a chilly, autumnal image of ‘‘death’s poverty’’: It is a bough in the electric light And exhalations in the eaves, so little To indicate the total leaﬂessness. (16.16–18)

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This might be a fragmentary glimpse of the poet in the act of writing the poem: sitting in a hotel room in a town not his own, he looks up from the page to transcribe what he sees. The bough, a version of Shakespeare’s ‘‘bare ruined choir,’’ is implicated in a traditional trope of perceptual adjustment, in the replacement of twilight by the spill of an electric light.21 The lyric tradition of evening as a time of recollection takes on a particular poignancy in this poem. Here, twilight itself becomes a metaphor for memory, an afterimage of the elusive present. An ordinary day in New Haven, in all its totality of experience, is irretrievable, but a residuum of the town persists in the mind: Yet the transcripts of it when it was blue remain; And the shapes that it took in feeling, the persons that It became, the nameless, ﬂitting characters – These actors still walk in a twilight muttering lines. (20.5–8)

This is not a Wordsworthian conception of memory as the eidetic retrieval of signiﬁcant events or spots of time; it is, rather, a haunting evocation of the insigniﬁcant and anonymous – everything that ﬂickers across the retina or passes through the mind in the course of a day. In a Cartesian fantasia on the nature of reality, Stevens imagines an ordinary day in New Haven abstracted and contained within ‘‘a man, / Who sits thinking in the corners of a room’’ (20.12–13). At the same time, in his characteristic grammatical pivot of ‘‘and yet,’’ Stevens recognizes in the next canto that this impalpable, twilight conception of reality is only a partial picture, one that evades various forms of the will: the man’s own desire to leave the Cartesian room and engage with the world; the wills of other men, which make him feel the limits of his own will; and what Stevens calls ‘‘the will of wills’’ (21.3), otherwise known as Mortality or Necessity. In Stevens’ binary conception, ‘‘The sun is half the world’’ (21.3), and ‘‘what remains, // At evening, after dark, is the other half, / Lighted by space, big over those that sleep, / Of the single future of night, the single sleep’’ (23.6–9). If day represents the public, social realm of conﬂicting wills, and night intimates the long sleep of death, then evening becomes the supreme symbolic threshold for Stevens, a vestibular emblem of the no longer present but not yet vanished – in short, the essence of lyric utterance. It is a temporal space of indeﬁnite delay: ‘‘What is, uncertainly, / Desire, prolongs its adventure to create / Forms of farewell’’ (23.16–18). That farewell takes poignant form in one of Stevens’ last poems, ‘‘The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.’’ It is an evening-star lyric in

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which the star, as Professor Eucalyptus had proposed, becomes an inner light. Light the ﬁrst light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good. (1–3)

Or perhaps Stevens’ interior paramour treats the appearance of Hesperus as if it were the effect of an imaginative ﬁat lux, a poetic imperative akin to Coleridge’s command to the setting sun in ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower.’’ In this way, the star is both an objective, endlessly recurring phenomenon and a part of the life of the spirit. The poem is, in effect, a version of ‘‘Crossing the Bar’’: instead of imagining a ﬁnal allegorical journey toward the western sky, Stevens presents a ﬁnal soliloquy – a lyric utterance on an evening that might be his last, or only an ordinary one. In truth, the two possibilities are not mutually exclusive, as Stevens well knows. It is only by understanding the signiﬁcance of evening in Stevens’ poetry as a threshold of diminution and disappearance that we can appreciate the poet’s ﬁnal gesture of consolation. Here, the Stevensian vocabulary of evening – the pure elements of light and air, the idea of a twilight space of consciousness – replaces, if only tentatively, all that has been lost: Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough. (16–18)

In the Romantic lyric, evening involves, in various ways, a plot of perceptual adjustment to a darkening world; and Stevens’ ﬁnal soliloquy, with its last word of contentment, makes an eloquent coda – one that arises not from a set of poetic donne´es but rather from something hard won and deeply felt.

Notes

introduction 1 Oscar Wilde, ‘‘The Decay of Lying,’’ in Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde, ed. Stanley Weintraub (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 196. The essay originally appeared in Nineteenth Century 25 (1889), 35–56; and it was revised and reprinted in Intentions (1891). 2 Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 300. 3 For a discussion of the pastoral signiﬁcance of otium and its implications in Epicurean and Christian thought, see Thomas Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Rosenmeyer describes otium as marking the time ‘‘when the whole of nature enters into a state of suspension, and all ﬂux, or almost all, is put to rest’’ (67). Rosenmeyer gives less consideration to the pastoral signiﬁcance of evening; but for a commentary on this subject, see Paul Alpers, The Singer of the Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 4 In this way, Wilde resolves the playfully exaggerated choice between Books and Nature that Wordsworth presents in his paired poems ‘‘Expostulation and Reply’’ and ‘‘The Tables Turned,’’ which are themselves structured by a Virgilian time-line. If, in Wordsworth’s phrase, the eye ‘‘cannot choose but see,’’ the mind cannot choose but quote and allude. I will return to these poems in my chapter on Wordsworth, when I discuss the function of evening as a form for the articulation of poetic and pastoral labor. 5 Virginia Woolf, Orlando (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956), 26–7. By this observation on the time-consciousness of an age, Woolf slyly excuses her Elizabethan protagonist’s sexual promiscuity. 6 Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). This metaphor is given a dramatic context in one of many nocturnal scenes in Macbeth. Banquo’s murderer, lying in ambush, becomes Death’s third self, in partnership with Night: ‘‘The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day; / Now spurs the lated traveller apace / To gain the timely inn ’’ (iii.iii.5–7). 7 Kenneth Burke (A Grammar of Motives [New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945], 8) has read Wordsworth’s ‘‘beauteous evening’’ sonnet as an example of what he 204

Notes to pages 3–6

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calls the scene–agent ratio: an octave of scenic description and a sestet of direct speech to the child. While Burke’s schema underlines the Petrarchan binarism of Wordsworth’s poem, it does not fully acknowledge the signiﬁcance of the exclamation, ‘‘Listen!’’ which converts atmospheric background into deliberate perceptual effort. Before the volta, then, we can mark an earlier turn typical of the poetics of evening, from the visual to the aural. In broad terms, Wordsworth’s sonnet exempliﬁes the mimetic form of what Robert Langbaum has called ‘‘the poetry of experience,’’ in which the speaker is not only a Cartesian ‘‘I’’ with thoughts and desires but also a body situated in space and time. See Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience (New York: W. W. Norton, 1957, rpt. 1963). See Northrop Frye, ‘‘Towards Deﬁning an Age of Sensibility,’’ in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 130–7. Robert Southey, Letters from England, ed. Jack Simmons (London: The Cresset Press, 1951), 111. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002). See Dustin Grifﬁn, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 73–7. Grifﬁn ﬁnds echoes of Milton’s nocturnal set-piece in the work of Alexander Pope (his translation of the Iliad), William Collins, Joseph Warton, John Dyer, and William Cowper, among others; and he attributes this literary phenomenon to what he calls ‘‘the rediscovery of the pastoral Milton’’ (73). Sean Shesgreen, Hogarth and the Times-of-the-Day Tradition (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), 19–21. See Shesgreen for a thorough interpretation of Hogarth’s series. As Shesgreen notes, the nature of time itself is changed here – ‘‘transformed from the sun’s lyrical and beneﬁcent visits to the countryside into an economic reality, an artiﬁcial and tyrannical force dominating people’s lives’’ (107). Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. R. F. Brissenden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 56 (i.8). My deﬁnition of the evening poem thus serves as a complement to Susan Stewart’s recent formulation of the nocturne or night-poem in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 255–91. While Stewart locates night poetry in Orphic and Neoplatonic traditions, I wish to describe a poetics of evening rooted in Virgilian pastoral and elaborated in the temporal narrative of Paradise Lost. The presiding spirit of the latter is not Hecate or Orpheus, but rather the Miltonic ﬁgure of ‘‘chaste Eve’’ invented by William Collins in his ‘‘Ode to Evening’’ – an apparitional Hour that pauses before vanishing. For a discussion of this sort of lyric moment, see Thomas McFarland, ‘‘Poetry and the Poem: The Structure of Poetic Content,’’ in Literary Theory and Structure, ed. Frank Brady et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press,

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1973), 81–113. McFarland calls this property of lyric poetry essentia – ‘‘[t]he moment when we most truly feel ourselves alive, and in the same awareness most feel ourselves passing into time.’’ See also Paul Fry’s notion of the ‘‘ostensive moment,’’ characterized by ‘‘that astonishment at the simple being-situated of the self among things,’’ in A Defense of Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 67. While Langbaum observed a productive tension between experience (an undifferentiated ﬂow) and event (a discrete, narratable moment), Abrams identiﬁed a formal mediation of that tension. If, as Samuel Johnson argued, ‘‘local poetry’’ such as Thomson’s The Seasons lacked a ‘‘method’’ or way of ordering ‘‘appearances subsisting all at once,’’ the greater Romantic lyric offered a procedure for doing so. See Abrams, ‘‘Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,’’ in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 527–60. Samuel Johnson made several trenchant observations on the limitations of the topographically descriptive form that he called ‘‘local poetry’’ in his essay on James Thomson. See Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, vol. iii (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 299–300. See Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,’’ in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258. Ibid., 228. See Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 204. Ricoeur cites Augustine’s illustration of time-consciousness in the recitation of a psalm. Augustine’s notion of the distentio animi, which Ricoeur describes as ‘‘measuring the movement of the human soul,’’ could equally apply to Romantic lyric. See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols., vol. i, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 14–20. Paul de Man, ‘‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’’ in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228. In his critique of the Coleridgian distinction between symbol and allegory, de Man is responding to William Wimsatt’s valorization of Romantic nature imagery as organic symbol rather than artiﬁcial analogy. See Wimsatt, ‘‘The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery’’ in The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 103–16. In light of Coleridge’s numerous twilight poems, ‘‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’’ is notable for representing the passage of time without situating itself in a particular time of day; like many of Dickinson’s lyrics, it retrospectively narrates a mental event from the perspective of an indeterminate present. In a haunting evocation of the zero-degree perspective of the dead, the phrase ‘‘earth’s diurnal course’’ names the time after Lucy’s death as purely physical revolution, without reference to discrete perceptual categories of dawn or evening, sleep or wakefulness.

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26 See ‘‘Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats’s To Autumn’’ and ‘‘Evening Star and Evening Land,’’ in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 124–46, 147–78. Hartman identiﬁes the prototype of the evening star poem as Bion’s brief hymn to Hesper. As taken up by Akenside, Blake, Coleridge, and others, this lyric genre concerns what Hartman calls the ‘‘interlunar moment’’ between the appearance of Hesper (Venus) and the rising of the moon. As both evening star (Hesper) and morning star (Phosphor), Venus symbolizes ‘‘a continuity that persists within apparent loss’’ – a persistence that Hartman relates to late eighteenth-century anxieties over literary continuity, ‘‘a great chain of poets.’’ 27 One of the most forceful announcements of the subordination of form to history was Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), in its argument that ‘‘specialized’’ studies – namely, formal analyses of various kinds – ‘‘must ﬁnd their raison d’eˆtre in the sociohistorical ground’’ (1–3). For an important caveat about the New Historicist enterprise in Romantic studies, see Alan Liu, ‘‘The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism,’’ in ELH 56:4 (1989), 721–71. Liu complicates the binary of form and context by suggesting that New Historicism itself amounts to a kind of formalism, in that it ‘‘colonizes the very world as its ‘text.’ ’’ 28 See Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and Wolfson, Formal Charges (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Wolfson makes a distinction between formalist criticism, which expresses ‘‘concern with how poetic form is articulated and valued,’’ and formalism, ‘‘an ideologically toned disciplinary commitment that prioritizes and privileges form in relation to other possible locations of value’’ (235n). 29 In the American academy, as Gerald Graff (Professing Literature [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987]) has observed, the debate over form vs. context has taken various shapes: the conﬂict between ‘‘critics’’ and ‘‘scholars’’ in the early part of the twentieth century, and, several decades later, the New Critical replacement of dominant philological and historical methods with the close reading of ‘‘the poem itself.’’ If there has been any point of agreement among critics, ‘‘it is on the principle that texts are not, after all, autonomous and self-contained, that the meaning of any text in itself depends for its comprehension on other texts and textualized frames of reference’’ (256). It is worth remembering that both Cleanth Brooks in his formalist The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) and Marjorie Levinson in her historicist Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (1986) describe their approaches as pedagogically informed experiments in interpretation and alternatives to dominant methods. Brooks ventured that it would be ‘‘interesting’’ to consider Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode as ‘‘an independent poetic structure, even to the point of forfeiting the light which his letters, his notes, and his other poems throw on difﬁcult points’’; and Levinson proposed that since the Ode had usually been read as strictly ‘‘literary,’’ it was worthwhile to ‘‘nudge the work toward a less literary register.’’ Both

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suggestions require mild qualiﬁcations: an interpretation that excludes context can only be ‘‘interesting’’ as complement to more historically informed approaches; and an historical reading functions helpfully so long as it does not distort or trivialize the formal properties of a poem. See Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), 114; and Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 100. William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936). John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957). The Wordsworthian afﬁnity to Jewish thought once noted by Lionel Trilling can be seen in a poem such as this. See Trilling, ‘‘Wordsworth and the Rabbis’’ (1950), in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, ed. Leon Wieseltier (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 178–202. See Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Smith suggests that ‘‘although temporal sequence provides the poet with an excellent principle of generation, it does not provide him with a termination point. He – his story, his poem – must, at some point, stop; but the conclusion, with respect to time alone, will always be an arbitrary one’’ (117). She notes, however, that ‘‘Lycidas’’ features what she calls ‘‘temporal punctuation’’ in the form of a sunset (129–30). In my ﬁrst chapter, I will elaborate the pastoral signiﬁcance of this moment, and in subsequent chapters will refer to its inﬂuence. See Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). As his title implies, Brown makes a pointedly teleological claim, arguing that pre-Romantic poems were ‘‘empty vessels that only their successors were able to ﬁll’’ (7). I extend the concerns of Brown’s study by drawing connections between eighteenth-century lyrics and exemplary Romantic works.

1 the pre-history of romantic time 1

Collins and Warton entertained the idea of jointly publishing their odes but ended up submitting their manuscripts to the publisher Robert Dodsley separately. Warton’s Odes on Various Subjects was published by Dodsley, and Collins’ Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects was published by Andrew Millar, both in December 1746. For commentary on these two volumes, see Richard Wendorf’s introduction to the facsimile edition of Warton’s Odes on Various Subjects (Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, 1979). 2 Joseph Addison, Spectator No. 413, in Selections from ‘‘The Tatler’’ and ‘‘The Spectator,’’ ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988), 374. 3 James Thomson, Liberty, The Castle of Indolence, and Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 11. On the genial inﬂuence of

Notes to pages 15–16

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Newton’s Opticks on the chromatic imagination and vocabulary of eighteenth-century poets, see Marjorie Hope Nicholson, Newton Demands the Muse (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1946, rpt. 1963). Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode might be said to illustrate a Romantic rather than neoclassical poetics of Newtonian color: it begins with the image of a rainbow and ends with a sunset, but both phenomena are invoked for their affective rather than purely visual signiﬁcance. The ‘‘sober colouring’’ of Wordsworth’s sunset is not to be found on any optical spectrum. William Gilpin, Observations, Relative Chieﬂy to Picturesque Beauty, 2 vols. (London, 1786), i: 162–3. ‘‘In every representation truly picturesque,’’ Gilpin insists, ‘‘the shade should greatly overbalance the light. The face of nature, under the glow of noon, has rarely this beautiful appearance. The artist therefore generally courts her charms in a morning, or an evening hour, when the shadows are deep, and extended; and when the sloping sun-beam affords rather a catching, than a glaring light.’’ Gilpin’s notions of the picturesque are informed as much by literature as by the visual arts. In the same passage in which he quotes Milton’s description of evening (175), Gilpin also echoes Satan’s nocturnal serenade to Eve, in which the moon ‘‘with more pleasing light / Shadowy sets off the face of things’’ (PL 5.43–4). See Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Philips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) esp. Part ii, sect. 3 (‘‘Obscurity’’) and Part ii, sect. 14 (‘‘Light’’). Mere light, Burke argues, is ‘‘too common a thing to make a strong impression on the mind’’; only the ‘‘sudden transition from light to darkness, or from darkness to light’’ exerts such an effect. By virtue of its gradual nature, evening therefore is not sublime. Like Gilpin’s picturesque scenes, Burke’s account of the sublimity of night is informed by Miltonic description: he cites both the ‘‘obscurity’’ of Death (PL 2.666–73) and the ‘‘majesty of darkness’’ around God’s throne (PL 2.26–7). Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, 300. Virgil’s predecessor Theocritus also ended several of his Idylls at nightfall, but Panofsky points out that when Theocritus’ shepherds break off their song they usually leave by making a joke rather than resting in the topographical eloquence of a darkening landscape. Panofsky’s aesthetic distinction between the two poets echoes the opinion of Hugh Blair, who praised Virgil for his superior reﬁnement: ‘‘The Roman discovered more of the polish, and correctness of art.’’ See Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 2 vols., ed. Harold F. Harding (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1965), ii: 348. Paul Alpers, The Singer of the Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 103. Alpers favors the word ‘‘suspension’’ because ‘‘it suggests a poised and secure contemplation of things disparate or ironically related, and yet at the same time does not imply that disparities or conﬂicts are fully resolved.’’ I am indebted to Geoffrey Hartman’s notion of a ‘‘Westering of the Spirit’’ in the mythological Progress of Poesy from East (Asiatic, Attic, Levantine) to

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West (namely, England), from Morgenland to Abendland. This movement, Hartman says, involved a domestication of the demonic genius of poetry by the genius loci of Albion – a process that manifested itself in the eighteenth-century conﬂict between the Longinian sublime and the pathetic or picturesque mode. Hartman notes that Virgil ‘‘was often considered the ﬁrst signiﬁcant way station in the Westering of the Poetical Spirit: it might almost be said that through him the idea of a Progress of Poesy became possible.’’ See ‘‘Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci’’ and ‘‘Blake and the Progress of Poesy’’ in Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 193–205, 311–36. For a discussion of pastoral otium, see Thomas Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Rosenmeyer insists that otium is not escapist (the word was originally a military term for a soldier’s leave from duty), and identiﬁes an Epicurean inﬂection: an embrace of the present moment, a denial of the objective reality of time, and an awareness that even the seeming stasis of noon is really in ﬂux (68–70). This contrapuntal relationship between evening and dawn – Hesperos and Eospheros, in Greek mythology – is exempliﬁed in a fragment from Sappho: ‘‘Hesperos, bringing all things back which bright Dawn scattered, / you bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring the child back to its mother.’’ See Andrew M. Miller, trans., Greek Lyric (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 61. In epithalamium, the nuptial procession is traditionally led by Hesperus, who delivers the bride to the bridegroom. John Dryden, trans., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Aeneis (London: printed for Jacob Tonson, at the Judges-Head in Fleetstreet, near the Inner-Temple-Gate, 1697). Dryden’s translations can also be found, with modernized spellings, in The Works of Virgil, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). All quotations from the Eclogues refer to the Loeb edition, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough and rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). In the strict economy of the Augustan couplet, Dryden sacriﬁces a literal translation of et iam in the ﬁrst Eclogue (‘‘For see, yon sunny hill the shade extends; / And curling smoke from cottages ascends’’); but rather than letting it go to waste, he transfers the phrase to the end of the sixth. See Alpers, Singer (128, 222–40) for a discussion of the tenth Eclogue, particularly regarding the reflexive nature of the poem. It is clear that Virgil’s evening shade is laden with symbolic meaning – that the poet is concerned more with the ﬁgurative shade weighing on singers than on the literal shade on crops. After all, the darkness of night is only temporary, and cannot in any literal sense be said to harm the grain. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 32, 113. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957). All citations of Milton’s poetry are from this edition.

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17 Isabel MacCaffrey (‘‘Lycidas: The Poet in a Landscape,’’ in Joseph Summers, ed., The Lyric and Dramatic Milton [New York: Columbia University Press, 1965], 89) and Paul Alpers (The Singer of the Eclogues, 240) have identiﬁed Virgil’s tenth Eclogue as the major model for ‘‘Lycidas.’’ Stanley Fish (‘‘Lycidas: A Poem Finally Anonymous,’’ in Milton’s ‘‘Lycidas’’: The Tradition and the Poem, ed. C. A. Patrides [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983], 319–40) observes that both Virgil and Milton self-consciously deploy pastoral tropes. Regarding the anonymous narrator of the last eight lines of ‘‘Lycidas,’’ Fish argues that the poem has been ‘‘impersonal’’ all along, and that Milton ‘‘gives over the conclusion of the poem to a collection of pastoral commonplaces which are not even structured into a summary statement’’ (339). 18 Description of the three primary times of day was common in classical and Renaissance poetry, as John R. Knott points out in Milton’s Pastoral Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 91. 19 See Patricia Parker, ‘‘Eve, Evening, and the Labor of Reading in Paradise Lost,’’ in English Literary Renaissance 9:2 (1979), 319–42. 20 Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 461. In historical terms, the new postlapsarian sense of temporal urgency can be traced to the fourteenth century, when the sacred reckoning of time by the canonical hours of the monasteries (Matins, Prima, Tertia, Sexta, Nona, Vespers, Compline) yielded to the secular division of the hours of the clock, in response to the commercial needs of the city (6–7). Quinones sees this shift as distinguishing the Renaissance from the Medieval (4). 21 See Joseph Summers, The Muse’s Method: An Introduction to Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 13–14. For Milton, he argues, ‘‘motion, whether physical or mental or spiritual, was the chief manifestation of vitality, that quality which, in The Christian Doctrine, he placed ﬁrst among the purely afﬁrmative attributes of God.’’ 22 Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, 3rd edn., ed. Hugh Maclean and Anne Lake Prescott (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 291. 23 See Geoffrey H. Hartman, ‘‘Reﬂections on the Evening Star,’’ in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, ed. Hartman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 110–22. 24 Dustin Grifﬁn, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 73–7. 25 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York, Oxford University Press, 1967), 35–64. Chronos is ‘‘humanly uninteresting successiveness,’’ the ticktock interval of the clock, while kairos is ‘‘an instance of what [psychologists] call ‘temporal integration,’ – our way of bundling together perception of the present, memory of the past, and perception of the future, in a common organization’’ (46). While Eve does not offer an ‘‘organization’’ or apocalyptic scheme, she does imply what Kermode calls ‘‘an escape from chronicity’’ (50).

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Notes to pages 24–27

26 Like many of Milton’s similes, this ﬁnal one has what Christopher Ricks calls ‘‘presentiment,’’ a frisson of the Fall. ‘‘Lucky the leaf unable to predict the fall,’’ Ricks says, quoting Auden; but, he adds, ‘‘man’s unluckiness is also his sense of dignity and of tragedy.’’ See Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 118–32. 27 On the lack of temporal speciﬁcation at the end, Knott argues that Milton avoids a customary evening description because it ‘‘would suggest the repose normally associated with evening in the Garden’’ (105). Earlier, however, Knott says that evening is described at Satan’s arrival precisely to show the sharp difference between tranquil scene and the tragic act to come. Under this logic, then, Milton could plausibly set the ﬁnal scene in an ordinary evening by way of making another sharp contrast. Why does he not? On the most obvious level, Milton avoids an evening scene in order to indicate that all is changed utterly. But, as I will show, there is a subtler signiﬁcance to the elaborate analogy he constructs. 28 Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, Miscellany Poems on Several Occasions (London: Printed for J.B. and Sold by Benj. Tooke at the Middle-TempleGate, William Taylor in Pater-Noster Row, James Round in Exchange-Alley, Cornhil, and John Morphew near Stationers-Hall, 1713), 179–83. All quotations of Finch, unless otherwise noted, refer to this edition. 29 William Wordsworth, Essay Supplementary to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1815), in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols., ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), iii: 73. Several Finch scholars have found Wordsworth’s praise to be a mixed blessing: on the one hand, it brought attention to a neglected female poet; on the other, it has promoted the mistaken impression that Finch was a nature poet, or even a pre-Romantic. For commentary that correctively places Finch within her literary-historical moment, see Reuben Brower, ‘‘Lady Winchilsea and the Poetic Tradition of the Seventeenth Century,’’ Studies in Philology 42 (1945), 61–80; Barbara McGovern, Anne Finch and Her Poetry (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992); Katharine Rogers, ‘‘Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea: An Augustan Woman Poet,’’ in Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979); and Charles Hinnant, The Poetry of Anne Finch (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994). 30 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 238–9. 31 Over a century ago, Myra Reynolds (The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry Between Pope and Wordsworth [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1896], 21) claimed that the ‘‘Nocturnal Reverie’’ is ‘‘the earliest poem in which we ﬁnd the beauty and something of the spiritual power of night represented.’’ More recently, in a phenomenological account of that power, Susan Stewart (Poetry and the Fate of the Senses [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002], 255–91) has placed the poem in a tradition of nocturnes with afﬁnities to Orphic hymn.

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32 Ruth Salvaggio has argued that Finch’s expressed preference for darkness and shade reﬂects an essentially feminine opposition to what she calls a masculine ‘‘Discourse of Light’’ (112) typical of the ‘‘Enlightenment mind’’ (116). (See Salvaggio’s chapter on Finch in Enlightened Absence: Neoclassical Conﬁgurations of the Feminine [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988], 105–26.) This binary opposition invites several qualiﬁcations, however. First, the scientiﬁc discourse of optics and the related tropes of illumination did not exclude an aesthetic attraction to picturesque darkness or shade, among either men or women. Second, while Finch’s poem declares a preference for darkness, it focuses, with the acuity of a Lockean empiricist, on what remains of the world to be seen in moonlight. Far from opposing contemporary discourses, the poem reﬂects them. 33 As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have shown, feminist readings of Paradise Lost that save the poem from its misogynistic implications have linked Eve with Satan as kindred rebels and visionaries, in the Romantic revisionary tradition of seeing Satan as Promethean hero. See Gilbert and Gubar’s chapter, ‘‘Milton’s Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers’’ in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Responding to Gilbert and Gubar, Joseph Wittreich (Feminist Milton [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987], 54) argues that even if women readers suspected that Milton’s defense of women was not strong enough, it was ‘‘sufﬁcient to allow women (Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea is a good example) to cast their own hopes in Miltonic dreams and to ﬁre them in the desire for a partner suited to their minds.’’ Wittreich here echoes Dustin Grifﬁn’s suggestion that Finch’s ‘‘Petition for an Absolute Retreat’’ is a ‘‘prominently Miltonic dream’’ of regaining paradise, in which the poet, like Adam, desires a mental and spiritual companion. Grifﬁn does not directly address the ‘‘Nocturnal Reverie,’’ but his general observation that ‘‘an eighteenth-century retirement poem very likely reﬂected images of Milton’s Eden’’ is relevant to my discussion of Finch’s poem. See Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 106–7. 34 For a reading of the poem in the context of Finch’s skeptical relationship to pastoral, see Ann Messenger’s chapter on Finch in Pastoral Tradition and the Female Talent (New York: AMS Press, 2001), 39–55. 35 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 227 (ii.xix.1). In 1713, when Finch published her Miscellany Poems, the word ‘‘reˆverie’’ was still an exotic enough coinage to merit a circumﬂex over the initial ‘‘e.’’ 36 In her poem ‘‘The Spleen,’’ Finch follows Milton’s example in mythically associating the Fall with personal misfortune: in Eden, the mental and the corporeal were in perfect harmony until ‘‘the ﬁrst degrading Sin’’ let Spleen into the body as its ‘‘dull attendant’’ (25–31).

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37 Carol Barash makes this point in English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714 (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1996): ‘‘For once one Milton rewrites the Bible, in some sense, can’t anyone? If the Bible was a book one could interpret and elaborate, then the one text women knew legitimately and well became a contested – and at the same time an emphatically open and negotiable – text’’ (18). On a related point, Grifﬁn notes that eighteenthcentury writers following in the Miltonic tradition often spiritualized retirement poetry by locating the true paradisal retreat within the mind or soul (Regaining Paradise, 107). 38 McGovern refers to ‘‘an air of Gothic mystery’’ in the poem (Anne Finch, 80), and Hinnant notes that ‘‘the word fear threatens to turn the scene into a spectral world of gothic chimeras’’ (Poetry of Finch, 155). 39 For a consideration of Collins’ poem within odal tradition, see Paul Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 115–25. In particular, Fry discusses the implications of personifying and addressing a cyclical natural phenomenon. For a consideration of the ways that person and personiﬁcation overlap and merge in Collins’ poems, particularly the ‘‘Ode to Fear,’’ see Steven Knapp, Personiﬁcation and the Sublime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 88. 40 The Works of William Collins, ed. Richard Wendorf and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 44–5. All subsequent quotations are from this edition. The poem was ﬁrst published in Collins’ Odes (1746) and reprinted, with revisions, in Dodsley’s Collection (1748). 41 Marshall Brown notes that Collins’ ‘‘intricate syntax has difﬁculty keeping to the point. Consciousness for him is expansive and centrifugal.’’ See Preromanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 51. 42 For a discussion of Collins’ Ode in the context of the translation of the genius loci to a native English tradition, see Hartman, ‘‘Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci.’’ Hartman points out that as genius loci, Collins’ Evening is both spirit and place, as well as a muse-like regent and ‘‘civilizing muse’’ that presides over the Abendland, the English destination of the ‘‘westering’’ spirit. As Hartman notes, there is doubt and anxiety in the poetry of Collins and his contemporaries over whether this poetic spirit has survived the journey vital and intact. 43 Brown has aptly described the ephemeral nature of Evening: she is ‘‘chaste’’ because ‘‘she is forever chased and never caught’’; she ‘‘shows forth her essence’’ in the act of leaving; and she possesses ‘‘no body, no place, no home, and therefore cannot be found’’ (Preromanticism, 53–4). To these excellent characterizations, I wish to point out the striking similarity between Evening and her poet, who also implicitly disappears from the poem, leaving a virtual home inhabited by abstractions. 44 Thomas Gray, Selected Poems of Thomas Gray and William Collins, ed. Arthur Johnston (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), 40–50. 45 Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, ed. R. P. C. Mutter (London: Penguin, 1985), 353 (viii.9).

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46 Quotations from the poem refer to The Poems of William Cowper, 2 vols., vol. ii, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 47 For a more extensive consideration of those ‘‘loop-holes,’’ see Kevis Goodman’s chapter on The Task in her book, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 67–105. I have been mainly interested in showing the lineage of pastoral temporality in evening lyrics; but, as Goodman cogently demonstrates, Cowper’s ‘‘Winter Evening’’ – a poem about domestic management and the work of interpreting the world through journalistic mediation – participates in that other Virgilian form, the georgic. 48 See the facsimile edition of Helen Maria Williams’ 1786 Poems (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1994). 49 See Hulme’s essay, ‘‘Romanticism and Classicism,’’ in Speculations, ed. Herbert Read (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, rpt. 1987), 118. 50 Warton’s petition is the Penseroso’s: ‘‘The taper’d choir, at the late hour of pray’r, / Oft let me tread, / While to th’ according voice / The manysounding organ peals on high, / The clear slow-dittied chaunt, or varied hymn, / Till all my soul is bath’d in ecstasies, / And lap’d in Paradise’’ (Poems on Various Subjects [London: Printed for G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1791), 125. Cf. ‘‘Il Penseroso’’: ‘‘There let the pealing organ blow / To the full-voiced choir below, / In service high and anthems clear, / As may with sweetness, through mine ear, / Dissolve me into ecstasies, / And bring all heaven before mine eyes’’ (161–6). 51 The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 34. All quotations of Smith’s poetry refer to this edition. 52 Mary Robinson, Selected Poems, ed. Judith Pascoe (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2000). 53 For an astute examination of this generic interplay in the eighteenth century, see G. Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Novel and Lyric in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 54 All quotations of Blake are from The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 55 For a consideration of Blake’s relation to the children’s literature of the time, including that of Isaac Watts and Anna Barbauld, see Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Glen does not mention Watts’s evening prayer, but I am indebted to her discussion of Watts as precursor and foil. 56 Isaac Watts, ‘‘Divine Song XXVI: An Evening Song,’’ Divine and Moral Songs (London, 1796).

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Notes to pages 48–50 2 coleridge’s lyric ‘‘moment’’

1

2

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4 5 6 7 8 9

Harper’s 1928 essay was the ﬁrst to apply the term ‘‘Conversation Poem’’ to lyrics other than ‘‘The Nightingale.’’ The essay is collected in English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. M. H. Abrams (London: Oxford University Press, 1975, 2nd edn.), 188–201. Harper noticed a closural gesture in the conversation poems that he called ‘‘the return’’; and W. J. Bate (Coleridge [New York: Macmillan, 1968]) suggested that this feature was symptomatic of an impulse ‘‘to return home – return to the hearth, the domestic and simple virtues, the humanly direct and unpretentious’’ (49). Bate takes Coleridge’s lyrics to be so ‘‘open’’ and unpretentious that they lack a ‘‘protective superimposed form’’ (48), but Abrams would offer a corrective to this notion in identifying the formal innovation of the ‘‘greater Romantic lyric.’’ See Anne Mellor’s chapter on Coleridge in English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 137–64. Mellor describes a tension in Coleridge’s poetry between the vision of a world in constant ﬂux and the ‘‘demand for coherent meaning.’’ Mellor focuses mainly on the ‘‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’’ ‘‘Kubla Khan,’’ and the Dejection Ode; but in a contemporaneous study, Kathleen Wheeler makes similar arguments about ‘‘The Eolian Harp,’’ describing a species of Romantic irony without speciﬁcally invoking the term. See Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1981), 65–91. M. H. Abrams, ‘‘Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,’’ in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 527–60. Albert Ge´rard offered a corollary to this formula when he suggested the metaphor of systole (contraction) and diastole (expansion) to describe the progress of Coleridge’s lyrics – a continuous pulse rather than the discrete binarism of departure and return. See Ge´rard, ‘‘The Systolic Rhythm: The Structure of Coleridge’s Conversation Poems,’’ in Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967). See Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 204. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anima Poetae, ed. E. H. Coleridge (London: Heinemann, 1895), 102–3. Harold Bloom, ‘‘Coleridge: The Anxiety of Inﬂuence,’’ in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 267. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 182 (ii.xiv.3). See the facsimile edition of Coleridge’s 1796 Poems on Various Subjects (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1990), x. As Daniel Robinson (‘‘ ‘Work Without Hope’: Anxiety and Embarrassment in Coleridge’s Sonnets,’’ Studies in Romanticism 39:1 [2000], 81–110) points

Notes to pages 50–51

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out, Coleridge’s admitted debt to Bowles masks a larger debt to ‘‘the femaledominated sonnet revival’’ (83) led by poets such as Charlotte Smith. Pointing to Coleridge’s praise of Bowles’s sonnets as ‘‘so tender yet so manly,’’ Robinson suggests that the poet felt an ‘‘embarrassment’’ about the feminization of the sonnet (84). While gender can be seen as a component of Coleridge’s anxiety, it is not the only one: Coleridge was also anxiously and apologetically aware of writing in a borrowed idiom, regardless of which predecessors he cared to acknowledge. When Robinson compares Coleridge’s early sonnet ‘‘To the Autumnal Moon’’ with Smith’s lunar poetry, he makes no mention of ‘‘Il Penseroso,’’ to which both Coleridge and Smith are surely indebted. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997), 144. All quotations of Coleridge’s poetry refer to this edition, unless otherwise noted. Coleridge’s Nehemiah Higginbottom sonnets appeared under the title, ‘‘Sonnets Attempted in the Manner of Contemporary Writers,’’ in the Monthly Magazine of November 1797. Twenty years later, Coleridge printed them in the Biographia as proof of his early recognition of various ‘‘sins’’ of contemporary poetry; in particular, the pensive evening sonnet was meant ‘‘to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism.’’ See Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2 vols., ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), i: 26–9. Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 1: 27. Paul Magnuson (Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988]) notes a connection between these poems in their Venusian symbolism: the eroticized myrtle-bower of Coleridge’s fantasy in the ‘‘Autumnal Evening’’ effusion, and the comparatively chaste myrtle and evening-star in ‘‘The Eolian Harp,’’ emblems of Love and Wisdom (146). (In Spenserian terms, we might say that the ﬁrst poem represents a licentious Bower of Bliss while the latter celebrates chastity-in-marriage.) Regarding ‘‘The Eolian Harp,’’ Magnuson suggests that the addition of the ‘‘One Life’’ passage in 1817 ‘‘requires that the emblems and similes in the ﬁrst part of the poem be disregarded as at best capricious moods that have no relation to the metaphysical speculation’’ (148). To the contrary, I would suggest that if these emblems are indeed capricious, they actually demonstrate the truth of Coleridge’s musings about the mind’s associative play with its natural environment, and that their nature as parenthetical asides suggests such mental movement. In his Epistle ‘‘Written at Shurton Bars’’ in Poems (1796) Coleridge quotes a phrase from An Evening Walk and attributes it to Wordsworth in an endnote: ‘‘The expression ‘green radiance’ is borrowed from Mr. Wordsworth, whose versiﬁcation is occasionally harsh and his diction too frequently obscure: but whom I deem unrivalled among the present day in manly sentiment, novel imagery, and vivid coloring’’ (186).

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14 For commentary on the dialogic nature of the poem, see Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry, 65–91. Rather than construing Coleridge’s ventriloquized disclaimer as a weakness, she sees it as a ‘‘framework’’ for a dialectic between the poet’s free-ﬂoating imagination and Sara’s ‘‘Urizenic’’ limitations of reason and morality. Wheeler’s Blakean reading somewhat slights Coleridge’s genuine discomfort with atheistic ramiﬁcations, as well as the poet’s skepticism about mechanistic philosophies of mind – the latter of which Paul Magnuson has articulated in Coleridge’s Nightmare Poetry (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1974), 3–5. Nevertheless, Wheeler opens the refreshing possibility that Coleridge is conscious of negotiating among various stances rather than merely falling victim to crippling self-doubt. It is this possibility that I explore in describing Coleridge’s self-conscious adaptation of the eighteenth-century evening poem. For a brief but suggestive commentary on ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ as a critique of the sensationalist component of Sensibility, see Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 19–23. 15 Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry, 70. 16 For a discussion of Coleridge’s similes, see Susan Wolfson’s chapter on Coleridge in Formal Charges (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 63–99. Against the New Critical notion of Coleridge as avatar of organic form, Wolfson argues that he was instead a kind of ‘‘double agent’’ who practiced the associative rhetoric of analogy as much as the imaginative fusion of the symbol (66). With a nod to deconstruction, she notes that in his similes ‘‘Coleridge is more prone to skepticism about ﬁgures than to a poetics of blithe equivalence’’ (86). Wolfson refers to the temporality of the simile in the rejected conclusion of ‘‘Frost at Midnight,’’ and in the course of my chapter, I elaborate on this idea in focusing on Coleridge’s representations of simultaneity and the temporal nature of poetic utterance. 17 Formal objections have been expressed by Albert Ge´rard, who ﬁnds fault with the poem for Coleridge’s awkward handling of what Harper calls ‘‘the return’’ (English Romantic Poetry [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968], 30); by Richard Haven, who ﬁnds the poem to be ‘‘imperfect’’ in its imaginative circuit of departure and return (Patterns of Consciousness: An Essay on Coleridge [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1969], 63); by J. Robert Barth, who sees ‘‘a gap, a fracture, between the almost mystical vision and the return, between the experience and its aftermath’’ (The Symbolic Imagination [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977], 30); and by M. H. Abrams (The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism [New York: W. W. Norton, 1984], 159), who sees it as a ‘‘ﬂawed example’’ of the greater Romantic lyric in comparison to the ‘‘perfection of the circuitous lyric of description and meditation in ‘Frost at Midnight.’ ’’ In a rather more sentimentalized reading, Harper suggests that Coleridge merely ‘‘steps down from the intellectual throne at the bidding of love’’ (191); but Harold Bloom reads this gesture more darkly as a failure of the imagination, a fall from

Notes to pages 54–60

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‘‘imaginative and daring poet’’ to ‘‘timidly orthodox young husband’’ (The Visionary Company [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971], 200). The sonnet to Bowles was ﬁrst published in the Morning Chronicle in December 1794. A slightly revised version appeared in collections after the 1796 Poems. For an account of Coleridge’s engagement with the tradition of nightingale poetry (especially the avian de´bat in such medieval lyrics as ‘‘The Owl and the Nightingale’’ and ‘‘The Cuckoo and the Nightingale’’), see Fred V. Randel, ‘‘Coleridge and the Contentiousness of Romantic Nightingales,’’ in Studies in Romanticism 21:1 (1982), 33–55. To add a qualiﬁcation to Randel’s discussion, I would distinguish between Milton and Milton’s eighteenth-century imitators, and between the postlapsarian nightingale of ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ and the prelapsarian nightingale of Edenic evenings in Paradise Lost. I would also point out that Milton describes the bird’s ‘‘melancholy’’ nature in ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ through a consciously deﬁned (and limited) perspective or temperament. In other words, when Coleridge says that the bird’s song seemed sad to a gloomy man, he is simply repeating the premise of Milton’s poem, not offering a critique of it. Despite Coleridge’s ambivalence about his marriage, it inspired a salutary change of poetic persona, from melancholy, night-wandering solitary to playful spouse. The creative evolution from early derivative sonnets to mature conversation poems has inspired Jack Stillinger to ask, ‘‘What happened to Coleridge?’’ and stay around for three speculative answers: the companionship of intimates to whom he could address his poems; marriage to Sara Fricker in 1795, which represented ‘‘an access of reality’’; and the beneﬁcial inﬂuence of rural Somerset, where Coleridge wrote most of his conversation poems, as well as ‘‘Kubla Khan’’ and the ‘‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’’ See Stillinger, ‘‘Pictorialism and Matter-of-Factness in Coleridge’s Poems of Somerset,’’ in The Wordsworth Circle 20:2 (1989), 62–8. The idea of imprisonment has had many metaphorical applications, of course; and I mention the Enlightenment metaphor of the mind and the Miltonic conceit of exile as the most immediately relevant contexts for understanding the trope in ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower.’’ Reeve Parker (Coleridge’s Meditative Art [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975], 15–60) sees an eschatological allegory in the poem’s pattern of conﬁnement and liberation, and discerns afﬁnities to Richard Baxter’s Puritan treatise, The Saint’s Everlasting Rest, in which the Christian is ﬁgured as earthly prisoner awaiting release into eternity. Parker suggests that without reference to such a typology, Coleridge’s ‘‘hyperbolic despair’’ in the beginning of the poem seems unwarranted (41). I would insist, however, that this despair is thoroughly Coleridgian in its humor, and related to the self-conscious parody that we see in the Nehemiah Higginbottom sonnets. If we read the opening lines of the poem as the ﬁrst stage in a total Christian allegory, we lose the dramatic (and temporal) sense of the poem as a process of thought, in which the poet comes implicitly to reject his prison-metaphor. In other words, the

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Notes to pages 60–66

poem does not begin as a sermon; it arrives at a sermonic lesson after moving through various idioms – locodescriptive, philosophical, epistolary. Thomas Warton, Sonnet V, ‘‘Written after Seeing Wilton-House,’’ in Poems on Various Subjects (London: Printed for G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1791), 109. The Spectator No. 411, in Selections from ‘‘The Tatler’’ and ‘‘The Spectator,’’ ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988), 368. See Anne Mellor, ‘‘Coleridge’s ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ and the Categories of English Landscape,’’ in Studies in Romanticism 18 (1979), 30–42. While Mellor focuses mainly on theories of the picturesque and the sublime and their painterly embodiments, I wish to show the poetic idiom that Coleridge inherited, as exempliﬁed in locodescriptive passages from Thomson and Cowper. James Thomson, The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 46–7. Thomson visited Hagley Park in 1743 and added these lines of made-to-order topographia in his 1744 revision. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 13. Biographia Literaria, i:304. See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), i:334–6. For the poem’s textual history, see Jack Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Notable revisions include: the addition of picturesque nature-description (particularly that of the roaring dell) sometime between 1797 and 1800; the omission of the identiﬁcation of Charles Lamb after 1800; and the removal of a reference to the ‘‘Almighty Spirit’’ in 1817. Such changes, Stillinger remarks, ‘‘have little bearing on the overall interpretation of the poem’’ (50), since in all of its versions it remains ‘‘one long eloquent expression of the unity of all things’’ (52). The grammatical change I have noted (which Stillinger catalogues but does not directly address) does not necessarily alter our overall interpretation of the poem, but it does give us a ﬁner sense of Coleridge’s concerns with temporality. Kathleen Wheeler notes a ‘‘mirroring effect’’ in several correspondences throughout the poem – bower and dell, walnut-tree and ash, Coleridge’s aerial vision of the rook and the friends’ emergence beneath the ‘‘wide Heaven’’ – and suggests that they illustrate the Coleridgian principle of ‘‘identity in difference’’ (The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry, 140–1). While I agree with her point about imagistic correspondences, I would emphasize their temporal dimension: the grammatical assimilation of two simultaneous experiences. The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). For another interpretation of the word ‘‘still’’ in the poem, see Kelvin Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979), 250. Everest argues that the doubleness of the word – as adjective and

Notes to pages 66–73

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adverb – ‘‘underpin[s] the development in Coleridge’s mood from static, barren introspection, to the dynamic growth in consciousness that is effected in the description of an imagined experience.’’ To say this, however, is to overlook the etymological link between the two senses and to misrepresent Coleridge’s poetic attachment to stillness, which he saw as anything but ‘‘barren.’’ The two senses of ‘‘still’’ are not mutually exclusive. Finally, to propose an evolutionary narrative from ‘‘static’’ to ‘‘dynamic’’ is to overlook the sense of persistence in the word. For a reading of the multiple and overlapping senses of the word ‘‘still’’ in lyric (and Keats’s poetry in particular), see Timothy Bahti, Ends of the Lyric (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 75–96. Bahti relates the duality of the word ‘‘still’’ (stasis and persistence, completion and process, a ‘‘no longer’’ and a ‘‘not yet’’) to the activity of reading, which is both teleological (tending toward a conclusive interpretation) and ongoing (never satisﬁed, never completed). The oscillatory motion that Bahti locates in the word is certainly to be found in ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower.’’ John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), 120–4. Paul Magnuson has argued that both ‘‘Fears in Solitude’’ and ‘‘Frost at Midnight,’’ which were published in a quarto pamphlet with ‘‘France. An Ode,’’ function as poems of ‘‘self-defense’’ – demonstrations of patriotism, Christian piety, and family-mindedness in the face of Tory attacks and government suspicion (and prosecution) of dissidents. See Magnuson, ‘‘The Shaping Spirit of ‘Fears in Solitude,’ ’’ in Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination Today, ed. Christine Gallant (New York: AMS Press, 1989); and ‘‘The Politics of ‘Frost at Midnight,’ ’’ in The Wordsworth Circle 22:1 (1991), 3–11. For an early appreciation of ‘‘Fears in Solitude,’’ see Carl Woodring, Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), 189–93. Woodring suggests that the poem is a ‘‘representative Romantic poem’’ in its subjective treatment of public themes, and in its ‘‘novel simplicity of style and structure’’ (193). That ‘‘structure’’ would later be articulated by M. H. Abrams as the ‘‘greater Romantic lyric.’’ For a consideration of the political implications of the protective shade of Virgilian retirement, see Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Biographia Literaria, ii:103. For a discussion of the role of ﬁctive auditors and the metaphysics of presence in the conversation poems, see Tilottama Rajan’s chapter, ‘‘Image and Reality in Coleridge’s Lyric Poetry,’’ in Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 204–68. Rajan makes a helpful distinction between the prophetic mode (‘‘the formal equivalent of radical idealism’’) and the conversational (‘‘dialogical and therefore inherently self-doubting’’ [220–1]), and while she does not directly address ‘‘Fears in Solitude,’’ these categories can be applied to the poem. We can characterize the poem as a prophetic utterance enclosed (and qualiﬁed) by a

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conversational frame; and in Magnuson’s terms, we can see this frame as a formal reﬂection of the political discourse in which Coleridge was immersed. The dialogue between Coleridge’s Ode and Wordsworth’s can be concisely summarized in the call-and-response of the nostalgic invocation that appears in both: ‘‘There was a time.’’ When Wordsworth utters the phrase, he describes a pastoral idyll of early childhood that is now recoverable only through an act of creative memory; but when Coleridge echoes it, he indicates a more recent period of his own life in which his resources of hope exceeded any misfortune – a time now past but perhaps soon to return. There is a difference, in other words, between Wordsworth’s irretrievable ‘‘visionary gleam’’ and Coleridge’s oscillatory ‘‘Joy,’’ which waxes and wanes, in maddeningly unaccountable ways, throughout adult life. As Harold Bloom has noted, Coleridge’s concept of continuous process constitutes a rejection of Wordsworth’s mythos of development: in the Dejection Ode, ‘‘the glory comes and goes, without relation to infancy, childhood, youth, or maturity’’ (The Visionary Company, 223). William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Arden edition, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), ii.ii.295–303. In quoting from the verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, I refer to the Collected Poems. This version is also printed in Coleridge’s ‘‘Dejection’’: The Earliest Manuscripts and the Earliest Printings, ed. Stephen Maxﬁeld Parrish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). For an analytical summary of the successive versions of the poem, see Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability, 91–9. For a study of the evening-star poem as it involves questions of literary succession and the imaginative renewal of poetic symbols, see Geoffrey H. Hartman, ‘‘Reﬂections on the Evening Star,’’ in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, 110–22. Hartman reads Coleridge’s sonnet as ‘‘anti-erotic’’ in its extreme sublimation (118). In broader terms, he sees Coleridge as ‘‘afﬂicted by secondariness as by a curse’’; and while I agree with this characterization, my intent in this chapter is to show how Coleridge’s acute consciousness of inheriting a poetic idiom informs a rhetorical strategy and conversational idiom. See Gene W. Ruoff’s reading of the poem in Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Making of the Major Lyrics, 1802–1804 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 59–103. John Ashbery, ‘‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,’’ in Selected Poems (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 190. Coleridge’s use of the word ‘‘trance,’’ in fact, suggests a relation between consciousness and the weather: in the verse letter to Sara, he describes the wind as subsiding into a ‘‘Trance of deepest Silence’’ (204), and in ‘‘Frost at Midnight’’ he hears the eave-drops ‘‘only in the trances of the blast’’ (71). The word comes from the Old French transe, or passage from life to death, which in turn springs from the Latin verb transire, to pass over or across; the French root is echoed in the now-obsolete English sense of a state of extreme dread. Since the Middle Ages, the word has indicated the condition of a swoon, a

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suspension of consciousness, or an intermediate state between sleeping and waking. For commentary on Coleridgian trance, see John Beer, ‘‘Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and the State of Trance,’’ in The Wordsworth Circle 8 (1977), 121–38; and Paul Magnuson’s comment on the transitional signiﬁcance of trance in the Dejection Ode, in Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue, 295–6.

3 wordsworth’s evening voluntaries 1

For Williams’ sonnet, see the facsimile edition of her 1786 Poems (New York: Woodstock Books, 1994). Wordsworth published his sonnet on Williams in a 1787 issue of the European Magazine, under the pseudonym of ‘‘Axiologus,’’ a Latin rendering of his surname. He never subsequently published the poem, but it is collected in Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936). All references to Wordsworth’s poetry refer to this edition, unless otherwise noted. Adela Pinch (Strange Fits of Passion [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997]) reads this sonnet as a model of Sensibility, in its ‘‘conversion of an intertextual relationship into an emotional one’’ (81). 2 For instance, Helen Darbishire (The Poet Wordsworth [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950]) calls ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ ‘‘the ﬁrst poem in which Wordsworth’s genius ﬁnds full expression’’ and sees it as a full-dress rehearsal for The Prelude (60, 144); and F. W. Bateson (Wordsworth: A Reinterpretation [London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1954]) sees it as exemplary of Wordsworth’s move ‘‘from the external object to the internal mental process’’ (140). 3 Bateson, Wordsworth, 145. 4 See Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 36. In Levinson’s argument, the historical facts that ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ elides or only partially acknowledges are these: Wordsworth’s distress over his departure from France and all that it represents (the abandonment of a lover and child, the collapse of revolutionary hopes, the war between France and England and the threat of invasion); the industrialization of the area around the Wye Valley (charcoal production, iron foundries); the presence of vagrants dislocated by traumatic social change; and the associative link between the ruined abbey and iconoclastic destruction wrought by the revolutionary regime in France. Any discussion of what Wordsworth includes or excludes, however, necessarily verges on a question of the half-empty vs. the half-full: Kenneth R. Johnston, examining the same historical evidence, commended ‘‘Wordsworth’s honesty in allowing the socio-political tensions of his poem to show through.’’ In essence, Johnston admired Wordsworth for noticing smoke in the woods, and Levinson found him evasive for not saying more about its source. See Johnston, ‘‘The Politics of ‘Tintern Abbey,’ ’’ in Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism, ed. Karl Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick: Rutgers

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Notes to pages 83–84

University Press, 1993). Johnston’s essay ﬁrst appeared in The Wordsworth Circle 14:1 (1983). M. H. Abrams (‘‘On Political Readings of Lyrical Ballads,’’ in Romantic Revolutions, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston et al. [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990]) quarrels with the assumption ‘‘that ‘Tintern Abbey’ is not only a political poem, but a political autobiography as well, and as such commits the author to tell the truth, the explicit truth, and nothing but the truth about his political experiences’’ (339). Mark Edmundson (‘‘Criticism Now: The Example of Wordsworth,’’ in Raritan 10:2 [1990], 120–41) has undercut the ´eclat of the provocative in Levinson’s claim by arguing that any autobiographical writer represses or overlooks certain historical details, and that Wordsworth’s omissions do not necessarily reveal much about ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ in particular. In a similar vein, David Bromwich (Disowned by Memory [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 69–91) sees the poem as reﬂecting Wordsworth’s transition from being ‘‘a moral thinker about society’’ to being ‘‘a moral thinker about personal experience’’ (74), and posits that it is fundamentally concerned with ‘‘the good of aesthetic sublimation’’ (73) rather than deceptively engaged in repression or mystiﬁcation. Bromwich’s essay, ‘‘The French Revolution and ‘Tintern Abbey,’ ’’ ﬁrst appeared in Raritan 10:3 (1991), 1–23. For a detailed study of the correspondence between ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ and the conversation poems, see Paul Magnuson, Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 139–76. Magnuson argues that Wordsworth deliberately revises ‘‘Frost at Midnight’’ out of a need to ‘‘assure himself of his own individuality’’ (171) and out of temperamental differences. Bromwich concludes that Wordsworth lost the competition if ‘‘delicacy of tone and cadence’’ is the standard of comparison, but he hastens to add that ‘‘the surface resemblances between the poems are a distraction’’ from a deep understanding of either (Disowned by Memory, 70). This passage can be found in Appendix B of the Poetical Works, vol. V, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 340. Wordsworth entitled the fragment, ‘‘On Returning to a Cottage, a favorite residence of the author, after a long absence.’’ The fragment has been cited by Hartman as an example of Wordsworth’s increasingly complex concern with the mediations between past and present (Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964; rpt. 1987], 167–8); by Paul Sheats as gestational writing that Wordsworth did in the year leading up to ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ (The Making of Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1785–1798 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973]); and by Mary Jacobus (Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976], 113) as an example of Wordsworth’s engagement with the eighteenth-century poetry of sentimental return. For discussions of Wordsworth’s early apprenticeship in eighteenth-century poetic forms, see Sheats, The Making of Wordsworth’s Poetry, and Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. As Jacobus points

Notes to pages 84–87

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out, ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ had precursors in the eighteenth-century ‘‘revisit’’ poem, such as Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘‘Deserted Village’’ (1770) and Samuel Rogers’ ‘‘The Pleasures of Memory’’ (1792); the ‘‘intertwining of recollection and renewal’’ was ‘‘an inherited motif ’’ (113–14). The pervasive inﬂuence of ‘‘L’Allegro’’ and ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ in the eighteenthcentury lyric has been noted by Northrop Frye (Fearful Symmetry [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947, rpt. 1969]), who suggests that it gave poets a model for representing nature as a demonic force or animating power (171). In particular, as Geoffrey Hartman remarks, the poems ‘‘showed Wordsworth how romance could be combined with realism, vision with nature poetry.’’ See Wordsworth’s Poetry, 99. Quotations from An Evening Walk refer, unless otherwise noted, to the 1793 version of the poem in the Cornell edition, ed. James Averill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). Dorothy mentions her reading of ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ in journal entries of June and December 1802. See Joseph A. Wittreich, ed., The Romantics on Milton (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), 110–11. Several years later, Wordsworth candidly assessed the poem, along with his contemporaneous Descriptive Sketches: ‘‘They are juvenile productions, inﬂated and obscure, but they contain many new images, and vigorous lines.’’ See The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), Letter to Anne Taylor, 9 April 1801. In his preface to the Cornell edition of An Evening Walk, James Averill more pointedly identiﬁes their structural weakness: ‘‘Multiplicity as an aesthetic principle is at war with the unity the mind wishes for in a work of art’’ (19). Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 126–7. Carl Woodring (Wordsworth [Boston, MA: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1965]) argues that ‘‘social accents in the poem barely rufﬂe the placid surface of its sentimental benevolence’’ (7), and the transition from female vagrant to natural environment thus represents one of those ephemeral disturbances. Sheats sees the turn as a ‘‘violent transition’’ and relates it to the inadequacy of the language of empirical transcription to represent states of feeling and the ‘‘dignity and identity of the mind’’ (57–8). In a generic context, Kenneth R. Johnston (The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy [New York: W. W. Norton, 1998]) points out that such abrupt transitions were typical of locodescriptive poetry, and notes that several contemporary reviewers praised the lines on the vagrant (153). F. W. Bateson (Wordsworth: A Reinterpretation) notes the ‘‘blend of pastoral artiﬁce and realistic observation’’ in this passage, and sees it as representative of the mundane details of human industry (e.g. a slate quarry, a forge) that later poems would largely exclude (78–9). These 1794 revisions, known as the ‘‘Windy Brow’’ additions after the place in Keswick where Wordsworth was staying when he began them, effectively

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Notes to pages 87–92

doubled the length of the 1793 version. The version incorporating these changes, transcribed from the working fair copy of DC MS 9, was ﬁrst published in Averill’s Cornell edition. The tree beheld at dusk assumed totemic signiﬁcance in Wordsworth’s visual lexicon, as the poet attests in the Fenwick Notes to An Evening Walk, in which he recalls, at seventy-three, the moment of his adolescence when he noticed how an oak at sunset ‘‘entwines / Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines’’ (213–14). ‘‘The moment,’’ he explains, ‘‘was important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness of the inﬁnite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by poets of any age or country, as far as I was acquainted with them: and I made a resolution to supply in some degree the deﬁciency.’’ In ‘‘Tintern Abbey,’’ the phrase ‘‘dark sycamore’’ distills this early descriptive zeal into a concise emblem for the shade of pastoral repose; it might be called a verbal synecdoche for the forms of abstraction that ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ accomplishes. See The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), 6–7. Wordsworth dictated this commentary to his friend Isabella Fenwick in 1843. In this way, the ‘‘now’’ of ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ is akin to the ‘‘now’’ of the third strophe of the Immortality Ode (‘‘Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song’’) as Geoffrey Hartman deﬁnes it: a word that stands outside the events that it describes, a temporal adverb of perpetual hope or anticipation. See Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 158. Albert Ge´rard (English Romantic Poetry [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968]) identiﬁes ‘‘perplexity’’ as the ‘‘key word to the total meaning of the poem’’ (107), describing a ‘‘dialectical oscillation which drives Wordsworth to statements of sublimity, only to stress their hypothetical character immediately afterward’’ (116). Hartman notes this passage in commenting on the formal relationship between broken and slowed rhythms and ‘‘halted consciousness’’ throughout the poem. He relates the odd syntactic break here to a characteristically Wordsworthian ‘‘shying from peripety or abrupt illumination’’ – a shadow of the odal structure of turn and counterturn. See Wordsworth’s Poetry, 27. See Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems, 45. Wordsworth’s account of the past amounts to what Harold Bloom calls, quoting Wallace Stevens, a ‘‘description without place’’ (The Visionary Company [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961, rev. 1971], 133). Wordsworth read the poem aloud when he visited Coleridge at Stowey in July of 1797, and during that visit, Coleridge wrote ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower.’’ For thorough discussions of the poetic conversation between Coleridge and Wordsworth, see Lucy Newlyn, Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), and Paul Magnuson, Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

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24 ‘‘John’s Grove’’ has received very little commentary from Wordsworth scholars, with the notable exception of David Simpson, who has discussed the poem in two different books. In Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (London: Macmillan, 1982), he considers it as an example of Wordsworth’s interest in the way the mind (rather than the eye alone) ﬁgures reality and projects other people’s perceptions of it (31–4). In Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987), he addresses the afﬁnities between the brothers to illustrate tensions in Wordsworth’s conception of poetry as a form of work (37). 25 See Geoffrey Hartman, ‘‘Inscriptions and Romantic Nature Poetry,’’ in The Unremarkable Wordsworth, 31–46. Hartman identiﬁes Wordsworth’s freestanding inscription-poem as a ‘‘new lyrical kind’’ (39) that ‘‘challenges the same apparent freedom of designation’’ that Coleridge’s conversation poems do (31). In fact, as I argue, Wordsworth’s poem of dedicatory naming for his brother transforms the convention of nature-inscription through the mediation of Coleridge’s ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.’’ As Elizabeth Fay suggests, the most probable model for the ‘‘Poems on the Naming of Places’’ was Bernardin de St Pierre’s Paul et Virginie, which Wordsworth had read in a translation by Helen Maria Williams: its title characters grow up in an edenic valley where they bestow names on favorite spots. See Fay, Becoming Wordsworthian (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 54–5. 26 See the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Mary Moorman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, rpt. 1991), 37, 106. According to Dorothy’s entries, Wordsworth began composing the poem as an inscription (which Dorothy refers to as ‘‘the Firgrove’’) on August 29, 1800, while pausing on a walk to Rydale in the company of both Dorothy and John; and on Sept. 1, the poet read his work in progress to Coleridge. Since the ultimate memorial gesture of the poem is not an act of naming but a gesture of return in John’s absence, it is likely that Wordsworth wrote the second half of the poem later, and Dorothy’s entry of March 26, 1802, conﬁrms this in recording that the poet ‘‘had been trying without success to alter a passage in Silver How poem – he had written a conclusion just before he went out.’’ As Moorman suggests, Dorothy is likely referring to the poem for John (106n). 27 For a consideration of the value of habit as worthy substitute for ‘‘the work of reason’’ in Wordsworth’s poetry, see Bromwich’s reading of ‘‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’’ in Disowned by Memory, 23–43. In ‘‘John’s Grove,’’ Wordsworth’s memorial visits are perhaps too deliberate and self-conscious to be called ‘‘habit,’’ but they aspire to that condition, in sympathetic connection to the mariner’s routine tasks. 28 A dialogue between ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower’’ and ‘‘Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree’’ can be traced in the shadings of the verb ‘‘gaze’’ alone. The hermit among the yew-trees, as Wordsworth’s invisible speaker warns the passing traveler, gazed too intensely and long for his own good: ‘‘he would gaze till it became / Far lovelier, and his heart could not sustain / The beauty,

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32

Notes to pages 93–99

still more beauteous!’’ (35–7). In Coleridge’s poem, however, the gaze becomes salviﬁc – a way of imagining another person’s perception and falling into a trance in which boundaries of time and space are momentarily dissolved. For a discussion of the poems of the Lyrical Ballads as forms of pastoral, see Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Curran notes the eclogic precedent of representing dual perspectives through a shepherd’s colloquy, and relates this to the structural doubling: the shepherd’s perspective vs. the urbane poet’s (101). For commentary on ‘‘Michael’’ as pastoral poem, see also Lore Metzger, One Foot in Eden: Modes of Pastoral in Romantic Poetry (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1986). Metzger emphasizes the traditional nature of the poem in its ‘‘retreat from the dominant ways of the modern world’’ (143–4). In larger terms, Geoffrey Hartman describes the poem as ‘‘a Pastoral in the most genuine sense: its care of nature is also a care of the human (as distinguished from supernaturalistic) imagination’’ (Wordsworth’s Poetry, 262). Two critics have noted the detailed attention paid to the cottage lamp, and offered somewhat different accounts of it. Levinson suggests that the lamp illustrates Wordsworth’s notion of ‘‘use-value’’ (as opposed to monetary value) accrued through long care and labor (Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems, 64); and Bromwich proposes that the lamp is a synecdoche for ‘‘the cottage industry that keeps the family in one place’’ and a sign of ‘‘Wordsworth’s interest in supplying the vivid sensation of poetry’’ (Disowned by Memory, 158). See Marjorie Levinson’s reading of ‘‘Michael’’ in Wordworth’s Great Period Poems, 58–79. Levinson suggests that ‘‘the poet works on the abundant raw material nature provides: stories, characters, places, things. He increases the intrinsic use value of these elements through the addition of his labor’’ (78). This is a persuasive metaphor for the narrator’s conversion of a ‘‘history / Homely and rude’’ (34–5), into a richly elaborated narrative; but it does not quite account for the poem as affective record of the narrator’s sympathetic imagination. It is important to keep in mind that the original ‘‘material’’ that the narrator putatively borrows is already in the form of a story; and he transforms it into a longer and more deeply felt narrative. The lamp itself has a use-value to the characters, but the description of the lamp does not have a comparable function for the reader – unless we very broadly construe mimetic detail as having use-value. For a response to Levinson’s concept of poetic production, see Reeve Parker, ‘‘Finishing Off ‘Michael’: Poetic and Critical Enclosures,’’ in Diacritics 17:4 (1987), 53–64. Parker suggests that Levinson’s notion of ‘‘raw material’’ amounts to a kind of ‘‘transcendental materialism’’ (54). Geoffrey Hartman compares the prologue of ‘‘Michael’’ to Book V of The Prelude, in which Wordsworth describes the early cultivation of his imaginative sympathies through hearing tales and reading books (Wordsworth’s Poetry, 261).

Notes to pages 99–112

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33 While Wordsworth pays tribute to the ‘‘homely and rude tales’’ he heard as a child, the story of Michael is a synthetic creation in adulthood, the interlacing of three actual sites – a sheepfold and two houses – into a single narrative. As Wordsworth reveals in the Fenwick Notes, the story of Luke was based on the circumstances of a family that had previously lived in Wordsworth’s house in Town-End, Grasmere; and the name of the Evening Star ‘‘was not in fact given to this house but to another on the same side of the valley more to the north’’ (10). 34 For a discussion of forms of time in The Prelude, see Herbert Lindenberger, On Wordsworth’s ‘‘Prelude’’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 131–204; and Jeffery Baker, Time and Mind in Wordsworth’s Poetry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1980), esp. 144–95. 35 All quotations from The Prelude refer to the 1850 edition. 36 Geoffrey Hartman compares the Boy of Winander to Lucy, in that both die before the awareness of nature fully matures into an awareness of the self and its mortality; and he likens the gap between the two verse-paragraphs of the episode to the space between stanzas in ‘‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,’’ in that both represent the ‘‘precarious transition’’ between these states of consciousness (Wordsworth’s Poetry, 19–22). 37 See Fenwick Notes, 55. 38 Wordsworth wrote the postscript in March 1835, mainly to express his opposition to the Poor Law Amendment Bill, but also to voice his fears for the Church at the hands of a Reformed Parliament. See the Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), iii: 240, 255–6.

4 shelley’s ‘‘woven hymns of night and day’’ 1

William Butler Yeats, ‘‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry,’’ in Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier Books, 1961), 87. By ‘‘philosophy’’ Yeats meant not the system of ideas (Platonic, Berkeleyan, Godwinian) that later scholars of Shelley have elaborated, but rather something akin to occult wisdom. Under the inﬂuence of Arthur Symons’ articulation of a Symbolist aesthetic and Carl Jung’s notion of collective memory, Yeats asserted the importance of ‘‘the ancient symbol’’ for several reasons: that it has multiple and often ambiguous meanings that exceed the knowledge of any one poet or reader; that it provides, in its suggestiveness, an antidote to what Keats called ‘‘a palpable design’’; that it is both abstract in its signiﬁcance and concrete in its empirical basis, both new in its present poetic context and ancient in its echo of ancestral mythologies. In his differentiation between the lyric poet of ‘‘essences’’ and the dramatic or epic poet of ‘‘circumstances,’’ Yeats recalls Shelley’s own distinction in the Defence of Poetry between a story (a ‘‘catalogue of detached facts’’) and a poem (‘‘a creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator’’).

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Notes to pages 112–114

2 If, as Harold Bloom has observed, Shelley was ‘‘a natural revisionist, by intellect and temperament,’’ the appearances of evening in his poetry provide ample and varied examples of that disposition. Bloom makes this remark in the course of his chapter, ‘‘In the Shadow of Milton,’’ in A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 3 Cf. ‘‘The sun was sunk, and after him the star / Of Hesperus, whose ofﬁce is to bring / Twilight upon the Earth, short Arbiter / ’Twixt Day and Night’’ (PL 9.48–51). 4 Many readings of ‘‘Alastor’’ have focused on the relationship between the narrator and the Poet, the most inﬂuential of which has been Earl Wasserman’s argument that the narrator is a Wordsworthian nature-poet telling a cautionary story about a solipsistic visionary for whom nature is not enough. See ch. 1 of Wasserman’s Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), esp. 15–46. Though Wasserman emphasizes the difference between the Narrator (poet of nature) and the ‘‘Visionary’’ (poet of the ideal), he ultimately makes a subtler point: that the two ﬁgures ‘‘differ in degree rather than in kind,’’ and that they represent two aspects of Shelley’s self (34). Wasserman’s magisterial study exhaustively explores this point, but for further discussion of the similarities between Narrator and Poet, see Lisa Steinman, ‘‘Shelley’s Skepticism: Allegory in Alastor,’’ in ELH 45 (1978), 255–69. Steinman notes that both ﬁgures wait for Nature to disclose its secrets; both ‘‘suspect that what they are seeking might only be obtained in death, or in the realm beyond’’ (261); and in answer to their metaphysical questions, both ﬁnd only images beyond language or even thought (267). 5 Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2nd edn., ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002). All quotations of Shelley’s poetry refer to this edition, unless otherwise noted. 6 Rajan’s distinction between poetic genres implicitly qualiﬁes G. E. Lessing’s deﬁnition of all poetry as a temporal art in contrast to the spatial arts of painting or sculpture. While Lessing makes the experiential distinction between reading words in a sequence and viewing an art-object in a glance, Rajan introduces a mimetic distinction between the narrative representation of passing time and the lyrical suspension of it. See Tilottama Rajan, ‘‘The Web of Human Things: Narrative and Identity in Alastor,’’ in The New Shelley, ed. G. Kim Blank (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1991), 85–107. In Rajan’s Lacanian interpretation, narrative is ‘‘the mirror stage of lyric,’’ in that it projects the self into an objective world and represents it as an other; and the Poet is the projection of the narrator. For another interpretation of narrative and lyric modes in the poem, see Michael O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conﬂict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 11–29. In arguing that the poem ‘‘intermingles narrative and lyrical effects,’’ O’Neill sees, in effect, a tension in the poem between telling and showing, statement and implication, which he associates with narrative and lyric, respectively (20). O’Neill

Notes to pages 114–117

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9 10

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provides more examples of narrative than lyric in his reading, however: while he notes the ‘‘impressive pastiche of eighteenth-century poets like Gray and Collins,’’ he does not consider the implications of these lyrical borrowings, other than to dismiss them as giving the poem the feel of a ‘‘literary museum’’ (23). See Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 91. Peter Brooks (Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984]) applies Benjamin’s idea to the deﬁnition of plot as ‘‘the internal logic of the discourse of mortality’’ (22). For an elaboration of this principle in ‘‘Alastor’’, see John Murphy, ‘‘Time’s Tale: The Temporal Poetics of Shelley’s Alastor,’’ in the Keats-Shelley Journal 45 (1996), 132–55. Murphy makes a helpful distinction between the Poet’s resignation to the rhythms of nature in his last moments and the narrator’s disconsolate wish, expressed in the elegiac coda, to reverse or transcend time (151–3). I would add that this difference in perspective is expressed in Shelley’s oscillations in ‘‘Adonais’’ between stoic acceptance of mutability and protest against it. Harold Bloom has characterized the erotic nature of the Poet’s quest as constituting Shelley’s reproach to Wordsworth for being ‘‘sexually timid in not directly associating the poet’s love of nature with his love of woman’’; and I would add that this reproach is mediated by the allusion to Collins, who in his Miltonic personiﬁcation does imply a connection between the two forms of love. See Bloom, The Visionary Company (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971, rev. edn.), 285–90. See Brooks, Reading for the Plot, esp. ch. 4, on the idea of repetition in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle; and ch. 5, on the plotting of Great Expectations. Both Tilottama Rajan and Celeste Schenk read ‘‘Alastor’’ as a kind of failure, with emphasis on its conclusion: while Rajan sees the poem as ‘‘the story of the Narrator’s failure to write his text as lyric’’ (94), Schenk describes it as an ‘‘e´le´gie manque´e’’ (121) that cannot muster the Christian consolation that its predecessor, ‘‘Lycidas,’’ offers. See Celeste M. Schenk: Mourning and Panegyric: The Poetics of Pastoral Ceremony (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 121–2. Stuart Sperry reads the elegiac postscript in ﬁgurative terms as a ‘‘personal catharsis,’’ in which the ‘‘splitting of consciousness’’ between Poet and Narrator reﬂects a break from Shelley’s past, particularly the poet’s former idealization of his wife Harriet. See Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). For readings of the ‘‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’’ that remark on its Wordsworthian echoes, see: Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company, 290–3, and A Map of Misreading, 148–9; Judith Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley (Cleveland: Case Western University Press, 1972), 32–40; Paul Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 194–7; G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth’s Inﬂuence on Shelley’s Poetry (Basingstoke: Macmillan,

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Notes to pages 117–119

1988), 167–71; and Michael O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings, 30–40. Blank pays particularly close attention to Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s conceptions of time, but I disagree with some of his conclusions. Blank argues, ‘‘In Wordsworth is the hope that poetry can create time; in Shelley is the fear that poetry can erase time. Both poets address the same problem, but whereas the older poet arrives at ‘immortality,’ the younger poet falls on ‘mutability’ ’’ (170). In his poetry Shelley frequently marks the passage of time, and at the end of the ‘‘Hymn’’ in particular, he envisions a symbolic suspension of time in the serenity of an autumnal evening; but neither of these activities amounts to an erasure of time. Blank suggests that the ‘‘harmony’’ that Shelley envisions is ‘‘the synchronisation of external time with internal time’’ (170). But I would insist that there is no ‘‘external’’ here: not an objective autumn or evening to which Shelley must adapt his internal clock, but rather a symbolic time – a balance between day and night, summer and winter – that signiﬁes the state of consciousness he hopes to attain. 12 For a discussion of the diurnal pattern of Wordsworth’s Ode, see Paul Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode, 133–61. Fry proposes that the Ode progresses from pastoral dawn to a ‘‘noontide’’ pitch of exclamatory rhetoric to an ‘‘evening retrospect’’ (142). In his reading of the ‘‘Hymn,’’ Fry notes that Shelley echoes the last part of this sequence in imitating Wordsworth’s ‘‘passage from joy to philosophy’’ (196). I would add that ‘‘noontide’’ in Shelley’s poem is ﬁgured only in the retrospective evening metaphor of the last stanza; the height of Shelley’s prophetic afﬂatus is really associated more with the nocturnal mode of the Penseroso and its Graveyard School descendents. Before Fry’s characterization of the diurnal arc in the Ode and the ‘‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’’ Desmond King-Hele offered a different metaphor to describe the phenomenon: he noted Shelley’s preference for ‘‘the rocket lyric – a soaring climb under full power followed by a free, relaxed descent.’’ See Shelley: His Thought and Work (London: Macmillan Press, rpt. 1971), 268. 13 In her study of the verbal registers associated with the three phases of the Ode, Helen Vendler has noted Wordsworth’s audacity in clothing the childhood stage of ‘‘glory’’ in ‘‘the most powerful cluster of poetic words, images, and concepts in English, the King James Bible.’’ See ‘‘Lionel Trilling and Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode,’’ in The Music of What Happens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 99. I would add that this mode of biblical sublimity returns in the consolatory ﬁnal section of the Ode. Most obviously, the survey of generational succession, ‘‘Another race hath been, and other palms are won,’’ echoes a similarly stoic passage from Ecclesiastes: ‘‘I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all’’ (AV, Eccles. 9.11). The ‘‘meanest ﬂower’’ that gives ‘‘thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’’ recalls a ﬂoral metaphor in 1 Peter 24 (‘‘For all ﬂesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the ﬂower of

Notes to pages 119–127

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grass. The grass withereth, and the ﬂower thereof falleth away’’); and Christ’s teachings on the inner nobility of the ‘‘meanest’’: ‘‘for he that is least among you all, the same shall be great’’ (AV, Luke 9:48). For a detailed biographical exegesis of this narrative, see Donald Reiman’s essay, ‘‘Structure, Symbol, and Theme in ‘Lines written among the Euganean Hills,’ ’’ in PMLA 77 (1962), 404–13. Judith Chernaik has noted the connection to epic journeys, such as those of Odysseus, Aeneas, and Oedipus. In particular, she suggests that Shelley might have been inspired by a choral poem from Oedipus at Colonus, which describes the hero as eternally stranded on a cold northern shore. See The Lyrics of Shelley, 81–2n. Insofar as Shelley’s frame-narrative holds out the prospect of interminable wandering among other islands, I agree with Chernaik’s classical references; but insofar as it is an allegory of redemption, I would insist on its afﬁnity to the Puritan aspects of Robinson Crusoe. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 136. See Leopold Damrosch’s chapter on Crusoe in God’s Plot and Man’s Stories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 187–212. For a psychological account of lyric apostrophe as the expression of a ‘‘primordial desire for recognition,’’ see Susan Hawk Brisman and Leslie Brisman, ‘‘Lies Against Solitude: Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real,’’ in The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will, ed. Joseph H. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 29–65. In the case of Shelley, an expatriate poet implicitly writing against injustices in his own country of origin as much as Napoleonic subjugation, the apostrophe to Tyranny is a particularly complex ‘‘lie against solitude.’’ It is a solitude literalized by Shelley’s position on his metaphorical ‘‘island.’’ In the Leavisite tradition of seeing Shelley as philosophically inconsistent and mentally undisciplined, Desmond King-Hele regarded the poem as a loosely associative ‘‘stream of consciousness’’ (107); but Wasserman corrected that assessment by reading the poem as an Apollonian hymn to light, ‘‘a single day that reaches a brilliant noon of extraordinary revelation.’’ See Shelley: A Critical Reading, 197–203. Karl Kroeber, however, makes the valid point that Wasserman somewhat misconstrues Shelley’s noon as a modernist symbol rather than as part of a larger pattern of ﬂux. See Kroeber, ‘‘Experience and History: Shelley’s Venice, Turner’s Carthage,’’ in ELH 41 (1974), 321–39. I would add that noon is not a symbol of perfection or epiphany, but rather a temporal process (it ‘‘descends’’), a heated moment of prophetic fury, and the archetypal time of pastoral repose. For another reading of the temporality of the poem as empirical experience, see Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley, 61–74. In Chernaik’s argument, noon is an immediate perceptual experience of the world, part of a counterpoint between the bright sunlight of the actual scene and the ‘‘dim ever-receding shore of the allegory’’ (68–9). Chernaik also notes, in practical terms, that Shelley’s temporal markings give form to an otherwise discursive meditation. I agree with Chernaik’s analysis; and I build

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Notes to pages 127–134

upon it here by offering further reﬁnements: Shelley’s debt to the Coleridgian conversation poem, the interplay between narrative and lyric modes, and the thematic afﬁliations with a tradition of evening poetry. The time of evening is both an immediately perceived reality within the poem and a literary chronotope to which Shelley refers several times before he arrives at an experiential dusk. See Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), ii: 294. Very few critics have remarked on the representation of time in ‘‘Adonais’’; Earl Wasserman, in his comprehensive study of the poem in Shelley: A Critical Reading is a notable exception. Wasserman compares the twilight to the body of the poet: ‘‘Both Adonais and the sun are gone and yet remain’’ (468). See Peter Sacks, The English Elegy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). Sacks identiﬁes several persistent elegiac tropes, accounting for them not only as literary conventions but as psychological categories of experience: e.g., the ﬁgure of weaving represents the ‘‘mediating fabric of language,’’ a surrogate for what is irrevocably absent; the motif of the funeral procession ensures a sense of psychic distance between the living and the dead; the myth of the sacriﬁced and reborn vegetation god creates a ﬁction of control over nature; and the repetition of phrases and motifs imparts ‘‘a sense of continuity’’ in the face of the discontinuity of death (18–36). The representation of the passage of time, I would argue, is yet another elegiac trope for the work of mourning, even as it underlies the other tropes that Sacks names. See Ellen Z. Lambert, Placing Sorrow: A Study of Pastoral Elegy Convention from Theocritus to Milton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976). Lambert praises Virgil’s eclogues for their temporal and spatial awareness: ‘‘In Theocritus we experience life in discrete units, from moment to moment. In Vergil we feel the passage of time’’ (29). Lambert further notes that while the noon hour of repose is the pastoral elegist’s favorite time, postRenaissance funeral laments are usually set at evening or night (187). Shelley’s two-day time-scheme represents a signiﬁcant complication to this narrative of generic development. For examples of this vein of interpretation, see Ronald Tetreault, The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 221–34; and Andrew Epstein, ‘‘ ‘Flowers that Mock the Corse Beneath’: Shelley’s Adonais, Keats, and Poetic Inﬂuence,’’ Keats-Shelley Journal 48 (1999), 90–128. Both critics construe the ﬂocks as representing poems, but under different interpretive rubrics: the Death of the Author and the Anxiety of Inﬂuence, respectively. Tetreault argues that the ﬂocks’ inability to survive their shepherd represents Shelley’s denial of the reader’s autonomy – the suggestion that ‘‘the affective potential of poetry depends exclusively on the presence of the poet’’ (230). But the viability of this reading is complicated – if not completely negated – by Echo’s sorrowful brooding over Adonais’ ‘‘remembered lay.’’ Epstein suggests that Shelley represents Keats’s

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‘‘sensuous and often empirically-based poems’’ as ‘‘airy and insubstantial’’ out of competitive insecurities (113). But this reading not only overlooks Shelley’s implicit reminder of the material basis of poetry but also fails to acknowledge that Shelley often conceived of all poetry – not just Keats’s – in these ethereal terms. 24 This ratio between pastoral time and Christian redemption can be conceived in terms of chronos (clock time or calendrical time) and kairos (the integrating realm of eternity, a nunc stans), as Frank Kermode deﬁnes them in The Sense of an Ending (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). 25 Shelley’s interest in Lucretius began, as the poet’s contemporary biographer Thomas Medwin notes, when he was at Eton (The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. i [London: Thomas Cautley Newby, 1847], 72) and continued through his later life. Mary Shelley’s journal entries attest to this fact (see Mary Shelley’s Journal, ed. Frederick L. Jones [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947]). In a letter to Godwin in 1812, Shelley dismisses much of the literature of ancient Rome as ‘‘ﬁt for nothing but the perpetuation of the noxious race of heroes in the world,’’ except for Lucretius, who ‘‘forms perhaps the single exception’’ (Letters, 1:317); and in the Defence of Poetry (1820), he praises Lucretius, along with Virgil, as ‘‘in a very high sense, a creator’’ (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 494). Lucretius’ poem was a quasi-epic narrative of material creation rather than of individual heroic deeds; in this respect, historical events are not things in their own right, but rather accidents of matter and place. Paul Turner was one of the ﬁrst critics to trace the inﬂuence of Lucretius in Shelley’s poetry, in ‘‘Shelley and Lucretius,’’ in Review of English Studies 10 (1959), 269–82; and Jane E. Phillips followed this line of inquiry in ‘‘Lucretian Echoes in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc,’ ’’ in Classical and Modern Literature 2:1 (1981), 71–93. For a brief commentary on Epicurean philosophy in Shelley’s poetry, see Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, 311–13. Wasserman notes that Shelley, like Epicurus, ‘‘rejected the idea of a transcendent creator and presider to whom man and nature are subservient’’ but ‘‘substituted for Epicurus’ chance an actuating and regulating world-soul’’ (313). The most wide-ranging consideration to date of Shelley’s engagement with Epicurean philosophy and Lucretian poetics can be found in Hugh Roberts’ chapter, ‘‘Shelley’s Lucretian Imagination,’’ in Shelley and the Chaos of History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 411–86. Roberts sees in Shelley’s poetry ‘‘a Lucretian vision of a world constantly losing structural coherence’’ (418), and he describes this vision with reference to twentieth-century scientiﬁc understandings of chaos, entropy, and information decay. 26 The processual and metamorphic qualities of Shelley’s poetry are as much a critical commonplace as Shelley’s skepticism, of course. For a study of these qualities as deconstructive tendencies, see Jerrold E. Hogle, Shelley’s Process (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), which argues that Shelleyan transcendence implies not a permanent state beyond the world but rather an endless movement from one state to another – what Hogle calls

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‘‘transference’’ (vii). Even Shelley’s image of the One in ‘‘Adonais,’’ Hogle points out, is not a still point but a burning fountain, a process of selftransformation. In his deconstructive reading, Hogle sees the various forms of ‘‘transference’’ in ‘‘Adonais,’’ especially Death, as reﬂections of the endless substitutive chain of language itself (294–319). Hogle focuses on bringing Shelley into a twentieth-century context; in accounting for Shelleyan ‘‘process,’’ he omits the ancient context of Lucretius. 27 See J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Miller applies these categories of repetition, which he adopts from Gilles Deleuze, in readings of nineteenth-century novels. Although Miller focuses on the repetition of events in the novel, his ideas have obvious relevance to the texture of symbols, images, and words in the lyric. If the emblem of novelistic repetition is memory, the emblem of lyric repetition is refrain – the vocal echo in song. Although lyric does not usually feature the kind of repeatable events that Miller studies in the novel, the narrative structures of ‘‘Alastor’’ and ‘‘Adonais’’ certainly do. 28 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘‘Ulysses,’’ in Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Christopher Ricks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 138–45. 29 Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982). I quote here from sta. 51 of the 1892 version of ‘‘Song of Myself.’’

5 keats and the ‘‘luxury of twilight’’ 1

The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), i: 238–9. 2 See the transcription of Keats’s marginalia in Beth Lau, Keats’s ‘‘Paradise Lost’’ (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 71. 3 Other underlined passages include: the blind bard’s invocation of the ‘‘darkling’’ nightingale (PL 3.26–50); the twilight games of the ‘‘unarmed youth of Heaven’’ (PL 4.451–8); Eve’s question about the stars, ‘‘But wherefore shine all night these?’’ and Adam’s response about the invisible spirits that sing to the ‘‘midnight air’’ (PL 4.647–58, 668–83); Eve’s dream of Satan’s nocturnal visitation (PL 5.38–43); the description of ‘‘grateful twilight’’ in Heaven (PL 5.618–47); and Raphael’s departure as the sun ‘‘Hesperian sets’’ (PL 8.630–2). See Lau, Keats’s ‘‘Paradise Lost,’’ especially 101, 118–21, 123, 129–30, 147–8, 154, 161, 175. Keats’s appreciation of the evening passages bears out Lau’s observation that the poet had a ‘‘tendency to focus on descriptive passages and felicitous phrases and to neglect passages concerned with theme, structure, or character development’’ (42); but it should also be noted that the idea of evening had both thematic and structural import for both Milton and Keats. All quotations from Paradise Lost in this chapter refer to John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957).

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4 Walter H. Evert, Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 40. 5 The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 34–5. In Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems (1784–1797), this appears as Sonnet 32, ‘‘To Melancholy. Written on the banks of the Arun, October 1785.’’ Both Thomas Otway (1652–85) and William Collins (1721–59) were natives of the Sussex countryside where the Arun ﬂowed. See also Sonnets 26 and 30, both entitled ‘‘To the River Arun’’ (30, 33); Sonnet 33, ‘‘To the naiad of the Arun’’ (35), which pays tribute to the ‘‘British bards’’ Otway, Collins, and William Hayley, who helped Smith publish the Elegiac Sonnets; and Sonnet 45, ‘‘On Leaving a part of Sussex,’’ which hails Collins as ‘‘the Enthusiast of the Lyre who wander’d here’’ (42–3). 6 In Sensibility: An Introduction (New York: Methuen, 1986), Janet Todd summarizes the verbal conventions of the poetry of Sensibility: a prescribed lexicon of qualities (e.g., benevolence, virtue, esteem) and adjective/noun combinations (e.g., the heart as honest, kind, or tender). Adela Pinch (Strange Fits of Passion [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996]) points out that feeling in the poetry of sensibility involves a mediation between literary convention and personal experience (8). 7 For a study of Smith’s ‘‘autobiographical lyric’’ and its popularity with contemporary readers, see Sarah Zimmerman’s chapter on the poet in Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 39–72. 8 John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 25. All citations of Keats’s poems, unless otherwise noted, refer to this edition. 9 For speculation about the sonnet’s poetic inﬂuences, see Robert F. Gleckner, ‘‘Keats’s ‘How Many Bards’ and Poetic Tradition,’’ Keats-Shelley Journal 27 (1978), 14–22. Gleckner sees the poem as a ‘‘tempering of Spenser via the reshaping of Milton,’’ a synthesis of the harmony of sounds in Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss (Faerie Queene ii.xii.70) with the nocturnal setting of ‘‘Il Penseroso.’’ While I agree with Gleckner’s argument about Miltonic inﬂuences on the poem, I would add that we ought also to take into account the Miltonic ‘‘Ode to Evening,’’ partly for the way in which nocturnal sounds ﬁgure into a meditation on poetic vocation. 10 Letters, i: 233. 11 Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, 1816–1878, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), ii: 65. 12 In ‘‘The Experiential Beginning of Keats’s Odes’’ (Studies in Romanticism 12:3 [1973], 591–606) Helen Vendler notes that in the odes, ‘‘Keats is unlikely to begin with any narrative account of an experience in life,’’ because thought supervenes upon this actuality. The ideas raised here were further elaborated by Vendler in The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), but this essay remains in itself a worthwhile comparative study of the odes’ occasions of utterance.

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13 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997). 14 The allegorical potential of perceptual detail ﬁnds its fullest expression, as Vendler has shown, in the Autumn Ode, after Keats’s apprenticeship in the sonnet under the model of Shakespeare’s development of conceits (Vendler, Odes of John Keats, 275–6). 15 See Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 36–7 (‘‘forlorn’’), 80 (‘‘darkling’’), and 94 (‘‘viewless wings’’). 16 Letters, ii: 212. 17 See Cynthia Chase, ‘‘ ‘Viewless Wings’: Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ ’’ Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 208–25, for a comparison between Keats’s ﬂoral inventory and both the Penseroso’s spelling of every star and herb and the ‘‘Lycidas’’-elegist’s catalogue of funereal ﬂowers. Chase argues that the speakers of both ‘‘Lycidas’’ and the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ engage in ‘‘false surmise’’ – false because the digression allows them momentarily to escape from the fact of Lycidas’ death and the nightingale’s ‘‘whelming voice,’’ respectively (221–2). While I agree with Chase’s characterization of ‘‘Lycidas,’’ I disagree with the notion that the bower-inventory in the Ode interposes a little ease, partly because it includes sober awareness of decay, and partly because the nightingale’s voice is not a sobering reality in the way that Lycidas’ death clearly is. 18 Mary Robinson, Selected Poems, ed. Judith Pascoe (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2000), 83. 19 For the original sonnets, see Petrarca, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), Poems 90 and 311. 20 The interpretive question about Keats’s ‘‘with thee’’ construction has tended to obscure the question of what it means for the night to be tender in the ﬁrst place. John Jones (John Keats’s Dream of Truth [London: Chatto and Windus, 1969]) appreciatively remarks that the word in the Ode is ‘‘inevitable where it belongs and suddenly so crass when Scott Fitzgerald makes the title of a novel with it’’ (1), but he does not deﬁne his notions of inevitability or crassness. Jones overlooks the fact that the word ‘‘tender’’ is borrowed from the lexicon of eighteenth-century poetic emotion; and when Fitzgerald quotes Keats, he is merely doing what Charlotte Smith does with Collins, Gray, and Milton. (In other words, Fitzgerald can be placed in a sentimental tradition of literarily mediated emotion as deﬁned by Janet Todd and Adela Pinch.) In any event, Jones protests too much, since he proceeds to inform us that every subject-heading of his book has been taken from three consecutive sentences in one of Keats’s letters, and that these words are no less than ‘‘enchanted’’ (1). 21 Earl Wasserman insists that the line should be read as a differentiation between poet and nightingale in their separate realms: ‘‘with thee the night is

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tender.’’ See The Finer Tone: Keats’s Major Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), 192–3. Cynthia Chase does not take sides but rather suggests that interpretation of the line involves an assessment of the speaker’s commitment to the ‘‘viewless wings of Poesy’’ (210). It is fundamentally related, she points out, to how we read the ﬁfth stanza: if the night is tender only with the nightingale, then the ﬂoral surmise is a pale substitute for the nightingale’s song of summer (as Wasserman and Stillinger claim); but if it is ultimately tender with the poet, too, then the surmise constitutes a rejection of transcendental ﬂight and an afﬁrmation of earthbound perception (as Leslie Brisman suggests in Romantic Origins [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978], 83). Perhaps the most idiosyncratic reading of the line has been offered by Albert Ge´rard (English Romantic Poetry [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968]), who insists that the poet and the nightingale are together in a transcendental realm: ‘‘ ‘Here’ is where the poet is, namely, with the bird, in the celestial world of the ideal, where the senses are abolished, where there is no physical light, and where the imagination can rejoice in a light that comes ‘from heaven’ ’’ (244n). Ge´rard strategically avoids quoting the phrase, ‘‘with the breezes blown,’’ however. To be consistent, he would have to read the wind as well as the light as only ﬁgurative, and Keats’s synesthetic mingling of light and motion is too rich an evocation of his embowerment to be so reduced to abstraction. In the full context of the stanza, it is difﬁcult to accept the premise that the senses are ‘‘abolished.’’ 22 Jack Stillinger remarks on several similarities between the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ and the conversation-poems: the situation of a speaker addressing an absent or invisible auditor, the ‘‘representation of actual processes of thinking,’’ and the ‘‘familiar pattern of excursion and return.’’ See Stillinger, ‘‘Keats and Coleridge,’’ in Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination: Romanticism and Adam’s Dream, ed. J. Robert Barth, SJ and John L. Mahoney (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 7–28. Stillinger notes ‘‘the presence of time, change, and death as additional complications in Keats’s poems’’ (21), but I would suggest that the conversation-poems are invested in representing time and change in ways that might have shaped Keats’s own temporal poetics. 23 Vendler notes that as a poem based on continuous song and the poet’s corresponding trance or reverie, ‘‘this ode could go on forever’’ (106); and that by allowing the bird to depart, Keats reasserts the philosophic mind. 24 The moment of the nightingale’s departure and the poet’s awakening to reverie has suggested a kind of dawning to some readers. Earl Wasserman (The Finer Tone), noting the speaker’s earlier ‘‘desire for the midnight of his life, instead of his soul’s daytime,’’ suggests as much: ‘‘Suddenly, when the poet has returned fully into himself, the darkness is gone; there is light, but no insight into the mystery’’ (222). Similarly, David Bromwich proposes that Keats emerges from the waking dream with a new kind of daylight vision, a mood of questioning if not genuine insight into the ‘‘mystery’’ to which Sperry refers: ‘‘The landscape has grown sober with the lucidity of daily

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things, and what survives the poem is a commitment to this mood as a ﬁnal standard of comparison’’ (Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic [New York: Oxford University Press, 1983], 386). Keats was familiar enough with An Evening Walk to refer to it in the famous letter in which he declares his impatience with ‘‘poetry that has a palpable design upon us,’’ and with Wordsworth in particular: ‘‘& because he happens in an Evening Walk to imagine the ﬁgure of the old man – he must stamp it down in black & white, and it is henceforth sacred’’ (Letters, 61, Feb. 1818). Beth Lau speculates that Keats might have read a copy of the poem owned by J. H. Reynolds, who quotes from it in a December 1815 article in the Champion, noting that ‘‘it is now become very scarce.’’ See Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 14. M. H. Abrams, ‘‘Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,’’ in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 527–60; and Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 34–7. Abrams himself admits that his paradigm of Natural Supernaturalism does not ﬁt Keats as well as it does Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. Jack Stillinger has described this as an A-B-A progression. See Stillinger’s chapter on ‘‘Imagination and Reality in the Odes,’’ in The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 99–119. Under the schema that he sketches, which strongly resembles Abrams’ model of the greater Romantic lyric, Stillinger places the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ and the ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’’ in the category of departure-and-return; and he describes the ‘‘Ode to Psyche’’ and ‘‘To Autumn’’ as focusing, respectively, on the excursion and the return (104). I would add that the Autumn Ode can also be seen as rendering an abstract version of the eighteenth-century topographical excursion, and that its gesture of ‘‘return’’ in the third stanza strongly echoes similar movements in the tradition of pastoral evening poetry (but with signiﬁcant variations). Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), iii, 299–300. Johnson’s criticism notwithstanding, we can note that Thomson does inject some narrative vigor into his seasonal tableaux, in the form of heroic conceits (the destruction of a beehive as the sacking of Troy) and pastoral incidents; and yet the temporal frame of each eclogue remains suspended in the participial limbo of weather cycles. Thomson’s most eloquent defender has been Ralph Cohen, who reads Thomson’s descriptive repetition as a kind of method in itself, a mimesis of natural process and the sheer boundlessness of the world: ‘‘Man and nature are seen as part of one universe, and recurrence becomes a method for exploring the inevitable differences in it.’’ See Cohen’s essay, ‘‘Thomson’s Poetry of Space and Time,’’ in Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660–1800, ed. Howard Anderson and John S. Shea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967), 191–2. Granting Cohen’s observations on Thomsonian

Notes to pages 164–166

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repetition, we can note, however, that in the Autumn Ode’s compact progression nothing is repeated – or rather, that Keats echoes himself with a difference. The Complete Works of James Thomson, ed. J. Logie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908). Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 220. This mental act of dwelling – the ‘‘manner in which mortals are on earth’’ – precedes all physical building, which takes the form of either the cultivation of growing things or the construction of shelter. Both kinds of building are present in the Autumn Ode: the architectural spaces of cottage and beehives, and the harvest of fruit and grain. Behind such efforts, Heidegger traces the Greek sense of techne as ‘‘letting or making appear’’; and this aptly describes the activity of Autumn in her long moments of beholding in the second stanza. In the progression I have been tracing, the second stanza, with its vignettes of human activity, forms a bridge between the earth of the ﬁrst stanza and the heaven of the third. On his walking tour of Scotland, Keats had attested to a similar feeling in a letter to Tom: ‘‘I never forgot my stature so completely – I live in the eye.’’ See Letters, i: 301. I am referring to the idea elaborated by Fried in Absorption and Theatricality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). In Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973, rpt. 1994), Stuart Sperry summarizes the seasonal and diurnal scheme of the poem as conventional wisdom: ‘‘As critics have often pointed out, the three stanzas successively proceed from the last growth of late summer through the fullness of high autumn to the spareness of an early winter landscape, just as they suggest the progress of a single day through its close in sunset’’ (337). For Bloom’s reading of the poem, see The Visionary Company (Garden City: Doubleday, 1961, rev. 1971), 421–5. In Bloom’s eschatological terms, the ﬁrst stanza represents the plastic and graphic art of the millennium, and the third rings with the music of apocalypse. But this characterization makes Keats sound too much like Blake; as Vendler has noted, Keats avoids intimations of apocalypse by making Autumn entirely passive: rather than wielding a ﬂail, she is herself, as grain, ‘‘winnowed’’ (Vendler, Odes, 251). In a later essay on Keats, Bloom seems implicitly to qualify his original formulation: he contrasts Shelley’s autumnal ‘‘Ode to the West Wind,’’ with its drive toward apocalyptic renewal, with Keats’s perfection in the ﬁgure of Autumn of ‘‘an image in which stasis and process are reconciled.’’ See ‘‘Keats and the Embarrassments of Poetic Tradition,’’ in The Ringers in the Tower (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 142. Referring to Keats’s famous description of his autumnal Winchester walk in a letter to Reynolds, Vendler speculates that the whole poem is ‘‘uttered from the stubble-plains’’ (Odes, 255). James Lott offers such a reading in ‘‘Keats’s To Autumn: The Poetic Consciousness and the Awareness of Process,’’ Studies in Romanticism 9: 2

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40

Notes to pages 166–168

(1970), 71–8. Lott suggests that in the ﬁrst two stanzas, ‘‘no particular attention is paid to the fact that time is passing’’ (73), whereas in the third, the speaker becomes aware of ‘‘what is happening in fact: the day is literally ending’’ (79). This is a reasonable interpretation, but it does not fully elaborate on its striking claim that time is ‘‘literally’’ passing in the poem. It ought to take into account the intertextual resonance of the phrase, ‘‘and now,’’ which may or may not refer to the ‘‘actual’’ time of utterance. See Geoffrey Hartman, ‘‘Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats’s To Autumn,’’ in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 124–46. While acknowledging that the mists might well be of the morning, Hartman insists on his twilight reading in order to make a compelling connection between Keats’s description of fruits and the darkling surmise of ﬂowers in the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale.’’ By suggesting the Miltonic temporal pattern of morn to noon and noon to starry eve, I am implicitly invoking another of Hartman’s ideas: the notion of Milton’s ‘‘counterplot’’ as expressed, for instance, in the serene archetype of earthly creation and the divinely given pattern of time. See ‘‘Milton’s Counterplot,’’ in Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 113–23. I am also mindful of Vendler’s remark that ‘‘the proximate contexts of the ode create the meaning the words have in the poem’’; and the temporal settings of Eden, as Keats’s copious underlinings in his copy of Paradise Lost indicate, are very near indeed. Adam invokes the mists in his hymn to God’s glory: ‘‘Ye mists and exhalations that now rise / From hill or steaming lake, dusky or gray, / Till the sun paint your ﬂeecy skirts with gold, / In honor to the world’s great Author rise’’ (PL 5.185–8). On the level of pure echo, one might make the alternative case that Keats’s autumnal mists recall the twilight end of Paradise Lost, where Milton likens the swiftness of the cherubim who glide ‘‘meteorous, as Ev’ning Mist / Ris’n from a River over marish glides, / And gathers ground fast at the Laborer’s heel / Homeward returning’’ (PL 12.629–32). Even so, the reference to evening at the end of the poem is given in an epic simile rather than through natural description; and the moment of Adam and Eve’s expulsion might in fact be a radically altered morning, the beginning of a day that seems, under the pseudo-sunrise and sunset of the angels’ ﬁery appearance, like an end. The last day in Eden, in other words, is as indeterminate as the ﬁrst stanza of the Autumn Ode. See The Odes of John Keats and Their Earliest Known Manuscripts, ed. Robert Gittings (Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970), 56–7. For a discussion of the place of ‘‘To Autumn’’ within the larger genre of odes, see Paul Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 258–78. In particular, Fry sees a naturalization of odal conventions: rather than building a fane or place of enunciation, Keats describes an unbounded space; and rather than explicitly offering a devotional hymn, he catalogues the sounds of evening. Vendler’s argument about the symbolic import of Keats’s Autumn highlights what David Perkins (The Quest for Permanence [Cambridge, MA: Harvard

Notes to pages 168–171

41

42

43

44 45

243

University Press, 1959]) overlooks when he contends that because they focus on ‘‘a central object possessing a speciﬁc and limited identity,’’ the ‘‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’’ and the ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ are ﬁner than the other odes (298–9). If the two odes elevated by Perkins are about the capacities of visual art and music, respectively, then the Autumn Ode, as Vendler argues, is about poetry itself. Although Autumn is not a distinct symbol like the Nightingale and the Urn, it nevertheless represents what Perkins himself identiﬁes as the controlling metaphor of Keats’s career, the idea of ‘‘human life as a process of growth’’ (191). As Vendler has remarked, Autumn becomes a willing participant in her dissolution, both bringing her copia into being and seeing it harvested, swelling the apples and patiently witnessing their ‘‘last oozings’’ into cider. Vendler insists, contra Bloom’s eschatological conception, that rather than becoming an apocalyptic thresher of wheat, Autumn is herself ‘‘winnowed’’ by the wind. See Vendler, Odes, 237, 251, 256–9. Hartman (‘‘Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ ’’) compares the ‘‘now’’ of Collins’ ode with that of Keats’s ode, and claims for the former that ‘‘[w]ith this drawn-out ‘now’ nature-poetry is born’’ (139). While Hartman justly notes the signiﬁcance of the adverb, he overlooks the ‘‘now’’ of Thomson’s nature-poetry and the Virgilian ‘‘now’’ of ‘‘Lycidas’’; surely, the latter was in Keats’s mind just as strongly. While I agree with Hartman in his excellent characterization of the Hesperian mode, I have tried to expand the historical sense of tradition in evening poetry; and my purpose in comparing the evening and autumn odes is more explicitly to deﬁne how Keats departs (syntactically, formally, thematically) from Collins. Walter Jackson Bate has gone so far as to suggest that the ﬁnal stanza depicts ‘‘life that can exist in much the same way at other times than autumn’’: the swallows are not necessarily gathering in a pre-migratory pattern, and the gnats make wailful noises at other times of the year, too. To make this claim, Bate has to set aside the visual evidence of stubble-plains and full-grown lambs and refuse to hear any pathos in the sounds of wailing and bleating. And yet Bate’s suspension of seasonal speciﬁcity in the third stanza makes sense insofar as it posits a ‘‘greeting spirit’’ that contains both time past and time future. Bate’s interpretation implies an important point about reading the poem: our predisposition to extrapolate meaning (temporal or mythological) from visual and aural details constitutes the sort of autosuggestion that led Keats to see post-harvest stubble-ﬁelds as ‘‘warm,’’ or that compels viewers of paintings to construe narratives on the slightest pretext. See John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 581–3. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 148. One of Keats’s anguished poems about Fanny Brawne, ‘‘What can I do to drive away,’’ struggles in the end to provide a substitute for Fanny’s physical proximity in consolations of the mind: ‘‘Give me those lips again! / Enough! Enough! It is enough for me / To dream of thee!’’ (55–7).

244

Notes to pages 172–179

46 For a sensitive reading of the valedictory nature of the third stanza of the Autumn Ode, see Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 208–14. Discussing Keats’s embarrassed or discomﬁted attitudes toward parting, Ricks suggests that the sunset at the end of the Ode represents ‘‘the pressure of Keats’s greatest blush,’’ but a blush ‘‘without shame or displeasure’’ (209–10). 47 Letters, ii: 208. 48 See Susan Wolfson’s chapter on Keats in Formal Charges (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 164–92. Wolfson brieﬂy touches on the thematics of the sonnet’s evening setting when she notes that Keats’s phrase, ‘‘shut of eve,’’ echoes a passage in Paradise Lost in which Eve overhears Adam and Raphael in conversation ‘‘at shut of Ev’ning Flow’rs’’ (PL 9.278). Wolfson suggests that through this echo, Keats’s sonnet on the loss of Fanny becomes afﬁliated with ‘‘the most famous poetic tale of primal loss through female betrayal and male enamoration’’ (174). I would argue, however, that the resonance of evening in this sonnet is not limited to this one allusion, and includes more than the idea of female betrayal. The female ﬁgure of the sonnet does not betray but rather, like Evening herself, fades away, without duplicity; here, as in the Autumn Ode, Keats attempts to naturalize loss. The word ‘‘betrayal,’’ ﬁnally, implies too much moral judgment in Keats’s representation of that loss. 49 For a reading of the sonnet in a biographical context, see Robert Gittings, John Keats: The Living Year (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 191–7. Keats wrote the sonnet in October of 1819, after seeing Fanny Brawne again in Hampstead, and Gittings suggests that the poem represents not only an attempt to disengage himself from this attachment, but also ‘‘to reconcile the daemon of his awakened passion for poetry’’ (193). Gittings is particularly illuminating on the inﬂuence of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. In particular, Burton’s recommended cure of fasting and prayer is taken up by Keats in the couplet.

6 later inventions 1

Gwendolyn Brooks, ‘‘Eventide,’’ quoted in George E. Kent, A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), 7–8. The poem originally appeared in American Childhood in October 1930. I am grateful to a former student of mine, Melissa Barton, for showing me this poem. 2 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poems and Other Writings, ed. J. D. McClatchy (New York: Library of America, 2000), 347–8. 3 The poem is collected in Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press, 2001), 51. 4 See Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963 [1957]), 50.

Notes to pages 180–186

245

5 See Bloom’s chapter, ‘‘Tennyson: In the Shadow of Keats,’’ in Poetry and Repression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). In particular, he cites ‘‘Ulysses’’ as an expression of Tennyson’s sense of belatedness, in which the speaker’s craving for ceaseless exploration represents a desire for what Bloom calls ‘‘earliness’’ with respect to what has gone before: ‘‘To know is to have become belated; not to know, not to understand, is to become early again, however self-deceivingly’’ (160). 6 All quotations of Tennyson’s poetry refer to Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Christopher Ricks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 7 John Hollander has read the end of ‘‘Mariana’’ as a parody of the end of Keats’s Autumn Ode (‘‘Tennyson’s Melody,’’ Georgia Review 29[1975], 676–703); and Herbert Tucker concurs, noting that while Tennyson’s rich atmospheric description loads every rift with ore, it pointedly omits the ‘‘fertile fruition’’ celebrated in Keats’s ode – in part because Tennyson could not fully accept Keats’s ‘‘acceptance of natural process.’’ See Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 77. In larger terms, Harold Bloom has described the poem as reﬂecting Tennyson’s belated relationship to Keats and Shelley and the tradition of Romantic quest (Poetry and Repression, 151). In Bloom’s reading, Mariana’s erotic frustration reﬂects Tennyson’s poetic frustration; her compulsion is of a piece with Tennyson’s repetition of Romantic motifs. While I agree with Bloom’s general characterization of Tennyson’s belatedness, I do not share his sense that it is ‘‘difﬁcult to keep the narrative and embowered voices separate from each other’’ (155). Rather, I would argue that we ought to pay attention to the counterpoint between description and monotonous refrain – especially at the end, in which the temporal syntax of the privileged evening moment is deﬂated by Mariana’s unvarying lament. In other words, I wish to show Tennyson wittily manipulating poetic conventions rather than displaying psychological symptoms of a compulsion or blockage. 8 A. Dwight Culler, The Poetry of Tennyson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 97. 9 For further consideration of the relation between ‘‘Ulysses’’ and ‘‘Tintern Abbey,’’ see Herbert Tucker’s reading of the poem in Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, 209–10. Tucker sees Tennyson’s poem as a more concentrated expression of lyric self-absorption: whereas Wordsworth sees a continuity between himself and his sister, Ulysses sees a ‘‘generational sundering’’ between himself and his son – and keeps the ‘‘wild eyes’’ of inspiration for himself alone. 10 Edward Dowden, Poems (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1914), 86. Other evening poems in the collection include ‘‘Evening,’’ in the sonnet sequence, ‘‘By the Sea’’; ‘‘Sunsets’’; and ‘‘The Pause of Evening’’ and ‘‘In the Window,’’ in the calendrical sonnet sequence, ‘‘From April to October.’’ 11 All quotations of Eliot’s poetry are from T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1980).

246

Notes to pages 186–202

12 For a brief but suggestive account of boredom as a late Romantic category of feeling with roots in Byron and Stendhal, see Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 152–6. Fisher’s characterization of boredom as ‘‘the symptom of a stricken religious consciousness’’ and as the default-state of what Baudelaire called the ‘‘unemployed’’ hero is relevant to my discussion of Eliot: the period of vespertinal meditation becomes, in poems such as ‘‘Preludes’’ and ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’’ a time of ennui. 13 See Ricks’s notes to the poem in T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1996), 177–81. 14 As Monroe K. Spears notes, ‘‘It was Baudelaire who ﬁrst showed [Eliot] that the experiences of an adolescent in an industrial city could be the material for poetry, and that the sordid aspects of the modern metropolis might be fused with the phantasmagoric.’’ See Spears, Dionysus and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 76. 15 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, with English translations by Richard Howard (Boston: David R. Godine, 1983), 277–8. 16 See Eliot’s introduction to Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals, trans. Christopher Isherwood (London: Blackamore Press, 1930), 16. 17 Jean Toomer, ‘‘Georgia Dusk,’’ in Cane, ed. Darwin T. Turner (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 15. The poem was ﬁrst published in The Liberator 5 (September 1922), 25 and later included in Cane (ﬁrst published in 1923). Evening, as image and setting, appears throughout Cane; and in a book with such a broad descriptive palette for the complexions of AfricanAmericans, ‘‘dusk’’ is a key-word. The brief lyric that opens the ﬁrst chapter, ‘‘Karintha,’’ begins: ‘‘Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon.’’ 18 For a thorough consideration of Eliot’s relation to romanticism, see George Bornstein, Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Bornstein identiﬁes three major phases in Eliot’s career: the period from 1916 to the early 1920s, when the poet conducted ‘‘a double mining and sapping operation against romantic poets’’; the mid 1920s to the early 1930s, when Eliot anathematized romanticism as usurping the role of religion; and a late phase, in which Eliot began to mellow in his stance toward romanticism and wrote the Four Quartets, which Bornstein calls ‘‘in some ways his most romantic poem’’ (107). More speciﬁcally, Bornstein aptly notes the resemblance of ‘‘East Coker’’ to the ‘‘greater Romantic lyric.’’ 19 Ibid., 174–5. 20 In his reading of ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’’ Harold Bloom likens Stevens’ evening star to that of Keats and Shelley, who saw it as ‘‘an emblem of the persistence of desire.’’ See Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 328–9. 21 This bough is one crux of an interpretive disagreement between Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom, two of the poem’s ﬁnest (and least daunted)

Notes to pages 202

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readers, about the extent of the poem’s sadness. Vendler reads ‘‘An Ordinary Evening’’ as a ‘‘resolutely impoverished poem’’ (269), a dejection ode that represents ‘‘a depression that is almost physical’’ (271), and she suggests that the ruined bough is a manifestation of that depletion. See Vendler, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). Taking issue with this reading, Bloom (The Poems of Our Climate) resolutely ﬁnds a greater degree of consolation in the poem: ‘‘A bough in artiﬁcial light makes a very different and doubtless more qualiﬁed impression than a bough in sunlight, yet it is a bough. Exhalations in the eaves are speaking out of context, yet remain exhalations’’ (325). Yet Bloom seems to overlook the bleak ‘‘total leaﬂessness’’ intimated by this image – or rather, willfully excludes it in a spirit of Stevensian dialectic. Rather than side with either reading of the poem, I would propose that it is a meditation on both major forms of ordinariness: the reassuring cyclicality of evening and the idea of exhaustion (of the body or of a poetic ﬁgure for time).

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Index

Abrams, M. H. 6, 163, 218, 224 greater Romantic lyric, concept of 6–7, 12, 163, 216, 221, 240 Natural Supernaturalism, concept of 163, 240 Addison, Joseph 15, 60 Alpers, Paul 16, 95, 204 Ashbery, John 77 Bahti, Timothy 221 Baker, Jeffery 229 Bakhtin, Mikhail 7, 36 Barash, Carol 214 Barth, J. Robert 218 Barthes, Roland 61–2 Bate, Walter Jackson 243 Bateson, F. W. 83, 223, 225 Baudelaire, Charles 186, 192 ‘‘Le Cre´puscule du Soir’’ 187–9, 200 ‘‘Le Guignon’’ 188 Beer, John 223 Benjamin, Walter 114 Berkeley, George, Bishop 66, 68 Blair, Hugh 209 Blake, William 1, 43, 179 ‘‘Nurse’s Song’’ 43–7, 177 ‘‘To the Evening Star’’ 43 Blank, G. Kim 231 Bloom, Harold 49, 148, 166, 180, 218, 222, 226, 230–1, 241, 245, 246–7 Bornstein, George 196, 246 Bowles, William Lisle 41–2, 55, 83, 108 Brawne, Fanny 175, 243 Brisman, Leslie 233, 238 Brisman, Susan Hawk 233 Bromwich, David 224, 227, 228, 239 Brooks, Cleanth 207 Brooks, Gwendolyn 177 A Street in Bronzeville 178 ‘‘Eventide’’ 177 ‘‘Hattie Scott’’ 177–8 Brooks, Peter 116, 231

Brower, Reuben 212 Brown, Marshall 12, 214 Burke, Edmund 15, 209 Burke, Kenneth 204 Burton, Robert 244 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 130 Cameron, Sharon 7–8, 49, 114, 216 Chase, Cynthia 238–9 Chernaik, Judith 231, 233 Cohen, Ralph 240 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 14, 39, 48, 106–7, 159, 161 ‘‘A Letter to – April 4, 1802’’ 76–7 Biographia Literaria 72, 75, 217 ‘‘Dejection: An Ode’’ 74–80, 82, 179, 182, 197, 222 ‘‘Fears in Solitude’’ 67–74, 129 ‘‘Frost at Midnight’’ 65, 79, 84, 91, 181, 152, 222 ‘‘Hymn Before Sun-Rise, in the Vale of Chamouni’’ 79 ‘‘Nehemiah Higginbottom’’ sonnet 50–1, 53, 219 ‘‘The Eolian Harp’’ 51–5, 69 ‘‘The Nightingale’’ 56, 57–60, 70, 171, 190 ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’’ 60–7, 92–5, 113, 124, 129, 160, 180, 195, 203 ‘‘To the Evening Star’’ 74–5 ‘‘To the Nightingale’’ 56–8 ‘‘Written at Shurton Bars’’ 217 ‘‘Written in Early Youth, the Time, An Autumnal Evening’’ 51–2 Collins, William 14, 32, 81, 112 ‘‘Ode to Evening’’ 32–5, 38–9, 44, 55, 62, 64, 86, 102, 109, 115, 147, 149, 168–9, 182, 187, 192, 198, 201 Cowper, William 14, 36 The Task 36–9, 63–4 Culler, A. Dwight 183, 245 Curran, Stuart 10, 12, 228

259

260

Index

Damrosch, Leopold 122 Darbishire, Helen 223 de Certeau, Michel 122 de Man, Paul 8, 12 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe 121–2, 128, 139 Donne, John 131 Dowden, Edward 185, 245 Dryden, John 17–18, 27, 110 Dyer, John 83, 122–4 Edmundson, Mark 224 Eliot, T. S. 8, 179, 186 ‘‘Portrait of a Lady’’ 187, 195, 197 ‘‘Preludes’’ 185, 190, 194 ‘‘The Boston Evening Transcript’’ 187, 190–1 The Four Quartets 194–6 ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’’ 13, 186, 196, 200 The Waste Land 191–3, 196 Epstein, Andrew 234 evening iconographic history of 4–5 etymology of 5–6 Jewish religious observance of 12 Everest, Kelvin 220 Evert, Walter 146, 147 Fay, Elizabeth 227 Fielding, Henry 5, 36, 179, 189 Joseph Andrews 5 Tom Jones 36 Finch, Anne 26 ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ 26–32 ‘‘A Pastoral Dialogue between Two Shepherdesses’’ 28–9 ‘‘Invocation to Sleep’’ 30 ‘‘The Spleen’’ 213 Fish, Stanley 211 Fisher, Philip 246 Fricker, Sara 56–7 Fried, Michael 166 Fry, Paul 206, 214, 231, 232, 242 Frye, Northrop 3, 225 Ge´rard, Albert 216, 218, 226, 239 Gilbert, Sandra 213 Gilpin, William 15, 209 Gittings, Robert 244 Gleckner, Robert, F. 237 Glen, Heather 215 Goodman, Kevis 215 Graff, Gerald 207 Gray, Thomas 35, 50

‘‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’’ 35–6, 37, 126, 133, 140, 148, 183, 188, 190, 195 Griffin, Dustin 4, 22, 213 Gubar, Susan 213 Harper, G. M. 48, 216 Hartman, Geoffrey 8, 12, 22, 92, 167, 209–10, 214, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 242, 243 Haven, Richard 218 Heidegger, Martin 164, 241 Hinnant, Charles 212, 214 Hogarth, William 5 The Four Times of the Day 5, 179 Hogle, Jerrold 235 Hollander, John 153, 238, 245 Hulme, T. E. 40 Hutchinson, Sara 75, 76, 78 Jacobus, Mary 224 Johnson, Samuel 163–4, 240 Johnston, Kenneth 223–4, 225 Jones, John 238 Kant, Immanuel 15, 99 Keats, John 83, 132, 145 ‘‘Fancy’’ 169 ‘‘How Man Bards Gild the Lapses of Time’’ 5.11 ‘‘I Stood Tip-toe’’ 5.39 ‘‘Lamia’’ 174–5 ‘‘O Thou Whose Face Hath Felt the Winter’s Wind’’ 150 ‘‘Ode to Apollo’’ 146–7, 153, 161, 168 ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ 151–62, 163, 164, 171 ‘‘Ode to Psyche’’ 135, 152–3, 158, 163 ‘‘Oh! how I Love on a Fair Summer’s Eve’’ 148–9 ‘‘Sleep and Poetry’’ 153, 155, 161, 165 ‘‘The Day is Gone’’ 173–5 ‘‘The Eve of St. Agnes’’ 157–8, 174 ‘‘The Fall of Hyperion’’ 135 ‘‘To Autumn’’ 162–73, 175–6, 182, 190 ‘‘To Charles Cowden Clarke’’ 172 ‘‘To My Brother George’’ 150–1 ‘‘When I Have Fears’’ 135, 162 Kermode, Frank 211, 235 King-Hele, Desmond 232, 233 Knapp, Steven 214 Knott, John 211 Kroeber, Karl 233 Lamb, Charles 63, 66, 69, 93, 125 Lambert, Ellen Z. 131, 234 Langbaum, Robert 179, 200, 205, 244

Index Lau, Beth 236, 240 Lessing, G. E. 230 Levinson, Marjorie 83, 89, 98, 207, 223, 228 Lindenberger, Herbert 229 Liu, Alan 207 Locke, John 29, 60 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 177 Lott, James 241 Lucretius Carus, Titus 137–8, 235 MacCaffrey, Isabel 211 Magnuson, Paul 67, 73, 217, 218, 221, 222, 224, 226 McFarland, Thomas 205 McGann, Jerome 207, 218 McGovern, Barbara 212, 214 Medwin, Thomas 235 Mellor, Anee 216, 220 Mellor, Ann 213 Messenger, Ann 213 Metzger, Lore 228 Miller, J. Hillis 140, 236 Milton, John ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ 25–6, 38, 40, 84, 149, 153–5, 161, 165 ‘‘Lycidas’’ 15–16, 19–20, 61, 113, 130, 133–4, 136–7, 141, 160, 170, 184. 190 Paradise Lost 20–5, 62, 72–3, 101, 103, 109, 113, 115, 119, 126, 145, 150, 152, 155, 158, 167, 181, 236, 242 Murphy, John 231 Newlyn, Lucy 226 Nicholson, Marjorie Hope 209 O’Neill, Michael 230, 232 Ovid 33, 77 Panofsky, Erwin 2, 16 Parker, Patricia 20 Parker, Reeve 219, 228 Patterson, Annabel 221 Perkins, David 242 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 5.31 Phillips, Jane E. 235 Pinch, Adela 223, 237 Puttenham, George 27 Quinones, Ricardo 21, 211 Rajan, Tilottama 114, 221, 230, 231 Randel, Fred V. 219 Reiman, Donald 233 Reynolds, Myra 212 Ricks, Christopher 212, 244

261

Ricoeur, Paul 0.20 Roberts, Hugh 235 Robinson, Daniel 216–17 Robinson, Mary 41 Rogers, Katharine 212 Rosenmeyer, Thomas 204, 210 Ruoff, Gene 77 Sacks, Peter 131, 139, 234 Salvaggio, Ruth 213 Sappho 191, 210 Schenk, Celeste M. 231 Sensibility, poetry of 25, 39–40, 52, 70, 146, 147, 153, 156, 161, 174, 223, 237 Shakespeare, William 3, 42, 57, 156, 161 Sheats, Paul 224 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 3, 112 A Defence of Poetry 135 ‘‘Adonais’’ 113, 130–44 ‘‘Alastor’’ 113–17, 126, 138 ‘‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’’ 117–20 ‘‘Julian and Maddalo’’ 3–4 ‘‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills’’ 113, 120–30, 139 ‘‘Ode to the West Wind’’ 135 ‘‘Ozymandias’’ 121 ‘‘A Summer Evening Churchyard’’ 112–13, 140 ‘‘The Cloud’’ 138 ‘‘The Sunset’’ 112–13 ‘‘To a Skylark’’ 113 Simpson, David 227 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 208 Smith, Charlotte 41, 83, 156–8, 237, 238 Elegiac Sonnets 41, 147, 153 ‘‘On Leaving a Part of Sussex’’ 41 ‘‘To Hope’’ 155, 157–8 ‘‘To Melancholy’’ 41, 147–8 ‘‘To the Nightingale’’ 157 Southey, Robert 3, 63 Spears, Monroe K. 246 Spenser, Edmund 3 ‘‘Epithalamion’’ 3, 192 ‘‘Prothalamion’’ 192 The Faerie Queene 22, 237 The Shepheardes Calendar 18–19 Sperry, Stuart 231, 241 Starr, G. Gabrielle 215 Stevens, Wallace 165, 196 ‘‘An Evening without Angels’’ 298 ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’’ 196, 199–202 ‘‘Delightful Evening’’ 196 ‘‘The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’’ 202–3 ‘‘The Man on the Dump’’ 197, 201

262

Index

Stewart, Susan 205, 212 Stillinger, Jack 75, 219, 220, 222, 239, 240 Summers, Joseph 22, 211 Symons, Arthur 229 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 180 ‘‘Crossing the Bar’’ 184–5, 203 ‘‘In Memoriam’’ 130 ‘‘The Lotos Eaters’’ 182–3 ‘‘Mariana’’ 181–2 ‘‘Ulysses’’ 144, 180–3 Tetreault, Ronald 234 Thomson, James The Seasons 14–15, 61, 163–4, 170, 220, 240 ‘‘Poem Sacred to the Momory of Isaac Newton’’15 Todd, Janet 237 Toomer, Jean 193 Trilling, Lionel 208 Tucker, Herbert 245 Vendler, Helen 168, 232, 237, 238, 239, 241, 242, 243, 246–7 Virgil 2, 16, 112 Eclogues 2, 16, 17–20, 25, 28, 32, 47, 52, 95, 130, 134, 160

Warton, Joseph 14, 40–1 Warton, Thomas 40, 60, 215, 220 Wasserman, Earl 230, 234, 235, 238, 239 Watts, Isaac 45–6 Wheeler, Kathleen 52, 216, 218, 220 Whitman, Walt 144, 194 Wilde, Oscar 1–2, 16 Williams, Helen Maria 39–40, 81, 146 Wimsatt, William 0.48

Wittreich, Joseph 213 Wolfson, Susan 10, 173, 218, 244 Woodring, Carl 221, 225 Woolf, Virginia 2–3 Wordsworth, Dorothy 59, 85–6, 91–2, 111 Wordsworth, John 92 Wordsworth, William ‘‘A Night-Piece’’ 185 ‘‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’’ 8, 206 An Evening Walk 14, 51, 82, 84–91, 98, 100, 103, 106, 117, 163, 165, 184, 217, 225–6, 240 ‘‘By the Sea-Side’’ 108 ‘‘Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty’’ 109–11 ‘‘Elegiac Stanzas’’ 108 ‘‘Evening Voluntaries’’ 107–11, 180 Fenwick Notes 226, 229 ‘‘It Is a Beauteous Evening’’ 3, 10–12 ‘‘Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree’’ 91–2 ‘‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’’ 61, 83, 87–91, 94, 163, 181, 184, 195, 199 ‘‘Lines written near Richmond, upon the Thames, at Evening’’ 81 ‘‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’’ 74, 100, 113–14, 117, 140, 141, 209, 222 ‘‘On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress’’ 81 ‘‘Poems on the Naming of Places’’ 91–5 Preface to Lyrical Ballads 56, 89–90 The Prelude 81, 99–107 ‘‘The Tables Turned’’ 81, 204 Yeats, William Butler 112, 143, 229 Zimmerman, Sarah 237

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM

General Editors

Marilyn Butler, University of Oxford James Chandler, University of Chicago

1. Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters Mary A. Favret 2. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire Nigel Leask 3. Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760–1830 Peter Murphy 4. Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution Tom Furniss 5. In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women Julie A. Carlson 6. Keats, Narrative and Audience Andrew Bennett 7. Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre David Duff 8. Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 Alan Richardson 9. Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 Edward Copeland 10. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World Timothy Morton 11. William Cobbett: The Politics of Style Leonora Nattrass 12. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 E. J. Clery

13. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 Elizabeth A. Bohls 14. Napoleon and English Romanticism Simon Bainbridge 15. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom Celeste Langan 16. Wordsworth and the Geologists John Wyatt 17. Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography Robert J. Grifﬁn 18. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel Markman Ellis 19. Reading Daughters’ Fictions, 1709–1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth Caroline Gonda 20. Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 Andrea K. Henderson 21. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England Kevin Gilmartin 22. Reinventing Allegory Theresa M. Kelley 23. British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 Gary Dyer 24. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 Robert M. Ryan 25. De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission Margaret Russett 26. Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination Jennifer Ford 27. Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity Saree Makdisi

28. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake Nicholas M. Williams 29. Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author Sonia Hofkosh 30. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition Anne Janowitz 31. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle Jeffrey N. Cox 32. Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism Gregory Dart 33. Contesting the Gothic Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conﬂict, 1764–1832 James Watt 34. Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism David Aram Kaiser 35. Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity Andrew Bennett 36. The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere Paul Keen 37. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 Martin Priestman 38. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies Helen Thomas 39. Imagination Under Pressure, 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility John Whale 40. Romanticism and the Gothic Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, 1790–1820 Michael Gamer 41. Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species Maureen N. McLane 42. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic Timothy Morton

43. British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830 Miranda J. Burgess 44. Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s Angela Keane 45. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism Mark Parker 46. Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780–1800 Betsy Bolton 47. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind Alan Richardson 48. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution M. O. Grenby 49. Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon Clara Tuite 50. Byron and Romanticism Jerome McGann; ed. James Soderholm 51. The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland Ina Ferris 52. Byron, Poetics and History Jane Stabler 53. Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 Mark Canuel 54. Fatal Women of Romanticism Adriana Craciun 55. Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose Tim Milnes 56. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination Barbara Taylor 57. Romanticism, Maternity and the Body Politic Julie Kipp 58. Romanticism and Animal Rights David Perkins 59. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History Kevis Goodman

60. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge Timothy Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson 61. Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery Deirdre Coleman 62. Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism Andrew M. Stauffer 63. Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime Cian Duffy 64. Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 Margaret Russett 65. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent Daniel E. White 66. The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry Christopher R. Miller

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The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (No. 66))

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Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780-1830 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

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The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth (Romanticism in Perspective)

Romantic Representations of British India (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

Romantic Representations of British India (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

William Cobbett: The Politics of Style (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Unfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism

Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760-1830 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

William Cobbett: The Politics of Style (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

The Truth About Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism and the Visual (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

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