CHAPTER 1

PART A: Previewing basic Issues raised in the Chapters which follow

The millennial transition 1999-2000, marking the 250th anniversary of Johann Wolfgang

von Goethe's birth in Frankfurt on the Main, provided me with a fitting occasion to consider again

the significance and symbolic value belonging to the word "Wanderer", which appears so

prominently and frequently throughout his works. Not only did Goethe infuse meaning into the

word in the furtherance of his own poetic and aesthetic needs but he passed on the benefit of this

achievement to an entire generation of poets, as shown, for example, in the common title of "Der

Wand(e)rer" introducing poems by Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schlegel. Goethe's

"Der Wandrer" was known to William Wordsworth through the mediation of an English

translation entitled "The Wanderer" by William Taylor of Norwich, and according to Jonathan

Wordsworth, the figure of the Wanderer in The Excursion owes it origin to an influence

emanating from Goethe's poetry.1 From this and other indications it appears that the verbal

phenomenon rooted in the "Wanderer" (or more precisely the verbs "to wander" and "wandern"

that give rise to the identical noun) transcends the language barrier that normally separates

German and English. This, at least, is a proposition that I hope to substantiate in subsequent

discussions.

The notion of the transcendent word has its place both in hermeneutic and exegetic

tradition 2 as well as in modern language theory. Formulated in the singular, "the word" is a

metonym for language as a whole. Wherever a word is situated, it belongs to the indivisible

corpus of language.

2 Chapter 1

Later in this study we shall note other interesting parallels between language theory and

theology centred on the nature of “the W/word“. About fifty years ago, when the bicentennial of

Goethe’s birth was very much in the foreground of discussions about German literature,

Professor L. A. Willoughby, honoured as one of the leading German scholars of his day,

published an article in Etudes Germaniques entitled: "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut'

in Goethe's Poetry".3 By referring to the essential arguments and observations contained in this

article, I hope to "kill two birds with one stone" in adducing evidence on the central importance of

the word "Wanderer" in Goethe's poetry (and other works) and in pointing to certain essential

characteristics of a "logocentric" approach to the criticism of literary texts. Professor Willoughby

intuitively applies this approach without justifying it in terms of any theory of language or literary

criticism (this gap I hope to fill in Chapter 2 by taking account of theories put forward by critics

with an expert knowledge of linguistics). His approach allows itself to be termed "logocentric" -

"word-centred" - for the following reasons:

• Professor Willoughby notes the conspicuous frequency with which the words "Wanderer" and

"Hütte" recur throughout Goethe's literary works, novellen and novels and, of course, in his

poems. The notable frequency with which the same word appears in a body of works calls for

an explanation.

• He notes a recurrent pattern in the passages surrounding the word "Wanderer". It is

commonly found in the immediate vicinity of the word "Hütte".

• He proposes an explanation for this pattern. It reveals the effect of a fundamental tendency in

the human mind. In this connection he recalls C.G. Jung's proposition that the libido seeks

union with the female aspect of the self. The Wanderer represents the male exploratory quest,

the "Hut" the goal of this quest - at one level, the harmonious union of man and woman and

the integration of the family within society.

Professor Willoughby's proposition offers a highly plausible explanation answer to the

questions that he raises in connection with the frequency of the "Wanderer“-"Hütte" collation

throughout Goethe’s prose and poetry, but he does not raise other very closely related questions,

in particularly the following:

3

• If the frequency of certain verbal patterns reflects the functions of the collective unconscious,

why are these patterns unevenly distributed throughout all poetic works in the German

language?

• Why should the word "Wanderer" suddenly gain prominence in Goethe's literary works, and

why should Romantic poets adopt the same word even though they adamantly rejected much

that the word "Wanderer" imports in the works of Goethe?

In this study I intend to apply a logocentric approach not only to Goethe's literary works,

however central the rôle they play in influencing the poetry of Goethe’s day, but also to a much

larger area including works written in English. Every intertextual comparison is predicated on the

notion of a unity shared by the works being compared. What can one take as a basis for

comparing works as various as Goethe's "Wandrers Nachtlied", "I wandered lonely as a cloud" or

Blake's "London"? All contain a word derived from either the German "wandern" or the English

verb "to wander". These verbs do not share exactly the same range of lexical meanings, but they

do possess a very similar power of evoking the same mythological or allegorical themes and, in

Goethe's time, they carried the same implications concerning the nature of poetry. Professor

Willoughby offers a clue that may help us to ascertain what it is that gives rise to the affinities

shared by the verbs "to wander" and "wandern" when he attributes the association of the

"Wanderer" and "Hut" in Goethe's writings to the influence of the collective unconscious. C. G.

Jung frequently referred to the etymology of words when elucidating his theories, and a reflection

on the etymology of "to wander" and "wandern" may well throw light on the reason for their

common implications.

These verbs are related through their common etymology to the modern German “Wandel“,

meaning “change“ or “transformation“, and to “Wende“, meaning “turning-point“, as also to words

signifying "turning" in English and German, e.g. “wenden“ and “to wind“. In a pre-Christian and

pre-scientific era, change was often attributed to supernatural forces (cf. the magician's "wand").

In the Christian period, Cain and pilgrims became Wanderers, probably because this word

still carried over associations with divine power, which, when combined with the sense of

"turning", acquired the connotations of sinning (turning from God), and repentance (turning back

to God). In the eighteenth century the allegorical and mythical-religious traditions evoked by the

4 Chapter 1

word "Wanderer" served to illuminate the nature and attributes of "the Poet". We should also

consider the similar tendencies to form recurrent verbal patterns or "valences" which the verbs

produce when combined with certain words and concepts. Professor Willoughby mentions one

such valence in the connection between "Wanderer" and "hut / Hütte", but there are others, such

as: wander(n) - night / Nacht; wander(n) - breeze / Wind; wander(n) - death / Tod; wander(n) -

moon / Mond. These juxtapositions and contrasts inhere in the basic mythology of the solar or

celestial hero’s quest for union with the female principle governing the night / death, the "great

ocean" and mother earth. The libidinal quest expresses a desire for a unity of opposites, harmony

and a healing of divisions. It is this impulse to achieve reconciliation that underlies Goethe's

Faust dramas and a number of Romantic poems in which Cain and other reprobates merge into

the figure of a returning pilgrim.

The sense of the term "context" as applied to this study is not identical with what is

commonly referred to as "the context" in such a case as when one wishes to ascertain the meaning

of a word in a given passage. In lucid prose, words are expected to convey one unambiguous

meaning even though words individually are capable of denoting or connoting a number of

different meanings.

In narrative poetry we usually apply the same criterion to establish the primary or literal

meanings of words. At the same time, we may discern patterns in groups of words, which

cannot be fully and adequately explained as the result of the poet's deliberation and foresight.

Professor Willoughby, as we have noted, explains the repeated collation of "Wanderer" and

"Hütte" as evidence of the mind's subconscious operations.

Not all scholars will concede that there is great value in comparing patterns that recur

throughout the sum of all poetry written by one author, or indeed in comparing apparent

similarities discovered in works by different authors, as in the views such scholars put forward

each poem is a unique "object" in which all words, symbols and images compose the indissoluble

unity of "the work". Critics who apply such a close and exclusive examination of literary works

are known as "contextualists", as they maintain that words and images are so bound up with

specifics of their "context", i.e. the work, that they lose that usual ability and function of words in

"normal” usage to refer to realities or purported realities in the same way that non-literary

language does. Critics whose views are to be considered in due course, such as Geoffrey

Hartman and Harold Bloom, doubt that poems gain significantly from any apparent or actual

5

references made in them to facts concerning the poet's life, "truth", religious beliefs, etc.4 Other

critics (whose opinions will be considered shortly) will argue that the "contextualist" position is

based on the fallacy that the internal aspects of a work can be recognised in total isolation from

the external references that words necessarily convey.

The debate concerning the relation of work to external reality finds its origin in the very

crisis which was attended by the extensive and conspicuous use of the word "Wanderer" in

poetry, a crisis precipitated by a radical reappraisal of the status of poetry in the modern world

once a theocentric world-view had been dislodged by rational and pragmatic ways of thought.

What earlier had been accepted as divine mysteries now had to be analysed and logically

explained without recourse to apparently discredited metaphysical assertions centred on a

theological premise. The more zealous apostles of rationalism could not tolerate gaps in the

ability of rationalism to explain all known and knowable phenomena. Patterns that cannot readily

be explained in such terms, particularly those encountered in the process of textual and verbal

analysis still occasion a certain irritation, even irascibility, especially if they cannot be passed off

as mere "coincidences". Another aspect of the denial syndrome encountered in those who demand

total explanations now is manifest in what I term "negative omniscience" of the kind reflected in

assertions that a poetic work is totally self-contained and cannot under any circumstances

whatsoever convey any "truth" concerning the world and common human concerns.

To consider "wandering" (as defined above) is to uncover a number of difficulties that

rational analysis has yet to resolve. The non-acceptance of the theocentric view entailed a total

reassessment of time and its relationship to what earlier had been conceived of as eternity. The

idea of a return to an origin, so central to human psychology and to the poets' quest for originality,

does not make sense in terms of logic that accepts time only as a measurable irreversible process.

There are also critics such as I. A. Richards and M. M. Bakhtin who assert, rightly in my

view, that the reading of texts involves a two-way process rather than an act of submission, for

they understand the text as the product of the interaction between the text per se, i.e. as an

objective configuration created by words, and the reader's state of consciousness, conditioned in

part by that reader's awareness of "the world" and the possibilities of language. This relationship

is, in M. M. Bakhtin's terminology, "dialogic" in character. 5 Dialogue implies freedom,

interdependence, not subjection to something entirely impersonal or "objective".

6 Chapter 1

"Wandering" not only refers to objects and ideas but implies relationships and contrasts on

the one hand and the desire of reconciling and harmonising them on the other. I do not believe it a

coincidence that the word "Wanderer" gained its greatest prominence in the “Age of Liberty“,

with all its hopes, challenges and traumatic side effects, not least among them the sense of

isolation and alienation manifested in poems referring to the Poet-Wanderer.

Having accepted that the verbs "to wander" and "wandern" imply freedom and a readiness

to engage in dialogue, we should be able, I suggest, to discover a body of evidence that will

corroborate this supposition in two of Goethe's most celebrated poems which bear the word

"Wanderer” in their titles. First, Goethe`s early poem "Der Wandrer" is itself a dialogue between

the Wanderer and a young woman he encounters. Second, in the two poems which make up

"Wandrers Nachtlied" there is a striking use of the pronouns "du" and "ich" (informal "you" and

"I"). In both poems "du" precedes "ich", significant perhaps in the light of modern linguistic

research showing that the child’s grasp of "I" as a form of self-reference in the earliest stages of

learning language is inseparably connected with the recognition of the meaning in "you" / "du". In

the following pages I will argue that the word "Wanderer" facilitated a dialogue between German

and English poets that truly took shape in the latter half of the eighteenth century, when its basic

implications were recognised both by German and English poets, with Goethe undisputedly

playing the central rôle in this process.

_________________________________

7

PART B

WANDERING OR THE (POET'S) QUEST FOR ORIGINS, LIBERTY AND SELF-DISCOVERY

1. A basic Implication of the Verbs "to wander" and "wandern“

The German verb "wandern" and the English verb "to wander" are not necessarily

identical in meaning, in as far as meanings can be indicated by lexical definitions, but they do

often imply that when wandering, a person walks or travels without having a fixed goal, or at

least one that this wanderer is able to reach at an appointed time. In such terms we may speak of

Ulysses and the Israelites under the leadership of Moses as "wanderers". The wanderer's lack of a

fixed timetable often carries with it the implication that he or she enjoys freedom of movement,

indeed freedom itself. Such freedom may well involve exposure to dangers, whether physical,

moral or psychological in nature, hence a need for guidance and tutelage. The necessary guidance

may come from the experience of wandering itself, as the wanderer, in order to survive, gains

self-knowledge, and this in turn involves a growing awareness of the wanderer's origins and

original purposes. In as far as "wandering" can be recognised as a literary phenomenon, this

general outline takes on a fresh aspect with the coming of a new historical period. In one regard

at least, there is no difficulty in locating appearances of this phenomenon, if one considers the

implication of the word "to wander" within its textual setting. In Milton's works the word

“wander“ often carries a signification that is to be understood within a theological frame, as when

it concerns Man's moral freedom, the Fall and the path to Redemption.

Goethe's "Speech on Shakespeare's Day"(1771)

The age on which this study is focussed formally began in 1771, when Goethe published

his "Speech on Shakespeare’s Day" ("Rede zu Shakespears Tag"). The speech itself is perhaps

no great work of art but rather an adolescent verbal outburst pleading for a break with neo-

Aristotelian rules regarding the writing of dramatic works. The lasting significance of the

“Speech“ lies not in its polemical message, for Goethe later submitted some of his plays to the

principles laid down by Aristotle. It lay rather in the semiotic effect of a word contained in the

8 Chapter 1

“Speech“, namely "Wanderer", in a sentence describing Shakespeare as "the greatest Wanderer"

("der größte Wandrer"). Basic associations in the essay underlie some of his later works.

Shakespeare was Goethe's "friend and companion" through life according to his poem "Zwischen

beiden Welten" ("Between both Worlds"), which names "William" and "Lida" (a reference to

Frau von Stein) as those who exerted the greatest influence on his development as a poet.

His novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre records the wanderings of the chief protagonist, an

actor with a great love of Shakespearean drama. In order to understand the word's significance

and later impact we must consider more than the one unambiguous meaning one normally expects

to find in words encountered in the reading of non-poetic prose. Shakespeare is called "the

greatest Wanderer" on the basis of Goethe's recognition of the sheer scope and range of

Shakespeare's imagination. Here the word "Wanderer" makes no reference to a physical act, nor is

it necessarily a metaphor based on an image presenting the picture of a person or thing in motion.

Such a figure is depicted elsewhere in the “Speech“ in the image of a giant bestriding the globe.

In common speech metaphors usually support, illuminate or add colour to the message being

conveyed without detracting from this message itself. The image in this case occupies centre

stage and totally overshadows the point it is ostensibly meant to clarify. The giant has a dual

identity achieved by references to Prometheus and a giant in seven-league boots as depicted in

folk-tales and fairy stories. Goethe’s reference to Prometheus recalls the mythical titan, both as

the creator of mankind, therefore a fitting symbol of artistic originality, and as the rebel seeking

freedom from the oppressive rule of Zeus, reflecting a desire for greater liberty in the realms of

politics, society and the arts. The reference to the folkloric giant reflects Goethe's newly

awakened enthusiasm for poetry based on a long orally transmitted tradition. This awareness, like

Goethe's discovery of Shakespeare, is attributable to an influence emanating from Johann

Gottfried Herder, then a close friend of Goethe. Herder had been compiling examples of ancient

ballads, German but also English, Scottish, Scandinavian and others. Herder's interest in this

material was engendered by the impulse provided by Thomas Percy's Reliques and Edward

Young's Conjectures on Original Composition.

In short, the word "Wanderer" forms the nexus of multiple references and images

contained in the essay and thus gains a supercharged meaning or value in much the same way

those words in poetry do. There is a further implication of the word "Wanderer" to consider. The

immediate circle of those who first heard or read the “Speech“ recognised in the word

"Wanderer" a reference to Goethe himself, celebrated for his habit of taking long walks. The word

9

"Wanderer” poses a nodal reference connecting "Shakespeare", in the "Speech" the epitome of the

poetic genius, with Goethe himself, not in some abstract sense but as a living person This fusion

of identities carries very profound implications concerning the nature of the modern poet's

identity and self-understanding, for unlike earlier poets, the modern poet has no comforting

assumptions about the guidance of the Heavenly Muse. I recall the basic definition of

"Wandering" outlined in the first paragraph of this chapter section. Goethe was evidently one of

the first poets to recognise the dilemma of the modern poet in an age when assumptions

concerning inspiration, the sanctity of language, the relation of time and eternity no longer

accorded with the spirit of a new secular age. In the terms presented in Goethe's "Speech", the

"Wanderer" refers both to a principle informing poetry, Shakespeare’s dramatic genius, and to

Goethe - a poet and also a full-blooded human being. In ages when a religious outlook had

prevailed, the Muse was understood to be the creative force working in or through the poet. As

the relationship between Muse and poet was thought to be supernatural in nature, poets did not

need to spend time sorting out their ideas about the Poet-Muse relationship. They first dedicated

their work to the Muse and then felt free to get on with the job of composing poetry.

However mysterious the Muse was believed to be, this being was evidently perceived as

one that had human attributes, allowing the poets to think of themselves as junior partners in a

personal relationship. The modern poet has no such assurance. Is the "Wanderer" a process, a

mode of creativity, or is he/she/it a personality? In the one case, the poet and poetry are taken to

be impersonal, and indeed certain modern critics like Northrop Frye (Fables of Identity) 6 assume

that they are. If there is thought to be a close identity uniting the "wandering" principle and "the

poet” in a biological and biographical sense, poets are likely to enjoy - and endure - feelings of

intoxication alternating with those of horrific isolation, as manifested in The Rime of the Ancient

Mariner and Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Goethe contended with the threat and

challenge posed by his Wander-Poet equation by dramatising and allegorising the figure of the

Wanderer in such a way as to interpose a healthy distance between the Wanderer as depicted in

poetry and himself as the "Wanderer". Goethe and the Romantic poets were thrown back on their

last resource, language itself, and only in their wandering in the medium of language could they

discover and recognise whatever should assume the rôle once ascribed to the Muse and the poet's

prophetic mission.

Geoffrey H. Hartman paints a very similar picture of the modern poet's situation in an

essay entitled "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness'", 7 an article primarily concerned with

10 Chapter 1

The English Romantic poets. He suggests that the Romantic poets adopted the term "Wanderer"

as an epithet for themselves. Here is further evidence that the word "Wanderer", in poetic

language at least, transcends the divide that otherwise distinguishes English from German. I

conclude therefore that Goethe was the first to formulate the equation making the Wanderer a

synonym for the Poet and this equation, along with its basic implication, was recognised and

adopted by the Romantic poets in the German-speaking world and, in less obvious ways, in

England.

3 Inter-cultural Influences affecting German and English Literature from 1760 to 1830

To evaluate such a possibility it is necessary to recognise the cross-cultural influences that

pertained during a period stretching from about 1760 to the early 19th century. From 1760 until

about 1780 the flow of influence ran from Britain to the German area. Some indication of this

trend is evident in the " Speech". There are traces of influence from British sources in works

written by Goethe shortly after the appearance of "the Speech on Shakespeare's Day". Goethe's

early poems and his novella Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther) also

show strong traces of influence flowing from the British Isles. Werther, a proto-romantic doomed

hero records in his journal his enjoyment of readings in Homer. However, he later records a

change of reading matter when he becomes absorbed in James Macpherson's Ossian with its

evocation of a wild and remote Celtic past. He renders a line from the Macpherson's "translation"

of some supposedly original source in Gaelic as "Der Wanderer wird kommen" - ("Tomorrow shall

the traveller come"). Goethe later commented that this change coincided with the juncture at which

Werther began his descent towards total social isolation and self-destruction. Goethe's knowledge

of Goldsmith's The Traveller leaves its mark in "Der Wandrer" of 1771, a poetic dialogue between

a cultural tourist exploring the sites of ancient classical temples in southern Italy and a young

woman occupying a cottage in this region.

Though the winds of influence blew eastwards in the 1760s and 1770s, they certainly

changed direction in the 1790s, when works by Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and August Bürger

excited great interest in English literary circles. I refer again to the fact that William Wordsworth

had read "The Wanderer", a translation of Goethe's "Der Wandrer" in 1798. Wordsworth's use of

the term "Wanderer" in The Excursion suggests much more than the importation of a word into

his poetic vocabulary, for it implies that Wordsworth, and probably other English Romantic poets,

understood the nature of Goethe’s equation of Poet-Wanderer. The English poets may also have

11

recalled occurrences of such words as “Wanderer“ and “wander“ in the works of Shakespeare and

Milton. I later investigate this intermingling of influences when discussing “I wandered lonely as

a cloud“. In this we shall contrast old and new meanings of the verb "to wander" in a blending of

influences revealing the power of language to conserve old meanings and generate new ones.

How language can do this will be focused on in the next chapter.

4. Mythology/ Religious Allegory/ Poetics

Common Areas of Concern reflected in German and English Texts containing "to wander" or "wandern"

It may prove instructive to consider in what ways the greatest "Wanderer" himself applied

the verb to "wander". In A Midsummer Night's Dream Puck refers to himself as "that merry

wanderer of the night", anticipating the juxtaposition of "Wanderer" and "Nacht" in Goethe's

poetry. As noted earlier, Professor Willoughby detects in the verbal juxtaposition associating

"Wanderer" and "Hütte" evidence of the operations of the unconscious mind, which, according to

C.G. Jung, underlie ancient myths representing the sun (a symbol of the libidinal urge) journeying

through the night in an attempt to achieve union with the "anima", the female aspect of the self.

Professor Willoughby also asserts that Goethe pioneered the discovery of the unconscious. The

final lines of Faust Part II end with a notable reference to "das ewig Weibliche", "the eternally

female". According to Professor Willoughby and other scholars, inadvertent verbal juxtapositions

in a text reflect the operations of unconscious mental processes. However, not all symbolic

journeys are only "mythical" in quality. There is also a historical aspect to consider. As Professor

Willoughby also points out, the "Wanderer"-"Hütte" juxtapositions find a precedent in the biblical

Festival of Tabernacles when the Israelites dwelt in provisional "huts" or booths. The story of the

wandering Israelites posed in Dante's view the primal allegory in the Christian tradition. The

biblical festival arguably expresses a need to establish a connection between astral time (with its

circular structure) and historical time (with its progressive attribute). Some other biblical or

classical motifs are identified as the “Wanderer” in both English and German, in particular Cain,

a figure which Professor Willoughby singles out as a particularly important motif in Goethe's

poetry and prose works. It is very difficult for post-Romantic theorists to hold together two

distinct but by no means mutually

12 Chapter 1

Antagonistic attitudes to time and time-consciousness - mythical or cyclical time, and historic or

progressive time.

Whatever one believes about the religious orthodoxy - or more often the lack of it - on the

part of Goethe and the Romantic poets, these poets all felt the need to avail themselves of images

and allegorical elements derived from biblical or other religious source-material typically recalled

by the word "Wanderer". Indeed, the question of the religious or essentially non-religious aspects

of modern poetry poses a major point of contention among literary critics. The word "to wander"

plays a key role in critical discussions concerning the status of poetry in the modern secular world

(Ch.3).

Goethe and his Romantic contemporaries did not share one religious point of view and yet

they all availed themselves of biblical allegories and other religious imagery. I think they did so

because they found that the use of the allegorical mode of expression "worked", that is to say, it

got them over the same obstacle, their lacking assurance about the identity of the Poet / Wanderer

and the nature of their source of inspiration in an age when it was too late to presume a belief in

direct inspiration and too early to appeal to the theories of Jung and Freud. The main problems

facing the poets of the Romantic era remain essentially those confronting critics at the end of the

twentieth century; though some have assumed a very authoritative, sometimes almost

authoritarian, pose. If, to refer to T.E. Hulme's dictum, Romantic poetry is "spilt religion", 7

modern criticism is sometimes open to the retort that it is spilt theology. In T.E. Hulme’s words:

You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism, then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.

5. The Recurrence of a Key Word in a) Single Works b) Works by the same

Author c) Poetic Tradition, - The Relevance of a "Logocentric" Method?

a) In what way is this discussion of the word "Wanderer" relevant to the tasks of interpreting

individual works of literature? Not all schools of criticism favour comparisons between identical

or similar words situated in different poetic works. Proponents of the internal school regard each

b)

13

Work as a distinct poetic object that fuses all composite elements into a unique construct. In their

view a word (image, symbol) acquires significance only as part of the unity suffusing the work.

Other poems may contain words sharing the same outward form, but their function and attributes

participate in a totally different system. Critics adhering to this school, emphasise the unique and

spontaneous qualities of the work, and so tend to regard words, with what they see as their limited

range of lexical meanings, as a source of raw material like the sculptor's stone or painter’s oils.

b) For Professor Willoughby the context that provides a basis for a comparing poems written by

Goethe is that derived from knowledge of Goethe's personality and the course of his life.

Professor Willoughby does not venture into comparisons between Goethe's poetry and that of the

German Romantic poets, although these also, being subject to Goethe's influence, frequently

contain the word "Wanderer" and other derivatives of the verb "wandern". A study in which a

critic compares works written by more than one author cannot be based on the assumption that

these works are the product of the same mind, as in Willoughby's study of the "Wanderer" image

in Goethe's poetry, and it is not possible to bypass this problem by claiming that the Romantics

simply adopted Goethe's formulations "lock, stock and barrel", that is to say, accepting the entire

system of values they imply in Goethe’s literary works. As subsequent discussions will

demonstrate, they were very much at variance with Goethe's concept of the Wanderer's (artist's or

poet's) rôle in society, but they did not choose another word with which to confute Goethe's

values but used the word they had appropriated from Goethe to do so. The word then lies at the

heart of a dialogue between poets whose most important differences emerge once they recognise

their essential affinities. Family arguments are not the least heated of disputes. G. H. Hartman

contends that the figure of the Wanderer translated into such characters as Coleridge’s Mariner

and Goethe’s Faust articulates a fundamental change of consciousness to which poets of the

Romantic generation were subject.8 Such a momentous change can only be recognised as

change in relief. i.e. against a cultural and historical background, and, in the literary domain,

within the ambit of all that T.S. Eliot meant by the unity of literary tradition. Hence the need for

an approach that involves the possibility of interpreting occurrences of words within a wider

historical or "diachronic" context.

14 Chapter 1

c) In the next chapter we shall consider the findings of a school of linguists, which argues that it

is possible to recognise a word's unique function within a work without losing sight of the fact

that a word retains essential and inherent qualities in whatever context it is found. It is possible to

argue that a word has both a universal and specific aspect if one allows that the exact position of a

word helps to determine its role in a continuing process, whether evident in a particular work, in

the author's life or in poetic tradition itself. We have already noted that the appearance of the

word "Wanderer" in the "Speech on Shakespeare's Day" marks the beginning of a new age in

poetry, which is not to say that the word acquired a meaning in no way related to implications that

it had earlier possessed, for in both German and English, words derived from the wander- root

had referred to some source of inspiration. In the English tradition this assumed the aspect of

"wandering Muse", and in the German tradition "the Wanderer" had been the epithet applied to

Wotan, a Germanic god of poetry and weather.

15

ANNOTATIONS

1. Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, (New York and Evanston, 1969).

2. The second hermeneutic principle of rabbinical exegesis (Rabbi Yishmael's baraisa) is based on the premise that a

word is imbued with a divinely bestowed meaning that transcends any particular context. Texts and passages in the

Bible that contain the same word are compared on the basis of this premise.

3. L.A. Willoughby, "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry", (Etudes Germaniques, 3,

Autumn 1951).

4. Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness'" Romanticism and Consciousness Essays in

Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1970).

5. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin University of Texas Press, 1981).

6. Northrop Frye Fables of Identity, (New York, 1963).

7. T.E. Hulme, Romanticism and Classicism, in Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, 1924.

8. Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’“.

CHAPTER 2 I: REFLECTIONS ON THE STATUS OF THE WORD IN THE PERIOD OF

GOETHE AND THE ROMANTICS

Geschrieben steht:"Im Anfang war das Wort!" Hier stock ich schon! Wer hilft mir weiter fort? Ich kann das Wort so hoch unmöglich schätzen, Goethe: Faust, Der Tragödie Erster Teil Studierzimmer I, 1224-6 It is written: "In the beginning was the Word!" Here I falter! Who can help me continue? That highly I can never consider the Word, Goethe: Faust, The Tragedy, Part I The Study I, 1224-6

****************************** The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the height of Love's rare Universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fire.

Weak verses, go kneel at your Sovereign's feet, And say, - "We are the masters of your slave, What wouldest thou then with us and ours and thine?" Then call your sisters from Oblivion's cave, All singing loud "Love's very pain is sweet, But its reward is in the world divine Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave." Shelley: Epipsychidion, 588-597

******************************

18 Chapter 2

It is one matter to assert that references to the "Wanderer" in the poetic works of Goethe

and the Romantics, both German and English, imply the "Poet". It is quite another to explain why

these poets should collectively equate the "Wanderer" and the "Poet" and assess the far-reaching

implications of this identification.

A certain difficulty in engaging interest in the investigation I wish to undertake possibly

lies in a widespread unwillingness to take the word "Wanderer" very seriously. While no student

of German literature (and music) can fail to notice the frequent and prominent use of "Wanderer"

in the titles of celebrated poems by Goethe and Romantic poets, it might appear to some critics of

literature that the use of this word - precisely because it is so prominent a feature of the literary

landscape - can pose little more than a "conceit", "mask" or "persona", devoid of deep

significance. Furthermore, critics of the internal school probably distrust the word, as it so often

implies the inextricability of life and art, particularly in the poetry of Goethe and Byron. Then

again, the Wanderer hardly provides a crisp image, but rather a mere word of somewhat indistinct

contour and expressive of apparently diverse and even contradictory meanings. How odd of the

poets to make it a central component of their vocabulary.

In English literature the phenomenon identified by the word "wandering" is not so

conspicuous as it is in German literature. The word "Wanderer" does not appear frequently in the

titles of poems. As a declined verb or as a participle with an adjectival function, "to wander"

enjoys a significance comparable to than of "wandern" in German. The near invisibility of "to

wander" as a declined verb obviates the danger of being dismissed as a convention. However, its

significance may be overlooked for a different reason, even though it is part of the same

phenomenon as that which is revealed in occurrences of "Wanderer" in German poetry.

A defence of "wandering" involves a consideration of the very fundamentals of poetic

language and even language in general, particularly in matters concerning the unconscious

influences that impress language. The Romantic poets' extreme self-consciousness, though

unquestionably compounded by personal feelings of turmoil, guilt or insufficiency, was

symptomatic of a yet more fundamental concern, one touching the very legitimacy of poetic

language in an age when Thomas Love Peacock in his essay The Four Ages of Poetry could view

poetry as an outmoded form of language that no longer accorded with a progressive modern phase

of human development. If poetic language had lost its legitimacy, then poets had lost their raison

d’être.

19

Though usually thought of as an atheist or agnostic, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his answer

to Peacock’s pronouncement on the death of poetry (one of the first of many), averred the

sanctity and prophetic nature of the art in A Defence of Poetry. The declining prestige of poetry

and a commensurate and related decline in regard to religious and biblical authority amounted to

a dethronement of "the Word". In this connection it is surely significant that, when pondering how

to translate logos into the language of his day, Goethe's Faust rejected the "Word" ("das Wort") in

favour of "the Deed" ("die Tat") as an adequate rendition of logos in the first chapter of St. John's

Gospel. This change of word reflected the Zeitgeist of Goethe's, not Faust's, epoch. "The Word"

seems to have absorbed the mustiness of libraries and the aridity of a recluse's study, and lost its

sense of an originating power; "the Deed" implies action and motion, which in Goethe's age were

being treated as virtues in themselves (Faust set the condition for the forfeiture of his soul in his

becoming resigned to a bed of idleness).

Faust contrasts "Word" and "Deed" as irreconcilable antitheses. These do not appear

absolutely irreconcilable in a possible inference from the Latin words rendering the passage that

exercised Faust's skills as a translator: in principio erat verbum. The "verb" is both a word and

often an indicator of a deed. Kenneth Burke recognises parallels between theology and the

domain of language, when stating in The Rhetoric of Religion: 1

What we say about words in the empirical realm will bear a notable likeness to what is said about God in theology.

The verbs "to wander" and "wandern", we have noted, have accumulated profound biblical

associations with Cain, the "wanderings" of Israel, etc. Before the Christian era, Wotan, a deity in

which Tacitus recognised an equivalent of Mercury, had been known as the "Wanderer". Not only

was this god believed to be a wanderer of the earth but was also esteemed as the sponsor of the

poetic arts. When Goethe called Shakespeare the “greatest wanderer“ in his “Speech on

Shakespeare’s Day“, he implicitly invested the dramatist's powers of imagination with divine

attributes.

As we have noted, the transition from the belief in direct inspiration to a modern

perception of the originality of the poetic genius entailed a deep sense of trauma. In their

dilemma, Goethe and later the Romantics tapped the power inherent in verbs of motion, the most

notable of these being "to wander" and "wandern", the bases of the common derivative

"Wanderer". Not only are these verbs indicators of action and movement: they are incomparably

20 Chapter 2

rich in allegorical associations.

. John Frederick Nims notes a connection between descriptions of motion and allegories

when stating in Western Wind, 2 a handbook for students of poetry:

A mountain may be a symbol of salvation; a traveller may be a symbol of a human being in his life. But it the traveller takes as much as one step toward the mountain, it seems that the traveller and the mountain become allegorical figures, because a story has begun.

Paradoxically, John Frederick Nims reiterates a common prejudice among critics that the

allegory is an outmoded and contrived form of figurative language. Nims effectively confute his

own argument in attesting that the very use of a verb of motion produces a story, an allegory,

irrespective of the author's conscious purpose. We may extrapolate from the words I have just

cited that the use of a verb of motion engages some faculty of the mind subject to the influence of

an unconscious element of the mind.

There is further evidence of some connection between the theological issues surrounding

the term logos and modern literary studies. The expression logocentric is a significant item in the

modern critic's list of basic terms. A logocentric approach to the study of poetic texts emerges in

the following discussion of theories put forward by Jurij Tynjanov. Together with Roman

Jakobson, Tynjanov was a member of the group of critics and linguists known as the Russian

Formalists. This movement arose in the early l920s before its suppression by Stalin. Trotsky

alleged that the Formalists had succumbed to "the superstition of the word". When repudiating the

Formalists, Trotsky echoed the lines (quoted above) in Goethe's Faust in the statement:

The Formalists show a fast-ripening religiousness. They are followers of St. John. They believe that "In the beginning was the Word". But we believe that in the beginning was the deed. The word followed as its phonetic shadow. 3

The logocentricity manifested by Tynjanov and other Formalists does not fully square

with mainstream criticism in the West, which perceives the essential basic elements of poetry as

"images" or quasi-musical effects. It was probably the Romantics who set the trend for

interpreting characteristics of poetry in terms of analogies with the non-verbal arts of painting,

sculpture and music, perhaps because "the word" as such had apparently lost its ancient vitality

and authority. Shelley, though a doughty defender of poetry, agonised about the heaviness of

21

words when composing the lines in Epipsychidion cited at the beginning of this chapter.

II: "THE WORD" IN LANGUAGE THEORY

In the domain of literary criticism, as formerly in that of ecclesiastical controversy, "the

word" and "the image" pose contrasts arousing intense debate as to which of them has precedence

over the other. Though it is hardly possible to conceive of a poem without words, literary critics -

and even poets themselves - have at times made unfavourable references to words and language,

such as in the case we now consider.

In the heyday of the Imagist movement, Ezra Pound records his opinion that words are

merely flat representations of concepts, whereas images are capable of expressing an unlimited

number of effects and nuances of significance. In an article on "Vorticisim" he argues that words

resemble numerals in having a fixed value, while images have an "algebraic" quality in their

ability to express an unlimited range of effects and significance. 4 Logically any argument or

proposition equating the essence of poetry with "the image" - fundamentally a metaphor based on

references to things apprehended by the sense of sight - implies that words have little more than

an identifying or descriptive rôle in poetry. Analogies between poetry and music may also, taken

too literally, induce a negative evaluation of words. Certainly, no high esteem of words, poetic

tradition the verbal dexterity usually attributed to poets is recorded in one article presenting the

view that the best poetry is "musical" in character.

In his article "The Musical Development of Symbols: Whitman", Calvin S. Brown

proposes that "symbols" produce the "musical" effects characteristic of the greatest poetic

achievements, for which Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" poses a pre-

eminent example.

Brown evaluates words as little more than the means of labelling symbols and considers

their normal connection with external reality to be irrelevant in poetry. Thus, according to

Brown, the poem's references and allusions to Abraham Lincoln, whose death instigated the

writing of the poem, serve only to reinforce the general idea of "a great man" as an element in that

poem's structure and development. A plain man or woman could be forgiven for finding such an

assertion difficult to accept.

22 Chapter 2

The trend towards evaluating poetry chiefly in terms of analogies between it and the visual

or musical arts was firmly established in the Romantic period. Since then a terminology derived

from such analogies has become so commonplace as to constitute a technical vocabulary the

routine use of which tends to discourage new approaches to literary criticism. In the concluding

chapter of Romantic Image Frank Kermode expresses regret at the habitually unreflecting use of

the terms "image" and "symbol", which, in this critic's view, are commonly assumed to provide

objective definitions and concepts although they in fact convey value judgements rooted in

"supernaturalist" beliefs and attitudes. 6 Kermode notes as a positive development a new interest

in language theory evinced by influential critics, which was "anti-supernaturalist" in effect.

Kermode's opinion about the objectivity of language theory is consonant with the simple fact that

words are readily identifiable, locatable, countable and generally accessible to methods of

statistical analysis. In the case of images and symbols, on the other hand, opinions differ as to

what provides the basic data to be investigated.

Critics of the internal school assume that words are arbitrary signs offering little insight

into the processes of poetic creativity. Having dissociated the essential forms and patterns of

poetry from those of language, they argue that poets shape images, symbols, musical effects, etc.

with recourse to the pliant and neutral medium of language. Critics with a thorough grounding in

language theory will be unable to accept that language is a transparent and neutral medium. To

use a term favoured by William Empson, language is too "ambivalent" to serve an essentially

referential function. 7 The noted linguist Philip Wheelwright has gone so far as to question the

ultimate justification for using the words "symbol" and "image" in the area of textual criticism,

pointing out that these refer to some - but by no means all - aspects of poetic language. One

could go further to argue that a tendency to identify "symbols" and "images" in poetry as the most

significant and vital aspects of the art leads to a bias in the criticism of poetry favouring the

appreciation of substantives and the effects they produce at the expense of a commensurate

appreciation of verbs and their effects, though verbs, particularly those describing motion, deeply

influence and inform the coherence of the poems. This myopia reflects and reinforces a

widespread prejudice against the narrative and allegorical elements in poetry, so often dismissed

as "trivial" or "artificial".

Linguists who stress the density, ambivalence end complexity of poetic language adopt a

position diametrically opposed to Ezra Pound's contention that words, unlike images, are

incapable of conveying a rich variety of effects and "algebraic" variations. Is there a possibility?

23

Of mediating between the entrenched imagist and language-based positions? It is timely to

reconsider a basic premise on which modern linguistics is founded.

According to Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of language, there are two distinct yet

mutually inseparable aspects of language, namely "la langue" and "la parole". The former

denotes language as a general system, while the latter defines it as the articulation of language in

speech or writing. Two scholars belonging to the Russian Formalist school of criticism, Roman

Jakobson and Jurij Tynjanov, point out in a jointly written paper that de Saussure's distinction

between "la langue" and "la parole" provided the proper basis for linguistic studies of literary

texts. 8 Without specifying which school of criticism they had in mind, they note that those who

failed to take account of this distinction have produced distorted and one-sided results.

In an article appearing as "The Meaning of the Word in Verse" 9 in English translation,

Tynjanov seeks to demonstrate the relevance of de Saussure's distinction between "la langue" and

"la parole" in the practice of textual criticism. His reference to "the word" seems to have an

almost biblical ring suggesting the notion of "the Word", for both "the word" and "the Word", in

language or theology, represent something universal condensed into one of its minuscule parts,

whether this universal entity be understood as language, the Scriptures, or even the Creator.

To make the essential nature of "the word in verse" better understood, Tynjanov uses two

metaphors: It is like a vessel which, however various its contents, always remains the same. It is

also like a chameleon in being able to change colour according to whatever environment poses its

context. I summarise what I see as Tynjanov's main postulations in the succeeding five

paragraphs:

1. The word has both a general and highly specific aspect, reflecting a duality in language

itself (cf. Saussure's distinction between "la langue" and "la parole").

2. In respect to its general aspect, the word comprehends all occurrences of words sharing

the same appearance and evincing recognisably similar meanings. According to Tynjanov,

words fulfilling these criteria partake in the same "lexical unity".

3. In one sense the occurrence of a word may be understood as a particular and uniquely

"coloured" manifestation of the word in the general sense defined above. It owes its unique

quality to its position in the text of which it is a part.

24 Chapter 2

4. At the primary level of language - that level at which one readily determines a word's

sense as inferable from its (verbal) context - a word is usually accorded one predominant

meaning - its secondary feature. If a word is felt to convey more than the meaning the

context requires, a reader or listener is forcibly aware of a contrast between the "word in a

specific context" and "the word outside any context" - in Tynjanov's parlance - between

the word's secondary feature and its basic feature, which allows one to feel or discern the

unity underlying the word's secondary features. 10 A usage of a word that entails an

awareness of this contrast tends to be deprecated as a lapse of style, in non-literary prose at

least. If, however, none of the usual meanings of the word accords with the word's primary

context, the word absorbs meaning from its context, often acquiring an expletive or strongly

emotional tone. If the suppressed meaning of the word poses the opposite of meanings

implied by the context, an oscillating feature is likely to arise. This is the case when words

which convey insults the normal use of language are to be understood as terms of

endearment. 11

5. So far we have considered the word without special reference of words in poetry. Words

in poetry are particularly striking in their ability to awaken in a reader's or listener's mind

awareness that a word exists both on the "synchronic“ and “diachronic” plane. The

same word belongs to the contemporary world of the poet and necessarily reflects his or her

surrounding world. The resultant new meaning of the word must in some measure

"displace" earlier meanings and associations of the word preserved by literary tradition. 12

It occludes or overlays these meanings without totally eradicating them. We shall consider

the effects of this apparent confusion later.

How far is it possible to harmonise Tynjanov's theories concerning the "word in verse"

with rival views upholding the primacy of "the image" or "musical structure" of poetry? In what

way, for example, does Tynjanov's insistence on the indissolubility of word and verbal context

find parallels in apparently similar assertions made by "contexualists" with leanings to New

Criticism? Few could fault Roman Jakobson's strict regard for internal qualities of a poetic work

evident in his essay on Baudelaire's "Le Chat". However, the Russian Formalists could not accept

that the internal features of a poem existed in absolute isolation from realities to which the poem

referred, whether they are events in a poet's life or some historical fact. We have already noted

25

linguistically based objections to the proposition that the effect of words is totally predictable or

compliant to design.

As Tynjanov's essay persuasively demonstrates, "the word" is both uniquely defined by its

position in a work, and yet partakes in what appears to be the almost mystic unity of the universal

word in the language. Thus we might conclude "the word", properly understood, unites the

"algebraic" quality of Pound's "image" and the "musical" quality of Calvin Brown's "symbol".

On the basis of arguments that have been discussed so far in this chapter, I hope to

crystallise a basic approach to the " logocentric" method of textual analysis to be applied to

poems considered in the following chapters of this study. Many of the issues that concern

linguistic and literary theory need not always be elucidated through technical phraseology. Let us

consider why we normally read a newspaper article once or twice, while we may return to a well-

loved poem any number of times and never exhaust its reserves of meanings and evocations. Is

the difference in our attitude to a newspaper article and a poem solely attributable to the intrinsic

qualities of an article or poem? From a linguist's point of view a piece of journalistic writing - or

even a section in a technical handbook - poses an immensely complex phenomenon. We tend to

evaluate texts in accordance with expectations reflecting our understanding of the purpose of a

given text, even if this were only to inform us on the right time to sow potatoes. The more

technical or factual the perceived objective of a text, the greater the expectancy on the reader's

part that words have a precise and unambiguous meaning. The reader normally understands

words in the light of their context determined not only by reference to the text in its entirety but

also through a recognition of recurrent patterns and conventional juxtapositions. We do not need

to consult a wide context to know that "a train of thought" and "the next train to Liverpool" are

different kinds of train. When reading poetry we do not suspend our usual mode of understanding

language. When confronted by some abstruse work by Dylan Thomas or James Joyce, we

inevitably first record a disparity between the text being read and the language we normally use.

If a poem does not superficially deviate from common usage, we understand words in

much the same way as we do when reading a non-literary text. Of course, if we understood

poetry only at such a level, we would read through (and discard) a poem as though it were a

report in a daily newspaper.

It emerges from Tynjanov's discussions that words in poetry possess an inexhaustible

range of meanings. With each new reading of a poem, new meanings rise to the surface of a

26 Chapter 2

reader's consciousness. Here we may speak of a process of progressive revelation, a fact

ultimately grounded in the dual nature of the "the word" with its specific and universal aspects.

The textual approach I envisage has a four-fold aspect. The four aspects to be considered

in this case I outline as follows:

• The Primary Level: At this level we determine the particular meaning of a word that is

most obviously consistent with its immediate verbal environment. Tynjanov could not

consider "lexical coloration" or "oscillation" without reference to the primary level of

language.

• The Structural Level: As Tynjanov has pointed out, no word exists outside some context.

The question remains: what is the context of a word in a poetic work? A word here is not

evaluated purely in terms of semantics, as it might in a non-fictional context. We have also

to consider its "structural" implications in relation to its position in the text and what Calvin

S. Brown sees as its "musical" effects (through a repetition of recognisably similar

elements, symbols, etc.).

• The Unconscious Level: In psychological tests doctors use the technique of verbal

response, assuming that a word has a unique private meaning in any individual's

subconscious mind. As this significance is inextricable from a most complex density of

mental associations underlying articulated thought, a single word response, bypassing the

purely rational processes of logic, provides a basis for analysing the deepest patterns in

verbal association. In her monograph Browning’s Poetry of Reticence, 13 Barbara

Melchiori bases her assessments of Robert Browning’s poetry on the hypothesis that any

individual word found in a poem may conceal vast depths of meaning apprehended only by

the unconscious mind. If this is the case, a focus on the primary sense of a word must

inevitably produce concealment or - Tynjanov's "displacement" - of this word's

significance at other levels. However, as "verbal clues", individual words (considered in

the light of their position in a text) will increasingly reveal to careful and intuitive

reflection their wealth of symbolism and implication.

27

• The Level of the Collective Unconscious: If we attempt to narrow down the terms of

discussion to the works of one author and treat these as evidence concerning that author's

personality or private psychological make-up, we may well end up by attempting to offer

belated couch treatment at the expense of a balanced and objective assessment of the

intertextual aspect of literary criticism. As T.S. Eliot suggests in "Tradition and the

Individual Talent", 14 there is something in poetic tradition, which seems to transcend the

individual mind of any particular poet. Lacking the option of explaining the unity of

tradition as evidence of the activity of a "Muse" or divine influence, we shall probably have

to posit the Jungian “collective unconscious“ or something very much like it.

In the following section we shall consider the allegorical range of signification of

"wandering" in the light of the Christian and rabbinical traditions of allegorical interpretation and

modern reflections on textual interpretation based on psychological theories.

________________________________________________________

28 Chapter 2

III: WANDERING IN RELATION TO ALLEGORICAL MOTIFS IN

ENGLISH LITERATURE

Common to the arguments of Aquinas and some modern linguists is the perception of a

basic "literal" or "primary" level of meaning in contradistinction to which other levels of

meaning, such as those, which are termed "allegorical" or "suppressed", are to be identified.

Aquinas referred to the four senses belonging to passages in the Scriptures, using the terms

"literal", "allegorical", "moral" and "anagogic". In The Banquet (Il Convivio) and in his letter to

Can Grande della Scala, 15 Dante took the biblical account of the flight of the Israelites from

Egypt as an example of an allegory in its pristine form, using it to illustrate the four senses

established by Aquinas. Accordingly, the biblical story refers at the literal level to the historical

migration of the Israelites at the time of Moses; at the "allegorical" level to God's plan of

salvation as described in the New Testament; at the "moral" level to the conversion of the soul

(and by implication to the biography of a believer's life and experience); at the "anagogic" level to

the parting of the soul and body at death.

The medieval categories of textual interpretation have not completely lost currency in

modern criticism. Northrop Frye has used the term "anagogic" to designate one of the archetypes

on which he bases his theory of myths that correspond to the seasons in the annual cycle. I now

suggest other ways in which the medieval systems of interpretation could be relevant to literary

criticism with reference to three well-known works in English literature. In these works the main

protagonist is a "wanderer" in some sense. In the context of these works it will be interesting to

note the implications of words derived from the verb "to wander". As Tynjanov has shown,

words, like texts, reveal obvious and less obvious levels of significance. It is sometimes possible

to correlate the senses of a word with the levels of meaning of the text in which it is situated. The

first case we consider provides an example or interpretation at an "allegorical" level.

1. The "wanderings" of Jesus in the Judean wilderness as described by Milton in Paradise

Regained recall the wanderings of Israel, which, according to Dante, anticipate (at the

"allegorical level" according to the narrower definition of this term) God's plan of

salvation achieved by Christ's death and suffering. The very occurrence of the verb "to

wander" in the body of the text recalls not only the wanderings of Israel and Elijah but

also significant occurrences of the verb "to wander” in Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve

29

leave Paradise "with wand'ring feet" according to the resounding final lines of this epic.

"Wandering" here is highly ambivalent in its implications. On the one hand, the fate of

wandering is one meted out to sinners like Cain. On the other, Adam and Eve leave the

domain of primal innocence to enter the path of human history which will lead them and

their descendants to redemption.

.

2. The Pilgrim's Progress tells of events, which the narrator ascribes to a dream and thus

recalls biblical precedents in dreams sent by God to reveal truth directly and without the

aid of normal physical perception. Though the journey depicted in the story is unreal in

one sense, it is shot through with evocations of the places and people Bunyan encountered

during his life. The journey recalls at another level the basic paradigm of all pilgrim

journeys within the Judeo-Christian tradition - the wanderings of Israel that lead to the

Promised Land. At one juncture in the story Christian approaches Mount Sinai and fears

that the summit of this mountain will fall down upon him. 16 This allusion apart, the story

of Christian's journey manifests what Dante defined as "the moral" sense of the story of

Israel's flight from Egypt. At this level the story, with or without the conscious consent of

the writer, acquires a biographical and progressive quality, as the very title of the book

indicates. We shall note in subsequent discussions that debates about the "progressive" or

"non-progressive" implications of literary treatments of "wandering" in its various aspects

concern basic questions about the relationship between art and life. The Pilgrim's

Progress is commonly held to be the first novel in English literature. Bunyan's other

works remain more obvious expressions of his didactic aims as a Puritan writer, perhaps

because they are based on static metaphors like The Holy City. The underlying metaphor

of a pilgrim journey bought out a dynamic and developmental potential revealed only in

The Pilgrim's Progress among Bunyan's literary works. The fact that the allegory of the

pilgrim's journey carries within itself a shaping or developmental potential denied to static

symbols emerges when we contrast other works written by the same author. Byron’s Don

Juan evinces a repetitive and circuitous pattern of episodes, whereas Childe Harold's

Pilgrimage presents a unity analogous to the path of life leading to the transition between

time and eternity.

30 Chapter 2

3. As the "editor" of the second version of Robinson Crusoe (1720) Crusoe remarks (I place

in bold print words that appear especially significant to me):

the story, although allegorical, is also historical… In a word, the Adventures of Robinson Crusoe are one whole scheme of a real life of eight and twenty years, spent in the most wandering desolate and afflicting circumstances that ever man went through.

Three words in this citation are of particular interest from the point of view taken in this

study. As "history", Crusoe's story describes in plausibly realistic terms the experience of a

man who was forced to survive almost thirty years of isolation from European civilisation.

The "allegorical" character of the story is not made explicit. The word "wandering" acquires

a negative tone by its juxtaposition with "desolate" and "afflicting". The negative

connotations of the word suggest disorientation and a punishment for sin or folly. The

uncertainties surrounding these references to "allegory" and "wandering" may be clarified if

we inspect occurrences of the verb "to wander" in the story itself. In the opening paragraphs

of Robinson Crusoe the verbs "to ramble" and "to wander" are associated with "thought"

and "inclination" in a manner that is fully consistent with common usage. The third

paragraph opens with the words: "Being the third son of the family and not bred to a trade,

my head began to be filled very early with rambling thoughts". The fourth paragraph

contains a sentence in which Crusoe states that he had no reason other than "a mere

wandering inclination" for leaving his native country. Although any verb of motion may

acquire a metaphorical meaning in whatever form of language, some have become linked by

usage with such notions as digression, deviation, transgression and so on. "To ramble" does

not conventionally imply a moral judgement. When referring to thought or speech, it

suggests that one or the other of these is logically disconnected or lacking in purposeful

direction. The connotative range of "to wander" finds no parallel in other verbs of motion

such as "to ramble", "to stray", "to digress", "to transgress", "to roam", etc. The

juxtaposition of "wandering inclination” and "leaving my father’s house” obviously recalls

the strong biblical associations of the word "to wander" with the wilderness journey of the

Israelites, the parable of the Prodigal Son and other well-known motifs. A reference to

"father's house" recurs in the story, pointing to the central significance of the

31

figure of the Prodigal Son. In one way this is strange, as Crusoe returns to England long

after his parents' death. If we take Crusoe's father to be a figure representing the patriarchal

order of established society rather than Crusoe's progenitor, the reason for Crusoe's being

likened to the Prodigal Son becomes understandable. Cut off from the civilisation of his

native land, Crusoe must re-establish a new social order based - let us say - on the

"Protestant work ethic". Certainly the novel's social and political implications were

immediately grasped by the reading public in England and on the Continent of Europe, and

those writers who were prompted by Defoe's novel to write their own Robinsonades dwelt

more on the idea of establishing a new civilisation than on that of Crusoe's isolation and

loneliness and on the theme of isolated individual endeavour. Crusoe's sense of guilt and

fear aroused by his crossing what he felt to be a forbidden threshold might also by

understood as the indirect expression of feelings known to Defoe himself, for we may

imagine that it was not without great trepidation that the author, approaching the age of

sixty, ventured for the first time into the realm of pure novelistic fiction.

Defoe anticipated a later generation of poets that included Goethe and the Romantics in

exploiting images and allegories of biblical and religious origin in order to contend with issues of

an essentially psychological or aesthetic nature. Byron and Shelley made Ahasuerus and Cain

symbols for "thought" and self-consciousness. In the figure of Goethe's Faust, Cain and the

Prodigal Son finally merge under the influence of Goethe's concern with aesthetics rather than

orthodox religion. Named "Wanderer" in the margin of the written text, Faust enters eternity. In

the apotheosis of the returning Wanderer, we discern the "anagogic" aspect of the story of the

wanderings of Israel and all that has been subsequently derived from it. Modern criticism is

divided on the question of whether literary evocations of wanderers such as Cain, the Pilgrim and

the Prodigal Son have retained - or lost - their original connection with religious truth or any

external reality. Harold Bloom maintains that "the interiorization of quest romance", a process

that took place during the Romantic period in his view, resulted in poetry becoming an

autonomous domain with no vital connection with "external" 17 factors.

32 Chapter 2

The controversy surrounding the Wanderer as represented in Romantic poetry is the main

subject for discussion in the following chapter. Certain critics would be horrified at any

suggestion that they indulged in any form of "wandering", yet if we apply a logocentric criterion

to their writings - if we inspect the implications of their choice of words - an interesting picture

will emerge.

_______________________________

33

ANNOTATIONS

1. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion (University of California, 1970).

2. John Frederick Nims, Western Wind / an Introduction to Poetry (New York, 1983).

3. Leon Trotsky, "The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism" in Literature and Revolution (Russian

version published in 1924), tr. Rose Strumsky (Ann Arbor: 1960).

4. Ezra Pound, "Vorticism", in Fortnightly Review (Sept. 1914). The following citation from this article is

cited in Imagist Poetry, Peter Jones (Penguin Books, 1972).

The symbolists dealt in association, that is in a sort of allusion, almost allegory. They degraded the symbol to the status of a word, they made it a form of metronomy. One can be grossly 'symbolic', for example, by using the term 'cross' to mean 'trial'. The symbolist's symbols have a fixed value, like numbers in arithmetic, like 1,2, and 7. The imagist's images have a variable significance like the signs a, b, and c in algebra. [....] the author must use his image because he sees it or feels it, not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics. 5. Calvin S. Brown, "The Musical Development of Symbols: Whitman", in Music and Literature, Athens

[U.S.], 1948).

6. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image, (London, 1957). The following citation gives the passage beginning the

Conclusion (Chapter IX):

I have to admit that the last chapter gave no real notion of the variety and subtlety of modern criticism, nor of the impact upon it of precisely that interest the earlier Symbolists lacked, a systematic application to language-theory. The effect of this has certainly been to 'de-mythologize' Symbolism, to reconcile its image with the more empirical and utilitarian theories of language (as Richard's flux of interpenetrating elements in the language itself, rather than the intuitive order of Bergson and Hulme). The effort is to dispense with that supernaturalism that habitually, in one form or another, accompanies Symbolist theory - Boehme and the correspondences, magic and mediumship, the sacramentalism of some Roman Catholic æstheticians, like David Jones. It can now be admitted that words are not pictures, that words behave differently from things - although it might be argued that we now study the secret lives of words as if they were dreams, and restore to our theories of communication the essential Romantic image, reducing our analogical universe to the language we speak. Nevertheless, the new attention to language has been anti-supernaturalist in effect. It has also involved discriminations and definitions of the word 'symbol' itself, which I have not gone into.

7. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London, 1930). 8. Jurij Tynjanov and Roman Jakobson, "Problems in the Study of Literature and Language" in Readings in

Russian Poetics / Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. by Ladislav Mateijka and Krystina Pomorska

(Michigan Slavic Publications, Ann Arbor, 1978), p.79-80.

34 Chapter 2

9. Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse", in Readings in Russian Poetics, pp. 136-145.

10. Tynjanov elucidates what he means by this contrast by discussing the various meanings of the Russian

word zemlja [earth ,soil, land, ground]. The following citation from his essay "The Meaning of the Word in

Verse" (Readings in Russian Poetics, pp.136, 137) clarifies his position. The relevant observations begin

with a list of examples revealing the word's basic range of meanings:

1. Zemlja and Mars; heaven and zemlja (tellus). 2. Bury an object in the zemlja; black zemlja (humus). 3. It fell to the zemlja (Boden). 4. Native zemlja (Land). In this instance there is no doubt that we have different meanings of one "word" in different kinds of usage. And yet, if we say of Martian that he fell onto the ground of Mars -"he fell to the zemllja" - it is awkward, even though it is obvious that zemlja in the phrase "he fell to the zemlja" is far from meaning the zemlja in the other examples. It would also be awkward to say of the soil on Mars "grey zemlja". 11. To illustrate this point Tynjanov writes (Readings in Russian Poetics, pp. 142, 143): It may also happen, however, that the oscillating number of words may be used without regard to their meanings. But they have the auxiliary function of "filling up" the intonal pattern with verbal material (cf. swearing or cursing intonations using arbitrary words) features [....]. It follows that expressivity of speech need not be rendered only through word meanings. Words may have an importance beyond their meanings. They may act as speech elements, which bear some expressive function. 12. In this connection Tynjanov remarks (Readings in Russian Poetics), p. 144: The appeal to tradition is important, but does not exhaust the problem. The poetic vocabulary is not created exclusively by the continuation of a certain lexical tradition, but also by contrasting itself to itself to itself (the vocabulary of Nekrasov and Majakovkij). "Literary language" evolves, and its development cannot be understood as a planned development of tradition, but rather as colossal displacements of traditions (a considerable rôle is played in this respect by partial reestablishment of older strata). 13. Barbara Melchiori, Browning's Poetry of Reticence (London, 1968), p.1.

14. T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", in The Sacred Wood - (first published November 4th

1920). The following citation is taken from the beginning of the essay's fourth paragraph:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists; you cannot evaluate him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

15. Il Convivio was written sometime between 1304 and 1308; the letter to Can Grande della Scala was

written about 1318. One scholar has cast doubt on Dante's authorship. The following citation is a part of

P.H. Wicksteed's Translation of the Later Works of Dante (London, 1904):

35 To elucidate, then, what we have to say, be it known that the sense of a word is not simple, but on the contrary it may be polysemous, that is to say, "of more senses than one"; for it is one sense which we get through the letter and another which we get through the thing the letter signifies; and the first is called literal, but the second allegorical or mystic. And this mode of treatment, for its better manifestation, may be considered in this verse: “When Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from a people of strange speech, Judea became his sanctification, Israel his power“. For if we respect the letter alone the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses is presented to us; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace is presented to us; if the anagogical, the departure of the holy soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory is presented to us. And although these mystic senses have each their special denominations, they may all in general be called allegorical, since they differ from the literal and the historical; for allegory is derived from alleon, in Greek, which means the same as the Latin alienum or diversum. 16. So Christian turned out of his way to go to Mr. Legality's house for help, but behold, when he was now hard by the Hill, it seemed so high, and also that the side of it was next the way side, did hang so much over, that Christian was afraid to venture further, lest the Hill should fall on his head. 17. In his introductory essay "The Internalization of Quest-Romance" in Romanticism and Consciousness /

Essays in Criticism (New York, 1970), Harold Bloom calls the phase of development preceding full

internalization the "Promethean" stage of Romanticism when the poets identified themselves as poets with

an immature aspect of their personalities incorporating a rebellious attitude to social injustice and repression

Full internalization was achieved by Wordsworth and Blake when the catharsis that attended their strivings

in poetry afforded a clear perception of the false selfhood in all that prevented or delayed a perfect state of

harmony in all the mind's questing and emotional energies; this Bloom likens to Freud's picture of a

"marriage" of the libido and the object of its love.

CHAPTER 3

A SURVEY OF WHAT LITERARY CRITICS MEAN BY "WANDERING"

My way is to begin with the beginning; The regularity of my design Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning.

Lord Byron: Don Juan, Canto The First, VII

Even if all wandering is the worst of sinning ("wandering" has yet to be established as a

recognised field of learning), literary critics occasionally refer to "wandering" and "wanderers" in

their articles and books. In this chapter we consider and compare four critical studies, noting

different, even conflicting, attitudes to "wandering". We may then inquire how such differences

might be resolved.

I: A Comparison of Articles by Professor L.A. Willoughby and Geoffrey H. Hartman with Reference to their Attitudes to "the Wanderer" as poetic Motif

While Professor Willoughby's article "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in

Goethe's Poetry" is exclusively concerned with Goethe's literary works (not only poetry), G.H.

Hartman's study "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness'" (both cited in the First Chapter of

this study) focuses on English Romantic poetry with the occasional reference to Goethe and his

literary works. The scholars predicate their arguments on what they take to be the shared

identity of the “Wanderer“ and “the Poet“ in German and English poetry during the age of Goethe

and the Romantic Movement. G.H. Hartman discusses the status of the "Poet" at the historical

juncture when religious assumptions about the nature of poetry and poetic inspiration were being

superseded by secular theories on the nature of the human consciousness. I begin by

38 Chapter 3

recapitulating the basic positions adopted by Professor Willoughby and G. H. Hartman and will

then proceed to a fuller discussion of issues arising from them.

Professor Willoughby bases his discussions on the recognition that the images of

"Wanderer" and "hut" occur so frequently in Goethe's writings that they must be attributable to

factors lying deep in the collective unconscious. According to C.G. Jung the libido is engaged in a

quest to achieve a perfect union with its female counterpart within the human personality. In

terms of Goethe's imagery, the "Wanderer" represents the male questing impulse, while the "hut"

represents the object of that quest, the domain of female influence, the family hearth. These

images well up from the collective unconscious, and are not, therefore, only of poetic interest.

However, Goethe as a poet moulded these and other images into constructs and patterns of

aesthetic value. The image of the "Wanderer" presented the young Goethe of the early 1770s a

very considerable problem. Being significant to him on both a general psychological and an

aesthetic level, the "Wanderer" image poses a central ambiguity that his early writings reflect.

This ambiguity first emerges in the “Speech on Shakespeare Day“, an anti-Aristotelian polemic

praising Shakespeare as the greatest "Wanderer". The image lends force to the idea of the vast

range of Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic genius. However, Goethe was well aware that his

choice of word would be understood by his immediate audience, fellow-members of the

Darmstadt literary circle, as an allusion to himself (his renown as a "Wanderer" was attributable

to his habit of taking long country walks). In two poems written about a year after the "Speech",

Goethe adopted contrasting strategies to surmount the difficulties bound up with the "Wanderer"

image. "Wandrers Sturmlied" ("Wanderer's Storm-Song") is a semi-confessional poetic

outpouring telling of the poet's bold but futile attempt to ascend Mount Parnassus, the seat of the

gods and Muses. The poet uses humour and self-irony as a means of psychological self-defence

evident in the closing scene depicted by the poem. This shows the Wanderer wading through mud

towards a wayfarers' hut after his inglorious descent from the sublime heights of Parnassus and

his return to a chill northern landscape on the plane of personally experienced reality. "Der

Wandrer" is a dialogue between a wanderer, a cross-country walker, touring the mountains near

Cuma in Italy and a young woman who inhabits a mountain-hut in the region visited. This level-

headed young woman counters the Wanderer's verbal rhapsodies excited by the sight of ancient

temples now in ruins. It is only in "Der Wandrer” that Goethe succeeded in

39

objectifying the image of the Wanderer to his own satisfaction. 1

In his article "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness'" Geoffrey H. Hartman argues

that the English Romantics were beset by an acute self-consciousness and attendant feelings of

being isolated from their roots in society and from established literary tradition. I summarise his

main propositions as follows: -

The Romantics' traumatised state of consciousness finds quintessential expression in the

nightmarish experiences of the Mariner as described by the speaker in "The Rime of the Ancient

Mariner" by T. S. Coleridge. The Mariner is a "Wanderer" or transfiguration of the figure of the

Wandering Jew. An affinity between the Mariner and the true Poet is inferable from their

common compulsive need to communicate verbally. The Mariner's voyage symbolically records

a transition from a state comparable to death to one of blessing, and at the deepest level, liberation

from a false understanding of the self. The religious connotations of the Mariner's voyage reflect a

Romantic tendency to reveal psychological and aesthetic processes in terms of religious allegories

and figures. In the place of the traditional triad of Eden, the Fall and Redemption, "a new triad"

of nature, self-consciousness and the imagination underlies Romantic poetry. Romantic

descriptions of journeys finally represent a purely inward process of the imagination deriving its

dynamic from the libidinal striving to achieve union with the object of its desire. Thus, the use of

images and allegories based on the material of religious tradition could no longer point to a

religious truth or correspond to realities outside the domain of art in any manner that should

interest scholars in literary criticism. In his essay "The Internalization of Quest-Romance" 2

Harold Bloom defends essentially the same thesis as that adopted by G. H. Hartman when

denying a vital connection in Romantic poetry between references and allusions to religious

motifs and any objective truth of a religious or philosophical nature. Although G. H. Hartman

does not refer to the term "internalization" in the article we are considering, he in fact pleads that

the same process H. Bloom describes as "internalization" deeply and irrevocable affected

Romantic poetry, indeed modern poetry in its entirety.

Having outlined the positions taken by Professor Willoughby and G. H. Hartman with

respect to the significance of the Wanderer: in poetry, I now examine differences in their attitudes

and conclusions which emerge from inferences drawn from their shared recognition of

40 Chapter 3

the close relationship between the "Wanderer" and the nature of poetry in the age of Goethe and

the Romantics. I discuss these differences under three headings.

The first of these, Wiederspiegelung, may require a short explanation. It literally means

"reflection" or "mirroring" and in the context of Professor Willoughby's discussion concerns the

reciprocal relationship between Goethe's literary activity and the course of his life.

Wiederspiegelung

Both Professor Willoughby and G. H. Hartman refer in their articles to a basic

psychological principle as the ultimate foundation of phenomenon they identify by their use of the

word "Wanderer". While G. H. Hartman uses a Freudian frame of reference in this regard,

Professor Willoughby bases his suppositions on a Jungian premise. Both concur that the

Wanderer's quest ultimately derives from the libidinal urge. While in G. H. Hartman's view the

Wanderer's quest is fully internalized, for Professor Willoughby the polarity of the "Wanderer"

and the "hut" has very concrete connections with the realities of common life. The "hut" is not

only a figment of the mind; it also stands for the family hearth - commitment to a social and

communal ideal. Professor Willoughby stresses the reciprocal nature of influences between

Goethe's life and work, particularly with regard to his friendship with Frau von Stein. Professor

Willoughby also stresses that there is another area in which Goethe's life and work cannot be

considered in isolation from each other: - travel.

Goethe's philosophic outlook rejected abstractions without a basis in first-hand experience,

and the best antidote to abstraction he found in travel and the traveller's enhanced perception of

previously unexplored surroundings. According to Professor Willoughby, Goethe’s period of

residence in Italy between 1786 and 1789 induced a fundamental change in Goethe's outlook on

life, which he came to understand as a "pilgrimage". Seeing Italy's town architecture, its

inhabitants and works of art meant more than recording surface features. It meant imbibing an

entire culture and its history. Professor Willoughby also claims that the polarity of "Wanderer"

and "hut" leaves a trace in the biblical Festival of Tabernacles commemorating the wanderings of

the Israelites through the wilderness of Sinai and the booth-like dwellings in which they lived

during that time. If we compare Professor Willoughby's opinion on Wiederspiegelung with those

of G. H. Hartman on the purely aesthetic function of allegorical motifs derived from the Bible,

41

we might conclude that they entertain diametrically opposed views on the poetry of the Romantic

era and its relationship to the contemporary world. However, their views are not divergent in

every respect.

In Professor Willoughby's view, Goethe was constrained to objectify the image of the

"Wanderer" in his earliest poems bearing the word "Wanderer" in their titles. Did this process of

objectification imply a total and irreversible internalization of the "Wanderer" image?

In Hartman's opinion, internalization spelt not only the end of poetry's living connection

with life and society, but also the end of poetry itself, a logical outcome on the supposition that

poetry reached a steady state in which progressive development would lose force. According to

this analysis, internalization signalled not only the imminent death of Romantic poetry, for

Hartman argues that Goethe invested his major efforts in his prose works in anticipation of the

demise of all poetry. Only "progressive" literary genres could survive in the future. There are

serious objections to the idea of the absolute kind of internalization posited by Hartman, but these

are better discussed later. I allow myself the comment that poetry is still alive and well at the end

of the twentieth century. This is not to deny that Hartman makes a valid point in stressing the

element of anxiety that traumatised poets in the Romantic age, an anxiety rooted in a fear that

they might be deserted by the inspirational force that had sustained poetry in earlier ages.

Without any reference to Goethe's historical context, Willoughby stresses that Goethe underwent

a period of uncertainty and anxiety when he first contended with the problem of representing the

figure of the Wanderer in poetry. One important consequence of Professor Willoughby's lack of

regard for the wider historical context framing Goethe’s life and works is the absence of any

specific reference to the German Romantics, whose use of the word "Wanderer" as a central word

and image was just as prominent as Goethe's. Professor L. A. Willoughby does make passing

reference to what he sees as Goethe’s low "romantic" wanderers (that is "romantic" with a small

"r"). In Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre Professor Willoughby finds two antithetical

kinds of "Wanderer". One the one side, there are Mignon, a girl troubadour of Italian origin, and

the Harper, a figure somewhat reminiscent of a bard or biblical prophet. Professor Willoughby

emphasises their "negative" characteristics, their erratic and undisciplined life-styles that are

partly responsible for their early and tragic deaths. One the other, there is Wilhelm Meister, a

member of a wandering troupe of actors whose errant life prepares him a socially constructive

rôle in the medical profession. Professor Willoughby seems to suggest that Mignon

and the Harper convey a warning against tendencies that were soon to culminate in the Romantic

Kommentar:

42 Chapter 3

Movement. If Goethe did intend to signal such a warning, he must have possessed vatic powers,

as the Romantic movement did not arise until after the publication of Wilhelm Meisters

Lehrjahre (1795). Indeed, Friedrich Schlegel cited the novel as one of the main factors that gave

an initial impulse to the Romantic Movement. In view of Goethe's later altercations with the

Romantics, it might seem paradoxical that he should have been one of its chief instigators, unless

one takes account of the phenomenon called "introversion". Introversion results from a selective

assimilation of certain elements that one author finds in the work of another, and the exclusion of

others. In accord with this principle the Romantics avidly accepted Mignon and the Harper as

models to emulate but rejected Wilhelm, for they saw in him one who embodied Goethe's

assertion of the principle that artists should pursue a useful and socially beneficial goal. Joseph

von Eichendorff’s celebrated novella: Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a

Good-for-Nothing) expresses a rejection of Goethe's belief in the necessity of combining art and

social or utilitarian priorities.

Logocentricity

A definition of the logocentric method to be applied in this study has already been outlined.

Though Professor Willoughby refers to the images of the "Wanderer" and "hut", his basic

approach can be construed as logocentric in view of the fact that the "images" he refers to coincide

in most cases with occurrences of the words "Wanderer" and "Hütte". His vacillation between

references to "hut" and "Hütte" points to an ambiguity. Is Willoughby primarily concerned with a

theme identified by a word with a mere designating function, or does he interpret words in the light

of their textual settings with thus allow himself to consider the possibility of their having a wide

range of meanings? Professor Willoughby begins his article with the observation that the "images"

of the "Wanderer" and the "hut" occur so frequently, both separately and in combination that they

must result from some pattern-forming propensity in the author's mind. He applies, in effect, the

statistical criteria favoured by linguists and textual critics who find language theories relevant to

problems encountered in literary studies. Professor Willougby assumes that a single principle of

unity and coherence transcends all differences in Goethe's literary works, affecting even the choice

of individual words and their location in a text. The organising effect of this principle is so far-

reaching as to lie beyond the full conscious control of the author.

43

A number of scholars have attempted to map an author's mind by noting idiosyncrasies

of language and word use that emerges from a study of his or her literary works. In her

monograph Browning's Poetry of Reticence, for example, Barbara Melchiori observes that the

word "gold" is the most frequently used substantive in Robert Browning's poetic works (occurring

altogether about 390 times), and must consequently be regarded as a word of special significance

to Browning at a deep unconscious level. 3 Though I consider Professor Willoughby's approach to

the phenomenon of the "Wanderer" to be essentially logocentric, his article entitled "The Image

of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry“ contains references to the "image" of the

"Wanderer", and not specifically to "the word" as such.

The term "image" has gained much favour in twentieth-century criticism. When referring

to an "image" in poetry, one is using a metaphor rather than a precise definition. This metaphor is

particularly apt when it directs attention to the spontaneous and incandescent effects of poetic

language. Professor Willoughby sometimes gives the term an altogether different significance

when he suggests that the image of the "Wanderer" informs not only metaphors contained by a

literary work, but also entire literary works themselves (cf. Faust), to which it furnishes a

comprehensive sustained metaphor, i.e. an allegorical frame.

Consciousness

Professor Willoughby emphasises the part played by unconscious influences contributing

to Goethe's powers of imagination and creativity, such as when he refers to the collective

unconscious posited by Jung. He also predicates the unity suffusing all Goethe's works on some

power of co-ordination that obviously transcends the consciously controlled functions of the mind

such as the memory, for Goethe could never have deliberately cross-referenced all occurrences of

the words "Wanderer" and "Hütte" in his works.

Willoughby limits the scope of his investigation to analysis based solely on a review of

Goethe's life and works without relating his findings to even a brief discussion of contemporary

trends and historical currents, effectively precluding the possibility of considering epochal influences that could only be meaningfully evaluated in a comparative survey involving some

reference to the works of Goethe’s contemporaries in the world of literature.

44 Chapter 3

Treating Goethe as though he lived in a historical and linguistic vacuum prevents any

evaluation of the influence of an epoch on states of consciousness as reflected by the choice and

position of words in literary works, a factor we have considered with respect to J. Tynjanov's

discussion of "the Word in Verse".

Geoffrey Hartman, on the other hand, addresses his attention to the prevalent influence of

the age that encompassed the works of Goethe and the Romantics - an influence so powerful as to

induce that collective alteration of consciousness to which Hartman attributes the Romantics'

intensely burdensome "self-consciousness". In my view, we have to take account of the

interaction of both the ahistorical unconscious posited by Jung and the new self-consciousness to

which Goethe and the Romantics were subject. M. Bakhtin is one of the few critics who to my

mind appears able to admit that literature reflects simultaneously a timeless or time-ranging

influence (identified as "the Carnivalesque") as well as an awareness of historical change.

By rounding up attitudes and opinions which themselves consider one aspect of conscious

to the exclusion of others I hope to effect a corrective balance to the self-imposed limitations

noted in the studies so far considered.

45

II: A Comparison of Opinions put forward by Northrop Frye and Bernard Blackstone reflected by their Use of the Words "Wanderer" and other

Derivatives of the Verb "to wander"

Hartman's perception of "a new triad" in Romantic poetry finds parallels in the discovery

of analogous patterns associated with "the Wanderer" by the critics whose findings we shall now

compare, namely Northrop Frye and Bernard Blackstone.

Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism contains an exposition of its author's theory of

myths. 4 According to this theory the principal literary genres identified as "tragedy", "comedy",

"romance", and "satire", incorporate recurrent mythical archetypes that respectively mirror a

season in the annual cycle. "Romance" in such terms is a myth of summer, while "satire" is myth

of winter. "Romance" typically concerns an archetypal hero who finally vindicates himself as the

victor over evil, though often after severe and almost fatal sufferings. In a section of Frye's

monograph with the subtitle The Mythos of Summer Romance, there is a paragraph containing

four occurrences of the verb "to wander" that throw considerable light on the issues we have been

considering. This paragraph is concerned with the basic plan underlying Milton's Paradise Lost

and Paradise Regained.

1. Moses and the Israelites wander through a labyrinthine desert,

2. Adam is cast out of Eden, loses the river of life and the tree of life, and wanders in the....

labyrinth of human history...

3. Israel is cast out of his inheritance and wanders in the labyrinth of Egypt and the....

Babylonian captivity.

4. Christ is in the situation under the law, wandering in the wilderness.

Frye's choice of verb reflects that of Milton.

• concerning the Fall: Paradise Lost, IX, 1136 and 1146 and XII, 648);

• concerning Christ's wandering in the wilderness; Paradise Regained, IV, 600;.

• concerning the wandering of Israel under Moses. Paradise Regained, I, 354.

46 Chapter 3

Frye discerns two concentric quest myths in Milton's Paradise epics, a "genesis-

apocalypse myth" and an "Exodus-millennium myth". Both myths describe a circle, ending

where they begin. Frye seems to find little room for the educating and moral value of wandering

itself, as this would presumably point to the word's personal and religious implications,

implications which do not accord with Frye's concept of the purely literary relevance of "myths".

He shows little interest in speculation concerning either the origins of myth in what he describes

as "murky" unconscious factors or similarities between the "true hero" of romance and the solar

heroes that loom large in psychological and anthropological analyses (Jung interprets the

wanderers of ancient legend and myth, Gilgamesh, Ulysses, Dionysos, etc. as those vicariously

passing through the realms of day and night in a symbolic framework making the sun a symbol

representing the libido).

A distinctly different point of view from Frye's is upheld in Bernard Blackstone's

monograph The Travellers Lost 5. The author begins his study by emphasising that the primary

metaphors in Romantic poetry are based on references to motion and journeys. He discerns a "true

wanderer pattern" in Romantic poetry based on acceptance of Christian belief in "a Fall, an

Original: or Radical Sin, and a Redemption". 6 Coleridge, Blake and Byron fulfil this condition,

and are "Christians". Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley do not fulfil it, and are not "Christians".

While the former group journey from Eden to Heavenly Jerusalem, the latter's journey is "from a

slum to a garden". 7 Wordsworth, in particular, is the object of severe criticism. His journey is

"circuitous" and lacks true progression.

Blackstone points to the story of the Prodigal son as a dominant motif in Coleridge's

poetry. The logocentric approach adopted in this study also highlights its central importance in

Romantic poetry and elsewhere, as an earlier discussion of Robinson Crusoe has shown.

While a comparison of opinions stated by Professor Willoughby and G.H. Hartman reveal

strong differences on the question of the relationship between literature and realities outside it, a

comparison of opinions stated by Northrop Frye and Bernard Blackstone reveal a complete

divergence of attitude to the possible relevance of religious propositions to the criticism of

literature. Closely related to such ideological differences is a strong readiness to place a harsh

value-judgement on whatever allegedly circuitous or progressive qualities they perceive in

literary works. I cannot help expressing the opinion that Blackstone's analyses show themselves at

their weakest when he allows religious views to intrude into his line of argument, even though I

agree in principle that questions of religious belief have a strong bearing on literary issues. Once

47

critics go so far as to condemn poets because they seem to hold different religious (or other

ideological) opinions from their own, somewhere a warning light should start blinking. According

another man's religious book, Byron might well belong to the non-Christian camp. As to

Wordsworth, M. Abrams discerns in The Prelude the allegorical substructure of the wanderings

of the Israelites to the Promised Land replete with a specific reference to the vision of Moses

experienced on the summit of Mount Pisgah. 8

Both the internal school of critics and those who adopt a more linguistically based

(logocentric approach) will agree on one question at least: the literary text is in its very nature

progressive. A word's significance is not conditioned by its meaning in terms of a dictionary's

definition only, or indeed most significantly, but by its position in the text. Here Calvin S.

Brown's analogy between symbols in a poem and "musical" motifs that "develop" as a piece of

music proceeds is most apt. While Blackstone is arbitrary in his readiness to judge or condemn

poets on the basis of the allegedly progressive on non-progressive quality of their works,

Northrop Frye finds little if any room for the even the possibility of progression in poetry. He

justifies his belief in the ahistorical nature of literary archetypes on the supposition that myths are

timeless. I refer to a totally different understanding of what constitutes a myth in the following

section.

48 Chapter 3

III: The Four Critics' Findings Compared

The four positions articulated by the critics whose discussions I have reviewed flatly

contradict each other when they define what they themselves identify as "wandering". Their

differences emerge most clearly when their assertions concerning the poetic imagination imply a

notion of time.

Two basic understandings of time come into question. One may conceive of time in terms

of a closed internally regulated cycle, or in terms of an ongoing linear process such as that typical

of history or personal experience. The opposition between cyclical and linear processes may be

encountered in many fields of learning, history, philosophy, psychology and so on. It usually

appears possible to accommodate both ways of understanding time within a comprehensive

framework.

In their various ways, the critics referred to above fail to see "wandering" whole. In my

view this failure leads to a bias in their evaluation of literary works and blindness to evidence

provided by the poets whose works they consider. I cite examples of what I mean.

In the lines from Anatomy of Criticism quoted above the verb "to wander" acquires an

unmitigated negative association with the "labyrinth" of "the law" and "history". In a later section

of this study occurrences of the verb "to wander" in Paradise Lost will show that the verb carries

a positive association through implications concerning moral freedom, the necessity of learning

from life and experience. The mixture of negative and positive aspects that inheres in

"wandering" is fully compatible with orthodox theology and the Thomist dictum of felix culpa.

Northrop Frye is unsympathetic to Milton's theology because in this critic's view literature is

informed by "myths" and, to follow his argument, myth and history pose diametric opposites. Not

all researchers of mythology agree. Robert Graves saw in myths an inseparable combination of

historical and imaginative or invented elements. These elements can be discovered in the mythical

journeys of ancient heroes described in The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey and The Aeneid.

Gilgamesh, Ulysses and Aeneas enter the underworld. Jung explained these excursions as a

symbolic representation of the solar hero's entry into the domain of night reflecting the libido's

quest for union with its source. On the other hand as M. Bakhtin pointed out, the journeys of

Ulysses originally had a political justification in legitimating a hierarchy of government and land

occupation. 9 To this extent, at least, the history of Israel’s migration toward the Promised Land

and the Homeric journey share a close affinity. In fact they provide motifs and

49

strands that have often been intertwined into the fabric of one work. However, as Erich Auerbach

argues in Mimesis, 10 the biblical mode of narrating an event typically evinces an awareness of

historical time, while the Homeric epic evinces a more fluid sense of time. The Miltonic epic

juxtaposes elements derived from both the biblical and Homeric traditions using nautical imagery

to describe the movements of Satan, while Jesus is depicted as a Wanderer in a "wilderness". As

protagonists seeking to establish a new order, be this the kingdom of God or the Evil Empire,

Jesus and Satan are also Wanderers, the founders of dynasties or kingdoms.

G. H. Hartman's contention that the metaphor of the journey lost its power to recall

religions truth harbours a paradox. He argues in effect that at a particular historical juncture

poetry lost contact with history. Its shedding of all "external" elements, Hartman argues, would

lead inexorably to the end of poetry, and anticipating this, Goethe increasingly devoted himself to

prose works as these retained a "progressive" quality. Hartman's admission that the total

internalization of poetry would lead to its end reveals to my mind the limitation inherent in the

term "internal", which is itself based on a metaphor. If the poetic imagination were to it lose any

connection with historical and biographical realities, it would be reduced to the rôle of reflecting

a general patterns in the mind, producing perhaps a map of the mind, even a model for explaining

Freudian theories on psychology. Poetry then ceases to be literature and becomes are expression

of a non-literary (i.e. exterior) discipline. Poetry still exists in the modern world, and the reason

for this is, I believe, that poetic language is irreducible to a statement about psychology or critical

theory. One may possibly "deconstruct" poetry at one level of significance but never at the levels

that are not fully subject to a consciously directed plan or design.

Professor Willoughby comes closest of the critics whose arguments have been considered

to achieving a balance in his discussion of the significance of the Wanderer in poetry. On the one

hand, he refers to Jung's theory of the unconscious when seeking to explain why the image of the

"Wanderer" occurs so frequently in Goethe's poetry. On the other, he treats the phenomenon

surrounding the word as an inseparable aspect of Goethe's life and personal development.

Willoughby has therefore the theoretical basis for accepting both the cyclical and the linear-

progressive facets of "wandering". In effect, he emphasises its progressive features considerably

more than its cyclical and universal aspects. Perhaps it is for his reason that he disparages

"romantic" wandering and suggests that in the figures of the Harper and Mignon one should

discern negative examples of the wrong kind of Wanderer. If one looks a Goethe's works

generally, one will note a tendency to associate two protagonists, one of whom is a survivor and

50 Chapter 3

the other a tragic failure or one who meets a premature death. It is not always the survivor who

earns great interest and sympathy in the respective work. It is Werther, Tasso and Egmont that

chiefly interest us, not figures like Albert or William of Orange. Two apparently conflicting kinds

of "wandering" complement each other, being derived from a duality than indwells the human

mind and personality.

_______________________________________

51

ANNOTATIONS

1. "Der Wandrer" is located at the crossroads of reciprocal influences affecting English and German

poetry; Young Goethe was an avid reader of Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield and The

Traveller, an account in verse of Goldsmith's tour of various European countries. This highly

reflective poetic travelogue leaves a trace in the influence it exerted on "Der Wandrer". William Taylor

of Norwich translated "Der Wandrer" into English in the 1790s. Wordsworth read this translation,

entitled "The Wanderer", and its abiding influence on him gave rise to the figure of the Wanderer in

The Excursion.

2. Harold Bloom, "The Internalization of Quest-Romance" in The Yale Review, Vol. LVIII, No.4

(Summer, 1969).

3. Barbara Melchiori, Browning's Poetry of Reticence, London, 1968. According to Barbara Melchiori,

a careful evaluation of verbal clues will allow critics to probe into significances which the poet himself

may wish to conceal, granted that he is even aware of them himself.

4. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism Four Essays, (Princeton, 1957).

5. Bernard Blackstone, The Travellers Lost, (Norwich, 1962).

6. Ibidem, p.20.

7. Ibidem, p.10.

8. M.H Abrams, ''The Design of The Prelude Wordsworth's Long Journey Home From: Tradition and

Natural Supernaturalism and..... Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1971).

9. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. M. Holquist, (Austin, 1981).

10. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, (Bern, 1946).

CHAPTER 4:

TEXTUAL STUDIES OF FOUR CELEBRATED POEMS INTRODUCED

BY A WORD DERIVED FROM THE VERB "TO WANDER" OR

"WANDERN"

The uncertain path:

This chapter consists of four studies of celebrated poems in German and English, namely:

"Wanderers Nachtlied" by Goethe, "I wandered lonely as a cloud" by William Wordsworth,

"London" by William Blake, and "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" by Wilhelm Müller. All the

poems considered are introduced by a word derived from the verbs "to wander" and "wandern". I

suggested earlier that these verbs, when encountered in poetry, evince what J. Tynjanov termed

"lexical unity". In this section we shall consider this unity in as far it can be ascertained by

comparing individual works.

Both "to wandern" and "wandern" refer to physical motion that reflects the wanderer's

state of mind. Perhaps only "I wandered lonely as a cloud" among the poems to be considered

refers to a specific physical excursion, though all reveal some aspect of a wanderer's mentality. In

the first three cases we shall consider how the poems capture moments of vision and instil

emotions that accompany these visions. These tell us little about a journey as such, an itinerary or

a destination, but they imply some encounter between an observer and an object or scene that

strikes that observer as wonderful or novel. I recall the etymological affinity of "to wander" and

"wandern" with verbs meaning "to turn" ("wenden", "to wend"). The poems capture in words a

psychological turning point involving not only enhanced awareness of external objects but also of

54 Chapter 4

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

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

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

and dynamic development. Significantly, it contains no reference to the lyrical "I". Wandering -

or the effect produced by the verbs "to wander" and "wandern" - integrates the imagist or musical

principles that certain critics we have considered would understand as non-verbal aspects.

Reflecting on the poems considered in this section, one may become increasingly aware

that "to wander" and "wandern" imply not only certain reciprocal relationships but also the very

principle of reciprocity itself. When we compare "I wandered lonely as a cloud" with "London",

we will differentiate between two kinds of vision, one engendered by physical perception, the

other by the inner vision of the mind when not prompted by physical sensation. William Blake

distinguished between the earth bound "wanderer" and "the mental traveller" in recognition of the

duality that underlies poetry and poetic "wandering". Both physical travel and dreaming provide

the optimal conditions for memorable and intense visions and images, but poets, whether they

adopt the stance of a "cold earth wanderer", like Wordsworth, or of a "mental traveller", like

Blake, are neither travelling or dreaming in the strict sense of these terms when they create

poetry. Though the cold earth wanderer and mental traveller differ in their basic initial stance,

they share a goal in illuminating the relationship between the inner mind and external realities.

Both the cold earth wanderer and mental traveller differ from the systematic and abstract thinker

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

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

inculcated by poetic renditions a wanderer's experience.

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

art; and one result of this new consciousness, we have noted, was a close association of the poetic

imagination with what Goethe, and later other poets, called the "Wanderer". By the same token,

these poets drew a close parallel between the poetic work and a journey or “pilgrimage". With the

loss of assurance in the inspiration bestowed by the Muse, the poets became increasing aware of

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

the medium of language. The identification of "text" and a journey to an appointed goal at least

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

with the process of verbal articulation.

55

Does the fact that all the celebrated poems discussed in this chapter begin with a

derivative of "to wander" or "wandern" point to what Tynjanov referred to as a word's "lexical

unity"? Is the initial position of these words significant? In what sense can "wandern" and "to

wander" be understood as "the same word"? If, as Tynjanov argues, words do not exist in

isolation from a context, a textual setting, a comparison of works containing words derived from

the verbs "to wander" and "wandern" may help us discover the answer to these questions.

56 Chapter 4

1: GOETHE'S "WANDRERS NACHTLIED" VIEWED IN THE LIGHT OF LONGFELLOW'S TRANSLATION

WANDRERS NACHTLIED Der du von dem Himmel bist, Alles Leid und Schmerzen stillst, Den, der doppelt elend ist, Doppelt mit Erquickung fullest, Ach, ich bin des Treibens müde, Was soll all der Schmerz und Lust? Süßer Friede, Komm, ach komm in meine Brust!

EIN GLEICHES Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh, In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch, Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch. WANDERER’S NIGHT-SONGS (AFTER GOETHE) - H. W. Longfellow Thou that from the heavens art, Every pain and sorrow stillest, And the doubly wretched heart Doubly with refreshment fillest, I am weary with contending! Why this rapture and unrest? Peace descending Come ah, come into my breast! O'er all the hill-tops Is quiet now, In all the tree-tops Hearest thou Hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees: Wait; soon like these

Thou too shalt rest.

57

The Question of how to translate “Wand(e)rer“ into English

When translating Goethe's "Wandrers Nachtlied" into English, Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow, a scholar versed in German literature as well as a celebrated poet, rendered its title as

"Wanderer's Night-Songs". His choice of the word "Wanderer" raises an interesting question.

Anyone who has learned a foreign language is likely to be familiar with the concept of "false

friends" - words in different languages which share a similar outward form but which convey

quite different meanings, e.g. English "deception" and French "déception". When located in a

non-fictional text, the German "Wanderer" is as likely to find its English equivalent in "traveller,"

"wayfarer," "migrant" or even "hiker" as it is in "wanderer". The translator's choice of word will

reflect his or her assessment of the general sense of the passage in question. In the case of

"Wandrers Nachtlied", however, it is not possible to determine which particular meaning of

"Wandrer" has precedence over others. The two short poems, which singly or jointly bear the title

of “Wandrers Nachtlied”, evoke the sentiments of a pilgrim on life's journey. The second poem in

this pair depicts a nocturnal scene witnessed by a speaker that the reader might imagine to be a

traveller or rover. The poems are also "songs", expressions of a poetic or artistic vision. The only

English word to convey a comparable range of associations is "wanderer". Its quality of

ambiguity and vagueness, which might disqualify it as a precise logical term, commends itself to

use in poetry. In the course of ensuing discussion we shall consider which ways in Longfellow's

translation significantly departs from the original, as these divergences throw much light on

matters concerning the interpretation of "Wandrers Nachtlied". The first divergence we encounter

is found in the poem’s title.

Implications of Divergences between Longfellow’s Translation and the German

Original

"Night-Songs" does not correspond to "Nachtlied" in number. Goethe's use of the singular

emphasises the unity evinced by the two poems. Longfellow's use of the plural emphasises their

respective singularity. The question of the poems' unity is best elucidated by reference to the time

and circumstances of their origin. The first "Night-Song" was written in l776, when Goethe was

still a newcomer to the court in Weimar. We note a correspondence between the mood of the first

"Night- Song" and the young poet’s situation in that year. He was then still recovering from the

trauma of his Sturm und Drang years when he had felt himself to be a Cain-like fugitive in danger

58 Chapter 4

of self-destruction

By 1776, Goethe was afforded the promise of relief from his woes by the consoling

influence of Frau von Stein. By 1780, largely as a result of being subject to this influence, Goethe

had acquired the virtues of self-possession, patience and a sense of the objectivity inculcated by

the contemplation of physical nature and works of art. As a minister charged with responsibility

for the supervision of mines, he frequently visited Ilmenau, and it was in the close vicinity of this

town that he wrote the second "Night-Song" and inscribed its words into the boards of a

wayfarer's hut set in the hills. The most probable date of this event was the 6th of September

1780. 1 When Goethe approached the end of his life, he returned to this hut. On reading the

second "Night-Song" carved in the boards of a wall, Goethe could not help weeping, so deeply

was the poem connected with his memories of Frau von Stein. Goethe himself set the precedent

for having the poems appear either separately or together. If the poems appear singly, each bears

the title of "Wandrers Nachtlied"; if together, only the first is thus entitled, while the poem of

1780 bears the title "Ein Gleiches"", (meaning here "a poem of the same kind"). Let us now go on

to consider words found in the poems and difficulties Longfellow faced when translating them.

The words "Spürest du" in the second "Night-Song" are rendered by Longfellow as

"Hearest thou". Any English translation of the German "du" in a poetic text cannot quite convey

the force of the German pronoun. The English "you" neither specifies a reference to only one

person, nor does it in itself indicate that there is a close or familiar relationship between the

speaker and the person addressed. "Thou" corresponds to "du" in terms of number and familiarity,

but carries possibly unwanted associations with certain biblical and literary traditions. An

evocation of tradition may well be consistent with the lofty tones of the first "Night-Song" so

reminiscent of the Lord s Prayer in the King James Bible. However, the self-same tone loses

something of the intimate feeling conveyed by "du" in the second "Night-Song".

The German verb “spüren" has meanings in the range “to trace", "to sense", "to make out"

and "to discern under difficult conditions". Why did Longfellow render this verb using "to hear"?

It seems unlikely that the answer will be found in any need to make concessions to demands of

metre. "Spüren" does not suggest which of the five senses allows one to be aware of some object.

In the given context Longfellow's choice of the verb "to hear" suggests that the speaker relies

exclusively on the auditory channel of perception when detecting the slightest movement in the

tree-tops to which he refers. Common sense tells us that despite the advent of darkness it is often

possible to see objects at night. Even if we allow that the speaker can attune his hearing to

59

movements in treetops (as opposed to those in their lower branches), we still have to consider the

hilltops referred to in the poem. Longfellow establishes by the very use of the verb "to hear" that

the reader records his physical perceptions. To suggest that the vision of the hills is not physical

in character, but rather some projection of the imaginative faculty is to deny the unity and

consistency of the poem itself. We face none of these objections if we accept that the second

night-song depicts a nocturnal landscape as seen by the speaker. Professor E.M. Wilkinson

suggests in an appreciation of the poem that the speaker sees what he describes by the twilight of

evening. 2 The only other source of light capable of illuminating the hills and trees to which the

speaker refers is that of the moon. When faced with two equally plausible explanations, even a

rigorously objective critic may find it appropriate to consider one poem in the light of another

written by the author, preferably at about the same time.

In one of the draft versions of "Wandrers Nachtlied" the opening line runs "Über allen

Gefilden" ("Above every field"). 6 This evinces a strong similarity with words found in "An den

Mond," which Goethe dedicated to Frau von Stein.

Here is the second strophe of this poem:

Breitest über mein Gefild Lindernd deinen Blick Wie der Liebsten Auge, mild Über mein Geschick. You spread over my pastures Your softening glance Like the eyes of the dearest one, mildly

Over my destiny.

If we concede that "An den Mond" evinces a deep affinity with the poems that share the

title of "Wandrers Nachtlied", it follows that the second person pronoun situated in the first line of

60 Chapter 4

"Wandrers Nachtlied" (1776) contains the same dual reference. As the poems entitled "Wandrers

Nachtlied" form a unity, we have a basis for inferring that the speaker describes a moonlit

landscape in the poem of 1780. But if this is the case, why should this poem contain no explicit

reference to the moon? I offer an explanation of this absence at a later section of this section.

However, I now briefly submit reasons why the poem's implicit suggestions concerning the effect

of moonlight are compatible with the deep psychological influences which Professor Willoughby

discusses in association with Goethe's use of the word "Wanderer"

In poetic usage the English and German words sharing the form "Wanderer" arouse

identical or similar associations, among them those of the "Wanderer" and the moon. Indeed,

Shelley's "Lines written in the Bay of Lerici" begins with an apostrophe to the moon with the

words "Bright wanderer". In my view there is an implicit association of the "Wanderer" and the

moon in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In his article entitled "Romanticism and

'Anti-Self-Consciousness"'. 4 G.H. Hartman identifies the Mariner as the "Wanderer" or

"Wandering Jew". The Mariner is finally released from the curse that he brought upon himself

when he blesses sea serpents he sees by the light of the moon. Parallel treatments of the

associated themes of the Wanderer and the moon in German and English poetry cannot be readily

explained in terms of adherence to some convention or well-established tradition. In my view an

explanation of this phenomenon must be sought in the deep levels of the psyche. Dr. C. G. Jung

constantly elucidated his theories by referring to the archetypal wanderers that appear in ancient

mythologies. 5 In this connection he pointed to "solar" heroes driven by a libidinal impulse to

achieve union with that aspect of the consciousness that gives rise to the image of a goddess of

the night, sometimes the moon, representing the anima, the female aspect of the self, sought by

the libido.

In an article to which I have already referred G.H. Hartman interprets poems that present

the theme of a journey as expressions of the imaginative process when engaged in the

composition of poetry. I continue this discussion exploring ways in which words and images

encountered in "Wandrers Nachtlied" mirror the quality and nature of the poems themselves. Let

us once more consider aspects of "Wandrers Nachtlied" in the light of Longfellow‘s translation.

Longfellow's rendering of "Vögelein" as "birds" in the second "Night-Song" does not convey the

diminutive force of the suffix indicating "little birds". What is lost by this inaccuracy? We are

61

surely not considering here some aspect of ornithology but a reflection of an internal aspect of the

poem itself. I find corroboration for this conclusion in a word that also implies a reference to

poetry and poetic inspiration, namely in "Hauch" ("breath"), which immediately precedes the line

beginning "Die Vögelein", for the words "die Vögelein" and "kaum einen Hauch" share the

feature of denoting a slight measure. These intimations are consonant with the tone of the second

"Night-Song" with its quality of reticence and lack of any superfluous word or image. It is the

sheer economy of language evident in the poem, with its tendency to stress the minimal or

negative aspects of what it describes, which lends the poem its especially vibrant qualities and its

density of associations. Again the line "Die Vöglein schweigen im Walde" will serve to illustrate

this point. In the normal way it should be translated as "The little birds are silent in the wood".

Longfellow's translation of this line offers one possible explanation of the birds' silence, but

forfeits the stark simplicity of the original, which stresses absence and negation. If, as I earlier

argued, a perception of light is implied by the speaker s reference to inaudible objects, the

absence of any reference to a source of light again reflects the poet's avoidance of any superfluous

statement.

The minimalism that characterises "Wandrers Nachtlied" enhances the suggestive power those

few words that compose it, making us unusually aware that words exist in their own right and are

not merely subservient to a concise referential and designating role. This is nowhere more clearly

evident than in the case of the word "Wanderer". In the introduction of this inquiry I focussed on

possible reasons why Longfellow chose the word "Wanderer" as the appropriate translation of

"Wandrer". No synonym of "Wanderer," whether "wayfarer", "pilgrim", or "itinerant artist"

covers the full range of meaning that inheres in "Wanderer", and no dramatic or contextual setting

foregrounds one sense of "Wanderer" at the expense of another. Any resultant ambiguity does not

lead to confusion or contradiction, as interpretations of the poem based on a regard for one of its

meanings complement and enhance alternative interpretations based on another understanding of

the word’s possible meaning. This ambiguity comes to light if we reflect on the nature of the

"rest" that is finally promised to the Wanderer. This might be construed as physical rest on a

traveller's return to home and family after the rigours of a long journey. It could betoken the rest

of a believer after life's journey is over, or a release from tensions that assail the poet's peace of

mind. In recognition of what Goethe called "Wiederspiegelung", the interaction of art and life, we

gather that all the aspects of "wandering" just mentioned colour the full meaning of the word

"Wanderer". We should not consider this word only in terms of its power to define subject matter.

62 Chapter 4

It implies structure, contrast, relationships and reciprocity. This is clearly evident in the antithesis

of "Wanderer" and "rest" in "Wandrers Nachtlied," or indeed, within the general context of

Goethe's poetic works, as Professor L.A. Willoughby convincingly demonstrates in his article "The

Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry". 6

If, as I suggested earlier, the associations of "Wanderer" and other forms derived from the

verbs "wandern" and "to wander', harbour the same wealth of implications, we should expect to

discover similar themes and antitheses in poems in which such forms occur. Certain similarities

of this kind may be the result of "influence". As I noted in another connection, according to

Jonathan Wordsworth, his renowned forebear, William Wordsworth, was deeply impressed by

Goethe's "Der Wandrer" as mediated to him by a translation of this poem by William Taylor of

Norwich. 7 In entitling the translation "The Wanderer", Taylor anticipated Longfellow’s choice of

the same word in the title "Wanderer's Night-Songs". In Jonathan Wordsworth's view, Goethe's

influence gave rise to the figure of the Wanderer in The Excursion. It is, however, in a

comparison of "Wandrers Nachtlied" and "I wandered lonely as a cloud" that I believe we are able

to discover the deepest affinities shared by Goethe and Wordsworth. In both poems we witness a

vision of natural objects, which effects a perfect balance of subjectivity and objectivity. The

communion of the observer and the observed springs from a harmony of the self-conscious and

the unconscious operations of the poet's mind. The merging of these modes of consciousness does

not result in either poem in an obliteration of references to recalled experience. Indeed, we can

even assign precise dates to the experiences which prompted Goethe and Wordsworth to write

these poems. However, the poems also evince that power which transcends the normal individual

or personal consciousness, the power the Romantics called "the imagination“.

Professor E. .M. Wilkinson observes in connection with the second "Night-Song" that the poem

reveals the essential order of language itself. 8 I believe a similar claim can be made for "I

wandered lonely as a cloud", for reasons that should become clear in the following discussion. It

is noteworthy that both poems begin with the word "Wanderer" or a declined form of the verb "to

wander", thereby typifying a trait in the poetry of their age. A conspicuous number of celebrated

poems written by Goethe and his Romantic contemporaries contain the word "Wanderer" in their

titles. The frequency of this occurrence is so conspicuous that one might be misled into

concluding that the word "Wanderer" is limited in function to serving as some conceit or

convention. One finds occurrences of the verb "to wander" at the beginning of English Romantic

poems which echo traditional evocations of the "wandering" Muse.9 If we discover essentially the

63

same phenomenon reflected in occurrences of the word "Wanderer" in German poetry and those

of the less conspicuous but no less significant appearances of the verb "to wander" in Romantic

English poetry, we have cause to ponder whether the Muse has truly departed from modern

poetry. In my view no prevalent influence or convention, and least of all coincidence, provides a

full explanation for the affinities and shared associations noted in this discussion.

64 Chapter 4

ANNOTATIONS

1. The background of the poem is discussed by Erich Trunz in his commentary on "Ein Gleiches" Goethe

Die Gedichte, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich, 1929).

2. We pointed to the immediacy with which language here conveys the hush of evening Über allen Gipfel

ist Ruh. In the long sound of Ruh and in the evening pause we detect the perfect stillness that descends

upon nature with the coming of twilight. Professor E.M. Wilkinson, "Goethe's Poetry", German Life and

Letters, N.S. 2,1949, pp. 316-329.

3. Hand-written copies were in the possession of Herder and Luise von Göchhausen.

4. In: Romanticism and Consciousness Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1970

5. "The nature of wandering in psychological terms is discussed in the fifth chapter of Psychology of the

Unconscious. I cite a passage from this chapter as translated by Beatrice M. Hinkle:

The wandering is a representation of longing, of the ever-restless desire, which nowhere finds its object, for unknown to itself, it seeks the lost mother, the wandering association renders the Sun comparison easily intelligible, also. under this aspect, the heroes resemble the wandering Sun, which seems to justify the fact that the myth of the hero is a sun myth. But the myth of the hero, however, is, as it appears to me, the myth of our own suffering unconscious, which has an unquenchable longing for all the deepest sources of our own being."

6. In: Etudes Germaniques July-Dec 1951.

7. Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity (New York / Evanston, 1969).

8. In the article cited in the second footnote above:

Here, in this lyrical poem, his [Goethe's] experience of natural process has been so completely assimilated into the forms of language, that it is communicated to us directly by the order of the words.

9. Most noticeably in Byron's Childe Harold' s Pilgrimage and Blake's Milton.

65

II: A DISCUSSION OF WORDSWORTH'S "I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD"

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle in the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed - and gazed - but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils

66 Chapter 4

Frederick Pottle’s Reflections on “I wandered Lonely as a Cloud“

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

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

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

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

article entitled "The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth". 1 He notes with reference

to "I wandered lonely as a cloud":

Ever since 1807, when Wordsworth published this poem, daffodils have danced and laughed, but there is nothing inevitable about it. The Greek myth of Narcissus is not exactly hilarious; and even Herrick, when he looked at daffodils saw something far from jocund.

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

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

clear:

Bring baskets now, and sally

Upon the spring's array, And bear from hill and valley The daffodil away That dies on Easter day.

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

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

ponders whether a recognition of this fact can contribute to an evaluation of Wordsworth's poem,

thus broaching one of the most contentious issues in literary criticism: What is the relationship

between poetry and "external" factors in the domains of a poet's biography and historical setting?

Wishing to clarify the nature of this relationship, Pottle cites the entry in Dorothy's Journal telling

of the occasion when she and her brother suddenly came across the daffodils, the abiding

impression of which is captured in "I wandered lonely as a cloud". Pottle attaches great

importance to divergences between the description of the daffodils recorded in the Journal and

Wordsworth's poetic vision of the flowers, for these, according to Pottle, enable a critic to

ascertain the scope of the imagination’s particular sphere of operation in treating material drawn

from sense data and experienced events.

67

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

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

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

poem and Journal entails a polarity between the "solitariness" of the speaker and the "sociability"

imputed to the crowd of daffodils, endowed as they are both in poem and Journal with the human

attributes of joy and the ability to laugh and dance. A further discrepancy between poem and

Journal concerns implications of word choice. While in Dorothy's account there is a reference to

a "wind" that animated the scene she described, the poem assigns vital power to a "breeze".

Dorothy's Journal leaves no doubt that the April day on which she and her brother were

impressed by the sight of daffodils was overcast and far from spring-like in any positive sense.

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

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

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

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

arouses into one "simple emotion". Adducing evidence from "The Leech Gatherer" and other

poems, Pottle argues that Wordsworth's imagery rarely incorporates an exact record of particular

memories. Indeed, he calls into question whether the poem owes any intrinsic quality to the

memory of an actual incident. For him the poem is essentially the product of the simplifying and

unifying operation of the imagination, and as such poses "a very simple poem".

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

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

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

speaker during his walk besides a lake.

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

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

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

contrast or polarity associating the earthbound and the celestial or, on the temporal plane, day and

night. Our sense of the poem's complexity may be much enhanced if we reflect on the effects

produced by the set of contrasts that inform the poem. Let us consider these interlocking contrasts

in greater detail. An antithetic relationship between the earthbound wanderer and the cloud to

which he compares his motion poses the first intimation of the opposition between the

68 Chapter 4

earthly and celestial.

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

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

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

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

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

two modes of consciousness, that of the mind exposed to the intrusion of sensations from the

external world, and that of the mind creating its own images in dreams and dreamlike conditions.

In other words, we are dealing here with modes of interaction between the conscious and

unconscious. The wanderer experiences two visions of daffodils, those seen in a natural

environment, and those perceived by his mind in "pensive mood".

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

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

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

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

eye and the daffodils which the speaker saw when out walking? A number of Wordsworth's

works contain lines implying that immediate visual perception entail a sense of discomfort at a

time before the mind is able to assimilate new sense impressions. Even in "I wandered"

Wordsworth's choice of words suggests that the speaker suffers the intrusion of an invincible,

albeit joyful, invasion appearing as a "host" in the (military) formation of ten thousand. While an

element of threat is at most implied in "I wandered lonely as a cloud", the military connotation of

"host" in biblical English is fully explicit in the opening of another of Wordsworth's poems, "To

the Clouds":

Army of Clouds! Ye winged Host in troops.

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

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

and "daffodil" with the latter’s power of evoking the myth of Narcissus. It is in some ways odd

that Pottle makes no reference to the verb "wandered" despite its strategic position in the first line

of the poem. We noted earlier the near invisibility of verbs in comparison to substantives. A

linguist might explain this phenomenon as the result of the verb's diffuse influence on the stream

69

of discourse. Be that as it may, in the process of considering the occurrence of "wandered" in the

light of its position, meaning and structural function, I now hope to complement and amplify

Pottle's arguments and insights respecting "I wandered lonely as a cloud". Let us consider the word

at the four levels of significance to which reference was made at the end of the first chapter of this

study.

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

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

aesthetic construct?

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

as a private individual and a poet?

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

poem?

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

above.

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

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

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

who "wandered by glassy brooks, / Thinking unutterable things". These words, found in the 19th

stanza of the first Canto, are followed in the next stanza by a reference to Wordsworth:

He, Juan (and not Wordsworth), so pursued His self-communion with his own high soul.

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

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

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

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

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

and physical, historical or biographical reality, but if we ignore or belittle the physical nature of

70 Chapter 4

the motion referred to in the poem, we will make little sense of the essential contrast that lies at

the heart of the poem, namely that which emerges when we compare the effects of physical

perception with the power of the mind to produce its own images autonomously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

ingesting elements of extraneous origin. The experience of physical motion and travel, as we

know, will always tend to enhance a person's awareness of the exterior environment. This normal

enhancement was heightened further in the Romantic period. As M. M. Bahktin has pointed out,

the poetry of Byron was subject to the process of "novelisation". 2 The novel is that genre which

in its nature thwarts any attempt to impose a hierarchical structure upon it, even when influencing

that most traditional of genres, poetry. The typical proclivity of Wordsworth and Byron to grasp

some apparently unimportant object or incident and invest this with universal significance finds a

precedent in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire and Laurence

Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, in both cases the author’s final work. It would seem from this

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

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

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

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

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

process that emerges from a study of the poem's aesthetic achievements as revealed in its images

in their immediate verbal environment. In the German poetry of the same period this leitmotif is

announced officially in the titles of celebrated poems. One of these lends itself to comparison with

"I wandered lonely as a cloud" with particular regard to the implications of the initial position of

words referring to "wandering": Wilhelm Müller's poem "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust"

("Wandering is the Miller’s Joy") - a poem that will be considered at the end of this chapter.

71

According to its immediately comprehensible meaning, "Wandern" refers to the act of roaming

in a rural setting, just as "wandered" does in Wordsworth's poem. However, from the first line on,

it gains ever wider references and associations with movements in objects and natural phenomena

exemplified by the turning of millstones and the flowing stream that causes their turning, with the

final effect that "wandering" emerges as the vital principle in all nature. This widening of

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

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

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

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

in the words "as a cloud"), the speaker likens himself to a cloud, as he and this object are both

solitary and in motion. We may infer from this comparison that just as the cloud is moved by a

"breeze", some correspondent breeze impels the speaker's wandering. This breeze then assumes

the aspect of a universal dynamic principle of the mind and poetic imagination. Hence the

parallel between the daffodils "fluttering in the breeze" and the poet's heart, which "dances with

the daffodils".

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

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

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

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

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

to the Milky Way adds strength to the motif established by words evoking the image of

nebulosity: (cf. "cloud," "host" and dancing "waves"). The reference to the stars of night points to

a duality, already implicit in the original poem, that inheres in the contrast of daylight vision and

the images produced by the mind at times of repose. Though the speaker does not sleep when

experiencing the vision of daffodils that flash before his inner mind, his state of consciousness

resembles that of the dreamer. The motif of the "night-wanderer" can be found in both English

and German poetic traditions. We recall the words of Puck in A Midsummer-Night's Dream. "I

am that merry wanderer of the night".

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

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

72 Chapter 4

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

rooted in the unconscious and the imagination. Similarly, the reference to” a poet" in the third

strophe might be taken as a commonly encountered expression like "If only an artist could paint

this landscape". At a deeper level, however, it points to Wordsworth's fundamental concern

with the operation and nature of the poet's imagination.

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

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

No prayers, no tears, but hear my doom in silence I will go forth a wanderer on the earth, A shadowy thing, and as I wander on No human ear shall ever hear my voice As contradictory as the verb's associations with death and joy in the exercise of the

imagination may seem, its range of significance does manifest a certain logic (a matter that will

be looked into at a later stage in thus study). In Wordsworth's case the positive or negative

valorisation of the verb "to wander" corresponds to the general state of mind in which he found

himself at different stages of his life and artistic development.

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

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

subject to the influence of Friederich Schiller's Die Räuber (the Robbers), a drama that portrays a

world torn apart by the titanic fury of those exercising the wrong kind of freedom. The play

reflects the spirit of Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress), through which both Goethe and Schiller

passed in the early phase of literary development. In Goethe's highly influential novel Die Leiden

des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) Werther's reference to himself as a

"Wanderer" ominously points forward to his social isolation and ultimate death.

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

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

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

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

"I wandered lonely as a cloud" marks the attainment of a balance and harmony of mind wrested

from the tension between daytime awareness and the influences of subconscious

73

proclivities. The attainment of this harmony involves the ingestion of images originating in the

involuntary reception of what is perceived by the senses. The equilibrium we perceive in poem

was preceded by - perhaps predicated on - a period when Wordsworth became familiar with

contemporary German literature and philosophy as this was mediated to him by T. S. Coleridge.

According to Jonathan Wordsworth, the poet was deeply impressed by a translation of Goethe's

poetic dialogue entitled "Der Wanderer", which he read no later than 1798.3 Professor L. A.

Willoughby notes in his article "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry"

that "Der Wanderer" (1771), though posing one of Goethe's earliest treatments of the "Wanderer"

image, attests to his ability to objectify the image without suppressing every trace of his

individual personality.4

4. In previous discussions we have considered issues relating to "I wandered lonely as a

cloud" in the light of literary and cultural traditions. I noted earlier that Frederick Pottle contrasts

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

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

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

the Greek classical myth with Christian folklore in his image of the daffodil that dies on Easter

Day (in common usage daffodils are called "Osterglocken" ("Easter Bells") in countries where

German is spoken). I will argue in this section that the very use of the verb "to wander" likewise

implies and reflects a confluence of biblical and classical traditions. I also hope to establish that

the word is coloured - to use a term that is much favoured by the Russian Formalist linguist and

critic J. Tynjanov 5 - by a contemporary influence stemming from Goethe and a diachronically

mediated influence stemming from Milton, that poet who consciously merged classical and

biblical or Hebraic elements in his epic poetry. A close analysis of certain passages in Paradise

Lost and Paradise Regained shows that the verb "to wander" is contextually associated to both

the classical motif of the "wandering" Muse and to the biblical motif of the wanderings of Israel

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

wilderness, events commemorated by the festivals of Passover and Lent. This nexus of

associations is implicit in the opening lines of Paradise Lost, in which the collocation of the

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

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

of Pentecost). 6 In Paradise Regained Milton mirrors the traditional view, upheld by Dante and

74 Chapter 4

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

earthly life and ministry of Christ, 7 the forty days of temptation recalling the forty years of

Israel's wandering in the wilderness of Sinai (The title of Housman's "The Lent Lily” conflates

the associated symbolism of Lent, Easter and daffodils). Alluding to a passage in Paradise

Regained, Keats taps the same traditional sources when uniting the theme of vernal renewal and

that of a pilgrimage leading through a wilderness:

And now at once, adventuresome, I send My herald thought into a wilderness - There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress My uncertain path with glee. Endymion 1, 58-61.

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

Regained 1,7.The association of spring's renewal and pilgrimage occurs a little later in

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

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

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

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

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

flight from "a house of bondage" and a "wandering cloud" that should guide the poet on his

future journey. Here we discover obvious allusions to the flight from Egypt in the Bible and the

pillar of cloud guiding the Israelites by day.

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

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

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

an analogous position in Paradise Lost. The verbal triad that consists of "breeze," "wandering"

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

as a cloud". We often note in criticism that verbal patterns recur and suggest underlying modes of

thought influenced by the operations of the unconscious. Here we may recall that Wordsworth

composed "I wandered lonely as a cloud" during a period of active preparation for the Prelude of

1805. While The Prelude contains a specific reference to passages in Milton's works, "I wandered

lonely as a cloud" contains no literary allusions at all. Here, the very order of words in the poem

75

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

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

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

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

folklore share an affinity with the implications of "to wander" in poetic tradition, for the flower

and the verb pose the meeting-point of classical and biblical traditions. The event which

prompted the writing of "I wandered lonely as a cloud" occurred on the eve of Good Friday

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

described in the poem was bound up with the thought of Easter in Wordsworth's mind.

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

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

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

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

religious mystical poetry, for, as this discussion of "wandering" has indicated, words mark an

intersection of traditional and contemporary influences. In the case of "I wandered lonely as a

cloud" the traditional influence is predominantly Miltonic, the contemporary German. Subject to

this dual influence Wordsworth combined traditional religious insight with the then modern

insights of psychological and aesthetic philosophy. The motif of "pilgrimage" is explicit in The

Prelude and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, while it is but suggested in "I wandered lonely as a

cloud".

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

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

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

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

Coleridge’s ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, however different these poems are in theme.

In Coleridge's narrative a "breeze" fills the sails of the mariner's doomed ship only when he

perceives sea serpents moving by the light of the moon. Like Wordsworth's dancing daffodils the

serpents combine beauty and motion, both of which attributes were seen as virtuous in their own

right by the poets of the age. In fact, these virtues exercise a mutual benefit. Beauty alone might,

as the legend of Narcissus suggests, bring entrapment and a death-like stasis. Motion without

some corrective might lead to frenzy and self-dissipation. It is "the breeze" which makes the

daffodils in Wordsworth's celebrated poem "dance". In poetic tradition "dancing" is not always

76 Chapter 6

positive in connotation. We need only think of the Dance of Death. However, in Wordsworth’s

poem "dancing” motion counteracts the stasis implied by the daffodil's mythical import. This

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

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

religious message, as Hartman and others argue. Here, it is relevant to consider the basic

implication of poetic "wandering” as a quest to reconcile apparently irreconcilable opposites and

antitheses, a quest based on the assumption that at a higher level than that at which such

opposites appear irreconcilable, harmony and reconciliation can be achieved. "Wandering" defies

the strict separation of internal truth and external reality. "The way" described in poems about

wandering, is part of the life of individual experience. How one can come to any different

conclusion when consider "wandering" in works of Milton, Goethe and Wordsworth - and for

Keats, "truth" and "life" are indivisible in "beauty".

77

ANNOTATIONS

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

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

(Autumn 1951).

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

3. Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, (New York and Evanston, 1969).

4. L. A. Willoughby, "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry", Etudes

Germaniques, 1951, 3, Autumn 1951.

5. Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse", Translated into English by M. E. Suino, Readings

in Russian Poetics, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystina Pomorska, (Ann Arbor, 1978).

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

harvest crops in the spring harvest), and became linked by tradition with the Giving of the Law at Mount

Sinai. Philo of Alexandria closely associated this event with a manifestation of divine inspiration

symbolised by the finger of fire that inscribed the tablets of the Law. The Christian sequel to Pentecost

reflects the Christian belief that the Holy Spirit supersedes the literal stipulations of the Law.

7. Both in 1l Convivio (The Banquet) and the letter to Can Grande della Scala, Dante referred to the

"allegorical" level of the story of the biblical exodus at which Dante discerned a prophecy concerning

Christ's life and work of redemption.

78 Chapter 4

III: WILLIAM BLAKE'S "LONDON"

(Printed version, 1794)

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man.

In every Infants cry of fear.

In every voice, in every ban.

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackning Church appalls.

And the hapless Soldiers sign

Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse

Blasts the new born Infants tear

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

79

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

quite different order from those encountered in Wordsworth's poetry. Blake's poetry does not

depict natural scenes in the familiar or realistic mode. Blake's eye perceived what the poet

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

precedents set by Dante and Milton, his long poems express the author’s concern for the spiritual

progress of mankind from its myth-shrouded beginnings to the ultimate advent of the New

Jerusalem.

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

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

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

Blake conceived of inferior kinds of wandering manifested by those who only represent a partial

aspect of wandering in its most comprehensive and inclusive sense.

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

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

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

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

Wordsworth and Coleridge.

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

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

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

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

realistically and those who choose to represent "dreamlike journeys"? In both kinds of journey,

the realistic and more obviously symbolic or mythical modes of representation merge, making an

absolute division between them appear questionable.

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

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

and Wordsworth as poets if we compare two celebrated poems introduced by a declined form of

the verb "to wander".

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

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

Dante's The Divine Comedy is as much concerned with his contemporary society as it is with

realities beyond temporal reality.

80 Chapter 4

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

Songs of Innocence and Experience. A comparison between the draft version of 1792 1 and the

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

significance.

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

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

reinforcement by the repetition of "dirty". The choice of "chartered" for the printed version

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

freedom was understood as a system of privileges graciously bestowed on subjects by a monarch

or member of the nobility. The formulation "German forged" in the draft version poses an

unfriendly allusion to George III and the Hanoverian dynasty. The substitution of "see" by "mark"

in the printed version, effects what J. Tynjanov referred to as "lexical coloration". The reader

becomes conscious of the potential universal implication of the word "mark" over and above its

specific meaning in any particular context. The word "wintry", substituted by "midnight" in the

printed version intimates the negative aspects of wandering with sin and disorientation. The

reference to winter gives occasion for a consideration of the "mythical" or season-oriented aspects

of "wandering", winter being a universal symbol of death and frozen mental conditions. Reasons

for considering wandering within a mythical and seasonal frame pose the subject matter of

discussion in a following section of this study.

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

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

the poem concerns timeless realities unbounded by references to any particular incident.

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

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

The poem reveals the most negative sense of "to wander", that namely that associated with the

Fall and its consequence, for it focuses attention on Man's almost total loss of moral freedom and

on acts of violence typified by the murder committed by Cain. Particular irony attaches to the fact

that the "free" city of London that had enjoyed the privileges and "liberties" vested in its charter

should symbolise such mental and spiritual bondage.

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

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

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

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

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

itself in a highly select aggregation of appropriate images.

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

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

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

"palace", is effected by the imagery of the third stanza. The choice of the word "blights" in the

fourth strophe reinforces the poem's theme of pollution with the implication that venereal diseases

wreak vengeance on the respectable who indulge in what they outwardly condemn. The threefold

repetition of "mark(s)" in the first strophe (in the draft "And see" stands in the place of "And

mark." in the printed version) is not only consistent with the combined motifs of pollution and

lost freedom but also introduces a biblical note into the poem through the word's evocation of the

mark of Cain in Genesis and the mark of the Beast in the Book of Revelation. The vision of the

poem then comprehends the history of mankind from its origins until the end of its unregenerate

condition in the last days. Cain was not an eternal nomad but the founder of city civilisation

according to the Bible. The appearance of the youthful harlot in the final strophe implies that

London and the Babylon of the Apocalypse are one.

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

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

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

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

identity of the speaker is inferable only from the manner and scope of his perception, which is

searching penetrating and ubiquitous. The Wanderer might be described as a kind of divinely

appointed secret agent like Baudelaire's flâneur. The words "I mark" may be taken to mean "I

record" as well as "I notice": The mystic eye scans London and witnesses its iniquities. The poem

contains hints that judgement will be visited on London not as a result of a purely external event

but of what is already stirring in London itself. The speaker hears or sees representatives of

professions which do society’s “dirty work” in various ways, whether chimney sweeping, soldiery

and prostitution. Though the point is not so clearly made as in Auguries of Innocence, the victims

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

reproaches the Church for its blindness to social injustice; the hapless soldier's sigh threatens

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

82 Chapter 4

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

that Blake believed was the inevitable consequence of marriages enforced by law.

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

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

poems; in the first place those sharing the general title Songs of Innocence and Experience. From

this basis we can proceed relatively smoothly to considering the yet wider circle that encompasses

Blake's works in general. The procedure of progressively widening the contextual vista centred in

a specific poem or poetic passage will be applied several times in the course of subsequent

discussions, a procedure which accords with linguistic theories that assert that "the word" marks

the intersection-point at which different levels of this word’s significance meet and interact.

While no discovery of external facts about the author and his or her times can objectively add to,

or detract from, the text, it may alter our perception of what is in the text, often by corroborating

what a reader intuits when reading it. I have suggested in the case of "London" that the poet's

vision offers an element of hope. If we consider the poem in the context of the collection of

poems to which it belongs -The Songs of Innocence and Experience - we may infer that it does

not reveal Blake's all-embracing conception of London but only a conception of its most negative

aspects. A different picture of London is shown by "Holy Thursday", a poem telling of alms

giving to the poor children of London. Innocence and experience are two contraries, which in

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

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

these the association of words or symbols signalled by the words "harlot", "Babylon" and forms

of the word "to wander" become explicit, while in "London" they are but inferable.

. & And thou 0 Virgin Babylon, Mother of Whoredoms, Shalt bring Jerusalem in thine arms in the night watches; and No longer burning her a wandering Harlot in the streets Shalt give her into the arms of God your Lord & Husband.

Milton Plate 3320-23

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ANNOTATIONS

1. Working Draft of “London“ (ca. 1792): underlined words are deleted, replacing words are in Italics: I Wander thro each dirty street / Near where the dirty Thames does flow/ And see mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness marks of woe END OF STROPHE In every cry of every man/ In every voice of every child every infants cry of fear/ In every voice in every ban/ The German mind forg'd links I hear manacles I hear END OF STROPHE But most How the chimney sweepers cry / Blackens o'er the churches Every blackening church appalls / And the hapless soldiers sigh / Runs in blood down palace walls. END OF STROPHE But most the midnight harlots curse/ From every dismal street I hear/ Weaves around the marriage hearse / And blasts the new born infants tear. END OF STROPHE AND THEN RECASTING OF FINAL LINES: But most from every thro wintry streets I hear / How the midnight harlots curse/ And blasts the new born infants tear NEW LINE And hangs smites the marriage hearse NL But most the shreaks of youth I hear NL But most thro midnight &c NL How the youthful

84 Chapter 4

IV: "DAS WANDERN IST DES MÜLLERS LUST" BY WILHELM MÜLLER

Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust, das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust, das Wandern. Das muß ein schlechter Müller sein, dem niemals fiel das Wandern ein, das Wandern. Vom Wasser habens wir’s gelernt, vom Wasser. Das hat nicht Rast bei Tag und Nacht, ist stets auf Wanderschaft bedacht, das Wandern. Da sehn wir auch den Rädern ab, den Rädern: Die gar nicht gerne stille stehn, die sich mein Tag nicht müde sehn, die Räder. Die Steine selbst, so schwer sie sind, die Steine. Sie tanzen mit den muntern Reihen, und wollen gerne schneller sein, die Steine. O Wandern, Wandern, meine Lust, o Wandern! Herr Meister und Frau Meisterin, Laßt mich in Frieden weiter ziehn, und wandern. To wander is the miller’s joy, to wander. ‘Twere a bad miller indeed who never spared a thought for wandering. Water taught us how to wander, water, which knows no rest by day or night but has a mind ever set on wandering. We catch it from the mill wheels, too, the mill wheels, which cannot bear to be at rest but never tire throughout my day. Even the millstones, heavy as they are, dance a sprightly roundelay, and want to turn yet faster. Wandering, wandering, is my joy. Master and Dame, let me continue on my way in peace, and wander.

85

To consider a poem in the light of the cycle of poems to which it belongs may sometimes

give one cause to deepen one's sense of the poem's seriousness when popular interpretations

suggest otherwise. Let us now turn to the fourth work to be examined in this chapter.

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

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

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

appears beguilingly simple, even naive, yet which harbours unsuspected profundity and subtleties.

The title refers at the primary level to "the miller", yet implies a reference to the poet himself,

Wilhelm Müller. Is this apparently jaunty poem in the folk-song tradition about the nature of the

poet and the poet's identity?

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

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

three-year period of gestation produced by the experience of co-operating with other young poets

and songsters who were then composing "Rollengedichte" ("role poems") at meetings in the

Berlin house of one F.A. Stegermann, a well-situated Prussian official during the winter of

1816/17. This genre was greatly influenced by contemporary Italian opera as well as by strong

patriotic undercurrents. On the surface, the poems contained in this cycle conjure up a seemingly

uncomplicated idyll of unspoilt rural life but this picture is not quite as ingenuous as it seems.

Each song represents the point of view of a dramatic character playing a part as though a

character in a play or opera. The story told by the cycle proves tragic, however jaunty the mood in

the opening song, "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust". The dramatic person assigned to this song,

a wandering miller's apprentice, finally drowns in the waters beside the mill the movement of

which he celebrates in his first song. The miller's daughter spurns his overtures of love and

bestows her affections on his rival in love, a young huntsman. The souring of the young

apprentice's emotional state is reflected in his change of attitude to the colour green, which first

evokes feelings of spring but later becomes associated in his mind with garishness and poison.

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

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

name predestined him to play the role of the miller's apprentice. In fact, during the later stage of

the cycle's composition, the role found a poignant corollary in Müller’s emotional commitment to

one by the name of Luise Hensel, a young poetess, who resembled the miller's daughter in

rejecting Miller’s ardent feelings of love.

86 Chapter 4

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

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

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

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

song by Franz Schubert. The speaker recalls the linden-tree beside the fountain outside the

gateway of his childhood home but finally describes his vain attempt, as a distraught and wind-

swept "wanderer", to return to the linden-tree of hallowed memory. In the wider historical

context surrounding the poem, we trace the despair which attended Romanticism in its final

throes, its demise being precipitated not so such by the after-effects of foreign occupation as by

the stiffing oppression of Metternich's system.

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

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

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

Friedrich Hölderlin, he typified a longing shared by other German writers and poets, including

Goethe and Schiller, that a new age would usher in Greece on German soul, marrying the best of

the ancient Greek heritage with the best in what was hoped would become a united and free

German nation. This hope is reflected in the very title of Goethe's epic poem Hermann und

Dorothea, telling of the encounter and subsequent marriage of two young fugitives caught up in

the disruptions caused by the invasion of French military forces during the Revolutionary wars.

Goethe's idealisation of a symbiosis merging ancient Greece and his contemporary world is

anticipated in "Wandrers Sturmlied" and possibly even in the Shakespeare Speech, in which

Prometheus merges with a figure derived from native folklore.

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ANNOTATIONS

1."Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust", like "I wandered as lonely as a cloud" apparently suffers from the great

popularity it enjoys in as far as its 'simplicity ' discourages critics from being willing to discover a deep level of

significance.

2. The motifs of the miller's apprentice and the fair daughter of a miller find a precedent in Goethe's writings.

The opposition of "wandering" and the wanderer's goal of rest and peace are evident both in the poetry of Goethe

and the songs of Wilhelm Müller. Even the figure of a tragic "romantic" wanderer goes back to Goethe's early

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

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

Literary references to drowning in Romantic - and post-Romantic literature (viz. Grillparzer's Der Arme

Spielmann (The Poor Musician) - imply the self-dissolution of the artistic process.

CHAPTER 5

THE WORD AT THE CENTRE OF TEXTUAL AND INTERTEXTUAL

ASSOCIATIONS

As M. H. Abrams points out in the introduction of his monograph The Mirror and the

Lamp, 1 a powerful consensus of critical opinion in the twentieth century has moved to a position

that stresses the objective nature of poetic works. In this connection he cites opinions put forward

by the Chicago neo-Aristotelian school, whose adherents, such as John Crowe Ransom, called for

recognition of the autonomy of the work itself. The approach adopted by Ransom, W.K. Wombat,

Cleat Brooks and others encourages a close attention to the structures and imagery of poetic

works and an attempt to exclude as far as possible any consideration of extrinsic factors such as

those relating to a poet's intentions, personal situation, etc. We have noted an extreme case of this

approach to poetry in Calvin S. Brown's essay on Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs first in the Door-

Yard Bloom’s".

One argument supporting the objective approach to poetic criticism states that the poet's

mind is unknowable and therefore any assertion based on a claim to knowing a poet's mind must

prove fallacious. However, one may argue with equal authority that "the work" cannot be directly

apprehended by a reader's mind. It must be assimilated and appropriated, and the consequent

processes generate what Bakhtin understands as a "dialogue" between the work and the reader's

mind and imagination. In recognition of this fact, objective criticism demands of a reader the

capacity to interpret texts "objectively". In his article "Objective Interpretation", 7 E.D. Hirsch

Jr. warns of the danger of making subjective interpretations of a text, admitting that texts

inevitably contain indeterminate and often ambiguous utterances.. The “objective“ approach

effectively offers what one might see as an academically correct mode of textual analysis. He

concedes that, when considering a difficult passage, one is entitled to base certain interpretative

judgements on a knowledge of a poet's typical use of words, at least to the extent that this is

inferable from readings in other works by the author.

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Here the objective critic must tread warily if he is not to shift his terms of reference

from the work to the author's mind, which in turn may cause the reader to stray into the

quagmire of intertextual inquiries and consequently forsake a close study of the work.

The logocentric textual approach is not subject to the constraints imposed by an

isolation of the work from all that surrounds it in the external world, for the word is both a

specific element in the work and yet a part of general language, and therefore capable of being

"coloured” by various contextual planes that extend beyond the narrow confines of the work

itself. Knowledge of the world is the basis for a reader's ability to perceive the internal

structures and associations of the work, and recognition of internal features enhances a reader's

awareness of the work's allusive and evocative powers. This principle of reciprocal

enhancement is better demonstrated by practice rather than by theory and abstract discourse. In

the following case studies we shall consider the implications of words in the light of their

settings in poetic works and literary tradition, paying attention to phenomena such as lexical

coloration and "suppression".

In the immediately following studies of texts revealing aspects of "intertextuality" the

cases to be investigated belong to one of the three following categories:

a) Passages containing the verb to "wander" and its derivatives in Shakespeare's works.

I hope to show that the unity underlying the various semantic and context-related implications

of the word must reflect powers of cohesion and harmonisation that can hardly be explained as

the product of conscious design, so diffuse and formally unconnected are the texts under

consideration. Like Professor Willoughby in his study of the "Wanderer" image in Goethe's

works, I find a sound foundation for an overall classification of intertextual phenomena in

the supposition that all utterances that flow from an individual's mind reflect the co

coordinating powers of the subconscious strata of that mind.

b) In subsequent studies we consider in comparisons between passages in works by different

authors. In such cases the principle producing coherence must be attributed to powers

transcending the bounds of any one individual author's mind.

c) I also hope to make textual comparisons combining both comparative approaches

designated above.

___________________________________________________________

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CASE 1: The following citations, with the exception of the final one, are from the works of

Shakespeare. In them the word "to wander" ranges in meaning and connotation from the negative

to the positive for reasons to be discussed shortly.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade When in eternal lines to time thou growest.

Sonnet XVIII

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

The Passionate Pilgrim XIV

Cinna. I dreamt to-night that I did feast with Caesar, And things unluckily charge my fantasy: I have no will to wander forth of doors, Yet something leads me forth.

Julius Caesar Act III Sc. III

Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough briar,

Over park, over pale Thorough flood, thorough fire I do wander everywhere A Midsummer Night’s Dream Act II, Sc. 1

I am that merry wanderer of the night

A Midsummer Night's Dream Act II, Sc. 1

Der, welcher wandert diese Strasse voll Beschwerden, wird rein durch Feuer, wasser, Luft und Erden: Whoever wanders this path full of woes becomes pure through fire, water, air and earth

Die Zauberflöte / The Magic Flute --------------------------------------------------------------

92 Chapter 5

How is it possible that the manifold associations of the verb "to wander" do not pose

contradictions but rather reflect the essential "lexical unity" of that word? One might suppose

from the first two citations that the word had a predominantly negative range of meanings for

Shakespeare, for it refers to the lost condition of dead souls or implies that human life is transitory

and futile. The citations from A Midsummer Night's Dream, on the other hand, show that the verb

"to wander" can convey very positive associations.

The implications of the verb "to wander" in the passage cited from Julius Caesar pose a

highly ambivalent mixture of positive and negative suggestions, which I now compare in the light

of the word's contextual setting in this drama and of Tynjanov's theories concerning the effect of

words found in poetry and literary passages.

We begin with the word understood at the primary level of significance, that is: according

to its immediately recognisable sense in terms of its context as it might be ascertained when one

reads a text in standard language.

1. When "wandering" from his house, Cinna exposes himself to great physical danger and

consequently succumbs to the fate of death. We have noted the association of "wandering" and

death in Shakespeare's eighteenth Sonnet.

2. His death results from an absurd confusion of identity stemming from the fact that he is a

namesake of Cinna the conspirator. Among other negative implications of "to wander" is that of

becoming disoriented, confused and subject to error.

3. Through its association with Cain, "wandering" evokes thoughts about violence and war.

4. The import of "to wander" in the dramatic context of the Third Act of Julius Caesar is not

entirely negative. Cinna's dream conveys a promise that Cinna and Caesar should "feast" with

each other, which implies that they will be united in death. Death then opens the door to

possibilities never realised on earth. It is the path leading to a spiritual dimension where ideal

relationships thwarted by the exigencies of physical limitations, are fulfilled. This pertains,

whether we consider the ideal love of Romeo and Juliet or the ideal harmony of ruler and poet to

which Petrarch and later artists and poets during the Renaissance aspired. This harmony is

symbolised by the laurel crown, the honour bestowed on emperors and poets. Cinna's choice of

the word "fantasy" has implications that transcend the sense of the word that accords with the

overt meaning of Cinna’s utterance. "Fantasy" bespeaks the poet's powers of creativity and his

93

mental freedom. Irony attaches to the sarcastic utterance that Cinna should die on account of his

bad verses. Cinna poses the only dramatic representation of a poet in Shakespearean drama of

which I am aware. The Romantic poets, by contrast, were much hampered in their attempts at

drama by their inability to depict much other than a dramatic self-representation of the Poet.

Cinna experiences a dream. The affinity between dreaming and "wandering" most clearly

manifested in a play which is defined as a dream by its very title, a play in which the verb to

"wander" acquires an entirely felicitous significance.

5. Let us now consider the positive associations of the verb "to wander" in A Midsummer

Night's Dream. In this drama "wandering” assumes the most general and inclusive range of

associations and implications, allowing all that is meant by “wandering“ - in a lower or partial

sense - to be subsumed and brought into harmony within the ambit of its highest or universal

sense. In one of the citations from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck refers to himself as "that

merry wanderer of the night". In the other one, however, a spirit speaks of its ability to "wander

everywhere” in sympathy with the elements of fire, water and air. In the context of the play

"wandering" takes on the significance of the power of the imagination to overcome all physical

limitations. With this sense in mind Goethe, called Shakespeare the greatest "Wanderer" in his

"Speech on Shakespeare's Day". The association of "Wanderer" and "night" is a feature in

Goethe's poetry as it is in A Midsummer Night's Dream. A coincidence? I do not believe so, but

before entering into a discussion of this question, let us try to find some common denominator in

the ranges of associations aroused by the verb "to wander".

In the first citations the verb absorbs from its context a negative sense to do with shadows

and the absence of the sun's presence or some diminution of sunlight. In view of the contrast

between winter and summer informing the 18th Sonnet and the Passionate Pilgrim, "wandering"

is relegated to the negative pole in oppositions between light, summer, youth and life, on the one

side, and shadows, winter, old age and death, on the other. A Midsummer Night's Dream reveals

"wandering" in its most positive aspect.

The play's very title hints at the fundamental reason for this positive range of associations.

In terms of ancient mythology, midsummer marks the sun's fullest possible incursion into the

realm of night. If we agree with Jung that the sun in ancient mythology symbolises the libido's

quest for union with its source, midsummer symbolically represents the greatest intrusion of the

sun into the realm of night, betokening at least a partial attainment of the libido’s quest for union

94 Chapter 5

with "the night", the anima. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the negative aspects of wandering,

though hinted at, undergo a process of sublimation. Where confusions occur, they are the source

of fun and playfulness, as when magic induces amorous feelings for the most unlikely object of

affection. Even the spectre of death becomes ludic in the tragi-comedy enacted by the amateur

troupe composed of Athenian artisans.

The action of Julius Caesar is set just before the vernal equinox, which in ancient

mythology marks the symbolic death of the solar hero preceding his victory over death and

winter. This victory is foretold by Cinna’s dream. The unity underlying the apparently

contradictory senses of "to wander" springs from what Jung referred to as "the collective

unconscious", allowing us to infer that the scope of this unifying influence extends beyond what

is attributable to imaginative powers of William Shakespeare, Goethe or any other genius, a

conclusion drawn by Professor Willoughby, in principle at least, in his article "The Image of the

'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's poetry".

There is an uncanny resemblance between the use of "to wander" in A Midsummer Night's

Dream and that of "wandern" in the libretto of Mozart's Magic Flute. Schikaneder, who wrote the

score, was a Shakespearean actor and may have been influenced by his knowledge of the play

(the association of wandering and elements is also apparent in Goethe "Wandrers Sturmlied").

There is evidence that the Queen of Night was originally cast in an essentially positive role belied

by the evil intentions later ascribed to her. The ambivalence of the figure suggests to my mind

that Mozart and Schikaneder teetered on the edge separating the classical high evaluation of the

sun and the romantic fascination with the night. 3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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CASE 2: TO BEGIN WITH THE BEGINNING A Word in Context

All eminence, and distinction, lies out of the beaten road; excursion, and deviation, are necessary to find it, and the more remote your path from the highway, the more reputable; if, like poor Gulliver (of whom anon) you fall into a ditch, on your way to glory.

Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition

My way is to begin with the beginning; The regularity of my design Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning.

Lord Byron, Don Juan

-----------------------------------------------------

A Contrast of a structural and narrative Implication of the same Word

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

poetry, 4 with reference to the lines in Don Juan cited above. But "ironic" in what sense? If irony

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

"wandering" and "the beginning" are closely linked in the author's mind. Possibly, but why is the

statement so obviously ironic? No definition of "wandering" according to a dictionary points

unequivocally to a connection between "wandering" and references to origins. Let us consider

which of the usual meanings of "wandering" "fits the context" of the lines from Don Juan cited

above.

"Wandering" here is not to be understood in the sense of physical motion. In terms of the

word's immediate contextual setting it refers to what the speaker ostensibly intends to avoid, a

failure to present certain items of subject matter in an orderly and strictly chronological manner.

96 Chapter 5

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

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

it is remarkable that he disparages "wandering" as "the worst of sinning". As though even the

most censorious of preceptors would go so far as to discern in some badly organised term paper

evidence of gross moral turpitude! It is not out of the ordinary for a person to use "wandering" as

a synonym for immoral behaviour or, in a different context, as a reference to incoherent or

illogical self-expression. Byron, however, contrasts both these meanings of "wandering" within

the space of the three lines of verse cited above. In so doing he displays the poet's proclivity to

play with words. Is this merely indulging in a triviality? Let us consider the word "wandering"

within the context of Don Juan. Are there other passages in this work in which "wandering" is

associated with "sinning" or "beginning"?

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

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

story in question. Beginning and parentage could pose an allusion to mankind's first parents, and

there is a notable passage in Don Juan which includes several occurrences of the verb to

"wander" and explicit allusions to Milton's version of the story of Adam and Eve. The verb "to

wander" (in declined form) occurs three times in the passage describing the shore-side walk taken

by Juan and Haidée, the prelude of their sexual and a spiritual union (Canto the Second The

first line of stanza CLXXXII).

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

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

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

that becomes explicit from what we read at the end of the eighty-ninth stanza, for here it is

asserted that first love is "that All / Which Eve has left her daughters since the Fall". In the

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

risk of "being damned for ever". Consciously or unconsciously (in my view probably the former),

Byron was influenced by Milton's use of "to wander" in a passage in Paradise Lost in which

there is an altercation between Adam and Eve about Eve's yielding to what Adam terms her

"desire of wandering". Eve reminds Adam of this choice of words referring to her "will / Of

wandering, as thou call'st it" (IX. 1145,1146). Shortly we shall consider another passage revealing

Milton's particular interest in the word" to wander".

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

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

Byron’s reference to "sinning" is at one level little more than a puerile jibe at certain attitudes

towards sexual mores. Byron's description of Haidée and Juan walking along the shore also

captures that sensuous and even voluptuous element in the Miltonic description of a walk that

culminated in Eve's emotional a seduction by the serpent (who approaches his quarry with a

mariner's skill). Both Milton's description of Eve's walk and Byron's treatment of the scene

culminating in the lovers' union of Haidée and Juan inculcate a sense of unity expressing a

sublimated form of sexual or libidinal energy, perhaps of a kind that psychologists of the Freudian

or Jungian schools believe to be the mainspring of all human creativity. Miltonic influence in the

respect just indicated also leaves a trace in the final passage in Shelley's Epipsychidion describing

a walk that leads to a lovers' union. Significantly, this passage is introduced by the verb "to

wander".

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

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

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

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

Dedication, the speaker refers to himself as one "wandering with pedestrian Muse" in contrast to

Southey depicted as one seated on a winged steed. In the tenth stanza the evocation of Milton is

not merely hinted at, for the speaker alludes to a passage in Paradise Lost in which there is a clear

reference to Pegasus and "wandering" conflating the word's associations with poetic inspiration

and disorientation.

Up led by thee Into the Heav'n of Heav'ns I have presumed, An Earthly Guest, and drawn Empyreal Air, Thy temp'ring, with like safety guided down Return me to my Native Element Lest from this flying steed unrein'd, (as once

Bellephoron, though from a lower Clime) Dismounted, on th'Aleian Field I fall Erroneous, there to wander and forlorn (12-20)

98 Chapter 5

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

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

in the light of its derivation from errare in Latin (to stray, to wander). Similarly Aleian means

"land of wandering" in Greek. In this passage Milton seems to anticipate the crisis in modern

poetry centring on the nature of poetic inspiration and the identity of the poet.

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

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

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

the Spirit brooding "dove-like" over the "vast Abyss" from which Creation came into being. The

dove is of course an established symbol for the Holy Spirit. Milton was not in any case strictly

orthodox on the question of the Trinity and the personal or non-personal nature of the Holy Spirit. 5 The conflation of the biblical Holy Spirit and the classical Muse springs from Milton' overall

strategy of merging Hebrew and classical traditions, and the mental orientations they typify, when

creating Paradise Lost.

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CASE 3: "WANDERING HUMAN THOUGHT"

Lexical Coloration considered in the Light of the Author's Epoch

Ahasuerus in Shelley’s Queen Mab

The Fairy waved her wand Ahasuerus fled Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist, That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove, Flee from the morning beam: The matter of which dreams are made Not more endowed with actual life Than this phantasmal portraiture Of wandering human thought.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab, VII, 267-275.

The lines quoted above refer to Ahasuerus, "the Wandering Jew", that legendary figure

whose haunting presence is revealed throughout Romantic poetry and even beyond. Though this

legend is of ancient origin, it acquired a fresh significance during and even before the Romantic

period. A poem concerning the Wandering Jew appeared in Percy's Reliques in 1765, heralding an

epoch in which the figure became a central motif in a number of celebrated poems. In some of

these, allusions to Ahasuerus are explicit, as in the case of Shelley’s Queen Mab and Hellas, of

Byron’s reference to this figure as “the Hebrew Wanderer“ in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and of

Goethe's "Der Ewige Jude" ("The Eternal Jew"). In others, a reference to the legend is at most

inferable. H. Hartman sees in the Ancient Mariner a transfiguration of the Wandering Jew.

According to this critic's analysis the Mariner or Wandering Jew epitomises the modern poet in

the process of striving to make the transition from self-consciousness to the imagination. "The

Rime of the Ancient Mariner" does not contain the word "Wanderer" (see following chapter) but

it does contain a word associated with the legend of the Wandering Jew, namely "cross", which

draws itself as a word with deep symbolic significances through repetition. in a manner noted by

J. Tynjanov. In Queen Mab the association of "cross" and "wander" is evident in lines recalling

incident to which the curse placed on Ahasuerus is attributed in the early legend.

100 Chapter 5

In the following case study the investigation begins with the identification of what J.

Tynjanov termed "lexical coloration", i.e. when a number of different meanings of a word become

apparent in the legend of the Wandering Jew, namely "cross", which draws itself as a word with

deep symbolic significances through repetition. in a manner noted by J. Tynjanov. In Queen Mab

the association of "cross" and "wander" is evident in lines recalling incident to which the curse

placed on Ahasuerus is attributed in the early legend.

But thou shalt wander o'er the unquiet earth. (VII, 182).

The next time the word "wander" occurs in Queen Mab (i.e. in lines quoted above) the

immediately apparent sense of the word conforms to current usage, as in the case of one saying

"my mind was wandering". To this extent the previous association "wandering Jew" is supplanted

or - in Tynjanov's terms "displaced" - by a sense associating Ahasuerus with a mental

phenomenon, a state of mind akin to that expressed in the works of an entire generation of poets

that included Goethe and the Romantics in that process Harold Bloom has identified as the

"internalization of the quest romance". Wanderers, particularly wanderers of biblical or religious

origin (Cain, the Pilgrim, the Prodigal Son), came to exemplify what we would now call

psychological phenomena, particularly those influenced by the operation of the subconscious.

Indeed, in Jungian terms, Ahasuerus is a symbol of nothing less than the repressed consciousness

of Western Man.

In the case we have just considered we note a contrast between the traditional and (from

Shelley's point of view) modern associations of the verb "to wander". We note this contrast when

taking account of the progression noted in the process of reading the text, for the reference to

"wandering" thought follows the occurrence of the verb referring to the curse imposed on

Ahasuerus at Calvary.

We appreciate the new significance of "wandering" not only from considering the aspect

of textual progression, which is an "internal" phenomenon. By comparing occurrences of the verb

"to wander" in poems by all Romantic poets we gain corroboration of the fact that the verb "to

wander" reflects a new recognition of a collective and contemporary psychological phenomenon

affecting the poetry of an entire generation of writers. There is no radical separation of the word's

"internal" and "external" scope of reference, a point constantly emphasized by J. Tynjanov and

other exponents of Russian Formalism.

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In earlier discussions it was noted that words form associations by their very proximity to

each other. Professor Willoughby noted such a case with reference to the words "Wanderer" and

"Hütte". In the story of Ahasuerus the words "Wanderer" and "cross" form a significant verbal

association, even when the word "cross" ostensibly conveys no reference or allusion to Calvary. I

say "ostensibly", as words in their own right possess a symbolic power that, potentially at least,

connects them with all words sharing the same form and range of meaning. We have reason to

suspect that words carry a deeper meaning than what they explicitly denote if they become

conspicuous through repetition, as in the case of the repetition of "cross" in The Rime of the

Ancient Mariner. The word’s power to recall "the Cross" accords with the nature of the basic

myth or allegory informing the poem, which G. Hartman identifies as "the Wandering Jew". As

the verb "to wander" does not appear in the poem, does it in strictly formal terms lie beyond limits

of this logocentric study? I address this question in the next chapter. 6

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102 Chapter 5

ANNOTATIONS:

1. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, Romantic Theory and Romantic Tradition (London / Oxford

/ New York, 1953).

2. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., "Objective Interpretation", PLMA 75 (1960).

3. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Die Zauberflöte, published by Kurt Pahlen (Goldmann Schott: Munich,

1978; 4th ed. 1982), pp.154-158. Kurt Pahlen assesses the evidence for the theory that Mozart at

Schikaneder's instigation reversed the roles of the Queen of the Night and Sarastro making the former

good fairy a power for evil and the former sorcerer the wise and noble priest of the Sun. Evidently a rival

theatre company pipped Die Zauberflöte to the post by staging an opera that bore striking similarities to

Mozart's opera. The opera in question was entitled Die Zauberzither oder Kaspar der Fagottist with music

by Wenzel Müller, a popular composer of melodies. In Kurt Pahlen's view the Queen of Night's first aria -

composed before the alleged change - conveys profound and noble sentiments that do not accord with the

supposedly evil character of the Queen of Night.

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

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

6. Nevertheless, I include a discussion of this poem in this study, on the basis of the fact that a noted

scholar recognises the centrality of "the Wanderer" as the key to understanding the poem's deepest levels

of significance. Ultimately the text is the dialogue and interaction of the text and the informed reader's

consciousness.

CHAPTER 6:

THE MOTIF OF THE ''WANDERER" IN THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

This study differs from previous inquiries into the literary motif of wandering and travel in

the following respect. It has a double focus in comparing the use of the two etymologically

related words ''to wander'' and ''wandern'' in the same period of literary history. It will as far as

possible establish the relationship of word choice to the treatment of subject matter. There are two

principal ways in which this can be done. Most simply, one may examine occurrences of such

keywords in their textual environment. This "logocentric" approach is the basis of the

methodology of textual study applied in the present investigation. According to this criterion,

however, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', Geoffrey H. Hartman's prime example of a poem

whose underlying motif is the Wandering Jew, would not qualify as relevant material.1 The word

''to wander'' appears nowhere in the ballad. Even so, a discussion of The Rime of the Ancient

Mariner within the ambit of a logocentrically based study is defensible if it can be shown that the

poem justifiably prompts critics to use the word "Wanderer". The text cannot be considered in

isolation from its reception by mind of the critic. The interaction between and critic and text

entails the use of the word "Wanderer". To say that a certain poem is about ''wandering'' or a

"wanderer” is to imply that the word identifies or evokes the same range of subject matter and

range or mode of association.

104 Chapter 6

With regard to The Ancient Mariner, ''to wander'' might be rendered as ''to err from the

appointed course (both physically and morally)" and "to suffer the fate of a long delay before

returning to one's destination''. Such definitions do little justice either to the depth of meaning

belonging to the word ''to wander'' or to the symbolic wealth of Coleridge's ballad.

I. The Fusing of Archetypal Figures associated with the Wanderer

For reasons discussed in the introduction of this study, the concept of wandering has roots

in religious thought concerning divine power, guidance and punishment. Wandering might

therefore be defined with reference to its traditional connections with the wandering figures of the

Bible, legend and classical mythology. In the course of time these have blended together in

western literature.

Geoffrey H. Hartman`s opinion that the motif of the Wandering Jew underlies the figure

of the Ancient Mariner, Cain and other wanderers in Romantic literature is intuited rather than

supported by detailed evidence or argument in his essay ''Romanticism and Consciousness''.

Viewed historically, the legend of the Wandering Jew is a post-biblical invention inspired by the

Church's negative attitude to Jewry. It echoes nevertheless the motif of exile from the Promised

Land and the biblical motif of wandering incorporating the figure of Cain (the biblical Cain was

not only a wanderer in a pejorative sense but the founder of civilisation).

If a study of the wandering motif is to be based on what on might term a vocabulary of

traditional wandering figures derived from the Bible, mythology and legend, what tests are to be

applied to ensure the appropriate categorisation of ''Wanderer'' figures in Romantic literature? The

entire exercise of categorising and labelling types of wanderer figures will prove to be of little

value unless the phenomenon of ''introversion'' is taken into account. Throughout the development

of literature, and particularly at periods of great historical change, the factor of ''introversion''

plays a major role in influencing the manner in which writer treated culturally transmitted

material. In the Romantic period this factor noticeably influenced the manner of radically

recasting wandering figures derived from periods subject to a predominant religious influence.

Originally this story of Lutheran inspiration served to illustrate the dire consequences of

transgressing against religious injunctions. Faust sold his soul to the Devil and went to Hell; there

is little in the manner of the narrator's treatment of the story to suggest that anyone should feel

sorry for him. Marlow's Faust, though he also goes to Hell in the end, acquires the dignity of a

105

Tragic hero. Goethe's Faust, who avoids Hell altogether, becomes the hero of a divine comedy.

Changes in the evaluation of content lead to formal changes in the story itself.

To the extent that ''transgressing'', albeit as the prerequisite of repentance, is a synonym of

''wandering'' in one of its principal senses, Goethe's Faust reflects the new positive significance

with which Goethe and the Romantics invested the word ''Wanderer'' and all that became

associated with it in their minds. Faust, like the Ancient Mariner, becomes the Prodigal Son.

However, if Faust and the Ancient Mariner is a Cain or Ahasuerus turned Prodigal Son, in what

sense can he be identified with the former? In a poetic context a figure such as Coleridge's

Mariner is not a flat personification of an idea (though a poem may take its inception from a

germinal idea).

It incorporates a nexus of associations the development of which may often be traced back

to earlier works by the poet. For this reason it may prove enlightening to consider how the motif

of the wanderer as exemplified in the figure of Cain had found expression in one of Coleridge's

works written before he composed The Ancient Mariner. In the Prefatory Note of The

Wanderings of Cain, Coleridge recalls Wordsworth's thinly veiled dissatisfaction with the Second

Canto of The Wanderings of Cain, which they had agreed to write in collaboration.

I hastened to him (Wordsworth) with my manuscript- that look of

humorous despondency fixed on his almost blank sheet of paper, and then its silent mock-piteous admission of failure struggling with the sense of the exceeding ridiculousness of the whole scheme - which broke up in a laugh and The Ancient Mariner was written instead.2

Is the connection between the abandonment of this joint project and genesis of The Rime

of the Ancient Mariner merely coincidental? The following evidence suggests that the

Wanderings of Cain and The Ancient Mariner are thematically related and that the latter was born

of Coleridge's failure to complete the former. This being so, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

may be directly associated with the word ''to wander,'' not only to the idea of wandering. Cain and

his son Enos in The Wanderings of Cain stray onto a dismal plain not unlike the infernal sea

described in The Ancient Mariner. Here they encounter a “Shape“ '' embodying the spirit of

Abel. It is as a ''Shape'' that the ship bearing Life-in-Death first appears to the Ancient Mariner

(line152). Cain, like the legendary Wandering Jew, vainly wishes for his own death. Coleridge's

Cain, incorporating attributes of the Wandering Jew, anticipates the Ancient Mariner, who

combines characteristics of both Cain and Ahasuerus, in as far as his cruel slaying of an innocent

106 Chapter 6

creature is analogous to Cain’s fratricide He commits an act of sacrilege like Ahasuerus in the

medieval legend. The motif of the Crucifixion is evoked by a repetition of the word ''cross'' in

association with the Albatross and its death (of ''At length did cross an Albatross'' in line 63,

''With my cross-bow/ I shot the Albatross'' in lines 81 and 82). The image of Death-in-Life and

Death playing dice for possession of the dead also underlines this motif. The conventional

symbolism associated with Cain and Ahasuerus accounts for much, but not everything, that

happens in the story told in the Ancient Mariner. Both Cain and Ahasuerus are traditionally

eternal wanderers with no prospect of finding their destination. The Ancient Mariner differs from

them in that he is finally released from the curse that has befallen him and "returns to his own

country". He incorporates the figure of the returning wanderer pre-eminently represented by

Ulysses and the Prodigal son. In both cases, "wandering" finally proves a beneficial experience.

Its punitive function is outweighed by its ultimate rewards, the widening and enrichment of

experience and the education that derives not from theory and precept but from subjection to the

process of trial and error. The Wanderer sets out a fool, a prey to folly and its consequences. He

becomes wise, even sly like Ulysses, as a consequence of his exposure to experience. As we may

conclude from the stories of Saul and Ulysses, wandering in the biblical and Greek classical

traditions establishes the prior condition for the Wanderer's enjoyment of a favoured status

accompanied by power and responsibility.

In that story which reveals the most generous attitude to wandering, the Prodigal Son

betters his elder brother, who never ventures from his father's house, to become fit to take

possession of his patrimony. Understood as the Prodigal Son, the Ancient Mariner seems to gain

few tangible benefits from his harrowing experiences. These, however, allow him to grow

spiritually and morally and give him an authority that the reluctant hearer of his story cannot

withstand. The wedding guest becomes a ‘‘sadder and wiser man’’, while the Ancient Mariner, in

becoming a prophet - implicitly a poet - reveals a truth, evident in many great works of

literature, that the traveller's misfortune is the narrator's opportunity.

Wandering journeys in biblical tradition constitute a paradox. On the one hand, we may

infer from them that wandering, especially long periods of wandering such as that of the Israelites

in the desert of Sinai, is the consequence of transgression or the erring proclivities of the human

heart. On the other, the experience of wandering ultimately proves beneficial, for it supplies the

opportunity of moral growth and education \ and may even secure much greater benefits than

those attained by "elder brothers" adhering to the path of rectitude.

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A similar paradox attaches to adventure stories with no overt claim to carrying moral

lesson. Adventure stories commonly tell of exciting events set in motion by an unforeseen

misfortune which thrusts the unwary traveller into a domain he would not have voluntarily

entered. As both a moral allegory and adventure story, Robinson Crusoe presents a double

paradox. However much Crusoe laments what he considers to be his ''sinful'' urge to wander, he

both as man of action and narrator derives immense benefits from his misfortune. As the narrator

of his adventures, Crusoe embodies the figure of the wanderer-speaker with its ancient precedents

in such figures as Ulysses and Moses (in rabbinical tradition Moses is not only seen as a

participant in the events described by the Pentateuch accounts but also as the (human) author of

the narrative itself, a Levite, a divinely inspired poet; indeed, some of the most lyrical passages in

the Pentateuch are attributed to Moses as dramatic speaker). 3 The greater part of the Odyssey is

occupied by passages attributed to Ulysses as the principal dramatic speaker in the text. The most

''fantastic'' or improbable events referred to in the body of the text are those which Ulysses

himself relates. The world described by Ulysses is primarily a mythical world occupied by such

beings as the Cyclops and Circe. Prolonged, uninterrupted, monologues reveal patterns similar to

those informing dreams and dreamlike states of mind. Travellers (inside and outside literary

context) are known for their ''tall stories'', the absolute veracity of which may be called into

question if moral criteria are applied, hence the highly ambivalent status of the wanderer-speaker

as witness, entertainer and suspected liar (viz. the miles gloriosus in classical times and the Baron

von Münchhausen). He is thus alienated from society, set apart from fellows, burdened by the

exceptional nature of what he has to tell and the compulsion to recount his story. Both as a poet-

visionary and as a traveller he is an outsider.

108 Chapter 6

2. Dualism and Dichotomies: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The metaphor equating the poet with an alienated traveller finds its basis both in

unawareness of the effects travel may have on an individual's psychology and in the picture of the

believer as an alien travelling homeward in the Bible and religious writings (cf. I Peter; 2,11). The

poet like the believer is conscious of a fundamental divide between the physical world and a

transcendent reality beyond it. Baudelaire's concept of the duality between ''Spleen'' and ''Ideal'' is

greatly influenced by the concept of the duality between the flesh and the spirit in religious

thought (cf. 2 Corinthians; 4,16,5,10). Fundamentally the same duality underlies ancient mythical

accounts of demigods wandering the earth. In The Epic of Gilgamesh the exact proportions of the

hero's divine and human constituency are given.

O Gilgamesh, lord of Kullab, great is thy praise. This was the man to whom all things were known; this was king who knew all countries of the world. He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood. He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, and returning engraved on a stone the whole story. When the gods created Gilgamesh they gave him a perfect body. Shamash the glorious sun endowed him with beauty, Adad the god of the storm endowed him with courage, the great gods made his beauty perfect, surpassing all others. Two thirds they made him god and one-third man. 4

The Ancient Mariner incorporates aspects and characteristics of the archetypal wanderers

of antiquity. Like them he is subject to the overriding influence of higher powers often identified

as the planets in the original sense of the word (the seven wanderers - the sun, the moon, Mars,

Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn). The movements of the ''cold earth wanderers'' participate in

cosmic movement. As the following quotation makes clear, Gilgamesh's mother holds Shamash

(the Sun) accountable for her son's impulse to wander:

O Shamash, why did you give this restless heart to Gilgamesh, my son; why did you give it? You have moved him and now and now he sets out on a long journey to the land of Humbaba, to travel an unknown road and fight a strange battle 5

109

In no reading of The Ancient Mariner can one overlook the relationship between the

Mariner, the Wanderer, and the higher powers represented by the sun, moon, the albatross and the

wind. This relationship forms what can be pictured as a vertically oriented polarity between the

horizontal plane of the earth and the region of the sky which, together with the many polarities

and parallels contained in the poem, contributes to the dense and complex structure of the poem.

The slaying of the albatross, which combines associations with Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the

poetic genius in one symbol, signals the loss of the modern (sentimental) poet's sense of being

harmoniously at one with his source of inspiration. With no certainty of an objective correlative to

the Wanderer's innate divinity, the Mariner is exposed to the heady and terrifying experience of

solipsistic isolation. What brings him (or rather Coleridge) the means of breaking out of his

despair and isolation is the discovery of the mind's inherent objectivity in thought, language and

poetic expression. On a symbolic level, the Mariner experiences a transition from death to a new

life. In this light we should consider another aspect of the Mariner's affinity with the archetypal

wanderers of antiquity.

The Mariner, like Gilgamesh, Ulysses and Aeneas, enters the nether realm of death. The

sun, traditionally a symbol of life and regeneration, represents stasis and death in Coleridge’s

poem. Apollo, the sun god, was not only the god of poetry in classical myth, but also the bringer

of pestilence. The colours displayed by Life-in-Death - red, yellow and white carry associations

both with the sun and the plague. In a manner consistent with a long poetic and religious tradition

the sea in The Ancient Mariner combines associations with death and the renewal of life, as in the

story of the Flood and the exodus of the Israelites through the Red Sea.

In Goethe's ''Wanderers Sturmlied'' the central symbol of water is supported by allusions

to the (classical) deluge myth. Water, traditionally a symbol of God's creative power becomes an

image symbolising the flow of poetic utterance in the poetry of Goethe and the Romantics. The

association of death and water, implicit in biblical accounts of the Flood and the drowning of

Pharaoh's men in the Red Sea, is evident in passages in Shakespearean drama. The nightmarish

element in The Ancient Mariner is also found in Clarence's dream in Richard III. In Ariel's song

describing the skull and skeletal remains of drowned man, the relics of death appear as things of

beauty. The idea of an aesthetic transformation of death’s destructive and deforming effects later

finds fuller expression in Baudelaire's ''Le Mauvais Moîne“

In The Ancient Mariner the nightmare quality pervading the poem belies the fact that the

events described in the narrative reflect Coleridge's success in achieving as aesthetic resolution of

110 Chapter 6

the tensions to which he was subject when writing the poem. The outward events The Ancient

Mariner formally devolve on moral issues. He commits a sin and incurs guilt. However, the

course of events referred to in The Ancient Mariner do not reveal the outworking of justice

according to any normally recognised criteria.

One critic is noteworthy in his attempt to explain the poem's apparent illogical nature.

Edward E. Bostetter points out in his essay "The Nightmare World of 'The Ancient Mariner' ",

the subtitle given to the poem in the edition of The Lyrical Ballads published in 1800 was ''A

Poet's Reverie''. 6 In the eighteenth century the reality of the unconscious mind was becoming

recognised as a principle governing not only general human psychology but also the process of

literary creation. The use of imagery and symbolism in poetry reflected this change, with the

result that the poem resists reduction to tidy explication or exegesis. While polysemy is a

characteristic of poetry in all ages, a new awareness of the nature and operation of the

subconscious mind affected the formal organisation of poems such as The Ancient Mariner. The

attempts to imitate the synthesising operation of the mind in creating images during dreams or

dreamlike mental conditions encouraged what might be termed a thickening or clustering of

poetic imagery. Over and above their function of recalling ideas and stimulating a mental picture,

images assume a function analogous to that of motifs in music - that is, they are to be appreciated

as elements of structure, uniquely defined by their context within the organic whole constituting a

poem. The free mode of musical association often characterises literary works concerned with the

liberation of mind and spirit from subjection to the exigencies of the material world, and with the

ultimate freedom associated with the idea that physical death releases the soul from its material

limitations.

To the extent that death is considered to be both the ultimate negation of physical life and

the passage to spiritual liberation and fulfilment, it is a negation that affirms its apparent

antithesis. The concept of wandering with its manifold associations with death, transition,

interrelated movements of mind and body etc. implies not only epic subject matter but also a

principle of organisation impelled by a principle like that identified by Goethe in his theories

concerning polarity (viz. Steigerung) that at once poses and reconciles contraries. German

Romanticism was inaugurated by Friedrich Schlegel's call for a new form of poetry, which he

referred to as Universalpoesie, that was to reconcile Classicism with modernity. 7 William Blake

also strove to reconcile dualities, though in a manner that accorded with religious mysticism

rather than by a frontal intellectual assault.

111

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is typically Romantic in expressing an intense concern

with polaric relationships. Primarily for this reason it is characterised by a strong ironic element

exemplified in what is probably the most celebrated line in the poem: ''Water, water everywhere /

Nor any drop to drink.'' (121,122). The motif of polarity is enhanced by reference to the

geographic poles and the ''Polar Spirits'' (Gloss to lines 393 - 405).

A number of the polaric oppositions found in the poem are based on tradition. Traditional

symbols are treated so as to accord with the aesthetic purposes of a Romantic poet. Just as the sun

carries predominantly negative associations, the moon the token of Celestial Mary’s healing

influence, carries those that are unambiguously positive. (Lines 292 -296). The figure of Mary as

intercessor is assigned an analogous role in the depiction of Faust's entry into Heaven at the end

of the dramatic action in Faust II. Those who directly associate the use of symbols originating in

religious traditions with confessions of faith should enquire why two Protestant poets should

award Mary such great significance. In The Ancient Mariner the Queen of Heaven and Death-in-

Life form an antithetic pair analogous to that formed by Circe and Penelope in The Odyssey or the

Whore of Babylon and the Bride of the Lamb in the Book of Revelation.

3. The Return of the Prodigal Son, or the Poet's quest to Reconcile Polarities and Tensions

The Ancient Mariner is a poem which contrasts antipodes and opposites, while at the same

time inducing a number of such antitheses to merge into one figure or symbol. For this reason it is

impossible to equate the Mariner with the Wandering Jew or the figure of Christ alone, though

elements connect with both are part of the Mariner's composition. The figure of Ahasuerus is

itself highly ambivalent, for Ahasuerus is a co-sufferer with Jesus. In Goethe’s poetic fragment

''Der Ewige Jude'' the Wandering Jew is Jesus. As we noted elsewhere, the poets of the Romantic

period freely availed themselves of religious symbols identifying Jesus with the poetic

imagination, Mary with the poet's anima or true identity and the Passion with the process of

literary and poetic creation.

Of all wanderer figures the Prodigal Son is perhaps the most inclusive - and therefore the

most apt - designation of the Ancient Mariner. Remembering that The Ancient Mariner reveals

Coleridge's desire for an aesthetic rather than a purely intellectual resolution of the tensions to

which he was subject when writing the poem, as in his life generally, we will note some striking

112 Chapter 6

similarities between the language of the New Testament and that of Plotinus when referring

respectively to the Prodigal Son and Jupiter. In his treatise ''On the Intellectual Beauty'' Plotinus

refers to Jupiter as one who returns to his father's house.

The vision has been of God in travail of a beautiful offspring, God engendering a universe within himself in a painless labor and -rejoiced in what he has brought into being, proud of his children - keeping all closely by him, for the pleasure he has in this radiance and in theirs. Of this offspring-all beautiful, but most beautiful those that have remained within-only one has become manifest without; from him (Zeus, sovereign over the visible universe), the youngest born, we may gather, as from some image, the greatness of the Father and of the brothers that remain within the Father's house 9

We need not here broach questions concerning Plotinus's indebtedness to the concept of

Christ as the visible expression of the Father. It is enough to note that the striking convergence of

New Testament verbal imagery and that of Plotinus was recognised by European thinkers and

poets from the age of the Renaissance onwards and was fully consistent with a symbiosis of the

Biblical and Greek classical images concerning the movement of persons and objects.

Both Plotinus in ''On the Intellectual Beauty'' and Dante in ''The Letter to Can Grande

della Scala'' identified the goal of the soul's journey the union of the soul with its divine source

and ground of being, God or ''the One.'' Though Dante identifies the beatific vision, the

consummation of the Christian pilgrimage journey, with a supreme expression of beauty, Plotinus

equated the Good and the Beautiful in a manner that orthodox religious might consider

questionable, if not outright dangerous.

The Plotinian notion that the act of contemplation creates an ontological unity embracing

the contemplator and the contemplated finds an obvious parallel in what John Keats termed

"negative capability" and other expressions of Romantic strategies to comprehend some

relationship between the poet represented as observer and the objects of his contemplation.

Let us now consider the figure of the Ancient Mariner as an expression of poetic

"wandering" motivated by an impulse to reconcile contraries and resolve the conundrum of the

Wander-Poet"s dual identity rooted in the poet's - here Coleridge's - biography and the process of

creating poetry.. In terms of symbols derived from religious traditions, how is the figure both

Ahasuerus and the Prodigal Son? And if the Ancient Mariner is in some sense the Prodigal Son,

in what sense has he gained? If we equate gain with any purely tangible benefits enjoyed by the

113

Mariner at the end of the poem, we might suppose very little. As Edward E. Bostetter points out,

the Mariner himself finally remains alienated from the world and society and produces alienation

in those he meets. As a repentant sinner he shows few signs of joy any more than Coleridge, as a

private individual with an affinity with the Prodigal Son, could rid himself of the mental anguish

in writing poetry understood as a means of self-therapy. In a parallel instance, David Holbrook

treats ''Fern Hill'' as an expression of Dylan Thomas' psychological ''schizoid'' condition. 10

Writing' “Fern Hill'' did not secure any lasting cure of Thomas' mental ailment, but is it any less

great a poetic achievement for that? The gain, whether we are speaking of ''Fern Hill'' or The Rime

of the Ancient Mariner is the poetic achievement itself. A great hindrance to an objective critical

approach to The Ancient Mariner stems from the very wealth of extra-literary topics and themes

that are readily associated with it - e.g. neo-platonic philosophy, Calvinist theology, the effect of

drugs on the consciousness, and so on. However interesting and enlightening a discussion of such

topics may be, it does not itself provide a basis for assessing The Ancient Mariner as a poetic

achievement. Bostetter goes so far as to deny the possibility that the poem is at all accessible to

logical analysis. The density and complexity of the poem’s imagery and structure render the work

intractable to paraphrase. Thus he rejects Warren’s contention that the poem derives its unity

from the neo-platonic concept of ''One Life''. 11 This, Bostetter concedes, furnishes the ''moral

tag'' which Coleridge gave to The Ancient Mariner, but in his view, the ostensible message of the

poem is belied by poet's nightmare vision of a world become the playground of malign forces.

Bostetter departs from objective internal criticism when he inveighs against the allegedly unfair

dealings of God with human beings or takes to task the ruling power in the universe as presented

in The Ancient Mariner, when speculating whether the Mariner has gained at the end of his

harrowing experience. He writes:

The Mariner's act may have been a sin, but it made him important to God and men alike; in this sense he was rewarded rather than punished. 12

One can hardly do justice to the power and mystery of The Ancient Mariner if one treats

the poem as one that is ''about'' a great idea or ‘‘about’’ the Mariner. Coleridge's choice of theme

was determined by the need to create a poem ''of pure imagination’’, as Bostetter puts it, - to

wrest beauty from the raw material afforded by nightmare visions and hallucinations. Here it is

important to consider the incident that marks the turning-point of the poem, which is reached

when the Mariner in a trance-like state (''unaware''), blesses the water snakes he sees by the light

114 Chapter 6

of the moon. The aspects of the swimming snakes that deeply affect the Mariner are their motion

and their beauty. The motion of the snakes symbolises and epitomises the principle of motion both

in external nature and in the poetic mind. As earlier discussions have suggested, Goethe, Schiller

and the Romantics equated motion with a vital force in nature and all life. Beauty meant for

Schiller and Keats the reconciling principle that should - and finally would - reconcile humanity's

moral and aesthetic strivings. The Mariner's visual encounter with the water snakes poses the

counterpoint of his act of killing the albatross, an act that likewise sprang from subconscious

impulses. It is ironic that snakes should provide the Mariner with the occasion at which he was

granted relief from the curse that had befallen him and his crew, in view of the role ascribed to the

Serpent in the story of Eden, though Moses had brazen serpents raised in the wilderness as a means

of curing those about to die from snake -bite. An allusion to this incident recorded in the

Pentateuch will not appear out of place if we accept The Ancient Mariner as the product of a

merging of basic allegorical journeys rooted in biblical and ancient Greek writings.

To conclude my argument, the "Wanderer", incorporating and merging the motifs of

Ahasuerus and the Prodigal Son, reflects not only Coleridge's concern with the Ancient Mariner

as a dramatic character, his psychological make-up etc., but also, and perhaps more

fundamentally, the very processes that mould and inform the poem in its entirety.

Rilke came as close as did any other writer we have considered to establishing a clear

connection between the figure of the Prodigal Son and the artist's quest to mould language

aesthetically in the last pages of Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Sketchings

of Malte Laurids Brigge). The figure of the Prodigal Son is here a metaphor that illuminates the

process of artistic creativity. The artist's ''return to God'' is not to be understood in purely religious

terms, as when it is applied to descriptions of mystical experience. It entails the labour involved

whenever artists and poets express an inward vision in a external medium thanks to - not despite

of - the latter's resistant nature. In the poet's case this medium is language. (See the conclusions

drawn by Hans Dietrich Borchert, a critic concerned with the figure of the Prodigal Son in Rilke

in: ''Das Problem des Verlorenen Sohnes'' bei Rilke). 13

____________________________________________________________________________

115

ANNOTATIONS

1. Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-consciousness"', Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1970), 46 - 56. 2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Prefatory Notes on The Wanderings of Cain, 1828. The words cited are found at the end of the first paragraph of the Prefatory Note. 3. Luther noted the lyricism of the song of Moses and the Israelites in the fifteenth chapter of Exodus. Psalm 90 is traditionally attributed to Moses. 4. The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated in English by N.K. Sanders (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1960) p. 59. 5. Ibid., 73. 6. Edward E. Bostetter, "The Nightmare World of "The Ancient Mariner" in: Other Poems, ed. Alan R. Jones and William Tydeman (Tiptree, 1973) pp. 185 - 199. 7. Friedrich Schlegel, 116th "Athenäum"-Fragment. 1798 - 1800. 8. From the English translation of The Enneads, revised by B.S. Page, 1956 in "On the Intellectual Beauty" reprinted in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Vovanovich, 1971), p. 112.

9. Ibid., p. 112. 10. David Holbrook, The Code of Night (London: Athlone Press, 1972). 11. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with an Essay by Robert Penn Warren (New York, 1946). . 12. "The Nightmare World..", p. 193. 13. Hans Heinrich Borcherdt, "Das Problem des 'Verlorenen Sohnes bei Rilke", Worte und Werte / Bruno Markwardt zum 60. Geburstag, ed. Erdmann and Alfons Eich.

CHAPTER 7

A FOCUS ON "THE WANDERER" IN GOETHE'S POETRY

with Special Reference to "Der Wandrer", "Wandrer's Sturmlied" and the

Römische Elegien (Roman Elegies)

Introduction

Professor Willoughby, we noted earlier, commented on the nature of the relationship

between "Der Wandrer" and "Wandrers Sturmlied". Both belong to the early period in Goethe's

literary career between his student years in Leipzig and his move to Weimar. In this period

Goethe first expressed basic concerns about the nature of the poet and the poetic imagination in

poems associated by title or otherwise with the word "Wanderer". According to Professor

Willoughby, Goethe achieved a balance between the demands of self-expression and objectivity

in giving the figure of the Wanderer a dramatic voice in the dialogue between the so-named

speaker and a young peasant woman in "Der Wandrer". During the same period of

experimentation Goethe revealed a more personal and confessional aspect of "the Wanderer" in

"Wandrers Sturmlied", a poem that Goethe long concealed from public attention, ostensibly

because it appeared to Goethe to be little more than a poetic rambling, in fact "half-nonsense".

The true reasons for Goethe's reticence lie in the sensitive nature of the issues raised by the word

"Wanderer" and its implications. To consider this is to recognise that the word "Wanderer" is no

mere conventional label or means of defining a persona.

118 Chapter 7

The poetic work entitled Römische Elegien (Roman Elegies) was composed when Goethe

concluded his two periods of residence in Italy from 1786 to 1789. Their connection with the

"Der Wandrer" and "Wandrers Nachtlied" lies in the contrast between the mentality of the restless

searcher striving for self-fulfilment presented in both early poems and that of the mature observer

and connoisseur of Rome's cultural and artistic heritage. "Der Wandrer " anticipates this

development. A passage belonging to the Römische Elegien Goethe - in what seems to be an

allusion to "Wandrers Sturmlied" - recalls those earlier days when he braved the elements during

wandering excursions in his northern homeland.

119

A: "DER WANDRER"

There follow excerpts from William Taylor of Norwich's translation of "Der Wandrer",

which evidently exerted a considerable influence on William Wordsworth's development (I have

place certain lines in bold letter for a reason that will become clear later):

.

THE WANDERER

Wanderer: God bless you, woman, and the sucking child Upon your bosom! Here I'll sit awhile Against the rock, and at the elm-tree's foot Lay down the burden that has wearied me. Woman What business brings you up these sandy paths During the heat of day? Have you brought toys, Or other ware, from town to sell i'th'country ? You seem to smile, good stranger, at my question.

Wanderer I bring no city-wares about for sale. The evening's very sultry. I'm athirst. Show me, good woman, where you draw your water. Woman Here, up these steps of rock, athwart the thicket. Do you go first: you'll soon be at the hut That I inhabit. We've a spring hard by it. Wanderer Traces of man's arranging hand are these! Thine--'twas not liberal Nature, to unite These blocks of marble thus--' 30. -------------------------------------------------------

120 Chapter 7

Woman Ere long my husband will return from labor, 112 Stay and partake with us our evening loaf. Wanderer 'Tis here you dwell? Woman Yes, in these very walls. My father built our cottage up himself, Of tiles and stones he found among the ruins; Here we all dwelt. He gave me to a ploughman, And died within our arms. Hope of my life, My darling, see how playful 'tis; he smiles. Wanderer All bounteous Nature, ever teeming mother, Thou hast created all unto enjoyment; Like a good furnish'd all thy children With one inheritance--a hut a home. High on the architrave the swallow builds,

Unconscious of the beauties she beclays; The golden bud with webs the grub surrounds, To form a winter dwelling for her offspring: And thou, O Man, between antiquity's Sublimest remnants patchest up a cot--

Art happy among tombs. Farewell, kind woman Woman You will not stay ? Wanderer God bless you and your child ! Woman Good journey to you. Wanderer Whither leads the road Across yon mountain?

121

Woman That's the way to Cuma. Wanderer How far may't be? Woman About three miles. Farewell! Wanderer Nature, be thou conductress of my way, Guide the unusual path that I have chosen Among the hallow'd graves of mighty dead, And mouldering monuments of ages gone; Then to a home direct thy wanderer's step, so To some asylum, from the north wind safe, And with a platane grove to shade the noon, Where, when his evening steps the hut revisit, A wife like this may clasp him in her arms, The nursling smiling at her happy breast.

"Der Wandrer", a poetic dialogue that originally belonged to a collection of poems

belonging to the genre of Künstlergedicht (Poetry on the Theme of Artists), describes an

encounter between a young peasant woman and a wandering traveller engaged in a walking tour

through mountainous terrain near the town of Cuma in southern Italy. The poem uncannily

anticipates Goethe's Italian travels, which then lay more than ten years in the future.

Towards the end of his life Goethe cited "Der Wandrer" as a poem demonstrating that

phenomenon of allowing poets an insight at times runs ahead of real events. 1 In other respect, the

poem also heralds motifs that would assume great significance in Goethe's poetry, notably one to

which Professor Willoughby has drawn attention - the encounter of a wanderer with a young

woman who epitomises humble life and domestic virtues. The image of a young woman

accompanied by a child in "Der Wandrer", as elsewhere, evokes strong religious connotations,

pre-eminent among them that of the Madonna and Child. In "Der Wandrer" this topos merges

with biblical images associated with stories telling of travellers' encounters with girls or young

woman drawing water from a well. The traveller in "Der Wandrer" implicitly represents the poet

as one in whom divine power resides. In requesting the young woman to give him a drink of

water the traveller recalls events described in the Pentateuch and the Gospels, such as the

122 Chapter 7

the well-known occasions when a servant of Abraham asks Rebecca for a drink of water, and

when Jesus makes such a request to a Samaritan woman (John 4). This poem anticipates the

explicit associations of the poet with the figure of Christ made later by Goethe himself, Jean Paul,

Blake and others. The dialogue between the Wanderer and the young woman acquires an almost

comic dimension in that it reveals a tension between the Wanderer's transports of the spirit and

the young woman's concern with the immediate practicalities of life. As the young woman leads

him along the upward path toward a well and her cottage, the Wanderer, stimulated by the sight

of ancient stones that were once part of classical buildings, indulges in a monologue of praise and

poetic utterance.

The interpolations of the young woman as she gives directions about the path they should

follow or imparts factual information, serve to keep the Wanderer in touch with physical reality

and counterbalance his proclivities to wander off in high self-communion. Taken to the extreme,

such contrast might lead to the almost farcical scenarios depicted in Goethe's Künstlergedichte, in

which the artist is held back from full devotion to his vocation by the necessity of contending

with bawling infants and a shrewish wife. "Der Wandrer" evinces no crude irony but rather a

touch of gentle irony illuminating the necessary inter-relationship between two planes of reality,

those represented by the young woman and the Wanderer respectively. It is also possible to find

in the contrasting attitudes and modes of speech of the young woman and the Wanderer a

dichotomy that Schiller would focus on his essay "Über naive und sentimentale Dichtung". The

woman is a child of nature living in the present. The traveller seeks to find a means of

transcending the barrier between the present and the past, the world he perceives physically and

the world his mind imaginatively apprehends. The traveller in "Der Wandrer" reveals traits of a

certain kind of 18th-century tourist, the would-be Rousseau or travelling "culture vulture", who

imbibed impressions of ancient ruins in Italy and France. If the Wanderer is a poet in his mode of

expression, he is also, like Werther, one endowed with an artist's special perception, if not with

the ability to transpose his vision onto the physical medium of canvas or paper.

Der "Wandrer" furnishes an early example of Goethe's frequently applied stratagem of

establishing antitheses before showing how their differences and contradictions are capable of

being resolved. Goethe did not claim to be able to solve the contradictions of life and existence in

purely logical terms, but he was able to accommodate seemingly irreconcilable differences within

123

a world-view based on experience as well as philosophical thought. Goethe was helped in this by

a sense of humour (and therefore of perspective), shared perhaps only by Lord Byron among the

English Romantics. As L.A. Willoughby and Elizabeth M. Wilkinson have noted, this sense of

humour allowed Goethe to make fun even of his own high-flown aspirations. 2

"Der Wandrer" treats two sets of interlocking antitheses. The restless progress of the

traveller is set against the fixedness of the young woman's home and established way of life. The

woman, contending with the every day needs of her family, lives in the present, while the

traveller allows his mind to wander into the distant past. On seeing the remains of an ancient

temple, the Wanderer reproaches Nature for having destroyed and deformed great works of art

with the words:

Schätzest Du so, Natur / Deines Meisters Meisterstück?

He is painfully aware of the discrepancy between the ruins he sees and the glory of what

they represented in antiquity. For the young woman the ancient remains have direct practical

value as building material for her home. Her attitude to the stones that were once part of a temple

poses a stark contrast with the Wanderer's aesthetic and imaginative raptures, though in Goethe's

poem no criticism of the young woman's utilitarianism is voiced or even implied.

In Goldsmith's The Traveller, which Goethe probably held in mind when composing "Der

Wandrer", the author censured what he saw as the disrespect that his contemporaries evinced

towards ancient monuments. 3 In Goldsmith's poem the travelogue still retains an element of

social satire that typified the famous descriptions of journeys in the heyday of the classical or

Augustan period. In Goldsmith's eyes the cannibalisation of ancient monuments for the purpose of

building homes for the poor was a symptom of cultural decline and disrespect for the

achievements of classical antiquity. Goethe, in this poem as elsewhere, does not disparage what is

practical and useful as something belonging to a category inferior to that of art and spirituality.

The turning point of the poem coincides with the juncture at which the Wanderer and the

young woman reach the well situated near the latter's cottage. Then, significantly, the child in her

arms wakes up. The Wanderer experiences an aesthetic and spiritual awakening which allows him

124 Chapter 7

to recognise unity where earlier he has seen division. The apparent antagonism between the

demands of nature and art, between living in the present and the Wanderer's self-immersion in a

vision of the past, gives way to the recognition that a universal process is evident both in natural

forces and human activity, be this artistic or mundane. In the following lines the wanderer

expresses a vision in which past and present merge. Art and nature, far from negating each other,

express the same vital principle. All nature's "children" from the caterpillar to the human being

are seen to be engaged in the same collective enterprise of constructing, weaving, and home-

building. We note one of the first appearances of the Wanderer-Hütte duality in Goethe's poetry.

Natur, du ewig keimende! Schaffst jeden Genuß des Lebens;

Deine Kinder all hast mütterlich mit einem Erbteil ausgestattet,

7 Einer Hütte. Hoch baut die Schwalb' am Architrav, Unfühlend, welchen Zierat, Sie verklebt, Die Raup' umspinnt den goldnen Zweig Zum Winterhaus für ihre Brut, Und du flickst zwischen der Vergangenheit Erhabne Trümmer Für dein Bedürfnis Eine Hütt', o Mensch,

. (Line 127 - 142) (See translation of these lines by William of Norwich shown in bold lettering)

In "Der Wandrer" the domains of nature, society and poetry meet pre-eminently in the

person of the young woman. She represents the figure of an archetypal mother, perhaps Mother

Nature herself, in the image of a young woman with her child in her arms at the beginning of the

poem. She is the epitome of the industrious wife and mother, who sustains the basic unit of

society, the family. The final lines of the poem associate her with the poet's muse. At the literal

level of meaning the poem concludes by expressing the hope that the Wanderer should one day be

married to a woman, like the one he meets near Cuma, with whom he will enjoy the consolations

and bliss of domestic life. The Wanderer looks forward to a day when he perhaps might return to

his wife at the close of day. The close of day has in religious and poetic metaphor a wider sense.

In this context, the reference to a grove of poplar trees recalls the association of poplars with the

125

entrance of the underworld in classical mythology.4 The Wanderer imagines returning home when

the evening sun sheds its last golden light; hitherto the sun has carried negative associations

throughout the poem when the thirsty and weary traveller sought refuge from the sun's oppressive

rays in the shade of trees. The image of the oppressive mid-day sun, present not only in this poem

but in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth's The Evening Walk and other treatments of

the theme of walking in the country, is not only rooted metaphor but doubtless also in the

experience of seasoned ramblers, a class to which the poets in question all belonged.

The image of a woman awaiting the traveller at nightfall associates a female with night

and death, with the Passion and the return of the soul to its final resting place. As we have noted,

in earlier discussions, poets in the Romantic age used religious imagery to express the experience

of a poet in the process of discovering the true self. The ancient Gnostic belief that the Passion

was founded on a purely spiritual truth rather than a historical fact involving physical death seems

to anticipate Hartman's concept of a poetic death and resurrection. At another level, the

association of night and a female figure mirrors the paradigm of the libidinal quest for union with

the female principle in the self. The proposition that the same figure finds a framework or

contexts different planes of reference might seem confusing or contradictory to those defending

certain ideological positions regarding the relation of poetry to life beyond literature, ideas

concerning religious truth and fundamental psychology. However, the power of words in literary

texts, and probably in common language, to simultaneously acquire significance from different,

though intersecting planes of significance, defies reduction to any one theory, such as that which

rules that symbolism in poetry concerns only poetical aims and effects.

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126 Chapter 7

ANNOTATIONS: "DER WANDRER"

1. In answer to Karl Friedrich Zelter, who had sent Goethe a letter from Felix Mendelsohn, in which the writer

claimed that he had identified the location providing the setting of "Der Wandrer", Goethe wrote in a letter dated

28th June 1831: "Das Gedicht "Der Wandrer" ist im Jahre 1771 geschrieben, also viele Jahre vor meiner

italienischen Reise. Aber es ist der Vorteil des Dichters, daß er das voraus ahnet und wert hält, was der die

Wirklichkeit suchende, wenn er es im Dasein findet und erkennt, doppelt 1ieben und höchlich daran sich freuen

muß." ("The poem "Der Wandrer" was written in 1771, that is to say many years before my Italian journey. But

it is the advantage of the poet that he intuitively foresees and esteems what the seeker after reality , having

found and recognized it in the real world, doubly loves and enjoys with highest delight).

2. L.A. Willoughby and Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, "'Wandrers Sturmlied' A Study in poetic Vagrancy", in: German Life and Letters, 1948, I, 102-116. The authors comment Without destroying his rapture, the poet can smile at it, playing upon the incongruity between uplifting and the down-to-earth aspects of his fantasy." P. 105. Also: "The whole movement of the poem's form inevitably grows out of the mood and the theme, a serious subject treated with sense of humour. Humour springs from a profound impulse of self-protection. It is a means of preserving inner security; but it is also a sign of it." P. 113 3. Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller, 1764, 159-162. Richard J. Jaarsma, commenting on these lines in his article "Satire, Theme, and Structure in The Traveller in: Tennessee Studies in Literature, Vol. XXV (Knoxville,1979) sees evidence of Goldsmith's belief in "the progressive decline of the human spirit." P. 52. 4. Robert Graves notes the symbolic associations of black poplars with death and the underworld in The Greek

Myths I & 2. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Book: 1955, rev. 60):

Black poplars were sacred to the Death-goddess...; and white poplars, or aspens, either to Persephone as goddess of regeneration, or to Heracles..(32.4). Also: "Persephone's black poplar grove lay in the far-western Tartarus, and Odysseus did not descend' into it - like Heracles.... Aeneas, and Dante - though Circe assumed that he had done so. 170.6. 5. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson: 1980), p. 95. Referring to The

Gospel Truth attributed to Valentius, the author writes: "Contrary to orthodox sources, which interpret Christ's

death as a sacrifice redeeming humanity from guilt and sin, this Gnostic gospel sees the Crucifixion as an

occasion for discovering the divine self within.

127

B: " WANDRERS STURMLIED"

1. The Problem of the Original Text

"Wandrers Sturmlied" confronts the interpreter with a number of problems relating to the

origins of the poem. These problems are not merely of "academic interest", as different

conclusions on this point entail significant differences of interpretation. The poem was composed

some time between March 1772 and September 1773, when Goethe sent a manuscript version to

Betty Jacobi. This version differs somewhat from the revised one which Goethe felt obliged to

publish almost forty years later in 1810 (shortly after the poem had appeared in print without his

permission). The first version of the poem differed from that published by Goethe in 1810 in the

organisation of the strophes addressed to the Wanderer's "Genius". This opening section

comprised three strophes of almost equal length, suggesting the beginning of a poem with a

regular formal structure, indicative perhaps of Goethe's original intention to imitate Pindar's

organisation of strophes in triadic groups.1 One critic, Klaus Weimar, goes so far as to doubt that

the last strophe of the poem was included in the version sent to Betty Jacobi in 1773.2 Weimar

argues that Goethe must have composed the fourteen lines beginning "Wenn die Raeder rasselten"

("when the wheels rattle") later and sent in a letter them to Friedrich Jacobi in 1774. This

conclusion leads Weimar to believe that "the original version''. ending according to Weimar with

the word "Theokrit", was conceived by Goethe as a hymn dedicated to Zeus after the manner of

Pindar, in which there is evidence of a close self-identification with Zeus on the part of the

Wanderer and the poet. After sending this version to Betty Jacobi, Weimar's theory goes, Goethe

retracted from what he now held to be a presumptuous, well nigh blasphemous, self-over-

evaluation and wrote an additional strophe to redress matters. There is, however, the internal

evidence provided by the text of the poem to consider, and this does not appear to vindicate

Weimar's contention.

128 Chapter 7

2. Mythological Figures and Tropes

The mythological landscape of the poems derives much of its imagery from Greek legends

associated with mountains - particularly Olympus, the home of the gods and Parnassus, sacred

both to Apollo and the Muses. In the Greek version of the Deluge story, Deucalion (Gk. "new-

wine sailor"), son of Prometheus, and Pyrrha, his wife, reached terra firma on Mount Parnassus.

It was also in the region of this mountain that Apollo slew the serpent Python. Apollo, the Muses,

and Deucalion' Flood enter as motifs into the texture of "Wandrers Sturmlied" and help to

demarcate the main elements of the poem's structure. The Flood legend underlies the associations

of water, earth and mud. Mud has great symbolic value in this poem, at least representing as it

does a merging or confusion of the elements earth and water. The first person speaker praises

water as the Jovian element of utmost purity against wine, a delectable though inferior liquid

attributable to the demigod Dionysus. 3 When composing the poem, Goethe may well have had

Pindar's Ode Olympian 1 in mind, for this begins with a eulogy of water:

Water is the best thing of all, and gold

Shines like flaming fire at night

More than all a great man's wealth. 4

Motifs: e.g. Ascent/Descent, evoking Spirits and Gods and "the Elements"

The mythological topography of "Wandrers Sturmlied" has both a vertical and a horizontal

axis. In terms of poetic imagery, the Wanderer ascends through the operation of a spiritual

levitating force, only to descend, as though down a slippery slope, to a low level at which he must

wade through mud in order to reach a refuge perched on a hill ahead of him. Climbing the hill

pose in an ascent of a kind, though hardly on the grand scale envisioned earlier. While the motif

of elevation, or ascent is common to many of Goethe's poems (e.g. "Zueignung"), "Wandrers

Sturmlied" is uncharacteristic of Goethe's typical treatment of analogous themes in its

disarmingly frank exposure of the sense of inadequacy the poet feels in meeting the challenge

imposed on him by his ambition of becoming at one with the gods. The Wanderer displays no

open defiance of Jupiter, as in Prometheus, nor sustained confidence in attaining unity with him,

as in Ganymed. Feelings of inadequacy well up within him even at the contemplation of "the fiery

129

black peasant" that appears in the seventh strophe, who possesses that firm resolution of spirit the

Wanderer feels to be lacking in himself despite help received from Muses, graces and gods.

Wafting precariously between earth and sky, the Wanderer feels himself to be missing out - both

as a human being, who should share the concerns and enjoyments of ordinary mortals, and as an

aspirant to the spiritual realm.

The desire to extricate himself from his muddy path motivates the Wanderer's appeal for help

addressed to his "Genius" or guardian spirit.

Den du nicht verlässest, Genius,Wirst ihn heben übern Schlammpfad Mit den Feuerflügeln. Him, whom thou dost not forsake, Genius, shalt raise from the mud path with fiery wings

The image of mud as the child of water and earth produces a humorous element in keeping

with the mock-heroic spirit that suffuses the poem, and we should not forget that humour and

self-irony serve as a defence against the discomforts of self-exposure. For all the real or apparent

humour in the poem, the fact that it treats highly sensitive issues is evident in the long delay of its

publication.

The section of the poem which traces the Wanderer's ascent towards Jupiter is divisible

into three subsections, in which the Poet-Wanderer addresses first his genius, second the graces

(Charites) and muses, and third the gods. The fact that Apollo alone among the denizens of

Olympus is not apostrophised need not surprise us in view of his aloof and threateningly

vindictive aspect. In the second phase of ascent, the Wanderer, now escorted by Muses and

graces, wafts or hovers over the muddy terrain with which he was contending when he addressed

his "genius". We note the change of tense from the future in the second strophe:

Wandeln wird er / Wie mit Blumenfüssen / Über Deukalions Flutschlamm,

He shall waft as though with flowery feet above Deucalion’s muddy deluge

to the present in the sixth:

Ihr umschwebt mich, und ich schwebe / Über Wasser, über Erde, / Göttergleich.

130 Chapter 7

Ye hover round me, I hover) Over water, Over earth /

God-like

At the same juncture, the Wanderer becomes aware of a separation of earth and water into

distinguishable bodies or masses, for he exclaims:

Das ist Wasser, das ist Erde.

That is water, that is earth.

It is interesting to note in passing that the emergence of earth, water and air from an

undifferentiated mass constitutes a central element of the various creation (and related deluge

myths) belonging to many cultural traditions. Perhaps references to the opposites of fire and water

allude to contemporary rival theories about the Creation (viz. Volcanism and Neptunism). In the

second phase of ascent, the Wanderer perceives the little black (swarthy) fiery peasant, whose

dark colour suggests his affinity to the earth.

In the third phase of ascent, and then only in the presence of the-third and highest of the

deities to which reference is made, the Wanderer finds the pure water he longs for at its

Castalian source. At this level of heightened awareness, the Wanderer speaks of his song as that

which flows to the god who is himself the source of water in both a literal and metaphorical

sense.

Dich, dich strömt mein Lied" (l 0th strophe).

Thee, thee, my song flows

The transitive use of an intransitive verb shows the trace of Klopstock's influence in

breaking the bounds of ordinary grammatically regulated utterances in order to achieve a higher

language more fitted to be the vehicle of rapturous emotion Klopstock anticipated Goethe in

favouring the image of the flowing stream to inculcate a feeling of the essential qualities of poetry

or inspired language. Even at the apex of his spiritual elevation, the Wanderer is still mindful of

his responsibilities towards common humanity. Not only should his song flow back to divinity;

from the Castalian fount a rivulet flows down to happy mortals below.

131

Pindar occupies a position of pre-eminence among the poets analogous to Jupiter's pre-

eminence among the gods, as a parallel between the gods and poets is evident in the very structure

of the poem. The eighth, ninth and tenth strophes of the poem refer in turn to Dionysus, Apollo

and Jupiter. The importance of this ordering is emphasized in the rhetorical question:

"Warum nennt mein Lied dich zuletzt?"

("Why doth my song name thee last") in the first line of the tenth strophe).

The final three strophes refer in turn to Anacreon famed for poetry about the joys of wine;

Theocritus, generally considered to be the originator of idyllic poetry (the words

"Sonnebeglaenzte Stirn" ("sun-illumined brow") suggest a connection with Apollo); and finally

Pindar. The last strophe is introduced by the image of turning wheels and racing chariots, a fitting

evocation of Pindar's celebration of the events and achievements of those competing in the

Olympic and similar festive games. The dust thrown up by the chariots is likened to a flurry of

grit, hail or sleet sweeping down a mountainside. "Kieselwetter" ("sleet") incorporates meanings

that pertain to the mineralogical. And to meteorological domains, and in the context of the poems

furnishes an image that fittingly marks the transition from one scene to another. 6 The vision of an

Olympian and Olympic past yields to the dreary reality of a traveller contending with the

meteorological conditions of winter in a more northerly clime.

4. Elements in the Poem which do not Conform to its Macro-Structure: A Discussion of their Implications

The Wanderer's ascent was not achieved without the experience of a trauma -that namely

which resulted from his encounter with Apollo, that most implacable of Greek deities, whom the

Wanderer may have offended by his very choice of the dithyrambic mode, customarily dedicated

to Dionysus, a mere demigod. Though he felt able to enter into a reciprocal relation with Jupiter,

he was totally overawed by Apollo’s brilliant sun-like radiance as well as perplexed by his own

inability to reciprocate in like manner - to "glow back". The following lines from the ninth

strophe express the Wanderer's sense of crisis in urgent tone:

132 Chapter 7

Weh! Weh! Innere Wärme, Seelenwärme, Mittelpunkt! Glüh entgegen Phoeb Apollen. Woe, woe, inner warmth, Soul warmth, The centre! Glow against Phoebus Apollo

These lines find an echo in the last strophe:

"Mut.--Glühte?--/Armes Herz!"

("Courage - glowed - Poor heart")

Scaling down his ambition, the Wanderer declares himself content with just enough self-

generated heat to enable him to get through the mud that separates him from his goal, a mountain

hut. Though the Wanderer may be perplexed by his inability to produce or sustain inner fire, not all

references to fire, or heat at least, carry negative or fear-engendering associations. Different

qualities of heat are referenced in the poem. The wings of Jove, metamorphosed into a birdlike

creature generate comforting, protective warmth. There is the inner warmth produced by wine.

There is the inborn ardour of the fiery peasant.

One reason why Goethe entertained misgivings about this poem has arguably less to do

with the poem's apparent formlessness than with the tensions and unresolved conflicts to which it

gives expression. The stage-by-stage ascent from earth to the heights of Parnassus might be

graphically represented as stairs leading upward. However, various cross-connecting links

between the lower and upper levels break the clean lines of the poem's tectonic structure. The

genius, the personal guardian spirit assigned to each mortal from birth to death (lower in the

hierarchy of spiritual beings than muses or gods), is identified in the eighth strophe with

Dionysus.

Vater Bromius! Du bist Genius, Jahrhunderts Genius, Bist, was innre Glut Pindarn war, Was der Welt Phoebus Apoll ist.

133 Father Bromius! Thou art genius, century's genius. Art what was inner warmth to Pindar, And what the world is to Phoebus Apollo.

A close association between the poet's "Genius" and Jupiter is suggested by the lines at the

beginning of the tenth strophe:

Warum nennt mein Lied dich zuletzt? Dich, von dem es begann, Why doth my song name thee last, thou from whom it began,

An underlying fear of being unable to distinguish the subjective consciousness from the

Universal Mind belies all attempts to enter the state of harmony and unity. To judge by the outline

of its structure, "Wanders Sturmlied" constitutes an affirmation of the traditional Olympian order,

with Jupiter stationed at its apex and Pindar occupying an analogous position among poets. Other

indications in the poem, however, point to trends that work against the official hierarchy. The

reason for the structural and emotional collapse revealed by the last strophe result not from

Goethe's sudden change of heart after the writing of the poem, but from the inner conflicts that he

experienced when writing it. On the one hand, Dionysus is linked in the structural context of the

poem with Anacreon and Anacreontic poetry of the kind Goethe had grown out of; on the other,

we find in the eighth strophe evidence of a close association of Dionysus (and Apollo) with

modernity (viz. "Jahrhundertsgenius") and the suggestion that Pindar is "passé‚" (viz. "Bist, was

innre Glut / Pindarn war" - "(Thou art what to Pindar was inner warmth"). What seems to be

called for here is not a downgrading of Dionysus but his re-evaluation in modern terms

5.The Poem's Inner Tensions

The reasons for arguing that the poem as we have it is not substantially different from the

poem as originally composed can be summarised as follows: Considering the recurrent triadic

structures in the poem, we would expect that a third strophe referring to Pindar would complete

the triad of strophes dedicated to the poets. Recognising this, Weimar argues that Goethe

originally considered reference to Pindar superfluous as so much had been said about him in the

poem earlier. 7

134 Chapter 7

Second, the metaphysical doubt, which, according to Weimar, suddenly beset Goethe after

the completion of the poem (i.e., without the final strophe) manifests itself throughout the poem.

There is no need to consult the final strophe to recognise in it the signs of deep metaphysical

anxiety, self-doubt and tension. The formal structure of the poem notwithstanding, a reading of

"Wandrers Sturmlied" (with or without the final strophe) not only reveals a close identification of

the Wanderer with Jupiter but also with Vater Bromius, or Dionysus. The wanderer at last follows

the peasant's footsteps to the security of an enclosed building. The Wanderer, Goethe himself,

will never return to the easy ways celebrated by Anacreon. His understanding of Dionysus has

deepened. This is not to say, either, that he has given up any hope of approaching Jupiter

thereafter. Many later poems prove the contrary. But he had learnt to tread (or waft) more warily

in the upper regions of Olympus.

135

ANNOTATIONS: "WANDRERS STURMLIED"

1. As C. M. Bowra explains in his introduction to The Odes of Pindar in Penguin Classics, Pindar often

uses a series of triads, each of which consists of strophe, antistrophe, and epode. See "Introduction," p.

xiii, in: The Odes of Pindar, translated and edited by C. M. Bowra, Harmondsworth, 1969.

2. Klaus Weimar, Goethes Gedichte 1769-1775: Interpretationen zu einem Anfang (Paderborn

Schoeningh, 1982), pp. 66-68.

3. In this connection it is interesting to note that Robert Graves concludes from his research into the

evolution of the Greek version of the Deluge story that Deucalion, as his name suggests, was originally a

Noachic figure responsible for the invention of wine. Reference to his importance in such a rôle was

subsequently suppressed in deference to Dionysian claims.

4. C. M. Bowra, The Odes of Pindar (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 64.

5. Greek philosophers before Plato were much concerned with identifying the primordial essence of the

universe in terms of one of, or a combination of "the elements". For Thales this was water, for

Anaximenes air (pneuma), for later philosophers a combination of the so-called "four elements" - earth,

water, fire and air.

6. While "Kies" in standard German means gravel or grit, "Kiesel" and "kieseln" have much the same

meaning as "hail" or "to hail" in Grimm's dictionary. See footnote 73 in: Weimar, Goethes Gedichte, p.

150.

7. Ibid. p. 83

136 Chapter 7

C: GOETHE'S RÖMISCHE ELEGIEN

THE "WANDERER" MOTIF BEFORE AND AFTER 1789

Goethe’s Elegien (later termed Elegien, römische (1806) before finally receiving the

present title), were written during or shortly after the poet's second period of residence in Italy

and published by Schiller in the Horen in 1795-6 without a declaration of their author's identity.

It was in the Neue Schriften of 1800 that Goethe officially acclaimed the Elegien as his own

works. As the first formal cycle of poems Goethe wrote, the collection of elegies poses a striking

contrast to the apparently rambling poems about "The Wanderer" written by Goethe in his pre-

Weimar days. First, and most obviously, in writing them Goethe subjected himself to the

discipline of conforming to rules laid down by ancient classical traditions, at least to the extent

that this was appropriate to poetry written in German. The Römische Elegien themselves contain

two references to the metrical pattern which Goethe followed during their composition. The basic

metric unit of the Elegien is the distich, a pair of lines consisting of a hexameter followed by a

pentameter.

Goethe's commitment to metrical regularity, which stands in complete contrast to the

metrical variations in "Wandrers Sturmlied", marks the arrival of Goethe's high classical period.

This had its beginnings in his first Weimar years and would last beyond the end of the eighteenth

century. Poems composed in his early years in Weimar still express the spirit of restlessness so

characteristic of Goethe's poems in the early 1770s. However, in poems describing walks and

journeys, such as "Harzreise" and "Ilmenau", the Wanderer, though still betraying signs of

restlessness, has become an acute observer of his surroundings. Goethe's classicism involved

more than adherence to a regular metre. Schiller, when alluding to the Römische Elegien in his

essay "Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung" - (contrasting the intuitive and unselfconscious

Greek poet with the sharply critical and self-conscious modern poet), referred to Goethe as "the

Roman and German Propertius" 1 Propertius had indeed served Goethe as a mode and source of

inspiration. Like Propertius, Goethe promoted love, erotic love in particular, to a major theme of

his poetry, and, when so doing, adopted the standpoint of a first person speaker. His choice of

traditional model brought a special advantage. In conforming to a classical precedent, Goethe

could forestall comments that the Römische Elegien provided a record of his amorous adventures

in Rome. On the other hand, there could be very little doubt that the joie de vivre expressed in the

137

Elegien corresponded closely to Goethe's elevated mood at a time when he enjoyed fulfilment in

his personal relationships. Though "Faustina", the figure who represents the poet's lover in the

Elegien, is a fictional character, she incorporates characteristics and aspects of a real woman in

Goethe's life. At least Frau von Stein as one of the first readers of the Elegien on their publication

was quick to identify Faustina, mentioned by name only once in the work (XVIII, 9) as Christiane

Vulpius, Goethe's life companion and later wife. Faustina may also incorporate traits of an Italian

woman with whom Goethe had a brief affair during his residence in Rome. 2

However, the spirit of exuberance that pervades the Elegien did not result only from

personal fulfilment in love relationships. In Rome itself Goethe discovered a spiritual and cultural

home that far surpassed any Northern city in its wealth of historical monuments and works of art.

Goethe exulted in the brightness of colour and the clarity of form that the Italian climate bestowed

on his Italian environment. For him, Rome meant primarily an aesthetic experience as he himself

observed in a letter dated 8th June 1787 to Charlotte von Stein:

Wo ich nun sitze. hier oder in Frankfurt, das ist eins und Rom ist der einzige Ort in der Welt für den Künstler und ich bin einmal nichts anders. Where I am now located, here or in Frankfurt, makes no difference, and Rome is the only place in the world for artists, and I am no different from others.

In the Römische Elegien Goethe presents love as a power not only manifested in a

personal relationship but in Rome, its history and present life. In mythological terms the god of

Love exerted an influence on Rome no less great than that of Mars. Indeed, Rome, as the

offspring of Mars and Rhea Silvia, is revealed in the Elegien as a city owing its existence to an

amorous impulse. Feeling himself to be in direct spiritual communion with the spirit of Rome, the

poet perceives no division between the classical past and the immediate present. The poet sees

more than the material record of a past age; he senses here the creative energy that found

expression in it. In Goethe’s view the products of artistic creation, such as paintings or sculptures,

though static in one sense, are both the product of and the producers of dynamic and creative

mental and emotional powers, whether acting on the artist or the beholder of artistic creation.

138 Chapter 7

It may seem on the surface that the Römische Elegien have little in common with

"Wandrers Sturmlied". However, there is evidence (shortly to be considered) that Goethe had the

latter in mind during the composition of the Elegies.

The word "Wandrer" appears only twice in the Römische Elegien, which in such a long

work hardly seems noteworthy on the basis of a statistical word count. However, the contextual

setting of the word in the second and seventh elegies is significant in the following respect: only

in the case of these elegies are there significant variations between the published version in the

Horen and one appearing in an unpublished manuscript.3 In the case of the second elegy these

divergences are particularly marked .The speaker complains that the "Wanderer" is dogged

wherever he goes by politically motivated and arbitrary tittle-tattle in much the same way that

contemporary British tourists excited by their presence a then popular ditty entitled

"Marlborough”. This reference corresponds to lines in the unpublished manuscript in which

Goethe expresses relief that he was shielded from the celebrity of Werther and Lotte, characters in

his sensationally popular novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of young

Werther), simply because he was not recognised as the author of that work.

A question arises. Why did Goethe expunge any reference to Werther in the published

version of the Römische Elegien? Most probably because he wished to divest the lyrical "I" of any

explicit reference to himself after he had come to realise that his very choice of poetic genre

precluded an explicit identification of the speaker with himself as a private individual. Any desire

to avoid personal embarrassment could hardly have been a decisive factor, as there was no

disguising the fact that the events and experiences described in the Elegies were drawn from real

occurrences in Goethe's life before and during his residence in Italy. By inserting the word

Wandrer" in the second elegy Goethe could both allude to his own person and cast the speaker as

a universal traveller and poet. Set in the context of the second elegy the "Wanderer" is in the first

place a traveller, tourist or ex-patriot. In that of the seventh elegy the Wanderer is to be identified

with the poet and artist in a mythological setting, as the following lines make clear:

Wie ich hereingekommen, ich kann's nicht sagen; es faßte Hebe den Wandrer und zog mich in die Hallen heran.

How it came about that I entered I cannot tell. Hebe clasped the Wanderer and drew me into the halls.

VII, 15, 1

139

An explicit association of the "Wanderer" with "the poet" follows a few lines further on:

addressing Jupiter Xenius, the protector of travellers, the speaker pleads:

Bist du der wirtliche Gott? O dann so verstoße den Gastfreund Nicht von deinem Olymp wieder zur Erde hinab! Art thou the hospitable god. O do not therefore cast thy guest down from Olympus to earth again

These words call forth the reprimand:

"Dichter" wohin versteigest du dich? "Poet", whither dost thou raise thyself high?

The speaker makes an important discovery: to enjoy the presence and companionship of

Jupiter, he need not attempt a hazardous mountain climb. Having asked Jupiter's forgiveness for

such a foolish assumption, he avers:

der hohe / KapitolinischeBerg ist dir ein zweiter Olymp.

the high Capitoline hill is a second Olympus"

It is almost as if the Wanderer is still smarting from the memory of an earlier traumatic

attempt to scale the abode of the gods before plunging into rivers of mud. In the light of the

feelings expressed in the opening lines of the seventh elegy we are probably justified in assuming

that Goethe did have "Wandrers Sturmlied" in mind when treating the theme of encountering

Jupiter, for they recall his earlier days of wandering under a grey northern sky. However, even if

we concede that Goethe here mockingly belittles all that he once associated with the Wanderer as

a figure in his early poetry, the very use of the word "Wandrer" implies that a continuous

development embraces the contradictions that emerge from a comparison of "Wandrers

Sturmlied” and the Römische Elegien. The poet’s original attempt to reach Zeus finds its inverted

corollary in the removal from Olympus to the Capitoline Hill. Far from being a remote and

unapproachable deity, Jupiter Xenius seeks and finds the poet in his earthy urban environs.

140 Chapter 7

In his classical period Goethe discarded his earlier notion that his ruling deity, whatever

called, could be approached directly, without the help of a mediating power or influence. This

Goethe found in art. The image of Jupiter Xenius, the god who condescends to move among

mortals as an unrecognised stranger, was greatly favoured by the Augustan poets of Rome, and of

these, by Ovid in particular. His Metamorphoses contains the story of Philemon and Baucis, who

entertained Jove and Mercury unawares. Faust and Jupiter merge into the figure of the Wanderer,

who enters the cottage of Philemon and Baucis shortly before Faust's apotheosis. In the Römische

Elegien Jupiter is closely associated with artistic creativity, either as a figure represented by

sculptors and other artists, or as the power of art itself. Plotinus, we recall, identified Zeus as the

source of artistic creativity (cf. Hölderlin; "Jupiter und Saturn"). In the Römische Elegien a

similar connection between the ancient gods of Rome and artistic creativity is implied rather that

stated. According to the fifteenth and sixteenth lines of the seventh elegy, Hebe takes the

Wanderer to an inner space or room ("Raum" connotes both). In later elegies the word "Raum" is

closely associated with the artist's "Werkstatt", his studio or atelier. The close juxtaposition of the

words in the following lines and the parallelism they imply are hardly coincidental:

Du betrachtest mit Staunen die Trümmern alter Gebäude Und durchwandelst mit Sinn diesen heiligen Raum. Du verehrst noch mehr die werten Reste des Bildens Einziger Künstler, die stets ich in der Werkstatt besucht. (XIII, 9-12)

Thou contemplatest amazed the ruins of ancient buildings and wander about this holy place with purpose. Thou admirest still more the noble remains of the creations of particular artists whom I constantly visit in the artist's workshop.

Words in the final strophe of the poem associate the poet's pen, and by implication the

written poem, with "the reed" and by extension with the pastoral music often associated with the

pipes of Pan. Goethe did not develop so deep an appreciation of music - the music of Beethoven

at least - as he evinced in the sphere of the visual and plastic arts, yet few poets have succeeded in

achieving the quality and diversity of the sonorous or "musical” effects of which poetry is

capable. The analogy between his songs and he reeds or rushes swaying in the wind further imply

an affinity between the processes of artistic creation and the growth of plants.

141

ANNOTATIONS: THE “RÖMISCHE ELEGIEN“

1. Friedrich Schiller, as the editor of the Horen, however, evidently contended with the objections and

misgivings of certain readers of the Elegien. A.W. Schlegel doubted that they could be classified as

"sentimental" in the sense of bespeaking the sensibility of medieval or modern poets. Despite, the appeal

of the Elegien to tradition, their impact was revolutionary, even shocking. The theme of erotic love itself

had many precedents in Roman classical poetry, but the very suggestion that this had some connection

with a modern poet's life was evidently disturbing, for Frau von Stein among a good number of other

people.

2. Goethe’s amorous relationship with an Italian woman seems to have been of short duration, lasting

from January to April 1787.

3. Apart from the elegies which never appeared in the Horen, for being considered too explicit for public

taste (see: Weimar Ausgabe von Goethes Werken, 143 volumes, 1887-1919, vol. 53, p.3-7), the second

elegy as rendered in a manuscript entitled Erotica Romana, explicitly attributes the poet's unwanted

celebrity to the fame of his novelle Die Lieden des Jungen Werther, adding that if the hero in this work,

had been his own brother, he would have readily beaten him to death!

CONCLUSION

Earlier discussions have indicated that the associations and meanings acquired by the

words derived from the verbs to "wander" and "wandern" are manifold; yet display an affinity, an

inner cohesion. According to its position, the most immediate or striking meaning of a word

(combining text-related specificity and the infinite generality of the word) may seem to pose a

complete contradiction of the sense of the same word displays in a different textual setting. This

is because in certain positions the verbal occurrence reveals only a partial, and possibly negative,

sense of the word. In another position an occurrence of this word may reveal a more inclusive -

and therefore positive - sense of "the word" approaching what in Tynjanow's theory of language

is taken to be universal - transcending any text.

One reason why "wandering" and "the wanderer" are the word of words in the poetic

works we have considered can be grasped without recourse to intensive language theory. This

reason lies in that infuriating intractability of all "wandering" as seen by the practitioners of

logical and reductive methodologies. Wanderers take time to reach their goals, indeed they often

seem to lose their original goal - or at least what they first thought this to be. Perhaps all

utterances in the medium of language, particularly literary and poetic language, involve

deferment, though not necessarily of the kind posited by Jacques Derrida when asserting that any

statement calls for an endless series of redefinitions and commentaries. Language has depth as

well as surface area. Certainly many stories and long poetical works thrive on deferment for much

the same reason that Scheherizade has to keep spinning stories to remain alive. Here I see another

aspect of the closest of associations between language and life. The end of a literary work often

depends of the deferment of an inevitable end, and to that extent at least writing is like living.

144 Conclusion

For one matter, a description of a wandering journey offers more material and allows a

longer duration of narrated and therefore narrating time than a poem about a dash to some clearly

defined destination. Poetic descriptions of fast journeys, such as Goethe's "Erlkönig", usually

imply the brevity and transience of life. Poems about random or repetitive and circuitous motions

cannot be meaningfully sustained once a loop or lap in such a journey has been described. Blake`s

"The Mental Traveller", a remarkable poem based on the notion of a reversal of time coexisting

with normal temporal progression, ends by stating that the sequence of events it has described will

recur ad infinitum.

The wandering journey that combines both progression and a circuitous structure implicit

in the idea of a return home is typically based on the allegory of a pilgrimage, which in turn must

contain references to a person and that person's self. There are various ways of relating the

sustaining factors in long works with the implications of the verbs "to wander" and "wandern".

We have noted that Goethe's early essay commemorating Shakespeare's Day, in which the word

"Wanderer" holds a key position, contains the basic association of ideas that would take a lifetime

to develop. The association linking the themes of poetry, autobiography, drama and physical

movement underlies the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and its sequel Wilhelm

Meisters Wanderjahre. Even the novel as genre, particularly the novel treating the theme of

education through life's experience, reveals a central facet of wandering with its implication of an

ongoing quest. The novel is that literary genre which defies closure and subordination to any

system or official hierarchy. Bakhtin discerned in the long poetical works of Byron the

"novelisation of poetry". The same process is surely evident in Wordsworth's The Prelude, which

features elements of autobiography and the Bildungsroman, which also made a deep impression

on Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Coleridge. Goethe's novel has an allegorical basis in the wanderings

of Israel from the time of the Tabernacle in the wilderness to the institution of the Temple in

Jerusalem. Biblical history provides the background to the course of events portrayed in the

novel, in which an itinerant group of actors prepare the way for a permanent theatre embodying

German cultural unity in a Nationaltheater.

The "Speech on Shakespeare's Day" concerns in the first place the nature of artistic

freedom with particular reference to drama and the Aristotelian unities. The process of writing the

Faust dramas lasted from Goethe's early period imbued with the spirit of Sturm und Drang to his

old age, for only at this stage of his life did he complete the second part of Faust. These dramas

demonstrate the principle of Wiederspiegelung referred to earlier, signifying the inextricability

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Of life and art. In the dialogue in Heaven, the Prologue of Faust Part I, there is a debate

between the Voice of the Lord and Mephistopheles reminiscent of that between the Lord and

Satan found in the Book of Job. Here the Lord prophesies that His servant Faust will fulfil divine

purposes without knowing that he does so, in all his erring ways. When Faust at the end of the

second part of Faust approaches his end, his name in the marginal references changes to the

"Wanderer", which in the given context reveals the word's association with the themes of the

returning Prodigal and the Poet. As in "Wandrers Nachtlied" the final rest the Wanderer seeks

harbours ambivalence, as it can be taken to imply death, a personal quest for fulfilment or the

poet's quest for an aesthetic resolution.

At its highest level “wandering“ is an expression of a yearning for wholeness. The Faust

dramas follow the Wanderer's path through life to the brink of eternity, the end of time. Though

couched in quite different terms other long works by Wordsworth and Byron reveal the same

plan. The Prelude was first intended to serve as the prologue to a great poetical and philosophical

work to be entitled The Recluse, but even though this work was never completed, its title of

Prelude is still apt if it is understood to mean that human life is a prelude to an immensely greater

realm of spiritual life. One does not have been assured by the belief in the eternity of the soul to

recognise that the idea of eternity can very effectively engage the imagination.

This study, being logocentric, has not served to prove some philosophical point, though

religious and philosophical questions are raised by the complex verbal relationships that emerge

when words are considered in the light of their position in a poetic text. It is notable that the

Wanderer-Hütte collation to which Professor Willoughby refers finds a parallel the long works of

English Romantic poets. In The Prelude the wanderer-cottage polarity is immediately obvious in

the Wordsworth’s self-description as an "undomesticated wanderer" and the account of his

attainment of a place of rest in the cottage in Grasmere. As Abrams points out The Prelude begins

and ends with references to the vale where this cottage is situated. In Milton Blake's cottage in

Felpham fixes a point in the poet's discovery of his own identity and his emancipation from the

dominant influence of Milton. In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, there is no cottage to which the

Wanderer returns, but the poet finds his home in nature as symbolised in the vast ocean, where

the Wanderer finds no haven, nor need he if the "ocean" has become his home. The final

destination for Childe Harold, the Wordsworthian Wanderer and Goethe's Faust is "eternity"

understood as the culmination of life's experience and the inner life of the poet's imagination.

Passages concerning the approach or death or eternity often include descriptions of a female

146

spirit or like personages (viz. "Epipsychidion", Faust Part II, and The Prelude, if the poet's sister

is accorded a deep symbolic, almost muse-like, significance). These recurrent evocations find a

ready explanation in terms of Jung's theory of the unconscious. I again recall that according to

Jung, the archetypal female representing the libido's quest for self-fulfilment conflates the figures

of mother and spouse and poses therefore the danger of an incestuous relationship. Jung suggests

that the human fantasy is fired by a desire to escape the logic of the mother-spouse equation by

seeking release from the literal plane of reality at which Oedipus marries his mother. However, as

Dante pointed out when speaking of allegory and its paradigm in the flight from Egypt one can

never completely detach the literal from the allegorical. The answer to this conundrum, assuming

there is one, must then be sought in the study of language and the words that compose it. I hope

that this study marks a further step forward towards a fuller recognition of the possibilities

inherent in language that will allow us to conjecture what power it is in the human consciousness

that gives language its mysterious coherence allowing it to transcend the bounds of any particular

individual's mind. I finally focus attention on the quintessential word in English and German

poetry, reviewing it in the light of history since the Romantic period.

The foregrounding of the word "Wanderer" was a historical phenomenon, partly

accentuated by the sudden recognition by poets of their isolated and ambiguous status, in

Germany also by the perceived need to establish the nature of a German cultural identity blending

the best of ancient Greece with stalwart German ideals of industry and moral integrity. The hopes

for a revitalised liberal and democratically led nation were hard to sustain in a German

Confederation deeply influenced by the creed of Metternich. Perhaps the original universal ideals

of Romanticism, already eroded by nationalism and a return - arguably even surrender - to

orthodoxy and the establishment, were bound to lose force for even more fundamental reasons.

Bakhtin spoke of a bifurcation of time in the collective consciousness of the European world that

began in the Romantic period and deepened after its demise. Instead of a quest to unite two modes

of consciousness respectively identified as "day" and "night", literature reflected a widening rift

between these aspects of consciousness. In E.T.A. Hoffmann's Das Fräulein von Scudery the

central character, a jeweller, sells expensive items to the customers he will rob and murder by

night. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the New Prometheus likewise signals a rift, in that case

between scientific rationalism and Man's deepest quests for emotional fulfilment and a sense of

identity.

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The schizophrenia-like state afflicting modern thinking is shown in more pronounced

form in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and in some of the science fiction novels of H.G. Wells. Perhaps

now, with a keener sense of the interdependence of the environment and scientific culture and the

fact that all human beings have become neighbours, the need to discover the laws of harmony and

cohesion in the human mind, revealed perhaps most clearly in our linguistic intelligence, will help

to heal the rift between reason and intuition. Goethe's Faust and Blake's Milton promise such a

final resolution.

___________________________________________________________________________

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Adams, Hazard. Critical Theory since Plato. New York, 1971. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur.

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Bloom, Harold. ''The Internalization of Quest-Romance'' in Romanticism and Consciousness Essays in Criticism. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York, 1970, pp. 46-56.

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Brown, Calvin S. ''The Musical Development of Symbols: Whitman“ in Music and Literature. Athens, 1948.

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Hartman, Geoffrey H. ''Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness'" in Essays in Criticism (ed. Harold Bloom). New York, 1970.

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Pound, Ezra. ''Vorticism'' in The Fortnightly Review, Sept. 1914. Pottle, Frederick A. ''The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth'' in

Romanticism and Consciousness (ed. Harold Bloom). NewYork, 1970, pp. 273-287. Originally in Yale Review Vol. XI. Autumn, 1951.

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Willoughby, L.A. ''The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe'sPoetry''. Etudes Germaniques, July-December, 1951.

Wilkinson, E.M. ''Goethe's Poetry''. German Life and Letters, 1949. Wilkinson, E.M./ Willoughby, L.A. '''Wandrers Sturmlied': A Study in Poetic

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