‘Deep pools, tall trees, black chasms, and dizzy crags,
And tottering towers’ [Home at Grasmere II. 711-3]
“Wordsworth’s real danger was always ‘the sublime'” says Geoffrey Hartman. But what is the sublime? While not neatly defined, Burke considered “terror…the ruling principle of the sublime”. It is something that evokes awe and delight, intermingled with terror and a feeling of diminutiveness.
Consider standing in a cataclysmic environment with raging seas and erupting volcanoes. Evidently, terror is ignited when it is experienced at close proximity. However, consider witnessing this from the edge of a tall cliff far away from these natural disasters. When viewed within a relatively safe distance, instead of utter fear, witnessing these events can also evoke delight. However, terror is not always a prerequisite of the sublime. Burke also mentions that the sublime can be experienced through abstract ideas such as vastness, or the divine.
Let us focus on an extract of Wordsworth’s The Prelude and see if we can find any significant impacts that the sublime has on the speaker.
‘She was an elfin Pinnace; lustily
I dipp’d my oars into the silent Lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my Boat
Went heaving through the water, like a Swan;
When from behind that craggy Steep, till then
The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Uprear’d its head. I struck, and struck again
And, growing still in stature, the huge Cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still,
With measur’d motion, like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling hands I turn’d,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the Cavern of the Willow tree.
There, in her mooring-place, I left my Bark,
And, through the meadows homeward went, with grave
And serious thoughts; and after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Work’d with a dim and undetermin’d sense
Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts
There was a darkness, call it solitude,
Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes
Of hourly objects, images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty Forms that do not live
Like living men mov’d slowly through my mind
By day and were the trouble of my dreams.’
Initially, readers are introduced to a serene environment where the speaker eloquently describes his surroundings: ‘lustily/I dipp’d’, ‘silent Lake’, ‘rose upon the stroke’. The beginning is more picturesque than it is sublime, leaving him in a state of tranquillity. Progressing through the poem, we notice the speaker’s speech deteriorating into barely syntactic sentences:
‘huge, peak, black and huge’.
The sublime reveals itself here as the speaker cannot fathom the vastness of this mountain, while he is as small as the ‘elfin’ boat, dwarfed by this massive scenery. Readers can notice the substantial effects, as ‘for many days’ his mind was ‘dim’ and ‘undetermin’d’ and a lingering ‘darkness’ and ‘solitude’, with ‘huge and mighty Forms’ perpetuated in his mind. The Prelude in this instance provides explicit detail of the sublime once we grasp an understanding of what kind of natural descriptions generally comprise it. However, let us also examine one of his other lyric poems: 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 on 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.’
It is much more difficult to decipher where the sublime could be captured here; the speaker’s main subject is daffodils, something more beautiful than sublime. However, if we notice the second stanza, the ‘stars’ acts as an external shift of the surroundings, now providing us descriptions of the cosmos which evokes a sense of immensity as it is ‘stretched’.
As humans, we are arguably terrified of infinity because it is something that our mind simply cannot grasp. This is a theme that was also found in The Prelude. The speaker’s mind became ‘dim’, he was unable to fully comprehend what he experienced. We may also notice a sense of competition in the third stanza as ‘the waves beside them danced; but they/Out-did the sparkling’. This sort of epic struggle could also be determined as the sublime even in its subtlety as the tension is still prevalent.
This idea of competition also occurred when Thomas Jefferson, at the quest of finding evidence of sublimity after reading Burke’s works on the concept, was at Harpers Ferry, considering the passage of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers through the Blue Ridge Mountains as he imagined “a war between rivers and mountains, which must have shaken the earth itself to its center”.
I wanted to explore the sublime and its relation to mankind, wondering whether our awe at the sublime would ever diminish if we were frequently exposed to it. Living in the city, the sublime is more likely to be found at glimpses and small touches through thunderstorms or luckily, if the clouds are clear and the lights are switched off, seeing the glittering sky that imbues this sense of minuteness. Apparently though, ‘it is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions’ (Burke) which I believe justifies the ‘little thought’ of the speaker in this lyric and the ‘blank desertion’ in The Prelude.
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