The Embodiment of Sublime in British Romantic Poetry

Pang Xuetong

(Anhui Jianzhu University,Hefei Anhui 230022)



The Embodiment of Sublime in British Romantic Poetry

Pang Xuetong

(Anhui Jianzhu University,Hefei Anhui 230022)

As a literary term,sublime,for a time,has become one of the leading criteria of literary criticism and a representative characteristic of high art.In British romantic poetry,sublime has a very broad embodiment.This paper,with the theoretical foundation of the sublime by Longinus,Burke and Kant,probes into the embodiment of sublime in the works of British Romantic poets,including Blake,Wordsworth,Coleridge,Keats and Shelley.

sublime;aesthetics;Romantic poetry

Ⅰ.Theoretical foundation of sublime by Longinus,Burke and Kant

According to Longinus,sublimity is “the ring of greatness in the soul”.〔1〕German classical philosopher Immanuel Kant developed the understanding of sublime based upon Burke’s notion of the concept.According to Kant,sublime can be divided into two kinds: the mathematical sublime and the dynamic sublime.The former is featured by its vastness in size or quantity and the latter causes terror and helplessness in front of the seeming irresistible natural powers and then a release and pleasure providing that the subject is in the safe situation.〔2〕

Burke and Kant believe that the characteristic of sublime experience is something with immense power in a clear and simple form,which necessarily contains the meaning of self-projection into the object,and the power is equal to the greatness,because the observer could transform the huge space into immense vitality and strength.Sublime is in no exception first the sensation of one’s own power and then the expansion of one’s own will.Through the involuntary projection of the subject’s own power into the object,the subject or the observer could easily feel the immense power of the sublime object and hope to possess that great power contrasted with his finite power.The manifestation of sublime lies in the signs of natural forces,the abstract form of architecture and the tension of the musical rhythm.〔3〕

Ⅱ.Sublime embodied in British Romantic poetry

1.William Blake — “The Tyger”

In Blake’s renowned poem “The Tyger” from his poetry collection Songs of Experience,the shape of the tiger is burning like a flame in the furnace,leaving a deep impression upon readers’ mind.The burning flame on the one hand creates the iron-like creature,and on the other hand it represents the tiger’s immense destructive power,forming both physically and connotatively the “fearful symmetry”.In Burke’s book A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,he mentions that the prodigious strength of wild animals which haven’t been tamed can cause sublime,because they “come upon us in the gloomy forest and in the howling wilderness,in the form of the lion,the tiger,the panther,or rhinoceros” and “whenever strength is only useful,and employed for our benefit or our pleasure,then it is never sublime”.〔4〕According to Burke,when the ideas of pain,dangers and terror fill the mind,the individual,out of self-preservation,will generate rebellious power and great passion which is by no means the simple enjoyment raised by positive factors.Therefore,Burke defined sublime as this,“whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger… is a source of the sublime”.〔5〕When we read into the lines of the poem,the image of a mighty tiger in the forest of the night will come into our mind,causing fear and terror.But moments later,we find ourselves out of the lines of the poem and in the safe situation,and the feeling of fear is released.Then the aesthetic pleasure arises and we feel the sublime through what Burke called “the impulse of self-preservation”.If the tiger comes toward us alive,we are not able to give any delight but to run at utmost pace.Kant argues in Critique of Judgment that sublime doesn’t exist in the nature itself but in the idea of reason and sublime is “an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to regard the elevation of nature beyond our reach as equivalent to a presentation of ideas”.〔6〕Therefore,the sublime could only be felt by those with aesthetic capabilities.

2.William Wordsworth —“Lines written above Tintern Abbey” and “The Daffodils”

In Wordsworth’s famous poem “Lines written above Tintern Abbey” published in the poetry collection Lyrical Ballads which is the representative works of British Romanticism,after observing the nature,Wordsworth wrote that he felt the joy of sublime: the setting suns,the round ocean,the blue sky,the living air and the mind had been deeply interfused together.The poet’s reminiscence of natural landscape and scenery gives the poet spiritual inspiration and elevation,which is a fine manifestation of Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”.He wrote in the poem,

“Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,/Which on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion;and connect / The landscape with the quiet of the sky.…〔7〕

The images of the steep cliffs,the quiet sky,the sounding cataract,the tall rock and the deep and gloomy woods,those are all examples of the aesthetic objects that Burke mentioned in the chapter “On the Sublime” in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,the eternity and infinity (the sounding cataract),the vastness (the tall rock and the steep cliffs),the obscurity and darkness (the deep and gloomy forest).Burke made the following illustration in the book: “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature,when those causes operate most powerfully,is astonishment;and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended with some degree of horror.In this case,the mind is so entirely filled with its object,that it cannot entertain any other,nor,by consequence,reason on that object which employs it.Hence arises the great power of the sublime,that,far from being produced by them,it anticipates our reasonings,and hurries us on by an irresistible force.Astonishment,as I have said,is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree;the inferior effects are admiration,reverence,and respect”.〔8〕As the poet wrote,“a feeling and a love,/ That had no need of a remoter charm,/ By thought supplied,nor any interest/ Unborrowed from the eye”,〔9〕the images of the steep cliffs,the quiet sky,the sounding cataract,the tall rock and the deep and gloomy woods are all the interest borrowed from the eye and they bring to the poet great astonishment and terror which occupy his mind and cannot reason and think.Then,the great joy of sublime is produced in the poet’s mind,as he wrote,“To chasten and subdue.And I have felt/ A presence that disturbs me with the joy/ Of elevated thoughts;a sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply interfused”.〔10〕

In Wordsworth’s most renowned poem,“The Daffodils” also named “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” published in 1807,he wrote in the last stanza,“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.”〔11〕

The vacant and pensive mood and the bliss of solitude which the poet felt is what Burke called one form of the sublime,the privation (such as vanity,silence,darkness and solitude).The poet lapsed into meditation and showed his intensely empathic temperament on the daffodils.According to the notion of aesthetic empathy that sublime is evoked in the same sensation through the transition of different subjects and objects,the poet projects his subject inner bliss of sublime into the object golden daffodils and comes into the state of ecstasy in which he imagines his heart dancing with the daffodils in the breeze beside the lake.

3.John Keats —“Ode to a Nightingale”

The sublime empathy has some similarity with John Keats’ phrase of “Negative Capability”.The term was coined by Keats in a letter in December 1817 to his brothers and Keats defined “Negative Capability” as a literary quality “which is when Man is capable of being in uncertainties,mysteries,doubts,without any irritable reaching after facts and reason”.〔12〕To be more specific,it means being capable of eliminating one’s own personality,in order imaginatively to enter into that of another person or an animal or an object.In another letter,Keats said that the “A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence,because he has no identity,he is continually filling some other body”.〔13〕For Keats,a poet should be qualified with “Negative Capability” and the capacity of empathy for participating in,experiencing,understanding and better expressing others’ feelings and ideas.

In “Ode to a Nightingale”,Keats uses his “Negative Capability” and the device of sublime empathy to make the description of arcadian bliss and the intense meditation on the contrast between the painful mortality that defines human existence and the immortal beauty found in the nightingale’s carefree song.In the first stanza,the poet immerses himself into the state of trance to enter the happiness of the nightingale’s melody,as he writes,“My sense,as though of hemlock I had drunk,/ Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains…But being too happy in thine happiness/That thou,light-winged Dryad of the trees,/ In some melodious plot”.〔14〕Then the poet imagines himself as the nightingale flying over flowers,the grass,the thicket and the fruit-tree wild,as he writes,“Away! away! for I will fly to thee,/ Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,/ But on the viewless wings of Poesy”.〔15〕With no vintage but “wings of Poesy”,his imaginative power and “Negative Capability”,the poet can project himself into the immortal nightingale to get rid of the painful mortality and join the bliss of the immortality with the bird.However,in the last stanza of the poem,when the poet returns to the real world,the trance caused by the nightingale is broken and the poet is left wondering whether it was a vision or a dream.This poem presents Keats’ inner struggle between ideal and actual,the antitheses of pleasure and pain,of imagination and reason,of immortality and mortality,of nature and human.

4.Samuel Taylor Coleridge —“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

In Coleridge’s representative poetry “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” published in Lyrical Ballads in 1798,Coleridge uses narrative techniques such as personification and repetition to create a sense of danger,the supernatural and serenity.In the poem,the sea is personified as a specter with mystery strength and horrible supernatural power.In the sea voyage of the mariner,he encountered the tyrannous and roaring storm-blast,high iceberg,the extreme drought of drinking water,the curse,death of partners and kins.All of these cause terror,horror and pain of the mariner.In the last stanza of the poem,when the mariner finished his storytelling,he went away as if lost his sense,as Coleridge wrote,“He went like one that hath been stunned,/And is of sense forlorn:/A sadder and a wiser man,He rose the morrow morn.”〔16〕In Critique of Judgment,Kant states,“For the sublime,in the strict sense of the word,cannot be contained in any sensuous form,but rather concerns ideas of reason,which,although no adequate presentation of them is possible,may be excited and called into the mind by that very inadequacy itself which does admit of sensuous presentation.Thus the broad ocean agitated by storms cannot be called sublime.Its aspect is horrible,and one must have stored one’s mind in advance with a rich stock of ideas,if such an intuition is to raise it to the pitch of a feeling which is itself sublime-sublime because the mind has been incited to abandon sensibility and employ itself upon ideas involving higher finality”.〔17〕The terror and horror itself cannot be defined as sublime,but after the experience,the suffering of all the pain and fighting against the sea and fate,when the mariner finished the reminiscence of the horrible experience,he lapsed into the state of sublime in the end and his mind got elevated.

From another perspective,all the misfortunes the mariner experienced on the sea result from the mariner’s shooting of the harmless Albatross.In the eyes of voyagers,the Albatross is seen as the auspicious omen when shipping on the sea and the shooting of the Albatross might cause the retribution and punishment by God.After witnessing and experiencing all of these,the mariner gained the revelation of the Divinity and was chosen by God to pass the teachings to the mass,as Coleridge wrote in the seventh part of the poem,“Since then,at an uncertain hour,/ That agony returns: /And till my ghastly tale is told,/This heart within me burns./ I pass,like night,from land to land;/ I have strange power of speech;/ That moment that his face I see,/ I know the man that must hear me:/To him my tale I teach.”〔18〕

On the way towards the church,the mariner felt the bliss of revelation is sweeter than the joy of the marriage-feast.Finally in the church,he made the preach that “He prayeth well,who loveth well/ Both man and bird and beast/ He prayeth best,who loveth best/ All things both great and small;/ For the dear God who loveth us,/ He made and loveth all.”〔19〕To Coleridge,the sublime is associated with the awe and worship of the Divine God.

5.Percy Bysshe Shelley —“Mont Blanc”

Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc” is the most representative of his focus on the romantic sublime and the importance of nature.Shelley wrote in a letter about his first viewing Mont Blanc in July 22,1816.The “magnitude”,the “majesty”,the “awful grace” and the “greatness” are all characteristics of the sublime.The mountains,falls and glaciers are not only geological entities as one could see or spiritual embodiments as they might be for Wordsworth: they inspire radical questions about meaning and perception.

The first line of the poem “The everlasting universe of things,/ Flows through the mind,and rolls its rapid waves,” starts with the universal knowledge and understanding that is closely associated with a sublime experience.In the first stanza,Shelley associates the experience with the natural landscape and “the source of human thought” and the sublime experience originates from the “secret springs”,the ceaseless brook and waterfalls,the infinity in nature.In the second stanza,Shelley expresses his trance of sublime explicitly and directly triggered by the natural scenery of the mountains,“Thou art the path of that unresting sound — / Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee/ I seem as in a trance sublime and strange/ To muse on my own separate fantasy”.

Ⅲ.Conclusion

Based upon the aesthetical notion of sublime by Longinus,Burke and Kant and the function of aesthetical empathy,we find almost all British Romantic poets stress the sense of sublime by observing the nature: the safety distance of aesthetical activities embodied in Blake’s “The Tyger”,the terror and astonishment caused by natural landscape in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”,the sublime empathy applied in Wordsworth’s “The Daffodils” and Negative Capability functioned in Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”,the biblical divinity and the momentary check to the vital forces followed by a discharge all the more powerful manifested in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”,the infinity felt in trance and fantasy in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”.Upon the analysis,we could see that sublime plays an irreplaceable and principal role in the development of British Romanticism.

〔1〕〔5〕〔12〕Abrams,M.H.,A Glossary of Literary Terms,Beijing: Foreign language Teaching and Research Press,2012.

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〔4〕〔8〕Burke,Edmund,A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers,1856.

〔6〕〔17〕康德：《判断力批判》,邓晓芒译,北京: 人民出版社,2015年。

〔7〕〔9〕〔10〕〔11〕〔14〕〔15〕〔16〕〔18〕〔19〕王佐良、周钰良、李赋宁、刘承沛：《英国文学名篇选注》,北京：商务印书馆,2010年。

〔13〕Keats,John,Selected letters of John Keats,edited by Grant F.Scott.Cambridge,Ma.:Harvard University Press,2002,pp.194-195.

About the author：Pang Xuetong,M.A,lecturer with School of Foreign Languages,Anhui Jianzhu University.His research fields include comparative study of English and Chinese languages and cultures & translation and interpretation theories and practice.