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"The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun"
--William Blake
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Revelation 12: 1-17
1 And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars:
2 And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.
3 And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.
4 And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.
***Understand: your reading experience of Blake as I've served it up to you in Romanticism: an Anthology is stripped of all that personalizes the art, of the layered symbolism in color, image, line, and idiosyncratic marks that serve as Blake's (for lack of a better word) punctuation, of the contrast between the tone of the language text and that of the illustrations (for even the letters of the words are illustrations), and of all the properties of a hand-made book. This is the worst possible distortion of his art and poetry, akin to presenting you with the head of John the Baptist on a platter: the prophet isn't in it anymore. The same is true of this virtual text (but one does wonder if Blake would've enjoyed blogging--I'm pretty sure Whitman would've been a blogger), though at least here you can see what The Book of Thel looks like. Click on "next" to navigate between plates. Click on "+" to enlarge.
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19 comments:
See? Right here. Cut and paste. Beware: your paragraphing may get lost if you don't make a space break. You will also probably lose any italics or bold font in the html translation from your word document to this window.
Weekly Response 1: The Implications of Edmund Burke’s Representation of Experience
Within the first paragraph of Burke’s “Introduction. On Taste,” I reached an impasse upon reading the philosopher’s affirmation that “the standard both of reason and Taste is the same in all human creatures” (Burke 63). If the Enquiry will be founded upon a precept as dogmatic and difficult to verify as this, I reasoned, then Burke will undoubtedly attempt to base his explanation of the states and thoughts which produce a conception of the sublime and beautiful—and thus human thought, perception, and aesthetics—upon a unitary idea of the physical world. Initially, I disagreed firmly with this concept: could everyone perceiving “great objects, and terrible” necessarily associate those objects with the “sublime,” and then associate “small ones [objects], and pleasing” with beauty, and specifically in accordance with Burke’s definitions (147)? I instinctively sought to dismantle not only the pretext of the argument but the argument itself: no one thinker, no matter how methodical, could encompass every characteristic of sublimity in a single definition, as—here I became presumptuous—the range of expressions of the sublime and beautiful among people, much less within a given culture, cannot be diminished in terms of descriptors specific to the philosopher. Just because Burke does “not find any natural object which is angular, and at the same time beautiful,” for example, I refused to believe that the presence of angles eliminated the possibility for the observation of beauty in an object (149). Irrespective of Burke’s caveat, “At least I never could observe it,” regarding the aforementioned, I encountered too many incidents in which the philosopher addressed his argument with a degree of absolute confidence to view his work as much more than an assault of Enlightenment rhetoric—at first.
Despite my earliest reaction, a more involved explication of Burke’s model of human thought has encouraged me to attempt to reconcile my own admittedly overzealous commitment to a relativist critique with his broader representation of the ways in which people categorize their experiences. I may not agree with his specific portrayals of the sublime and beautiful, but my appreciation for his assessment of the means by which these states are determined by individuals has increased along with my understanding of his work. In the case of each state, a linear cognitive progression occurs which produces a response in the form of one of the passions; the “great and sublime in nature” leads to “Astonishment,” “that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror,” and “the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other” (Burke 101). Where the effort to isolate the abstract conditions Burke is investigating is fraught with the potential for misinterpretation or overreaching on the philosopher’s part, the internal experience and the mapping of inner spaces, conceptions and events—the means by which we respond to beauty or sublimity—appears valid, insofar as cartographies of the human thought process can be. I almost regret Burke’s founding impressions and his later, objective points that, for example, “the ideas we naturally annex to that size [the large] are those of tyranny, cruelty, injustice, and every thing horrid and abominable,” in light of such figures as “Polyphemus, Cacus, and others” (184). His models of thought, although grounded in what I still believe to be a fallacy—a shared “sentiment” cannot be substantiated in the “hold” over the “reasons or…passions” which “maintain the ordinary correspondence of life—”nevertheless offer an imaginative framework which, at the very least, reflects the extreme states which appear to induce catharsis among all people (63).
Works Cited
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings. Ed. David Womersley. London: Penguin Books, 2004.
I know it's a weird idea, but I had fun with it. I hope other people do too.
Thel and Burke’s Conception of the Sublime
As Thel crosses the threshold into the underworld seeking the answers to her questions about immortality and the nature of life itself, she transitions from a state of lamentation for her own mortality to a state of actual terror from the realities she is confronted with. The underworld that Thel enters carries an essence of sublimity that all pervious encounters during her quest lack. The lily of the valley is the epitome of beauty, as outlined by Burke. It is contained, feminized, and possesses an aesthetic balance that is pleasing to the eye. The cloud, while a more intangible, masculine energy, is unthreatening and functions as a beacon of unity by providing sustenance to plants and animals. The cloud possesses a larger presence by means of its physical instability, but its nature and use are clearly delineated and represent beauty more than sublimity.
Thel’s encounter with the worm and clod of clay bring her further from beauty and into the realm of pain. Thel’s astonishment at the circumstances of the worm moves her to incredulous repetition of the question “Art thou a Worm?” The worm is an ugly, lonely creature that inspires both pity and disgust, but the pain that it represents is not sublime. The clod of clay comes closer to sublimity – it is seemingly insignificant, but actually vast and powerful in an unexpected way. However, because the clod of clay is humble and accessible in her maternal conversation with Thel, she herself is not sublime, though she seems to know of sublimity through her own experience: “But how this is, sweet maid, I know not and I cannot know; I ponder and I cannot ponder; yet I live and love.” (ln. 91-92)
Thel’s descent into the underworld is sublime only in the vastness of the revelation that occurs right before she flees back to the innocent vales of Har. The images of death themselves are not immediately threatening to Thel; she is given a safety net by the clod of clay to “to enter and return” (ln. 102-103) without fear for her own life. It is only when her perception of the world is questioned by the voice from the pit that Thel is put in real and present ideological danger. The senses, their purpose, and the very purpose of physical form itself is questioned by the voice. As Thel sits in her own grave plot she is assaulted by the notion that her physical realm of Har is actually a mask of true existence, with death and the bodiless underworld being the actual self.
The body is simply “a little curtain of flesh” and the senses are its primary tool. The footnote refers to the “curtain of flesh” as the hymen, reinforcing the virginal nature of Thel and the idea of innocence, but it can also be related back to Blake’s “All Regions are One” in which he states “the Poetic Genius is the true Man, and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius.” (pg 174) Thus, humans have the potential for sublimity, being linked to the universal Poetic Genius that is vast, intangible and unknowable by any one person.
Thel’s flight from the underworld is a flight from pain and the painful realization of the sublime. Thel goes on her journey seeking answers, but gets in way over her head and ends up in a place she never intended where she is questioned on the very nature of her existence. What begins as lamentation over the mortal fate that must befall her, a safe form of pain that Burke would classify as delight, quickly cascades into a glimpse into the sublime that Thel cannot help but flee from.
The Merge of Sublimity and Beauty in Burke and Blake
Upon beginning to organize (which I am sure was not Burke’s intentions for me to do) Burke’s argument on passions, I immediately found myself finding an excess of bleeding between the two final results of sublimity and beauty simultaneously acting as one cohesive possibility. As Burke begins to break down sublimity and beauty into its smaller parts and aspects, it seems as though he has forgotten his argument at times without consideration for any “thing” to be both objective and subjective at the same time. I’m aware this seems impossible to nearly everyone but these oppositions reside in sublimity and beauty where the “I” and the “you” will eventually coexist as a unit (knocking heads with one another if combining the sublime and the beautiful, but, it does not seem to actually happen with “loving” relationships (of which Burke claims can only be beautiful).
Eventually, there will be a constant battle between the “you” and “I” but still coexisting in a relationship. The “I” will begin to want the same aspirations that the “you” wants according to the structure of Burke’s argument. There is a mental conflict because the pain and pleasure eventually run together in this loving relationship (and other interactions as we’ll see later in Blake) because, as Burke tells the reader in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, “ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure” (Burke 86). Over time, in a relationship where the “I” and the “you” must function together, the “you” must seek pain from the relationship such as the constant reminder that his/her love one (or their relationship) might one day die. So, the “you” also consists of an “I” that seeks sublimity in a situational beauty.
So, with sublimity and beauty practically working together in my mind, I became curious about this concept when reading William Blake’s The Book of Thel. More than anything, I became intrigued by the prospect of the “cloud” character. In a way, it made me think back to Burke’s argument about “beautiful objects small” (147) where “love” dwells “on small ones” (little) and that “we love what submits to us”. We are also seeing the reference of “little” in “affectionate” terms (147). Thel refers to this cloud as “little” and thus, automatically makes it sound endearing and innocent, creating an irony against the innocence that is supposed to be focused on Thel (the innocent seems innocent to the innocent). Here, the beautiful and sublime are colliding with one another in a strange way in that this cloud is beautiful because it is confined, little, and even reliant on the pleasure of having a loving partner that is the vale (“And the bright Cloud sailed on, to find his partner in the vale” (Blake line 74)). The cloud is also beautiful because it does not feel pain when it fades away but it intends to carry on towards the sublime through self-preservation of its identity to giving life (alluding to the sublimity of the metaphor of God giving life) where the cloud explains: “…weigh my light wings upon balmy flowers”(line 55). And still, even the Cloud must live in fear of death and the possibility of the terror of killing others (i.e. flowers, worms, natural life). I also wondered if the Cloud could be seen as a metaphor for God as a creator of life fearful of the death from the objects that it has created and the terror that it can bring (i.e. storms).
Dyson Shannon
Eng. 344: Romantic Lit.
Gina Franco
Response 1
April 3, 2008
Sublimity: A Plateau Inaccessible to Humans
Edmond Burke’s ideology raises as many questions as it answers. My philosophical views differ greatly from Burke’s, and I imagine many people have concerns about Burke’s view on the sublime and beautiful; however, an abundance of talented writers, philosophers, theorist, and dreamers have turned to his work for guidance to their aspirations and vindication of the same. Burke’s reasoning that sublimity arises from the pain side of the senses is one proverbial pill I cannot swallow.
On this subject of pain’s path to sublimity, I agree with Longinus when he writes: “Some emotions, such as pity, grief, and fear, are found divorced from sublimity and with a low effect. Conversely, sublimity often occurs apart from emotion” (140). Pity, grief, and fear are certain causes of pain. Initiated through the senses, emotion determines pleasure or pain; therefore, Burke’s idea of pain (and pleasure for that matter) cannot be a source of sublimity. The truly sublime can only be found in nature. This is not a suggestion that nature is a creation granted to humankind from some omniscient being; it is a statement of fact to which we humans must succumb.
The sublime are the things in nature humankind cannot reproduce through description, artistic endeavors, or other means of expression or imitation, for nature’s grandeur and dimension are not confineable—regardless how badly the human race wants to package everything into a neat little box with a label. Examples of the sublime include the following: the seven natural wonders of the world (you can Google® them); thunderstorms, hurricanes, tornados; any one of the seven seas—okay I’ll stop there. If we humans cannot obtain sublimity physically, anything we produce suffers the same consequence.
Our senses or imaginations might lead us to sublime thought, but the creation of the sublime is beyond our grasp—live with it folks. It is Longinus’ definition of sublimity and how it is judged that sits foremost in my mind: “. . . reckon those things which please everybody all the time as genuinely and finely sublime. When people of different trainings, ways of life, tastes, ages, and manners all agree about something, the judgment and assent of so many distinct voices lends strength an irrefutability to the conviction that their admiration is rightly directed” (139-140). This is fairly universal, what we all can agree upon is all those things we will never agree upon.
This week, I chose to take a closer look at William Blake’s Book of Thel. Upon its first reading, themes of one’s own innocence and mortality were obviously present, but after a second reading, it’s interesting to note the images of nature and its relation to what is terrifying or unsafe. Before the poem even begins, Thel’s Motto advertently speaks of “images of mortality” (Blake 176), which are noted in the poem’s footnotes. This sets an interesting tone, perhaps preparing the reader of the very literal journey that the young virgin is about to embark upon. This tone also creates one of awareness of the reader’s own mortality in their reading of the poem.
In the beginning of the poem, the young virgin is quickly introduced to the idea of life and death, as she notices “the children of the spring, born but to smile and fall” (Blake 176); she wonders how the subject of morality affects each person, or, as we’re to later examine, how it affects things in the natural world. At this time in the summer, Thel is confronted with several images of innocence (the lily of the valley, the lamb, etc.) and these take an important part in the poem because it is these images that force Thel to come to question her own innocence and her own mortality. With her wondering why all things in nature inevitably come to an end, she is directly addressing their purpose and how truly sad she finds the prospect. Thel has a difficult time grasping the idea that all parts of nature serve some purpose and then proceed to be buried, to become “the food of worms” (Blake 178). The ground and the death that it represents to her symbolize a darkness that is terrifying. It is also interesting to note that the images of darkness and coldness are mentioned following the small references to mother and child and to Thel’s own potential maternity.
As the end of the poem approaches, Thel’s experience in this land (where she has her encounters with the lily of the valley, the worm, and the cloud) proves to be somewhat confusing. All of the more natural images prove to her that there is a benefit to living and being with nature; the relationships are trying, but they provide a certain kind of alluring companionship. The last plate deals with Thel’s emergence into another world. Perhaps it represents the real, mortal world where her maturity and innocence start to evolve. When Thel sees her own grave, she is overcome with fear because of the darkness she senses. She is also confronted with several questions that tackle the personal qualities of humans. There is mention of eyelids, ears, nostrils, and a tongue, all begging a response. This appears to be all too much for Thel, as she leaves the strange world to go back to her own. This confrontation with the more mortal (where one’s own senses are what will dictate) world is too consuming because she is not prepared to really be there at all. She prefers her other world where her innocence is guarded and her status as a young virgin is well kept. Perhaps seeing her own grave was overpowering; the prospect of living in a world where death is a certainty is very unappealing. Even though it is somewhat intriguing, it is not enough to keep Thel there. Har is the place where she has come to feel most safe because of the deceiving nature that is has – it is as though it has cast some sort of spell on her. It is also the place where Thel feels confidant of her place, unlike the natural, mortal world that has come to only represent a fear and darkness that is all too overwhelming and real.
The Book of Thel: Observation or Experience?
This poem thrusts us back into the Garden of Eden. The religious imagery from the Biblical Genesis story of creation manifests an inherent discontent in the greatest creation, which is Mankind. Thel, the adolescent, virginal youth finds unhappiness in this place of “sunny flocks,” of “dreams of infants,” “transient day, like music in the air” and all that is “gentle.” In this place, this Garden of Eden, this immortal state, where all is perfect, Thel is restless. Like Adam and Eve and their curiosity of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the youth wants to know more, experience more. And in wanting to know more, she questions the unreality of her state. She consults other things created: the Lily of the Valley, the clouds, the worm, and the Clod of Clay. These created figures personification appear as representation of Christ. In the bible, Jesus is referred to at the “Lily of the Valley.” Moreover, the image of the Clod of Clay which opens up for Thel mimics the Biblical story of Jesus and Nicodemus discussion of the kingdom of heaven with the illustration of a man entering his mother’s womb a second time. This Clod of Clay, this representation of the womb, or a second birth differs from the Biblical story. The biblical story refers to the second birth as a spiritual birth, but here, Thel enters a human death. Thel enters a place, with imagery associated with hell, infinite of sorrow and darkness. Thel hears of the “sorrow of voices” or the sorrows of the experienced who lament the terror of their experiences, experienced through their five senses ("Ear," "Tongue," "Eyelids," "Nostrils" and "Flesh"). When Thel, the young virgin, the adolescence confronts her own mortality as she comes to “her own grave plot,” she quickly runs back to paradise.
At the end, Thel leaves us with her life’s motto or guiding principle. However, the motto is full of questions. And to help myself understand what Blake is doing I have rearranged the questions. Can Eagles see the pit (the pit of experience)? They see from up top. They only see it through observation. Can the mole see the pit? Yes. The mole lives right in it. Blake has left us to wonder which is better: experience or observation. It is interesting that Blake uses the Garden of Eden because that is where humankind first struggled with the idea of good or evil? Ignorance or knowledge? Observation or experience?
How does all this fit into our recent discussion of the sublime? The idea of the Clay of Clod as a representation of the womb and of Thel’s mortality links to Burke’s explanation of pain. Thel immediately escapes the overwhelming experience of pain because of its effect on the senses. Because pain is associated with these dead figures, Thel must elude death by removing herself from pain experienced through senses. She must escape back to a world void of this terror. According Burke, Thel is concerned with “self-preservation” (Burke 86). Also in light of Burke, I found it interesting that Thel’s pleasurable experience in this paradise does not have the same lasting impression as the horror she experiences in the pit. It is the horror or the fear of death that is the “strong[est] emotion” (Burke 86).
Burke’s argument in “On Taste” predicates a bodily model against which all humans can be compared. He writes “we must suppose, that as the conformation of their organs are nearly, or altogether the same in all men, so the manner of perceiving external objects is in all men the same” (65). These assumptions, which appear to be based on uncited physical evidence, become necessary to validate his ultimate point, that “the standard both of reason and Taste is the same in all human creatures,” (Burke 63). For Burke, each body has a natural form, which includes fundamental and shared qualities. He draws a distinction between Tastes acquired and those innate, suggesting that “there is in all men a sufficient remembrance of the original natural causes of pleasure,” (68). Even if someone learns to “prefer the Taste of tobacco to that of sugar,” they could still distinguish between tastes, otherwise “we immediately conclude that the organs of this man are out of order,” (Burke 66). By Taste, he means not only imagination and judgment, but the bodily sense, an emphasis on physicality moderns might not use to describe a cerebral sensibility.
While reading this introduction “On Taste,” I was reminded of an early nineteenth-century document, The Physiology of Taste by Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, which explores this sense following similar criteria. In the spirit of synthesis, I reread the passage in Brillat-Savarin also entitled “On Taste,” and drew some comparisons. In like manner as Burke, Brillat-Savarin addresses possible challenges to the generalized argumentation he uses to anatomically describe taste. This is facilitated “through the numerous papillae scattered over [the tongue’s] surface, [which] absorbs the sapid and soluble particles of the substances with which it comes into contact,” (Brillat-Savarin 37). As Burke mentions the “mad” person who “cannot distinguish between milk and vinegar,” Brillat-Savarin employs testimony from a man whose tongue has been cut away as punishment (Burke 66). As someone lacking the “natural” sensory setup, the man is called to answer “if he still found any enjoyment in what he ate, and if the sensation of taste had survived the cruel operation he had undergone,” (38). Brillat-Savarin also mentions something that Burke does not, namely the anatomical differences between humans. “Anatomy teaches that all tongues are not equally provided with these papillae,” he writes, “and that one tongue may possess three times as many as another,” (39). This is elaborated with an anecdotal example, as the anatomy explains “how it is that of two guests seated at the same banqueting table, one displays the liveliest pleasure, while the other seems to be eating only under constraint,” (39). What I mean to accomplish by introducing this other text is an illustration that Burke’s interest in this physical sensory experience was shared by others during a similar period.
This model is a hard sell in our modern intellectual climate. Binaries made to contrast the sane with the mad, the natural with the monstrous, or the self with the other reference collective histories we would rather avoid. Normative body constructions venture too close to eugenics, colonial racism, or male misogyny. The crux here is an implied moral hierarchy, the natural being more beautiful and more good than the unnatural. Though bodies continue to be subtly generalized, relativism makes me shy away from such a rigid system. Unfortunately, because I am not convinced by Burke’s foundational claims about the body, I cannot fully follow his logic to the conclusion that even thoughts, even something nebulous as taste could be held in common with all other humans. Still, I imagine that Burke’s eighteenth-century audience would have been very familiar with this bodily form, particularly considering its prevalence in earlier anatomical thought (for general overview, see Nancy Siraisi “Vesalius and Human Diversity,” in the book Medicine and the Italian Universities, available for preview on Google books).
In addition to course readings:
Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste. Translated by Anne Drayton. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. First edition published in French, 1825.
Sean Frohling
Professor Franco
Romanticism
April 4, 2008
Sublimity and the art of Writing
“To make anything very terrible,” as Edmund Burk points out, “obscurity seems in very general to be necessary.” (102). Whether this effects the mindset of the reader, or the description of the character, this simple point is one of the basics for writers. One of the many examples that Burke brings up in his work, “A philosophical Enquiry into the sublime and beautiful’ is Milton’s description of Death. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s figure is, as Burke puts it, “dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree.” (103). What this means is that uncertainty in the reader is far more terrifying than the knowledge on may posses. In every art form, this has become more than just a figure of expression, but a standard fact.
So what exactly is Edmund Burke trying to explain to us in this Enquiry?
Burke’s description of obscurity is a warning to other writers who might be tempted to follow too closely with their writing to the idea that fear is generated from the unknown. As he clearly describes to us,
“On the other hand, the most lively and spirited verbal description I can give, raise a very obscure and imperfect idea of such objects; but then it is in my power to raise a stronger emotion by the description than I could do by the best painting.” (104).
Writing is an art of attracting the emotions of the reader, influencing their thought process by the ideas and emotions that are subliminally pushed forward into their mind through the talent and subtlety of the writer. Burke here is stressing this because that while making a reader understand and follow an idea is the point of many works and written essays, it is through the lens of emotion that it must be dealt. Instead of using cold hard fact, an idea that would have appealed too many of the peers of Burke’s time, he recognizes that while a painting has the imagery to inspire idea, writing has the beauty to inspire emotion before idea.
Obviously this goes to prove that Burke is writing for the benefit of writers, and his essay, while an extremely well written philosophical tool, is aimed at achieving the same work that the ancient Greek text was pointed towards. In hopes to reach the heights of sublimity, Burke has lead us on a twisting path through his ideas of what sublimity is.
William Blake argues in There is no Natural Religion that atheist philosophers limit themselves by trying to understand the world without God because the human experience is finite, thus their arguments are circular and focused on the individual, which, having an end, is mortal. He wrote “he who sees the infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only” (Blake, 175). Blake intends to unify living beings under one God in an “over soul” argument as a means to reconcile the notion of experience as having generally similar reaction to stimulus with an infinite amount slight deviation from one to another. He operates under the assumption that men cannot comprehend infinity therefore they seek to explain their desires in terms they can understand, which Blake finds fruitless. Blake concluded, “if it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character, the Philosophic and Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over and over again” (Blake, 175). Blake ironically finds an end to the argument in the infinity that God and spirituality represents. He reasons people who recognize possibilities outside of the limited human world come to conclusions to philosophical arguments through their inner spiritual tendencies instead of relying on the outside reality, which allies them with God and the infinity which he has attained. However, any satisfaction Blake feels by using God as a conduit to the desired immortality is superficial because he contrives it from a personal perception from his finite life.
In “The Chimney Sweeper” Blake wrote about a chimney sweep who tries to enlighten another man to God’s protection by which the chimney sweep becomes a reflection or a symbol of God. The other man, Tom Dacre, has his head shaved and it looks like a lamb, which is Jesus’ sacrificial symbol. Dacre must not believe in God as the answer to his suffering because Blake connect the lamb to him, and though his head is literally without hair, the chimney sweep says “for when your head’s bare/You know that soot cannot spoil your white hair” (Blake, 183). This statement assumes that Dacre’s ignorance was acceptable because without knowledge of God there cannot be corruption of purity from evil forces. This fits with Blake’s notion of each person being limited by their perceptions because if Dacre was never taught how to experience God then he could not be held accountable for his unholy discretions. Later in the poem, Dacre raises to a much more positive and uplifting reality with the notion that God’s vastness would take care to that which he does not otherwise understand.
While “The Chimney Sweeper” is congruous with some of Blakes ideas, it does not make sense in terms of the thought that every person comes from the same “Poetic Genius” as he puts it in All Religions Are One because if every person has the same equipment operate then everyone should be able to feel and understand that, not just a portion of beings. In fact, Blake states that “the desires and perceptions of man, untaught by anything but organs of sense, must be limited to objects of sense” in There is No Natural Religion which means the experience of God must be taught from one to the other in order to exist, it is not an inherent feeling to all men (Blake, 175). It is possible that the act of perpetuating the notion of God’s infinity is actually what satisfies the desire for personal mortality because it creates the illusion of inclusion in a group that continues after death.
Burke makes it clear in his writing that the concepts of pain and pleasure are two very different ideas. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, he explains how they exist independently of one another. He does, however, also show that they can, sometimes very often, go hand and hand with one another. It is when these concepts overlap or become more ambiguous that the ideas of pain and pleasure become more complicated. It makes us then wonder about what happens when people find pleasure in pain or getting pleasure in seeing something that should be painful, or when they find they feel pain when they are experiencing pleasure. Neither one of these circumstances is unheard of. So while pain and pleasure do not have to be tied together, they often do, or at least find a way to make it unclear which passion a person is experiencing in the moment. It is also often unclear when both passions are being experienced which one has to greater affect on a person. It is when this happens that Burke’s arguments take on another level than simply black and white, pain or pleasure.
One good example of this is Burke’s explanation of Delight. When he explains what he means when he says Delight, he says, “I make use of the word Delight to express the sensation which accompanies the removal of pain or danger; so when I speak of positive pleasure, I shall for the most part call it simply Pleasure” (84). He makes it clear that delight is really a part of Pain, and not pleasure, which seems to go against what we might normally believe. Though through his explanation, he goes on to show that when he says delight, he is speaking of being faced with an incredible danger and suddenly being taken away from it. This is not a form of pleasure. It is the very sudden absence of fear, a sort of relief, which does not make it a pleasurable experience, even if we are grateful to experience it. It is a lack of terror, not an abundance of pleasure. It would be like getting hit by a car, but at the last minute some superhero sporting a cape comes along to whisk you away from any real danger. You almost died, but you are suddenly safe. You experience relief, or to use Burke’s language: Delight. There is nothing giving you a sense of pleasure, but you are suddenly free from the shock and terror of nearly getting run over. This Delight or relief can be a way to lead to the sublime.
Another time when the clear cut arguments of Burke overlap a bit to cause some tension and interest is when he argues that light cannot as easily be sublime as darkness can. He says this is because light is too ordinary. He goes on to explain, however that while “Mere light is too common a thing to make a strong impression on the mind, and without a strong impression nothing can be sublime. But such a light as that of the sun, immediately exerted on the eye, as it overpowers the sense, is a very great idea” (120). He explains that Light can then be a sublime experience because such a great force of light would cause blackness to the eyes, after it overpowers the senses. Light is therefore only able to convey the sublime because it is acting in the same way as darkness. Burke then states that because of this, “darkness is more productive of sublime ideas than light” (121), so why then shouldn’t we just experience it through the use of darkness instead of taking the long way around to get to it through light?
The Sublime in Relation to the Physical and Death
I intend to present a portion of the argument of part four of Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, which at first reading seems to only to provide supplementary examples. What is unique about part four is that it attempts to establish a physical source of the Sublime in order to solve two questions raised in parts one through three. However, at times the text seems to suggest a different solution which is never fully addressed. Burke has already described a causal connection between pain, terror and sublimity, as summarized in part three:
The passions which belong to self-preservation turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime (97).
This description does not seem to entirely satisfy Burke. The definition of sublimity exists only in the associative world of the imagination, with the idea of terror and the idea of pain producing a sense of the sublime.
It seems that two contradictions, arise from a purely associative concept of the sublime, both of which the author addresses. First, how may terror become delight? Burke questions, “But if the sublime is built on terror, or some passion like it, which has pain for its object; it is previously proper to enquire how any species of delight can be derived from a cause so contrary to it” (164). Secondly, how may objects without any direct sense of physical danger produce terror and sublimity? Burke sets out to describe how, “such examples as I have given of the sublime in the second part, are capable of producing pain, and of being thus allied to terror and to be accounted for on the same principles” as well as the associative process by which terror may excite delight by directly connecting the sublime with the physicality of the senses (166).
A distinct, determinant link first seems to solve the problem of achieving a relationship between pain and delight. Burke utilizes a metaphor of labor:
Melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder, is the consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this relaxed state of the body. The best remedy for all theses evils is exercise, or labour, and labour is a surmounting of difficulties, an exertion of the contracting power of the muscles; as much resembles pain, which consist in tension or contraction in every thing but degree (164).
Similarly, the “exercise of the finer organs” (the senses) provides an escape from melancholy. In this way, objects without a physical sense of terror are able to cause variations of pain to the senses and produce terror and sublimity; viewing an immense object causes, “but a small tension of this membrane (the retina), another, and another, and another stroke, must in their progress cause a very great one, until it arrives at last to the highest degree; and the whole capacity of the eye, vibrating in all its parts must approach near to the nature of what causes pain” (166). It is as though Burke is attempting to ground the concept of the sublime by connecting more directly with the senses; however, it may be that a purely imaginative source of sublimity is equally plausible.
If we recall the causal connection between pain, terror and sublimity as described by Burke, and then consider death to which pain is only, “an emissary of this king of terrors,” the connection between sublimity and the senses seems less necessary (86). Objects suggesting infinity in their size or repetition do not necessarily need to strain the eye, but rather may produce terror by creating a sense of danger. Confronting the apparently infinite is terrifying on two fronts. It can be known only through suggestions of the finite, and so is inherently obscure, and as Burke argues, “To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary” (102). Secondly, the infinite promises by its very presence to outlast us; to confront it is to confront death itself. The relief from danger occurs in the knowledge that immensity and illusions of infinity or only illusions. They are representations removed from the danger of death and so are able to be sublime.
It may even be suggested that terror produces delight as a direct result of being represented. By removing the danger of actual terror, we are able to safely define it; we are able to control it, and in sense begin to delineate death. However, the idea must still retain some possibility of danger and some unknowable quality to it, or else it would not be terror being represented and controlled. In a sense, sublimity is an idea teetering on the edge of actually terrifying and delightfully terrifying.
Even after reading Burke’s ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,’ the idea of the sublime still seems obscure to me. When faced with William Blake’s ‘The Book of Thel,’ I began wondering what the sublime is in this context. Is the sublime only applied to the phrasing and wording, or does it have more to do with the subject of the text? Is it subjective at all, or is that getting sublime confused with beauty? So I took ‘The Book of Thel,’ and after rereading it many times, tried to form some kind of conclusion as to what the sublime is or represents in this text.
In ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’ Burke writes,
“The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime. The passions belonging to self-preservation are the strongest of all the passions.” (Burke p. 97).
In ‘Romanticism: An Anthology’ it states that,
“Thel (1789) is a sustained attempt to examine the ‘fall’ into the physical world and sexual experience. …through a narrative that concerns a girl’s encounters with a series of characters – lily, cloud, clod of clay, and worm – loaded with allegorical significance never precisely spelled out. Much hinges on the virgin’s return to the Vales of Har, which signifies reluctance to submit to the descent into experience.” (Wu p. 170).
Now it is possible to look at ‘The Book of Thel’ and attempt to ascertain what is sublime about it. At the end of the poem, “The virgin started from her seat, and with a shriek / Fled back unhindered till she came into the vales of Har.’ ([Wu] Blake lns 124-5, p. 179). This depicts the curious virgin, who has spent much of the rest of the poem questioning things, denying herself a kind of pleasure, “…the bed of our desire,” (Blake ln 123). In fleeing back to the Vales of Har and to a place of innocence and safety, she denies herself pleasure. One way this part could contribute to the sublime is if in denying pleasure for herself she created in herself a sense of ‘delight’. Her ‘delight’ could also be incited by the disturbing images she encounters, for example,
“A Land of sorrows and of tears where never smile was seen.
She wandered in the land of clouds through valleys dark, list’ning
Dolours and lamentations; waiting oft beside a dewy grave
She stood in silence, list’ning to the voices of the ground,
Till her own grave-plot she came, and there sat down”
(Blake lns108-112 p. 179).
Through viewing her own grave she has an eerie confrontation with death and mortality. As she flees to Har this no longer poses a real threat to her so she may ‘delight’ in her memories of it. Burke would attribute these ‘delights’ to the sublime and it is in these ‘delights’ that we may find one way encountering the sublime in ‘The Book of Thel’.
Carolyn Hanig
Gina Franco
Romantic Literature
3 April 2008
Response to Burke
While I find the literary work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke, full of good ideas and I can see where Romantics draw from him (especially from his ideas on light and color), I still have some natural objection to his theory about Taste. I will for once take a skepticist stance to argue this. Burke says “should any man be found who declares that to him tobacco has a Taste like sugar, and that he cannot distinguish between milk and vinegar; or that tobacco and vinegar are sweet, milk bitter, and sugar sour, we immediately conclude the organs of this man are out of order, and that his palate is utterly vitiated” (66). This depends on the fact that reality is as it is. What if reality is not what it is? What if that man is actually correct for what he is as a human being? After all, isn’t this how that particular person’s body functions? Who is to say that just because ninety five percent of the human population says that lemons taste sour that they are correct? Did not also a good majority of the people think that the world is flat and were they not also wrong? If our perceptions can be wrong, how can one group mandate a certain perception of taste that is “correct” in any sort of objective?
We cannot simply agree with the reality most people seem to have. Perhaps our perceptions of taste are wrong. Perhaps what we call bitter is supposed to be sweet and sweet sour. All taste is accidental and cannot be proven to be right or wrong in any circumstance because we cannot know for sure if we are right. If any work is sublime it is a wonderful phenomenon that we cannot calculate sublimity in literature. This seems a lot more plausible to me than what Burke explicates in his book because although it sets good groundwork for the definition of Romanticism, books that are popular or books that become good literature do not hit people in the same way and with the same degree. Similarly, books that are in popular taste do not usually last long enough to become literature. It does not seem like one can create a formula for capturing the attention of the whole human race even if it is a basic human emotion such as terror and self-preservation.
So, on some levels, I reject Burke, but on others I agree with him. I guess you could say it’s something like a love-hate relationship in that way. For example, I love what he says about terror and obscurity: “when we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes” (102). On one level I agree that terror is beautiful and inspiring, but that it is inspiring to me. I do not wish on any level to create a subjective basis for determining literature, but I do have a hard time accepting that there is something that can reach and inspire the entire world all at once based on the things that he says in his book. I know that in class we talked about how the Romantics thought they could change the world. I’m not so optimistic about that, but only in the sense that I think there isn’t a formula for reaching people, for example if one puts obscurity and terror into a book in this way, then it will be more effective than a book that is not terrible. I think sublimity is more of an unexplainable and uncontrolled phenomenon that happens whenever it happens.
Works Cited
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. David Womersley. England: Penguin Books, 2004.
Specifically about There is no Natural Religion, I am interested in the second sixth and seventh statement. Though Blake’s philosophical reasoning and his creation of these neat syllogisms has been pretty effective, it seems like here his logic is lacking. The sixth statement reads:
If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.
This comes directly off of statement five, which declares that “less than all cannot satisfy man.” And finally, statement seven reads:
The desire of man being Infinite, the possession Infinite, and himself Infinite.
Though it may be unfair to criticize in this way without the third statement, I feel Blake is making a major assumption here to get to the point he wants to make. Though I agree with his ultimate point, he is here assuming that man’s “eternal lot” is not despair. If working truly though logic, it seems that the end of six is the ultimate conclusion. I feel I must be missing something because this seems to be the only grave logical flaw here. Though Blake does address “Man’s perceptions…not bounded by organs of perception,” he does not sufficiently argue that the perceptions of people are limitless.
Also, this made me wonder how familiar Blake was with Eastern philosophy, religion, spirituality and how he came to these conclusions which seem anathema to many religious doctrines. There is a definite link here to the Tao, especially in All Religions Are One. Though I do not have the resources right now to quote at anything in particular, thoughts presented in the Tao Te Ching and the works of Chuang Tzu are easily apparent here.
This work also raises the question for me of what Blake’s observations mean for us. Though he is saying something here about the universe that may be true, he does not seem to present any new path for humans to follow. This question especially bothers me with regard to his discussion of man’s true form, the “Poetic Genius.” As Blake says, the “Poetic Genius [is] adapted to the weaknesses of every individual.” Thus, it seems that it should be the goal of people to overcome their physical weaknesses to get closer to the Poetic Genius. However, Blake unfortunately does not offer any suggestions for how we could proceed in this direction.
Since there isn't an independent post for the second week of response papers, I'll just put this here for now. Sorry if I missed any alternate instructions while I was out sick.
Response for 04/11/08
Essential Human Sympathy
I must admit to having little knowledge of the history of the British slave trade; what I do know if filtered through the lens of American history, which is a bias I feel is important to keep in the mind while examining Ann Yearsley’s A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade.
I found the method and structure of the piece to be the two most notable aspects of the poem, apart from the main theme. Yearsley starts off strong with a direct address, initially to a large audience, specifically Bristol, but with overt intention that all of both Britain and Ireland are to be held accountable as well. She then moves to rally any potential sympathizers through a brief appeal to the better nature of humanity: “But come, ye souls who feel for human woe…” (31) Immediately afterward, Yearsley creates a character, Luco, through whom she will relay the individual horrors of slavery.
By attaching a face and, most significantly, a name to a victim of slavery, Yearsley personalizes the argument in a way that would be impossible with a nameless everyman and intangible philosophical concepts. Yearsley then points an accusatory finger at those who profit from the inhumanity of the slave trade, in a very pointed tirade. From the beginning, Yearsley makes no attempts to refute or contest the slavery-favoring argument that Europeans (whites) are inherently and biologically superior to other races. This creates an important tone in the poem, where equality of humanity in all people is assumed with such certainty that it never even needs to be stated in the text. Yearsley’s description of her character Luco’s life story further expounds upon this universal humanity.
What makes Luco an effective and sympathetic protagonist for a political poem like Yearsley’s are the universal human experiences tied to his very specific life story. The concept of family, detailed and distinct relationships between himself and his mother and father, the pain of his lost love and the intolerability of the labor forced upon him are all concepts that can be understood and grieved for by people who have never been slaves themselves. Yearsley never casts Luco as an innocent savage or a less fortunate creature, as other abolitionists have done in pursuit of their causes; rather, Luco is a man, just like any other, whose life has been terribly disturbed by human cruelty. He is a vessel for sympathy more than pity, which is what sets him apart as a compelling character.
Yearsley casts Luco as the martyr and his death burning on the tree is reminiscent of Christ’s crucifixion. The hypocrisy of slave traders and their supporters is clearly delineated in the poem and Yearsley is very careful to distinguish false “Christians” from actual Christian doctrine. She makes a similar distinction between the law and justice, which I find to be particularly significant towards the overall theme of the work. Yearsley’s argument in this poem is enacted to tremendous effect in her characterization of Luco and the construction of the piece to focus so intently on his situation. All of Yearsley’s incendiary accusations against false Christians pursuing only financial gain are earned and given potency by the sympathetic human soul she places at the center of her case.
Carolyn Hanig
Professor Franco
Romantic Literature
11 April 2008
Response to “The First Book of Urizen”
I thought that Blake chose a really good name for the imagination. It kind of sounds like “lost” which Los certainly is in the beginning and it seems like that Blake would use this because as the footnotes tell us “Urizen himself has been aligned in the past with Reason – ‘your reason’” (pg 223). It seems as though this would suggest that Urizen knows what he is doing while Los is just thrown out into the world unknowingly. Los “howled in a dismal stupor” (152) because he is suddenly separated from the being that he once was. He is now essentially lost in this world that isn’t even fully developed and he’s in pain for it.
The repetition of the number seven seemed to closely relate two things which have somewhat significance in the story. The deadly sins of the soul are seven as well as the days of making. Blake repeats the symbol of seven because he is retelling the story of Genesis. The way he tells it is very kind of disturbing. Rather than a gentle creation, one has:
“Rage, fury, intense indignation
In cataracts of fire blood and gall,
And enormous forms of energy;
All the seven deadly sins of the soul
In living creatures appeared” (96-101).
This is not something that is peaceful but chaotic and rather violent. Here the phrase “seven deadly sins” is repeated, but Blake says that they appear in living creatures. This relates back to the choice to stick at the end of each day made the phrase “state of dismal woe” (215). This state of dismal woe and sin is instilled in all living creatures before the world was fully developed. This is before humans were even created so that they came into a world that is not Eden as the bible would have us believe, but a world already without grace.
The way that Blake creates the human race is not also only disturbing, but indistinct. As we talked about in class, Los tries to or does rape Enitharmon. The impregnation of Enitharmon is portrayed through the use of a “worm” (349). In chapter four, stanza three Blake says “when Enitharmon sick,/Felt a Worm within her womb” (348-349). When they say that Enitharmon is sick it makes me think that she is already pregnant, but then the next line says that she felt a worm within her womb which could mean that she’s still being impregnated. This could be just people’s rudimentary way of viewing pregnancy, but I think Blake does this on purpose. After it has been shown that she was pregnant there is in the fifth and sixth lines suggestions that she hasn’t been impregnated yet: “All day the worm lay on her bosom;/All night within her womb” (353-354). Perhaps this is to show how the human person isn’t perfect, that the creation of something isn’t perfect. As we were saying in class, Urizen is the one that wants to categorize. Perhaps Los is imperfect in his regeneration on his own self or he cannot regenerate easily because he cannot make distinctions like Urizen can. Or perhaps Blake simply did not want to make it explicit because it was not ok to make it explicit at his time.
Works Cited
Blake, William. “The First Book of Urizen.” Romanticism: An Anthology, Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. 2006. Pages 223-240.
Quinnetta Bellows
Romantic Literature
Professor Franco
April 18, 2008
Charlotte Smith
Smith’s “The Emigrants,” written in blank verse, explains how these disavowable clergyman and nobility find refuge in their exiled state in Sussex. It is not their refuge that takes me, or even Smith’s explanation of the Emigrants injustice toward the poor, but mostly I’m taken by how she arrives to these points in her piece. Immediately the poem positions me on the cliffs of Brighthelemstone, where Smith and I sit as gods and observe the “misguided Man.” As I’m observing, Smith’s images takes me into the wake of morning. Before I even know who the poem is taking about, Smith shares expression of sympathy for those “few the morning wakes to joy” and those whose “changing dreams/ that sooth’d their sorrows, for calamities.” These men, once highly respected among others, have been exiled from their land. However, why should I feel sorrow for these men “misled by early prejudice?” I guess that was Smith’s intent to begin the poem without mentioning whom she was referring to. As soon as she presents the woes of these wandering Exiles, she immediately takes the heaviness of their suffering and demonstrates how she too at some point was exiled. In this place in the poem, she enters into a connection with these men. While I would abhor these acts committed by these priest and nobility as unforgivable, Smith urges us as readers to be forgiving and understanding. She beckons us to have compassion because their punishment is far greater than what man cold give them. It is only in light of her own experience of exile that she finds commonality with these men.
Smith’s position us as a reader into the flux of her feelings about these men and the violent turn of the revolution through her image of the “troubled waves.” This extended metaphor sails us as readers into the misfortunate lives of the exiled and gives us hope that these exiled will allow their anarchy to be “in the tempest lost.”
Emily Mutchler
Response #1
On Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry
When I read Edmund Burke’s essay, “Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful,” I thought that it was interesting that he describes “taste,” or an appreciation of beauty, as an inherent aspect of human nature, which is actually at odds with the [deductive] logic, because “the business of judgment is in finding similarities…[and] in making distinctions, we offer no food to the imagination” (Burke 543). Because Burke links the creating of similarities to art, as he describes the metaphor as a process of likening “wit,” and the “imagination,” as all being opposed to “judgment” it seems as if Mary Shelley might have been influenced by his aesthetic ideas when drawing some of the distinctions between good and “unhallowed” arts in writing Frankenstein.
Though Shelley does frequently liken science to art and language throughout the novel, she also seems to do to compare them: She portrays the successful scientists in the novel, who we would associate with processes of “judgment” and linear, deductive logic, as failed artist. Walton finds in frustration that he cannot be the next Shakespeare or Homer, so he heads off to the North Pole to study magnetism. Similarly, as Victor pieces together his creature, he makes a point of describing his own appearance as that of a slave, rather than that of an artist.
Conversely, Henry, who Victor admires for his imaginative ability and witty conversation, has no interest in the study of science at Ingolstadt. Interestingly, Burke discusses the aesthetic beauty of the works of the “oriental writers,” whose works Henry studies at the University, as being “very fond of similitudes [though]…they seldom take care to make them exact…they take no notice of the difference of the things being compared” (Burke 544). It is no coincidence that when Victor abandons the science department to study these “oriental writers” with Henry that he gains “consolation” (Shelley 51).
We can also see that part of what makes Walton and Victor failures as artists, but great successes as scientists, is their over-reaching ambition, their desire to be different, rather than similar, to surpass all of mankind in their achievements. Because Victor’s creature is “singular,” and as an assembly of disparate pats, lacks that which Burke describes as a sort of artistic coherency, it is no wonder that Victor finds him ugly, despite the care he took in selecting “beautiful” parts. Tellingly, Walton finds that he cannot, through his ingenuity, become Homer and distinguish himself, while Burke provides Homer as an example of an artist who has “excelled in similitudes,” such as “metaphor” but has “been weak and backward in sorting [and] distinguishing and sorting [his] ideas” (Burke 544).
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