Poetry in Transition

Rather than embellish events with archaic themes and images, William Butler Yeats concluded that poets should merely describe and critique the world around them. This idea was quite a departure from the Romantic Era, in which the use of ancient images and age-old themes from religion and mythology was a popular practice. This practice, however, would soon undergo a massive reconstruction. By the end of the Victorian era, the themes and images from religion and mythology which were popular during the Romantic era, slowly became déclassé, giving way to the more ephemeral images and themes seen in the work of the poets of the 20th century.

John Keats and William Blake were both writers of the Romantic era, the period lasting from approximately 1790 to 1840, but they were as different as the two poets could be. Blake’s writing reflected both his strong faith and an even stronger will, and Keats’ writing reflected both his persistent longing and an overpowering sentimentality. Whatever their differences, both writers contributed enormously to the English canon and had a significant impact on later poets. Blake was popular in the early Romantic era and Keats wrote at the very end of the era, but each writer’s work reflects the visual and thematic trends which were prominent throughout the Romantic period. Keats, for instance, quite often relied on images and themes from Greek and Roman mythology while Blake focused on themes and images from religion, and it is for this reason that their works best represent the Romantics on the whole.

Among the many desires of humans is to understand the nature and meaning of their existence. Like the mythology that Keats draws on, literature brings sense and meaning to an otherwise confusing and chaotic world. Authors then are not just observers of the world around them, they are also interpreters. Among the Romantics, William Blake in particular was a dedicated interpreter.

What Blake did by using images and themes from Christian theology in his poetry was to help his readers understand the nature of life and the human relationship with God. For instance, in a crisis of faith, a Christian might ask why there is misery and savagery in the world. The simple placation that it is all part of God’s plan may not be a sufficient enough answer. Literature can help unravel the ball of chaos.

In the following passage from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake provides a possible answer to the question of why there is suffering in the world:

"The pride of the peacock is the glory of God

The lust of the goat is the bounty of God

The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.”

With this passage, Blake intimates to his readers that the beauty of the peacock and the fertility of the goat are balanced by the ugly rage and blind hunger of the tiger. There is often misery in this world, but it is not the intention of God to make mortals suffer. Instead, God must bring balance to His creation. The tiger, the predator, brings physical balance to the lust of the goat by decreasing the goat population. As for the tiger and the peacock, there is an aesthetic balance struck between the placid beauty of the peacock and the dangerous beauty of the tiger. In this poem, there is also a message about the nature of sin. The traits of each animal are one of the seven deadly sins. While these sins may be perceived in the animal, they are not sins because, by nature of God’s design, animals cannot sin. Therefore, the actions of animals are merely facets in God’s plan, facets mortals may never understand. For humans, the evil things they do are sins, because humans are blessed with a greater consciousness. This being the case, the sins of humans are not formed by God. Sins are formed by the aspect of our nature that does not allow mortals to see God and instead allows them to see only what is most apparent. In There Is No Natural Religion, Blake wrote,

“He who sees the infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only."

Blake means that humans alone cannot perceive God without first embracing faith, for it is faith that makes the infinite feasible.

Mythology stories are generally meant to give both rhyme and reason to the world of mortals. While Blake used images and themes from religion to help guide his readers to a greater understanding of the world around them, Keats used images from classical mythology as a means of capturing the complexities of human emotion. By using the persistent mythology of the Greeks and Romans, images embedded in the cultural consciousness, he imbued his work with intellectual and emotional universality. Whether he intended to do so or not, Keats’ poems tap into the emotional and intellectual core of human society. In his poem Lamia, Keats uses themes and images from the Greek and Roman mythos to address the changes that were occurring within the hearts and minds of everyday people. Keats writes:

“Hyperion slid into the rustled air

And Saturn gain'd with Thea that sad place

Where Cybele and the bruised Titans mourn'd."

Cybele, the mother of the mountain, was often viewed as the protector of ancient rites, so she mourns with the Titans for all that has passed. Even Hyperion, the greatest of the Titans is gone, and Thea, his counterpart, is ushered away by time, of which Saturn is the god. In this poem, Keats demonstrates how in touch he was with the emotional undercurrents of society. The Titans, the grandfathers of the Greeks, are buried in antiquity along with the pantheon of Greek and Roman gods, and while this event is sad, the modern alternative to the ancient gods and goddesses are reason and self-actualization. Keats, by writing from the very depths of his soul, probably had a well-developed sense of self, and this sense of self allowed him to feel very deeply. However, this well-developed sense of self also cultivated a powerful discontent within the poet.

Blake and Keats lived in England during a period of radical change. According to the Concise Companion to the Romantic Age, English religious fury … filled the ground with corpses and left upon the landscape many a ruined church." Because of these massive and violent changes, beginning with the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, the Church had lost much of its previous control. The violent changes which occurred during the Romantic era, “grew out of [the] long-standing compromises of Anglican Church and the Nonconformists." The result was that many people were coming to God without an intermediary and were developing personal relationships with Him. Blake himself was a Nonconformist who believed in and promoted a personal relationship with God. Much of his work contains images and themes consistent with this belief. As for Keats, he was of a different school of belief. He never admitted to being an atheist, but his writings were not consistent with a belief in the Christian God. Instead, he embraced reason.

Changes in the nature of worship had allowed people to develop personal relationships with God, but they also gave people the freedom to turn away from God, to embrace reason, and in some cases, atheism. Religious conviction was considered the opponent of reason. As a result, many people began to turn away from the church. This turning away, as it were, was reflected in the writing of many of the Romantics. Lord Byron “cultivated a skepticism about established systems of belief” which was reflected in his work. While Byron does use elements from classical mythology, he tends to avoid images and themes from religion. Percy Bysshe Shelley, part of the live fast and die young crowd, maintained a tacit connection to the Greek mythos, but he was admitted atheist who completely rejected the use of themes and images from religion. The turning away from religion was becoming a societal norm that carried over into the Victorian era. Religious imagery continued to fade, and so too did the use of themes and images from Greek and Roman mythology.

In the Victorian era, English writers began to drift away from Eastern classical traditions and began to write using more regional mythology. Keats confronted this change in Lamia, when he wrote “Upon a time, before the faery broods / Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods / Before King Oberon’s bright diadem / Sceptre, and mantle, clasp’d with dewy gem, / Frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns." Oberon was the king of fairies from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a purely English creation, and he banishes both the Dryads and the Fauns from his English lands while the “faery broods” force the Nymphs and Satyrs from the forests. The antiquated myths of the Greeks and Romans are giving way to English mythology. This is seen in practice when Christina Rossetti uses monsters from classic English mythology in “Goblin Market”, a poem that addresses the themes of addiction and sexual manipulation. “Morning and evening / Maids heard the goblins cry: / ‘Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy…’” The Gesta Romanorum, written sometime in the 13th century A.D., is among the earliest English documents to mention Goblins. There is also an allusion to a fairy enchantment, which saps the life force of the enchanted:

“[Laura] no more swept the house,

Tended the fowls or cows,

Fetched honey, kneaded cakes of wheat,

Brought water from the brook:

But sat down listless in the chimney-nook

And would not eat.”

Tolkien tells us that “Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold." When Laura ignores all warnings from Lizzie and stays to sample the fruit, she becomes the latter, only the dungeon is her own body. It is easy to see why many scholars have called this a metaphor for addiction. If this is the case, then there is more to the use of mythological images and themes than establishing background, as is the case in the Romantic works of Lord Byron or the Victorian works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Since the majority of Rossetti’s poems were for children, she often used sparse and simplistic themes and images, so the use of complex metaphors and frightening goblins in Goblin Market is uncharacteristic. This is because the images act as a veneer for some rather touchy issues, such as sexual temptation and addiction. This is important to the transition of mythological images and themes because by this point in the history of literature, because the poem becomes a tool for social dialogue and by extension, social development; a concept remarkably evident in the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

While it is true that religious images and themes were more déclassé in the Victorian period, they did not disappear entirely, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning proves. Browning, in her poem The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point, used religion to expose man’s inhumanity to man:

“I am black, I am black;

And yet God made me, they say.

But if He did so, smiling back

He must have cast His work away.”

What she does, however, is place her readers inside the mind of a runaway slave, a man whose mind is as equally complex as his white counterparts. For centuries, whites saw themselves as being God’s privileged race, educated and civilized. People of other colors were considered inferior. Kipling gives a good example of this notion in White Man’s Burden: The end for others sought, / Watch sloth and heathen Folly / Bring all your hopes to nought." The phrase “sloth and heathen folly” creates an image of natives lazy natives and their playful existence unburdened by farming and other complex tasks. Of course, this is blatantly deceptive, because most of the British holdings were agrarian well before they were colonized. The slave’s thought process shows readers that the black man also possesses the same feelings and emotions as a white man. As he considers his lot in life, the slave alternates resentment for his position in society to acceptance that his suffering is brought on by men, not God:

“And yet [God] has made dark things

To be glad and merry as light.”

In those moments the slave reveals that he perceives God’s love for blacks, for dark things, to be just as strong as it is for whites. Today this notion of intellectual equality seems obvious, but in Browning’s era, such ideas could have been damning to her reputation.

While Browning, and Rossetti, used elements and metrical themes from earlier traditions, they were also experimenting with new elements, focusing particularly on social issues. Their era was a changing of the guard, so to speak. No longer would archaic themes and images from Greek mythology and religion dominate English poetry. They would, in the 20th century, be replaced by more pragmatic and ephemeral images and themes. Pragmatic because the use of simple words and phrases would become a trend, and ephemeral because images and themes would rarely draw on timeless mythology. Instead, descriptions would be more raw and contain more of the immediate. There are also good doses of tragedy and the hopelessness in poetry of the 20th century. Readers and writers in this period religious images for comfort and solace. Of course, as evidenced by the estrangement of the ordinary people from the church in the Romantic and Victorian eras, some other agent besides time conspired to create this shift in artistic perspective. The world that once was would be forever changed by an event so significant, it would determine the course of human events throughout the 20th century: World War I.

The poets of World War I such as Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen brought the gritty realities of war to a wide audience, giving roots to the trend of realism in poetry. T.S. Eliot’s Post-WWI poem The Waste Land was “emblematic of an era of confounding loss and despair." Eliot wrote:

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water …”

What Eliot was saying, essentially, was that nothing would ever be the same. What tree in the wake of all the death and destruction could grow as bountiful and beautiful as a tree which grew before the world went mad? Nothing can grow in the wasteland that the Great War left behind. All the images that were once so vivid had been occluded by the broken bodies and the broken souls, those images that cannot and will not fade with time.

The world had become something strange, something broken. Something had been lost and all that remained was despair. It was amidst this loss and despair that came a growing trend of both self-analysis and criticism of the world. In his poem “Babylon”, Robert Graves wrote:

“Wisdom made a breach and battered

Babylon to bits: she scattered

To the hedges and ditches

All our nursery gnomes and witches.

Lob and Puck, poor frantic elves,

Drag their treasures from the shelves.”

The poet was not just expressing great personal loss; he was also describing how the world in the face of such violence and loss had changed drastically. All those wonders of childhood, real and imagined, were gone and were irrecoverable. The gnomes and witches, the elves, Lob and Puck, have packed up their things and left for good. The dream was over, and Wilfred Owen, killed in the Great War, describes exactly how it ended:

“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.”

The Orisons of which Owen writes are eulogies, the final uttered prayers for the dying. For soldiers in the trenches, the only eulogy they received was “rapid rattle” of the rifle. Owen shows us first-hand the horrors of war, the shattering of innocence.

William Butler Yeats, considered one of the most competent interpreters of life and society, was a keen observer of the early events of the 20th century. As demonstrated in the works of Keats and Blake, Yeats tapped into the universal consciousness. He, like Blake, interpreted the nature of life and the human relationship with the eternal (God), and like Keats, he taps into the emotional and intellectual core of human society. Yeats was able to put into words many of the emotions people were feeling in the shadow of the horrors that were and the horrors to come. In his poem, The Second Coming, Yeats eulogizes the early 20th century:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

Yeats seems to hold little hope for the future, as he calls the turmoil of the 20th century a widening gyre. There is a certain despondency in Yeats, an undercurrent of horror, but there is also hope, hope which he draws from the most ordinary objects and situations. In his poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree, Yeats wrote:

“I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core."

Though he walks on pavement, upon the earth yet simultaneously apart from it, the “water lapping low” echoes in his ears, drawing him in, bidding him reconnect with his earthly origins. The message is so important and so insistent that it pushes through to the very center of his being, reminding him he is alive.

In one of his essays on the art of poetry, Yeats wrote, “[poets] gave up the right to consider all things in the world as a dictionary of types and symbols.” Instead, the poet was “a critic of life and an interpreter of things as they are." In other words, with the passing of innocence, poets lost the right to embellish the world around them. As Blake and Keats show us, the world is not perfect or idyllic, yet there are perfect moments. Yeats simply urges the poets to write beautifully of the world, but not at the expense of the moment, because moments are the only mortal possession.

This poetry of the Romantic Era was alive with images and themes from religion and mythology, but as society progressed, these images and themes became less popular, until, in the 20th century, they fell almost completely out of popular use. The innocence of the Romantics no longer had a place in the aftermath of Word War I. While it was not truly the war to end all wars, it did change the nature of war. Even if war broke out in one quiet corner of the world, it could still spread, pulling millions upon millions down to their deaths. In the wake of such horror, of such shattering reality, literature and poetry underwent an inevitable shift. Beauty and wonder were now measured against the devastating nature of the new reality.