The sacrifice of the wild self: youth, conflict, and the forging of the universal poetic voice

“ Undying recollections; Nature there
Was with thee; she, who loved us both, she still
Was with thee; and even so didst thou become
A silent Poet; from the solitude
Of the vast sea didst bring a watchful heart
Still couchant, an inevitable ear,
And an eye practised like a blind man's touch. ”

“ Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud HERNANI. There is some meaning in the old theory about wild oats; and a man who has not had his green-sickness and got done with it for good is as little to be depended on as an unvaccinated infant. ”

“ Again, "I will explain to you, in prose, my feelings in writing that poem.... I describe myself as having been exalted to the highest pitch of delight by the joyousness and beauty of nature; and then as depressed, even in the midst of those beautiful objects, to the lowest dejection and despair. A young poet in the midst of the happiness of nature is described as overwhelmed by the thoughts of the miserable reverses which have befallen the happiest of all men, viz. ”

“ Thus, Poet, in your youth when storms are wild
⁠And passions break upon the heart and brain,
To leave their ruin there—shipwreck and waste—
⁠Pick up your lute! Upon it undefiled
You'll find song-pearls that your heart-deeps retain,
⁠The crown the years have brought you, white and chaste. ”

“ A great advance is discernible in Timbuctoo, but that Matthew Arnold should have discovered in it the germ of Tennyson’s future powers is probably to be attributed to the youth of the critic. Tennyson was in his twenty-second year when the Poems Chiefly Lyrical appeared, and what strikes us in these poems is certainly not what Arthur Hallam saw in them: much rather what Coleridge and Wilson discerned in them. They are the poems of a fragile and somewhat morbid young man in whose temper we seem to see a touch of Hamlet, a touch of Romeo and, more healthily, a touch of Mercutio. ”

“ So while it is right to say that poetry should be the expression of feeling, it should not be the expression of subjective or indi- vidual feeling. It should be the utterance of the universal mind or the general will. 1 1 should express feeling lit by reflection. As every natural fact is presented to us in the light of its ideal aim, so every subjective feeling should be given out as an illustration of the poet's whole experience. ”

“ Until Apollo calls him to the sacrifice, ignobly the poet is plunged in the cares of this shoddy world; silent is his lyre, cold sleeps his soul, of all the petty children of earth most petty it seems is he. ”

“ Pure and spotless must the victim be that the sacrifice may be acceptable! Where are you, youth, who will embody in yourselves the vigor of life that has left our veins, the purity of ideas that has been contaminated in our brains, the fire of enthusiasm that has been quenched in our hearts? We await you, O youth! Come, for we await you!”
Feeling his eyes moisten he withdrew his hand from that [362] of the sick man, arose, and went to the window to gaze out upon the wide surface of the sea. ”

“ But hail, ye mighty masters of the lay,
Nature’s true sons, the friends of man and truth!
Whose song, sublimely sweet, serenely gay,
Amused my childhood, and informed my youth.
O let your spirit still my bosom sooth,
Inspire my dreams, and my wild wanderings guide!
Your voice each rugged path of life can smooth;
For well I know, wherever ye reside,
There harmony, and peace, and innocence, abide.
XLIII.
Ah me! abandoned on the lonesome plain,
As yet poor Edwin never knew your lore,
Save when against the winter’s drenching rain,
And driving snow, the cottage shut the door. ”

“ The chariots of the gods in even poise, obeying the rein, glide rapidly; but the others labour, for the vicious steed goes heavily, weighing down the charioteer to the earth when his steed has not been thoroughly trained:—and this is the hour of agony and extremest conflict for the soul. For the immortals, when they are at the end of their course, go forth and stand upon the outside of heaven, and the revolution of the spheres carries them round, and they behold the things beyond. But of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily? ”

“ Who, indeed in his first youth,—youth when the soul is nearer to the heaven from which it sprang, and its divine and primal longings are not all effaced by the sordid passions and petty cares that are begot in time,—who is there in youth that has not nourished the belief that the universe has secrets not known to the common herd, and panted, as the hart for the water-springs, for the fountains that lie hid and far away amidst the broad wilderness of trackless science? ”

“ Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!
Later in the decade, comes Sir Henry Wotton. It will be seen that I have arranged my singers with reference to their birth, not to the point of time at which this or that poem was written or published. The poetic influences which work on the shaping fantasy are chiefly felt in youth, and hence the predominant mode of a poet's utterance will be determined by what and where and amongst whom he was during that season. ”

“ Youth is the season when, through this sensitiveness, the deadly pressures get their purchase on the soul; it is also the season for the most momentous and potent influences for good. In youth, if there is the possibility that the soul be permanently [Pg 77] warped out of shape, there is also the possibility that it receive the nourishment that enables it to develop its own robust beauty. It is by hero-worship that we copy not the externals of personality, as in childhood, but the inner spirit. ”

“ What is the situation at the beginning of the poem? What effect does the "liquor" have upon the youth? Why is the presence of Ulysses so much in harmony with the situation? How does he greet Circe; how the youth? What does his presence suggest to the latter? Why? Note the vividness of the pictures he describes; also the swiftness with which he changes from one to another. What power is ascribed to the poet? Why his "pain"? What effect is gained by closing the poem with the same words with which it is opened? Why the irregular verse used? ”

“ The fact that youth finds itself thus at home in the world explains the difference in temper between the new poets of freedom and the old. The wild or wistful cry of Shelley for an ideal state emancipated from pain and death is as remote from their poetry as his spiritual anarchy from their politics; they can dream and see visions, in Scott's phrase, 'like any one going', but their feet are on the solid ground of actuality and citizenship, and the actuality comes into and colours their poetry no less than their vision. ”

“ And the poet is he whose flesh emerges from the shell, whose soul oozes forth. And when, in our hours of anguish or joy, our soul oozes forth, we are all of us poets.
And that is why I believe that it is necessary to agitate the masses, to shake men and winnow them as in a sieve, to throw against one another, in order to see if in this way their shells will not break and their spirits flow forth, whether they will not mingle and unite with one another, and whether the real collective spirit, the soul of humanity, may not thus be welded together. ”

“ Contain yourselves from it: the soul lives by avoiding what it dies by affecting. Contain yourselves from the ungoverned wildness of pride, the sluggish voluptuousness of luxury, and the false name of knowledge: that so the wild beasts may be tamed, the cattle broken to the yoke, the serpents, harmless. For these be the motions of our mind under an allegory; that is to say, the haughtiness of pride, the delight of lust, and the poison of curiosity, are the motions of a dead soul; for the soul dies not so as to lose all motion ”

“ When we consider such a natural transformation and discipline of the will, when we catch even a slight glimpse of nature’s resources and mysteries, how thin and verbal those belated hopes must seem which would elude death and abolish sacrifice! Such puerile dreams not only miss the whole pathos of human life, but ignore those specifically mortal virtues which might console us for not being so radiantly divine as we may at first have thought ourselves. Nature, in denying us perennial youth, has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble. ”

“ It is the transition into a state of greater self-dependence which demands this sacrifice; and he only who has no conception of the strengthening and fortifying influence of university life,--he who does not perceive with what higher advantage this material loss is counterbalanced, can alone break out into lamentations on this head. He who is accustomed to chase youth out of one pen into another, and to begrudge every free breath, every lighter moment, every refreshment of over-passing Muse--who trembles and shakes lest by such trivial circumstances they should have lost both body and soul ”

“ Go side by side, through the woods, reciting poetry; mingle your souls with the sap of the trees and the eternity of God’s creations; abandon yourselves to reverie and the torpors of sublimity! Give up your youth to the Muse; it will replace all other loves. When you have experienced the world’s miseries; when everything, including your own existence, seems to point towards one purpose; when you are ready for any sacrifice, any test,—then, publish your works. ”

“ Knows not the strength that comes when vibrant thought
Beats 'gainst the bounds of fixèd time and space;
For law unto the master is pure freedom,
The prison-house a garden of delight.
So doth the blown breath from the bugle's walls
Issue in most triumphant melody;
So doth the impassioned poet's perfect verse,
Confined in law eternal, mate the stars.
TO THE POET
Let not thy listening spirit be abashed
By the majestic ranks of ancient bards
Or all the clarion singers of thy day:
For in thy true and individual song
Thou art a voice of nature ”

“ At rest in all the best that love could give!
How excellent to bear into old age
⁠The poet's ardor and the heart of youth,
⁠To keep to the last sleep the vow of truth,
And leave to lands that grieve a glowing page! ”