Editor's Note #4
The Romance of Reality
They are Keats’s Songs of Innocence and Experience—his two poems on reading, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” and “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” two sonnets that resonate with each other, but with a dissonance in their titles and opening lines. The earlier poem is about reading something for the “First” time, after merely hearing about it. The later is about returning to an encounter that was somehow inconclusive, but about which “surmise” can be made.
We tend to think of first times—crossing some threshold, entering into some new condition of loss and gain—as entries into “experience,” yet the earlier poem remains a Song of Innocence: an entry into the world’s first dawn, which is also its “serene” old age. The later is hoped to be a Song of Experience. This difference appears in their imagined modes of assimilation. In “Chapman’s Homer”: breathing—easy come, easy go. In the Lear sonnet: tasting, ingesting—a more inward and lasting transformation that raises the question of whether and how it will leave the taster parturient.
Here is the second poem:
O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute!
Fair plumed Syren! Queen of far away!
Leave melodizing on this wintry day,
Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:
Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute,
Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clay
Must I burn through; once more humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme,
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.
Keats first mentions this sonnet in a letter of 23 January, 1818, to his friend Benjamin Bailey. “My brother Tom is getting stronger,” he reports, “but his Spitting of blood continues. I sat down to read King Lear yesterday and felt the greatness of the thing up to the point of writing a Sonnet preparatory thereto; in my next you shall have it.” The poem itself appears in a letter to his brothers, then in Devon, of the same date. Shakespeare’s play had been on the poet’s mind. A month earlier, in the letter that defined “Negative Capability” as that quality which “goes preeminently to forming a man in literature,” Keats had named it in support of his conviction that “The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relation with Beauty and Truth.” Now broaching the play in earnest, he tells his brothers that “The thing appeared to demand the prologue of a Sonnet. I wrote it and began to read.” That “prologue,” which dismisses one divinity and implores bard and clouds to “give me new phoenix-wings,” is effectively a prayer. But why was a prayer needed—and what did the reader fear?
The strongest clue, the thought that appears to me to lie closest to the poem’s root, appears in the initial letter to Bailey. Keats writes:
One saying of yours I shall never forget—you may not recollect it—it being perhaps, said when you were looking on the surface and seeming of Humanity alone, without a thought of the past or the future or the deeps of good and evil. You were at the moment estranged from speculation and I think you have arguments ready for the Man who would utter it to you. This is a formidable preface for a simple thing; merely you said, “Why should Woman suffer?” Aye. Why should she?”
The thought is elliptical, but clear enough. The echo is of Genesis. “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception,” God curses Eve: “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.” In view of the panorama of horrors that is “the surface and seeming of Humanity alone,” the poet’s friend—a student at Oxford, later to become a clergyman—wonders if those sorrows should cease. The thought haunts the poet and returns to him in the poem. Unlike John Milton, who two centuries earlier, in his own sonnet “On Shakespeare,” imagined only that the plays would “make us marble with so much conceiving”—turned to stone by their fecundity of invention—Keats fears that reading this earthy, earthly play will leave him “to wander in a barren dream.”
To those who might say that Keats is referring to barrenness of imagination only, and who thus doubt the link to Bailey’s thought, one need only point to the current widespread voluntary or semi-voluntary childlessness of so many of the young and no longer so young. To the extent this phenomenon is rationalized by despair at the condition of the world and human prospects, is it not a form of being struck barren in fact, as a result of being struck barren in dream? Every child begins in imagination. Preparatory to life is desire’s vitality. (Does a child, too, call for the prologue of a sonnet?) Keats fears the play will wither desire at the root. And yet, strangely, he also seems to court, to yearn for, this bitterness, finding it “bitter-sweet.”
In its encounter with experience, Keats’s sonnet on King Lear presents two visions of the Romantic. His reading not only coincided with his brother Tom’s worsening illness—the consumption that would take him later on in 1818, and the poet three years later—but also found him poised between supervising the publication of the “golden-tongued” (or, as readers have often thought, cloyingly sweet) Endymion and embarking on the ”more naked and Grecian grandeur” of Hyperion. Those two visions are juxtaposed within the King Lear sonnet—our first clue that this second poem on reading contains, and supersedes, the first.
One vision is that named in the opening line: Romance as escape—to lands and times of “far-away.” Such untrodden regions are familiar from Keats’s poems—one thinks, besides Endymion itself, of such medieval otherwheres as the “Eve of St. Agnes”; though even there one is apt to find a dialectic of Romance and Reality, of Dreaming and Pain, that reaches its apex in “Ode to a Nightingale,” where fantasy pushed to its uttermost—those “mystic casements opening on the foam / Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn”—bursts the bubble, extreme of distance producing an echo of the poet’s solitude.
Here, escape itself is bid Adieu. But is Keats turning, simply, away from Romance? Or is he turning toward a deeper Romance, one whose gesture is itself a descent, down and into and through? Away from the “queen of far away”—“serene” lute and quality of “Syren” identifying her with the world of the earlier poem—and towards the terroir, the terrain, of his own albeit ancient Albion, masculine proving-ground of “old oak forest” and Druidic rite—is this not its own Quest-Romance, its own ordeal of self-making? The question answers itself—and, in so doing, takes us into the heart of Keats’s reading of Shakespeare’s play.
For Keats’s prayer upon the threshold is half recollection and itself a reading. The arc it describes—of entering voluntarily into purgatory to emerge chastened and annealed—is already an emulative enactment of the journey taken by one who is perhaps, albeit cryptically, the play’s most important character, its first student and first teacher. And who is also—I want to suggest—its figure of the Romantic artist.
Of Lear’s Edgar—legitimate son of Gloucester; faithful son; Cordelia’s double—we are told at the play’s outset by his half-brother Edmund, that he, too, is too “far-away” to survive the world: “So far from doing harm that he suspects none.” Yet it is Edgar who, like Keats, will bid innocence adieu; who will voluntarily—though constrainedly—afflict himself, through an act whose first gesture is divestiture of self (“Edgar I nothing am”). Edgar’s life, I once wrote, “is a parable about the cunning, and the strength, and endurance, and imagination that goodness must learn if it is to survive and, to any extent, prevail in the world.” A parable of goodness learning strength, yet preserving therein an experimental freedom.
Edgar combines pretense and actuality—the Romantic imagination in its shamanic mode. His are real sufferings, voluntarily assumed—for his own sake first of all (strange double, then, of the self-cutting of Edmund, itself pedagogic, though indirectly, and against the grain of its instrumentality). Ultimately, such pains’ import is to teach rather than deceive—is to undeceive, even if deceit is their outward form. (Cordelia, in contrast, heaves her heart into her words, speaks the mere truth, demystification, and suffers immediate nudity, the fading coal.)
“Thou art the thing itself,” Lear says to Poor Tom, oblivious that he wears his nudity as a disguise. Yet how else should the thing itself be manifest except by feigning, by the disguise of some particular embodiment? So, too, of Edgar’s later teaching, leading his father to the point of real suicide in intent, but only in play: carried to the point of spiritual actuality, that he might be reborn in fact. In his trickery and stage-managing, Edgar is the play’s poet-impresario, its Prospero. He teaches Lear and learns what Cordelia does not or cannot: to suffer, act, and inflict. And he restores his father to life—for a time.
Some thirty-eight years after Keats wrote his sonnet, this blend of reality and pretence was noted by Walt Whitman, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest[.]
In Whitman’s words, Harold Bloom insists, we are to hear Poor Tom on the heath. To Lear’s question, “What hast thou been?” Tom answers:
A serving-man, proud in heart and mind; that curled my hair; wore gloves in my cap; served the lust of my mistress' heart, and did the act of darkness with her; swore as many oaths as I spake words, and broke them in the sweet face of heaven: one that slept in the contriving of lust, and waked to do it: wine loved I deeply, dice dearly: and in woman out-paramoured the Turk: false of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey.
A tenuous link, perhaps, one of the gossamer tangles of one of Bloom’s last works, The Daemon Knows. Underlying it, however, are some lines Bloom has just quoted from the preceding section of Whitman’s poem: “I too had been struck from the float forever held in suspension, / I too had receiv’d identity by my body, / That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body.” Famous and, one might suppose, widely cherished lines that Bloom here strikingly calls Whitman’s “darkest,” finding in their “knowledge of the body’s priority” an echo of Freud’s “anatomy is destiny”—or, as we might say with Lear, “the thing itself.”
“I too,” Whitman declares, in lines that profound his favored trope of universality, of identity between poet and reader, the latter seeing the former as himself, much as Lear sees himself in Poor Tom. And so it is that Whitman enters his echo of Tom O’Bedlam: “I am he who knew what it is to be evil.” Concealed is that the echo is of a persona, the mask, as is the vessel of any artist. To speak is to speak with a mask—reality strangely brothered: Tom, Thomas, Didymus, Doubter, Twin. More fitting than not that these lines should recall Shakespeare’s Edgar, who, Bloom aptly notes, “pretends to previous sins.” Forging a link by forged crimes.
And yet, long before Whitman or Keats, Edgar’s words find an echo within the play: in Lear’s sorrows over the dead body of his child: “And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life! / Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Is it not as much as to ask: Why should Edgar have life, and not Cordelia? Why do sinners’ ways prosper? Edgar’s feigned crimes—conceived in imagination and birthed as acts—give him a strength to persist denied to Cordelia and Fool.
Why should woman suffer? Who would engender today must think of fate—no different than at all times, perhaps, though we have felt our fresh incursions of the real. What talisman to give one’s child? What talisman to give oneself? Is the child a talisman? A gift to oneself? Is one thus Lear? (A dark thought for those who think offspring justified only by the condition of the world: Does not this resemble Lear’s expectation that his children will accept a just division, paid for with love? This, too, is a Syren-Romance.)
The parent should be wary what he takes the play to mean, wary what he takes from it to give his child. A talisman should protect, not oblige. Survival, itself, must be wary of obligation—lest the child, should it meet with tragedy [spit, spit], compound defeat with guilt. The child loves according to its bond, which is to life, not to life’s contingent source. The personal cannot assume the scale of absolute origin: as if, being father, I became nature itself, to dictate custom. But nature does not dictate custom.
What is the “damnation” Keats refers to in his sonnet? Cruelty? Moral abjection? There is no other damnation, in the play’s pagan world. Its pains are those of this world: physical torment; living outcast from love. To pass through its trial, to come through and not be struck barren—imaginatively, erotically, generatively—can only mean to come to some new affirmation, however qualified or defiant, of this world, even against this world. Though its Edgar will ultimately declare, in his moment of recovered identity, which is also his moral vengeance, “The gods are just,” the play is not a theodicy, but a biodicy.
In London that March my wife and I ate samphire. Our son swirled in her belly. Incipient, a fist coiled and uncoiling. Dreadful trade. I lifted up mine eyes whence I had fallen. On the sad height. Two full moons. Until I found the world again.
Descent, too, is a Romance.
— Paul Franz
