Home >
Humanities And Science >
Academics
PROLOGUE
In English and German both "to wander" and "wandern" refer to physical motions that typically reflect the wanderer's state of mind. "I wandered lonely as a cloud", among the most celebrated poems about "wandering", refers to a specific physical excursion. Where this is not the case in other poems concerned with the same theme, they at least reveal some aspect of a wanderer's mentality. In examining two poems under discussion we shall consider how William Blake's imagination captures moments of vision and the emotions they arouse. These tell us little about a journey as such, an itinerary or a destination, but they imply some encounter between an observer and an object or scene that strikes that observer as wonderful or novel. I recall the etymological affinity of "to wander" and "wandern" with verbs meaning "to turn" ("wenden", "to wend"). The poem captures in words a psychological turning point involving not only enhanced awareness of external objects but also of a universal principle, perhaps an aspect of a "higher self". While the process of wandering entails exposure to intense images and visual impressions in the first case we shall study, Wilhelm Müller's "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" is infused by the musicality of rhythmic repetition and dynamic development. Significantly, it contains no reference to the lyrical "I". Wandering - or the effect produced by the verbs "to wander" and "wandern" - integrates the imagistic or musical principles that certain critics would understand as the essential non-verbal aspects of poetry, compared to which the reference of words to matters in the world of external reality are of little account.
Comparing "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and "London", one becomes aware that the verbs "to wander" and "wandern" imply not only certain reciprocal relationships but also the very principle of reciprocity itself. We differentiate here between two kinds of vision, one engendered by physical perception, the other by the inner vision of the mind detached from physical sensation. William Blake distinguished between "cold earth wanderers" and "the mental traveller" in recognition of the duality that underlies poetry and poetic "wandering". Both physical travel and dreaming provide the optimal conditions for memorable and intense visions and images, but poets, whether they adopt the stance of a "cold earth wanderer", like Wordsworth, or of a "mental traveller", like Blake, are neither travelling or dreaming in the strict sense of these terms when they create poetry. Though the cold earth wanderer and mental traveller differ in their basic approach to the same reality, they share a goal in illuminating the relationship between the inner mind and external realities. Both the cold earth wanderer and mental traveller differ from the systematic and abstract thinker in that the former reveal the view point of an individual in specific situations as though exposed to the uncertainly of moment-to-moment experience - hence the sense of novelty, and expectation inculcated by poetic renditions a wanderer's experience.
In the eighteenth century, poets became more self-conscious about themselves and their art; and one result of this new consciousness was a close association of the poetic imagination with what Goethe, and later the German Romantic school, called the "Wanderer". By the same token, these poets drew a close parallel between the poetic work and a journey or "pilgrimage". The text is not about a journey. It is a journey. With the loss of assurance in the inspiration bestowed by the Muse, the poets became increasing aware of the pitfalls that awaited poets on their "uncertain journey" (as Keats put it in Endymion) through the medium of language. The identification of "text" and a journey to an appointed goal at least held a promise that the unity of the text would contain all the stresses and aberrations associated with the process of verbal articulation.
Blake's "London" and Wilhelm Müller's "Das Wandern ist des Müller's Lust"
If one undertakes to compare a poem written by an English Romantic and one by a German counterpart, it will be by no means immediately apparent why the resultant choice should fall on Blake's "London" and "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" ? `Is this choice not a rather haphazard one in view of fact that the poems are completely different in tone and content? Blake's poem presents London in a very sombre light as the scene of human degradation while Wilhelm Müller's is a vigorous, almost jaunty, song praising the joys of roving in an idyllic rural setting. Despite these differences, let us explore areas of common ground such as they are and evaluate their significance.
First both poems enjoy great popularity and fame. However lugubrious in tone, "London" belongs to the most well known. II would even venture to assert that with "Jerusalem" and "Tiger" it belongs to Blake's top three. There can be no doubt that "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" is not only the most well known of Wilhelm Müller's poems. It is one of the most celebrated poems in Germany thanks to Schubert's musical setting of the poem as Lied.
Second, both are a part of a cycle of poems or songs. In Blake's case the poem is included in Songs of Innocence and Experience and in Müller's, in Die Schöne Müllerin. The inclusion of any poem in a greater work throws open an interesting question, especially if one insists that a poem is a unique object subject to its own internal structural logic and consistency. We will note that poems considered in the light of their participation to a greater whole, reveal facets that are often overlooked when the poem is viewed in isolation. This is particularly true of "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" as the mill described in the poem will prove to be at the scene of the main character's death, itself the result of an unhappy love relationship.
. Germany, of course, is renowned for its Wanderlieder.. The word "Wanderer" appears in the titles of celebrated poems by Goethe, who started the trend of giving the word an unprecedented eminence, and by German Romantic poets such as Hölderlin and Eichendorff.. The reasons for this phenomenon are too complex to be properly discussed here (view essay "Between the Muse and the Unconscious"). Suffice it to say that the word, though previously charged with religious and mystical significances, became the accepted term addressing the modern self-conscious and consequently anguished poet, whose very raison d'ệtre seemed to be in question in the new secular age. It might seem to some that the word served merely as a convenient label by which to identify the typical posture and partial self-dramatization of poets at the historical juncture we are considering, but such a glib assumption is challengeable, as the words "wander" and "wandern" , like all words in fact (as many linguists would concur), are not fixed lexical terms but integral parts of the works to which they belong, sharing their singularity. The very affinities between Goethe and the German Romantics gave rise to differentiations of attitude and even to acrimonious contentions. The English poet were also subject to Goethe's influence, particularly Coleridge and Wordsworth (see essay "Wordsworth's Daffodils Reconsidered" and "From the Ripple on the Surface to the Hidden Depths") but less obviously so than in the case of their German counterparts, though two very well-known poems in English do include the verb "to wander" in their first line, namely "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and "London". The words "I wandered" and "I wander" set the tone for the poems that follow. In the English tradition words derived from "to wander" have had a strong profile even from Anglo-Saxon times. The Bard, whom Goethe called "the greatest wanderer of all" gave prominence to the word in A Midsummer Night's Dream" for Puck announces "I am that merry wanderer of the night". A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Sc. 1 Milton resoundingly concludes his great epic Paradise Lost with a reference, charged with Biblical and theological implications, to the "wandering steps and slow" of Adam and Eve when entering the domain of experience and history. Shakespeare and Milton reflected on the nature of "wander" as a word of almost philological interest, as shown by the lines:'T may be, again to make me wander thither. /'Wander', a word for shadows like myself
The Passionate Pilgrim XIV In Paradise Lost Eve reminds Adam of his use of the word "wandering" by referring to her "will / Of wandering, as thou call'st it" (IX. 1145,1146 Yet as with the German poets of their age, the English Romantics were imbued, indeed plagued, by the same sense of isolation and alienation as that which afflicted young Goethe and the German Romantics. Indeed. Geoffrey Hartmann applies to the Romantic poets the designation of the Wanderer or Wandering Jew fully explicit in his essay entitrled"Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness"'In: Romanticism and Consciousness Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1970)..
**********************************************************************
WILLIAM BLAKE'S "LONDON"
(Printed version, 1794)
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man.
In every Infants cry of fear.
In every voice, in every ban.
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls.
And the hapless Soldiers sign
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
The journeys and excursions described in William Blake's poetry are (or seem to be) of a quite different order from those encountered in Wordsworth's poetry. Blake's poetry does not depict natural scenes in the familiar or realistic mode. Blake's eye perceived what the poet understood as the spiritual realities that underlie the world of common experience. Following precedents set by Dante and Milton, his long poems express the author's concern for the spiritual progress of mankind from its myth-shrouded beginnings to the ultimate advent of the New Jerusalem.
William Blake and Goethe, however much they differed in many obvious respects, shared the belief that, in its ultimate manifestation mankind's "wandering" journey through history and experience meant progress in the act of striving to unite polarities and contrasts. Like Goethe, Blake conceived of inferior kinds of wandering manifested by those who only represent a partial aspect of wandering in its most comprehensive and inclusive sense.
In "The Mental Traveller" there is a reference to "cold earth wanderers", whom the speaker disparagingly contrasts with "the mental traveller" as one who is free to move through time and space without encumbrances, even in reverse sequence. This reference seems to constitute an allusion to the depictions of travel and movement found in "The Lyrical Ballads" by Wordsworth and Coleridge. However, is the difference between Blake's depictions of a traveller's experience and those of the Lakers' so fundamental as it might first appear? Or did both Blake and Wordsworth seek to illuminate the same fundamental relationship, though their approaches to it were from quite opposite directions, revealing the difference of stance between poets who represent travelling realistically and those who choose to represent "dreamlike journeys"? In both kinds of journey, the realistic and more obviously symbolic or mythical modes of representation merge, making an absolute division between them appear questionable.
As "wandering" was for Goethe and the Romantics a synonym for poetry and the poetical imagination, we will be in a stronger position to assess similarities and differences between Blake and Wordsworth as poets if we compare two celebrated poems introduced by a declined form of the verb "to wander".
Blake's visions do not reveal any escapist refusal to confront the realities of the world, but rather manifest an acute awareness of social and political conditions. To make a comparison, Dante's The Divine Comedy is as much concerned with his contemporary society as it is with realities beyond temporal reality.
"London" belongs to the Songs of Experience, and within a yet broader context, to The Songs of Innocence and Experience. A comparison between the draft version of 1792 1 (1) and the printed version of 1794 reveals significant alterations giving pointers to the poem's deep levels of significance.
In the printed version "chartered street" and "chartered Thames" replaced "dirty street" and "dirty Thames". Perhaps the motive of pollution that runs through the poem did not need any reinforcement by the repetition of "dirty". The choice of "chartered" for the printed version reflects a fundamental shift in attitude towards the nature of freedom. Before the Romantic period freedom was understood as a system of privileges graciously bestowed on subjects by a monarch or member of the nobility. The formulation "German forged" in the draft version poses an unfriendly allusion to George III and the Hanoverian dynasty. The substitution of "see" by "mark" in the printed version, effects what J. Tynjanov referred to as "lexical coloration". The reader becomes conscious of the potential universal implication of the word "mark" over and above its specific meaning in any particular context. The word "wintry", substituted by "midnight" in the printed version intimates the negative aspects of wandering with sin and disorientation. The reference to winter gives occasion for a consideration of the "mythical" or season-oriented aspects of "wandering", winter being a universal symbol of death and frozen mental conditions. Reasons for considering wandering within a mythical and seasonal frame pose the subject matter of discussion in a following section of this study.
While "I wandered" in Wordsworth's poem is set in the past tense, implying a division between past and present, London begins with the verb set in the present tense. This implies that the poem concerns timeless realities unbounded by references to any particular incident.
Blake's "London", far from expressing the feelings of elevation and joy that characterise "I Wandered lonely as a cloud", presents a dismal picture of London as a symbol of fallen humanity. The poem reveals the most negative sense of "to wander", that namely that associated with the Fall and its consequence, for it focuses attention on Man's almost total loss of moral freedom and on acts of violence typified by the murder committed by Cain. Particular irony attaches to the fact that the "free" city of London that had enjoyed the privileges and "liberties" vested in its charter should symbolise such mental and spiritual bondage.
As a born Londoner, Blake had every opportunity of roaming through the streets of London, yet it is doubtful that he should ever have experienced an occasion when every face he saw betrayed "marks of woe". The concept of universality, here the universal condition of fallen Man, informs the poet's vision. It is not here a question of the speaker inferring a general truth from the appearance of particulars but of a general truth, or what is perceived as such, revealing itself in a highly select aggregation of appropriate images.
Images indicating pollution are strikingly frequent, particularly in the working draft of the poem in which "dirty" held the place of "chartered". An association of physical pollution, in the form of soot and the shedding of blood, with moral corruption in high places, in "church" and "palace", is effected by the imagery of the third stanza. The choice of the word "blights" in the fourth strophe reinforces the poem's theme of pollution with the implication that venereal diseases wreak vengeance on the respectable who indulge in what they outwardly condemn. The threefold repetition of "mark(s)" in the first strophe (in the draft "And see" stands in the place of "And mark." in the printed version) is not only consistent with the combined motifs of pollution and lost freedom but also introduces a biblical note into the poem through the word's evocation of the mark of Cain in Genesis and the mark of the Beast in the Book of Revelation. The vision of the poem then comprehends the history of mankind from its origins until the end of its unregenerate condition in the last days. Cain was not an eternal nomad but the founder of city civilisation according to the Bible. The appearance of the youthful harlot in the final strophe implies that London and the Babylon of the Apocalypse are one.
Is the vision informing the poem then one of unmitigated despair offering no glimpse of Babylon's divine counterpart, Jerusalem? "To wander" bears, even in this poem, implications, which are not entirely negative. The speaker is a witness. He refers to himself only when stating, "I see", "I mark", "I hear" and "I meet". He perceives people but does not interact with them. The identity of the speaker is inferable only from the manner and scope of his perception, which is searching penetrating and ubiquitous. The Wanderer might be described as a kind of divinely appointed secret agent like Baudelaire's flâneur. The words "I mark" may be taken to mean "I record" as well as "I notice": The mystic eye scans London and witnesses its iniquities. The poem contains hints that judgement will be visited on London not as a result of a purely external event but of what is already stirring in London itself. The speaker hears or sees representatives of professions which do society's "dirty work" in various ways, whether chimney sweeping, soldiery and prostitution. Though the point is not so clearly made as in Auguries of Innocence, the victims of oppression will prove the instruments of their oppressors' undoing. The chimney-sweeper's cry reproaches the Church for its blindness to social injustice; the hapless soldier's sigh threatens violence to the Palace where war plans are forged. The poem's reference to " the youthful
harlot's curse" alludes to the often involuntary inveigling of young girls into prostitution, an institution that Blake believed was the inevitable consequence of marriages enforced by law.
"London" belongs to a cycle of poems, and in so doing cannot be treated as a totally enclosed or self-sufficient work. It allows itself to be elucidated through comparisons with other poems; in the first place those sharing the general title Songs of Innocence and Experience. From this basis we can proceed relatively smoothly to considering the yet wider circle that encompasses Blake's works in general. The procedure of progressively widening the contextual vista centred in a specific poem or poetic passage will be applied several times in the course of subsequent discussions, a procedure which accords with linguistic theories that assert that "the word" marks the intersection-point at which different levels of this word's significance meet and interact. While no discovery of external facts about the author and his or her times can objectively add to, or detract from, the text, it may alter our perception of what is in the text, often by corroborating what a reader intuits when reading it. I have suggested in the case of "London" that the poet's vision offers an element of hope. If we consider the poem in the context of the collection of poems to which it belongs -The Songs of Innocence and Experience - we may infer that it does not reveal Blake's all-embracing conception of London but only a conception of its most negative aspects. A different picture of London is shown by "Holy Thursday", a poem telling of alms giving to the poor children of London. Innocence and experience are two contraries, which in Blake's view together form the prerequisite for moral progress. We may see the work in a wider context still, namely as an anticipation of Blake's future works including Milton and Jerusalem. In these the association of words or symbols signalled by the words "harlot", "Babylon" and forms of the word "to wander" become explicit, while in "London" they are but inferable.(2)
(1) The Working Draft of "London" (ca. 1792): underlined words are deleted, replacing words are in Italics:
I Wander thro each dirty street / Near where the dirty Thames does flow/ And see mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness marks of woe END OF STROPHE In every cry of every man/ In every voice of every child every infants cry of fear/ In every voice in every ban/ The German mind forg'd links I hear manacles I hear END OF STROPHE
But most How the chimney sweepers cry / Blackens o'er the churches Every blackening church appalls / And the hapless soldiers sigh / Runs in blood down palace walls. END OF STROPHE But most the midnight harlots curse/ From every dismal street I hear/ Weaves around the marriage hearse / And blasts the new born infants tear. END OF STROPHE AND THEN RECASTING OF FINAL LINES: But most from every thro wintry streets I hear / How the midnight harlots curse/ And blasts the new born infants tear NEW LINE And hangs smites the marriage hearse NL But most the shreaks of youth I hear NL But most thro midnight &c NL How the youthful
(2) . & And thou 0 Virgin Babylon, Mother of Whoredoms, Shalt bring Jerusalem in thine arms in the night watches; and No longer burning her a wandering Harlot in the streets Shalt give her into the arms of God your Lord & Husband.
Milton Plate 3320-23
********************************************
"DAS WANDERN IST DES MÜLLERS LUST" BY WILHELM MÜLLER
Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust, das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust, das Wandern.
Das muß ein schlechter Müller sein, dem niemals fiel das Wandern ein, das Wandern.
Vom Wasser habens wir's gelernt, vom Wasser.
Das hat nicht Rast bei Tag und Nacht,
ist stets auf Wanderschaft bedacht,
das Wandern.
Da sehn wir auch den Rädern ab, den Rädern:
Die gar nicht gerne stille stehn,
die sich mein Tag nicht müde sehn, die Räder.
Die Steine selbst, so schwer sie sind,
die Steine.
Sie tanzen mit den muntern Reihen,
und wollen gerne schneller sein,
die Steine.
O Wandern, Wandern, meine Lust,
o Wandern!
Herr Meister und Frau Meisterin,
Laßt mich in Frieden weiter ziehn,
und wandern.
To wander is the miller's joy, to wander. ‘Twere a bad miller indeed who never spared a thought for wandering. Water taught us how to wander, water, which knows no rest by day or night but has a mind ever set on wandering. We catch it from the mill wheels, too, the mill wheels, which cannot bear to be at rest but never tire throughout my day. Even the millstones, heavy as they are, dance a sprightly roundelay, and want to turn yet faster. Wandering, wandering, is my joy. Master and Dame, let me continue on my way in peace, and wander.
To consider a poem in the light of the cycle of poems to which it belongs may sometimes give one cause to deepen one's sense of the poem's seriousness when popular interpretations suggest otherwise. Let us now turn to the fourth work to be examined in this chapter.
Wilhelm Müller belongs to the German Romantic movement during its terminal phase. This is not to say that the quality of his poetry is necessarily inferior to that of other Romantic poets. In my view "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" belongs to that class of poetry, which appears beguilingly simple, even naive, yet which harbours unsuspected profundity and subtleties. The title refers at the primary level to "the miller", yet implies a reference to the poet himself, Wilhelm Müller. Is this apparently jaunty poem in the folk-song tradition about the nature of the poet and the poet's identity?
Müller's poem is the first in a cycle of so-called Lieder in the cycle of poems entitled Die schöne Müllerin, (The Miller's fair Daughter), published in 1820. The poem originated during a three-year period of gestation produced by the experience of co-operating with other young poets and songsters who were then composing "Rollengedichte" ("role poems") at meetings in the Berlin house of one F.A. Stegermann, a well-situated Prussian official during the winter of 1816/17. This genre was greatly influenced by contemporary Italian opera as well as by strong patriotic undercurrents. On the surface, the poems contained in this cycle conjure up a seemingly uncomplicated idyll of unspoilt rural life but this picture is not quite as ingenuous as it seems. Each song represents the point of view of a dramatic character playing a part as though a character in a play or opera. The story told by the cycle proves tragic, however jaunty the mood in the opening song, "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust". The dramatic person assigned to this song, a wandering miller's apprentice, finally drowns in the waters beside the mill the movement of which he celebrates in his first song. The miller's daughter spurns his overtures of love and bestows her affections on his rival in love, a young huntsman. The souring of the young apprentice's emotional state is reflected in his change of attitude to the colour green, which first evokes feelings of spring but later becomes associated in his mind with garishness and poison.
The sublime evocation of a place of final rest for the weary wanderer echoes Goethe's treatment of the theme of the wanderer's return to a hut, the symbol of a final solace. Müller's own name predestined him to play the role of the miller's apprentice. In fact, during the later stage of the cycle's composition, the role found a poignant corollary in Müller's emotional commitment to one by the name of Luise Hensel, a young poetess, who resembled the miller's daughter in rejecting Miller's ardent feelings of love.
The rural idyll presented in the cycle also reflected an idealisation of native German values and the hope that they would soon help to mould a new united and free German nation. However, as the Romantic Movement entered its dying years, a deepening sense of pessimism was seeping in. Such is intimated in Müller's "Der Lindenbaum", beautifully set to music and song by Franz Schubert. The speaker recalls the linden-tree beside the fountain outside the gateway of his childhood home but finally describes his vain attempt, as a distraught and wind-swept "wanderer", to return to the linden-tree of hallowed memory. In the wider historical context surrounding the poem, we trace the despair which attended Romanticism in its final throes, its demise being precipitated not so such by the after-effects of foreign occupation as by the stiffing oppression of Metternich's system.
In some ways Müller was German Romanticism's Byron, for both he and Byron embraced the cause of Greek independence and both died at a comparatively young age. Though his philo-Hellenism was more pronounced than that of his contemporaries, with the possible exception of Friedrich Hölderlin, he typified a longing shared by other German writers and poets, including Goethe and Schiller, that a new age would usher in Greece on German soul, marrying the best of the ancient Greek heritage with the best in what was hoped would become a united and free German nation. This hope is reflected in the very title of Goethe's epic poem Hermann und Dorothea, telling of the encounter and subsequent marriage of two young fugitives caught up in the disruptions caused by the invasion of French military forces during the Revolutionary wars. Goethe's idealisation of a symbiosis merging ancient Greece and his contemporary world is anticipated in "Wandrers Sturmlied" and possibly even in the Shakespeare Speech, in which Prometheus merges with a figure derived from native folklore.
ANNOTATIONS
1."Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust", like "I wandered as lonely as a cloud" apparently suffers from the great popularity it enjoys in as far as its 'simplicity ' discourages critics from being willing to discover a deep level of significance.
2. The motifs of the miller's apprentice and the fair daughter of a miller find a precedent in Goethe's writings. The opposition of "wandering" and the wanderer's goal of rest and peace are evident both in the poetry of Goethe and the songs of Wilhelm Müller. Even the figure of a tragic "romantic" wanderer goes back to Goethe's early "Sturm und Drang" period of writing. Is the death of the lovelorn apprentice perhaps an expression of a poetological concern related to an awareness of the volatile or fluid aspect of a "musical" aspect in poetry? Literary references to drowning in Romantic - and post-Romantic literature (viz. Grillparzer's Der Arme Spielmann (The Poor Musician) - imply the self-dissolution of the artistic process.