P. B. Shelley's Alastor, (lines 192-205)

Roused by the shock he started from his trance—
The cold white light of morning, the blue moon
Low in the west, the clear and garish hills,
The distinct valley and the vacant woods,
Spread round him where he stood. Whither have fled
The hues of heaven that canopied his bower
Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his sleep,
The mystery and the majesty of Earth,
The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes
Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly
As ocean's moon looks on the moon in heaven.
The spirit of sweet human love has sent
A vision to the sleep of him who spurned
Her choicest gifts.

This passage describes a psycho-spiritual condition that frequently recurs in Shelley's poetry and, indeed, that captures a familiar theme of romantic literature as a whole.

At this point in the poem, the Alastor Poet has been wandering through sites of ancient ruins while an "Arab maiden"—despite the Poet's neglect of her affections and even of her very presence—tends to his physical needs. Shortly thereafter, the Poet has an erotic, visionary dream in which he sees a "veiled maid" who seems to be his very soul-mate. In his dream, the maid—apparently a poet herself—sings about "Knowledge," "truth," "virtue," "lofty hopes," and "divine liberty," themes that mirror the most ardent thoughts and dreams of the Poet himself. Both the Poet and the dream maiden are enraptured, and eventually she gives in to the "irresistible joy" and "With frantic gesture and short breathless cry / Fold[s] his frame in her dissolving arms" (184-86). In a distinctly Shelleyan figure, visionary fulfillment is figured in baldly sexual terms. Such ecstasy does not last, and once the vision fades, the Poet is left with his solitary "vacant brain." The quotation above follows immediately on the heels of this visionary consummation. The Poet awakens with a start back in a cold physical reality which now seems inadequate—with "garish hills" and "vacant woods"—and he is left with nothing but questions: "Whither have fled / The hues of heaven that canopied his bower / Of yesternight?" Now he can only "Gaze on the empty scene."

This sense of extraordinary fulfillment followed by longing and emptiness suggests that Shelley has been reading his Wordsworth and his Coleridge. Wordsworth's Intimations Ode presents a similar pattern as his speaker is struck with a sense of loss and then wonders "Whither has fled the visionary gleam" (Ode, line 56), and Coleridge, in his "Dejection: An Ode" (written in direct response to the initial stanzas of Wordsworth's Ode), writes about a remarkably beautiful sunset: "And still I gaze--and with how blank an eye!" (Dejection, line 30). Alastor would seem to be Shelley's contribution to this poetic conversation, and the differences in how each poet copes with his particular post-vision depression are instructive. Wordsworth, famously, posits a notion of pre-existence which, if it doesn't necessarily rekindle the same sort of joy he once knew, at least provides an assurance that soul itself is immortal and thus destined for a realm beyond the mutability of Nature. Coleridge is not so optimistic. His own "Joy" has been extinguished by "abstruse research" (89) among other things, and it will not return for him, though his poem concludes with a prayer that Joy and solace might visit his beloved friend.

Shelley takes a somewhat different approach. Certainly his Poet-protagonist feels acutely the pain of a lost visionary fulfillment, but his response to that loss is to ignore the actual world (as he was oblivious to the Arab maiden who loved him and tended to his needs), and to orient his quest toward another encounter with his dream-ideal. Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley—at least in my reading—does not come to a decisive answer about the fleetingness of his encounter with this visionary moment of fulfillment. Instead, Shelley sees this interesting psychological/spiritual condition in the context of social ethics, and readers are left with a question: Are we supposed to admire the Alastor Poet's dedicated the pursuit of his ideal? Or are we supposed to question the value of such an other-worldly pursuit if it causes a real, mortal, natural world to seem inadequate by comparison?

Malthus, from the Essay on the Principle of Population

Thomas Robert Malthus was a "romantic" only by an accident of history; by temperament and thought he was anything but. Nonetheless, Malthus's ideas about population and economic distress were very much in play as writers from Charlotte Smith to William Godwin to Percy Bysshe Shelley considered the causes of the economic inequities that were themselves the causes of the political upheaval that was pervasive during the romantic period. Malthus was a fine writer and subtle thinker, but the idea for which he was most famous can be gleaned from these sentences from the opening chapter of his Essay on the Principle of Population... (1798, followed by several expansions and reprints).

1. The root cause of social and economic inequities "is the constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it."

2. "[P]opulation, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years, or increases in a geometrical ratio."

3. "[C]onsidering the present average state of the earth, the means of subsistence, under circumstances the most favourable to human industry, could not possibly be made to increase faster than in an arithmetical ratio."

The basic idea here is relatively simple from a 21st-century perspective already familiar with interpretations of culture and economics based on demographic and statistical data. This was news in the late 18th century:

If one thinks of economics in the broadest terms as the access to and distribution of the material means of survival (e.g. a species' access to food), then one of the driving forces of economic activity is captured in Malthus's tragic logic. The population of a species "increases in a geometrical ratio" (that is, populations increase exponentially) while the food supply increases in only "an arithmetical ratio." For example, suppose one husband and wife have four children, and, in twenty five years or so, each of these children has four children of their own who, in another twenty five years or so, have their own four children, &c. &c. Clearly this population will expand very rapidly. At the same time, however, the production of food can only increase comparatively slowly as new fields are opened, better agricultural methods are developed, and so forth. Even under "circumstances the most favourable to human industry," says Malthus, the food supply can only grow by an "arithmetical ratio"—that is, by adding a bit here and there, but not nearly so rapidly as the exponential growth in population. One might quibble about the exact numbers, but the simple fact, from Malthus's point of view, is that populations increase faster than food supplies, and, if unchecked, this leads inevitably to periodically repeated catastrophic starvation events which wipe out whole swaths of the population and thus restart the clock on the way to the next Malthusian catastrophe.

It's a simple, if tragic model for understanding the evolution and history of human societies.

But what does Malthusian theory have to do with romanticism? Well, a number of romantic writers were deeply concerned with revolutionary politics. The early Wordsworth was a great supporter of the French Revolution, William Godwin (and his son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley) were both advocates of the "perfectibility" of human societies, and the overwhelming political and economic question of the day had to do with the increasingly strained relationship between a small number of people with resources, power, and money and a larger number—the "lower orders"—who lived in desperate poverty and were sometimes on the brink of starvation. The reformers of the period were motivated by an idealism that dared to imagine a more perfect society of freedom and, if not universal wealth, at least more equitably distributed resources. Such idealistic thinking is everywhere in the period—from Godwin's "perfectibilitarianism" to Shelley's social idealism. One might even cite the Preamble to the new American Constitution with its emphasis on forming "a more perfect Union" which will "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."

Malthusian theory is a warning to such heady idealism. If Malthus is right, then the kind of "perfect Union" the reformers are imagining is simply not possible—and not because of some corrupt, greedy, and self-serving political or ecclesiastical establishment. Instead, the very expression of human passion, which Malthus identifies (for reasons obvious enough) as the root cause of the "geometrical" growth of the population, will need to be regulated or "checked." The only alternative is to spin ever closer to the destruction and despair of the next Malthusian catastrophe.

Malthusian thinking was, to say the least, controversial during the period. Conservatives tended to embrace Malthus's population logic, seeing it as a tragic explanation for the poverty of the "lower orders." In the most cynical of such appropriations, extreme poverty was portrayed as an inevitable and necessary condition since it held the overall population growth in check and thus prevented an even greater Malthusian catastrophe. (The fact that such logic also allowed persons of authority to sidestep responsibility for the misery of the "lower orders" was also useful.) Other writers saw some genuine potential in Malthus's thesis—by refraining from having children, the poor could materially improve their lot without necessarily resorting to some political revolution. Still others, saw the implications of Malthus but also saw a kind of heartlessness in treating people as so many demographic statistics and then justifying systemic cruelty based on such findings. Among these latter writers was P. B. Shelley who, in his Preface to Prometheus Unbound, says: "I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon, than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus."

Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," lines 36-50

         Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

This is one of the most often quoted, most often remembered passages from Wordsworth's poetry. "Tintern Abbey"—for such the poem is almost always called, though the actual title is the ungainly "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey..."—offers an early formulation of Wordsworth's pantheistic philosophy. It may be the first full-blown expression of a Wordsworthian High-Romantic ideology (perhaps theology); much of the rest of Wordsworth's poetry is essentially an expansion on, clarification of, or reaction to the lyrically measured claims of "Tintern Abbey."

Prior to the quoted lines, Wordsworth describes the immediate "here and now" of the poem—a visit to the Wye Valley, ostensibly on 14 July 1798—and he then details the benign influences of his recollections of nature when, during the five years since his last visit, he was living "in lonely rooms, and mid the din / Of towns and cities" (26-27). Thus, the chronology represented in the poem thus far has a visit to the Wye Valley (in 1793, presumably) followed by a five-year span in which the poet was in a lonely urban space, and now in 1798 he has returned to the natural scene. This recent history allows the poet both to admire the beauty of the natural scene before him and also to reflect on the value of his recollections of that scene even when he is removed from its immediate presence. This last reflection is the focus of the lines quoted above.

Initially, when the poet is lonely and stuck in the city, his recollections of natural beauty offer a kind of psychological solace and comfort: they provide "tranquil restoration" in "hours of weariness." But this is something more significant than a mere psychological palliative against urban alienation. The recollections have a moral element since they are involved with "acts / Of kindness and of love," and they lead ultimately to the moment of spiritual vision recorded above.

The central idea of the passage is that contemporary life is confused and often oppressive—it is a "heavy and ... weary weight" that makes up an "unintelligible world." But these recollections of natural beauty serve as a sort of catalyst producing a "serene and blessed mood" which Wordsworth describes in terms that seem almost mystical. The ordinary motions of the "corporeal frame" (respiration, circulation of the blood, etc.) are "almost suspended" while the mind (or "living soul") can suddenly "see into the life of things." Clearly this is a visionary moment, a momentary revelation of some "life" beyond the ephemeral appearances of "things" and beyond the confusion and alienation of ordinary urban life.

One aspect of such a passage that I find particularly intriguing is the context it provides for Wordsworthian nature ideology. It is clear everywhere in Wordsworth's writing that nature, or, more accurately, a feeling response to natural beauty, is the source of psychological comfort, moral judgment, and now even spiritual vision. What is sometimes overlooked, though, is the necessity of some non-natural space as well, some space like the "lonely rooms" described in "Tintern Abbey." One cannot fully appreciate nature unless one can recollect images of nature from a vantage point outside of nature. That non-natural vantage point is thus an essential element of the psycho-spiritual development expressed here in "Tintern Abbey" and elaborated throughout Wordsworth's life in The Prelude.

Following through on this observation, I would suggest that calling Wordsworth a "nature poet" is much too simple if one sees the term in a sort of binary system where nature is positive and non-nature (i.e. the city) is negative. It would be much more accurate to identify Wordsworth as a poet concerned with the movement back and forth between natural and non-natural environments, for in that movement Wordsworth can trace the development of his own poetic sensibilities. The fact that Wordsworth was writing at a time when England itself was being transformed from an agrarian/agricultural to an urban/industrial culture likely has some significant relationship to this central thematic concern of his poetry.

Austen's Pride and Prejudice, iii.14 (or chapter 56)

Here is a late-novel conversation between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Elizabeth Bennet. Lady Catherine has the first lines:

   "I will not be interrupted. Hear me in silence. My daughter and my nephew are formed for each other. They are descended on the maternal side from the same noble line; and, on the father's, from respectable, honourable, and ancient, though untitled families. Their fortune on both sides is splendid. They are destined for each other by the voice of every member of their respective houses; and what is to divide them? The upstart pretensions of a young woman without family, connections, or fortune. Is this to be endured! But it must not, shall not be. If you were sensible of your own good, you would not wish to quit the sphere, in which you have been brought up."
   "In marrying your nephew, I should not consider myself as quitting that sphere. He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal."
   "True. You are a gentleman's daughter. But who was your mother? Who are your uncles and aunts? Do not imagine me ignorant of their condition."
   "Whatever my connections may be," said Elizabeth, "if your nephew does not object to them, they can be nothing to you."

It was once unusual to see Jane Austen in a political context, but passages like this certainly support such a reading. "The Spirit of the Age"—as William Hazlitt and others described the late 18th and early 19th centuries—was in large measure a spirit of revolutionary change. An older aristocratic/monarchic system preserved money, power, and cultural authority in the hands of a few dominant, titled families, and those titles were handed down through the arcane rules of primogeniture from one generation to the next. This was not a system to inspire and reward individual merit—one's place in the social order was determined chiefly by the circumstances of one's birth. The emergent social order, however, tended to emphasize and reward individual merit and individual judgment. It was a more democratic (and capitalistic) social order that allowed for much greater mobility among social classes and that granted some power and cultural authority to persons who did not necessarily belong to established, "respectable" families. In one sense, the political debates of the 1790s that set conservative writers like Edmund Burke against radical/reformist writers like Thomas Paine or Mary Wollstonecraft offer a microcosm of this social, political, and economic sea change.

The passage above is imbued with this debate. For her part, Lady Catherine offers an almost cartoonishly extreme image of the aristocratic concern with family wealth and noble status. She begins with a bald assertion of her sense of cultural authority by issuing a direct command to Elizabeth: "Hear me in silence." She follows with a detailed account of the Darcy/de Bourgh lineage and the further assertion that the "fortune on both sides is splendid." These are powerful aristocratic credentials that are supposed to awe Elizabeth into submission, and, by extension, to assert her own "ancient" rights to power and to keep such bounders as she imagines Elizabeth to be in the "sphere, in which [they] were brought up." Note that there is no place in this system even to recognize any individual merit in a person like Elizabeth. From Lady Catherine's point of view, Elizabeth is of a class that is to be kept in its place. The fact that the marriage that Lady Catherine hopes to encourage between her daughter and her nephew is vaguely incestuous (at least from a twenty-first century vantage perspective) simply underscores the jealously guarded intra-familial relations of the aristocratic system.

Elizabeth, of course, will have none of Lady Catherine's pretensions, though she does adopt a version of the "family heritage" argument. Her first response is to assert the status of her own connections: "I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal," and even Lady Catherine must acknowledge the validity of Elizabeth's claim (though she continues to question the "connections" on Elizabeth's mother's side). Of greater importance, however, is Elizabeth's argmuent that it is the nephew's—Mr. Darcy's—views that count here, not Lady Catherine's: "Whatever my connections may be, if your nephew does not object to them, they can be nothing to you."

Granted, one would not go so far as to claim Austen as a radical reformer, but there is a crucial difference here between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine that mirrors the logic of the political radicals. Lady Catherine's conception of the social order allows no place for individual judgment—everything depends on the historical and financial circumstances into which a person is born. But Elizabeth contends that such general claims of authority based on nothing more than social rank (e.g. Lady Catherine's initial command to Elizabeth) need to be subordinated to the concerns of the individuals involved. If what is at issue is a potential match between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth, it is the prerogative of these individuals to decide their own best interests. The "ancient" aristocratic order is subverted by a new emphasis on individual judgment and individual merit.

The echoes of the socio-political debates of the period are obvious enough in a passage like this that pits the old-guard Lady Catherine against the plucky and self-reliant Elizabeth, and it is clear that the novel favors Elizabeth. This raises a broader question about Austen. Several posts here on Romanticism @ UAB have focused on the revolutionary moment of romanticism. Where exactly would Austen's novel fit into this debate? Does Elizabeth's individualism put her on the side of the radicals? Or do the portrayals of such well-tuned and tasteful estates as Pemberley put her on the side of the conservatives?

Byron's "Don Juan," Canto I, st. 93

In thoughts like these true wisdom may discern
  Longings sublime and aspirations high,
Which some are born with, but the most part learn
  To plague themselves withal, they know not why;
'Twas strange that one so young should thus concern
  His brain about the action of the sky:
If you think 'twas philosophy that this did,
I can't help thinking puberty assisted.

At this point in Byron's hilarious Don Juan, the young eponymous hero has just begun to emerge from his quirky moral education. Juan and the beautiful Donna Julia are falling in love, but Juan recognizes that, because Julia is married, any potential relationship is illicit. Recognizing his danger, Juan tries to distract himself. He wanders in the "leafy nooks" and seeks "self-communion with his own high soul"—Byron's parody of the stereotypical stance of the Romantic Poet (he mentions Wordsworth and Coleridge by name). And Juan tries to distract himself with sublime thoughts about astronomy, philosophy, and "the many bars / To perfect knowledge of the boundless skies." These are examples of the "Longings sublime and aspirations high" in the second line of the stanza quoted above.

Ordinarily we think of such "aspirations high" as motivated by some purely intellectual or spiritual calling. One seeks "perfect knowledge" as an end in itself—that which is beautiful or good or true (to borrow the Platonic trinity) is its own self-justifying end, and such perfection is typically assumed to be an intellectual or spiritual pursuit far removed from and unsullied by the base appetites of an actual physical, sexually interested body. The comedy of Byron's poem depends in part on his linking of the base and physical with the intellectual and spiritual. In the process, the "lofty" or "sublime" becomes a kind of side-effect of thwarted sexual desire—"If you think 'twas philosophy that this did, / I can't help thinking puberty assisted." The supposedly transcendent is brought crashing down to earth with all the slapstick of a dreamy stargazer slipping on a banana peel.

One way to understand what makes Byron's later poetry so funny is to consider a rhetorical figure called a "zeugma." With its origins in the Greek word meaning "yoke" (as one might yoke oxen together to pull a heavy load), "zeugma" has come to mean a yoking together of dissimilar elements. A corny example:

The senator departed for the statehouse, his mind inflamed by lofty principles and cheap bourbon.

Here the "lofty principles" that one might expect from a senator are yoked together with "cheap bourbon"—both are, in fact, parallel objects of the pronoun "by," both are elements that might affect (albeit in very dissimilar ways) the senator's mind. The "lofty principles" are thus brought into a distinctly worldly context and the result, if all goes well, is the reader's knowing laughter. Pretensions are exposed, hypocrisy skewered. Byron's poem often adopts a form of zeugmatic thinking in order to produce its own sort of comedy. In the passage above, for example, poor Juan is himself motivated by both "philosophy" and "puberty"—one lofty and transcendent impulse, the other very physical and worldly. (An instructive exercise, by the way, is to identify passages that seem most likely to inspire the reader's laughter, and then see whether there is some zeugmatic structure involved.)

The point is particularly significant in light of romanticism's preoccupation with the connections between the human/natural world and some supernatural realm beyond (as captured in the title of a classic of romantics criticism from the mid-2000s, M. H. Abrams's Natural Supernaturalism). Byron, in an earlier moment in his career, descibed the condition of humankind as suspended between "dust" and "deity" and thus belonging to neither realm and perpetually discontent. In Manfred, unless one reads the drama as parody, this condition led to a kind of anguished and self-destructive alienation. Here in Don Juan, the "dust" and the "deity" are also linked, but the result now is laughter.

Coleridge's "Eolian Harp" (lines 44-48)

And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversly framed,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

This passage comes from Coleridge's early "Effusion XXXV" (1795) which was later revised and retitled as "The Eolian Harp." The lines present one of the clearest statements anywhere of the pantheistic thinking underlying many of Coleridge and Wordsworth's early poems.

The poem as a whole develops the Eolian harp as an extended metaphor for human/divine relations and the origins of poetic creation. Eolian harps themselves are devices that function something like stinged-instrument versions of wind chimes. They are made of wood fashioned into a shape resembling an elongated hollow box/sounding board with strings stretched lengthwise inside. On either side of the box are holes to let the breeze pass through. The harp is then clasped into a window frame ("and that simplest lute / Placed lengthwise in the clasping casement" [12-13]), and, as the wind blows, the strings vibrate and create the "floating witchery of sound" (20) that here inspires the poet's musings on this otherwise tranquil evening.

For Coleridge, the Eolian Harp becomes a metaphor for human consciousness, especially the consciousness of a perceptive poetic mind. The structure of the metaphor works something like this: The human mind is analogous to the harp itself—well made and finely strung perhaps, but inert and passive unless activated by some external force. Taken literally, this external force is, of course, the breeze that causes the strings of the harp to vibrate; metaphorically this breeze is the flow of visual, auditory, even olfactory perceptions that inspires the thoughts and musings of the perceptive human mind (hence all the descriptive "here and now" detail of the poem's opening verse paragraph.) Following through on the figure, the music produced by an Eolian harp would, metaphorically, refer to those thoughts and musings—including poems like this one—that are produced by human intellectual and creative effort.

It is this line of metaphorical thought (recurrent, as M. H. Abrams and others have shown, in canonical romantic poetry) that explains the romantic fascination with nature in general and natural beauty in particular. Nature presents a beautiful, sometimes awesome, and constantly changing array of perceptions which flow through the attentive and receptive mind of the poet. The resulting poetry—that is, the music produced from the poet's mental "harp"—is thus a joint product of Nature and Mind, the inspiring breeze and the well tuned harp.

There are a number of significant implications of this model of human consciousness and creativity. One involves the (potentially heretical) religious stance of pantheism. As the speaker of Coleridge's poem muses on his current scene and as he develops and contemplates the Eolian harp metaphor, he suddenly generates the speculative question expressed in the passage quoted above. In effect, the speaker expands on the harp metaphor, considering that, if such a structure is applicable to human beings, then why wouldn't the same structure apply to "all of animated nature"? After all, humans are not alone in being equipped with the ability to perceive the natural world around them, so wouldn't cows and fish and foxes and the rest of "animated nature" be similarly harp-like? And further, if all creatures of "animated nature" are essentially "organic Harps diversely framed," then all are animated by the same "intellectual breeze" (the word "intellectual" meaning something like "non-material" or "metaphysical" here—see the commentary on Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"). Human beings and "animated nature" are thus all the instruments of a single metaphysical entity which might here be equated with Nature and which is, in effect, our single collective soul and our God. Though it's important to recognize that Coleridge expresses this idea as a speculative question rather than a philosophical or theological claim, the passage nonetheless stands as a singularly decisive statement of romantic pantheism.

In thinking further about this Coleridgean theology, it would potentially be fruitful to consider the pantheism of the focus passage here in the context of the repudiation that follows immediately thereafter. Why does Coleridge's wife cast a look of "mild reproof" on these speculations, and why does the speaker of the poem acquiesce in this repudiation of "philosophy's aye-babbling spring" (57)?

Another useful comparison would be to see the pantheism of "Eolian Harp" in relation to Blake's condition of Innocence as expressed, for example, in "The Lamb." Both identify a sense of common divinity between human beings, animals, and some inspiring metaphysical force. Does that mean that Blake, too, is a pantheist?

Blake's "London" (lines 1-4)

It's been a few weeks since I've opened my Blake, but he's the first poet I turn to when the semester is over and I have time to collect my better thoughts. I've been struck this week by Blake's epigrammatic writing. It's such remarkably rich poetry that virtually any couplet would serve as the foundation for a fruitful close reading. That said, I've decided to focus this week on the opening quatrain of "London" from the Songs of Experience:

I wander thro' each charter'd street
Near where the charter'd Thames doth flow
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In pointed contrast to the speakers of the Innocence lyrics (see discussion of "The Lamb," for example), the speaker here is embittered, alienated, pessimistic. He "wanders" through an urban landscape rather than through the pastoral scenes of Innocence, and his view of this space reflects the kinds of selfish exclusion and psychological isolation that are characteristic of Experience in general and modern city life in particular. In the first two lines, the repeated adjective "charter'd" underscores this sense. The word refers literally to some preemption for private use—as one might "charter" an aircraft or a bus, taking it out of general public service and using it for some private purpose. In the present case, both urban space ("each charter'd street") and even nature itself ("the charter'd Thames") have been appropriated to some private purpose and are thus not available—at least not available in the same way—to the speaker of the poem.

One might see this as a familiar complaint about urban life—that private property is held and controlled through legal or financial means, and that this fosters a sense of envy or resentment among those, like the speaker of the present poem, who feel themselves excluded. The speaker's analysis becomes even more emphatic in the next lines. Consider the word "mark" that appears three times in the space of two lines. The first instance is a verb, "[I] mark in every face I meet...." The meaning here would be something like "see" or "notice" or "remark," as in the familiar expression "Mark my words!" In the fourth line, "marks" is a noun which means something like "signs." Following through on this reading, a paraphrase of these lines would be "In every person's face I notice signs of weakness and woe." Putting the whole quatrain together, we get the image of a disaffected and unhappy speaker who feels himself excluded from any real connection with both human and natural environments and who sees similar signs of alienation on the faces of everyone else he meets in London. It's a gloomy condition, a classic expression of Blakean Experience.

There may be some truth to this critique of modern urban life (certainly such expressions of alienation are common enough in literature and popular music), but the poem offers also a novel and distinctly Blakean reading of the possible causes of this condition. Suppose we return to that word "mark" in line three, and suppose now we read the word in a different light altogether, as synonymous with "making a mark" (as one might "mark on a paper" or "mark on a chalkboard"). This changes everything. One assumption underlying the paraphrase presented above is that the speaker of the poem functions like a camera, noting and describing what he sees as he "wanders" the streets of London. If we adopt this second way of understanding "mark" however, the speaker-as-camera idea becomes speaker-as-projector. That is, instead of simply recording signs of weakness and woe that we assume are already and unequivocally evident on other people's faces, the speaker actually projects those signs onto the faces of everyone he meets. This is by no means as far-fetched an understanding as it might first appear—after all, reading the expression on someone else's face is a matter of interpretation not simply a recording of fact, and interpretation is inevitably shaped by the state of mind and the purposes of the interpreter. The alienated speaker, in this view, actually creates his own alienating environment, or, more accurately, the environment he describes is as much a projection of his own alienated condition as it is some pre-existent "reality" that he comes upon in his wandering.

Blake says elsewhere (in "The Mental Traveller") that "The eye altering, alters all." The line could be a gloss on this passage from "London"—the environment the speaker perceives is not some stony "reality" that is external to himself; rather, that environment is itself a function of his mode of perception, of his condition of Experience. And this is perhaps the crucial point of Blake's Songs. The poems illustrate, as the subtitle says, the "contrary states of the human soul." Hence, in reading the Songs, our task is not so much to believe the speaker at face value as it is to see the speaker as exemplifying a particular psycho-spiritual condition of Innocence or Experience. That speaker might, as in "The Lamb" for example, feel himself to be at one with both Creation and the Creator, or he might, as in "London," feel himself isolated, bitter, and alienated. The point is not so much to arrive at some true representation of an external reality; rather it is to exemplify how reality itself is a product of the mental condition of the perceiver. In my view, this reading helps explain one of Blake's most famous phrases, the "mind forg'd manacles" that appear in the next stanza of "London"—but I'll leave it to my readers to explain this intriguing phrase.

As always with Blake, the verbal interpretation is only part of the story. To see several different versions of the illustrated page, consult the Blake Archive.