Imagination and Redemption in the Poetry of Blake and Wordsworth
The value they saw in the Imagination and its redemptive powers does not in any way suggest that either poet agreed on the level of commitment each owed to it in their lives and work, for differences do occur in their conceptions of the Imagination and the scope of its powers. In other words, while Blake saw heaven in every wildflower, Wordsworth questioned where spirituality or infinity began and nature left off. Yet, the Imagination and its power to bring clarity to the human condition inspired much of their work, and a full examination of this influence will be needed in order to understand the depth of their poetry.
Both Blake and Wordsworth place a great deal of worth on the Imagination in their poetry and its power to move beyond the commonplace and menial. The objects and imagery in their poems take on a greater significance for their connective universal appeal. For Blake, the world as seen through the Imagination reconciles him to the Infinite. The Imagination perceives the world beyond the sensual details often limited to what we can see, hear, taste, smell. Since spirituality is an abstract, it can not immediately be sensed or realized by the material. Yet, to see beyond the five senses, or what scientists during Blake’s period referred to as Reason (the empirical and analytical processes of perceiving the universe), is to bring one closer to the Infinite.
Blake states this in his poem “There is No Natural Religion”: “1. Man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover” (Stillinger 80). Blake rejects the notion that the world can best be perceived through Reason, and that this in fact inhibits the mind from embracing and assimilating the Imagination within every day perceptive realities. If one is to see that “heaven [is] in a wild flower,” one must be able to see the “Infinite in all things.”
To do so also brings one closer to God. His poem, “The Tyger,” exemplifies the conception of the Divine being in all things. In this poem, Blake marvels over the fact that the same Divine hand which “made the Lamb” also created a dreaded and sublime creature as the Tyger: “What immortal hand or eye/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” (23-24). If God is present in these two contradictory creatures-lamb and tiger-then He can be found anywhere. Empiricists would suggest little similarities between both animals outside the categorizations they have created, but Blake reconciles those differences, which he finds meaningless, through the Imagination. The Tyger and the Lamb are the same because God exists in them both.
Likewise, Wordsworth also believes that the Imagination as a mental faculty reconciles the individual to the Infinite. Yet there are major differences between Wordsworth’s concept of the infinite from Blake’s. Unlike Blake, Wordsworth sees nature as a chief means of separating one from the material to the spiritual. Clearly, in many of Wordsworth’s poems, there is a demarcation between nature as it is perceived in reality and the “spirit of nature,” which is the divinity found in nature. Whereas Blake sees “heaven is in a wildflower,” Wordsworth believes that heaven could be reached through nature. In this sense, heaven is a conduit for deeper, spiritual matters, but not necessarily the Divine itself. In his poem, “Lines Written in Early Spring,” he harks subtly on this demarcation when he writes “[t]o her fair works did Nature link/The human soul that through me ran;” (250).
Here, Nature’s fair works, its flora and fauna, which he lists within the poem, retain an integrity that Blake would not immediately recognize. Rather, nature, like “the human soul,” contain within them a conduitive aspect of the Infinite, linking both nature and the human soul to heaven. In most of his poems, nature acts as this conduit not only to link him to the Infinite, but to memories as well. In the poem “Tintern Abbey,” or “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” nature’s power, its beauty, and spirituality, sends the poet on reveries of past memories of pleasure and yearning. The Imagination thus takes on an infinite timelessness in which past and present reconcile themselves in memory. In “Tintern Abbey,” Blake conveys this sense of the Infinite:
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. (43-49).
Whereas Blake recognized immediately the spirit in “the life of things,” Wordsworth sees the “life of things” only when he is removed from the “corporeal frame” to become “a living soul,” thus opening himself to the Imagination. Nature plays a significant role in the poem for the transformation to take place. Wordsworth wanders through an abbey he visited years before, taking in the scenery with an almost detached, observational tone until “[t]hese beauteous forms” brings him to the “tranquil restoration” in which this change from the corporeal to the Infinite occurs. Here, Wordsworth suggests that the Imagination exists within the suspension of time, between the past and present and can only be gotten to through nature’s tranquil powers.
Blake may disagree, for he believes that the Imagination exists in all things and not simply in the mind, where memories or even the perception of time are “mind-forg’d manacles.” Despite this difference, Blake and Wordsworth do share one common belief over the redemptive powers of the Imagination and its influence in both their poetry. Both poets see the Imagination as the antithesis of modern values. Blake addresses this in “There Is No Natural Religion,” when he writes “The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels” and “[I]f any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot”(81). Blake’s poems such as “London” and “The Chimney Sweeper” address the dispiriting affects modernism has on the Imagination. As he writes in “London,” the inhabitants of the city are enslaved by those “mind-forg’d manacles” which embraces “the Chimney-sweeper’s cry” and the corruption of the Church (9-12). The City, with its emphasis on the material, are far astray from the Infinite.
His poems in “Songs of Innocence,” play on Wordsworth’s idea that the child is the father of man. These poems express the redemptive power of the Imagination, which comes easily and more powerfully to the child than the adult.
In “The Chimney Sweeper,” the Imagination offers hope amid the squalid conditions of children forced into the dangerous livelihood. Tom, a child sweeper, has a dream in which he is visited by an angel who reveals to him a vision of heaven, in which all the chimney sweepers are set free from their burdens.
The vision, spurred on by the child’s Imagination, enables him to endure the treacherous life in which he is forced to lead. While the poem can also double as a rebuke against the practice of kidnapping children and forcing them to work in this dangerous industry, it also offers redemptive hope: “Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;” (23). The fact that this harsh and stark vision of these children’s lives is included in “The Songs of Innocence” offers a clue as to Blake’s own attitudes toward the Imagination and its value. The child’s innocence, its ability to fully embrace the Imagination and thus the Infinite, has a value that counters the brutal and dulling realities of modern, industrial life.
Wordsworth also sees redemption not only in the Imagination but the child’s embrace of that Imagination. In “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” Wordsworth remarks on how a child’s perception of nature contrasts greatly with that of an adult. “My heart leaps up,” from which the line “the Child is the father of the Man” comes, also reveals the continuity in which one must engage if one is to be “Bound each to each by natural piety” (9), or to continuously see the “life in all things” from childhood to maturation. Yet, the same dulling affects of the modern industrial world severs the adult from his child-like receptibility of the Imagination. Wordsworth addresses this in poems “Lines Written in Early Spring” and “The Tables Turned.” In “Lines,” Wordsworth remarks that he is unable to enjoy the pleasure of a wooded grove because he is preoccupied with “[w]hat man has made of man.”
Blake, like many Romantics, believed that rational thought inhibited the Imagination. Thinking, in this case, about man-made constructs (Industrialism, modernism) has an inhibitive affect on his ability to be swept away by nature, thus cutting him off from the Imagination and the Infinite. He addresses this further in “The Tables Turned” when he writes that the intellect “[M]is-shapes the beauteous forms of things:/We murder to dissect” (27-28). Rationality is destructive, but the Imagination, as both Blake and Wordsworth believe, redeems humanity from itself, frees it from its own self interests (or as Blake writes “[h]e who sees the Ratio only sees himself only” [81]) and brings it closer to its true, spiritual or even child-like self.
Yet, both Blake and Wordsworth’s conceptualizations of the Imagination and its redemptive powers leave little room for any other values or concepts that do not embrace their own. Even Blake disagrees greatly with Wordsworth’s opinions. Blake sees God in all things, but does not consider that rationality or the senses could have been God-derived as well. After all, if God is in all things, is He not present even in things that Man creates? Even Blake suggests as much when he writes: “The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite” (81). Wordsworth likewise comes perilously close to justifying even rationalizing the evils of the world through his obsession with nature and the Infinity. In the poem, “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth makes note of the “vagrant dwellers” who have camped at the abbey, but later writes:
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:-” (36-41)
Here, Wordsworth seems to suggest that poverty or the “burdens” of the modern, industrial world is something from which he must escape in order to be fully redeemed by the Imagination. Wordsworth doesn’t address those burdens, but rather ignores them in his quest to find spiritual communion with all of natural, living things. But one might argue though that in order for Wordsworth, or Blake for that matter, to embrace the Infinite, then they must leave behind that material squalor which they believed dragged down humanity, as Blake suggests in his poem “London.” However one reads their particular conceptions, both Blake and Wordsworth see poetry as more than mere entertainments, but a means to deliver one to a higher spiritual calling. Through poetry, humanity is redeemed by the Imagination.
