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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. 323. $72.00.
When, as commanded in Revelation, John of Patmos takes the little book from the hand of the angel and eats it, he finds it both sweet in his mouth and bitter in his belly. Though the apocalypse as the ultimate unveiling of the Word of God is the true object of the soul's desire, its absorption in Blake's Bowlahoola, "the Stomach in every individual man," is another matter. "In Bowlahoola," Blake writes in Milton,
Los's Anvils stand & his Furnaces rage; Thundering the Hammers beat & the Bellows blow loud Living self moving mourning lamenting & howling incessantly.
And when, as the type of John of Patmos's eating and digesting, the Biblical Ezekiel is handed a roll of a book and told to eat it, filling his bowels with it, he, like John, finds it sweet as honey in his mouth, though exceedingly bitter in his belly. Bearing the iniquity of the house of Israel in his belly and bowels, he, in a state of continuous siege, lies three hundred and ninety days on his left side and forty days on his right (each day appointed for a year). Dining with Ezekiel in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake, who is having the same problem with his stomach and bowels, asks him why he has eaten dung and lain so long on his right and left sides. "[T]he desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite," Ezekiel replies. As the romantics not surprisingly discovered, digesting the apocalypse was largely a matter of eating dung, which Blake describes as "excrementitious."
Morton Paley's Apocalypse & Millennium in English Romantic Poetry is in some metaphorical sense an examination of the romantic poets' "Stomach for digestion" understood as the digestion of the apocalypse in the form of the millennium. None of them, in Paley's discerning account, had the stomach for it, Byron perhaps least of all, apocalypse in his case "turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips." Of the six poets discussed by Paley, Shelley, he argues, "is the one in whose imagination the millennial played the greatest role," Shelley's Prometheus Unbound remaining for him "the most ambitious and least unsuccessful Romantic attempt to unite apocalypse and millennium." Commenting upon Demogorgon's affirmation of hope as both "suffering woes which [it] thinks infinite" and creating out of that suffering "[f]rom its own wreck the thing it contemplates," Paley remarks: "Yet one must take a very long view indeed to imagine such hope."
Shelley's imagination, however, does not depend upon the "long view." "There is this difference between a story and a poem," Shelley writes in his Defence of Poetry,
that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have...
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