The Sublime (& Skippin' Reels of Rhyme)

A few odds & ends for you as we approach our last class session with the Romantics. First of all, as a kind of footnote to "Ode to a Nightingale": our song of the day on Monday was Buckley's cover of Cohen's "Hallelujah," but it could very well have been Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." For those of you who are so inclined, check out Dylan's lyric and see what you think about this possibly being a folk song version of Keats's ode; it relates that same kind of desperate pursuit of one's muse ("and if you hear vague traces of skippin' reels of rhyme / To your tambourine in time, it's just a ragged clown behind / ... / in the jingle jangle morning I'll come following you").

If any of you want to read that famous (and wonderful) stolen boat episode that I cited (last week?) from Wordsworth's autobiographical poem The Prelude, you can find it here. As he remembers rowing (with exhilaration) out into the lake in the early evening, he looks up to see the mountain (which hadn't been visible from the shore) suddenly looming over him ("growing still in stature the grim shape / Towered up between me and the stars"), which produces trembling and drives him hastily back to his mooring place. This takes us from the realm of sentimental Romanticism (a day by the ocean, a serene sail on the lake, a walk in the sun, dancing with daffodils, etc.) into the realm of the sublime, reminding us that joy can be mingled with fear, exhilaration with doubt and anxiety. Another example, this time from the world of painting, as I showed you in class, might be J.M.W. Turner's The Passage of St. Gothard. In Turner's tight vertical composition, you see an alpine setting that has a dizzying effect (reminding us a little of the descriptions of Nature in "Kubla Khan," or maybe, for some, Gandalf's fall from the bridge at Khazad-dum with the balrog?!), that directs the viewer's eye down to the abyss and produces a sense (perhaps) of vertiginous terror. The sublime, then, involves both aesthetic appreciation but also an anxious confrontation with the savage grandeur of Nature.

Here is Schopenhauer, who, in The World as Will and Representation, distinguishes between two kinds of aesthetic experience, the beautiful and the sublime: "The feeling of the sublime is distinct from the feeling of the beautiful only by virtue of an additional element, namely an elevation above the relationship -- recognized as hostile -- between the object contemplated and the will in general." This "hostility" is "occasioned by the sight of a power that is incomparably superior to the individual and that threatens him with annihilation."