"Wandering" in Poetic Imagery and Structure

By Julian Scutts, Student

This essay explores reasons for the appeal of the verb "to wander" to the poetic mind

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Intertextuality and the Single Verb: Part II


If any one verb were be described as the Poet's favourite verb, "to wander" and its close counterpart in German "wandern" would probably head the list in the realm of English and German poetry. Rather than debate whether this choice of verb is justified, we do well to investigate the phenomenon of "wandering" with close reference to actual occurrences of the verbs in their poetic contexts. In some of their most famous poems Goethe and the German Romantics lent great prominence to a substantive derived from "wandern" when placing the word "Wanderer" in the titles of such poems as "Wandrers Nachtlied" or "Der Wandrer", There are many instances of the declined verbs "to wander" and "wander" which tend to escape critical comment altogether. The effects created by the use of these verbs are pervasive rather than immediately striking.
In his study "The Image of the Wanderer in Goethe's poetry" Professor Willoughby has claimed that the "image" referred to in the title of his article pervades Goethe's dramatic and poetic works, even informing the entire structure of the lengthy dramas Faust Part I and Faust Part II. (1) To my mind the idea of such an all-pervading image is almost a self-contradiction. After all, the literary term of "image" is itself an image or Metaphor. In the sense defined by Ezra Pound a poetic "image" is unique and hence incapable of reduplication. Such an image produces a mental picture which can be apprehended in a single act of perception, as with the perception of an object in real life. Indeed, "the image of the wanderer" sets against the expectation of discovering the crisp contours of an object or an intense vision the diffuse and vague associations of "wandering", which in any case denotes an action or abstraction rather than a visible or tangible entity. However, I believe it is still meaningful to speak of "the image of the wanderer" if one reflects on the relation between words found in a passage of poetry or literary prose and the work, or even body of works, which constitute their context in a wider sense
In this study we shall consider occurrences of the words "wandering" and "wander" and set them in their immediate context, that is to say as part of the sentence or passage in which they are found, and then view their wider implications for the work or body or works which constitute their wider environment. There follows a synopsis of my main argument.
In literature the words based on the verb "to wander" have two basic aspects, the first I term "Epic", the other "structural". In the first case, these words conjure up entire stories, usually based on symbolic figures such as Cain, the Wandering Jew or a pilgrim in search of a divinely appointed goal. In the second, they imply a principle of structuration involving the deeper movements of the soul, the imagination or the subconscious. It is primarily for this reason that poets identified themselves as "wanderers". I also believe it to be no accident that the word "Wanderer" enjoyed the greatest use and significance in the Romantic Period, when poets and philosophers began to recognize the nature of what we now understand as the subconscious and the collective unconscious. I hope to show that this contrast of the two aspects of "wandering" occurs both within the context of a single sentence and with that supplied by the word's environment in the literary work in which it is located, and beyond that in literary sources to which it alludes , ultimately reflecting, perhaps, a duality that underlies the operations of the human mind itself.


CASE 1 TO BEGIN WITH THE BEGINNING
A Word in Context


All eminence, and distinction, lies out of the beaten road; excursion, and deviation, are necessary to find it, and the more remote your path from the highway, the more reputable; if, like poor Gulliver (of whom anon) you fall into a ditch, on your way to glory.

Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition


My way is to begin with the beginning;
The regularity of my design
Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning.

Lord Byron, Don Juan

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A Contrast of a structural and narrative Implication of the same Word

"Ironic, of course," remarks Frank D. Connell, the Editor of a critical selection of Byron's poetry, (2) with reference to the lines in Don Juan cited above. But "ironic" in what sense? If Irony consists in saying one thing and meaning another, we might understand the lines to imply that "wandering" and "the beginning" are closely linked in the author's mind. Possibly, but why is the statement so obviously ironic? No definition of "wandering" according to a dictionary points unequivocally to a connection between "wandering" and references to origins. Let us consider which of the usual meanings of "wandering" "fits the context" of the lines from Don Juan cited above.
"Wandering" here is not to be understood in the sense of physical motion. In terms of the word's immediate contextual setting it refers to what the speaker ostensibly intends to avoid, a failure to present certain items of subject matter in an orderly and strictly chronological manner.
The speaker announces his intention of beginning his account of Juan's life by informing his readers about Juan's parentage in a manner consistent with "the regularity of his design". Even so, it is remarkable that he disparages "wandering" as "the worst of sinning". As though even the most censorious of preceptors would go so far as to discern in some badly organised term paper evidence of gross moral turpitude! It is not out of the ordinary for a person to use "wandering" as a Synonym for immoral behaviour or, in a different context, as a reference to incoherent or illogical self-expression. Byron, however, contrasts both these meanings of "wandering" within the space of the three lines of verse cited above. In so doing he displays the poet's proclivity to play with words. Is this merely indulging in a triviality? Let us consider the word "wandering" within the context of Don Juan. Are there other passages in this work in which "wandering" is associated with "sinning" or "beginning"?
A reference to "sinning" suggests some item of epic content. Sinning implies the existence of sinners and sinners form the basis of a story. There in are hints pointing to the nature of the story in question. Beginning and parentage could pose an allusion to mankind's first parents, and there is a notable passage in Don Juan which includes several occurrences of the verb to "wander" and explicit allusions to Milton's version of the story of Adam and Eve. The verb "to wander" (in declined form) occurs three times in the passage describing the shore-side walk taken by Juan and Haidée, the prelude of their sexual and a spiritual union (Canto the Second The first line of Stanza CLXXXII).
The words "And forth they wandered, her sire being gone" imply that the young couple took advantage of the temporary absence of paternal surveillance. The lovers' walk with its sequel recalls Milton's version of the events that led to Adam and Eve falling from grace, a connection that becomes explicit from what we read at the end of the eighty-ninth stanza, for here it is asserted that first love is "that All / Which Eve has left her daughters since the Fall". In the ninety-third stanza we find reference to "our first parents". Like them Juan and Haidée ran the risk of "being damned for ever". Consciously or unconsciously (in my view probably the former), Byron was influenced by Milton's use of "to wander" in a passage in Paradise Lost in which there is an altercation between Adam and Eve about Eve's yielding to what Adam terms her "desire of wandering". Eve reminds Adam of this choice of words referring to her "will / Of wandering, as thou call'st it" (IX. 1145,1146). Shortly we shall consider another passage revealing Milton's particular interest in the word" to wander".

Byron not only betrays interest in that aspect of Milton's description of Eve's walk though Paradise that concerns "sinning", which for Byron inevitably had a strong sexual connotation. Byron's reference to "sinning" is at one level little more than a puerile jibe at certain attitudes towards sexual mores. Byron's description of Haidée and Juan walking along the shore also captures that sensuous and even voluptuous element in the Miltonic description of a walk that culminated in Eve's emotional a seduction by the serpent (who approaches his quarry with a mariner's skill). Both Milton's description of Eve's walk and Byron's treatment of the scene culminating in the lovers' union of Haidée and Juan inculcate a sense of unity expressing a sublimated form of sexual or libidinal energy, perhaps of a kind that psychologists of the Freudian or Jungian schools believe to be the mainspring of all human creativity. Miltonic influence in the respect just indicated also leaves a trace in the final passage in Shelley's Epipsychidion describing a walk that leads to a lovers' union. Significantly, this passage is introduced by the verb "to wander".
Let us consider another way in which "wandering" and "beginning" are related to each other in Don Juan, and indeed in Byron's other long poem incorporating his travels. An occurrence of the verb "to wander" is juxtaposed to a reference to the Muse in the Dedication to Don Juan and again in the first Strophe of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. In the eighth stanza of the Dedication, the speaker refers to himself as one "wandering with pedestrian Muse" in contrast to Southey depicted as one seated on a winged steed. In the tenth stanza the evocation of Milton is not merely hinted at, for the speaker alludes to a passage in Paradise Lost in which there is a clear reference to Pegasus and "wandering" conflating the word's associations with poetic inspiration and disorientation.


Up led by thee
Into the Heav'n of Heav'ns I have presumed,
An Earthly Guest, and drawn Empyreal Air,
Thy temp'ring, with like safety guided down
Return me to my Native Element
Lest from this flying steed unrein'd, (as once


Bellephoron, though from a lower Clime)
Dismounted, on th'Aleian Field I fall
Erroneous, there to wander and forlorn (12-20)



Again, as in the dispute between Eve and Adam, the word " wander" is foregrounded, here in a brief exercise in comparative philology. Milton recalls the original meaning of "erroneous" in the light of its derivation from errare in Latin (to stray, to wander). Similarly Aleian means "land of wandering" in Greek. In this passage Milton seems to anticipate the crisis in modern poetry centring on the nature of poetic inspiration and the identity of the poet.
From a Puritan's point of view it was perhaps somewhat risqué of Milton to have identified the Holy Spirit as the Heav'nly Muse in the opening lines of Paradise Lost. In that context Milton could hardly dwell on the feminine qualities of the Muse, and only hints at this in his reference to the Spirit brooding "dove-like" over the "vast Abyss" from which Creation came into being. The dove is of course an established symbol for the Holy Spirit. Milton was not in any case strictly orthodox on the question of the Trinity and the personal or non-personal nature of the Holy Spirit.(3) The conflation of the biblical Holy Spirit and the classical Muse springs from Milton' overall strategy of merging Hebrew and classical traditions, and the mental orientations they typify, when creating Paradise Lost.


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CASE 2: "WANDERING HUMAN THOUGHT"


Lexical Coloration considered in the Light of the Author's Epoch


Ahasuerus in Shelley's Queen Mab

The Fairy waved her wand
Ahasuerus fled
Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist,
That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove,
Flee from the morning beam:
The matter of which dreams are made
Not more endowed with actual life
Than this phantasmal portraiture
Of wandering human thought.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab, VII, 267-275.

The lines quoted above refer to Ahasuerus, "the Wandering Jew", that legendary figure whose haunting presence is revealed throughout Romantic poetry and even beyond. Though this legend is of ancient origin, it acquired a fresh significance during and even before the Romantic period. A poem concerning the Wandering Jew appeared in Percy's Reliques in 1765, heralding an epoch in which the figure became a central motif in a number of celebrated poems. In some of these, allusions to Ahasuerus are explicit, as in the case of Shelley's Queen Mab and Hellas, of Byron's reference to this figure as "the Hebrew Wanderer" in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and of Goethe's "Der Ewige Jude" ("The Eternal Jew"). In others, a reference to the legend is at most inferable. H. Hartman sees in the Ancient Mariner a transfiguration of the Wandering Jew. According to this critic's analysis the Mariner or Wandering Jew epitomises the modern poet in the process of striving to make the transition from self-consciousness to the imagination. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" does not contain the word "Wanderer" but it does contain a word associated with the legend of the Wandering Jew, namely "cross", which draws itself as a word with deep symbolic significances through Repetition. in a manner noted by J. Tynjanov. In Queen Mab the association of "cross" and "wander" is evident in lines recalling incident to which the curse placed on Ahasuerus is attributed in the early legend.


In the following case study the investigation begins with the identification of what J. Tynjanov termed "lexical coloration", i.e. when a number of different meanings of a word become apparent simultaneously, here in references to the legend of the Wandering Jew, namely "cross", which draws itself as a word with deep symbolic significances through repetition. in a manner noted by J. Tynjanov. In Queen Mab the association of the Crucifixion and "wander" is evident in these lines recalling the curse placed on Ahasuerus in t early legend.

But thou shalt wander o'er the unquiet earth. (VII, 182).

The next time the word "wander" occurs in Queen Mab (see the lines VII, 267-275 quoted at the top of this section) the immediately apparent sense of the word conforms to current usage, as in the case of one saying "my mind was wandering". To this extent the previous association "wandering Jew" is supplanted or - in Tynjanov's terms "displaced" - by a sense associating Ahasuerus with a mental phenomenon, a state of mind akin to that expressed in the works of an entire generation of poets that included Goethe and the Romantics in that process Harold Bloom has identified as the "internalization of the quest Romance". Wanderers, particularly wanderers of biblical or religious origin (Cain, the Pilgrim, the Prodigal Son), came to exemplify what we would now call psychological phenomena, particularly those influenced by the operation of the subconscious. Indeed, in Jungian terms, Ahasuerus is a symbol of nothing less than the repressed consciousness of Western Man.
In the case we have just considered we note a contrast between the traditional and (from Shelley's point of view) modern associations of the verb "to wander". We note this contrast when taking account of the progression noted in the process of reading the text, for the reference to "wandering" thought follows the occurrence of the verb referring to the curse imposed on Ahasuerus at Calvary.
We appreciate the new significance of "wandering" not only from considering the aspect of textual progression, which is an "internal" phenomenon. By comparing occurrences of the verb "to wander" in poems by all Romantic poets we gain corroboration of the fact that the verb "to wander" reflects a new recognition of a collective and contemporary psychological phenomenon affecting the poetry of an entire generation of writers. There is no radical separation of the word's "internal" and "external" scope of reference, a point constantly emphasized by J. Tynjanov and other exponents of Russian Formalism. (4)



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ANNOTATIONS:




.1. L.A. Willoughby, "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry", (Etudes Germaniques, 3, Autumn 1951).

2. Byron' Poetry, A Norton Critical Edition (New York, 1978).

3. William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex, Cambridge (Mass. and London, 1983).

4. Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse", in Readings in Russian Poetics" in Readings in Russian Poetics / Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. by Ladislav Mateijka and Krystina Pomorska (Michigan Slavic Publications, Ann Arbor, 1978), pp. 136-145