Finding Reality

The Pursuit of Protean Graveyard and Romantic Poets

One of the central ideas in Buddhism is to strip away the illusions of life and hold to reality. The Dalai Lama explains that in Buddhism, consciousness and reality could be split into roughly two categories: sensory and linguistic. The first is associated with the “engagement with objects direct and unmediated,” or essentially an aesthetic, sensory reaction without interpretation or reaction from the observer. However, the second form of consciousness in this division is associated with “cognitive engagement” where the world “mediated via language” expresses judgements often creating “our distorted way of understanding the world” and “confusion in our mind” (8-9). Thus, in order to “cultivate the genuine desire to seek freedom” from suffering is to break from “conditioned existence” and “seek complete liberation from cyclic existence” through the “recognition of this form of suffering” (13); people are conditioned into a cycle of judgment that feels automated but ultimately distorts reality and creates suffering. These Buddhist ideas echo common literary divisions and critical perspectives such as Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism or Lacan’s Symbolic Order. For Derrida, “language mediates our experience of ourselves and the world… language is wholly ideological: it consists entirely of the numerous conflicting, dynamic ideologies” (Tyson 253). Those ideologies, for Lacan, are representative of the “Symbolic Order,” a set of social constructs that provides a set of “meaning-making” blueprints that creates a separation from the “intimate union we experience with our mother” (29). Thus, the Symbolic Order and the “world of language” is a world of “loss and lack,” where the illusion of “fulfillment and control” from the earlier stages of our lives are in direct conflict with the world of “needs, desires, and fears that limit the ways in which and the extent to which we can attend to our own needs, desires, and fears” (30).

These three perspectives, juxtaposed, create an interesting picture for humanity: humanity is enslaved by the automation of urban life, lost in their search for some knowledge that will provide comfort in their temporality and insignificance and endlessly molded by the societal constructs that mediate how they perceive everything. These aspects of humanity also offer an exigence to the creations of the genre ‘Graveyard Poetry’ and lay the groundwork for the imagery, philosophy, and motivations of the poets themselves. The poets then laid the groundwork for the Romantic movement, differences that (when critically analyzed) seem minute or inconsequential when approached from the broader context of the poems’ purposes. In essence, Graveyard poets attempted to strip away the illusions of their social orders and attain some truth, a truth that is associated with the confrontation of death and the freedom allied with actualizing their lives. Their pursuit and acknowledgement of death as an inevitability is usually an optimistic one, much like the acknowledgement of suffering in Buddhism is optimistic. It is a practical attempt to reframe the limitations of language and society’s structures in an attempt to give meaning to readers confronted with the abyss of death; to gain reinforcement from hope, if not then resolution from despare (Milton 1.190-1). This exact emphasis on optimism and the reliance on aesthetic elements then influenced the romantic movement, with poems such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Mont Blanc ranking with significant familiarity when compared with the poets Thomas Parnell, James Thomson, and Tomas Warton, some respective ‘Graveyard poets’ that preceded him. 

Wandering Wings above Darkness

Since the premise of this argument is enclosed around the genre of Romanticism, it’s important to establish certain trends in the romantic era first and proceed into the annals of literary history. The term ‘romantic’ as it applies to literature comes from the German poet Friedrich Schlegel, who defined this movement of literature as “literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form.” From there, critics expanded the definition and shades of romanticism to include a focus on subjectivity, “emphasis on individualism” and “spontaneity,” a rebellious attitude toward norms and forms (as established by intellectualism and industrialism), and reflection in solitude (Morner). The Romantic genre classification is so broad that it is naturally plagued with inconsistencies regarding definitions and authorial classifications, but this definition does provide a general guideline to ground this exploration.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Mont Blanc could be considered the quintessential British romantic poem. Published a century after some of the poets covered later in this essay, Shelley’s piece uses the aesthetic gravity and insurmountable vastness to contemplate the “source of human thought” and its “tribute” to the everlastingness of Mont Blanc’s power. Juxtaposing his consciousness against the seeming eternity of mountains, he contemplates the “still and solemn power of many sights, / And many sounds, and much of life and death.” It’s a poem expressing the vastness and longevity of non-human existence only to be interpreted by the vastness and eternity of the internal mind. Shelley concludes: “And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, / If to the human mind’s imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy?” Despite the limitations of human existence, Shelley places incredible importance on the power of the imagination to interpret and claim the grandeur of Mont Blanc because it is not appreciated otherwise. To Shelley and Mont Blanc, humanity is a spec of dust, lost in the “secret chasms” and “vales” of the “majestic River” of experience and imagination, inconsequent and insignificant except for its ability to comprehend its insignificance and temporality. In essence, the acknowledgement of insignificance is significant, and the swelling of poetic interpretation is an expression of the mountainous eternity of Mont Blanc and the mind; they, and humanity, are unified in the boundless experience of poetic expression. 

These sentiments are fitting for Romanticism, which emerged from the “epistemological crisis” and response to Hume’s empiricism (Schey 53). Romantics were interested in “reclaiming ‘the great outdoors’” and bridging humanity with nature in a time humanity was desperately attempting to separate itself from it; increasing scientific progress and empiricism attempted to frame humanity as separate from nature (54). Shelley’s response was to introduce skepticism, uncertainty, and insignificance. Skepticism “can be seen only as a failure” for the epistemological framework of an empiricist (58), yet Shelley placed increasing significance on the insignificance and skepticism of man. Despite the heavy ontological focus in Mont Blanc, the poem ultimately leads readers to focus on “the claims Shelley ‘would like to make’ rather than of the ones he does make” (60), emphasizing the limitations of language and poets to express any empirical truth besides the limitations of truth being expressed at all. It was an expression of the “fundamental shift in Western attitudes” from empirical thought and an attempt to emerge a new consciousness belligerent to nationalism, the rise of urbanism, and to explore “what it means to be a human being” as the shifts of society forced people to grasp with their significance and place in a growing society (Cooksey).

Applied to the guiding framework established earlier in this paper, Shelley’s Mont Blanc represents the Lacanian notions of the missing ‘other,’ the objet petit a, and object of certainty and comfort for a person’s psychology (the object filling the role being Mont Blanc); it’s an optimistic exploration into the Buddhist split of consciousness where the sensory and interpretive qualities of consciousness interact to create meaning for the poet and reader; it’s a piece deconstructing empirical thought, simultaneously asserting insignificance and significance. Shelley maintains, above all, optimism in the face of insignificance and vulnerability and uses the “wandering wings” of poetry to “float above thy darkness”; the fears and insecurities that these thoughts would elicit in an empirical mind. Yet, all these expressions were preceded by Graveyard poets that, when confronted with their respective ‘Mont Blancs,’ were pushed to undertake a similar poetic trajectory.

A King of Poetic Fears

Thomas Parnell, an Irish poet, requests that his readers “Think, mortal, what is it to die” in A Night-Piece on Death. Parnell acknowledged the influence of classical literature that preceded him and the influence of Milton (Carpenter 163). With the help of Alexander Pope, A Night-Piece on Death was published posthumously in 1722. His piece is representative of Graveyard poetry that contains “the gloomy atmosphere, funereal imagery, sweet melancholy, and the pondering of life's transience and divine purpose.” Parnel chose to ignore deconstructing or criticizing the structure of graveyard poet’s tropes: monologuing, the liminal hour, solitary reflection, or prosody (Hahn). Instead, Parnell stayed within the genre in order to emphasize the aesthetic elements that trigger internal epiphanies and reactions. 

Parnell’s speaker takes a journey around the “flat smooth stones” and “marble tombs” that create contemplation. His thought process is indicative of T. S. Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’; the external grave stones, tombs, and mounds prompt the internal meditations that Parnell’s speaker explores. The speaker requests this stimuli by abandoning his studying in order to walk in the physicality and aesthetics of a graveyard: “No more I waste the wakeful night, / Intent with endless view to pore / The schoolmen and the sages o’er.” It’s a provocation of academia and the limitations of the imagination to find answers without the influence of external elements. He uses a synecdoche with the “steeple” that “guides [the] doubtful sight” of the speaker among the “livid gleams of night,” indicating a strong religious presence common in Graveyard poetry. The speaker goes into extensive detail regarding the “pillars” that swell and the “sculptured stones,” graves filled with the bones of men “senseless of the fame they give” and the entire journey is a complete contrast to the actions of the first stanza where the speaker insults the intense focus of studiousness on death within books. 

In essence, Parnell seems to be attacking the approach to understand spirituality and death through the learning and studying of books. Instead, Parnell elevates a first-hand, physical confrontation and meditation on mortality. His approach echoes the romantics that follow him as he seemingly uses the external to wash and bathe his emotional and internal existence; the gravestones create emotional waves in Parnell like Mont Blanc does in Shelley. There is also a split consciousness indicative of the Buddhist consciousness mentioned earlier in this paper, where the external aesthetic world exists then the individual and their imagination imposes an interpretation onto it. The gravestones and graves exist “senseless of the fame they give” and are “nameless,” yet they “heave the crumpled ground” and are quick to “disclose / Where Toil and Poverty repose.” In essence, language is a mediating force that expresses their decay, poverty, fame, and faded existence and the reality simply exists outside of human interpretation. As Parnell composes his lines, he is attempting to bridge both of his consciousnesses with language mediating the divide.

Parnell’s poem ponders consciousness and existence in a similar manner as Shelley’s Mont Blanc: What are thou, and gravestones, and lakes, and burdened trees, if the human mind resorts to vacancy? However, Parnell phrases the question with a ‘voice’ of death. Death provides its own exigence: “Death’s but a path that must be trod, / If man would ever pass to God.” Parnell uses this voice (albeit when the ravens “cease [their] croaking din”) to shift a paradigm on life and associate it with the “rough rage of swelling seas” and a prison sentence (in the final stanza) that ends with a “blaze of day,” seemingly an optimistic light seen at death. In other words, Parnell decides to shift to a positive and productive view on life by associating it with the release of years and force readers to think “what it is to die” from an optimistic perspective. 

As a whole, it could be argued that Parnell makes “an elegant and thoughtful contribution to the genre of poems about writing” (Carpenter 166) in A Night-Piece on Death, too. From this perspective, Parnell seems to be chasing an illusory concept incapable of being expressed in language itself. Instead of attempting to close his poem with some epiphany or insight, Parnell divests his poetic privilege as a speaker to a representation of death, having it conclude that death can act as a “blaze of day” for those suffering from “years they waste.” There is a fractured inability for language to convey the meaning that Parnell wishes to express, however grounded the imagery may be, and the fear of death reigns as a “great King” that gifts the “glitt’ring sun” to souls that have had “their suffering years” served in the seeming prison sentence of life.

Tempestuous Thomson

In 1730, a Scottish poet from Ednam had a 5,541-line poem published and circulated in Britain. Upon publication, The Seasons earned Thomson acclaim and “household” status as a poet that reintroduced “nature as a subject for poetry and created vivid word pictures of sublime landscapes and rural scenes” (Stevenson 124). Growing up, James Thomson was requested by a professor to read a psalm about the glory and power of God. That professor praised it highly but recommended that Thomson “keep a stricter rein upon his imagination, and express himself in language more suited to ordinary understandings” (Radcliffe 141). As an adult, he completed his epic poem The Seasons that attempted to show how “the precious freedom [Scottsmen and the English] enjoy may be lost or preserved in its primitive purity to the remotest ages” (152).  Whether or not his place among the Graveyard poets is fixed seems to depend on which section of The Seasons is discussed or how various authors are placed among the Romantic, Victorian, Augustan, or other miscellaneous categories. Some scholars, such as Amelia Worsley, place James Thomson among the “Lonely Poets” in crisis, poets “particularly attracted to loneliness and lonely places” (12) that create a “tension between desire and fear” by relying on “lonely spaces [that produce] both freedom and danger-both lament and refusals of language” (130). Regardless, the murky classification of James Thomson only furthers my claims and bridges the importance and influence of his work on the Romantic era and the broad relevance of his writing.

“Winter” seems to encompass the most desolate, violent, and chaotic imagery that allows this section of The Seasons to be placed alongside other Graveyard poetry without much hesitation. Much like Parnell, Thomson draws attention to the desolate and powerful scenes of winter that bring “solemn thought.” He emphasizes the strength of a raging tempest where “Long groans are heard, shrill sounds, and distant sighs”; a powerful vortex “bids the world prepare” and drives “anchor’d navies from their stations.” Nature, as Thomson expresses it, begins to become a force in itself capital. It is almost Hellenic as it is no longer an expression of earthly aesthetic existence or an extension of God, but a separate force that requires “Nature’s King” to subdue its destructive forces. Thomson’s tempest begins rather early in the piece as winter “Falls” with “A heavy gloom oppressive.” A voice, seemingly the voice of Nature and a possible extension of God, “bids the world prepare” as the air “hurls… Down in a torrent.” The “ethereal force” spreads a brine that “seems o’er a thousand raging waves to burn.” It is Nature (capitalized) “loosen’d” into a tempestuous reign that can only be subdued until “Nature’s King,” a Christian God, “commands a calm.” Eventually, Winter and Nature reign “tremendous o’er the conquer’d year,” with “Horror wide,” pushing the speaker to view the death and melancholy in its wake and submit to the “Father of light and Life!” Thomson requests that God “teach me what is good! Teach me Thyself!” which consequently undermines the call for submission to ecclesiastical institutions as God can ostensibly convey his message through his interaction and control of Nature directly.

Yet, Thomson doesn’t end the poem in desolation and despair. Instead, much in the fashion of his peers, he focuses on the optimism and the paradigm-shifting nature of observing such incredible power. The speaker eventually shakes “off th’ intrusive cares of day, / And lay the meddling senses all aside,” evidently using the incredible chaos and power to place himself in a submissive position to God and his environment. He places himself in the position of a student and requests to be saved “from folly, vanity, and vice” and to be induced with “conscious peace, and virtue pure, / Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!” The incredible power of nature forces him to rethink his own arrogance and place himself at the mercy of God. To Thomas, this submission is essential to bear the “keener tempests” that come; an armor to battle the “raging year” and rigours of Winters of life (literal and figurative). 

Furthermore, Thomson suggests a cyclical nature of suffering and happiness: “The storms of wintry time will quickly pass, / And one unbounded Spring encircle all.” These closing lines and the seasonal focus in the poem reflects the traditions of Shakespeare and authors before him (Spring and Summer equate with life; Fall and Winter, death). The element that separates Thomson from other Graveyard poets (such as Robert Blair) is his emphasis of Nature as its own element. For Robert Blair, nature is a direct extension of God, something that when studied can create Faustian horrors: “Death only lies between a Gloomy path! / Made yet more gloomy by our coward fears!” (689-90).  However, Thomson doesn’t not end this section of his poem with a sermon or call to God’s submission, but affirms a capitalized Nature as its own being with its four primary moods shifting independently, though guided by God when needed. This conceptualization of Nature and God fits well with Romantic practices, too, as the explicit, ecclesiastical nature of 18th century poetry is often abandoned to feature Nature at the forefront in The Seasons.

The poem feels particularly Shelleyan when the language attempted to express the wintery scene is scrutinized. Thomson writes:

“And ev’n reluctant party feels a while

Thy gracious power, as through the varied maze

Of eloquence, now smooth, now quick, now strong,

Profound and clear, you roll the copious flood.”

In Mont Blanc, Shelley’s opening lines reflect the phrasing, tone, and theme:

“The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—

Now lending splendour, where from secret springs

The source of human thought its tribute brings

Of waters—with a sound but half its own…”

Both stick to the irrefutable power of mutability (another Shelley poem) and push the reader to shudder at their own inconsequential and temporal existence. The repeated, short phrases beginning with “now” bridge their syntactical structures and the “copious flood” of Thomson’s thought reflects much of the “secret springs” of Shelley.

W. B. Hutchings’s argument for the sequential nature of poetry (using Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s explanation of the nacheinander) brings the pieces even closer thematically. While paintings are consumed simultaneously (each aspect of the painting being absorbed by the observer at the same time), poetry is, by necessity, sequential (the nacheinander) and must be consumed a stride at a time. Hutchings explains that this consequence “draws attention, not to the object described, but to the person (or the words) doing the describing” (37), creating a limitation in the creation of consciousness for the poet. In essence, Thomson’s work is a continual act of suspense and anticipation for the reader as the scene unfolds itself within the limitations of consciousness; humanity lives a temporal, sequential existence. A reader’s imagination creates a third dimension to the work consequently making it “a work of art and not reality: it is the work of art’s plausibility, not identity, as a version of reality that creates the power which stimulates our imagination” (46). The nature of poetry is succession (46), thus Thomson’s poetry (particularly The Seasons) is an act of anticipation and the stimulation of the imagination and not necessarily a representation of the descriptive aesthetic truths he observed and he described. Thomson, in essence, provides an “impression” of nature that the reader is to react to and react to imaginatively (49). Art is “not itself reality or actual feeling” for aestheticists like Thomson, but symbolic and reflective of a reader-response theory of criticism: art is “expressive of the idea of reality, of feeling as reflected in the rapport between observer and object, reader and poem;” it’s a transaction (51). 

From a Buddhist perspective, this conflict is directly reflective of the conflict of consciousness and the limitations of people to observe without imprinting some sense of linguistic structure for judgment on their observation. Respectively, the reality of an individual is tainted by their impressions and their perception. Hutchings elaborates that there are  “insuperable structural problems” (43) from the descriptive element of The Seasons because Thomson’s choice and order of descriptions is directly related to the presentation of the pieces. Thomson had a keen sense “of description, purely and completely” because he maintained the “imaginative space” of the reader (62), yet the poem deconstructs itself because language itself is the medium and is limited by its temporal nature; the nacheinander. In an attempt to paint a ‘painting’ of nature for the reader linguistically, Thomson deconstructed the nature of aesthetic poetry.

A Contentious Contemplative Thought

In 1745, Thomas Warton, only seventeen years old, attempted to challenge the literary behemoth Alexander Pope. As a consequence of this challenge, characteristics often associated with Romanticism (arguably) began to flourish. Robert J. Griffin, in his 1992 essay “The Eighteenth-Century Construction of Romanticism: Thomas Warton and the Pleasures of Melancholy,” explores the conflict that occured between Augustan poets, ‘pro-romantics,’ and romanticism, ultimately arguing that “everything follows” from the conflict between Warton and Pope, a conflict that provides a “genesis of a romantic construction of literary history” (802). Griffin begins by exploring the complex history of genre classification, arguing that ‘romanticism’ is a “discourse that arises to a psychological dilemma in relation to modernity in general” and Pope. To challenge Pope, Warton maintained stylistic and allusory elements that contrasted and opposed Pope. For Pope, the images of “dusky caves” and “intermingled graves” created a “[breath of] browner horror on the woods,” while Warton placed Eloise in a “tomb / Reclin’d” where she watched the “tapers of the dead” “As through the mazes of festive balls” (806). Warton attempted to “displace Pope altogether” (807) as he attempted to “construct itself around the allegorical opposition between Day and Night, Mirth and Melancholy” (803). Warton seems to have had blatant vehemence toward Pope, too, as he accused Pope of “being both an alien… and a thief” of Milton: Pope was “pilfering from obsolete English poetry, without the least fear or danger of being detected” because Milton’s minor poems were “rarely read” (811). 

Because of this contention, Warton’s reactionary nature prompted heavily allusory writing as he attempted to maintain fidelity to many standards and expectations of Augustan writing while calling praise and attention to the mythic figures of literary history. His frequent allusions carry substantial historical weight, but often fall short within the context of the poem. “Pope” and “Spenser” are referenced in lines 153 and 157 respectively, with the “tragic Muse” (212), “Divine Melpomene” (213), “Monimia” (215), and “Jaffier” (220) making it challenging for ignorant readers to apprehend the meaning. The allusions often place heavy emphasis on graveyard imagery and an overturning of traditional aesthetic tendencies. While referencing “true Romeo’s lips” (218), Warton juxtaposes the image with “Juliet[‘s] gaping tomb” (217). In Warton’s references to the wealth of Moscow and their “golden palaces” (242), there is a strong emphasis on the decay or insignificance of those traditionally aesthetic objects. In other words, Warton’s piece is reacting to the aesthetic trends of the time by attempting to redefine the aesthetic sensibilities and respond to the question: what is beautiful?

Warton further perforates his poetry with “queen sublime” (17), or a spirit that drinks in the somber aesthetics of a graveyard in order to “coldly [strike] the mind with feeble bliss” (165). To do this, Warton asks his reader to “pour your sorrows to the pitying moon” (173), a cathartic request where the “solemn mansion” (208) and “December’s foggy glooms” (73) act as companions for the meditative and internal reflections found in the confrontation of one’s mortality. This focus on the cathartic element of confronting destruction emphasizes disillusionment, especially from the Lacanian Symbolic Orders that individuals have been indoctrinated into. Warton asks his readers to “let my thought contemplative explore / This feeling state of things” (80-81), an expression of the literary memento mori trope intended to break the consciousness of an individual so that they could perceive reality without the influence of their illusions. Fittingly, in the attempt to “let [his] thoughts contemplative explore / This fleeting state of things” (80-81), Warton deconstructs (much like Thomson and Parnell) the capacity for language to communicate something that is ultimately incommunicable because of the sequential nature of language. Confronted with the ‘Mont Blanc’ of death and Warton’s graveyard, the sheer mass of the eternity of death leaves him grappling for some fleeting object that will condense and coalesce the chaotic nature of his existence.

A Protean Task

Whether it be the sweeping exploration of Shelleyan eternity or the grounded exploration of the aesthetics of a storm in Thomson, these poets are all attempting to conceptualize and articulate some concept of reality that, however fleeting language may be, can stand the test of eternity. For this reason, their purposes have always been futile for the concept of immortality exists only as that: a concept. In practice, the poems are a protean act. Nemerov explains the Protean poet: 

“A man has an urgent question about his way in the world. He already knows the answer, but it fails to satisfy him. So at great inconvenience, hardship, and even peril, he consults a powerful and refractory spirit who tries to evade his question by turning into anything in the world. Then, when the spirit sees he cannot get free of the man, and only then, he answers the man’s question, not simply with a commonplace but with the same commonplace the man had been dissatisfied with before. Satisfied or not, however, the man now obeys the advice given him.”

These poets ask a question associated with immortality, mortality, nature, God, language, aesthetics, and death, and the question is unfathomably unspeakable because of the limitations of language but the answer and ‘reality’ is clear: humanity’s nature is to die, it’s consciousness is limited, and there is beauty.  Their ‘protean encounter’ with this unspeakable question is detailed through their poetry though their ‘Mont Blanc’ or season or graveyard or object petit a changes. Yet, the changing subject and continued similarities (thematic and aesthetic) between the poems furthers the importance of their seemingly unified conclusion. Their conclusions are optimistic in their futility and they are a testament of man’s significance in his insignificance, his perpetual strive to persevere in the “vast river” that “ceaselessly bursts and raves” (Shelley) or challenge the “beast” that lies in “mute oblivion” (Warton 54) or hail the “congenial horrors” of the tempests reigning (Thomson) or survive the “rough rage of swelling seas” (Parnell). In their poetic exploration of what it means to die, they ask their reader to preserve and live.

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By Pavel Tretyak

Written February 27 2022

Last Edited March 9, 2023