VISIONARY CINEMA
the confines of a possible cinema - a greater human form, male and
female together, containing the world
within
it, from the caves of
middle-earth to the starry wheels above. To visualize a poem, and a.
visionary poem at that, is to see what cannot be seen. In the closing
lines of
Jerusalem
Blake speaks of what Stevens terms a sceing and
unseeing in the eye, as an
identifying
of all human forms. He asks for
too much, and perhaps at last we will be condemned to judge him as
he judged Milton, a true poet when he wrote of visual torment, but a
fettered bard of the absolute when he asked us to go beyond the abyss
of the eye. Yet his eternal appeal is in his demand that we must and
can do so.
With Wordsworth, we move to a more overt defeat of the eye,
though the consequences of the defeat are deliberately mitigated by the
poet, in contrast to Blake's grim delight in our apprehension of the
defeat of sight by vision. Though Blake might have seen our movie
theaters as so many more temples of U rizen, he would have found them
demonically relevant, mills of the mind in retreat from the work of
creation that might bum up
the
Creation. But to Wordsworth, they
would have been merely irrelevant to the inward eye of solitude, which
is the eye of his song. As I have chosen what Blake himself termed one
of his more "terrific" passages, I take, for contrast, Wordsworth in his
eerie, his preternatural
quietness,
showing a strength of being perhaps
more primordial, in its effect, than that of any other poet whatsoever.
The Ruined Cottage,
the tragic tale of Margaret, supplies the passages.
Where, with Blake, we are rhetorically compelled to know that we are
in the presence of a poet's prophetic
power,
here in Wordsworth the
rhetoric makes us know the strength of a prophetic
endurance
that only
an extraordinarily exalted poet possesses. Blake moves us by a counter–
point that turns on the irony of unnecessary limitations; Wordsworth
moves us, possibly more deeply, by a counterpoint that turns on the
anti-ironic, on the necessity of a suffering so permanent, obscure and
dark that it .overcomes its own status as limitation and shares the
nature of infinitude. Blake shows us vision collapsing into space and
time; Wordsworth shows a spot of time or moment of space that holds
vision precariously open to further experience. For Blake the mind is
always lord and master, even if the mastery belongs, at times, to Urizen,
the writer of the great poem of winter. For Wordsworth, there is always
a precise extcnt and a
howness,
to the mind's mastery, and always there–
fore an abiding recalcitrance in which outward sense is not only the
servant of the mind's will, but has an unsuspended and dangerous will
of its own. The tyranny of the eye, that most despotic of our senses, is
