Steve_Bamlett_blog

In the seventeenth century educated persons kept commonplace books where things they heard or read could be stored for use or as a momento of the use they had already served, and might, if remembered in this way, serve again. Sometimes they consisted of practical guides to a task, like a recipe, although it was often a useful thing to jot down pithy guidance from books, sometimes a sacred one luke the Bible or Koran or the Upanishads with some supposed divine authority, that claimed to give direction (spiritual, practical or moral) to life-choices. Are these the kind of ‘quotes’ intended to be addressed by this prompt question?

A seventeenth century English commonplace book by Beinecke Flickr Laboratory – [Commonplace book], [mid. 17th c.] Uploaded by Edward, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11825444

When I asked the question of myself, I found it difficult because it asked for one quotation, whilst quotations come to mind often without any apparent forethought. Sometimes they are triggered by events that are obvious in their relevance or sometimes by ones where relevance is hard to attribute after the event and hard to relate to any known trigger. Certainly the quotations that are most frequent didn’t, I thought to myself, give me moral guidance: the most frequent being Wordsworth’s (from The Prelude, Book One), ‘there is blessing in this gentle breeze’. That remembered clause seems to address those moments of physical sensation where the burn and beat of sun on a day that is hot is salved by the hint of coolness that kisses it to mint condition: no wonder it seems a ‘blessing’ as if some parentally inclined God leaned down to you for your especial beneficence, some slight redemption!

But when that quotation comes into mind, it comes wrapped in the passage from which it derives and some of the meanings and feelings the memes of the passage encapsulate. The joy I associate it with has more than the line alone in it about the breeze, it has the whole sense of a life that, rather than seeking guidance anywhere, rejoices in having none that toy need heed overmuch. Do you get this too? Here is the passage:

Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free,
Free as a bird to settle where I will.
What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale                
Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream
Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?
The earth is all before me. With a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way. I breathe again!
Trances of thought and mountings of the mind
Come fast upon me: it is shaken off,                        
That burthen of my own unnatural self,
The heavy weight of many a weary day
Not mine, and such as were not made for me.
Long months of peace (if such bold word accord
With any promises of human life),
Long months of ease and undisturbed delight
Are mine in prospect; whither shall I turn,
By road or pathway, or through trackless field,
Up hill or down, or shall some floating thing
Upon the river point me out my course?   

Here is no simple personification of the ‘gentle breeze’ for its service to you seems to be one that visits more than yourself, for in doing so, it leans into your pleasures and joy and shares them almost bodily, with ‘half-consciousness’ of the delight there is to be offering obvious pleasure to anothwr kind of being.

It’s a religious feeling certainly, conveyed by the names ‘blessing’ and ‘mission’, but also one lavish in its servility in serving the bodily self alone. And then I remember that this breeze whispers questions that arise out of potentials hitherto unexplored – suggesting that a longed for escape has been achieved and the capacity to be, ‘free as a bird to settle where I will’, given as part of the proferred service. Then the breeze reveals itself – it is the ‘freedom, the glorious ‘liberty’ to be free of imposed guidance – to make choices without anyone to gainsay them:

The earth is all before me. With a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way. 

Then, I think to myself, that another quotation has jostled that last in my mind’s spaces, like but not the same as the continuation from the breeze above. That is because that open vista seen by Wordsworth, ‘The earth is all before me’, recalls another such, almost as powerful and frequent a visitor to me in the mind’s rarely inspected storeroom. That latter one will come with more with a sadness and darkness to close itself around me than that in Wordsworth’s music, where the ‘breeze soon becomes the consciousness of having escaped city smog so that you can ‘breathe again’. Those breaths happen as you ‘wander’ as someone without a ‘guide’ other than a cloud, would. I say it recalls another line with the same pattern of rhythmic force, but with difference – slight but maybe important difference. The lines are:

The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

These are the very last lines of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, wherein Adam and Eve face a choice, as Wordsworth surely knew when he penned his lines. It wasn’t routine city tasks in a smoky capital like London that made Adam and Eve realise they did not know what it was to make a significant choice, for in Eden all choices but one were trivial and needed no guidance, because already planned as safe and riskless. Of course the excepted one matters where God made his guidance clear – not to eat of the Forbidden fruit, to know the difference between good and evil choice for oneslf.

Adam and Eve had not forgotten what freedom was like – they never had it. – and it is a given that happiness in terms of thevcelestial thinking described by Milton’s God consisted entirely in those bonds to God that do not feel like bondage, confinement within one limited space and simple set of tasks that does not feel like it is a prison, but surely is to postlapsarian humanity. 

However, the issues remain the same: ”The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest‘ or ‘The earth is all before me … I cannot miss my way‘. There are differences! Adam and Eve face the ‘world’, Wordsworth the ‘earth’: is that the case because Wordsworth flees a city that is as much the ‘world’ in the eaely nineteenth century as settings in untended or ‘wild’ [aka free] nature, whilst for Adam and Eve, the ‘world’ can only be what their choices will make it in the future – including the construction of cities just as much as farms, or the margins of common land in nature.

Wordsworth’s choices are trivial – each one may yield the same benefit as another because they are the reflex of his freedom, and the questions have the rhythm of excitement that wandering might now have. For Adam and Eve the wandering is different: embedding the consciousness that no-one might or could care enough to ‘guide’ them as God did through his Angels, providing instead some guessable but not knowable hope in ‘Providence’ where with to ‘guide their choices. A totally regular iambic pentameter mimes their embodied but uncertain and slowed down action: ‘They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,/ Through Eden took their solitary way’. That ‘solitary’ which for Wordsworth is akin to ‘joy’  (elswhere lonely as a cloud) for Adam and Eve is the mark of their loss of guidance.

.....: now free,
Free as a bird to settle where I will.
What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale                
Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream
Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?
The earth is all before me.

But I suddenly turned to the ending of Paradise Lost, for much of the earlier passage did not attend willingly with the remembered quotation as it had with Wordsworth’s lines from The Prelude. What did I find? Verse so glorious and brilliant that I wonder why it did not keep returning to me, unlike the last four melancholic but humanely dignified lines that follow it. So read them now, as I did:

So spake our Mother Eve, and Adam heard
Well pleased, but answered not; for now too nigh
The Archangel stood, and from the other hill
To their fixed station, all in bright array
The Cherubim descended; on the ground
Gliding meteorous, as evening mist.
Risen from a river o'er the marish glides,
And gathers ground fast at the labourer's heel
Homeward returning. High in front advanced,
The brandished sword of God before them blazed,
Fierce as a comet; which with torrid heat,
And vapour as the Libyan air adust
Began to parch that temperate clime; whereat
In either hand the hastening Angel caught
Our lingering parents, and to the eastern gate
Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain; then disappeared.
They looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

What these lines show is the dramatic performance of the last time God orders his Angels to give and manifest a direct and unmistakable guide to where Adam and Eve should walk in future. They excel as dramatic verse, even when they represent the avenging angels as something of a wodrpus show of spectacle, it is something sinister; a mist in the marshes where humans will in future drown following some will o’ the wisp in the night.

Direction is given and dramatised in the trochee at the beginning of this otherwise iambic line: ‘Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast‘, emphasises leadership as a thing driven by the authority leadership assumes, even in a Trump or Starmer, but without compassion. The line speeds up to hasten our parents ‘direct, and down the cliff as fast’ as certainty of oppressive authority wills them to arrival at a ‘subjected plain’. ‘Subjected’: That is the fate they must learn.

When our first parents look back for past beauty all they see is a site (and a sight) that would not be out of place in the Hell in the poem: ‘Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate / With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms’. The dread and threat of a militia are bothexemplified by burning flames like Hell. For Milton’s God made hell; Satan only atywmpted to make it habitable.

Why I don’t have these lines come back to me like the four that follow them is that they are about the cruelty contained in guidance – or at least what seems so to such of those who desire freedom as a condition of human being, ever suspicious of guidance having another agenda. Like Wordsworth, we all want to find a secure place, a ‘harbour’ and a ‘home’, but we don’t know what they look like yet so any path might lead to it. If the last lines of Paradise Lost are sombre, they are also what will enable Wordsworth to remember that quotation and obviously rewrite it.

In my commonplace book, I don’t want guidance, I want encouragement and facilitation to find beauty and hope in life – not all the best verse does that but the best poetry does. Milton’s epilogue writes God out in wonderful verse and redeems his cruelty in the fact of humans making choices and allowing others to do so as a community of respect, guided by communality.

With love

Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx