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 guides from books, sometimes a sacred one with some supposed divine authority, that claimed to give direction (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, triggered by events that are obvious in their relevance to ones where relevance is hard to attribute after the event and hard to relate to any know 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’, which 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 better: 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, it comes wrapped in the passage from which it comes and some of the meanings and feelings it encapsulates. 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. 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. A religious feeling certainly, conveyed by the name ‘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’. And then the breeze reveals itself – it is the ‘freedom, the glorious ‘liberty’ to be free of imposed guidance – to make choices without no-one 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,that another quotation jostles to my mind, like but not the same as the continuation from the breeze above, for that open vista, ‘The earth is all before me’, recalls another such, almost as powerful and frequent a visitor to me but coming more with a sadnessand darkness that closes round me than that in Wordsworth, where the ‘breezr’ soon becomes the consciousness of having escaped city smog so that you can ‘breathe again’, as you ‘wander’ as someone with out 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 may be important,; the lines being:

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.

They are the very last lines of Paradise Lost, wherein Adam and Eve face a choice, as Wordsworth surely knew when he penned his lines. It wasn’t city tasks 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 – except for one where God made his guidance clear – not to eat of the Forbidden fruit. They had not forgotten what freedom was like – they never had it, and it is a given that happiness in terms of celestial thinking 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 prison. But the issues remains the same: ”The world was all before them, where to choose?‘ or ‘The earth is all before me … I cannot miss my way‘. There are differences! Adam and Eve face the ‘world’, Wordsworth the ‘eart’: is that so because Wordsworth flees a city that is as much the ‘world’ as settings in untended nature, whilst for Adam and Eve, the world can only be what their choices will make it in the future – including cities just as much as farms, or 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, not the consciousness that no-one might or should care to ‘guide’, but by some guessable hope in ‘Providence’ where to ‘guide their choices, such that the 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’ 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. What did I find. Verse so glorious that I wonder why it was not one that kept returning to me, unlike the last four melancholic but dignified lines. 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 slow, it is something sinister, a miss in the marshes where humans will in future drown following some will o’ the wisp in the night. Direction is given promise, the trochee at the beginning of this line: ‘Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast’, emphasises leadership as a thing driven by the authority of leadership but without compassion. The line speed up to hasten our ‘parents ‘direct, and down the cliff as fast’ as certainty of oppressive authority will to arrived at a ‘subjected plain’. ‘Subjected’: That is the fate they must learn. When they look back for past beauty all they see is a site and a sight not out of place in Hell in the poem: ‘Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate / With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms’. Dread and threat all exemplified by burning. 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 – for such to those who desire freedom, guidance will always be. Like Wordsworth we want to find a secure place, a ‘harbour’ and a ‘home’, but we don;t know what they look like yet. 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 – not all the best verse does that but the best poetry does. Milton’ writes God out in wonderful verse and redeems his cruelty by humans making choices and allowing others to do so as a community of respect.

With love

Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx