tradition!
So, way back in January I scrimshawed this little post about tradition wherein I did descant on John Keats and the art of tying shoes. Near the end I invoked Wendell Berry, and it's worth hearing him again: ''Thus the art [poetry], so private in execution, is also communal and filial. It can only exist as a common ground between the poet and other poets and other people, living and dead. Any poem worth the name is the product of a convocation. It exists, literally, by recalling past voices into presence'. Just so. But what does this look, or rather sound like?
Well, Richard Hays in his excellent work depends to a large degree on John Hollander's The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After, itself a damn fine litel boke. On pages 89-91 or thereabouts, you fine a look at a tangle of echoes of and allusions to Milton's Paradise Lost in poems by Shelley, Keats, and Hardy. We shall steal a bit of Hollander, and add our own inane babble, and perhaps see in the nexus at least of Keats and Milton the living form of a tradition.
You see, in book 3 of Paradise Lost, Milton seeks to ascend to the highest heaven to sing of the Son of God in converse with the Father. This is a task farther above his powers than the retelling of the fall of Satan and his minions. He writes, and implies the answer:
Hail holy Light, ofspring of Heav'n first born,
Or of th' Eternal Coeternal beam
May I express thee unblam'd? since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from Eternitie, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate [1-6].
This task is made all the more impossible as total blindness has overtaken our bard, as it did Homer. A 'drop serene', gutta serena, as opposed to 'suffusion', or partial blindness, 'hath quenched' the light of the heav'nly Muse's 'sovran Lamp', which he can feel but not see - 'but thou/Revist'st not these eyes, that rowl in vain/To find thy piercing ray' [21-5]. Yet, he says, he never ceases to 'wander where the Muses haunt/Cleer Spring [27-8], and so hopes to sing of such heights even in his blindness. Thus, he invokes the Muse and says, in the key passage,
Then feed on thoughts, that voluntarie move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful Bird
Sings darkling, and in the shadiest Covert hid
Tunes her notcurnal Note. Thus with the Year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose,
Or flocks, or heards, or human face divine . . . [37-44].
The 'wakeful Bird' is the nightingale [proof is left as an exercise for the reader], and so Hollander can speak of 'metaphorical poetic light come out of darkness in the music of the nightingale and of blind bards and prophets' [p 89]. So the bard as 'wakeful Bird', as nightingale, 'sings darkling', and leaves a trace, an echo that will forever associate birdsong heard over the shoulder with the song of the prophet/poet. So, where does Keats come into all of this?
His 'Ode to a Nightingale' is a work of dejection, a Romantic riff on Ecclesiastes, wherein the poet tells us
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiat to the drains
One moment past, and Lethe-wards had sunk [1-4].
Thus our poet goes on to bemoan 'The weariness, the fever, and the fret' [23], this world where 'palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs' [25], where 'but to think is to be full of sorrow' [27]. This is far from simple, however, because he listens to the song of the nightingale, the 'light-winged Dryad of the trees' who offers 'some melodious plot' and thus 'Singest of summer in full-throated ease' [7-10]. Thus, in Keats's 'Ode' the 'wakeful Bird' does not sing darkling, or perhaps he does - more in a second - but rather the poet says 'Darkling I listen' to the song of light and summer [51]. 'Darkling' he listens for he has been 'half in love with easeful Death' [52], not, he notes, through envy of the nightingale's 'happy lot', but, he says at least, from 'being too happy in thine happiness' [5-6]. Hollander asserts, provacatively to my mind, that the 'the word [darkling] is transformed in the echo, not merely by being applied to the response rather than to the act of eloquence, but by including in its sound somehow and acknowledgment of the source, as if to say "Darkling, I listen as Milton's wakeful Bird/Sings darkling", and even, "Darkling, I listen to Milton's darkling"' [90, emphasis in original].
Consider: somewhere in the passage to Keats from Milton something has happened, such that Milton's 'darkling' is too much happiness and light, and as such inspires the giddiness of despair from too much happiness at such happiness. This passage is captured in the echo itself, wherein one can feel such a passage from the 'wakeful Bird' singing darkling of too much light, to the poet listening darkling to such a song of light out of darkness. I feel, anyway, that a whole world has changed from one to another.*
So this is what a living tradition of one sort actually looks like. Through intimate familiarity with the earlier work, indeed through a loving assimilation of the work in the context of radically different experience, a new work emerges that is in fact a tissue of echoes and allusions as much as an 'original' composition. Of course, the Christian tradition doesn't seek to register massive shifts in philosophy and faith like the poetic tradition sketched above, but rather seeks to keep faith with the originals. For all that the processes are much the same. In fact, much of the Old Testament itself is largely a fabric [textus, text] of allusions, echoes and riffs on the Torah. And so on down through the centuries.
An obvious example - Isaiah 45.23: 'By myself I have sworn; from my mouth has gone out in righteousness a word that shall not return: "To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear"'. See here a rather straightforward use of the passage: 'Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God; for it is written, "As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God". So then each of us will give and account of himself to God' [Rom 14.11-12]. So far, so simple, at least it seems.
What of a more allusive reference:
'Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father' [Phil 2.5-11].
The resonance created by this allusion would find its ultimate amplification in the Christological confessions of Nicea and Chalcedon.
So there - tradition is vindicated, the convocation of the saints in the collaborative, intertextual interpretation of Jesus Christ according to the Scriptures is praised. Let's have no more arguing over the matter and the mirth of it all. We can all stand under the Divine Aeneid [so much Luther] of the Scriptures and add our thread to the fabric of allusive commentary, if only we will shut up and let the text in its richness shake us down and first interpret us. But that, as the kids say, is for another day.
* I leave an examination of Hardy's brilliant and transfomative poem 'The Darkling Thrush' to the reader.