How do you express an inexpressible emotion? This is a task that many of the writers of the Romantic era began to attack. One tactic used was to describe the event or experience that gave you that inexpressible emotion. Thomas Burke talks about the fallibility of words in expressing both the exactness of objects and the sentiments that objects create in the mind. What is even more difficult is using the inexactness of words to depict a non-representable and indefinable experience, such as the sublime. Like many writers of this time (including Burke) both William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge attempt to represent the sublime through the common human experience. All three are attempting to refer to something they believe is universal, but the sublime because it is referring to something indescribable is actually deeply personal, and the way writers attempt to represent the sublime becomes polarized, but often includes common thematic traits.
Burke represents the sublime as something terrible and awe-inspiring. Wordsworth explores the internal tranquility of being in nature and therefore the sublime and Coleridge explores how memories, contemplation and imagination rather than physical objects can cause this experience. All three of these authors seem to agree that nature causes the sublime, and that it is a shared indescribable human experience, but when they actively put it in words, this is when they begin to differ from one another. Throughout this essay I will be looking at three works that focus on the sublime and compare them, more specifically I will be using Burke’s A Psychological Enquiry as a lense to look at Wordsworth’s Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey and Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight. Burke’s work comes in the form of an intellectual essay while Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s are poems, but all three of these works specifically reference the sublime by name and struggle with what it means to experience it. making them ideal works to consider.
In A Psychological Enquiry Burke is considering the effect of sublime objects on the mind, and the general qualities that these objects should have in order to have a sublime effect. Burke went as far as to name this indescribable sensation that we less specifically call the sublime. He called it “terror”, saying that whatever “-operates in a manner analogous to terror is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”(pg 37) Basically this meant that for Burke, terror was the strongest nameable emotion that a person could feel, and as thus it was as close as describing the sublime he could get. When describing those objects that would represent this terrible sublime, he references to the great and terrible aspects of nature -“Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too, where this cause of terror be endued with greatness of dimensions” (pg 39) Here he is referencing the great mountains, craggily peaks that overlook unimaginable depths, frothing waves, and dark forests that were so often the subject of visual artists of the time.
Wordsworth’s explanation of what the sublime feels like however, is in direct contrast to Burke’s. While he also turns to nature, likely due to its universal properties, he believes that “the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants…” and is ashamed by the “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation,” of his time (pg 436). In his preface to Lyrical Ballads he explains that instead of focusing on those “gross and violent stimulants” he would instead focus on the humble and rustic world because “in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature” (pg 434). Wordsworth felt that it was unnecessary to go to such extremes as the terror inducing things that Burke talked about and instead believed that you could find that sublime sense from something simpler. He equated the sublime with an internal tranquility that could be obtained through contact with nature, so although his sublime is the same in name (and maybe intention) as Burke’s sublime, is a very different inexpressible emotion.
In fact, this may be the biggest difference between artists trying to express the sublime- because it is an indescribable emotion, it is at the same time universal in its inexplicable nature and deeply personal as soon as one begins to give it words in an attempt to describe it. All three of these writers could be expressing reactions to the same piece of nature, and they could all feel that they had an inexplicable reaction to it, but what that means for each of them could be entirely different. For a third perspective on this we can turn to Coleridge who also explores the sublime through nature, but in a more introspective imaginative way. This is likely due to the fact that he grew up in the city rather than in the country surrounding by nature the way that Wordsworth did, and therefore had less direct contact with nature. Coleridge views nature as an external changing force rather which affects the way that he views the sublime as well. And while he doesn’t long for the still internal tranquility of Wordsworth, he also doesn’t see it as akin to terror as Burke does. Rather he experiences the sublime through nature as a healing but wild force.
Line’s Written Above Tintern Abbey is a work well-known for its attempt to deal with the sublime, with Wordsworth referencing the literal word sublime multiple times throughout the poem. This poem is the last of a larger collection of poems by Wordsworth called Lyrical Ballads in which he attempts to explore the sublime and nature through language of the common man as well as topics of the common man. He says that “this purpose will be found principally to be: namely to illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement.” (pg 435) This choice to address the experience of “common men” adds to the idea of the sublime as a universal experience, promoting the idea that all people, including the common man, experience it. It also gives the poem a different setting than it would have had, if say he had been addressing the sublime in poetry in the way that Burke recommended.
For Wordsworth poetry is more like a mirror, in which he shares his personal experience, but it’s always something universally identifiable that any reader could imagine in themselves. Tintern Abbey is written, as the title suggests, a few miles above Tintern Abbey, which is “a famous picturesque destination” in Bristol. (pg 429) It is almost an ode to the picturesque beauty of the location in which Wordsworth attempts to document both what the location looked like literally and the sublime feelings he experienced on looking at it.
It immediately is made clear that this is going to be an internal introspective experience, in lines six and seven which say “Which on a wild secluded scene impress thoughts of more deep seclusion;” (pg 429). Already nature is given a influencing power, able to “impress thoughts” onto Wordsworth, and alongside the “deep seclusion” he undergoes very soon Wordsworth is experiencing “tranquil restoration:-feelings too of unremembered pleasure;” (pg 430). By using words like “seclusion” “tranquil restoration” and “unremembered” Wordsworth gives the sense of almost a sedated peace, some deep state of relaxation, and meditation that only nature is able to give. He wants the reader to know however, that it is not as simple as that, that it is something more, which is when he begins trying to explain the inexplicable-ness of the sublime. Looking down over Tintern Abbey he feels something “Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, in which the burthen of the mystery, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible work is lighten’d:- that serene and blessed mood,” (pg 430). It seems the easiest way to convey try and explain this indescribably “serene and blessed mood” to the reader is literally to say it is indescribable. It’s this strange moment where the only thing he can do to convey this feeling is admit that he can’t put it into words, and just hope that the reader gets the memo.
It seems that when dealing with the sublime, you are dealing with a sort of translation, and it turns out that a lot can be lost in the translation between feeling an emotion and putting it into words. Burke speaks to this idea- “but still it will be difficult to conceive how words can move the passions which belong to real objects, without representing those objects clearly.” (pg 43) Despite the fact that he believes that “words affect the mind so much more than the sensible image” he also believes that words can be inexact in many aspects. In order to remedy this fact, he believes that a writer can “call into his aid those modes of speech that mark a strong and lively feeling in himself.” (pg 43) Or in other words, the author can call upon passion to try and convey
Coleridge experiences the sublime through nature as well, but through imaginations and memories rather than direct experiences. His view on nature’s influence is in contrast with Wordsworth’s, for while Wordsworth sees nature as a bringer of internal tranquility, Coleridge sees it it as a force that actively changes and brings one out of themselves. In Frost At Midnight he actually laments the fact that the night is so peaceful saying- “Tis calm indeed! So calm, that is disturbs and vexes meditation with its strange and extreme silentness”, the calmness of the night is disturbing to him, in opposition to that “serene and blessed mood” that Wordsworth attains in the calmness of nature. He seeks a scene more similar to that which Burke seeks in nature, something awesome and great- “a breeze by lake and sandy shores, beneath the crags of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds…”, but he doesn’t describe his response to it as terror-filled but rather experiences it as a more positive learning experience.
For him it is a religious and spiritual experience, God is speaking to him through nature. It isn’t a terrible thing, it is a beautifully deep meditative experience that he learns from and changes because of. Though it would make sense to attach something indescribable to God’s word and make it equivalent with a religious experience, Coleridge is the only of the three that does this. He describes it as “the lovely shapes and sounds intelligible of that eternal language, which thy God utters, who from eternity doth teach himself in all, and all things in himself. Great universal Teacher! He shall mould thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.” (line 59-64). He makes the sublime here akin to something that lasts forever that is so great and mystical (or religious) that it is “eternal” and from “eternity”. He attributes this unidentifiable emotion as something that only God knows, and only God can create or even explain.