Poetic Knowing: From Mind's Eye To Poetic Knowing in Discourses of Poetry and Science

By Barton R. Friedman

Barton R. Friedman argues that the languages of literature and science empty many of the same conceits. "Poetic Knowing" focuses on "the rhetorical strategies by which scientists and poets" create knowledge, and includes close readings of Yeats, Blake, Tennyson, Williams, and Olson. Scientists are rhetorically engaged in tran

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parafine Press
• Release date: Nov 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9780998282114

Barton R. Friedman

Barton R. Friedman is the author of Fabricating History, English Writers on the French Revolution and Adventures in the Deeps of the Mind, both from Princeton University Press, and the poetry collection You Can't Tell the Players, published by Cleveland State University Press. Friedman was a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Cleveland State University.

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Introduction

Plotting a Course

Does the modern man object that all this is poetry and not science? Yes, truly it is poetry—the mere words stir one like a Beethoven symphony—but who among us is entitled to say where science ends and poetry begins, in matters about which we are so supremely ignorant? May not the poetic vision be sometimes as far in advance of the scientific as the scientific is in advance of the ordinary commonplace mortal?

—Sir Alexander Kennedy, British Engineer

(Quoted in Root-Bernstein 341–42)

1. The Poet’s Regress

The long-standing unease with which poetry and science have tended to eye each other is easily illustrated. Reflecting on the place of poetry in an enlightened and literary society, Thomas Macaulay remarks that He who . . . aspires to be a great poet must first become a little child (156). Macaulay pronounces this judgment on poetry in a famous appreciation of Milton, written in 1825 partly to praise Milton for having escaped the poet’s regress into childhood. He is reflecting the conviction of his age, and ours, that progress—measured mainly by advances in science—and poetry are at odds.

Though conceding that poetry—despite the unsoundness of mind required to read as well as write it—gives . . . much pleasure (154), Macaulay is, as M. H. Abrams observes (1953: 306–307), aligning himself with those who would deny it worth. If we take him as one pole in a debate that, to this day, often allows no middle ground, and summon Blake to speak for the opposite pole, there seems no chance of reconciliation between them. To Blake, the unholy triumvirate,Bacon, Newton, Locke, were at least as unsound of mind as poets were to Macaulay. Macaulay argues that enlightenment entails extrapolating from particular images to general terms, that Generalisation is necessary to the advancement of knowledge (153, 154). Blake denounces generalization as idiocy: To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit (1988: 641). Macaulay asserts that In an enlightened age . . . Men will judge and compare; but they will not create (155). Blake has Los, in Jerusalem, insists that I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create (1: 21; 153).

Nonetheless, Macaulay (who, had tried his hand at verse) understands the poet’s craft. If he depreciates the particular as a preoccupation of rude minds, he acknowledges that it is indispensable to the creations of the imagination (154). For him, the imagination creating is epitomized by children, who in play abandon themselves to illusion: Every image which is strongly preserved to their mental eye produces in them the effect of reality (155).

To abandon oneself to illusion, equate image with reality, is to exercise what Keats has taught us to call negative capability; which he described in a letter to his brothers as when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason (1: 193). To eschew fact and reason is for Macaulay to embrace illusion; it is unscientific, childlike. And as if in evidence of the link he detects between children’s play and poets’ practice, it re-emerges in the fantasy lived by the child of Dylan Thomas’ Fern Hill, who refashions experience into an idyll.

To the child, all nature is sentient, aware, in tune with his pleasure. He is honoured among wagons and prince of the apple towns. He lordly dictates to trees and leaves. He is huntsman and herdsman; calves sing and foxes bark to the sound of his horn. As he rides to sleep, owls bear the farm away; when he awakes, the farm, like a wanderer white / With the dew returns. The world exists as his consciousness. Had he the maturity to reflect on his experience, as the persona in Wallace Stevens’ Tea at the Palaz of Hoon has, he too could all but conclude that I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself; / And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

All but. For overlaid on the perspective of the boy in Fern Hill is the perspective of the man he has become. The man understands, as Macaulay would have, that the boy confounds reality with fantasy:

. . . nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

Before the children green and golden

Follow him out of grace . . .

Time, not the boy, is prince of the apple towns. Looking back, Thomas’ persona recognizes himself time’s captive, Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

His song is both morning song and mourning song. As morning song, the child’s expression of wonder at a world enlightening, it is spontaneous, wayward, perhaps even wordless, like the sea. As mourning song, it is Fern Hill, the poem and the landscape it celebrates, sung by a man who knows that time holds him, all nature, green and dying. It is a poem about time’s arrow, entropy.

Thomas’ use of past tense is thus more than narrative convention. It establishes his point of view as retrospective, allows him to contain the child’s phantasmagoria in the adult’s fact-straitened experience. In this sense, it suggests the design of a reminiscence, in prose, by an observer of nature with an eye maybe even finer (if more outwardly focused) than Thomas’, Sir Isaac Newton. His last days upon him, Newton confided to a friend: I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. (quoted in Westfall 117). As Sir Alexander Kennedy asks, who among us is entitled to say where science ends and poetry begins? If, for Macaulay, to become a poet is to possess the imagination of a child, for Newton, to be a scientist is to pursue the curiosity of a child.

In his reverential Foreword to the Dover edition of the Opticks, Einstein builds on Newton’s self-portrait:

Fortunate Newton, happy child of science! He who has time and tranquility can by reading this book live again the wonderful events which the great Newton experienced in his young days. Nature to him was an open book, whose letters he could read without effort. The conceptions which he used to reduce the material of experience to order seemed to flow spontaneously from experience itself, from the beautiful experiments which he ranged in order like playthings and describes with an affectionate wealth of detail. (lix)

Einstein is evoking the sensibility that underlay not just Newton’s science but his own. As Gerald Holton remarks about him, he traced his insights into space and time to an interest in questions only children ask (1978: 279). Nature was his plaything.

Confronted with such claims, Macaulay might object that what Newton and Einstein share is not a method, which proper training could teach to any capable student of science, but an intuition, which requires their mental powers to command. Paraphrasing Rosalind Franklin’s disdain for the idea that he and Francis Crick might arrive at the structure of DNA by tinker-toy-like modeling, James Watson has her protest that only a genius of [Linus Pauling’s] stature could play like a ten-year-old boy and still get the right answer (45).

2. Players’ Progress

Yet, in his primer for aspiring scientists, The Incomplete Guide to the Art of Discovery, Jack E. Oliver emphasizes the sort of curiosity that preoccupies ten-year-old boys (and girls) as an impetus toward getting right scientific answers:

What is there? is the basic question of geography. What is it made of? and How did it get that way? are the basic questions of geology. To answer these childlike but fundamental queries has always been the prime goal of basic earth science . . . (13–14)

In posing science, as the investigation of nature by mature minds, against poetry, as the self-indulgence of grown-up children, Macaulay has, then, reckoned without the testimony of scientists. As Watson was to put it, in conveying (albeit ironically) the casualness with which he and Crick mapped the course they would follow to the structure of DNA, All we had to do was to construct a set of molecular models and begin to play (34).

Blind alley on blind alley teach Watson and Crick that playing with molecular models is not all they have to do, that Franklin is partly right if, in the end, stubbornly wrong. Franklin might herself have thought better of the potential inherent in ten-year-olds’s play had she known about Barbara McClintock’s struggle with a similar problem. Stymied by the apparent indistinguishability of the chromosomes she is examining, McClintock finds that the more I worked with them, the bigger and bigger [the chromosomes] got, and when I was really working with them, I was right down there with them, and everything got big. I was even able to see the internal parts of the chromosomes—actually everything was there. It surprised me because I actually felt as if I was right down there and these were my friends (quoted in Kroeber 34). It is as if she has, Alice-like, encountered a vial labeled Drink me, and, presto! is tumbled to the dimension of the chromosomes she is seeking to comprehend. Her perspective is transformed, and much more so than the perspective of Thomas’ surrogate self in Fern Hill, looking once more through childhood’s eyes to see hay fields high as the house. If McClintock uses non-Keatsian language, her transformation suggests a Keatsian sensibility: As you look at these things, they become part of you. And you forget yourself (quoted in Kroeber 34).

Her report of the intimacy she experiences with chromosomes, comparable to Keats already with the nightingale, reinforces the case William Hazlitt (whose Shakespeare lectures introduced Keats to the concept) makes for negative capability as a tool of discovery: the imagination, Hazlitt declares in his Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), . . . must carry me out of myself into the feelings of others by one and the same process by which I am thrown forwards . . . into my future being, and interested in it (1–2).¹ But should we conclude, on the basis of Hazlitt’s testimony, even of McClintock’s, that negative capability, essential to the literary imagination, is also a powerful tool in the kits of scientists? Robert Scott Root-Bernstein answers that question by having his physical chemist, Hunter Smithson, who is the intellectual leader of the colloquium on doing science that comprises Root-Bernstein’s objective fiction Discovering, cite James Clerk Maxwell, claiming that the quest for new knowledge starts precisely with being carried out of oneself: the purpose of research is ‘to drive us out of the hypotheses in which we hitherto have taken refuge into the state of thoroughly conscious ignorance which is the prelude to every real advance in science’ (50).

Maxwell’s thoroughly conscious ignorance resonates with Keats’s uncertainties, mysteries, doubts. Being carried into uncertainties, mysteries, doubts not only captures the moment of transport that joins the speaker of Keats’s Ode to the nightingale but also, through the questions he puts to the priest heading the procession etched into the frieze of the Grecian Urn, suggests the speculations on the unfathomable that such moments yield.

3. One for Bishop Berkeley

Macaulay dismisses this mode of inquiry as the despotism of the imagination over uncultivated minds (155). He is ironically reversing Coleridge’s indictment, in Biographia Literaria (1817), of mechanism, the epistemology of empirical science, as the despotism of the eye (1:107). For Keats writing to his brothers, Coleridge exemplifies a mind made irritable with reaching after fact and reason, incapable of remaining content with half knowledge (1: 194). But do irritable reaching after fact and reason and negative capability—submission to, if not contentment with, half knowledge—necessarily exclude each other, as Keats seems to have supposed?

Roald Hoffmann, Nobel Laureate in chemistry and author of two finely crafted books of verse, embeds that very question in his poem One for Bishop Berkeley: Wouldn’t it, his persona asks, make more sense / to have us top the master plan?² He is confessing his irritability, which he takes it he shares with the rest of us, at being immured in half knowledge by life confined, both geographically and temporally, to what Frank Kermode calls the middest, that is, the middle of the middle: in the middle / is where the brain is . . .

Hoffmann has his persona posit two alternative ways of world-making, either of which would free us from the prison of the middest and allow us to claim our place atop the master plan. The first is rooted in a Blake-like emanative vision—if all devolved from us, fell in threads below / ah, then we could rest, secure / in our creation, we unnervous gods—the second in a reassuringly progressive concept of evolution:

Or, tiny but elemental clusters

freed of doubt of our divisibility,

we would reproduce, willfully,

stack, aggregate, grow

effortlessly upward, the only way

for us . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . In time

green vines would come, climbing

trellises of our own making.

Nothing insecure, or uncanny,

for the atoms that we are

would be in all.

But, the persona is forced to concede, the world as it is leaves everything insecure; ourselves, neither unnervous nor gods, surrounded by the uncanny, by doubt; for our brain is constrained / by the skull, / bound by stretched skin, / few slits / for the senses to flow through.

His concession invites Blake’s riposte: How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five? (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 6; 1988: 35). The persona does not know. And his acknowledgment, that his senses may refract as much as reflect the world outside his skull, scores one for Bishop Berkeley.

For Hoffmann, despite his professional engagement in perhaps the hardest of the hard sciences, is no more than Coleridge willing to bow to the despotism of the eye. In his scheme, the brain breaks out of its prison to grasp at elements of fact and reason beyond direct access by the eye:

So this transforming prisoner

beams out, thinks:

See it big

the stars

make them far.

See it small

a cell.

He reaffirms Berkeley’s own argument, in his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), that the estimate we make of the distance of objects considerably remote is rather an act of judgment grounded on experience than of sense (1: 171).

Since this estimate still depends on how we see, we may ask, has Berkeley, or Hoffmann’s persona, actually plotted a way to escape the despotism of the eye. Berkeley responds to this challenge in his Essay by devising a thought experiment, projecting us into the consciousness of a man born blind being made to see, and inviting us to imagine what sense he makes of the sights his newly opened eyes reveal to him:

. . . the sun and stars, the remotest objects as well as the nearer, would all seem to be in his eye, or rather in his mind. The objects intromitted by sight would seem to him (as in truth they are) no other than a new set of thoughts or sensations, each whereof is as near to him as the perception of pain and pleasure, or the most inward passions of his soul. (1: 186)

By the apparently offhand refinement of eye to mind, Berkeley is laying a foundation for his provocative dictum: "esse is percipi (2: 42). The mind organizes the impressions the eye captures; it conceptualizes what we have learned, from cumulative experience, to comprehend as the world. Or, in the succinct conclusion of Hoffmann’s persona, the brain thinks":

Querying

the proximate causes

of its confinement,

testing powers,

dreaming,

it strews the world

with all the sizes of its creation.

Querying, testing, dreaming are also activities Berkeley ascribes to the suddenly sighted blind man, in whose visual awakening he urges that—by exerting what Keats would have understood as negative capability, and Macaulay as the imagination’s despotism—we participate: though perhaps it may not be an easy task to divest our selves intirely of the experience received from sight, we must, nevertheless, so far as possible, endeavour to frame true conceptions of what might reasonably be supposed to pass in his mind (1: 209).

Framing true conceptions of what might pass in the blind man’s mind, we not only share in the moment of his healing. We essentially, self-consciously re-enact the cognitive process whereby, Berkeley would have it, we construct reality. We contemplate our brains strewing the world with the sizes of their creations. The blind man serves Berkeley, the ordering intelligence of One for Bishop Berkeley serves Hoffmann, in ways analogous to the ways the child serves Thomas and Macaulay: as embodiments of minds fabricating (Macaulay might have said hallucinating) their own surroundings.³

Despite Macaulay, though, neither Berkeley’s blind man nor Hoffmann’s speaker can be accused of claiming that the worlds they see, hear, feel, and in which they walk come altogether from themselves. If Berkeley preserves nature as objective reality by affirming its existence in the mind of God, whom he names the Author of Nature, Hoffmann preserves matter as substantial reality by the kinds of formulations he permits his surrogate self in One for Bishop Berkeley.

Unlike the philosopher whom he compliments, and complements, however, the poems’ persona avoids the word mind, and so the metaphoricity, even mystery, that attaches to it. For him, the power ordering phenomena, large and small, emanates from a tangible organ: the brain that, as one of its functions, thinks. Nor does he imply that the brain thinking creates ex nihilo. Projecting itself, Keats-like—Zoom / the lifeless stretch / to Orion, searching, scanning all the way—or McClintock-like—then / back through where we are, plunge / reeling out this or that measuring tape / into submicron oscillations / of enzymes’ inanimate girders—it marshals for its purposes familiar instruments of scientific observation:

Separate ‘scopes are conscripted,

micro and tele, for out

is far, and one must reach

the cavities

where the tiny structures hide.

Berkeley too had called attention to the seeming magic by which scopes, micro and tele, transport us out of ourselves: A microscope brings us, as it were, into a new world (1: 206). But unlike Hoffmann, who regards the eye wired to the brain as an instrument for expanding knowledge, to be augmented by contrivances that extend its reach, Berkeley highlights the gap between objects our eyes see and objects magnification brings before us to subvert the confidence we habitually accord sight (seeing is believing) as a guide to reality. As he reasons in The Principles of Human Knowledge (1710):

What may be the extension, figure, or motion of any thing really and absolutely, or in it self, it is impossible for us to know, but only the proportion or relation they bear to our senses. Things remaining the same, our ideas vary, and which of them, or even whether any of them at all represent the true quality really existing in the thing, it is out of our reach to determine. So that, for aught we know, all we see, hear, and feel, may be only phantasy and vain chimera, and not at all agree with real things existing in rerum natura. (2: 78-79)

Berkeley is not championing extreme skepticism. Rather, he is tracking Locke’s argument in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding to its logical roots and rejecting the skepticism he unearths there: "All this skepticism follows, from our supposing a difference between things and ideas, and that the former have a subsistence without the mind, or unperceived" (2: 79; emphases Berkeley’s).

4. In the Mind’s Eye

Had he had the cumulative history of science to draw on that Root-Bernstein would have almost three centuries later, Berkeley might well have detected in this supposition of a difference between things and ideas a cause of error in microscopy itself. Recounting Louis Pasteur’s discovery of asymmetry, on Day Two of the colloquium Root-Bernstein has invented in Discovering to build a foundation for a science of science, Hunter Smithson contrasts Pasteur’s accuracy of observation with the failure of his rivals, Mitscherlich and de la Provostaye, to see what lay before their eyes. But how could Mitscherlich and de la Provostaye have made such a mistake? asks Jenny, who, as a French cultural historian, is an intelligent, but conveniently innocent, contributor to the discussion. Quite easily, Hunter replies, in part: . . . to recognize the asymmetry, you have to align the crystals and specifically search for planes of symmetry. That requires having a preconceived notion of what to look for. And when Jenny looks into the microscope Hunter has brought to illustrate his presentation, only to report that she sees nothing, another of the participants, Ariana (an artist as well as an endocrinologist) explains: You’re having problems because you’re not using what artists sometimes call ‘the eye of the mind.’ You have to imagine first what you expect to see (91).

Ariana is (inadvertently?) echoing the incantation with which W. B. Yeats’s musicians open his play At the Hawk’s Well (1916):

I call to the eye of the mind

A well long choked up and dry

And boughs long stripped by the wind,

And I call to the mind’s eye

Pallor of an ivory face,

Its lofty dissolute air,

A man climbing up to a place

The salt sea wind has swept bare.

Yeats establishes, as venue for this play, not a theater but a drawing room, its curtain a black cloth that the musicians fold and unfold, its scenery a blue cloth to suggest the well, and perhaps some design on the patterned screen against the rear wall to suggest the tree. The audience must imagine as their way of seeing. The play is set in the mind’s eye. The old man and young man (Cuchulain), who are its human characters, enter from the audience. Thing and idea merge in what Yeats would have called unity of being, first through his metaphorical language, then through the choreographed action into which it translates.

Yeats’s triumph in At the Hawk’s Well rests in the play’s incorporation of a strategy for staging the creative process itself, and for inducing its audience, by using their minds’ eyes, to share in the artist’s experience.⁴ It thrusts them into a Berkeleyan realm where esse is percipi indeed. Or as Yeats was imperiously to declare at the end of his life, in A General Introduction for a Collected Works only now wending its way to print, The world knows nothing because it has made nothing, we know everything because we have made everything (1961: 510).

Rare would be the scientist—or artist—willing to give credence to that breathtaking claim, especially if he or she were also privy to the epistolary argument between Yeats and T. Sturge Moore over the materialism of Moore’s philosopher brother, G. E. Moore. There (in a letter of May 1927) Yeats dismisses Moore’s materialism as not worth debating: why quarrel with a phantom, as Plotinus calls matter? (1978: 92–93).

5. Strings and Things

Yet natural phenomena that seem vexatiously phantom-like are what, during the very time of the Yeats-Moore dialogue, quantum theory was trying to explain. The uncertainties of measurement characterizing quantum events prompted two of the physicists who created the theory, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, to propose a descriptive language for physics that any scientist or philosopher of science, with head still stuck in nineteenth-century positivism, must have judged at best idiosyncratic, at worst perverse: the concept of complementarity, as Heisenberg puts it, has encouraged the physicist to use an ambiguous rather than an unambiguous language, to use the classical concepts in a somewhat vague manner in conformity with the principle of uncertainty, to apply alternatively different classical concepts which would lead to contradictions if used simultaneously. To illustrate, he deploys a selection of rhetorical tools for penetrating the shells of atoms—electron orbits, matter waves, charge density, metaphors all—and pronounces their use in many ways quite satisfactory, since it reminds us of a similar use of language in daily life or in poetry (1958: 179).

Hoffmann too declares that language is often used in science as it is in poetry:

The language of science is a language under stress. Words are being made to describe things that seem indescribable in words—equations, chemical structures and so forth. Words don’t, cannot mean all that they stand for, yet they are all we have to describe experience. By being a natural language under tension, the language of science is inherently poetic. There is metaphor aplenty in science. Emotions emerge shaped as states of matter and, more interestingly, matter acts out what goes on in the soul. (1989: 1)

That science is replete with metaphor, that matter itself becomes metaphor for what goes on in the soul, the persona of One for Bishop Berkeley acknowledges through his pun on conscripted. Scopes, micro and tele, are conscripted, drafted, into the endless war to overcome half knowledge; they are also "con-scripted": artfully integrated into statements that, Janus-like, reach out to grasp features of our world remote from ourselves, while probing inward for a grasp of what in ourselves impels us to reach out.

Hoffmann manages another in his own corpus of such artful statements in Grand Unification, a poem partly about words . . . being made to describe things that seem indescribable in words. Grand Unification explores, in both quantum and human worlds, the resonances of the (metaphorical) descriptor typing one of the latest developments in microphysics, string theory:

This is just a rule; strings that meet

wriggling in their roughened-up space-time,

if their tips just touch, they must merge,

And bigger lines, loops, necklaces or thatchings

self-assemble. This is so. But it is not real,

it’s just a rule. Loops tangle, there is an exchange

Of quantum numbers . . .

The poem not only images the imageless; it asserts the power of its own medium to blend rule—abstract mathematical language—with reality—experiential human language. It asserts this power by effecting it: in its unfolding, assembling itself as what its title proclaims it to be. Like the dizzying multi-dimensionality of the tiny realm it brings into focus—clockwise rippling nothingness / in ten dimensions. Twenty-six the other way—it too compactif[ies], in a silent crumpling, curling / in of what there’s room for, into inwards’ innards.

This involuted structure, by which the poem makes itself its subject, is sealed by its epitomizing metaphor, string, looping its end back on its beginning, in what almost, but not quite, forms a closed circle:

We are so near understanding

everything. I believe, reasons without words,

classy symmetries. It’s a rule. And up scale the sun

shines, frost melts and zing! go the strings of my heart.

The speaker’s heart strings, metaphorical as the strings loosing bosons and fermions are metaphorical, tie human to quantum scales, artifice (the popular song embedding the image) to mathematical formalism. The poem thus makes a case for itself as its own grand unification, as close to a theory of everything as any physicist’s conceptual design.

But the poem also knows itself to fall short. It dismantles the very idea of a theory of everything with gentle comic irony. Heart strings never go zing according to rule. As accurately as mathematical physics may learn to predict the frequency and the effects of stray collisions by which particles are ejected,

This is not: people,

passing, a look that locks on some missed braid

of a future. This is not: a hummingbird’s tie

to the sweet and red, tie testing stasis.

And it is not the interlace of frost, another

season’s nonlinear history of steam meanders.

Nor: rope dancers . . .

For those, the persona stresses, mathematics will not do: you need words.

This realization emerges at the poem’s exact center, the second line of the sixth triplet in a series of twelve. Grand Unification is itself a classy symmetry. Its direct address— established by the call to attention, Mind you, that heads the list of macroscopic events stray particle collisions are not—draws the reader into the poem: its loop widens to make you (us) part of the grand unification it strives to encompass.

You (we) belong to the domain least amenable to comprehension by mathematics. For us, one needs words: poetry—hence the allusion, figured in the interlace of frost, to Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight. Coleridge’s poem embeds a tension between the apparently spontaneous order manifest in the interlace frost inscribes on his window—The Frost performs its secret ministry / Unhelped by any wind—and the poet’s yearning for inspiration, a stirring of wind that will infuse him with the power to fashion order from random happenstance. Hoffmann registers the same tension: chaotic patterns are the norm in nature, he observes, in a book he has coauthored with the artist Vivian Torrance: Imagine aerial reconnaissance of a planet, this planet if you like, for intelligent life. The quickest guidepost to human-like activity is to be found in the constructed struggle with natural disorder. Local victories are found: plowed fields, buildings, a Vivaldi opera (1993: 30).

Frost at Midnight, Grand Unification, all poems, comprise local victories in humankind’s constructed struggle with natural disorder. Characterizing frost’s secret ministry as a nonlinear history of steam meanders, Hoffmann implies nature’s capacity, unhelped by any poetic afflatus, to win its own local victories, however brief, over its impulsion toward disorder, entropy. And buried in Frost at Midnight is Coleridge’s half-intuition of this same essentially nonlinear dynamic, whereby natural events unwind, to appropriate Hoffmann’s apt oxymoron, as chaotic patterns.

Coleridge suggests such a process at work through the impressions that assemble themselves into the speaker’s utterance. The owlet’s cry—which unexpectedly Came loud—and hark again! loud as before—is juxtaposed to the frost performing—freezing its chaotic pattern on the window—and the inmates of his cottage, who, having left him to that solitude, which suits / Abstruser musings, blend then into now in a seemingly seamless flow.

That the seeming seamlessness of this flow emanates from a deft manipulation of tenses—past to present to present perfect within the first three sentences—reflects Coleridge’s suspicion that enduring victories over natural disorder are won solely by human artifice. The flow of events in time proceeds unpredictably, uncontrollably, often disjointedly. The prophetic promise implied by the film in the grate, that "fluttering stranger," remains, as Coleridge recalls from his childhood, unfulfilled: no one, neither townsman, nor aunt, nor beloved sister, appeared at the classroom door to rescue him from the boredom of his studies.

To control events, the poet, again, needs words. The daydreaming of the inattentive boy Coleridge had once been, his eye fixed on his swimming book; the discernment of the insightful watcher he has since become, his eye fixed on all the numberless goings-on of life, appear comparably wordless: Inaudible as dreams.

But only appear: Coleridge the poet puts them into words by the very act of pronouncing them wordless. They fall audibly on our (minds’) ears, as he remembers the church bells of his birthplace falling on his, Most like articulate sounds of things to come. Through its turn to the child sleeping at the poet’s side, the poem too articulates things to come:

. . . thou, my babe! Shalt wander like a breeze,

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

Of ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds,

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear

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.

The poem renders the poet Presageful, as the boy he had been, despite the promise of the fluttering stranger, found that he was not. It articulates (both verbalizes and organizes) the sequence of idyllic experiences envisioned as Hartley Coleridge’s future.

That idyll exists for the poet, as for us, solely in the poem. Whether it might await Hartley in life neither the poet nor his contemporary readers could have presaged. Gazing at the film in the grate, recalling the daydream it had brought to his childhood self pretending to study, Coleridge sees reflected in it his similarly dreamful adult self: Methinks its motion in this hush of nature / Gives it dim sympathies with me who live . . . In the film, Coleridge perceives—or, rather, through the film, he portrays—his imagination at work:

Making it a companionable form,

Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit

By its own moods interprets, everywhere

Echo or mirror seeking of itself

And makes a toy of thought.

This interaction of fantasizing self and fluttering stranger epitomizes the tautology constituted by Frost at Midnight; which, typical of the Greater Romantic Ode its author collaborated with Wordsworth to invent, is a poem about itself, how it came to be.⁵ It unwinds circularly, ending as it opened, with the product of frost’s secret ministry displayed on the window before him. Like the circle of Grand Unification, however, the circle of Frost at Midnight remains unclosed. Because Coleridge envisions his son nurtured in such harmony with nature that he will, like Einstein’s Newton, be able to read nature as the Book of God’s Word, the designs frost forms naturally seem no longer to mock the poet’s ongoing struggle with chaos.

It is to suggest this moment of transcendence that Frost at Midnight is set at that peculiar interstice between night and day, when time’s arrow appears, for a nanosecond, to pause. If not through the poem, at least in the poem, the poet claims power to contain the effects of entropy.

But this magical instant is infinitesimal, undetectable by instruments less fine than imagination. The shielding it grants the poet, and here his son, from time’s arrow melts, like frost—which is why the meditation the fluttering film induces in Coleridge becomes a plaything, a toy. It comprises a child’s dream, from which the man must awake, as the man must awake from the dream his boyhood self had dreamed in the morning of Fern Hill.

What checks time’s inexorable movement forward, then, is artifice; the poet imposes his precarious stasis on events by the spell his words cast. In Grand Unification, the calculated disparities between stanza form and syntax, whereby units of meaning run through triplets to complete themselves in the next triplet, or even the one after that, simulate strings meeting and entangling into bigger lines, loops, necklaces, thatchings. In Frost at Midnight, the fluttering stranger, as trope for the poet’s imagination, makes something of a self-similarity, imaging in small the psychic process the poem embraces as a whole.