The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)

READING 27.

Q What kind of Creator does Blake envision? What

preconceptions color Blake’s view of nature?

Nature and the Natural

in Asian Literature

CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature 11

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poetry and his paintings. Indeed, his poetry was conceived
along with visual images that he himself drew. Trained in
the graphic arts, he prepared all aspects of his individual
works, designing, illustrating, engraving, and hand-color-
ing each page (Figure 27.5).
Blake’s early poems featured singular images with clear
and vivid (and often) moral messages. “The Lamb,” a
short poem from his Songs of Innocence(1789), envisions
that animal as a symbol of God’s gentle goodness. In his
Songs of Experience(1794), childlike lyricism gives way to
the disillusionment of maturity. The most famous poem in
this collection, “The Tiger,” asks whether goodness must
be accompanied by evil, and whether God is responsible
for both.

Blake‘s “The Tiger”

Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright

In the forest of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the first of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? And what dread feet?

What the hammer? What the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? What dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,

And watered heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry.

Blake’s poetic imagination took much from the Bible and
Milton’s Paradise Lost(see chapter 22)—some scholars see
in the fifth stanza of “The Tiger” an allusion to Milton’s
powerful Satan. Regardless of whether one perceives the
Maker as satanic or divine or both, the poem seems to
assert the typically Romantic view of the artist as sharing
God’s burden of creation and the creative process.

Although no literary movement

in Chinese history has been desig-

nated “Romantic,” there are clear

examples of the Romantic sensi-

The Promethean Myth in Literature

nineteenth century, especially in those works that exalt the

emotional identification of the individual with nature.

The Chinese writer Shen Fu (1763–1809) shares with

Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats the reflective view of

nature and a heightened sensitivity to its transient moods.

A bohemian spirit, Shen Fu failed the district civil exami-

nations that guaranteed financial success for Chinese intel-

lectuals. Often in debt and expelled from his family by an

overbearing father, he found brief but profound joy in his

marriage to a neighbor’s daughter, Zhen Yuen. Shen Fu’s

autobiography, Six Chapters from a Floating Life(1809), is a

confessional record of their life together, a life in which

poverty is balanced by the pleasures of married love and an

abiding affection for nature.

In the following excerpt from Shen’s autobiography—a

favorite with Chinese readers to this day—the writer

describes the simple pleasures he and Zhen Yuen derived

from growing flowers and designing “rockeries”: natural

arrangements of rocks and soil that resemble miniature gar-

dens. The tender story of the destruction of the “Place of

Falling Flowers,” the couple’s tiny version of the natural

landscape, anticipates the central event of Shen’s intimate

Figure 27.5 WILLIAM BLAKE, The Tyger, ca. 1815–1826.

Etching, ink and watercolor, 11 4 in.