A Defense of Judgment by Michael W. Clune

Author:Michael W. Clune [Clune, Michael W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT000000 Literary Criticism / General, PHI001000 Philosophy / Aesthetics
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from Thee to my sole self!39

Keats finds himself precipitated out of absorption by thoughts of himself. He emerges from absorption into a depressing self-consciousness, characterized by a sense of his distinctness from the nightingale’s song. One might say that the experience of self tends to dull and diminish the intensity of experience. In this sense, not death but self-consciousness resembles sleep, the gradual cessation of experience. This sense of self begins to stir almost immediately upon the poem’s triumphant declaration of union with the song, culminating in the memories of past thoughts of death that open the third stanza. But the words “now more than ever seems it rich to die” mark a transformation in the poet’s image of death. Death no longer seems easeful to him; now it seems rich, and the awareness of the self seems like sleep.40

This reversal is not an artifact of poetic language but a result of poetry’s insight into the structure of experience. Keats’s aesthetic effort to describe absorbed listening results in the discovery of a new way to love death. Perhaps this discovery will seem less useful than the insights about experience generated by Dickinson’s effort to create an aesthetically convincing representation of what it’s like to die. Yet it seems clear, as many critics have argued, that she knew Keats’s poem well. It seems likely that she worked out her own poetic version of absorbed hearing and death with the earlier poet’s example in mind. Dickinson’s illumination of surprising features of the experience of absorbed listening—her literary knowledge—may well have arisen from her examination of literary desire—Keats’s surprising way of longing for death.

Keats holds open a desire that perhaps we have all felt, without giving it a name and without allowing it to linger. Imagine again that you are at a concert. Your eyes are closed, and you are listening to music that enthralls and absorbs your attention. Suddenly, you find that you are not quite as absorbed as you would like to be.

You become conscious of a kind of intermittent flutter, interrupting, fracturing your absorption. A vague, background irritation, a creeping self-consciousness, fugitive thoughts: “Here I am, listening to this music.” “I wonder how long this piece lasts.” “Did I remember to feed the meter?”

Your sense of self appears over the experience after a certain amount of time, like mold on bread. And you wish the experience of the music were a little cleaner, a little more intense. But the sense of self is now an insistent, discordant note, interrupting the music. Keats compares it to a bell, a slowly tolling bell, a new sound that works against the sound of the music, calling you away from it.

The most natural thing in the world would be to grasp the tongue of the bell, to still it, to snuff the discordant note, to eliminate the self, to turn it into a sod, so the experience of the song could intensify, and never stop.

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