'Destroyer and Preserver': Poetry's Obsession with Aeolian forces

(source: getty images)

(My research into this area is still undergoing - more recently I have done some work on Blake's 'Jerusalem' and am intrigued by the Apollonian connotations of his 'bow of burning gold', the golden weapon endowed to Apollo by Hephaestus in Greek mythology. More research will be required to fully unpack Apollo's existence as an intermingling of poetic muse and natural, wind-inspired presence in poetry. This essay is just a compendium of some of the work I have done thus far on this intriguing and ever-proliferating subject.).

In her cultural study of natural phenomena Wind: Nature and Culture (2023), Louise M Pryke writes that:

‘From before the time of the first humans, wind has shaped the earth. Across diverse civilizations and cultures, it has exerted a similarly potent formative influence on the stories, myths and legends that provide structure for human conceptions of the natural and supernatural worlds’. 

Humans – and therefore human art and cultures – have always been fascinated by the wind and how to represent it aesthetically. We see this across generations of visual art, in the shapes of Van Gogh, Monet, Turner, Rousseau and Renoir; and in music, in Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, Liszt’s Dante Symphony and Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antartica, to name just a few. 

In literature, the wind is a ubiquitous instrument of warring forces: divine retribution and regenerative rebirth; communication and nothingness; creation and destruction. In Chaucer’s ‘General Prologue’ (1400) it is only ‘whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth’ (5), inspiring the natural world to wake, that folk ‘longen [...] to goon on pilgrimages’ (12). Here, humans take their cues from the movement of the wind. This happens in the 14th century verse work Sir Gawaine and the Grene Knight too; the Gawain poet uses the movement of the wind to drive the narrative’s progression, allowing a year to pass within the space of 15 lines, helped along by the alliterations: ‘After þe sesoun of somer wyth þe soft wyndez/ Quen Zeferus syflez hymself on sedez and erbez [...] Wroþe wynde of þe welkyn wrastelez with þe sunne [...] And wynter wyndez aȝayn, as þe worlde askez ’ (516-530). 

In the world of King Lear (1608), Shakespeare’s humans are merely toys, buffeted and scorned by the terrifying, unknowable ‘winds and persecutions of the sky’ (II.iii.12). Percy Bysshe Shelley’s west wind is a poetic mouthpiece for reform, a jointly destructive and regenerative – ‘destroyer and preserver’ (14) – harbinger of change. Harold Macmillan’s famous 1960 speech did what Pryke terms ‘the frequent conjoining of wind, change and fate’: ‘the wind of change is blowing through this continent, and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact’. Written just two years later, Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ (1962) is about, to Christopher Ricks, ‘not indecision, [...] but re-decision, decision that’ll always have to be taken, taken up, again’. Dylan’s ‘wind’ is an elusive non-answer to the song’s increasingly desperate political questions: the wind is reassuringly ever-present and constant, but elusive and impenetrable to human interrogation. Scorpions’ ‘Winds of Change’ (1990) saw the wind as something unknowable but monumental: ‘a storm wind [...] will ring the freedom bell for peace of mind’. The song, written at the height of perestroika, became a hit just after the defeated coup that would end the Soviet Union. 

Wind signifies movement, motion and change. Its state speaks volumes: soft winds are comforting and serene; eerie, whistling winds are a universal symbol of the haunting; and gales and hurricanes are newsworthy natural disasters, and dramatic, the fabled stuff of ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ (1900). The wind is everywhere in idiom: ‘the job is a breeze’, ‘the eye of the hurricane’, ‘a candle in the wind’, ‘to get wind of’, ‘to throw caution to the wind’, to have a ‘second wind’ and to ‘move/ run like the wind’ are commonplace. 

Having briefly elucidated the wind’s role in literature and culture, I will now turn to the specific image of the Aeolian lyre. I will then consider the lyrical output of AE Housman and Thomas Hardy, and explore the ways in which their conceptions of the imagination probe the ancient Aeolian image. I choose Housman and Hardy because they are typically regarded as vernacular, unphilosophical poets; F R Leavis, for one, criticised Hardy on the very basis of his lack of imagination and originality, labelling him ‘the conventionally poetical [...] rustic’. However, springing as they do from ultra-philosophical Victorian predecessors (Tennyson and Wordsworth), they are actually in an intense, dialectical relationship with lyrical traditions which seek to define the human imagination through its relationship with the natural world, and in particular, with the Aeolian lyre. As Harold Bloom wrote in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), ‘weaker talents idealise, figures capable of imagination appropriate for themselves’. In other words, the best poets consider themselves as part of a non-linear continuum of lyric tradition, a historicised community of intertextual, mutually-influencing imagination.

From ancient lyric, the Aeolian lyre represents the human imagination, almost portrayed as an explanation or vindication for the (otherwise abstruse) process of poetic stimulation. After all, the OED’s primary definition of ‘lyric’ is ‘of or pertaining to the lyre; adapted to the lyre’. Indeed, the earliest lyric saw the lyre as an imaginative stimulant, a muse – as in Sappho’s fragment 119 (‘come, divine lyre! Speak to me and sing!’) and Pindar’s Pythian 1 (‘golden lyre [...] singers obey your notes’). In portraying the lyre as an imaginative muse, both poets admit that the lyric – even the human mind itself – needs an interlocutionary vessel or interlocutor, acknowledging as Paul Celan does, that ‘the poem is lonely’ and needs ‘an other’ or ‘opposite’.

Thomas Gray’s ‘The Progress of Poesy’ (1754) also considered the lyre as an imaginative, mythically charged force (‘awake, Aeolian lyre, awake,/ And give to rapture all thy trembling strings’), but by the Romantic period, poets had begun to reconfigure this. Coleridge’s ‘The Eolian Harp’ (1796) considers the lyre as similarly synaesthetic to Gray’s (creating ‘light [in] sound’ and ‘a sound-like power [in] light’), but his poem diverges in its account of imaginative, poetic agency. Where Gray commands the lyre via imperative, Coleridge is awakened by the harp. The harp and imagination are approximated by simile: his ‘phantasis’ are ‘as wild and various as the random gales,/ That swell and flutter on this subject lute’: the lute is a ‘subject’, an active agent. By dressing the imagination in a metaphor which combines the natural, aleatory and aesthetic (a wind-powered musical instrument), Coleridge distinguishes the harp from its lyrical predecessors, explicitly portraying both harp and imagination as acutely sensitive to external stimuli, inspiring and invigorating – and active.

Percy Bysshe Shelley would agree with this in his 1821 Defence of Poetry: ‘man is an instrument over which a series of impressions are driven [...] like an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre’. The lyrical tradition to materialise the immaterial, the lyrical afflatus, through an aelatory and aesthetic symbol seems to correspond with Wordsworth’s feeling that poetry stems from a ‘spontaneous’ imaginative overflow, and also agrees with Hegel’s assertion that ‘art in its highest vocation is a thing of the past’. But as Shelley would decide in his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1818), the wind – the imagination – can be a ‘destroyer and preserver’: as we will see, it [the image will be] can be both preserved and destroyed, celebrated and altered by lyrical evolution. The power is in the poet’s hands to ‘destroy’, upset, and then revive a ‘dead’ metaphor.

Both Housman and Hardy demonstrably thought critically about the lyrical imagination and its relationship to lyrical tradition. In Housman’s 1933 ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’ he extolled Johnson’s virtues, a poet whom Christopher Ricks credits with the ‘renovat[ion] of the dead’ – ‘his cliches are brought disconcertingly back to life [in his poems]’. Johnson himself considered it poetry’s aim to ‘adorn’ ‘known truths’ – and Dennis Taylor celebrates Hardy for his ‘constant’ ‘variation of traditional verse forms’ in his lyric. Hardy himself enjoyed his lyrical metre’s ‘cunning irregularity’. The imagination is a central theme to both A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Satires of Circumstance (1914), both poets intrigued by its relationship to nature and ‘the toils of time’. They both participate in the lyrical tradition of the Aeolian force as a harbinger of the imagination, yoking together cliched images, forging anew out of historical precedent. 

Housman’s ‘Into My Heart’ uses the Aeolian as an operative metaphor for the way the imagination operates in lyric. His memories are natural, wind-swept and aleatory, ‘blow[ing]’ into his heart ‘from yon far country’. But his bygone ‘happy highways’ are irretrievable; despite being in tangible accordance through the breeze on his skin, they are irredeemably separated through time: ‘cannot come again’. ‘On Wenlock Edge’ portrays the wind antithetically to this – it is a ‘preserver’ of an otherwise inaccessible past. Through the speaker’s experience of the ‘gale’, he can forge an inter-generational continuum between human imaginations across time, where people have equal shares in the same primaeval elements. The ‘saplings’ are being assailed by the very same winds which ‘threshed’ ancient ‘woods’.

The Roman at ‘Uricon’ – although ostensibly distanced via unfamiliar vernacular and atavistic mythology – is brought close to the ‘English yeoman’ out of their shared experience. They share the same ‘blood, thoughts and hurt’. Housman creates a cross-temporal current or concatenation, bringing the human imaginations of ‘then’ and ‘now’ together, situating the timestamps within the same clause and bringing them into even closer proximity by their grammatical mirroring: ‘then ‘twas the Roman, now ‘tis I’. His buoyant ballad metre and sanguiness is not forgotten amidst the lyric’s concluding testament to human futility and interment (‘ashes’). The speaker is finding, as Wordsworth recommended, ‘perpetual benediction’ in the imagination, or ‘thought’ of ‘our past years’. Housman’s optimistic trans-historicism is directly precipitated by the Aeolian, virulent ‘gale’, reprising the lyrical tradition of the Aeolian harp’s muse-like impetus. 

If the aleatory nature of the Aeolian lyre, which is opened up as an image more generally to encompass the force of wind in Housman’s poems, was freeing for the imagination, this same trait can render it treacherous – as Wordsworth found of nature more generally. For Wordsworth and Hardy, the imagination, like the wind, could function as a ‘destroyer’, not always adequately able to ‘preserve’ or console. Housman’s Aeolian impulse turned inwards in nostalgia in ‘Into My Heart’, but in Hardy’s ‘The Voice’ it is an extrinsic stimulant. The speaker imagines the ‘call’ of his deceased wife over the wind, but his certainty in the wind’s preservational, temporally-binding capacity collapses after stanza 2, along with the lyric’s metrical structure. Just like the wind, and the poet’s imagination, the woman is invisible (‘let me see you then’) and capricious (‘saying that now you are not as you were’).

By stanza 3 these undercurrents of doubt have risen to the fore; the woman’s voice ‘dissolv[es]’ in the wind, which is denigrated via dismissal – ‘only the wind’. The word ‘imagination’ could almost be interchangeable with ‘wind’ here, as the speaker realises the ‘call’ was chimerical: testament to lyric history’s coalescence of the aeolian with the imagination. Hardy’s metre ‘dissolves’ too, as the final line’s catalectic, open-vowel sounds contribute to the woman’s vocal dissolution, embedding her dying away within the lyric. Hardy’s rhyme-scheme does the same, as the A and B constituents of its ABAB rhyme scheme are elided, approximated by assonance: ‘noward, forward, falling and calling’ barely differentiated. He also inverts the humour typically ascribed to a dactylic trisyllabic rhyme (‘listlessness’ and ‘wistlessness’), as the call is exposed as an aspirational, oneiric act of over-imagination. As in Housman’s ‘Into My Heart’, her voice will not ‘be heard again, far or near’. The invocatory ‘O’’s of Percy Shelley’s apostrophe in ‘Ode to the West Wind’ are nullified, corrected and transformed into Hardy’s ‘No’’s of resignation and redundancy: ‘heard no more’. By exposing nature and the imagination as treacherous, Hardy enters dialogue with a lyrical tradition which did the same.

After Wordsworth’s bereavements of 1805, he disparages his former idealisation of nature in his palinode ‘Peele Castle’ (1806). His former faith that ‘Nature never did betray/ The heart that loved her’ is decried, as his imagination is refused as an ‘illusion’, ‘betrayed’ – nature’s aeolian, elemental forces and the imagination cannot ‘preserve’ fleeting experiences, and in ‘Peele’, ‘nature’ does ‘betray the heart’ that ‘loves’ her. In ‘Where the Picnic Was’, Hardy similarly diverges from traditional elegiac practice, refusing to place illusory faith in some abiding life force. The Aeolian is not able to ‘preserve’: the fact that ‘now a cold wind blows’ seems to lead to the clause which testifies how ‘one – has shut her eyes/ For evermore’. Because the wind and the imagination are so closely interrelated – the wind is so consistently used as a correlative for the human imagination – any account of the wind is automatically an account of the human mind too, by dint of its metonymic significance. If the wind (or nature more generally, in Wordsworth’s case) is treacherous, then the imagination is too. Indeed, in Hardy’s ‘Apology’, the preface to his 1922 ‘Late Lyrics and Earlier’, he defended his poetry from criticism of ‘pessimism’, using Wordsworth’s own terms – what is ostensible ‘pessimism’ is actually Wordsworthian ‘obstinate questionings’, the place where he seeks to understand our ‘existence in this universe’. 

Hardy’s ‘On the Way’ concludes 2 stanzas with the statement ‘and the wind a lyre’, harking back to the classical lyrical tradition of the wind as endowed with an articulative power. But the subclause also phonetically assimilates his – and Wordsworth’s – realisation about its treacherous proclivities: that both wind and imagination can be a ‘liar’. The repetition of the paronomasia reinvigorates his angry disillusionment. Hardy Re-evaluates the quiescent communicative potential of the aeolian natural force to impel the imagination and revive lost experiences, through the metonymic representative of both nature and the imagination, hoping for authority from the symbol’s historical omnipresence. [acc state what it is again for clarity] His nascent hope that in reviving a dead image he can revive a dead love though, is as illusionary as Wordsworth’s ‘blind[ness]’ to the ‘truth’ of his imaginative tendencies in ‘Peele’. Hardy thus interrogates the Romantic conception of the wind’s ability to ‘preserve’ and uphold the imagination, deciding instead that both forces are ungovernable, and cannot be counted upon to inspire and console.

Roland Barthes claimed in The Death of the Author (1967) that the ‘text is a tissue of quotation, drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’, and indeed Housman and Hardy both draw on make use of the generationally-charged resonance of the Aeolian lyre and its metonymic relevance to the imagination in their poetry. As T S Eliot wrote, the ‘past can be altered by the present’ just as much as its inverse: the lyre’s omnipresence in lyric imbues it with the foundation of authority which allows later poets to probe it with radical reworkings. In classical lyric, the lyre was an interlocutory vessel between nature and the imagination; in Romantic lyric it was treacherously ambivalent; and Housman and Hardy wrestle with these same bifurcated conceptions of it – the imagination is Aeolian, both a ‘destroyer and preserver’. Both poets are thus in a dialectical relationship to their lyrical heritage, engaging in an exploration of the lyrical imagination – and the mystery of lyric’s unruly, inchoate production and inspiration. The past is not intimidating or detracting to them, but (perhaps incongruously) liberating, the touchstones upon which they can refresh and challenge, ‘destroy and preserve’ atavistic modes of thinking about the human imagination.