Find Brief Solace

I spent a good part of last Friday and Saturday on Twitter, scrolling through my timeline. No matter how long I scrolled, no matter how far down the feed I looked, I did not reach the end of my rage about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe V. Wade and roll back human rights in this country. I still haven’t reached the end of it.

My fellow citizens and I are all tweeting and scrolling and blogging and screaming, yet none of our words, nor all of them together, can really capture or channel this primal fury.

At times like this, I think of Wordsworth.

William Wordsworth, the 19th century Romantic poet, helped launch a literary movement that broke away from — or broke through — polite poetic forms favored by established critics of his time. These forms included such things as Petrarchan sonnets, epics, or occasional poems written in heroic couplets (two lines of iambic pentameter whose final syllables rhyme), replete with allusions to classical literature, and expressing an explicit propositional argument. John Dryden experimented with this form, Alexander Pope perfected it, and Samuel Johnson approved it.

Wordsworth used heroic couplets in some of his work, but he is better known for challenging the strictures of formalism: for breaking rules of poetic diction that required “elevated” or “polished” language, for embracing irregular rhyme schemes, for composing odes that eschewed iambic pentameter altogether, and for writing meditative poems in blank verse with occasional end rhymes and internal rhymes — subtle, simple design that subordinates itself to impression, to mood.

In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poetry and criticism by Wordsworth and his fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge that is both a manifesto about and a demonstration of the tenets of Romanticism, Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

Thus, Wordsworth did not reject those well-known forms because he was not capable of writing them well; he rejected them because he judged them not always capable of fully capturing or conveying the overpowering flood of emotion that comes when the poet seeks to put into words something that is almost by definition ineffable: the inchoate flood of feelings that overpowers us when we encounter the sublime — an experience that brings us up to and past the very threshold of language.

The Romantic literary movement in English poetry coincided with and embraced the notion of a “spirit” of unfolding freedom moving in and through and history — a notion manifested for the Romantics by the French Revolution and famously articulated by Hegel. Freedom of spirit, an unfettered effusion of the soul — this was an animating principle of the times and of the poetry that sought to capture them.

But as the Revolution took a back seat to the Reign of Terror, and the ruination of the Terror cleared the ground for the rise of Napoleon, Wordsworth began to rethink his championing of unfettered freedom. When we move or are moved beyond the threshold of language, we may be moved to act but we may not be able to control the direction of our actions.

So Wordsworth, in his disappointment or his cynicism or his weariness, hearkened back to poetic forms that imposed restraint — the restraint of prescribed rhyme schemes, prescribed meter, prescribed length.

He discusses this turn toward restraint in a famous sonnet, published in 1807:

Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth, the prison into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (or such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

In this poem, Wordsworth gives us images of various actors who choose to circumscribe their own freedom — nuns and hermits and students in the tiny rooms where they pray or study, women who sit at the spinning wheel and men who operate a hand loom, bees that spend a long time seeking nectar from a single flower. The constraints of these small spaces are not the same as the constraints of a prison cell, because those who choose to enter them can choose to leave them.

In the same way, the speaker of the poem says in an abrupt pivot in the middle of line nine — a volta within the volta of this Petrarchan sonnet — he has sometimes chosen the constraints of the sonnet form as a vehicle for expression of thought. The speaker describes this choice in the past tense, as a “pastime” (and a past time) , a labor in which he found relief from limitless feeling, from “too much liberty.” The strictures of the sonnet form give the speaker-poet a relief from having to wrestle with the inchoate formless unconstrained passions that can overwhelm him as he struggles to put emotion into words.

But note that the speaker doesn’t suggest that he will stick with sonnets from now on, or that he has turned his back on more freeform writing. The sonnet form is not his new normal; it is a break, a “brief solace,” a respite from having to grapple with aesthetic choices. Yet makes the sonnet a respite for the speaker-poet, not a prison, is his ability to make that fundamental aesthetic choice about form. Because the sonnet form is a choice he can make, he can enjoy its temporary restraints and then set it aside.

Still, there is a deep irony at play: he uses the sonnet form to talk about how the sonnet used to offer comfort to him.  This is an indicator that he has not completely set aside his appreciation for old forms and more traditional ways of poetic work, even as he speaks of them in the past tense. At the same time, a sonnet about the “brief solace” afforded by sonnets is, literally, brief. It’s fourteen lines, and then it’s done, and then the weight—the weight of “too much liberty,” of a chaotic world broken free of any form or regularity—falls upon the poet once again.

Now perhaps you see why I think of Wordsworth when I am overwhelmed by and united with the absolute limitless rage I feel and see all over social media.

Most of us are still firmly in the “emotion” stage of response to this execrable Supreme Court decision, and it’s really fine for us to stay there as long as necessary. At some point, though, we will have to channel our emotions into clear and deliberate action, just as the Romantic poets sought to channel ineffable experience into legible words.

As we do this work, some of us will need to take a break, however temporary, from that motivating rage. We will have to do something that feels immediately productive, however small that deed might be, something that provides a respite: tend the garden, cook a meal, write a sonnet, write a blog post. We are feeling all the fury and all the sorrow and all the indignation all at once, and it is overwhelming. We will all need “brief solace,” a way to take a break, a way to step back from our own experience and join with others in already familiar (if not fully expressive) forms of action.

Instead of thinking of all the social media posts that urge others to vote or that make personal promises to “whoever needs to travel to my state” as useless gestures, think of them as brief respites people are taking, temporary refuges from that sense of overwhelming rage. And yes, we should all avail ourselves of the opportunity to choose participation in the political system, to embrace the staid restraint of voting, even if voting will not be sufficient to address the profound societal dysfunction and looming authoritarianism that threatens us now.  As many people have pointed out, those who wish to protect women’s human right to make their own health decisions and receive adequate care should support grassroots organizations already doing that work.

For many people reacting viscerally to the Supreme Court’s recent decision, that’s a new form of activism, a new vision of politics. It is easier in the moment to fall back on the familiar: on voting, on personal decisions.

Voting in every election is crucial. But voting and encouraging others to vote, as crucial as it is, can also be simply a “brief respite” from much more daunting work. Amidst the constant onslaught against human rights and human dignity, all of us who vote also have to find new forms, new words, new ways of putting this overwhelming rage into some form. Ideally, we should find a form of action in which we can combine our strength to bring about change.

Don’t ask me what form that is. I don’t know. I may be a romantic; I am not a revolutionary.

For now, though, sing your rage and I will join your song.