Formal Evolutions

More than most poems, Mathilde Blind's Ascent of Man upholds Alice Meynell's claim that “[i]f life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical” (Rhythm 1). The poem achieved a degree of popularity, if not notoriety, through its use of varied metrical structures, driving rhythmic impulses, and vivid imagery to portray the drama of human evolution. Blind “hurries her reader along, breathless and perspiring perhaps, but never anxious to stop,” writes a critic for the Athenaeum; “We have known her book to be read in the Underground Railway, and the reader to be so absorbed in its contents as to be carried unawares several stations past his destination” (Rev. Ascent 87). Rhythm and meter are important not only for the poem's ability to absorb its readers, even to the point of distraction, but more significantly as part of Blind's understanding of evolution itself. In the Ascent of Man, life on earth progresses ineluctably toward something like metrical form, from “[a] pulse stirred in the plastic slime” to “[h]armonies of confluent sound” that “[l]ift you at one rhythmic bound/From the thraldom of the ground” (Poetical Works 159, 188; hereafter PW). In Blind's evolutionary model, humankind achieves “a flaming world embrace” by accessing the metrical uniformity of a “universal heart,” a rhythmic beating with which every human being might sympathize (PW 189).

Blind did not have to look far in Darwin and other evolutionary writings of the time to justify foregrounding rhythm and meter in her own developmental narrative. Rhythm in particular marks Darwin's ideas of evolution, and especially his theories of sexual selection. The reader of The Descent of Man (1871) will learn of the “vibratory movement” of peacocks and birds of paradise that in the process of mating “rattle their quills together,” and of the male North American grouse, who “drums rapidly” with his wings against either tree stumps or his own body so as to lure female grouses from out of hiding (Darwin 2: 61–62). To the extent that these animals rely on rhythmic patterning as part of their mating rituals, vibratory experiences enable their continued development as species. This is true, Darwin suggests, for humans as well: “the suspicion does not appear improbable that the progenitors of man, either the males or females, or both sexes, before they had acquired the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavoured to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm” (Darwin 2: 337). Darwin consistently identifies rhythmic utterances as important substitutes for “articulate language,” as when he quotes from an eighteenth-century scholar to describe the patterning of a hen's clucking: “when she has laid an egg, [she] ‘repeats the same note very often, and concludes with the sixth above, which she holds for a longer time’; and thus she expresses her joy” (Darwin 2: 51). Rhythm, then, is a kind of language, one more universally accessible than written or spoken words because, as we shall see, it is felt physiologically rather than processed intellectually. Darwin recognizes the evolutionary importance of such physiologically experienced rhythm inasmuch as rhythm facilitates the communication required among animals for procreation.

Darwin also gestures in these descriptions toward his belief in a necessary truth to rhythmic form. We see this readily, for example, in his casual attribution of joy to the rhythmically clucking hen. Why must the cluck necessarily indicate “joy,” and not, say, relief, or any number of other possible emotions? Darwin also assumes every hen expresses the very same emotion by way of her patterned clucking; there is a truth, according to this way of thinking, in rhythmic patterning such that a hen's clucking will mean the very same thing no matter which particular hen lays the egg. Such thinking on rhythm had its most vocal proponent in the Victorian literary world in Coventry Patmore. Patmore insists, for example, that “[t]he six-syllable ‘iambic’ is the most solemn of all our English measures”; something inherent in iambic trimeter lends itself to brooding subjects: “It is scarcely fit for anything but a dirge” (Patmore 27). Tennyson famously responded to Patmore's reasoning with his own six-syllable – but hardly solemn – iambic poem:

Nonetheless Patmore's rhythmic logic had by the late 1850s already become a commonplace among critics of poetry, and Darwin in 1871 was just one of many to suggest that, at least among animals of similar bodily structure, rhythm communicates particular knowledge from one individual to another.

As one might imagine, Darwin's thinking here relies less on poetic theory than it does on the physiological and medical treatises to which poets at mid-century were looking for inspiration. Following from Lockean empiricism, works such as Alexander Bain's 1855 Senses and the Intellect argue that both thoughts and feelings arise from the rhythmic impress of the physical world on the human body.³

In Bain's model, our ability to identify sound comes from the “discrimination by the [auditory] nerve of the frequency of the pulses or compressions given to it.” The auditory nerve “propagate[s] to the brain a different form of excitement according as the beats are few or many,” and depending on “extremely minute differences of pitch [that] impress themselves discriminatively on the fibres” (Bain 206). Hearing, then, results from our experience of rhythm, which tends to be experienced similarly by all similarly structured organisms. Darwin gestures to much the same point in the Descent: “The perception, if not the enjoyment, of musical cadences and of rhythm, is probably common to all animals, and no doubt depends on the common physiological nature of their nervous systems” (2: 333). From this perspective, the song of a sparrow will, on average, articulate a comparable message to any other sparrow, and perhaps even to other animals. According to Darwin and his Victorian contemporaries, in other words, particular patterns of stressed and unstressed – or long and short – beats translate necessarily into particular thoughts, ideas, and feelings. The clucking of a hen will indicate the very same joy from one hen to another, a concordance of experience made possible by all hens' comparable physiological structures.

Blind renders Darwin's tacit argument regarding the essential truth of rhythm into a truth of poetic form, and it is to Blind's melding of poetic and evolutionary theory that we now turn. Not merely a facile analogy, the organizing, structuring efforts of poetry stand in Blind's view as crucial work in the evolution of the human race. At the very opening of The Ascent of Man, Blind envisions

– an image of steady advancement through poetic rhythm that remains an ideal both in the poem and in Blind's work more generally considered. It should be noted before proceeding that Blind diverges from Darwinian theory in her insistence on teleological progress both within the universe and more specifically human development (hence her shift to an “Ascent of Man” in place of Darwin's “Descent”).⁴ Though a religious skeptic, Blind had great faith in what she calls, in her commonplace book, “the righteousness of the Cosmic Order” (CB 36). In so taking the world's “chaos and welter” and rendering it a structured “rhythmical chain,” poetry participates in a world-making process, enabling the human individual to access something of “the Cosmic Order.” The “ascent of man,” as Blind insistently calls it, is a movement toward form facilitated by poetic structure, and made possible by the universality of rhythmic experience.

Appropriately enough, then, the first section of Blind's Ascent narrates the earth's chaotic, early formation by means of strictly governed dactylic hexameter lines. Blind the poet exerts her structuring power over nature's pulsating overflow:

Blind's primeval atoms of “measureless speed” fall into highly measured and exacting metrical patterns. “Auroral pulsations” of unpredictable rhythmic impulses fit within the stanza's strict metrical form; when they “strik[e] the blank heaving surface” of the hexameter line, they emerge through Blind's mediation in neatly ordered dactyls. Blind's meter echoes the Greek hexameter line as Homer practiced it (generally five dactyls followed by a spondee), thereby emphasizing the epic nature of the evolutionary scene: STRUCK out of DIM fluctuant FORces and SHOCK of eLECtrical VAPOUR. The narrative continues: Blind has much to say about such convulsive, ravaging phenomena, what she calls in an essay on Darwin and Shelley “the irresponsible forces of Nature.” The work of evolution, she argues, involves subjecting unruly instinct, or natural disorder, to disciplined control: “turning these elemental forces, that filled [humankind's] progenitors with fear and terror, into the nimblest of servants,” and ultimately allowing for “higher stages of moral and mental development” (Shelley's View 19). One sees the possibility for such work in the “fugitive vapours,” from the lines quoted above, that by chance “take a form.” So too, through a combination of happenstance and conscious labor, Blind imagines the human species evolving toward ever higher levels of moral and intellectual sophistication through the imposition of or accession to formal structure.

In Blind's Ascent, the first human enters the scene notably devoid of metrical regularity:

Uncoincidentally, the wild and stammering rhythms of Blind's fourth line interrupt an otherwise consistent iambic tetrameter stanza, with graphic dashes highlighting the rhythmic breaks; this “new strange creature” has yet to learn its position within a metrically ordered universe. Only after considerable development – after learning how to manipulate fire and to grow crops of food, for example – does the human race begin to discern structure behind the apparent chaos of nature: From the sun and the moon humans learn to determine periodicity, through which metrical oscillations the natural world begins to make formal sense. The breaking of the sea on the shore, for example, now seems a rhythmic movement within a grander metrical scheme. The throbbing stream echoes the pulsing rhythms of the “tumultuous seas,” and an ordered metrical structure governs what had at first appeared fitful rhythmic motions. “Periodicity,” writes Alice Meynell in a nearly contemporaneous essay, “rules over the mental experience of man” (Rhythm 1). So too for Blind, human life is necessarily a metrical experience.

In Blind's Ascent, however, this necessary periodicity does little to save humankind from a history of passion and violence, and the poem proceeds for several hundred lines recounting, among other brutal historical episodes, the fall of Rome and the Reign of Terror. Even with a “shaping brain” and an understanding of natural order, “the spasm of life” still wrests control from the human species (PW 182). That is, uncontrolled rhythmic impulses reign supreme, even in the face of persistent resistance from art. Poets in particular, and perhaps inevitably given Blind's metrical predisposition, represent the highest stage of development away from unruly spasm, and it is through their verses that the latent order of the universe ultimately comes into greatest focus:

In so “fashion[ing]” the universe through metrical order, the poet reconfigures the heavens and the earth. Indeed, Blind's poet assumes messianic proportions as she enables through the work of rhythmic “shaping” an entirely new experience of the world. Shelley, the poet Blind most admired, had of course trumpeted a similar vision of the poet as world-maker in his 1821 Defense of Poetry. Not only are poets in Shelley's view the unacknowledged legislators of the world, they work by way of “a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound…which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words themselves” (Shelley 484). Like Blind, Shelley believes in a necessary “truth of things,” and a connection between such “truth” and the “harmonious and rhythmical” nature of poetry (Shelley 485). But Blind, building on Victorian physiological science and evolutionary theory, takes Shelley one step further in her insistence on the physiological, bodily foundations of rhythmic “truth” and experience. Whereas Shelley describes the poet bringing new light to the world – “enlarg[ing] the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight” (Shelley 488) – Blind conceives of this poetic enlightenment as a physiological experience enabled by the revitalizing forces of rhythm and meter. Through its rhythmic fashioning, poetry will bring about the ultimate “ascent of man,” the “loftier raptures, loftier pain” by which humankind will realize its place in the world.

Blind's theory of poetry, and especially the messianic overtures of the Ascent, should be seen as part of broader cultural efforts in the nineteenth century to counteract through art the horror many Victorians discovered in evolutionary theory. Grant Allen's 1877 Physiological Aesthetics, for example, anticipates Blind's work by locating in aesthetic structure a reasoned space from which to confront the exigencies of a brutal and unpredictable natural world:

Like Blind, Allen looks to physiological experience to concretize a life otherwise “prostrate” to “the terrible forces of nature.” Published in the anxious wake of Darwin's Descent, Allen's Aesthetics avoids poetry offering only “a rambling, disconnected stream of ‘spasmodic’ images,” directing readers instead to works of aesthetic wholeness in which the poet “has gathered together, as in a treasure-house, all that is glorious and beautiful, without and within, in the boundless universe or in the soul of man.” It goes nearly without saying that in a study of physiological aesthetics, such wholeness relies at least in part on “the spontaneous choice of a metre that harmonises with [the poet's] theme” (Allen 281, 283). Much as Darwin recognizes the importance of “vibratory movement[s]” among peacocks and grouses, and Alexander Bain details the body's reliance on rhythmic patterning for sense perception, Allen and Blind after him concentrate on the centrality of metrical periodicity to human life, and they promote aesthetic works that resonate sympathetically with that necessary periodicity.

Allen and Blind of course were not alone in this endeavor to move beyond rhythmic spasms and toward metrical regularity. From the early 1850s, the height of the so-called Spasmodic movement in poetry, unregulated rhythmic impulses had been associated with cultural instability.⁵

Darwin's contributions to late-Victorian cultural thought only aggravated what had already been established as a fundamental tension between spasm and meter, and this tension plays out in poetry and poetic theory across the Victorian fin de siècle. For example, Alice Meynell's poetic ideal, which seems very much akin to Blind's, follows the Spasmodic model of seeing poetry as relying for its greatest effects on the physiological experiences of the human body (Sydney Dobell, in a characteristic Spasmodic gesture, had written that poetry “is actually in tune with our material flesh and blood” [Dobell 22, 25]). Meynell idealizes such a Spasmodic “vital union,” as she calls it, of “mind and body, where tidal thought and feeling are quick with the blood and various with the breath of life” (Meynell, “Coventry Patmore” 96).⁶ And yet Meynell, like Blind, also requires “an explicit code of literary law” to govern these “tidal” thoughts and feelings inspired by poetry (94). Edmund Gosse likewise writes in 1877 of the need to “make immortal art out of transient feeling,” to bring a “constructive power” to bear on eccentric and spontaneous human experiences (Gosse 53). This project of emphasizing the “constructive power” of poetry is for Gosse, as for so many of his day, both an aesthetic and a cultural project, and the significance of Darwinian evolution to his thinking must not be underestimated. Blind herself ends the Ascent contemplating humankind's rhythmic positioning in the universe: Most urgent for Blind and her contemporaries seems to be whether such rhythmically inspired revelations will ultimately be made part of human experience, or whether humans will be doomed by and large to wander through fits of irregular, destructive spasms. In the section that follows we shall explore Blind's apprehensions of a world in which rhythmic patterning often fails to fit comfortably within metrical forms. The spasmodic, unpredictable, and often injurious work of rhythm takes on especial weight for Blind with respect to women, who seem in her view not to sympathize as readily with established metrical patterns, and to suffer disproportionately for their lack of metrical synchronicity.

Lyric Spasms

Blind's most explicit delineation of the conflict between individual rhythmic spasm and sympathetic metrical regularity comes not in her poetry, but in her 1885 novel Tarantella. It is to this somewhat anomalous work, then, that we turn before addressing the trouble with rhythm in poetry from Blind's later period. It will be immediately apparent that, as suggested in the work of Darwin, Bain, Allen, and others, much of the point of Tarantella is to demonstrate that rhythm and meter perform important functions beyond the confines of poetry.

Blind highlights the dangers of unmeasured rhythmic exuberance through the figure of Antonella Mansi, a young woman from Capri who dances the wildly fantastic tarantella that gives the novel its title. Antonella enters her dancing with “a convulsive tremor.” The violinist who accompanies the young woman's dance finds himself “almost involuntarily [striking] an impassioned allegro,” after which Antonella loses all restraint in her performance:

Another scene of Antonella's dancing points more directly to the spasmodic and uncontrolled nature of her movements. One imagines this dancing could not possibly fit within a standard measure, but instead strikes out haphazardly against the regular flow of metrical beating: Much as Antonella allows her passion to overflow, seemingly, the confines of her physical being, those around Antonella become caught in her web of enthusiasm. The violinist reports in a later scene being “swept away against my better reason by a tumultuous emotion” (1: 186; ch. 16) and transported “by a sudden fit of passion” (1: 193; ch. 17). This rhythmic experience works notably against “better reason” and the kind of shaping, controlling mind Blind celebrates in the Ascent. Antonella's dancing seems more a return to the convulsive and chaotic fluctuations of the earth's early formation, before “the righteousness of the Cosmic Order” asserted its governing presence.

Blind offers in her novel a contrary model for rhythmic expression in Mina Lichtenfeld, a young German girl who sings ballads “in a low, sweet voice that had an indefinably plaintive ring” (2: 78; ch. 33). Mina's music inspires communal sentiment much like a performance earlier in the novel that sways “a mass of people…by one common emotion” and provokes Mina's townspeople to “realize the solidarity of those human units, each of which, bent on its individual desires, aims, and passions, seems often so indifferent, alas! even so antagonistic, to its fellows” (1: 80; ch. 8). Mina, in other words, stands for the kind of sympathetic rhythmic experience that Darwin describes as part of sexual selection and that Bain finds in basic patterns of sense reception (sound waves striking the ear, for example). Whereas Antonella's spasms promise only estrangement, Mina's ballads intimate a “harmony with universal law” such as that Blind associated with her friend Mazzini (“Personal Recollections” 702).⁸

Blind argues throughout her literary career that to succeed evolutionarily requires identifying and articulating those individual rhythmic qualities that fit into the grander metrical form, the “universal law,” rather than yielding to spasmodic individualism.

But it is not always easy to resonate with “universal law,” and much of Blind's poetry highlights the difficult tensions between rhythm and meter, between individual experience and the ordered structure of the surrounding world. We see this at first in the struggles Blind pictures in the Ascent as sonic dissonance:

Slamming doors, crying children, and verbal abuse, conjured in part by the stanza's cutting alliterations, all help cast a skeptical eye on the place of rhythmic communication – Darwin's “articulate language” – in modern human civilization. What once appeared as patterns of sympathetic rhythmic beating now manifest as violent interactions, miserable cries, aggressive shouting. Blind emphasizes such savage discord even more in her 1891 collection of dramatic monologues, Dramas in Miniature, which focuses in particular on the effect of rhythmic spasms on modern women. The poems detail the experiences of destitute women: mothers separated from dying children, girls forced by economic necessity into lives of prostitution, women gone insane and forcibly removed from those they love. The tragedy of these women's lives comes less from their own capitulation to rhythmic individualism, though this is important, than it does from defective social structures, the failure of human communities to provide a sympathetic “world embrace” within “universal law” like that fantasized in the more optimistic moments of the Ascent. Whereas Blind's evolutionary narrative found metrical order for the “dim fluctuant forces and shock of electrical vapour” that comprised the earth's earliest moments, the poet seems at a loss to accommodate in regulated meter the spasmodic fluctuations of women in the modern world.

Blind brings into focus the modern deficiency of sympathetic embrace in the first poem of the Dramas. “The Russian Student's Tale,” a dramatic monologue spoken by the eponymous Russian student, narrates the young man's seduction and betrayal of an impoverished woman. When the woman admits to having turned to prostitution to avoid starvation, the student is distraught and sympathetic: “A sob rose to my throat as dry/As ashes” (PW 226–27). And yet the student abandons the woman, refusing to take on the social stigma tied to fallen women. Predictable as it is in terms of Victorian social conventions, Blind's tale distinguishes itself through the song of a nightingale the student overhears at intervals throughout his narrative. The nightingale, it becomes clear, is a figure – as constructed by the student – for the abandoned young woman:

These lines, the poem's spasmodic refrain, expand or contract rhythmically depending on the number of syllables one accords to words like “Electrically” and “Tumultuously.” “The Russian Student's Tale” culminates with a variation of the refrain that marks the death of the lovelorn nightingale: The woman thus dies, or at least she dies metaphorically, from having been abandoned by her lover, the result of both the conditions of working-class urban existence and Victorian ideals of feminine propriety.

But let us consider in more detail the student's vision of the singing nightingale. The night glows “electrically,” and the river, the Neva, surges and swells; the physical world itself seems alive with pulsing, rhythmic energy, and it is from out of these pulsing patterns that the nightingale's spasmodic lyric song emerges. If anything, the nightingale's spasms seem at one with the surrounding, pulsating world. The wind carries the song, the ecstasies and throes of which parallel and even sympathize with the surge and swell of the river. Hence the nightingale, and the abandoned woman whom the nightingale represents, embodies a kind of ideal of sympathetic vibration, as though it were connected through “universal law” to the world around it. Such a vision accords with Darwin's view of rhythmic communication, as well as with ideals of rhythm articulated by physiological theorists from Alexander Bain to Grant Allen, in which rhythm is universally understood. But the outcome of Blind's poem demonstrates the ultimate failure of this fantasy. The poor woman is abandoned, after all, not only by the Russian student, but by a culture and social structure with little room for the truly impoverished, and especially not for those who through desperation turn to prostitution. Within this structure, the young woman dies and the nightingale's passionate song “fade[s] o'er the silent vale,” unheard by any who truly would sympathize, let alone help. What in earlier times may have facilitated the lyric's rhythmic transmission – its connection, say, to the natural world's surge and swell – now disables its ability to communicate among human individuals. The nightingale's spasms fail to resonate with “universal law” insofar as it now applies to the human community at large, and the lyrical bird dies.

Hard-hearted social values again come head to head with genuine feeling in “A Mother's Dream,” a poem from the Dramas narrated by a woman who leaves her daughter, who was born out of wedlock, at a nunnery so she will not suffer from the “stain” of illegitimacy (PW 259). Too late, the mother repents her decision and attempts to recover the little girl from the nunnery, believing that her daughter is

The woman reaches the convent only to learn her daughter has died and had indeed been calling for her mother as she lay on her deathbed (PW 264). In responding to “nature's deepest chords,” the narrator accedes to what Blind calls “universal law,” turning belatedly from the artificial social structures that had separated her from her daughter. Like “The Russian Student's Tale,” “A Mother's Dream” calls attention to and mourns the disjunction between social forms and genuine feeling. Whereas Blind writes passionately of Shelley's ability to translate “the hidden laws of nature” into art and to communicate “thoughts [that] throb audibly through their solemn rhythms” (“Shelley” 97), Dramas in Miniature forcefully shows how the modern world distorts Shelley's pulsing, rhythmic “throb[s]” into destructive movements like the spasmodic jerking of Antonella's tarantella. More often than not, it seems, rhythmic pulses go awry, and women especially suffer the consequences of such failure.

Blind, however, appears reluctant to forsake entirely the experience of rhythmic spasm. Undoubtedly, she wants structured patterning that will communicate clearly, much as the “vibratory movement[s]” of male peacocks form part of an elaborate mating ritual clearly intelligible to their female counterparts. But at the same time, Blind demands lyric spontaneity that will, like Shelley's poetry, “penetrate…into the fiery depths of human passion” (“Shelley” 90). Such balanced poetry Blind finds in the works of both Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who offers “a distinctively womanly strain of emotion in the throbbing tides of her high-wrought melodious song” (George Eliot 7) and Arthur O'Shaughnessy, of whose volume Music and Moonlight (1874) Blind writes glowingly.⁹

In the works of both poets, formal structure governs the excesses of lyric spontaneity; Barrett Browning's song is “high-wrought,” or finely structured, and O'Shaughnessy is “a master of the formal art of poetry,” his work marked by “grace of diction, and an aërial delicacy of rhythm” (Rev. Music and Moonlight 320). Blind turns critical when writing of poets who have mastered only one of the requisite components, form or spontaneity. With respect to Frances Kemble, for example, Blind values the poet's “rare emotional force” and “irresistible…directness of utterance,” but she notes disapprovingly that Kemble does not “carefully and assiduously cultivate…[her feelings] by the labour requisite to produce every highest product of art.” Kemble does not contain her passion within finely structured meters; she overflows, like the spasmodic nightingale, onto the page with a force that is both “irresistible” and troubling (Rev. Poetic Works 50–51). Blind cannot fully endorse Kemble's poetry, even as she also cannot approve of those poets who lose all sense of spontaneity by adhering too stringently to metrical structure. Blind suggests, for example, that George Eliot's Spanish Gypsy (1868) suffers from a “ponderousness of metre” (Correspondence; letter to Richard Garnett, 15 May 1869); “the work lacks that best and incommunicable gift which comes by nature to the poet…. [H]er thoughts, instead of being naturally winged with melody, seem mechanically welded into song” (George Eliot 223).

Any number of Victorian poets might have identified with Blind's astringent aesthetic logic, her ideal of balance between form and expression, objective sense and subjective sensibility, meter, and rhythm. Few poets, however, elaborated so compelling a view of poetry as ineluctably intertwined with cultural values, and in particular late-Victorian cultural upheaval anent the shifting landscapes of evolutionary theory. To return for a moment to “The Russian Student's Tale,” the lyric spasms of Blind's nightingale suggest powerfully the post-Darwinian human condition, the state of being, in the words of Grant Allen, “[s]olitary in a boundless universe” and “cry[ing] like infants for the light” (Allen 277). At the same time, the poem's formal structure, and especially the ballad-like tetrameter couplets into which the lyric spasms fit, gestures to a cultural structure that fails, as we have seen, to redress the pain of the nightingale's suffering. Many of the Dramas in Miniature appear as modified ballads, part of a late-Victorian ballad revival driven especially by women poets, and Blind uses the form to critique British culture at the fin de siècle; more than any other poetic form, the ballad seemed to nineteenth-century readers an embodiment, or more likely a fantasy, of a unified British culture.¹⁰

The problem with such unity, of course, rests with the ballad's inability to accommodate individual spasm, the “fiery depths of human passion” that Blind so valued in Shelley and that cannot be restricted to form, whether that form be poetic, cultural, or otherwise. The cultural structure implicit in the ballad's metrical form dooms Blind's young prostitute, even as her “lyric spasms of wildest wail” resonate so thoroughly and unambiguously with the pulsing rhythms of the natural world. “This poor lost child,” mourns the Russian student, “we all – yes, all –/Had helped to hurry to her fall” (PW 228). Thus results the poet's near-impossible negotiation between nature and culture, spasm and restraint, rhythm and meter: “in the present state of disorganization,” writes Blind, to quote again the poet's moving judgment of modern life, “one may be chilled to the Soul by…complete isolation from the pulse of a collective life.” Rhythmic pulses seem not to cohere into reasoned metrical structures, and those structures that do exist seem not to account for individual rhythmic pulses.

Blind's poetic ideal thus appears always beyond reach, except perhaps as an ideal to which she turns throughout her literary career. In her essay on Shelley, Blind uses the Pygmalion myth to describe the perfect melding of form and passion, the ideal Shelley and few others come close to achieving:

In passionately embracing solid form, the poet accesses the “vast dumb mystery” of nature, through which he converts dead matter into a living, breathing being. The idea is not to abandon form – cultural form, metrical form, the “Cosmic order” – but rather to “w[i]n a response from its locked lips,” to bring life to form's “cold repose.”

Such yearning for vital structure is very much the crux of the quote with which I opened this essay, Blind's speculation of 1893 that “[t]he poet only truly lives when he feels the rapture of communion; when his soul mirrored in a sister soul is doubled like the moon glassed in the Lake of Nemi.” The rapture Blind so values comes by apprehending the wholeness of the moon's form, a phenomenon Blind explores more fully in a poem entitled “The Mirror of Diana” (it is from where the temple of Diana once stood on Lake Nemi's shore that one may best witness the fully doubled image of the moon on the lake's surface):

As the moon glides into place above the lake, forming its mirror-perfect image, Not only the nightingale, but all of nature – glowworms, fireflies, and “all the wild wind instruments/Of pine and ilex” – seems enthralled, captivated by the moon's perfect image: The moon's rapturous form evaporates into “the flux of things,” but not before inspiring an ideal vision of perfect beauty through perfect form.

An importantly similar scene of rapture, and one that further indicates Blind was not alone in her poetic thinking, marks the climax of George Eliot's poem “The Legend of Jubal,” first published in May of 1870 (Blind's essay on Shelley came out in July of that year, perhaps responding in part to Eliot's poem; Blind later published the first full-length biography of Eliot, demonstrating among other things the earlier poet's influence on the young Blind). Through the passion of Jubal, the Biblical creator of song, writes Eliot,

When Jubal at last presents his musical creation to his community, they are all entranced, caught like the townspeople of Tarantella in a throbbing universality, an ideal of rhythmic sympathy: Jubal's music casts a “glow diffusive” on his audience, like the light Blind's moon radiates over the natural world. In both poems a rhythmic throb pulses intimately and universally – a noteworthy paradox – through all living creatures. And yet the question remains for Eliot and Blind alike whether any poet in the modern world might translate such passionate experience into a poetic form, might bring, as Blind writes of Shelley, “the hidden laws of nature” into art and communicate to others with “thoughts [that] throb audibly through their solemn rhythms” (“Shelley” 97).

The ideal of rapturous form, what Blind calls “the rapture of communion,” fuses emotional affect with structural poetics. In so doing, it seems to access, like the song of Jubal, a physiological experience that is both individual and communal. If such an ideal remains for the most part unattainable in the modern world, much like the lovelorn nightingale's impossible infatuation with the moon, it abides nonetheless as perhaps the only conceivable reconciliation between individual spasm and universal, formal structure. In forms of rapture we may discern tangible shapes among the “dim fluctuant forces” mediating our modern lives. It is for Blind, at last, as Henry Maudsley writes in his 1870 Body and Mind: “No, science has not destroyed poetry, nor expelled the Divine from nature, but has furnished the materials, and given the presages, of a higher poetry and a mightier philosophy than the world has yet seen” (111). Blind makes no pretense to having achieved this “higher poetry,” but her works look forward in anticipation of it. Through her ideal of rapturous form, Blind imagines a passionate synthesis of individual and community, spasm and structure, that she believes may yet be achieved.