Section II
Romantic Conceptions of Time

4. The Temporality of the Soul: Immanent Conceptions of Time in Wordsworth and Byron

Ralf Haekel

This chapter investigates the temporality of the soul in the Romantic period. Just like traditional concepts of the soul, time oscillates between immanence and transcendence: an immanent transient temporality, on the one hand, and transcendent notions of eternity, on the other. Whereas the latter are often associated with religion, theology, and philosophy, the former is connected to history and historicism. Taking its cue from the similarities and differences of the concepts of time and history in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Benedict Anderson, the chapter argues that Romantic poetry is likewise characterised by this tension between immanence and transcendence expressed by these two twentieth-century authors. This is particularly the case in poems in which the soul is the main trope and symbol. The chapter concludes with an analysis of two poems shaped by the conflicting conception of time: William Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality and Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Both poems, the chapter argues, are ultimately characterised by an immanence that borders on pessimism—even Wordsworth’s poem, which is usually read in a much more optimistic and positive manner.

In a famous passage of Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson, quoting from Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (Über den Begriff der Geschichte), distinguishes two different concepts of time:

Our own conception of simultaneity has been a long time in the making, and its emergence is certainly connected, in ways that have yet to be well studied, with the development of the secular sciences. But it is a conception of such fundamental importance that, without taking it fully into account, we will find it difficult to probe the obscure genesis of nationalism. What has come to take the place of the mediaeval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin, an idea of ‘homogeneous, empty time’, in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.¹

In order to develop his well-known theory of nationalism, Anderson juxtaposes a religious medieval ‘messianic’ concept of time and the empty, homogeneous time of secularised modernity. Whereas the former comprises the present moment in time as part of an eschatological idea of history—a ‘simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present’²—the latter is characterised by a post-Enlightenment approach that conceives of history merely in terms of the natural sciences and exists without a concept of transcendence—be that a Judaeo-Christian heaven or a philosophical realm of ideas.

This dichotomy of two distinct conceptions of time suggested by Anderson, however, hardly does Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ justice.³ In his late work—the Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen were written in 1939, a year before he committed suicide in Portbou whilst fleeing from the Nazis—Benjamin does not contrast two concepts of time but rather two different philosophies of history; he does indeed describe a dichotomy, but one between historicism and historical materialism. Historicism, in this context, has to be understood against the German background, as a term denoting Historismus, the nineteenth-century German theory of historiography as the positivist assembling of historical facts.⁴ Whilst this form of historicism aims at describing the past ‘the way it really was’, historical materialism in Benjamin’s sense, on the other hand, tries to seize the past in the present moment in order to inspire hope for the future. According to Benjamin’s understanding, the past is not fixed and given, hence objectively describable, but dependent on the historian’s perspective and thus also prone to change. In Benjamin’s idiosyncratic reading of classical Marxism, historical materialism is fundamentally shaped by theology:

The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that.⁵

Hence, Walter Benjamin does not, as Benedict Anderson’s passage suggests, contrast a medieval Christian concept of time with the modern secular notion of time structured by clock and calendar. Benjamin’s criticism of German historicism rather needs to be understood from the position of a theologically infused historical materialism that focuses on the present moment as that point in time in which past and future meet in an intimation of eternity. Benjamin emphasises this notion in an appendix to his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’:

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.⁶

In the following, I wish to argue that the way Benjamin conceptualises and problematises history and time in his historico-philosophical theses of 1939 bears striking resemblance to the Romantic period—although I am aware of the anachronism. Just as in Benjamin’s conception, the Romantic concept of time betrays a sometimes bewildering co-existence of transcendence and secularism. This resemblance may not be a coincidence, however, as Benjamin, having written his doctoral dissertation on the concept of criticism in German Romanticism, was an expert in Romantic philosophy and aesthetics.

In ways that differ fundamentally from each other, William Wordsworth and Lord Byron also refer to transcendence and eternity in poems that are ultimately entirely secular in their outlook—Ode: Intimations of Immortality and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In order to stress the similarities as well as the striking differences regarding temporality in both poems, I want to investigate a topic that is peculiarly situated between materiality and immateriality, time and eternity, history and messianic time: the concept of the soul. I argue that both poets represent the transition from a religiously infused to a worldly concept of mind that betrays the dawning of the modern historical worldview that both Anderson and Benjamin have in mind. In their treatment of the past, both Romantic poets are remarkably close to Benjamin’s vision: Wordsworth calls up a Platonic notion of eternity, whilst Byron’s bleak view of history seems already wholly immanent; only in its melancholy does it betray a longing for change that has transcendental overtones. In order to contextualise my readings of both poems I will first outline the change in the concept of time as well as the temporality of the soul in the Romantic period.

Falling into Time: The Temporality of the Soul

The conception of time around 1800 is fundamentally shaped by transformations occurring in the preceding age of Enlightenment. During the long eighteenth century—the period of the Enlightenment and Romanticism—the concept of time underwent a fundamental change. One key aspect is the development of a ‘dual structure of Enlightenment time’,⁷ i.e. the separation of absolute time, on the one hand, and subjective time, on the other. The former concept conceives of time as something objective and scientifically measurable. Perhaps the most famous definition is provided by Isaac Newton in his Principia Mathematica of 1687: ‘Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows uniformly, without regard to anything external’.⁸ Opposed to this is the conception of time as subjective and conditional on personal experience.

One hundred years after Newton’s definition, the concept of absolute time was first contested in the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. West-Pavlov describes Kant’s treatment of time as ‘a subjective factor integral to perception itself’. He states:

In other words, time was a condition of possibility of perception of the world, and only because it framed perception could it mistakenly be ascribed to the external world itself. To this extent, Kant was the forerunner of modern phenomenological theories of temporality.⁹

During the Romantic period, time is further treated as highly idiosyncratic and individual, for instance in William Wordsworth’s notion of memory as particular ‘spots of time’ which constitute a co-existence of two states of temporal consciousness: of remembered past and lived presence. Jonathan Wordsworth explains this concept as follows:

The ‘forms’ (images) stamped upon the mind yet (still, at the time of writing) exist, with their independent life, achieving within the mind a permanence comparable to that of their ‘archetypes’ (the landscapes, natural forms, from which they derive). [...] it is clear that we should expect the ‘spots of time’ to be not just memories where time stands still, but images, pictures in the mind, imprinted as the result of more than usually important emotional experience.¹⁰

This subjective conception of time based on personal experience finds its pinnacle later in nineteenth-century philosophy with Henri Bergson who distinguishes between time as ‘a homogeneous medium in which our conscious states are ranged alongside one another as in space’ and ‘pure duration’,¹¹ which he conceives of as a solely psychological state.

The Romantic period, situated right in the middle of this development, is characterised by a tension of time as externally measurable and as subjectively experienced. It negotiates a modern secular conception of time as shaped by science and Enlightenment reason and the Romantic insight that a human being is, to quote Shelley’s fragment ‘On Life’, ‘incapable of imagining to himself annihilation, existing but in the future and the past, being, not what he is, but what he has been and shall be’.¹² This focus on the present betrays a desire typical of many Romantic authors to reconcile scientific progress with a more universal approach to life and being that transcends the conception of time as merely homogeneous and empty. It is, in other words, an attempt to bring together time and eternity by means of what Benjamin might describe as a ‘weak Messianic power’.

The soul is of particular importance here, even as it further complicates the matter. Traditionally a philosophical and religious entity, the soul encapsulates both eternity associated with transcendence and temporality associated with immanence. In a scientific age, the soul is therefore per se characterised by this double tension between eternity and time, as well as subjective time and objective scientific time.

I will begin, however, by very briefly delineating the transformation of the concept of the soul around 1800.¹³ During the Romantic period, the soul was part of a larger revolution of the scientific understanding of the human—and of the scientific system in general—encompassing the entire eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The history of the soul is therefore part of the fundamental scientific change concerning the theory of the human from Early Modern natural philosophy to the Modern scientific system. In the course of this transformation of the human sciences, the traditional Aristotelian tripartite soul—nutritive, sensitive, and rational—makes way for the modern scientific notion based on an organic and nervous conception of a human being and human consciousness. The change in the conception of the human soul, together with the scientific system and the shape of cultural knowledge, had not only an immediate impact on the field of science but also on the medium of literature in which these concepts were expressed.

In the context of literature and the Romantic history of ideas in general, Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy is particularly relevant. In Plato and Neoplatonists such as Plotinus, the soul mediates between the world of ideas or the One, on the one side, and the immanent and transient world in which we live, on the other. The soul is part of the human, but its own nature is closer to the divine, as Socrates states in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo: ‘The soul is most like the divine and immortal and intellectual and uniform and indissoluble and ever unchanging, and the body, on the contrary, most like the human and mortal and multiform and unintellectual and dissoluble and ever changing’.¹⁴

Many of the Romantic poets use Neoplatonic ideas to tackle the paradoxes they experience in poetry and art. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous definition of beauty as ‘Multëity in Unity’, according to which a poem tries to reconcile transcendence with immanence in order to capture the one in the manifold (and vice versa), is exemplary in this context. Time, in this Neoplatonic approach, therefore exists in two forms: as eternity in the realm of ideas, i.e. the unchanging and transcendent intelligible world, and as time within the physical sensory world. Andrew Smith describes the problem of time and soul in Plotinus’s Enneads as follows:

Moreover, since we are ourselves time-bound to a large extent and particularly in our reasoning it makes sense to have as full an understanding as we can of our human situation. Despite the fact that the real self may be located at the level of Intellect and eternity, the empirical self, the self which philosophizes discursively, is vested in the reasoning powers of the soul (V.3.3.35–6) whose life is time. To this extent the transcendent world may be, if not illuminated by, at least indicated from the time realm of reason. Hence the importance of time as well as eternity.¹⁵

Mediating between immanence and transcendence, the soul, in a way, encompasses both eternity and transient immanent time. For the Neoplatonic concept of the soul, the process of being born is not only a transition from transcendence to immanence but literally a falling into time.

What happened to the concept of soul in the Romantic period can be described as a paradox. By losing its status as a scientific and philosophical truth defining life and cognition, the soul, particularly if it appeared in the medium of literature and especially in the genre of poetry, became a metaphor of transcendence, eternity, and immortality. Yet, by pointing to these aspects that are decidedly otherworldly, the topic of the soul reflects the fact that any kind of poetry—or art in general—is necessarily immanent and may thus only anticipate an ideal it can never reach. As the second generation of Romantic poets became increasingly frustrated with the transcendental aspects of their own aesthetic theory the focus shifted back to the linguistic material of poetry. This led to a characteristic form of self-reflexivity in poems on the soul, which thus, paradoxically, highlighted the poems’ mediality and materiality: the very fact that the soul denotes transcendence highlights the immanence of the poem in which it does so.

Looking at the topic of the temporality of the soul in Romantic poetry, one can discern the tendency to reconcile modern scientific progress with a desire for transcendence and eternity. Due to its self-reflexive tendency, the soul in poetry has fundamental implications for the formal arrangement of a literary work of art. In what follows, I discuss two poetic ways to approach the temporality of the soul: a circular concept and a progressive one, William Wordsworth’s Ode and Lord Byron’s Childe Harold.

William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality

In William Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, time is, as the title unmistakably indicates, linked to notions of immortality, particularly the Platonic concept of the immortality of the soul.¹⁶ The speaker describes the beginning of life and the awakening of the mind as a fall from eternity into time:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy! (58–66)¹⁷

With the moment of birth, a gradual process of forgetting sets in, and eventually all access to the pre-natal state is barred for the adult speaker. The concept of the soul in Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, arguably the most famous Romantic poem on the topic, is complex and problematic; it embraces many of the multifaceted and sometimes contradictory elements that characterise the concept of the soul around 1800. The Ode is, hence, a poem about the immortality of the transcendental soul and simultaneously a poem about the immanent secular mind.

Referring to the Platonic notion of anamnesis, the poem juxtaposes eternity and time, but, surprisingly perhaps, it does not end up glorifying transcendence. The Ode’s first stanzas are concerned with a severe crisis: the speaker’s initial experience of loss—the loss of an original insight that is still accessible in early childhood:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore; –

Turn wheresoe’er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more. (1–9)

According to Plato, any human knowledge is a form of memory that recalls knowledge of the immortal and eternal soul before it entered the body: to learn means to remember what we once knew before we were born and what was lost at the moment of birth. Hence, the soul still has limited access to the realm of ideas through learning—which is at the same time an act of remembrance. Whilst in Plato learning is remembering, in Wordsworth, on the contrary, the boy moves further and further away from this form of innocent wisdom as he grows older, matures, and gains worldly knowledge. This sense of loss, however, is, and this is the gist of the poem, gradually replaced by an enhancement of the immanent mind and the faculty of the imagination—linked to time and not to eternity. Wordsworth’s poem thus proposes an epistemology that consists of a strange mixture between both the Platonic model and the dominant Lockean empiricist theory according to which the mind of a child is a tabula rasa at birth—and yet the poem is at the same time opposed to both of them. For the growing child, who originally had access to the realm of ideas, the process of learning is a form of forgetting. The more experienced the boy becomes, the further he moves away from the original state of the soul.

As the poem proceeds, it becomes clear that it is not the care for an afterlife or the soul’s salvation that is at its heart. Instead, the speaker’s concern is with the human mind in this life and especially with the creative mind of the poet-speaker himself. The main theme of the Ode is, therefore, the crisis of the imagination, and this crisis is also the volta of the poem. Although the adult speaker does not have immediate access to the realm of ideas, he still has the ability to remember his own childhood:

Hence in a season of calm weather

Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. (164–70)

The mind can remember remembering. This act of memory, however, is also a poetic act, and therefore it is identical with Wordsworth’s famous notion that poetry ‘takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity’¹⁸ and also with his notion of the ‘spots of time’—the coexistence of ‘two consciousnesses’ he describes in The Prelude. It is not the eternal realm of ideas but actually their loss that gives rise to the creative process, and only in the act of remembering are there ‘intimations of immortality’—not in the ideas as such. In other words, the idiosyncratic reinterpretation of the Platonic concept of anamnesis in the Ode contains Wordsworth’s entire poetic theory of the imagination in a nutshell.

It thus becomes clear that Wordsworth’s concept of the soul betrays a focus on the immanent mind and not on some otherworldly ideal. By referencing Plato’s Phaedo, the poem evokes the entire classical discourse on the soul, yet it never fully accepts the religious and mythological dimensions of this discourse. The allusion to Platonic idealism is therefore not made to evoke the immortality of the soul; rather, these classical pre-texts are invoked in order to describe poetry as a philosophical act and thus to elevate the dignity of the poet’s imagination.

This turn from transcendence to immanence is also visible in the poem’s formal features. The Ode is arranged in a circular manner and consequently often described as a prime example of an organic work of art hinting at the realms of transcendence and eternity. Therefore, it has been analysed time and again as a poem that leads from crisis and scepticism to closure and harmony¹⁹ and, hence, it has been seen to be a prime example of the Romantic ideology in Jerome McGann’s sense.²⁰ But a closer look reveals that the Ode undermines, rather than fulfils, the harmony promised by the organic work of art. The joy that the speaker feels is fragile and fleeting. The immortal world soul—another Neoplatonic concept evoked in Wordsworth’s poem—is a mere point of reference for the poet speaker’s imagination. Due to this problematic crisis and pseudo-resolution, there is a constant tension involved in the acts of the imagination—the fear that it may utterly fail again in the future is always present. The imagery is fraught with tension and the vocabulary used in the Ode’s final stanza is highly ambiguous and sceptical, and thus it is doubtful whether the poem really has, to quote Matthew Arnold, ‘Wordsworth’s healing power’.²¹ The many connotations and puns make it clear that the form of the poem undermines the speaker’s positive resolution.²²

I will try to demonstrate this in a close reading of the poem’s closing stanza:

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,

Forebode not any severing of our loves!

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;

I only have relinquished one delight

To live beneath your more habitual sway. (187–91)

At first glance, the final stanza seems to be closing the poem on a positive note, directly turning the negative emotions of the poem’s beginning into a positive mood at its close as a result of the speaker’s introspective development. This reading, however, disregards the ambiguities that characterise almost each of the final seventeen lines. One may claim that the speaker finds his strength ‘In the soothing thoughts that spring/Out of human suffering’ (183–84); yet, the overall impression is that joy does not eventually conquer fear but, on the contrary, that the impression of loss prevails. The line ‘And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves’, with which this final stanza opens, consciously repeats and reflects the opening line of the entire poem, suggesting a positive development, but also, by remembering the initial crisis, hinting at the fact that this is only momentary and therefore transient and brittle. The very next line is an expression of fear, because this invocation of nature can be read not only as a statement but as the speaker’s pleading: ‘Forebode not any severing of our loves!’ The ‘habitual sway’ of line 191 refers, on a literal level, to the swaying groves, but ultimately, on a symbolical level, it self-reflexively refers to the speaker’s mood swings, the comings and goings of poetic inspiration.

The seemingly innocent description of nature is highly ambiguous as well:

I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,

Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;

The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

Is lovely yet;

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality (192–98)

The brook does not simply flow but it frets, a word that also connotes anxiety and worry; furthermore, the speaker trips, which indicates that even in a light-hearted and innocent mood, danger is lurking underneath. Furthermore, the simple word ‘yet’ is doubly stressed and therefore deserves attention. First, the line is the only one in this stanza that does not conform to the iambic pentameter, and, second, it rhymes with the ambiguous term ‘fret’. Considering that the genre of the ode is closely linked with the religious hymn and, hence, takes its origin in an oral setting, a different stress in pronouncing the line gives it a totally different, more negative, connotation: ‘The innocent brightness of a new-born Day/Is lovely yet;/The Clouds’. In an oral recitation, the readers could make a break between ‘lovely’ and ‘yet’, thus stressing the latter term. Furthermore, in a purely acoustic rendering ‘yet’ could thus move much closer to ‘the clouds’ as if in an enjambment. In this reading, ‘yet’ becomes part of an enjambment, and the menacing clouds would be emphasised in a way that was hidden before. Thus, if the orator should choose to pronounce the word as if belonging to the following line, the stress is put on darkness rather than on light. The clouds take on a double meaning as well. On the one hand, they are the symbol of a medium between the eternal One, symbolised by the sun, and the immanent world. On the other hand, the clouds obviously darken the light and hide the sun from view. Quite tellingly, the notion of immortality is now turned into ‘man’s mortality’—hence, the transition from the transcendental soul to the immanent mind is complete. The final lines nevertheless seem to emphasise a positive turn right before the poem’s close:

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. (203–06)

I would claim, however, that the Ode retains the pessimism and negativity that characterise its first stanzas. The most obvious instance of this inclination towards the negative can be found in the very last word ‘tears’, which tellingly rhymes with ‘fears’. But also the flower in the penultimate line is not just simple, it is ‘mean’. And all of these ambiguities refer not to the world or to humankind in general but ‘to me’—hinting at the solipsism responsible for the initial crisis.

The Immortality Ode thus turns out to be an example of an extreme form of solipsism, and furthermore, one that the text—through its ambiguities—, but not the speaker, is aware of. The temporality of the soul that lies at the heart of the poem seems to promise a resolution and closure, and the movement from transcendental immortality to mortal immanence has its origin in a severe crisis, which is seemingly resolved in a coming-to-terms with the poetic self. The vocabulary, however, undermines this and hints at a fundamental crisis that returns regularly. Thus, the poem does not present a resolution typical of an organic artefact. Rather, the catastrophe of the opening stanzas remains looming in the background. The ambivalence characterising the final stanza and thus ultimately the entire Ode is part of the transition of the soul from immortality and transcendence to secular imagination and immanent mind, from eternity to time.

Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

An even bleaker vision can be found in Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Whilst Wordsworth’s Ode hides its anxiety and scepticism underneath a layer of optimism, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold presents an openly disillusioned picture of the nature of time and history. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. A Romaunt, published in four cantos between 1812 and 1818, made its author, as Byron himself claimed, famous overnight. The long poem is written in Spenserian stanzas and based on Byron’s own travels through Europe during—in Cantos I and II—and after—in Cantos III and IV—the Napoleonic Wars.²³ The term ‘pilgrimage’ in the title is slightly misleading as the poem can hardly be called a spiritual work; neither is it based on a tour with religious intentions and a clearly definable destination. More accurately, it is a poem that takes account of Europe from a radically sceptical and even negative point of view. Childe Harold is, most of the time, not actively involved in the ongoing plot but rather a passive onlooker who becomes almost invisible and at times drifts out of view entirely. The reference to the protagonist in the title therefore also leads readers astray, as it is sometimes difficult to say whether the traveller is really at the centre of attention, as the poem’s point of view frequently changes between the narrator and the eponymous hero Harold, who both are implicitly rather than explicitly identified with Lord Byron himself.

The first two cantos were begun in Albania in 1809, mainly written in Greece, and finished in Turkey. This first part of the poem was influenced by the experiences Byron had on his Grand Tour from 1809 to 1811, and it reflects key issues of this journey and the places Byron visited. Cantos III and IV were composed much later, after the Congress of Vienna and Napoleon’s defeat in the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815. They recount two further journeys Byron undertook, the first from Waterloo up the Rhine River, and the second and final from Venice to Rome. Although the entire poem gives an account of three journeys, it is apt to say that the first two and the latter two Cantos each form a unit and the whole makes up one coherent poem: whilst Cantos I and II paint a picture of the Napoleonic Wars, Cantos III and IV are a disillusioned account of Europe after Waterloo and an ongoing reflection on history, civilization, culture, and art. The poem furthermore features the first of Byron’s ‘Byronic heroes’, Childe Harold, who is anything but a chivalric hero but rather a gloomy and melancholy character. Furthermore, the speaker-narrator, who at times can hardly be distinguished from Harold, may be read as such a Byronic hero as well.

The poem gives a negative, even nihilistic, account of contemporary European history in a semi-fictitious manner. The outlook on time and history is an ostensibly pessimistic one, and Europe is described as decaying or already lying in ruins. Time, which in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage thus features primarily as the necessary condition of a historical situation characterised by disintegration, decay, and decline, is presented as immanent time towards death, and the soul is symptomatically described as mortal and subject to an empty, homogeneous time.

In the second Canto, the hero travels from Portugal and Spain to Greece, a country that automatically, for a Romantic traveller at least, calls up history and classical art. Yet, Byron’s is a Greece that is plundered by other nations, especially Britain; and even art loses its quality to outlast time. Invoking the goddess Athena as his muse, the speaker contrasts a glorious past with a desolate present: ‘Ancient of days! august Athena! where,/Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul?/Gone – glimmering through the dream of things that were’.²⁴

Right at the beginning of the canto, the speaker describes the corpse of an imaginary Ajax whose dead body metaphorically signifies the decline from ancient glory. The sense of misery connected with the present as opposed to the past becomes clear in the description of the hero’s cranium that even the worms shun: ‘Remove yon skull from out the scattered heaps:/Is that a Temple where a God may dwell?/Why ev’n the Worm at last disdains her shattered cell!’ (II.5).

In the next stanza, the skull is described as the seat of the soul, which is then immediately connected with the topics of time and history:

Look on its broken arch, its ruined wall,

Its chambers desolate, and portals foul:

Yes, this was once Ambition’s airy hall,

The Dome of Thought, the Palace of the Soul:

Behold through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole,

The gay recess of Wisdom and of Wit

And Passion’s host, that never brooked control:

Can all Saint, Sage, or Sophist ever writ,

People this lonely tower, this tenement refit? (II.6)

The skull is the classic symbol of memento mori- and the vanity-topoi, and these immediately conjure up a link with mortality and hence the immanence of time. This is indeed a conception of time that is homogeneous and empty—the soul no longer promises an access to transcendence and eternity. Byron’s poem describes even the most traditional concepts that hint at eternity—religion and the ancient gods—as immanent concepts prone to passing and vanishing:

Even Gods must yield – Religions take their turn:

‘Twas Jove’s – ’tis Mahomet’s – and other Creeds

Will rise with other years, till Man shall learn

Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds (II.3)

Religion, the gods, the glories of ancient art—all these topics referencing the past evoked in the poem eventually only refer to time’s transience. This all-encompassing notion of decline and decay is also emphasised in Stanza 53 of Canto II:

What valley echoed the response of Jove?

What trace remaineth of the Thunderer’s shrine?

All, all forgotten – and shall Man repine

That his frail bonds to fleeting life are broke?

Cease, Fool! the fate of Gods may well be thine:

Wouldst thou survive the marble or the oak?

When nations, tongues, and worlds must sink beneath the stroke! (II.53)

Notions of eternity and transcendence are only called up to stress the poem’s bleak view on Napoleonic Europe—and time and history in general. It seems therefore only fitting that the nineteenth century would also engender the theory and practice of historicism so fiercely attacked by Benjamin in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’.

The form of Byron’s text, however, I argue in conclusion of this chapter, critically reflects this immanent comprehension of time. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is an epic poem, yet, both in its conception and for its readership, it functions as a piece of travel writing. Although it is termed a pilgrimage, it is not clear where that pilgrimage is supposed to lead or what its purpose is—certainly not a religious one. The melancholy Byronic hero is travelling an empty and forlorn world mirroring his own emptiness inside. There is no salvation anywhere, which is also why the text’s temporality is immanent. As a travel book, it maps out the secular world, and its empty and homogeneous time is mirrored in the progressive and repetitive form of the poem: the Spenserian structure could go on endlessly, repeating stanza after stanza like clockwork.

The poem’s very melancholy stance, however, betrays a yearning for a different temporality, characterised by intimations of immortality and eternity. Regarding its philosophy of time, this poem is, in a manner, the reversal of the Immortality Ode. Whereas Wordsworth’s poem ends with a reconciliation of immanent time and transcendent eternity that betrays its anxiety in the negativity and ambiguity of its final stanza, Childe Harold’s concept of time is, at first glance, wholly immanent and subject to a history of decline and decay. Only the melancholy point of view of its protagonist as well as its narrator shows a longing for a concept of time that transcends the secular world and the perspective of a persona ‘incapable of imagining to himself annihilation’.

I began this chapter with an anachronistic reference to Benedict Anderson and Walter Benjamin. Anderson’s strict opposition of messianic time characterised by the simultaneity of past, present, and future, on the one hand, and empty, homogeneous time, on the other, serves him to construct a teleology starting from a religious medieval worldview to a secular modern one. The text he quotes, however, Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, undermines this strict contrast. Benjamin’s own conception of a theologically informed historical materialism constructs the present as a conception of time as weakly messianic—characterised both by an immanent conception of time, but with a longing or at least a hope for change and transcendence. Benjamin’s blending of eternity and time, I claim, finds an equivalent in the tension between eternity and time of the Romantic period.

The two different texts—Wordsworth’s and Byron’s—are both immanent poems that refer to the soul—a topic traditionally mediating between eternity and time, transcendence and immanence. They focus both on time as fleeting and transient, but both, in ways almost diametrically opposed to one another, long to transcend the immanent and secular world. Whilst Wordsworth’s poem constructs time as circular, hinting at eternity in its very form, Byron’s epic is progressive, mirroring the hero’s walking in a disenchanted world, whilst his melancholy expresses a longing for an eternity that seems forever lost.

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