Wordworth’s Black Jesus
TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy man of men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;—
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.
To Toussaint L’Ouverture enacts the symbolic transfiguration of the image of a man into the image of a God. The man who provided Wordsworth with the basis of the image is highly prized and semiotically rich political hostage Toussaint L’Overture, leader of the Haitian slave revolt of 1794-1804, against French, British and Spanish Empires. The God Wordsworth turns L’Overture’s image into is the one he - and that section of the romantic generation he spoke for - needed in 1803. This is a God who, in the first place, absolves this politically recanting generation of the need to declare for either Napolean or Pitt - L’Overture is a third-way emblem. Secondly, Wordsworth’s Black Jesus allows commitment to progressive ideals to be deflected away from dangerous political activity in the contingently real world, and towards passive contemplation of a next-world utopia underpinned by the eschatological guarantees of religious belief.
In the aftermath of the Peace of Amiens of March 1802, signed between Monarchist Britain and Bonapartist France, thousands of British revolutionary tourists, among them many who had once been (or, in rarer cases, were still,) supporters of the French revolution crossed the channel too see for themselves what the novel society of Republican France was like. William Wordsworth scorned it all as a vapid fad:
Or what is it that ye go forth to see?
Lords, lawyers, statesmen, squires of low degree,
Men known, and men unknown, sick, lame, and blind,
Post forward all, like creatures of one kind,
With first-fruit offerings crowd to bend the knee
In France, before the new-born Majesty.
'Tis ever thus. Ye men of prostrate mind,
A seemly reverence may be paid to power;
But that's a loyal virtue, never sown
In haste, nor springing with a transient shower:
(Lines 2-11, CALAIS, AUGUST 1802)
Unlike those he rather haughtily criticises here, Wordsworth’s own brief trip to Calais in August of 1802 was not undertaken happily or voluntarily. It had been close to a decade since a youthful love affair with Catherine Vallon had left the awkward legacy of daughter Annette, now 9 years old and about to meet her father for the first time due to restrictions on travel imposed by the war. Wordsworth went to meet his daughter under pressure from his sister Dorothy Wordsworth, who accompanied him, and his betrothed Mary Huthinson. These expected him to settle matters to do with Annette in advance of his wedding. Wordsworth’s had political as well as personal hangovers to deal with from his time in France. His passionate youth in France, where he witnessed the early glory of the French Revolution had inspired in him a feeling, as it did in many, of attending at a rebirth of humanity, which he couched poetically in terms of apocalyptic ecstasy:
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!--Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress--to assist the work,
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,
The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
(As at some moment might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of paradise itself)
The budding rose above the rose full blown.
What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of?
(Prelude, French Revolution, Lines 2 to 19, 1805)
Wordsworth had recoiled in horror from the French Revolution following the outbreak of the Terror, and with the rise of an openly aggressive French foreign policy . He had, over time, dropped much of his political activism - in this he was typical of the ‘80000 incorrigible Jacobins’ half-hallucinated by the reactionary genius Edmund Burke in mid-1790’s Britian. However, like many others of his generation, while Wordsworth had slid into disenchantment and passivity, he was yet to become an opponent of the French Revolution and of change from below in general. Though he already knew that Utopia had failed utterly to materialise in France , the seeming total reversal of the early gains of the revolution that he experienced when he arrived in Calais still shocked him deeply. Wordsworth felt exposed as naive. He felt conned. It was if the dream had been only masking an imminently greater nightmare all along:
A homeless sound of joy was in the sky:
From hour to hour the antiquated Earth
Beat like the heart of Man: songs, garlands, mirth,
Banners, and happy faces, far and nigh!
And now, sole register that these things were,
Two solitary greetings have I heard,
"Good-morrow, Citizen!" a hollow word,
As if a dead man spake it! Yet despair
Touches me not, though pensive as a bird
Whose vernal coverts winter hath laid bare.
(Lines 4-14 COMPOSED NEAR CALAIS, ON THE ROAD LEADING TO ARDRES, AUGUST 7, 1802)
The period before, during and after the visit to France forced Wordsworth into a heightened critical confrontation with the past, present and future direction of the revolution, and from there to try and evolve a new attitude towards it upon which he would base a re-founded ethics and a renovated aesthetics. The form he chose to express this critical crisis and its attempted resolutions was the sonnet. Barely two years after the expanded edition of the distinctly rupturous and heretical Lyrical Ballads, this choice marks a return to literary piety. In his framing Prefaratory Sonnet Wordsworth outlines the reasoning behind his sonnet turn:
Nuns fret not at their Convent's narrow room;
And Hermits are contented in their Cells;
And Students in their pensive Citadels;
Maids at the Wheel, the Weaver at his Loom,
Sit blithe and happy; Bees that soar for bloom,
Higher than the highest Peak of Furness fells
Will murmur by the hour in Foxglove bells:
In truth, this 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:
Pleas'd if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.
The hermetic and religious allegorizing of the writer here is crucial to our understanding of the full significance of Wordsworth’s sonnet turn - away from a mass audience and orientation, and towards the literary elite and their specialized and bookish concerns. The primary allegorical figures of the nun and the hermit signal that Wordsworth now sees his task as a poet as an isolated and metaphysical one rather than one collaborationist and agitational. It also, by a higher level association with monastic literary mysticism, indicates that the poems will carry hermetic encodings only visible to those belonging in the same category of semiotic competence, the same ‘order’, as Wordsworth himself. These are, in Wordsworth’s time, the narrow band of the highly literate and acculturated - British intellectuals, undergoing, like Wordsworth, a dramatic revaluation of their attitude to political revolution at home and abroad, in the highly pressuring context of war abroad and repression at home. Speaking through the sonnet allows Wordsworth to situate himself, bishop-like, within the esteemed continuity of literary canon - to speak to ‘eternity’ - and to knowingly address his own contemporaries familiar with the canon’s coding and its connotations in present time. The Wordsworthian sonnet is then a complex and condensed act of communication which consciously addresses its intended literary audience through a doubled and hybridised symbolism bearing historico-literary connotations meaningfully fused with topical associations and only fully apprehensible to canonical initiates.
As well as allowing Wordsworth to deal with his little secret, the Peace of Amiens lifted the British Blockade of the French Navy and meant, for the first time in years, that the French could send substantial forces to Haiti where a slave revolt against had been in progress for 8 years. The French went under Leclerc with the pretense of treating on an equal footing with the Haitians and regularising the situation between the two countries. But their real mission was to undermine the revolution, making way for a reconquering and reintroduction of slavery. They took L’Ouverture hostage and brought him back alone and desperate to France to secret imprisonment.
Wordsworth knew that L’Ouverture had been subject to extraordinary rendition but not where he was being held. In Wordsworth’s day, no more than in ours, there was not much hope held out for kidnapped political hostages being held in secret locations. Wordsworth knew the outlook for L’Ouverture, if he were not already dead, was very grave. Through the figure of L’Overture his consistent sympathy for the hopelessly downtrodden, in evidence throughout his previous poetry, was activated at a point in ethical and political confrontation with the slave-supporting regimes of both Britain and France. Wordsworth - master of symbols - would have intimated that a martyred L’Ouverture would potentially come to symbolise humanist resistance to all inhumanist tyrannies. And L’Ouverture has indeed become such a symbol, at least for a large section of the political underground, becoming, following CLR James The Black Jacobins, a central ikon of Trotsykism and Marxist Third Worldism. It was Wordsworth who first word-painted this powerfully influential ikon onto being, and it is one of his many great artistic achievements:
Toussaint, the most unhappy Man of Men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon's earless den; -
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen Thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and Man's unconquerable mind.
By the time Wordsworth came to the sonnet, the motif of transfiguration, that is of aesthetically transforming a human figure into a divine figure, had been embedded as a central and widely encountered aspect of art, poetry, and, of course, religious worship for more than an aeon. Following Petrarch, Dante, Shaakespeare, Milton, and others, the sonnet recognisably bore a deeply-embedded aura of erotic, political, and religious intensity. For Wordsworth, searching desperately for a new conviction to replace the revolutionary creed that he and his congregation were rapidly losing, or had already lost, the choice of L”Overture as ikon must have been suggested even by the prisoners name which contains both Saint and Opening.
Besides this, the morphology of the sonnet - it is shaped like a window, as well as like a portrait painting - doubles the symboling of the numinous and liminal before we have even started the poem. There, we find the kidnap victim pictured as ‘most unhappy man of men’. The singularity of L’Ouverture’s despair, and his status as a ‘man of men’, makes him both an intense individual sufferer and a representative of collective trauma - a suffering Jesus if ever there was one. The ‘whistling rustic’ of line 2 is a masterpiece of condensed and layered symbolism. Firstly, it is a type of The Good Shepherd - a representation of Christ at work in Christian Art since the undergound, persecuted days of catacombs. Secondly it is a romantic synecdoche of the contemporary poor and one of numerous similarly isolated, happy, downtrodden rural figures to appear in Wordsworth’s poetry. The fact that he is ‘whistling’ grants him an organic happiness - he is a worker in Utopia, but also makes him echo the trumpets of Revelations, priming our apocalyptic expectations for the poem. The Irish eye-ear will pick up an echo of ceol sidhe - the strange music which serves as otherworldly omen in gaelic lore and literature. The rustics plough is also a three-pronged symbolic instrument. It symbolises peace, regeneration, and - once again as romantic synecdoche - the hard, good work of the labouring poor. The pairing of the imprisoned and doomed black general in line 1 with the mass figure in Line 2 reminds us of L’Ouverture’s role in leading the rustic slaves of Haiti towards the gates of freedom. It also embeds the prophecy of Matthew 20:16 that the last shall be first, and the first last signaling again that a grand reversal is on the way. The poem wonders if Christ/L’Ouverture can hear the whistling and thus be comforted in his doom with the news of his resurrection, or if thy head be now Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;. The employment of a rapid monosyllabism, intertwining with the alliterative P’s E’s’ and D’s, sonically images the hammering of nails into a coffin. The line redoubles the gloom of the first line by presenting us with a definitively deceased saviour who is out of earshot of the ceol sidhe, and is himself beyond saving. The deep dungeon is both prison and tomb, the ‘den’ introduces a note of corporeality and decay by association with animals who keep dens. But Den also has associations, by way of Bunyan, with Christian retreat, sanctuary and visionary experience:
As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain
place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I
slept, I dreamed a Dream.
Again we see the double coding at work, the coding of impending sudden reversal, the prison being where TL is persecuted but also the place where he transcends persecution in Christian repose, reflection, acceptance and immersion in the Good News of Revelation. The line also references the darkest phase in the Martyrdom of Christ, the time between Friday Death and Sunday Resurrection - when there is no sign left of the redemption, and divinity has, apparently completely left the earth. This strange 36 hour, yet 3 day, period was naturally a source of great interest and debate among early church fathers. The living Christ could neither be in heaven - there is only room for one ascension - nor on Earth. Where was he then? Well, in hell, where, like Orpheus with superpowers, he was saving the souls of all the righteous that had died since the beginning of time and had not had the benefit of the divine presence to confirm their convictions. Even when Christ - or political progress - are nowhere to be seen, they are still at work in unseen ways, burrowing away mole-like, as Marx would have it, beneath the visible, on behalf of our redemption. L’Ouverture, and the radical ideals he represents, may well be dead and buried, but that is only how things appear on the surface, to the untrained eye. Besides, in heaven he will bring the good news of the risen people to those countless who died dreaming of such without ever seeing it.
The approaching rising is inscribed again in Line 5 where ‘miserable chieftain’ rhymes with and modifies line 1’s ‘most unhappy man of men’. Though still down, L”Ouverture has been raised to the status of The head of a body of men, an organization, state... and A military leader. The word chieftain, though it may justly appear somewhat patronizing to us, is in fact again a perfect symbolic efficiency of Wordsworth’s part, reflecting both the dual, Michael-Collins-like role of L”Ouverture as both military and political leader of the Haitian Revolt, as well as echoing the designation of Christ in Isaiah 55:4 as a leader and commander to the people. And there is a world of difference between being ‘most unhappy’ of all men, to being merely miserable. At the caesura in line 5 the poem takes a curious turn and, apparently, directly addresses its eponym:
...where and when
Wilt thou find patience?...
Of course there is no prospect of this query ever reaching the ear of Toussaint L’Overture. Wordsworth undoubtedly realised this, and, by inserting such a glaring lacunae he raises the question of to whom in fact is the poem addressed. It is, I believe, a masked address to his readership on the theme of their ongoing post-revolutionary ethical trauma. In the first place, it is addressed to the poetry readership of the London Morning Post, where it was published on the 2nd of February 1803, one of a dozen or so sonnets published by Wordsworth in the same outlet in 1802/3. This was a small circulation paper - no more than a couple of thousand - founded as a Whig Outlet in 1795 but now of a moderate Tory persuasion. It was one of the organs through which the small but prolific and vocal english cultural elite conversed with each other. Many of these highly educated readers were, like the Morning Post itself, shifting rightwards politically. Many, like Wordsworth, while they had absconded from progressive political activity, were not quite ready to abandon the utopian dreams that had animated the hopes and passions of their youth, for which they would always be nostalgic, for which they would always be seeking a replacement. It is for this small, scattered, disenchanted and rightward drifting elite that Wordsworth constructs his Black Jesus. It is to them the poem, and indeed the whole sequence of 1802/3 sonnets is addressed. Again the signaling is layered, his apparent advice to the martyr not to physically resist his captivity signals Wordsworth’s now strong disavowal of revolutionary violence, a reassuring message for a Tory publication with its Tory and proto-Tory readership. It echoes an important passage in the Bible where spiritual fortitude and readiness for the redemption are defined in terms of political patience:
Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord’s coming. See how the farmer (the whistling rustic of line 2) waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains. You too, be patient and stand firm, because the Lord’s coming is near. Don’t grumble against one another, brothers and sisters, or you will be judged. The Judge is standing at the door!
It is a moment when the poem definitively moves away from sympathy for the actual struggle of Toussaint and the poor he represents and towards an abstract contemplation of the consoling - and eliding - image of their holy suffering, now eschatologically framed and politically neutered. Contemplative affinity with the image of Toussaint the martyr allows Wordsworth and his melancholic congregation the welcome luxury of being able to continue an abstract support for ideals of equality and justice - they are, after all, Christian doctrines well before they are Jacobin notions - without being obliged to take any risky concrete action towards realizing these ideals.
Wordsworth now issues a doubled imperative, which is aimed apparently and weirdly at the image he has drawn, but in reality is a command on how the image should be constructed in the imagination of those that come to contemplate it:
Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort.
What the contemplator is now commanded to imagine, and to identify with, is no longer a doomed and despairing prisoner but one who has turned the other cheek, accepted their faith and is under orders to Live, and take comfort. Of course the only life this makes possible for L’Ouverture is the life of an image, shaped by an image maker, within the tomblike ‘scanty plot of ground’ of the sonnet. The contradiction between ‘though fallen thyself, never to rise again’ and the framing ‘Die not....Live’, irresolvable in the real, historical world, is resolved in the metaphysical realms of art and religion, where the referent can be long dead but its sign live on undead as long as it can be understood.
For the rest of the sonnet Wordsworth turns to construction and presentation of his own modified post-enlightenment, romanticized, somewhat secularised image of God, with its attendant promise of resurrection, redemption and eternity for all true believers.
Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.
Consolingly, only the discardable fleshy body of man, whether of Jesus, L”Ouverture, Wordsworth or any of his readers, is shed into history, decay and forgetting. What is far more important is the dead man’s contribution to the ‘Powers’ he has left behind. These ‘Powers’ are all aspects of one, Wordsworthian, and therefore High Romantic, deity. It is in the first place an omnipresent God of the active, shaping, destroying/creating elements, connected with a vague political collective through the trope of ‘the common wind’. Shelley, you will recognise, went on to radicalise this Christian pantheism in Ode to The West Wind. Storms and floods and so on were common political allegories in 18th Century english landscape painting. Every time that Bob Dylanesque ‘common wind’ blows, and justice and equality are struggled for, or even thought of, those who fought for them in the past are honoured, remembered, continued, reinscribed into the historical body which is a physical river flowing towards a metaphysical ocean of eternity. The righteous dead are also reanimated in the great expressive passions - one is tempted to say the stations - of living humans; exultations, agonies, and love. Tellingly, Wordsworth places the climactic emphasis on a divine aspect of the human - the unconquerable mind - being unconquerable is an aspect of the highest divinity, much sought after but never achieved, by human tyrannies.
At its most radical reading this passage is an appropriation of the religious symbolic heritage for pantheistic, atheistic, and even socialistic ends. The watermark, as it were, of the poem is religious, but the currency seems designed, at least in part, for secular exchange. As long as there is injustice and inequality there will be struggle against them. Take comfort in this even if your own personal part in that seemingly endless struggle has failed or been blocked by circumstance. But TTL is also ultimately a reactionary scripture. You can touch the divine, contribute to upholding it, be personally transformed by it, simply by contemplating its symbolism in the works of arts and scripture. No action is needed. One can save one’s body and one’s soul at the same time. This, of course, is the perfect religion and the perfect divinity for Wordsworth and his generation, who needed to resolve the contradiction between radicalized youth and mature reaction, who wanted to uphold at a philosophical level the commitment to liberty, equality, fraternity, but who did not wish to participate any more to the political movement for their appearance on earth, who no longer wanted to put their body at risk in their work, as the unswervingly radical Pasolini, one hundred and fifty years and many revolutionary defeats and resurrections later, insisted the artist should.