Starting from Death: The Poetry of Ann Batten Cristall

And thought. . .is at the limit of this conflagration,
like a candle blown out at the limit of a flame.

(Georges Bataille)

She published only one volume of verse, Poetical Sketches (1795). The title recalls Blake's first book, especially since Cristall associated with Blake's London circle. And because her book was published by Joseph Johnson.

But we know little about her.

I have seen only one copy of this volume -- the British Library copy. Not many could have been printed. The single copy recorded in an American archive, at Columbia University, has been lost. The book was issued by subscription, with two-hundred and thirty-four named subscribers (including George Dyer, Samuel Rogers, and Mary Wollstonecraft).

But we know little about her. Roger Lonsdale's biographical notice in his Oford Book of Eighteenth-Century Women Poets summarizes the sketchy surviving details of her life. And her loss to us, her life as well as her work, measures the kind of cultural amnesia we always suffer under. The loss of her work -- all we have not made of it -- passes a clear judgment on our visions of judgment.

For Cristall was a remarkable talent. Of course she deprecated her learning and her technical skills, as she would have been expected to do. We observe the correctness of her demeanor in the opening words of the Preface she wrote for her book of poems:

These light effusions of a youthful imagination, written at various times for the entertainment of my idle hours, I now present to such Readers whose minds are not too seriously engaged; and should they afford any degree of amusement, my most sanguine expectations will be answered. To attempt any more in an age like this, enlightened by authors, whose lives have been devoted to the study of metaphysical and moral truth, would be presumptuous; and my experience does not justify such efforts. Most of my days have been passed in solitude, and the little knowledge I have acquired cannot boast the authority of much experience; my opinions, therefore, would carry little weight; for although the dictates of Nature may be sometimes more just than conclusions drawn from a partial knowledge of the world, yet even the most settled convictions are never, perhaps, unbiassed by prejudice, or uninfluenced by affection.

From among my juvenile productions I have principally selected for the volume some poetical tales and unconnected sketches, which a love for the beauties of nature inspired. The versification is wild, and still incorrect, though I have taken much pains to reduce it to some degree of order; they were written without the knowledge of any rules; of which their irregularity is the natural consequence. (ix)

Cristall's oblique critical reflection implicitly asks us to reconsider the commonplace distinctions between "nature" and "experience", between writing from impulse and writing from rules, between poetries of pleasure and poetries of instruction. Her work, she says, is a poetry of pleasure: the "light effusions" of her book hardly deserve notice or attention "in an age like this, enlightened by" so many bright or weighty intelligences. Yet here, in her candid and modest address, we may well be struck by the more serious pretension of her work that comes through a (poetical? accidental?) play of language: the oblique rhyme between the "light effusions" of imagination and the "enlightened" study of philosophical truth.

The accidental appearance of this effect is surely a deliberated poetical move, as we realize in the opening poem of the book, "Before Twilight. Eyezion". Exactly like Prometheus Unbound, the poem is a synaesthetic dialogue (between the lovers Eyezion and Viza) on the life and the light of sympathetic vision. The poem centers in a changeful dance of "light": the idea(s) of it, its phenomenal appearances, its verbal forms.

DAWN had not streak'd the spacious veil of night,
When EYEZION, the light poet of the spring,
Hied from his restless bed, to sing,
Impatient for the promis'd beams of light:
Sweetly his voice through woods and vallies rang
While fleeting o'er the hills these anxious notes he sang.
Swift, swift, ye lingering hours,
And wake the morning star;
Rouse from the dew-fraught flowers
The shades, and drive them far.
Quick on the wing of morning,
Dart the young glimmering light. . . . (1-12)

What has roused Eyezion is not the dawn but, paradoxically, certain darknesses -- "The shades" he glimpses on the flowers whose dew glimmers under a star-illumined light. This is the light that the poem associates with Eyezion's beloved Viza, whose eyes are "star-like" (44) and who is explicitly identified with the morning star Venus.

The poem centers in a complex set of interchanges between its two poetical creatures. Their purely imaginative character is important, for the day they bring forth -- the apparitionally natural events that illustrate or represent their love -- is not at all quotidian. That day and its epiphenomena constitute a particular form assumed by the "current of creative mind" (53) that sustains the Cristall world. Forms of light proliferate.

Rise, Phoebus, from yon fountain,
Your saffron robes display;
Warm every lake and fountain,
And kindle up the day.

My soul, fledg'd with desires,
Flutters, and pants for morn,
To catch the orient fires
Light trembling o'er the lawn. (15-22)

This is a song of light and fire calling up an imagination of the natural world. It is literally a "light effusion", as Cristall's Preface had promised. Here its "Light trembling" appearance discloses as well the tactile status of its transformative potential: dawn is a warming and an upkindling as well as a visible event.

But most of all dawn is the mental dawning of aesthetic consciousness itself, Intellectual Beauty. Eyezion sings his song and "VIZA unfolds her charms" (32):

Midst rills she laves her tresses,
And blooming beams delight;
Swift -- love my soul oppresses --
Why's thought more quick than light? (35-38)

Here all moves as a play of language, as the excellent rhyme delight/light suggests. Do the lines reveal more of Eyezion or more of Viza? We cannot say, anymore than we should assign a determinate meaning to the word "light".

The startling wit of "Before Twilight. Eyezion" incarnates that form of "creative mind" celebrated through the poem. It is Thoreau's dawning form, and is characterized by words like "delight", "fertile fancy" (55), "Love's light wings" (69) and "Young joy" (77). Eyezion (like Viza) embodies this form:

A current of creative mind,
Wild as the wandering gusts of wind,
'Mid fertile fancy's visions train'd,
Unzon'd I shot, and o'er each limit strain'd;
Around in airy cicles whirl'd
By a genius infinite,
While Love in wanton ringlets curl'd
My tresses, passion to excite. (53-60)

The passage shows that Cristall has fully assimilated the speculative philosophical and aesthetic thought of her age. The text gives her version of Sir William Jones's "Hymn to Na'ra'yena" and Blake's "Song of Los". But the distinctiveness of Cristall's verse comes through perhaps most clearly in the final pair of lines, where enjambment generates a moment of arresting and delightful wordplay through the manipulation of the synactic function of the word "curl'd". Here is the lightest of touches, a figure flaunting its purely decorative status. The anacreontic image is a second-order sign for the style she has chosen, the discourse of the "feeling mind" ("Evening. Gertrude", 162).

Eyezion's explanation of the action of "creative mind" finishes reflexively. What Dante called "intelletto d'Amore" informs the current of Cristall's verse.

Thus skimming o'er the tracts of life,
Borne on light elements I bound;
Free from rage and coarser strife,
I catch new beauties all around . . .
Upon poetic spells I fly
Wafted afar from black Despair;
And, as I sing,
Am rais'd on high:
Young joy with pleasure smoothes the scene,
Of mortal eyes unseen;
With these I fleet,
Amid the Loves and Smiles sweet flowrets wreathe;
And every sigh I waft, and every joy I breathe,
Mix'd with seraphic airs, fly on poetic feet. (65-68, 73-82)

Two things should be said about this splendid and important passage. The first is technical. We must guard against a reading that would filter these lines through the stylistic conventions of romantic writing. The argument about poetic diction in Wordsworth's great Preface to Lyrical Ballads has gained such authority -- at any rate until the coming of the decorative styles of postmodern writing -- that we can easily lose our ability to read verse written according to other conventions. The entirety of Cristall's work is built upon a commitment to "poetical diction", which Cristall (like Erasmus Darwin and Sir William Jones) uses to construct images that are explicitly cartoon-like and fragile. That quality of the Cristalline world is fundamental. When Blake later names it "a Vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon" (in Milton plate 31), he replicates one of Cristall's central preoccupations: that "every human bosom starts from death" ("Written When the Mind was Oppressed", 36). Here the word play with "starts from" is doubly significant: as an index of her style, on one hand, and as a locus of key philosophical preoccupations, on the other.

The technical features of Cristall's verse characteristically involve important "metaphysical and moral" issues, as we see once again in this climactic sequence of the book's opening work. "Before Twilight. Eyezion" initiates a five-poem sequence whose principal subject is poetry itself, and in particular the poetry licensed through eighteenth-century sensationalist philosophy. The final couplet of the passage at hand underscores the philosophical authority being assumed in the poetic method, that is, in an argument by images and poetical devices.

The massively assonantal character of Cristall's verse is both typical and telling. "Before Twilight. Eyezion", for example, is in an obvious sense a celebration of the morphemic and phonemic possibilities of the "i" form. The aural substructure founds the work's powerful synaesthesia, which itself embodies the argument about the intellectual authority of feeling. At once agent, medium, and receptor, Eyezion's poetical discourse discovers figures for its "light effusions". His words are themselves theophanies -- literal forms of the creative mind he celebrates. So the text fills itself with the earth and "airs" of its own imaginings, it creates beings of pure sound who then "fly" through these worlds on their evanescent "poetic feet".

But "Before Twilight. Eyezion" by no means discovers the whole truth about the "creative mind" it calls to our attention. Cristall deploys a five-part sequence of poems to complete her presentation. The "Loves and Smiles" of the first poem define a special experience Blake called "Infant Joy". As this twilight world turns to its morning, noon, and evening -- to the poems "Morning. Rosamonde", "Noon. Lysander", "Evening. Gertrude" -- engines of Loss discover the torments of love and jealousy. When Rosamonde enters the "glowing" world announced by Viza ("Before Twilight. Eyezion", 105-108), "Nature's wild harmony,/ Breath'd love, and sang delight" ("Morning. Rosamonde", 11-12).

These harmonies, this love and its delights, bring suprising difficulties ("surprising", that is, when initially encountered in the perspective of the first poem's "Young Joy"):

Fresh ROSAMONDE the glowing scene surveys,
Her youthful bosom inly stung with pain;
Early amid the shadowy trees she strays,
Her shining eyes the starting tears restrain;
While tyrant Love within her pulses plays. . . (13-17)

"Morning. Rosamonde" deconstructs the "i" world created ex nihilo through the opening poem's delights of love: VIZA gets a new name, ROSAMONDE, EYEZION turns to URBAN. "Starting tears" are re-straining the poetical instruments, we hear the world in different tones. Words like "glowing" and "bosom" find new sounds echoing to their senses: "shadowy", "pulses": "Love" (!). The familiar becomes quickly estranged from itself, and words -- those apparently firm self-identities -- acquire altogether new meanings, new feelings. The "Love" articulated in the second poem appears very different from the "Love" we met in the first.

So the changes unroll through the sequence. The climax of these transfigurations comes at the end of the fourth poem, "Evening. Gertrude", where the heroine's final reflections echo and complete Eyezion's earlier discourse on poetry and the currents of creative mind. All along the desires of love are equated with the poetic impulse. Before the coming of the "Night" -- the final text -- Gertrude has a critical vision of a pastoral feast of the poets:

Gay wicked wit amid the circle spread,
And wanton round the lively sallies sped;
Each neat-trimm'd maiden laugh'd with playful glee,
Whom whispering swains divert with mimicry.
Fair ROSAONDE, whose rival bosom burn'd,
With taunting mirth directs young URBAN's eyes;
He, with mischievous archness, smiles return'd,
Amid whose circles wounding satires rise;
Their sportive feet still beat the flowery ground,
While wicked looks, and jests, and jeers went round. (135-44)

Here Gertrude attends to the love-play -- the poetry -- of all the couples named earlier in the poem. These couples define her own identity, for they represent her "wandering" desires. Gertrude's vision establishes the ground of her anti-poetics. Consequently, she flees the illusions generated through her own desire:

With shame she burns, and blushes at her woe,
And wonders at her weakness and her pain. (151-52)

The definitive figure of Gertrude's flight comes as the termination of this poem, where the emblems of sensibility begin to undergo their final set of transmutations. In the end we are turned over to the culminant text of the sequence, Cristall's Night Thoughts.

The title form of this last text in the sequence -- it is not bifurcated like the previous four titles -- signals the poem's commitment to a firm Truth. "Night" dismisses all the apparitions and transformations we know and cherish:

SOLEMN is night, when Silence holds her reign,
And the hush'd winds die on the heaving main;
When no short gleam of scatter'd light appears,
Nor lunar beams make faint the nobler stars. . . . (1-4)

Earlier Eyezion set us "skimming o'er the tracts of life". Now a final figure, Henry, rediscovers the underlying truth of those tracts.

O! how sublime this tract, for man design'd!
Vast the perceptions of his rapid mind!
Strongly to earth his young affections cling,
While fancy waves her bright and various wing;
But soon each hope of earthly bliss is cross'd,
Nipt in the bud, or in possession lost;
Blushing, our empty wishes we survey,
When we our passions with our motives weigh. (31-38)
The lines bring a kind of Final or Last Judgment to the visionary history that here ends in "Night", and this climactic event is brilliantly signalled by the second coming of the word "tract". The effect of this verbal refiguring is startling and even uncanny. Cristall's dismissal of poetry -- the verse argues nothing less -- comes in a classical poetic form, a word play that demands an end to word play, that calls for moral truth and clear ideas.

The most important of those ideas calls up paradoxical thoughts like: "he who would save his life must lose it". But Cristall is not preaching an art of renunciation. Her Night Thoughts make no discounts from either the pleasures or the pains of mortal experience. The argument is grounded in a commitment to (not a mere belief in) expenditure and ecstasy.

Deeply I feel this still and solemn hour,
Impress'd with GOD's immeasurable power;
While worlds unnumber'd 'mid yon ether burn,
And thoughts immense pour in where'er I turn.
How much man errs, whose soul, with thought sublime,
Looks on tow'rds endless bliss thro' boundless time!
When he to earthly passions gives dire sway,
Or mourns those joys which of themselves decay! (39-46)

Here the current of creative mind continues to operate, perpetuating itself under the sign of Energy. As they pass through Cristall's "thought sublime", errors are passing beyond their commonplace apparitions. The soul may err if its eyes are fixed too near or too far, or if it cedes power to earthly passions, or if it mourns the expenditures of its own intensities.

Once again we may recall the benevolent double-meaning insinuated through the night thought "And every human bosom starts from death". The unenlightened are figures of fear, the thoughtful are figures stepping westward. Cristall typically sees the latter in forms of deprivation. "A Fragment. The Blind Man" foretells the argument we know best through Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence". A "Rash youth (4)" encounters a blind old man -- at once a figure of Lear and of Homer -- wandering allegorically on a dark and stromy night. He is rash because his sympathies, while quick, see neither out far nor in deep. The old man has a third eye lit with "a ray of sacred light" (5) He understands the agencies at work around and within him. Hark! 'tis GOD's voice which urges on the storm;

He to this world of elements gave form.
From them he moulded all, yet gave not peace,
But broke the harmony, and bade them rage;
He meant not happiness should join with ease,
But varied joys and pains should all the world engage. (24-29)

The fragment is yet another "tract" on the "metaphysical and moral" function of poetry. The old man's words distinctly recall Cristall's discussion of poetical incorrectness and her own "wild" harmonies. The storm is another figure of "creative mind", and so is the "Blind Man" of the poem, and so is the text's "Fragment" genre.

For all its Wordsworthian form, this fine little poem makes a move rarely taken by Cristall's romantic successor. The rash youth's effort to protect the old man from "this horrid scene" (21) is accepted by Cristall's old man, who "yields" to the "fear" driving the youth's benevolence (23). Like Wordsworth in so many of the poems we know and admire, the blind old man might well have chosen a more grand gesture. For all his modesty, the leech gatherer is a figura of romantic self-reliance, whose features recur throughout Wordsworth's writing:

And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,
I love to see the look with which it braves,
Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,
The light'ning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves.
("Elegiac Stanzas. . ." 29-32)

That is not the gesture Cristall either makes or needs. The power of her old man lies as much in his fortitude as in his weakness, in what he can give as in what he should receive. Or so at least one might frame the situation in moral terms.

In sensational terms, her old man's body must possess more Blakean "inlets of soul" than could be fulfilled on dark and barren heaths. 'Tis better to give than to receive? Not necessarily -- at least not in the dynamics of sensibility and sentiment. Eyezion and Viza, Rosamonde and Urban, all (like Ahab) have their humanities. They are also some of the names we might give to this blind old man, whose names (in poetic fact) are legion.

Legion and evanescent. Unlike Wordsworth's leech-gatherer, Cristall's old man follows the Song of the Spirits in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, who urge Asia to "Resist not the weakness/ Such strength is in meekness" (II.3.93-4). The old man is one current of creative mind, borne along a larger flood. What he does not seek is precisely an "unfeeling armour" that would protect him from "The storm whereon [he] ride[s], to sink at last" (Childe Harold III. 389).

That committment to life as energy and expenditure -- to a God who is the totality of their eternal recurrence -- defines the verse style that Cristall practises. In this respect her single volume of work, and the single surviving copy known to us, are alike emblems of her mortalized and unworldly aesthetics. For her poetry should not be defined by measures of fame or endurance. A thing of beauty is not a joy for ever, it is a joy for now.

Though not a sentimental writer like Hemans, Cristall's sensibility nonetheless forecasts the lament for the lost Pleiad:

They rise in joy, the starry myriads burning--
The shepherd greets them on his mountains free;
And from the silvery sea
To them the sailor's wakeful eye is turning--
Unchanged they rise, they have not mourned for thee.
("The Lost Pleiad" 11-15)

Indeed, for what should they mourn? The Lost Pleiad fairly defines the character of all these starry myriads, whose triumph comes through the "old magnificence" (7) of their "burning" and eventual death. Starting from that death, the Lost Pleiad alone founds the transpersonal abundance written in the stars.

Why, who shall talk of thrones, or sceptres riven?
--Bow'd be our hearts to think of what we are,
When from its height afar
A world sinks thus--and yon majestic heaven
Shines not the less for that one vanish'd star. (21-25)

Like the sentimentality of Hemans, Cristall's sensibility measures the fame so desperately sought by Keats and found by Byron. Beside the "vanish'd star" of her life and single volume of poems, they and their works seem curiously humbled. Her writing possesses a clear generosity that gets regularly sacrificed to the high cultural ambitions pursued by the poets and dispensed by their critics.

Indeed, her writing is engaged exactly in defiance of those palpable cultural designs. But "defiance" is perhaps too strong a term, too "palpable". For Cristall's writing doesn't defy the brilliant cultural illusions of those whose names are written, if not in the book of life, then in the annals of literature. Her work celebrates the losses that poets like to imagine they might save. In this she recollects the truth about all the dancers whose "sportive feet still beat the flowery ground" ("Evening. Gertrude", 144): that they live through illusions that cannot be sustained.

In Cristall we see that the One Life within us and abroad is exactly that, just one life. It is a life that spends itself in living. If written down it comprises only one book, however many volumes it may accumulate. And that one book might just as easily vanish as not since it was written, like L. E. L.'s love letter, to be burned up.