Piping Down the Valleys Wild: Some Literary and Historical Sources

The title page of Songs of Innocence (1793) by William Blake (1757-1827). You can view the entire 1793 edition and read commentary at the Tate Museum’s website.

An 1802 poem along similar lines by William Wordsworth (1770-1850):

My heart leaps up when I behold
  A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
  Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

How do Blake’s and Wordsworth’s poems express a fundamental tenet of Romanticism?

The Dream of Ossian (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1813).

Some years earlier, the Scottish poet James Macpherson had published Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, which he claimed were his translations of texts by Ossian, a forgotten third-century Gaelic bard whose poems had been lost until Macpherson himself discovered them on a trip around the northern coast of Scotland. Fingal was the legendary king of Caledonia, in northwestern Scotland. It is now commonly accepted that Macpherson wrote the poems himself, but at the time Thomas Jefferson enthused over Ossian, “I think this rude bard of the North the greatest Poet that has ever existed.”  Fingal was wildly successful, and was translated into every major European language. Napoleon adopted Ossian as his own guiding poet, and is said even to have gone into battle with a copy of Fingal in his pocket; the artist Girodet, the official portraitist to Napoleon’s family, painted this scene of Ossian in paradise, welcoming the souls of the French officers killed in the Napoleonic Wars, in 1805.

Why was Ossian — later acknowledged to be a fraud — so important to the Romantics?

Could it be because these seemingly ancient poems spoke to the longing for a unified culture and community, one based on spiritual aspirations rather than on the arbitrary borders set out by the various monarchies of Europe?

Or could it be because of the Ossianesque atmosphere of mist, of caves, of the bleak landscapes of the North?

You can read selections of Ossian’s poems here.

“Das Mädchen von Inistore” (The maid of Inistore), one of Schubert’s settings of Ossian (Macpherson) in German translation.

The text, in English:

Weep on the rocks of roaring winds, o maid of Inistore! Bend thy fair head over the waves, thou lovelier than the ghost of the hills, when it moves in a sunbeam, at noon, over the silence of Morven. 

Brahms set the same text for women’s choir, harp, and two horns. Note how the instrumentation adds a sense of the mystical and the mysterious.

Mendelssohn, after a trip to Scotland, wrote his Hebrides Overture, which he subtitled “Fingal’s Cave.”

The mystical love of nature — at a time when the degradation of the natural world by industry was starting to be noticed — is a hallmark of Romanticism. It is perhaps fitting, then, that at a time of great alarm over climate change, some of nature’s most radical defenders of the earth have adopted the philosophies of Romanticism’s most noxious offspring, Nazism.