BLANCO WHITE’S SONNET
Fear is natural by night. Man in the day-time is beset by foes; but while he can use his eyes, he has a sense of security. Something he can effect towards self-protection. But in the dark he feels helpless.
Hence it is natural that the Hebrew poets of the Midrash (on Psalm 92) have used as a theme Adam’s first experience of the dark. There was no darkness on the first Friday after Creation. The primeval light, which illumined the world from end to end, was not quenched, though Adam had already sinned before night-fall of the day on which he was born. But the Sabbath came with the Friday’s close, and the celestial rays shone on through the hours that should have been obscure. When, however, the Sabbath had passed, the heavenly light passed with it, and Adam, to his consternation, was unable to see. Would not the wily serpent choose this as a favorable moment for insidious onslaught? Then the light that failed in nature was kindled in man’s intellect. Adam, by the friction of two stones, cleverly made artificial light, and so could see again.
So runs one form of the Jewish legend. Another (I am summarizing both from Prof. Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews, vol. i, pp. 86-89) expresses the thought differently. The primeval light does not figure in this version, but it is the normal sun that sinks before Adam’s gaze on the Saturday night. Adam was filled with compunction. “Woe is me!”, he exclaimed, “I have sinned, and because of me is the world darkened; because of me it will again return to a condition of chaos.” So he passed the long vigil of the dark in tears, and Eve wept with him. But with the day he dried his eyes. For he saw the sun rise once more, and realized that the alternations of day and night were part of the divine order of nature.
In both these fancies Adam is much disturbed by his first experience of the dark, a guilty conscience made a coward of him. But not all Hebrew homilists rested in this attitude of fear. The author of the eighth Psalm is above all the poet of the night in its more uplifting aspects. He sees not the terror, but the illumination of the dark. The poet contemplates the heavens at night; he does not mention the sun, but “the moon and the stars” which God has ordained. “Unquestionably, the star-lit sky, especially in the transparent clearness of an Eastern atmosphere, is more suggestive of the vastness and variety and mystery of the universe.” So writes Dr. Kirkpatrick on Psalm 8. 3, and he refers to an eloquent passage in Whewell’s Astronomy, Book III, Chapter 3. Certainly those who have beheld the heavens on an Oriental night can conceive nothing more glorious than the spectacle, nor recall aught more wonderful than the Psalmist’s description of it.
It was left to the theologian Blanco White to combine the two thoughts of fear and illumination, expressed in the Midrash quoted above and in Psalm 8, into an exquisite Sonnet. The author’s name is queer enough. But though Joseph Blanco White (1775-1841) was born in Seville, he was an Irishman by descent. When the family settled in Spain, they translated the patronymic White into Blanco. On his coming to England, the theologian simply retained both forms of the name. As the writer in the Dictionary of National Biography recalls, Blanco White applied to himself the lines which occur in Richard II, Act i, scene 3. Norfolk, doomed to exile in a foreign land, thus laments his fate:
The language I have learn’d these forty years,
My native English, now I must forgo;
And now my tongue’s use is to me no more
Than an unstringèd viol or a harp.
Strange that this passage, of which only a small part has been here quoted, has never been turned into Hebrew, with a change in one single word of the second line, by a Zionist. Yet more strange that Blanco White, who thus deplored the fact that his paternal English was not his native speech, has given us one of the greatest poems in the English language!
Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew
Thee, from report divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely Frame,
This glorious canopy of Light and Blue?
Yet ’neath a curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the rays of the great setting Flame,
Hesperus with the Host of Heaven came,
And lo! Creation widened in Man’s view.
Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O sun! or who could find,
Whilst fly, and leaf, and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless Orbs thou mad’st us blind?
Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife?
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?
It is indeed an exquisite thought. First we have Adam’s fears as night falls. Then we have the reply, the antidote. The sun really conceals. Day shows us indeed insect and plant, but not the vast system of worlds which fill the heavens. It is night that brings to view the amazing extent of the stars, and unfolds the universe which the day had hidden. So death may reveal much that life conceals.
Coleridge pronounced this “the finest and most grandly conceived Sonnet in our language.” The praise is not exaggerated. Yet it was written by one whose native tongue was Spanish, and who, though his career was extraordinary enough, never wrote another line in prose or verse that has lived. Single-speech Hamilton is joined in the realm of immortality by Single-Sonnet White. Written about a century ago, it lives and will go on living. As the writer from whom I drew the allusion to Shakespeare remarks: “Probably Blanco White will continue to be known by this Sonnet, when his other works, in spite of the real interest of his views, have been forgotten.”
Great as the Sonnet is, it fails, however, to express the full significance of the eighth Psalm. The mazes and the wonders of the starry heaven above, unfolded as the sun sets by night, raise the question “What is man?” that he should be of account when compared to these stupendous forces of nature. Yet, crowned with glory and honor, man is master of these forces. “The splendour of God set above the heavens is reflected in His image, man, whom He has crowned as His representative to rule over the earth” (Briggs). Contrasted though the glories be, the glory of man as creature is related to the glory of God as Creator.