Today, Romantic poets and the Industrial
Revolution. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
You probably saw the movie
Chariots of Fire back in 1981. But you may
not know that the title is a phrase from an English
hymn sung in the background near the beginning of
the movie. The words by poet William Blake seem at
first seem to portray the Industrial Revolution as
a form of human evil. He says:
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Robert Burns said much
the same thing when he first saw the fire and smoke
of the Carron Iron Works in 1787:
We cam na here to view your warks
In hopes to be mair wise,
But only, lest we gang to Hell,
It may be nae surprise.
By the early 19th century a return-to-nature
movement was sweeping England. The Romantic poets
wanted to tap into nature's wild forces. Nature
hadn't looked so pretty when life was a struggle to
create minimal physical well-being in a seemingly
hostile world. But now the new factories were
providing goods and implements by which people
could live more amicable lives.
The problem is, those works started obscuring
nature. As they did, poets and artists began to
make nature into something it'd never quite been.
But, while Burns saw nature as beautiful, it was
still a dark and formidable Gothic presence:
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring
Percy Shelley, a little
younger and more the creature of the fully-evolved
Romantic movement, saw nature in more benign terms:
Sweet oracles of woods and dells,
And summer winds in sylvan cells;
Nevertheless, Hellish mills were replacing both
Scott's and Shelley's visions of nature with their
harsh brush strokes of fire and iron. Yet it was
William Blake who also said: "Nature without man is
barren." He saw that we're ultimately responsible
for reclaiming nature. His "Chariots of Fire" text
ends like this:
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire! Bring me my spear!
O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of Fire!
I will not cease from mental fight;
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
Blake, the sensible observer of the human lot,
outlines our responsibility. We can't shrink from
the mental fight of building a world fit for
habitation. When he asks for his bow, arrows,
spear, and chariot of fire, he's reaching for tools
with which to build that world. He's arming for
mental fight. He realized that, from now on, nature
would shine through the fire and mills only if we
had the wits to make it do so.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds