“Druid Rocks”: Restoration, Originality, Nature and Authority in John Dryden, Titia Brongersma and William Blake’s Visions of Megalithic Monuments

According to John Hughes in his Boscobel Tracts, Charles Stuart spent Wednesday the seventh of October, 1651, reckoning and re-reckoning the stones of Stonehenge, to beguile the time till he could return to his hostess Amphillis Hyde and her safe house, Heale. The King was fugitive from the rout at the Battle of Worcester. His companion Colonel Phelips claims that Charles’s extemporary pleasure was to refute a “fabulous tale,” namely, that the stones at Stonehenge could not be summed “alike twice together,” but that rather, abiding under enchantment, they must perpetually elude human census. Similar demystifying empiricism inflects a 1663 poem on the topic by the royalist Dryden, though the stones really do seem to persist under the sway of innumerability. Charles counted what he saw. But (as recently as the summer of 2015) fully ninety more stones of no small size were detected on, or beneath, the Wiltshire Downs. So fable and fact part and meet at once. The past is – and remains – as difficult to prophesy as the future. Yet a megalith, that most assertive and simple of monuments and images, is predictably provocative, even when such massive commemoration itself is ruined and amnemonic. For John Dryden, Stonehenge, with its crown-like arrangement of stones, marked the ceremonial venue of Danish coronations. For Titia Brongersma, the megalithic hunebed at Borger, in the Landscape of Groningen and Drenthe, Netherlands, comprised a temple to an entity of her own sex, the Goddess Nature, erected for (and to be restored by) panegyric to that divinity. For William Blake, Stonehenge amounted to both the relic and portent of the bloody and detestable practice and doctrine of vengeance, rather than Christian forgiveness of sins. What unites these poems is their will to displace not the megaliths, but an old version of the past. Patriotic Dryden prefers natural philosophy, advanced under Bacon, chartered by Charles II, to the controvertible authorities of Greece and Rome: fealty to a king thus still allows (even encourages) insubordination toward respectable pseudodoxia. Brongersma invokes an indigenous, yet universal female figure; in her allegiance to her native ground and its intellectual circle (centred at Groningen), she rejects or, better, sublimates to the glories of her homeland the legacy of Greece and Rome, while assuming the decorum of her congruity with a goddess. And Blake, despite the massacre at Welsh Anglesey (or Isle of Mona, in 61) and the legions’ razing of the sacred groves there, aligns Romans with Druids, and dismisses both in favour of Judaeo-Christian revelation. Dryden, Brongersma and Blake therefore raise verses, if not books, like a ring of resonant, responsive stones, supernumerary to Stonehenge and to the hunebed, whetting by the keenness of their gaze the inscrutability of their topic, using the centrum phonicum supplied by these wonders to amplify their own voices. “As the Eye – Such the Object” says Blake. And if, as he asserts, “Every Eye Sees differently,” then no object is available to a final ‘reckoning.’ The special authority of these old structures precedes the literate revolution: they come from before books. Stonehenge and hunebed become Mosaic tablets that are also, conveniently, Lockean tabulae rasae. They remain, to use the latest parlance and the most current instance, equally illegible to, and inscribable by, hackers and their semblables, those hypocrite readers, the confabulating police (poets all, whether they will or no). Charles was not the last to combine the role of tourist with hunted refugee. Brongersma projected a resounding female voice in a place where the jealous atavism of paternal classics, perpetuated at Groningen, might not wholly smother it. …