Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.
Introductory EssayThe Poetry of Nature
Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts (1860–1943)W
The poetry of nature, by which I mean this “poetry of earth” expressed in words, may be roughly divided into two main classes: that which deals with mere description, and that which treats of nature in some one of its many relations with humanity. The latter class is that which alone was contemplated in Keats’s line. It has many subdivisions; it includes much of the greatest poetry that the world has known; and there is little verse of acknowledged mastery that does not depend upon it for some portion of its appeal.
The former class has but a slender claim to recognition as poetry, under any definition of poetry that does not make metrical form the prime essential. The failures of the wisest to enunciate a satisfactory definition of poetry make it almost presumptuous for a critic now to attempt the task; but from an analysis of these failures one may educe something roughly to serve the purpose. To say that poetry is the metrical expression in words of thought fused in emotion, is of course incomplete; but it has the advantage of defining. No one can think that anything other than poetry is intended by such a definition; and nothing is excluded that can show a clear claim to admittance. But the poetry of mere enumerative description might perhaps not pass without challenge, so faint is the flame of its emotion, so imperfect the fusion of its thought. It is verse of this sort that is meant by undiscriminating critics when they inveigh against “nature-poetry,” and declare that the only poetry worth man’s attention is that which has to do with the heart of man.
Merely descriptive poetry is not very far removed from the work of the reporter and the photographer. Lacking the selective quality of creative art, it is in reality little more than a representation of some of the raw materials of poetry. It leaves the reader unmoved, because little emotion has gone to its making. Poetry of this sort, at its best, is to be found abundantly in Thomson’s “Seasons.” At less than its best it concerns no one.
Nature becomes significant to man when she is passed through the alembic of his heart. Irrelevant and confusing details having been purged away, what remains is single and vital. It acts either by interpreting, recalling, suggesting, or symbolizing some phase of human feeling. Out of the fusing heat born of this contact comes the perfect line, luminous, unforgettable, with something of mystery in its beauty that eludes analysis. Whatever it be that is brought to the alembic,—naked hill, or barren sand-reach, sea or meadow, weed or star,—it comes out charged with a new force, imperishable and active wherever it finds sympathies to vibrate under its currents.
In the imperishable verse of ancient Greece and Rome, nature-poetry of the higher class is generally supposed to play but a small part. In reality, it is nearly always present, nearly always active in that verse; but it appears in such a disguise that its origin is apt to be overlooked. The Greeks—and the Romans, of course, following their pattern—personified the phenomena of nature till these, for all purposes of art, became human. The Greeks made their anthropomorphic gods of the forces of nature which compelled their adoration. Of these personifications they sang, as of men of like passions with themselves; but in truth it was of external nature that they made their songs. Bion’s wailing “Lament for Adonis,” human as it is throughout, is in its final analysis a poem of nature. By an intense, but perhaps unconscious, subjective process, the ancients supplied external nature with their own moods, impulses, and passions.
The transitions from the ancient to the modern fashion of looking at nature are to be found principally in the work of the Celtic bards, who, rather than the cloistered students of that time, kept alive the true fire of poetry through the long darkness of the Middle Ages.
The modern attitude toward nature, as distinguished from that of the Greeks, begins to show itself clearly in English song very soon after the great revivifying movement which we call the Renaissance. At first, it is a very simple matter indeed. Men sing of nature because nature is impressing them directly. A joyous season calls forth a joyous song:—
This is the poet’s answering hail, when the spring-time calls to his blood. With the fall of the leaf, his singing has a sombre and foreboding note; and winter in the world makes winter in his song.
This is nature-poetry in its simplest form,—the form which it chiefly took with the spontaneous Elizabethans. But it soon became more complex, as life and society became entangled in more complex conditions. The artificialities of the Queen Anne period delayed this evolution; but with Gray and Collins we see it fairly in process. Man, looking upon external nature, projects himself into her workings. His own wrath he apprehends in the violence of the storm; his own joy in the loveliness of opening blossoms; his own mirth in the light waves running in the sun; his own gloom in the heaviness of the rain and wind. In all nature he finds but phenomena of himself. She becomes but an expression of his hopes, his fears, his cravings, his despair. This intense subjectivity is peculiarly characteristic of the nature-poetry produced by Byron and his school. When that Titan of modern song apostrophizes the storm thundering over Jura, he speaks to the tumult in the deeps of his own soul. When he addresses the stainless tranquillities of “clear, placid Leman,” what moves him to utterance is the contemplation of such a calm as his vexed spirit often craved.
When man’s heart and the heart of nature had become thus closely involved, the relationship between them and, consequently, the manner of its expression in song became complex almost beyond the possibilities of analysis. Wordsworth’s best poetry is to be found in the utterances of the high-priest in nature’s temple, interpreting the mysteries. The function of the “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” is to convey to a restless age, troubled with small cares seen in too close perspective, the large, contemplative wisdom which seemed to Wordsworth the message of the scene which moved him.
Keats, his soul aflame with the worship of beauty, was impassioned toward the manifestations of beauty in the world about him; and, at the same time, he used these freely as symbols to express other aspects of the same compelling spirit. Shelley, the most complex of the group, sometimes combined all these methods, as in the “Ode to the West Wind.” But he added a new note,—which was yet an echo of the oldest,—the note of nature-worship. He saw continually in nature the godhead which he sought and adored, youthful protestations and affectations of atheism to the contrary notwithstanding. Most of Shelley’s nature-poetry carries a rich vein of pantheism, allied to that which colors the oldest verse of time and particularly characterizes ancient Celtic song. With this significant and stimulating revival, goes a revival of that strong sense of kinship, of the oneness of earth and man, which the Greeks and Latins felt so keenly at times, which Omar knew and uttered, and which underlies so much of the verse of these later days.
That other unity—the unity of man and God, which forms so inevitable a corollary to the pantheistic proposition—comes to be dwelt upon more and more insistently throughout the nature-poetry of the last fifty years.