"The poetry of earth is
never dead," wrote Keats; and, though the
statement sounds, at first thought, a dangerously
sweeping one, there is no doubt that if he had
been called upon to argue the point he would have
successfully maintained his thesis. Regarded subjectively,
the poetry of earth, or, in other words, the quality
which makes for poetry in external nature, is
that power in nature which moves us by suggestion,
which excites in us emotion, imagination, or poignant
association, which plays upon the tense-strings
of our sympathies with the fingers of memory or
desire. This power may reside not less in a bleak
pasture-lot than in a paradisal close of bloom
and verdure, not less in a roadside thistle-patch
than in a peak that soars into the sunset. It
works through sheer beauty or sheer sublimity;
but it may work with equal effect through austerity
or reticence or limitation or change. It may use
the most common scenes, the most familiar facts
and forms, as the vehicle of its most penetrating
and most illuminating message. It is apt to make
the drop of dew on a grass-blade as significant
as the starred sphere of the sky.
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 pure 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 pure 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 presentation
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 "Season."
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, unforgetable, 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 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:—
"Summer
is icumen in,
Lhude sing, cuccu.
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wude
nu."
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 this 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
"Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern
Abbey" are, at first glance, chiefly descriptive;
but their actual function 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.
The
main purpose of these brief suggestions is to
call attention to the fact that nature-poetry
is not mere description of landscape in metrical
form, but the expression of one or another of
many vital relationships between external nature
and "the deep heart of man." It may
touch the subtlest chords of human emotion and
human imagination not less masterfully than the
verse which sets out to be a direct transcript
from life. The most inaccessible truths are apt
to be reached by indirection. The divinest mysteries
of beauty are not possessed exclusively by the
eye that loves, or by the lips of a child, but
are also manifested in some bird-song’s unforgotten
cadence, some flower whose perfection pierces
the heart, some ineffable hue of sunset or sunrise
that makes the spirit cry out for it knows not
what. And whosoever follows the inexplicable lure
of beauty, in color, form, sound, perfume, or
any other manifestation,—reaching out to it as
perhaps a message from some unfathomable past,
or a premonition of the future,—knows that the
mystic signal beckons nowhere more imperiously
than from the heights of nature-poetry.
