The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery

 

The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery

LEARNERS of romantic personality poetry have had a great deal to tell us about the philosophic elements of this poetry: the particular mixture of Deistic theology, Newtonian physics, and pantheistic naturalism which saturates the Wordsworthian landscape in the duration of ‘Tintern Abbey, The theism which sounds in the “Eolian Harp’ of Coleridge, the confrontation between French atheism and Platonic idealism which even in “Pro- Methegs Unbound’ Shelley was not able to settle. We have been in-Strutted in some of the more barely scientific coloring of the poetry—the Images originated from geology, astronomy, and magnetism, and the Coruscate green enigma which the electricians participated to such phenomena as Shelley’s Spirit of Earth. We have contemplated also the “sensibility” of romantic readers, distinct, according to one influential Interpretation, from that of neoclassic readers. What was fascinating to the Age of Pope, ‘Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux” (even about These the age might be loath to admit its excitement), was not, we are tom, what was so manifestly exciting to the age of Wordsworth. ‘High mountains are a feeling, but the hum of cities torture.’ Lastly, recent critical history has reinvited interest to the romantic theory of intuition, and particularly to the edition of that concept which Coleridge originated from the German metaphysicians, the view of poetic imagination as the esemplastic capacity which reshapes our primary understanding of the world into symbolic routes to the theological.

We have, in brief, a subject— simply contemplated, the essence of birds and trees and streams— a metaphysics of an animating doctrine, a unique sensibility, and a concept of poetic imagination—the significance of the last a question of debate. Romantic poetry itself has previously endured some detriment among advanced critics. One delightful question, however, seems still to want conversation; that is, whether romantic poetry (or more especially romantic nature poetry) shows any creative pattern which may be assessed a special similarity of the subject, the philosophy, the sensibility, and the theory—and hence possibly an ex- planation of the last. Something like an answer to such a question is what I would describe.

For the objective of providing an antithetic point of deviation, I quote here a part of one of the best known and most toughly adequate of all metaphysical images:

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two.

Thy soul the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if th' other do.

It will be appropriate if we comment that this resemblance, rather exaggerated as some might think, is yet unmistakable to interpretation because quite overtly asserted, but again is not, by being asserted, specifically distinguished or restricted in its poetic integrity. The kind of resemblance and the kind of dis- parity that ordinarily attain between a drawing compass and a pair of dividing lovers are things to be attentively deemed in reading this image. And the discrepancy between living lovers and tough metal is not least crucial to the tone of accuracy, constraint, and belief which is the victory of the poem to communicate. Though the resemblance is cast in the shape of the statement, its mood is actually a kind of sub imperative. In the next age, the uncertainty of such a drastic distinction was relaxed, yet the overtness and crispness of statement persisted, and a satire of its own sort.

“Tis with our judgments as our watches, none

Go just alike, yet each belias his own.”

We may take this as typical, I speculate, of the metaphoric structure in which Pope attains quintessence and which withstands a few years later in the couplets of Samuel Johnson or the more strong Churchill. The difference between our decisions and our watches, if noted at all, may be a pleasant epistemological joke for a person who questions the existence of a judgment that is taken out as a watch and consulted by another Judgment.

But the 'sensibility," as we realize, had begun to change even in the era of Pope. Examples of a new sensibility, and of a different structure, having something to do with Miltonic verse and a "phaysico-theological nomenclature, are to be found in Thomson's Seasons. Both a new sensibility and a new structure occur in the hamlets' brown and dim-dis-covered spires of Collins’s early instance of the full romantic fantasy. In various poets of the mid-century, in the Warton’s, in Grainger, or Cunningham, one may think, or rather see expressed a new sensibility, but at the identical time, one may bemoan an absence of poetic quality—that is, of a poetic structure sufficient to embody or objectify the new perception. It is as if these forerunners of another epoch had felt but had not felt strong enough to work upon the subjects of their feelings a pattern of meaning which would utter for itself—and which would hence endure as a poetic monument. As a central exhibit I shall take two sonnets, that of William Lisle Bowles "To the River Itchin' (1789 ) and for the discrepancy that of Coleridge To the River Otter' (1796)—written in the confessed fabrication of Bowles. Coleridge owed his first poetic enthusiasm to Bowles (the "father" of English romantic poetry) and continued to express unlimited admiration for him as late as 1796. That is, they shared the same sensibility—as for that matter did Wordsworth and Southey, who too were deeply affected by the sonnets of Bowles. As a schoolboy Coleridge read eagerly in Bowies' second edition of 1789 (among other sonnets not much superior):

Itchin, when I behold thy banks! again,

Thy crumbling margin, and thy silver breast.,

On which the self-same tints still seem to rest,

Why feels my heart the shiv'rieg sense of pain?

Is it—that many a summer's day has past

Since, in life's morn, I carol'd on thy side?

Is it—that oft, since then, my heart has sigh'd,

As Youth, and Hope's delusive gleams, lew fast?

Is it—that those, who circled on thy shore,

Companions of my youth, now meet no more?

Whate'er the cause, upon thy banks I bend

Sorrowing, yet feel such solace at my heart,

As at the meeting of some long-lost friend,

Here is a demonstrative manner which once appealed to the sensibility of its author and of his more sophisticated contemporaries, but which has with the lapse of time gone flat. The orator was happy as a boy by the banks of the river, Age has brought disillusion and the dispersal of his friends. So a return to the river, in recollecting him of the past, brings both sorrow and solace. The truths are asserted in four rhetorical questions and a concluding statement. There is also something about how the river looks and how its looks might participate to his feelings—in the metaphoric recommendation of the 'crumbling’ border and in the approximately illusory hues on the texture of the surge which surprisingly have out-lasted the "delusive gleams' of his owe hopes. Yet the total impression is one of simple association (by contiguity in time) simply asserted what might be described in the theory of Hume or Hartley or what Hazlitt talks about in his essay "On the Love of the Country." 'It is because natural objects have been correlated with the sports of our childhood, with our feelings in solitude . . . that we love them as we do ourselves."

Coleridge himself in his 'Lines Written at Elbingerode in 1799" was to speak of a 'spot with which the heart correlates Holy memories of child or friend." His excitement for Hartley in this duration is well known. But later, in the Biogmphia Literaria and in the third of his essays on 'Genial Criticism,' he was to renounce explicitly the Hartleyan and mechanistic way of shifting back responsibilities of meaning. And already, in 1796, Coleridge as poet was interested with the more problematic ontological grounds of association (the several levels of resemblance, of correspondence and analogy), where cognitive activity exceeds mere "associative response"—where it is in fact the unifying activity known both to later eighteenth century associationists and to romantic poets as "imagination." The 'sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world' of which Coleridge speaks in the introduction to his leaflet anthology of sonnets in 1796 must be applied by us in one sense to the sonnets of Bowles, but in another to the best romantic poetry and even to Coleridge's representation of Bowles. There is an important difference between the kinds of unity. In a letter to Sotheby of 1802 Coleridge was to say more emphatically: "The poet's heart and intellect should be combined, intimately combined and unified with the great appearances of nature, and not merely held in solution and loose mixture with them.'8 In the same paragraph he says of Bowies' later poetry: "Bowles has indeed the sensibUtty of a poet, but he has not the passion of a great poet... he has no native passion because he is not a thinker."