Chapter II (5)

This is clearly seen in his use of summaries. He has a habit of analyzing Nature into separate facts and then classifying these facts under topics. For instance, to make a list of his sounds one hardly needs to search through the poems. They will be found already grouped together. So, too, the garden flowers, the greenhouse flowers, the colors of trees, country occupations, and country pleasures, are arranged under heads instead of being scattered through various descriptions. Then there are many summaries of miscellaneous facts. Now the literary purpose of nearly every assemblage of details is the establishment or illustration of some point connected with the general conception of the superior attractions of the country. The catalogues of facts have a definite argumentative value, and the artistic selection of these facts out of the mass known is determined by the especial point under consideration. In “Retirement” there is a rapid enumeration of many phases of Nature in various seasons, the purpose being to show that all forms of Nature are pleasing to a poet’s mind. The following passage is a good example of a summary the purpose of which is to present a concrete, picturesque, amplified statement of the creed that Nature gives a wisdom higher than can come from books:

But trees, and rivulets, whose rapid course
Defies the check of winter, haunts of deer,
And sheep-walks populous with bleating lambs,
And lanes, in which the primrose ere her time
Peeps through the moss that clothes the hawthorn root,
Deceive no student. Wisdom there, and truth,
Not shy, as in the world, and to be won
By slow solicitation, seize at once
The roving thought, and fix it on themselves.[495]

Frequent summaries are used to show that in the country God gives especial revelations of his power. The long flower catalogue is to show that the beauty of the flushing spring but speaks to man of the in-dwelling of God.[496] The ceaseless activity of Nature is attested by another summary.[497] Still further summaries illustrate the power of Nature over the man wearied with cares of state.[498] The beautiful summary of rural sounds is to show the exhilarating effect of Nature on the languid mind and heart.[499] It is this underlying purpose that gives unity to passages which would otherwise be hardly more than catalogues.

Another characteristic way in which Cowper presents Nature is in descriptive passages used as a background for his own meditative figure. The beautiful description of the sheltered path where he walked in winter[500] would lose much of its meaning if we were not throughout conscious of the poet’s presence and his delighted response to all the influences about him. Nearly all the passages that might otherwise be called pure description are given warmth and tone by the fact that we go with the poet, and, as it were, hear him talk about the scene as one he has long known and loved, until it takes an added interest from his personality, or we seem to see him in semi-identification with the scenes. It is the apparent equality, the comradeship, between the hare, the squirrel, and the poet in the solitary winter retreat that adds to the beauty of the spot the needed human touch. Nature is thus suffused with human experience and takes on a new interest. But it usually happens that these descriptions become, further, either the appropriate setting for a certain train of reflections on the part of the poet, or they directly suggest these suggestions. In the winter retreat just spoken of the fearless, innocent animal life becomes the occasion of a long disquisition on the lesson of benevolence taught by Nature to man. In the sheltered walk the poet finds his mind soothed and prepared for a Wordsworthian contemplation on Nature as the teacher of the wise, so that ultimately many of Cowper’s descriptions, as well as his summaries, become contributory to his main purpose.

Cowper’s knowledge of natural facts was not more remarkable than John Scott’s. His range was much narrower than Thomson’s. Other men had loved Nature with passionate intensity. To other minds Nature had suggested deep thoughts of God and man. Cowper came when many elements of the new attitude toward Nature had been clearly voiced. What marks him out as holding a unique position is not only that he gave body and emphasis to the new thought, but especially that he became its propagandist. He analyzed the effect of Nature on man, he translated his personal experiences into a theory which he set himself to interpret and promulgate. He wrote with the zeal of a convert. Joy such as had come to him late in life was man’s natural heritage. Men must be called back from the perverted and ruinous life of towns to the simplicity of Nature. His theme is stated abstractly, repeated in concrete form, illustrated and amplified with the patience and ardor of absolute conviction. He was the preacher of the new religion of Nature.

Robert Burns was deeply sensitive to the charms of Nature. In a letter to Mrs. Dunlop he said:

I have some favorite flowers in Spring, among which are the
mountain-daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the wild brier-rose,
the budding birk and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang
over, with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary
whistle of the curlew in a Summer noon, or the wild mixing
cadence of a troop of grey-plover in an Autumnal morning,
without feeling an elevation of soul like the Enthusiasm of
Devotion or Poetry.[501]

Again he says:

I have various sources of pleasure which are in a manner
peculiar to myself.... Such is the peculiar pleasure I take
in the season of Winter more than in the rest of the year....
There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more--I don’t know
if I should call it pleasure, but something which exalts me,
something which enraptures me--than to walk in the sheltered
side of a wood or high plantation in a cloudy winter day, and
hear a stormy wind howling among the trees and raving o’er the
plain. It is my best season for devotion; my mind is rapt up in
a kind of enthusiasm to _Him_ who ... walks on the wings of
the wind.[502]

Note also what Mr. Walker, his companion on the border tour, says of him:

I had often, like others, experienced the pleasures which arise
from the sublime or elegant landscape, but I never saw those
feelings so intense as in Burns. When we reached a rustic hut
on the river Tilt, where it is overhung by a woody precipice,
from which there is a noble waterfall, he threw himself on
the heathy seat, and gave himself up to a tender, abstracted,
and voluptuous enthusiasm of imagination.... It was with much
difficulty that I prevailed upon him to leave the spot.[503]

This susceptibility to Nature was one of the signs by which “Coila” knew that Burns would be the poet of Scotland. He represents her as saying to him:

I saw thee seek the sounding shore,
Delighted with the dashing roar;
Or when the North his fleecy store
Drove thro’ the sky
I saw grim Nature’s visage hoar
Struck thy young eye.

Or when the deep green-mantl’d earth
Warm cherish’d ev’ry flow’ret’s birth
And joy and music pouring forth
In ev’ry grove,
I saw thee eye the gen’ral mirth
With boundless love.[504]

In his “Commonplace Book,” Burns records his eager desire to write verse that shall make “the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic woodlands & sequestered scenes on Aire, and the healthy, mountainous source, & winding sweep of Doon emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, Tweed, &c.” And his love of Nature was limited in scope to just these scenes of which he speaks. He had no interest in mountains or the sea. Mr. Douglas calls attention to the fact that, “living in full face of the Arran hills he never names them.”[505] He was as narrow in his limits and as vividly local in the Nature he chose to represent as was Cowper, but what he loved he loved with intensity. In the beautiful and picturesque scenery about Ayr he found poetic inspiration. To William Simson he said,

The muse, nae poet ever fand her,
Till by himself he learn’d to wander,
Adown some trottin burn’s meander,
An’ no think lang;

and in “The Brigs of Ayr” he says the simple bard may learn his tuneful trade from every bough.

Burns’ knowledge of the Nature about him was abundant and exact, and he was keenly critical of any note of falsity in the poems of others. He objected to the “Banks of the Dee” because of the line,

And sweetly the _nightingale_ sang from the _tree_.

“In the first place,” he said, “the nightingale sings in a low bush, but never from a tree; and in the second place, there never was a nightingale seen or heard on the banks of the Dee, nor the banks of any other river in Scotland. Exotic, rural imagery is always comparatively flat.”[506]

Again he said of another song, “It is a fine song, but for consistency’s sake, alter the name ‘Adonis.’ Was there ever such banns published, as a purpose of marriage between _Adonis_ and _Mary_? These Greek and Roman pastoral appellations have a flat, insipid effect in a Scot song.”[507] He gives especial praise to Rev. Dr. Cririe, because “like Thomson,” the poet had “looked into Nature for himself,” and had nowhere been content with a “copied description.”[508]

When Burns wrote a descriptive poem of set purpose he was comparatively commonplace and uninteresting as in “The Fall of Foyers” or “Admiring Nature.” His best descriptions come in, by chance as it were, in the midst of some vivid human interests. One of the most beautiful is a stanza in “Halloween”:

Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays,
As thro’ the glen it wimpl’t;
Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays,
Whyles in a wiel it dimpl’t;
Whyles glitter’d ta the nightly rays,
Wi’ bickering, dancing dazzle;
Whyles cookit underneath the braes,
Below the spreading hazel,
Unseen that night.

Work so perfect as this is rare in any age. The beauty of the poem is simply the beauty of the stream itself.

Burns’ chief use of Nature, however, is in connection with man. External Nature is illustration, background, frame, for human emotions. “The Lass of Cressnock Banks” was written at twenty-two and is the first one of his poems in which there is any distinct use of Nature. It is merely an assemblage of twelve formally drawn-out similes to represent the beauty of the lassie. Some of these similes are conventional and unmeaning, as when her hair is likened to curling mist on a mountain side,[509] her forehead to a rainbow, her lips to ripe cherries, and her teeth to a flock of sheep. In later poems the similitudes are simpler and sweeter, but they are drawn from a small number of facts and those of the more obvious sort, as the “simmer morn,” “the flower in May,” “the opening rose.” A much more effective use of Nature is as dramatic background either by congruity or contrast. As fine examples of the use of Nature to give the keynote of the human emotion it accompanies we have the opening lines of the “Elegy,” “Farewell Song to the Banks of Ayr,” “Raving Winds around Her Blowing,” and “Farewell to Ballochmyle.” The more usual form is to represent a natural picture in contrast to the human emotion, as in “The Chevalier’s Lament,” “The Lament of Mary, Queen of Scots,” or best of all, “The Banks of Doon.”

Ye banks and braes o’ bonny Doon,
How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?
How can ye chant ye little birds,
And I sae weary, fu’ of care!

It is characteristic of Burns that his knowledge was wider and his sympathy keener in the realm of animate than of inanimate Nature. He apparently thought of animals almost as if they had been human. The address to a mouse is as tenderly and genuinely sympathetic as if it had been to a hurt child. On winter nights he listens to the wind and cannot sleep for thinking of the “ourie cattle” and “silly sheep” and helpless birds that “cow’r” with “chittering wing.”[510] He scorned hunting and said there was no warm poetic heart that did not inly bleed at man’s savage cruelty.[511] He found it impossible to reconcile so-called “sport” with his ideas of virtue.[512] He knew animals, especially birds, in an intimate, friendly fashion. In the description of their manners and habits there is the most minute realism. The following phrases are illustrative: “Ye grouse that crap the heather bud;” “Ye curlews calling thro’ a clud;” “Ye whirring paitrick brood;” “Ye fisher herons watching eels;” “sooty coots;” “speckled teals;” “whistling plover;”

Clam’ring craiks at close o’ day
’Mang fields o’ flow’ring clover gay;

and

Ye duck and drake, wi’ airy wheels
Circling the lake.[513]

In accurate first-hand observation, in abundant knowledge, in the use of felicitous descriptive epithets, in great personal joy in Nature, in delight in winter, in love for animals, and in a critical estimate of the value of truthful portrayal, Burns represents the new spirit.

William Lisle Bowles is another of the reputed “fathers” of modern poetry. His slender title to the distinction thus conferred upon him by Rev. George Gilfillan,[514] rests on the admiration of Coleridge,[515] Southey,[516] and Lovel for his early poems.[517] From 1798 to the end of his life Bowles wrote constantly, so the list of his works is a long one; but in the present study we are concerned only with the poems before 1798, the ones that stirred Coleridge to abandon metaphysics for poetry.

From fourteen to nineteen years of age Bowles was in Winchester School under the tutelage of Dr. Joseph Warton, who won the boy’s confidence and inspired him with his own tastes. In the “Monody on the Death of Dr. Warton,” written eighteen years after these school days, Bowles says of Warton,

Thy cheering voice,
O Warton! bade my silent heart rejoice,
And wake to love of nature; every breeze
On Itchen’s brink was melody; the trees
Waved in fresh beauty; ...
... And witness thou
Catherine, upon whose foss-encircled brow
We met the morning, how I loved to trace
The prospect spread around....
So passed my days with new delight.

Warton also taught him to love literature. He learned to read Greek poets with “young-eyed sympathy,” and he went with “holier joy” to

The lonely heights where Shakespeare sat sublime.

Charmed, the lad bent his soul

Great Milton’s solemn harmonies to hear.

“Unheeded midnight hours” were beguiled by the wild song of Ossian, and his fancy found a “magic spell” in the “Odes” of his master, Dr. Warton.

The influences of these early school days had awakened Bowles to love of Nature and of poetry, and when sorrow came it was to Nature and to poetry that he turned for relief. His “Sonnets” are the direct and genuine expression of a personal grief. They were composed, he says, during a tour in which he “sought forgetfulness of the first disappointment in early affections,”[518] and they are pervaded by a melancholy unmistakably real. But along with this deep sadness is a frequent recognition of the power of Nature to give at least temporary respite from grief. Not only does she “steep each sense in still delight,”[519] but she bestows “a soothing charm.”[520] The lovely sights and sounds of morning

Touch soft the wakeful nerve’s according string.[521]

The river Itchen brings “solace to his heart.”[522] After visiting the Cherwell he says:

Whate’er betide, yet something have I won
Of solace, that may bear me on serene.[523]

In the midst of sorrow he is

Thankful that still the landscape beaming bright
Can wake the wonted sense of pure delight.[524]

What Bowles saw in Nature was largely determined by his state of mind. His own sadness led him to a quick perception of the pensive or melancholy suggestions in any scene. He loved sequestered streams, romantic vales, the hush of evening. The sounds he heard were soft and plaintive. The river Wainsbeck makes “a plaintive song among its “mossy-scattered rocks.”[525] He listens to the wind and seems to hear a plaint of sorrow.[526] Sea sounds are

Like melodies that mourn upon the lyre.[527]

There is strange music in the stirring wind
When lowers the autumnal eve.[528]

Of the bells at Ostend he says:

And hark! with lessening cadence now they fall;
And now, along the white and level tide,
They fling their melancholy music wide;
Bidding me many a tender thought recall
Of summer days, and those delightful years
When from an ancient tower, in life’s fair prime,
The mournful magic of their mingling chime
First waked my wondering childhood into tears.[529]

Again, his own striving after self-control leads him to look with pleasure on such natural objects as have withstood the shock of tempests. Rugged Malvern Hill, on which the “parting sun sits smiling,” teaches him a lesson of victory over grief, and he exclaims,

Ev’n as thou
Dost lift in the pale beam thy forehead high,
Proud mountain! whilst the scattered vapours fly
Unheeded round thy breast--so, with calm brow
The shades of sorrow I may meet, and wear
The smile unchanged of peace, though pressed by care![530]

Some of the brief descriptions in these sonnets are not without a certain beauty in themselves, as in this passage from “Dover Cliffs”:

On these white cliffs, that calm above the flood
Uprear their shadowing heads, and at their feet
Hear not the surge that has for ages beat,
How many a lonely wanderer has stood!
And, whilst the lifted murmur met his ear,
And o’er the distant billows the still eve
Sailed slow, has thought of all his heart must leave
Tomorrow.

But here, as elsewhere in the poems, the chief thought is human grief; and the most important characteristic of the poems, taken as a whole, is the intimate union between the spirit of a man and the spirit of Nature. It was always Bowles’ theory, says Clark,[531] that Nature is the true subject of poetry; but he does not, in his later work, strike so true and simple a note as in these early sonnets.

Such general statements as are to be drawn from this study of specific poets can be more advantageously made after the chapters on “Fiction,” “Travels,” “Gardening,” and “Painting,” for these chapters offer facts that modify or confirm the impressions gained from the poetry.