by M H Abrams
Romantic poets, at the turn of the nineteenth century, introduced into the literary realm an extraordinary emphasis on the natural world, and an unprecedented set of concepts, attitudes, and feelings with reference to that world. Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” which he composed in 1798 at the age of twenty-eight, formulated and helped to establish a vision of nature that is distinctively Romantic. That is, the poem manifests a sense of total affinity and communion with the natural world by representing it as a living entity in whose life—Coleridge as well as Wordsworth sometimes called it “the one life”—all things, human and nonhuman, participate. As Coleridge later put it in “The Eolian Harp” (1817):
O the one Life, within us and abroad,
Which meets all Motion and becomes its soul . . .
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere.
“Tintern Abbey” also exemplifies what is sometimes called the Romantic “religion of nature,” for it transfers to this green earth attributes, together with the appropriate feelings of reverence and awe, that in earlier eras of Western culture had been applied exclusively to God.
I want to emphasize that the Romantic vision of the natural world is not an outmoded phenomenon, of no more than historical interest. The Romantic attitudes toward nature are in fact of crucial import to us, because relevant to pressing contemporary concerns. That relevance becomes evident if we substitute for the term “nature” the current term “environment,” and if we substitute for the Romantic concept of the one life, in which human beings are interrelated with all that is nonhuman, the current concept of “ecology”—the interrelations and interdependence of all living beings with each other and with the physical environment.
We know today that our physical and biological environment is under severe stress. We are polluting our soil, water, and air. We are rapidly depleting this green earth of its greenery, its forests and plains. We are exterminating, at an increasing pace, plant and animal species which, once lost, can never be reconstituted. And at a frightening rate we are overpopulating our crowded earth. We—or at least many of us—know these things, from what ecological scientists tell us and from personal observation. But simply to know such things, on the intellectual level, is not enough, as the Romantic poet Shelley pointed out so early as 1821 in his essay A Defence of Poetry. “There is no want of knowledge,” Shelley wrote, “respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government, and political economy.” And about the natural sciences and their practical applications, he said: “The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world has, for want of the poetical faculty [the imagination], circumscribed those of the internal world, and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.” What we lack, Shelley said, is
the creative faculty to imagine that which we know, we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine, we want the poetry of life.
For, he declares, it is especially poetry—defined broadly as any “expression of the Imagination”—that “compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know.”
I shall try to specify some of the chief ways in which poets of the Romantic era (the quarter-century beginning in the late 1790s) imagined what they knew about their physical environment. To stay within the limits of your patience, I have to be very selective. I’ll focus mainly on English poets, although what they say holds true for a number of poets in Germany as well; while among the English examples I’ll attend mainly to two major poets of the first Romantic generation: William Wordsworth, born 1770, and Samuel Coleridge, born 1772. And even from these writers, I have time only to select a few passages to represent the diverse ways in which they expressed a hitherto unexampled set of attitudes and feelings toward the green earth and the forms of life that inhabit it.
In part, the Romantic representations of nature were a reaction against the products of the industrial revolution during the preceding half-century—the age of iron and steam, of the factory system (in the phrase of the Romantic poet William Blake, “the dark Satanic mills”), and of the sprawling urbanization that were making conspicuous and ugly inroads (again in a phrase from Blake) on “England’s green and pleasant land.” For example, Wordsworth’s epoch-marking poem that we call, for short, “Tintern Abbey,” was written, as the full title specifies, while he contemplated the natural scene from the banks of the river Wye “a few miles above Tintern Abbey.” As Wordsworth knew, the river a few miles below Tintern Abbey, to cite a popular guidebook of the time by William Gilpin, was “full of shipping, carrying coal and timber”; there were also along the banks of the river iron-manufacturing furnaces that made the water “ouzy, and discolored” in the tidal section downstream. And some fifteen years after “Tintern Abbey,” in the eighth book of his long poem The Excursion (1814), Wordsworth vehemently attacked what he called the “outrage done to nature” by factories and “the manufacturing spirit,” as well as by the expanding manufacturing towns, with the result, he laments, that one sees “the barren wilderness erased, / Or disappearing.”
In great part, however, the Romantic vision of nature was in vehement reaction against the post-Newtonian and post-Cartesian world-view prevalent among the philosophers and intellectuals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Newton’s science had postulated a universe in which the ultimate elements are particles of matter in motion—for the very good reason that these are things that can be numbered and measured, and thus are capable of being managed mathematically. But later thinkers, building on some passages in Newton’s own speculations, had converted these scientific postulates from a conceptual model into a world-picture; that is, into the representation of the way, deep down, things really are. S. T. Coleridge, for example, who was a metaphysician as well as a poet, greatly admired what he called “the immortal Newton” as a theoretical and experimental physicist; he decried, however, the conversion of Newton’s postulate of particles in motion from what he called “a fiction of science” into “a truth of fact,” thereby making this vital world into “a lifeless Machine whirled about by the dust of its own grinding” (“Conclusion” to Aids to Reflection). Equally intolerable to the Romantic sensibility was the dualism of the reigning philosophy and psychology of the preceding century, which established an absolute division between the human mind, or “subject,” and its material physical milieu, and so replaced the concrete, vital, and companionable world of traditional European culture with a world consisting, fundamentally, of particles in purposeless motion, connected by purely causal relationships.
From such a representation of the world both Romantic philosophers and Romantic poets recoiled with repulsion and disbelief. Typical is the response of the young Goethe and his friends to the Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature (1770), a book that undertook to reduce the phenomenal world—and also human consciousness and purposiveness—to the operation of causal laws on material particles. This book, Goethe wrote, “appeared to us so dark, so Cimmerian, so deathlike, that we found it difficult to endure its presence, and shuddered at it as at a specter.”
How hollow and empty did we feel in this melancholy, atheistical half-night, in which earth vanished with all its images, heaven with all its stars. There was to be an eternal matter in eternal motion, and by this motion, right and left and in all directions, without anything further, were to be produced the infinite phenomena of existence.
(Dichtung und Wahreit, Part III, Book xi)
Similarly repelled, Coleridge, in his periodical The Friend, described the predominant world-view of the preceding century as “that intuition of things” in which “we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind as object to subject, thing to thought, death to life.” And as he wrote to Wordsworth in May of 1815, “the philosophy of mechanism . . . in every thing that is most worthy of the human intellect strikes Death.” Wordsworth agreed that the
philosophical separation of mind from nature is lethal; as he wrote in a manuscript version of “The Ruined Cottage,” 1797–98: “solitary objects . . . beheld / In disconnection are dead and spiritless,” as opposed to the unifying vision in which “all things shall live in us and we shall live / In all things that surround us.”
To many Romantic writers, the theory world posited by philosophical mechanism and dualism was not only intolerable to human needs, but drastically incompatible with ordinary human experience. The central enterprise of the philosophical systems of Schelling, Hegel, and other German thinkers was to reunite the “subject and object”—or in their alternate terms, “ego and non-ego,” “spirit and the other,” “mind and nature”—that Descartes and post-Cartesian philosophers had put asunder; they would thus restore to the lived world its sensuous concreteness and human values, and thereby make it possible for human beings to feel that they belonged again in a world from which—in a term Hegel established to define the basic human malaise—in a world from which they have been “entfremdet”—“alienated.”
For early Romantic poets as for contemporary philosophers, a cardinal enterprise was to heal the breach that culture had imposed between subject and object, between the self and the natural world, so as to revivify and rehumanize the world and make it adequate to human experience and responsive to human needs. In an essay “On Poesy or Art,” S. T. Coleridge elaborated the views of the German philosopher F. S. Schelling, in a statement that serves to identify what is most distinctive in the literature of his time. Poetry or art, he says,
is the mediatress between, the reconciler of nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into every thing which is the object of his contemplation. . . . To make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature,—this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts.
II.
In reaction against the bleak theory world of mechanism and dualism, Romantic poets achieved intellectual and emotional relationships to the natural world unexampled in earlier cultural history. To formulate these experiences in words, they did not invent new terms; instead, they enlarged the expressive possibilities of the existing vocabulary by inventing types of metaphor that would make the old vocabulary adequate to express the new states of consciousness. Let me present several passages, to indicate how early Romantic poets developed metaphors that, as Coleridge put it, would humanize nature, and serve to “make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature.”
My first instance is from Wordsworth’s great narrative poem, “The Ruined Cottage,” which he composed in 1797–98 but left in manuscript. Wordsworth describes an eight-year-old shepherd boy—patently modeled on his own young self—who from a mountaintop sees the sun “rise up and bathe the world in light.”
He looked,
The ocean and the earth beneath him lay
In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched
And in their silent faces did he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none
Nor any voice of joy: his spirit drank
The spectacle. Sensation, soul and form
All melted into him. They swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live
And by them did he live. They were his life.
Here we have the paradigmatic Wordsworthian—and widely Romantic—situation: a human being, solitary, confronts a scene (“He looked”), and the interaction between the viewer and the scene, the subject and the object, generates the poetic passage. Now, note Wordsworth’s metaphors for this interaction. The observer’s spirit “drank / The spectacle”; that is, the observer ingested the objects of the natural world, so that these, in another metaphor, “melted into him,” and thus became part of his identity. Note in addition that the metaphoric process goes two ways: as the observer “drank” the spectacle, so the objects in that spectacle “swallowed up” his animal being. The observer, having ingested the scene, is in turn ingested by it; in Coleridge’s terms, the observer, having internalized the external, is then himself internalized. The result of this mutual appropriation is the interfusion of outer and inner, of the human self and the natural world, into one being: “They were his life.” And this visionary condition, in which Wordsworth expresses the one life not as a concept but as a moment of experience, is signalized by an enraptured state of mind that Wordsworth twice calls “joy.”
Metaphors of ingestion, especially drinking, occur repeatedly in Wordsworth’s descriptions of the interpenetration, through the senses, of mind and nature. One example is Wordsworth’s representation, in The Prelude, of what he calls “a Spot of Time”; that is, a visionary moment of perception of the outer world, by which, as Wordsworth puts it in another of his ingestive metaphors, “our minds / Are nourished and invisibly repaired.”
And afterwards the wind and sleety rain,
And all the business of the elements,
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music of that old stone wall,
The noise of wood and water . . .
All these were spectacles and sounds to which
I often would repair, and thence would drink
As at a fountain.
Wordsworth exploits a variety of other metaphors to express the integration of the external with the internal, of the human with the nonhuman. As a prime example, here is a passage, drafted in 1799, that Wordsworth later reworked for inclusion in his poetic autobiography, The Prelude (1805). As a boy, he mimicked the hooting of owls that they might answer him.
But at times they did not answer.
Then often in that silence, while I hung
Listening, a sudden shock of mild surprize
Would carry far into my heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into my mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
Of this passage, Coleridge remarked: “Had I met these lines running wild in the desert of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out, ‘Wordsworth!’ ” Why are these lines unmistakably Wordsworthian?
Note that by the phrase “far into my heart” Wordsworth attributes to the mind, metaphorically, the spatial dimension of depth—a space into which the sound of torrents is carried, and into which “the visible scene” can “enter” and be internalized. At the same time, outer objects are unobtrusively humanized. The torrents are given, metaphorically, a human feature, a “voice”; and to the lake is attributed another human feature, a maternal “bosom,” into which it receives, comfortingly, the “uncertain heaven”—that is, the shimmering reflection of the sky in the still water of the lake. In a final stroke of invention, Wordsworth annuls the division between mind and nature by tacitly equating the mind’s perception of the outer scene with the outer scene’s reception of the objects that it reflects. That is, in the same way that the lake receives the rocks, woods, and uncertain heaven, so the mind receives the lake, including its reflected imagery of rocks, woods, and the uncertain heaven. Inner and outer, human and nonhuman, mind and nature are merged, metaphorically, into a seamless unity.
I have time for one other example, related to the closing lines of the passage I have just quoted, that ascribes to the lake a comforting maternal bosom. In the second book of The Prelude, Wordsworth struggles to invent a vocabulary—inescapably, a metaphoric vocabulary—in the attempt to say what no one, so far as I know, had said before. Wordsworth’s point is that a world that an infant gets to know while in the security of his mother’s arms, and while nursing at his mother’s breast, is a world transfor
med:
Blest the infant Babe . . .
Nursed in his mother’s arms, who sinks to sleep
Rocked on his Mother’s breast; who with his soul
Drinks in the feelings of his Mother’s eye!
For him, in one dear Presence, there exists
A virtue which irradiates and exalts
Objects through widest intercourse of sense.
No outcast he, bewildered and depressed:
Along his infant veins are interfused
The gravitation and the filial bond
Of nature that connect him with the world.
In these circumstances, a world that would otherwise be an alien object is experienced (in Wordsworth’s figure) as irradiated by human feelings, with the result that the infant is bound doubly to the world—he is bound physically, by the pull of gravity, and emotionally, by a transference to the world of the loving interrelations between mother and son. In Wordsworth’s terse phrasing: “No outcast he,” for
Along his infant veins are interfused
The gravitation and filial bond
Of nature that connect him with the world.
As in these examples, so elsewhere in Wordsworth’s early poetry, natural objects are metaphorically received, enter, flow into, sink down, and melt into the mind, while the mind dwells on, drinks, feeds upon, and conducts emotional interchanges with natural objects. The division between what is external and internal thus dissipates, transforming a divorced and alien world, in which the human being would feel himself to be outcast, into a congenial world, in which he can feel thoroughly at home.
III.
The need to be at home again in the world—that is a persistent motif in Romantic literature, and in Romantic philosophy as well. A widespread structural trope, shared by poets and philosophers, figures human life as a circuitous journey away from home, through an estranged world, in an irremissive but unknowing quest for the home that has been left behind. Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude is structured as a laborious spiritual journey which, at its end, turns out to be preliminary to another poem which has been the unrecognized goal of the author’s spiritual quest from the beginning; that goal, as the title of the following poem specifies, is home—Home at Grasmere. Hegel’s exactly contemporaneous philosophical work, Phenomenology of the Spirit, turns out to have the same plot. It represents the evolving vicissitudes of the Universal Spirit in its self-educative journey through history, starting with its departure from its own alienated self, around and up and back, toward the culmination in which it will repossess its alienated self, and so find itself, in Hegel’s phrase, “bei sich”—“at home with itself in its otherness.” As the poet Novalis described this dominant philosophical trope of his era: “Philosophy is really homesickness—the compulsion to be everywhere at home [Trieb überall zu Hause zu sein].”