IV
I do not believe that nature worship idea in literature has been yet fully analysed. Critics have refused to see the exact meaning of the expression "love of nature." The poets themselves have told us that they saw in nature lessons of moral improvement and inspirations for humanitarianism. Granting that this is so, the fact still remains that there is much left unsaid by the poets. Some of them recognised the real significance of their love for nature when they told us how they were inspired by her to love, or were reminded of their lack of love.
Wordsworth, who is one of the greatest nature poets the world has ever had, appears singularly free from the voicing of the love passion in his work. Except for the Lucy poems and a few others, he has given us little love poetry. Hazlitt complained that he found no marriages or giving in marriage in Wordsworth's poetry. But nevertheless the sex element is there though never directly expressed. There is nothing, it is well known, calculated to make a man long for the love of woman or to miss her more than when he is in the presence of nature. Anthropology teaches us the close connection between love and nature. When Wordsworth sang of the beauties of nature he was voicing a cry for satisfied love which he did not have up to his thirtieth year, when he married. He was also pining for love of the girl he met in France in his twenty-third year, the mother of his illegitimate daughter. The poet was using symbols, such as trees and daisies, whose glory he sang when he meant he wished he had love. Some things can be enjoyed alone, though not altogether, such as food, plays, pictures, reading, music, lectures, etc. It is the great distinction of nature that she inspires human love and also provokes sadness.
Most of the old bucolic poets frankly associated their Corydons and Amaryllises with enjoyment of nature. Wordsworth, who had much of the English Puritanism, was reserved. Any reader who takes up the nature poetry of Wordsworth lays it down after a while with the feeling that the poet is not telling the whole truth. It does not follow that Wordsworth was deliberately concealing it, for he may have been unaware of what was in his unconscious. After he married and had love he continued for a while to give us great nature poetry, for the most part a reflection of his early mood. For it must not be assumed that because a man has love he therefore loses his love for nature. Wordsworth's greatest nature poem, "Lines on Tintern Abbey," was written before his marriage; the nature poetry of the last thirty or forty years of his life was rather poor.
The secret of Wordsworth's great nature poetry is this: it was a sublimation of his unsatisfied love cravings and a symbolic means of expressing them. Instead of singing directly of his longing for love, or creating imaginary love scenes for himself, or voicing despair, as other poets did, he expressed his passion for nature and thus vented himself unconsciously of his feelings. True, the impulse of the vernal wood interested him because it taught him much about moral evil and good; it made him also think of love and he sang of his love indirectly by praising that impulse.
This theory which seems so inevitable is one to which we are forced from so many human experiences with nature and yet critics have not dared to advance it. The psychology of nature worship will no doubt be more completely studied by psychoanalysts some day, and we will understand our nature poets better. The interpretation may offend those who want to persuade themselves that nature has only sermons for us, but let the reader take up some of the sensuous nature descriptions in Keats and Spenser and he will realise more clearly the underlying meaning of nature worship.
It is significant that much sexual symbolism has been found in two poets who were deemed most reticent on the subject of sex—Wordsworth and Browning.