SHAKESPEARE'S SYMPATHY FOR NATURE
The poetry of India may serve as a measure of the part which Nature can play in drama; it is full of comparisons and personifications, and eloquent expressions of intimate sympathy with plants and animals. In Greek tragedy, Nature stepped into the background; metaphors, comparisons, and personifications are rarer; it was only by degrees, especially in Sophocles and Euripides, in the choruses and monologues, that man's interest in her appeared, and he began to greet the light or the sky, land or sea, to attribute love, pity, or hate to her, or find comfort in her lonely places. During the Middle Ages, drama lay fallow, and the blossoming period of French tragedy, educated to the pathos of Seneca, only produced cold declamation, frosty rhetoric; of any real sympathy between man and Nature there was no question.
Over this mediæval void Calderon was the bridge to Shakespeare.
Shakespeare reached the Greek standpoint and advanced far beyond it. He was not only the greatest dramatist of modern times as to human action, suffering, and character, but also a genius in the interpretation of Nature.[[1]]
In place of the narrow limits of the old dramatists, he had the wider and maturer modern vision, and, despite his mastery of language, he was free both from the exaggeration and redundance of Oriental drama, and from the mere passion for describing, which so often carried Calderon away.
In him too, the subjectivity, which the Renaissance brought into modern art, was still more fully developed. His metaphors and comparisons shew this, and, most of all, the very perfect art with which he assigns Nature a part in the play, and makes her not only form the appropriate background, dark or bright as required, but exert a distinct influence upon human fate.
As Carrière points out:
At a period which had painting for its leading art, and was turning its attention to music, his mental accord produced effects in his works to which antiquity was a stranger.
Herder had already noted that Shakespeare gives colour and atmosphere where the Greek only gave outline. And although Shakespeare's outlines are drawn with more regard to fidelity than to actual beauty, yet, like a great painter, he brings all Nature into sympathy with man. We feel the ghostly shudder of the November night in Hamlet, breathe the bracing Highland air in Macbeth, the air of the woods in As You Like It; the storm on the heath roars through Lear's mad outburst, the nightingale sings in the pomegranate outside Julia's window.
'How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank,' when Love solves all differences in the Merchant of Venice! On the other hand, when Macbeth is meditating the murder of Duncan, the wolf howls, the owl hoots, and the cricket cries. And since Shakespeare's characters often act out of part, so that intelligible motive fails, while it is important to the poet that each scene be raised to dramatic level and viewed in a special light, Goethe's words apply:
Here everything which in a great world event passes secretly through the air, everything which at the very moment of a terrible occurrence men hide away in their hearts, is expressed; that which they carefully shut up and lock away in their minds is here freely and eloquently brought to light; we recognize the truth to life, but know not how it is achieved.
Amorous passion in his hands is an interpreter of Nature; in one of his sonnets he compares it to an ocean which cannot quench thirst.
In Sonnet 130 he says:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dim;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks....
And yet, by Heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied by false compare.
His lady-love is a mirror in which the whole world is reflected:
Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind....
For if it see the rudest or gentlest sight,
The most sweet favour or deformed'st creature,
The mountain or the sea, the day or night,
The crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature.
(Sonnet 113.)
When she leaves him it seems winter even in spring:
'For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute.'
(Sonnet 97.)
Here, as in the dramas,[[2]] contrasts in Nature are often used to point contrasts in life:
How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
Which like a canker in the fragrant rose
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!
O in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!
(Sonnet 95.)
and
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done;
Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
(Sonnet 35.)
In an opposite sense is Sonnet 70:
The ornament of beauty is suspect
A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air,
For canker vice the sweetest buds did love,
And thou presentest a pure unstained prime.
Sonnet 7 has:
Lo! in the orient when the gracious light
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,
Serving with looks his sacred majesty.
Sonnet 18:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate,
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date--
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 60:
Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Sonnet 73:
That time of life thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by-and-by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
There are no better similes for the oncoming of age and death, than the sere leaf trembling in the wind, the twilight of the setting sun, the expiring flame.
Almost all the comparisons from Nature in his plays are original, and rather keen and lightning-like than elaborate, often with the terseness of proverbs;
The strawberry grows underneath the nettle.
(Henry V.)
Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep.
(Henry VI.)
The waters swell before a boisterous storm.
(Richard III.)
Sometimes they are heaped up, like Calderon's, 'making it' (true love)
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night
That in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.
(Midsummer Night's Dream.)
Compared with Homer's they are very bold, and shew an astonishing play of imagination; in place of the naive simplicity and naturalness of antiquity, this modern genius gives us a dazzling display of wit and thought. To quote only short examples[[3]]:
'Open as day,' 'deaf as the sea,' 'poor as winter,'
'chaste as unsunn'd snow.'
He ranges all Nature. These are characteristic examples:
King Richard doth himself appear
As doth the blushing discontented sun
From out the fiery portal of the east,
When he perceives the envious clouds are bent
To dim his glory and to stain the track
Of his bright passage to the occident.
(Richard II.)
Since the more fair crystal is the sky,
The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly.
As when the golden sun salutes the morn,
And, having gilt the ocean with his beams,
Gallops the zodiac in his glistering coach
And overlooks the highest peering hills,
So Tamora.
(Titus Andronicus.)
As all the world is cheered by the sun,
So I by that; it is my day, my life.
(Richard III.)
So sweet a kiss the golden sun gives not
To those fresh morning drops upon the rose,
As thy eye-beams, when their fresh rays have smote
The night of dew that on my cheek down flows;
Nor shines the silver moon one half so bright
Through the transparent bosom of the deep.
As doth thy face through tears of mine give light;
Thou shinest on every tear that I do weep.
(Love's Labour's Lost.)
This is modern down to its finest detail, and much richer in individuality than the most famous comparisons of the same kind in antiquity.
Sea and stream are used:
Like an unseasonable stormy day
Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores
As if the world were all dissolved to tears,
So high above his limits swells the rage
Of Bolingbroke. (Richard II.)
The current that with gentle murmur glides,
Thou know'st, being stopped, impatiently doth rage;
But when his fair course is not hindered,
He makes sweet music with the enamell'd stones,
Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge
He overtaketh on his pilgrimage;
And so by many winding nooks he strays
With willing sport to the wild ocean.
Then let me go, and hinder not my course. (Two Gentlemen of Verona.)
Faster than spring-time showers comes thought on thought.
You are the fount that makes small brooks to flow.
And what is Edward but a ruthless sea?
(Henry VI.)
If there were reason for these miseries,
Then into limits could I bind my woes;
When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o'er-flow?
If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad,
Threatening the welkin with his big-swoln face?
And wilt thou have a reason for this coil?
I am the sea: hark, how her sighs do blow!
She is the weeping welkin, I the earth;
Then must my sea be moved with her sighs;
Then must my earth with her continual tears
Become a deluge, overflow'd and drowned.
(Titus Andronicus.)
This battle fares like to the morning's war
When dying clouds contend with growing light,
What time the shepherd blowing of his nails
Can neither call it perfect day nor night.
Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea
Forced by the tide to combat with the wind;
Now sways it that way, like the self-same sea
Forced to retire by fury of the wind.
Sometime the flood prevails and then the wind:
Now one the better, then another best;
Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast,
Yet neither conqueror nor conquered.
So is the equal poise of this fell war.
(Henry VI.)
In the last five examples the epic treatment and the personifications are noteworthy.
Comparisons from animal life are forcible and striking:
How like a deer, stricken by many princes,
Dost thou lie here! (Julius Cæsar.)
Richard III. is called:
The wretched bloody and usurping boar
That spoil'd your summer fields and fruitful vines,
Swills your warm blood like wash and makes his trough
In your embowell'd bosoms; this foul swine
Lies now even in the centre of this isle.
The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind.
(Richard III.)
The smallest objects are noted:
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport. (King Lear.)
Marcus: Alas! my lord, I have but kill'd a fly.
Titus: But how if that fly had a father and a mother?
How would he hang his slender gilded wings,
And buzz lamenting doings in the air!
Poor harmless fly!
That, with his pretty buzzing melody,
Came here to make us merry! and thou
Hast kill'd him!
(Titus Andronicus.)
Shakespeare has abundance of this idyllic miniature painting, for which all the literature of the day shewed a marked taste.
Tamora says:
My lovely Aaron, wherefore look'st thou sad,
When everything doth make a gleeful boast?
The birds chant melody on every bush,
The snake lies rolled in the cheerful sun,
The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind
And make a chequer'd shadow on the ground.
(Titus Andronicus.)
And Valentine in Two Gentlemen of Verona:
This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods,
I better brook than flourishing peopled towns;
Here can I sit alone, unseen of any,
And to the nightingale's complaining notes
Tune my distresses and record my woes.
Like this, in elegiac sentimentality, is Romeo:
Before the worshipp'd sun
Peer'd forth the golden window of the east....
Many a morning hath he there been seen
With tears augmenting the fresh morning's dew.
Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and As You Like It are particularly rich in idyllic traits; the artificiality of court life is contrasted with life in the open; there are songs, too, in praise of woodland joys:
Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me,
And tune his merry note
Unto the sweet bird's throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither!
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.
(As You Like It.)
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude.
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen
Altho' thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho unto the green holly!
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly![[4]]
(As You Like It.)
Turning again to comparisons, we find birds used abundantly:
More pity that the eagle should be mewed
While kites and buzzards prey at liberty.
(Richard III.)
True hope is swift and flies with swallow's wings.
(Richard III.)
As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye,
Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort
Rising and cawing at the gun's report
Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky,
So at his sight away his fellows fly.
(Midsummer Night's Dream.)
And plant life is touched with special tenderness:
All the bystanders had wet their cheeks
Like trees bedashed with rain.
(Richard III.)
Why grow the branches when the root is gone?
Why wither not the leaves that want their sap?
(Richard III.)
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,
Which in their summer beauty kiss'd each other.
(Richard III.)
Ah! my tender babes!
My unblown flowers, new appearing sweets.
(Richard III.)
To himself so secret and so close ...
As is the bud bit with an envious worm,
Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air
Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.
It is astonishing to see how Shakespeare noted the smallest and most fragile things, and found the most poetic expression for them without any sacrifice of truth to Nature.
Juliet is 'the sweetest flower of all the field.' Laertes says to Ophelia:
For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood,
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward not permanent, sweet not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a moment.
The canker galls the infants of the spring
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed;
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent.
(Hamlet.)
Hamlet soliloquizes:
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seems to me all the uses of this world.
Fie on't, O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
Indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you--this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
But the great advance which he made is seen far more in the sympathetic way in which he drew Nature into the action of the play.
He established perfect harmony between human fate and the natural phenomena around it.
There are moonlight nights for Romeo and Juliet's brief dream, when all Nature, moon, stars, garden, seemed steeped in love together.
He places his melancholy, brooding Hamlet
In a land of mist and long nights, under a gloomy sky, where day is only night without sleep, and the tragedy holds us imprisoned like the North itself, that damp dungeon of Nature. (BOERNE.)
What a dark shudder lies o'er Nature in Macbeth! And in Lear, as Jacobi says:
What a sight! All Nature, living and lifeless, reasonable and unreasonable, surges together, like towering storm clouds, hither and thither; it is black oppressive Nature with only here and there a lightning flash from God--a flash of Providence, rending the clouds.
One must look at the art by which this is achieved in order to justify such enthusiastic expressions. Personification of Nature lies at the root of it, and to examine this in the different poets forms one of the most interesting chapters of comparative poetry, especially in Shakespeare.
With him artistic personification reached a pitch never attained before. We can trace the steps by which Greece passed from mythical to purely poetic personification, increasing in individuality in the Hellenic period; but Shakespeare opened up an entirely new region by dint of that flashlight genius of imagination which combined and illuminated all and everything.
Hense says[[5]];
The personification is plastic when Æschylus calls the heights the neighbours of the stars; individual, when Shakespeare speaks of hills that kiss the sky. It is plastic that fire and sea are foes who conspire together and keep faith to destroy the Argive army; it is individual to call sea and wind old wranglers who enter into a momentary armistice. Other personifications of Shakespeare's, as when he speaks of the 'wanton wind,' calls laughter a fool, and describes time as having a wallet on his back wherein he puts alms for oblivion, are of a kind which did not, and could not, exist in antiquity.
The richer a man's mental endowment, the more individual his feelings, the more he can see in Nature.
Shakespeare's fancy revelled in a wealth of images; new metaphors, new points of resemblance between the inner and outer worlds, were for ever pouring from his inexhaustible imagination.
The motive of amorous passion, for instance, was a very divining-rod in his hands, revealing the most delicate relations between Nature and the soul. Ibykos had pointed the contrast between the gay spring time and his own unhappy heart in which Eros raged like 'the Thracian blast.' Theocritus had painted the pretty shepherdess drawing all Nature under the spell of her charms; Akontios (Kallimachos) had declared that if trees felt the pangs and longings of love, they would lose their leaves; all such ideas, modern in their way, had been expressed in antiquity.
This is Shakespeare's treatment of them:
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time removed was summer time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase ...
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee.
And thou away the very birds are mute,
Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near,
(Sonnet 97.)
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Could make me any summer's story tell....
Yet seem'd it winter still....
(Sonnet 98.)
Or compare again the cypresses in Theocritus sole witnesses of secret love; or Walther's
One little birdie who never will tell,
with
These blue-veined violets whereon we lean
Never can blab, nor know not what we mean.
(Venus and Adonis.)
Comparisons of ladies' lips to roses, and hands to lilies, are common with the old poets. How much more modern is:
The forward violet thus did I chide;
Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells
If not from my love's breath?...
The lily I condemned for thy hand,
And buds of marjoram had stolen thy hair;
The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair....
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see
But sweet or colour it had stolen from thee.
(Sonnet 99.)
And how fine the personification in Sonnet 33:
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to West with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.
This is night in Venus and Adonis:
Look! the world's comforter with weary gait
His day's hot task hath ended in the West;
The owl, night's herald, shrieks 'tis very late;
The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest
And coal-black clouds, that shadow heaven's light,
Do summon us to part and bid good-night.
And this morning, in Romeo and Juliet:
The grey-ey'd morn smiles on the frowning night,
Checkering the Eastern clouds with streaks of light.
And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels;
Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye,
The day to cheer, and night's dank dew to dry ...
Such wealth and brilliance of personification was not found again until Goethe, Byron, and Shelley.
He is unusually rich in descriptive phrases:
The weary sun hath made a golden set,
And by the bright track of his golden car
Gives token of a goodly day to-morrow.
The worshipp'd Sun
Peered forth the golden window of the East.
The all-cheering sun
Should in the farthest East begin to draw
The shady curtains from Aurora's bed.
The moon:
Like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven.
Titania says:
I will wind thee in my arms....
So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist; the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.
O how I love thee!
That same dew, which sometime on the buds
Was wont to swell, like round and orient pearls,
Stood now within the pretty flow'rets' eyes
Like tears.
(Midsummer Night's Dream.)
Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty.
(Winter's Tale.)
Pale primroses
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength.
(Winter's Tale.)
Goethe calls winds and waves lovers. In Troilus and Cressida we have:
The sea being smooth,
How many shallow bauble boats dare sail
Upon her patient breast, making their way
With those of nobler bulk!
But let the ruffian Boreas once enrage
The gentle Thetis, and anon behold
The strong-ribb'd bark through liquid mountains cut,
Bounding between two moist elements
Like Perseus' horse.
And further on in the same scene:
What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!
Commotion in the winds!
... the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores.
The personification of the river in Henry IV. is half mythical:
When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank
In single opposition, hand to hand,
He did confound the best part of an hour
In changing hardiment with great Glendower;
Three times they breath'd, and three times did they drink,
Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood;
Who, then affrighted with their bloody looks,
Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,
And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank,
Blood-stained with these valiant combatants.
Striking instances of personification from Antony and Cleopatra are:
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne
Burn'd on the water; the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the time of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster
As amorous of their strokes.
And Antony, enthron'd in the market-place, sat alone
Whistling to the air, which but for vacancy
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too
And made a gap in nature.
Instead of accumulating further instances of these very modern and individual (and sometimes far-fetched) personifications, it is of more interest to see how Shakespeare used Nature, not only as background and colouring, but to act a part of her own in the play, so producing the grandest of all personifications.
At the beginning of Act III. in King Lear, Kent asks:
Who's there beside foul weather?
Gentleman: One minded like the weather, most unquietly.
Kent: Where's the King?
Gent: Contending with the fretful elements.
Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea,
Or swell the curled waters 'bove the main,
That things might change or cease; tears his white hair,
Which the impetuous blasts with eyeless rage
Catch in their fury and make nothing of;
Strives in his little world of men to outscorn
The to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain.
In the stormy night on the wild heath the poor old man hears the echo of his own feelings in the elements; his daughters' ingratitude, hardness, and cruelty produce a moral disturbance like the disturbance in Nature; he breaks out:
Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunder-bolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ungrateful man....
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit fire, spout rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters,
I tax you not, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription; then, let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!
How closely here animate and inanimate Nature are woven together, the reasoning with the unreasoning. The poet makes the storm, rain, thunder, and lightning live, and at the same time endues his human figures with a strength of feeling and passion which gives them kinship to the elements. In Othello, too, there is uproar in Nature:
Do but stand upon the foaming shore,
The chidden billow seems to pelt the clouds....
I never did like molestation view
On the enchafed flood.
but even the unruly elements spare Desdemona:
Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds,
The gather'd rocks and congregated sands.
Traitors ensteep'd to clog the guiltless keel--
As having sense of beauty, do omit
Their mortal natures, letting go safely by
The divine Desdemona.
Cassio lays stress upon 'the great contention of the sea and skies'; but when Othello meets Desdemona, he cries:
O my soul's joy!
If after every tempest come such calms,
May the winds blow till they have wakened death!
And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas
Olympus-high, and duck again as low
As hell's from heaven. If it were now to die,
'Twere now to be most happy.
Iago calls the elements to witness his truthfulness:
Witness, you ever-burning lights above,
You elements that clip us round about,
Witness, that here Iago doth give up
The execution of his wit, hands, heart,
To wrong'd Othello's service.
Nature is disgusted at Othello's jealousy:
Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks;
The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets,
Is hush'd within the hollow mine of earth
And will not hear it.
In terrible mental confusion he cries:
O insupportable, O heavy hour!
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe
Should yawn at alteration.
Unhappy Desdemona sings:
The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow;
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,
Sing willow, willow, willow;
The fresh streams ran by her and murmur'd her moans,
Sing willow, willow, willow.
A song in Cymbeline contains a beautiful personification of flowers:
Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
And Phoebus 'gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs
On chalic'd flowers that lies;
And winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes;
With everything that pretty is,
My lady sweet, arise;
Arise! Arise!
The clearest expression of sympathy for Nature is in Macbeth.
Repeatedly we meet the idea that Nature shudders before the crime, and gives signs of coming disaster.
Macbeth himself says:
Stars, hide your fires!
Let not light see my black and deep desires;
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
and Lady Macbeth:
... The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements.... Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry 'Hold! hold!'...
The peaceful castle to which Duncan comes all unsuspectingly, is in most striking contrast to the fateful tone which pervades the tragedy. Duncan says:
This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
and Banquo:
This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve
By his loved masonry, that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here; no jetty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle;
Where they most breed and haunt I have observ'd
The air is delicate.
Perhaps the familiar swallow has never been treated with more discrimination; and at this point of the tale of horror it has the effect of a ray of sunshine in a sky dark with storm clouds.
In Act II. Macbeth describes his own horror and Nature's:
Now o'er the one half world
Nature seems dead.... Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabouts.
Lady Macbeth says:
It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman
Which gives the stern'st good-night.
The night has been unruly: where we lay
Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death
And prophesying, with accents terrible,
Of dire combustion and confus'd events,
New hatch'd to the woeful time: the obscure bird
Clamour'd the live-long night: some say, the earth
Was feverish and did shake.
and later on, an old man says:
Three score and ten I can remember well;
Within the volume of which time I have seen
Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night
Hath trifled former knowings.
Rosse answers him:
Ah, good father,
Thou see'st the heavens, as troubled with man's act,
Threaten his bloody stage; by the clock 'tis day,
And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.
Is't night's predominance or the day's shame
That darkness does the-face of earth entomb
When living light should kiss it?
The whole play is a thrilling expression of the sympathy for Nature which attributes its own feelings to her--a human shudder in presence of the wicked--a human horror of crime, most thrilling of all in Macbeth's words:
Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale.
In Hamlet, too, Nature is shocked at man's mis-deeds:
... Such an act (the queen's)
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty
... Heaven's face doth glow,
Yea, this solidity and compound mass
With tristful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act.
But there are other personifications in this most wonderful of all tragedies, such as the magnificent one:
But look, the dawn, in russet mantle clad.
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill.
The first player declaims:
But, as we often see, against some storm
A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,
The bold winds speechless, and the orb below
As hush as death....
Ophelia dies:
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook.
and Laertes commands:
Lay her i' the earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring.
Thus Shakespeare's great imagination gave life and soul to every detail of Nature, and he obtained the right background for his dramas, not only through choice of scenery, but by making Nature a sharer of human impulse, happy with the happy, shuddering in the presence of wickedness.
He drew every phase of Nature with the individualizing touch which stamps her own peculiar character, and also brings her into sympathy with the inner life, often with that poetic intuition which is so closely allied to mythology. And this holds good not only in dealing with the great elementary forces--storms, thunder, lightning, etc.--but with flowers, streams, the glow of sunlight. Always and everywhere the grasp of Nature was intenser, more individual, and subjective, than any we have met hitherto.
Idyllic feeling for Nature became sympathetic in his hands.