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.
V
There is no better proof that common objects, when possible, were formerly assigned sexual associations, than the obscene riddles of the Exeter Book. This work is largely attributed to the second great English poet Cynewulf in the eighth century. Certain riddles are propounded which reek with lewd suggestions, and the answer is supposed to be some object innocent in itself; it is apparent, however, from the questions and descriptions given that the interest in this object is because it is sexually symbolical. Thus the answers meant for the 26th, 45th, 46th, 55th, 63rd and 64th riddles of the Exeter Book are leek, key, dough, churn, poker and beaker, respectively. The reader will note thus how these objects had a sexual symbolic meaning for our ancestors.
Professor Frederic Tupper in his scholarly work The Riddles of the Exeter Book says: "By far the most numerous of all riddles of lapsing or varying solutions are those distinctly popular and unrefined problems whose sole excuse for being (or lack of excuse) lies in double meaning and coarse suggestion, and the reason for this uncertainty of answer is at once apparent. The formally stated solution is so overshadowed by the obscene subject implicitly presented in each limited motive of the riddle, that little attention is paid to the aptness of this. It is after all only a pretence, not the chief concern of the jest." He quotes from another scholar, Wossidlo, a number of other objects than those suggested in the Exeter Book, which in other riddle books were invested with sexual symbolism. These are spinning wheel, kettle and pike, yarn and weaver, frying-pan and hare, soot-pole, butcher, bosom, fish on the hook, trunk-key, beer-keg, stocking, mower in grass, butter-cask and bread-scoop.
Freud is apparently correct when he stated that familiar objects of our day like umbrellas and machinery are given a sexual significance by our dreams unconsciously.
That man early expressed his interest in love in symbolical terms is conceded by most anthropologists and philologists. They have traced the origins of many of our customs and institutions, our words and figures of rhetoric, to the veiled eroticism of former times. In our speech are many terms which now have a distinct sexual significance, though they originally had a symbolic one. The word for seed in Hebrew is zera, the Latin word is semen (from sero, to sow). Both words are also used for spermatozoa. Man formerly sought analogies just as he does to-day; he often feared to violate a taboo, or aimed at a delicacy of expression. He saw the life producing principle at work everywhere, and he found symbols for it in the phenomena of nature, in the sun, moon, water, forest, garden, field, trees, roses; in animals like the serpent, the horse, the bull, the fish, the goat, the dove; in implements like the arrow, the sword, the plough. Common objects assumed for him suggestive meanings. He saw a means of coining new expressions for generative acts and objects; he found associations when he used the fire-drill drilling in the hollow of the wood, or when he threw wood upon the fire. In later time he coined new symbolical terms suggested by such acts of his as stuffing a cork in a bottle, or putting bread in the oven, or inserting a key in the lock.
Man speaks in symbolic language especially when it comes to sex matters. This symbolism appears hence in his dreams and his literature. The language of the unconscious is symbolic, and literature is often expressing the author's unconscious in symbolic terms without his being aware of this.