On poetic interpretation of nature

by John Campbell Shairp

On the whole, though Shakespeare never set himself formally to study or describe external Nature, yet his dramas are full of her presence and her works—not taken from books or daintily tricked out by art, but idealized from his memory well stored with country scenes. Again, these are given, not in elaborate descriptions, but in rapid strokes, and side-glances, vivid, penetrating, intense, thrown off from the heat of an imagination brooding mainly over human interests and emotions. And perhaps after all that view of Nature is the truest, healthiest, manliest, which does not pore or moralize over her appearances, but keeps them in the background, putting man into the foreground and making him the central object. As Man and Nature stand over against each other, and are evidently made each for each, it may be that not apart from Man, with his emotions and his destiny, can Nature be rightly conceived and portrayed.

MILTON.

When we pass from the images of Nature that abound in Chaucer and in Shakespeare to those which Milton furnishes, the transition is much the same as when we pass from the scenery of Homer to that of Virgil. The contrast is that between natural free-flowing poetry, in which the beauty is child-like and unconscious, and highly cultured artistic poetry, which produces its effects through a medium of learned illustration, ornate coloring, and stately diction. In the one case Nature is seen directly and at first hand, with nothing between the poet and the object except the imaginative emotion under which he works. In the other, Nature is apprehended only in her “second intention,” as logicians speak, only as she appears through a beautiful haze, compounded of learning, associations of the past, and carefully selected artistic colors. With Milton, Nature was not his first love, but held only a secondary place in his affections. He was in the first place a scholar, a man of letters, with the theologian and polemic latent in him. A lover of all artistic beauty he was, no doubt, and of Nature mainly as it lends itself to this perception. And as is his mode of apprehending Nature, such is the language in which he describes her. When he reached his full maturity he had framed for himself out of the richness of his genius and the resources of his learning a style elaborate and splendid, so that he stands unique among English poets, “our one first-rate master in the grand style.” As an eminent living French writer says,—“For rendering things he has the unique word, the word which is a discovery,” and “he has not only the image and the word, he has the period also, the large musical phrase, somewhat laden with ornaments and intricate with inversions, but bearing all along with it in its superb undulation. Above all, he has something indescribably serene and victorious, an unfailing level of style, power indomitable.” This admirable description of M. Scherer applies mainly to Milton’s style, as it was fully elaborated in his great epic. And the thought has sometimes occurred, whether this magnificently elaborated style can be a fit vehicle for rendering truly the simplicity, the refreshingness of Nature,—whether the poet’s art, from its very opulence, must not color too much the clearness and transparency of the external world. However this may be, it is certain that it is not to his maturer poems, with their grandeur of style, that we look for his most vivid renderings of scenery, but to those early poems, which had more native grace of diction and less of artistic elaboration. Nowhere has Milton shown such an eye for scenery as in those first poems, “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” “Lycidas,” and “Comus,” composed before he was thirty, just after leaving Cambridge, while he was living under his father’s roof at Horton, in Buckinghamshire. During the five years of country life, the most genial of all his years, amid his incessant study of the Greek and Latin poets, and other self-improvement, his heart was perhaps more open than at any other time to the rural beauty which lay around him. “Comus” and “Lycidas” both contain fine natural imagery, yet somewhat deflected by the artistic framework in which it is set. In the latter poem, in which Milton, adapting the idyllic form of Virgil, fills it with a mightier power, classical allusion and mythology are strangely, yet not unharmoniously, blended with pictures taken from English landscape. Every one remembers the splendid grouping of flowers which he there broiders in. Of this catalogue it has been observed that, beautiful as it is, it violates the truth of nature, as it places side by side flowers of different seasons which are never seen flowering together. It is in his two “descriptive Lyrics” that we find the clearest proofs of an eye that had observed Nature at first hand and for itself. In the poem descriptive of mirth, it has been observed that the mirth is of a very sedate kind, not reaching beyond a “trim and stately cheerfulness.” The mythological pedigrees attached both to mirth and to melancholy strike us now as somewhat strange, if not frigid; but, with this allowance, Milton’s richly sensuous imagination bodies forth the cheerfulness, as he wished to portray it, in a succession of images unsurpassed for beauty. In the lines descriptive of these images, Art and Nature appear perhaps more than in any other of Milton’s poems in perfect equipoise. The images selected are the aptest vehicles of the sentiment; the language in which they are expressed is of the most graceful and musical; while the natural objects themselves are seen at first hand, set down with their edges still sharp, and uncolored by any tinge of bookish allusion. Aspects of English scenery, one after another, occur, which he was the first poet to note, and which none since could dare to touch, so entirely has he made them his own. The mower whetting his scythe,—who ever hears that sound coming from the lawn in the morning without thinking of Milton? “The tanned haycock in the mead;” the cottage chimney smoking betwixt two aged oaks; the moon

“As if her head she bowed,

Stooping through a fleecy cloud;”

the shower pattering

“On the ruffling leaves,

With minute drops from off the eaves;”

the great curfew-bell heard swinging “over some wide watered shore;”—these are all images taken straight from English landscape which Milton has forever enshrined in his two matchless poems.