Nature Mysticism

by John Edward Mercer

For now the Heavenly Power
Makes all things new
And thaws the cold and fills
The flower with dew;
The blackbirds have their wills,
The poets too."

Or take these exultant lines from Coventry Patmore's "Revulsion" Canto:

"'Twas when the spousal time of May
Hangs all the hedge with bridal wreaths,
And air's so sweet the bosom gay
Gives thanks for every breath it breathes;
When like to like is gladly moved,
And each thing joins in Spring's refrain,
'Let those love now who never loved;
Let those who have loved, love again.'"

Recall the poems that celebrate in endless chorus the emotions stirred by the pomp and glory of the summer; by the fruitfulness or sadness of the mellow autumn; by the keen exhilaration or the frozen grip of winter. Some poets, like Blake, have written special odes or sonnets on all the four; some like Keats, in his "Ode to Autumn," have lavished their most consummate art on the season which most appealed to them. Each month, too, has its bards; its special group of qualities and the sentiments they stimulate. Truly the heart of the nature-mystic rejoices as he reflects on the inexhaustibility of material and of significance here presented!

And what of the flowers? Once again the theme is inexhaustible. The poets vie with one another in their efforts to give to even the humblest flowers their emotional and mystic setting. Some of the loveliest of the old-world myths are busied with accounting for the form or colour of the flowers. Wordsworth's Daffodils, Burns's Daisy, Tennyson's "Flower in the Crannied Wall," these are but fair blooms in a full and dazzling cluster. Flowers (said a certain divine) are the sweetest things God ever made and forgot to put a soul into. The nature-mystic thankfully acknowledges the sweetness, but he questions the absence of the soul! The degree of individuality is matter for grave debate; but to assume its absence is to place oneself out of focus for gaining true and living insight into nature's being. How much more deep-founded is Wordsworth's faith "that every flower enjoys the air it breathes."

Let us bring this matter to the test in regard to the big brothers of the flowers—the trees. Passing by the ample range of striking and beautiful myths and legends (packed as many of them are with mystic meaning), let us turn to the expressions of personal feeling which the literature of various ages provides in abundance—limiting the view to certain typical examples. The Teutonic myth of the World-tree was dealt with fully in the chapter on Subterranean Waters. But it is well to mention it now in connection with the far-extended group of myths which centre in the idea of a tree of life, which preserved their vitality in changing forms, and which even appear in Dante in his account of the mystical marriage under the withered tree. Virgil was a lover of trees; the glade and the forest appealed to him by the same magic of suggested life as that which works on the modern poet or nature-lover.

It is generally supposed that, in England, the loving insight of the nature-mystic was practically unknown until Collins, Thomson, and Crabbe led the way for the triumph of the Lake poets.

This may be true for many natural objects—but it is not true for all. How fresh these lines from an address to his muse by Wither:

"By the murmur of a spring,
Or the least bough's rustelling;
By a daisy whose leaves spread,
Shut when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree,—
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature's beauties can
In some other wiser man."

Surely this is the voice of Wordsworth in Tudor phraseology. Still more startling is this passage from Marvell, out of the midst of the Commonwealth days: so remarkable is its Nature Mysticism and its Wordsworthian feeling and insight, that it must be given without curtailment. It occurs in the poem on the "Garden."