"COMETAS
"When? When I beat thee, wailing sore; your goats looked on with glee,
And bleated; and were dealt with e’en as I had dealt with thee."
And then, without a pause, the landscape shines through the noisy talk:
"Nay, here are oaks and galingale: the hum of housing bees
Makes the place pleasant, and the birds are piping in the trees,
And here are two cold streamlets; here deeper shadows fall
Than yon place owns, and look what cones drop from the pine tree tall."
Thoreau, to press the analogy from painting a little further, lays the undertones on with a firm hand: "It is a wild, rank place and there is no flattery in it. Strewn with crabs, horse-shoes, and razor-clams, and whatever the sea casts up,—a vast morgue, where famished dogs may range in packs, and cows come daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them. The carcasses of men and beasts together lie stately up upon its shelf, rotting and bleaching in the sun and waves, and each tide turns them in their beds, and tucks fresh sand under them. There is naked Nature,—inhumanely sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray."
It certainly is naked Nature with a vengeance, and it was hardly fair to take her portrait in that condition. Theocritus would have shown us Acteon surprising Artemis, not naked, but nude; and there is all the difference between nakedness and nudity that yawns between a Greek statue and a Pompeiian fresco indiscreetly preserved in the museum at Naples. Theocritus shows Nature nude, but not naked; and it is worth noting that the difference between the two lies in the presence or absence of consciousness. In Greek mythology, nudity passes without note or comment; the moment it begins to be noted and commented upon it becomes nakedness.
Theocritus sees Nature nude, as did all the Greek poets, but he does not surprise her when she is naked. He paints the undertones faithfully, but he always lays on the overtones, and so spreads the effulgence of the sky-stream over the undertones, and the picture becomes vibrant and luminous. The fact is never slurred or ignored; it gets full value, but not as a solitary and detached thing untouched by light, unmodified by the landscape. Is there a more charming impression of a landscape bathed in atmosphere, exhaling poetry, breathing in the very presence of divinity, than this, in Calverley’s translation:
"I ceased. He, smiling sweetly as before,
Gave me the staff, 'the Muses’'
And leftward sloped toward Pyxa. We the while
Bent us to Phrasydene’s, Eucritus and I,
And baby-faced Amyntas: there we lay
Half-buried in a couch of fragrant reed
And fresh-cut vine leaves, who so glad as we?
A wealth of elm and poplar shook o’erhead;
Hard by, a sacred spring flowed gurgling on
From the Nymphs’ grot, and in the somber boughs
The sweet cicada chirped laboriously.
Hid in the thick thorn-bushes far away
The tree frog’s note was heard; the crested lark
Sang with the goldfinch; turtles made their moan;
And o’er the fountain hung the gilded bee.
All of rich summer smacked, of autumn all:
Pears at our feet, and apples at our side
Rolled in luxuriance; branches on the ground
Sprawled, overweighted with damsons; while we brushed
From the cask’s head the crust of four long years.
Say, ye who dwell upon Parnassian peaks,
Nymphs of Castalia, did old Chiron e’er
Set before Hercules a cup so brave
In Pholus’ cavern—did as nectarous draughts
Cause that Anapian shepherd, in whose hand
Rocks were as pebbles, Polypheme the strong,
Featly to foot it o’er the cottage lawns:—
As, ladies, ye bid flow that day for us
All by Demeter’s shrine at harvest-home?
Beside whose corn-stacks may I oft again
Plant my broad fan: while she stands by and smiles,
Poppies and corn-sheaves on each laden arm."