Quietly as a sleeping infant’s breath,
Send up cold waters to the traveller
With soft and even pulse! Nor ever cease
Yon tiny cone of sand its soundless dance,
Which, at the bottom, like a Fairy’s page,
As merry and no taller, dances still,
Nor wrinkles the smooth surface of the fount.
Here twilight is and coolness; here is moss,
A soft seat, and a deep and ample shade.
Thou may’st toil far and find no second tree.
Drink, Pilgrim, here; here rest! And if thy heart
Be innocent, here too shalt thou refresh
Thy spirit, listening to some gentle sound,
Or passing gale, or hum of murmuring bees.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS.
The very name of God
Sounds like a juggler’s charm; and, bold with joy.
(Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism,
Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon,
Drops his blue-fringèd lids and holds them close.
And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven,
Cries out, “Where is it?”
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
Thus I, easy philosopher,
Among the birds and trees confer,
And little now to make me wants
Or of the fowls, or of the plants . . .
Already I begin to call
In their most learned original;
And where I language want, my signs
The bird upon the bough divines,
And more attentive there doth sit
Than if she were with lime-twigs knit.
No leaf does tremble in the wind
Which I, returning, cannot find.
Out of these scattered Sibyl’s leaves
Strange prophecies my phancy weaves;
And in one history consumes,
Like Mexique paintings, all the plumes,
What Rome, Greece, Palestine e’er said.
I in this light mosaic read.
Thrice happy he who, not mistook,
Hath read in Nature’s mystic book.
ANDREW MARVELL.
It seems I have no tears left. They should have fallen—
Their ghosts, if tears have ghosts, did fall—that day
When twenty hounds streamed by me, not yet combed out
But still all equals in their rage of gladness
Upon the scent, made one, like a great dragon
In Blooming Meadow that bends towards the sun
And once bore hops: and on that other day,
When I stepped out from the double-shadowed Tower
Into an April morning, stirring and sweet
And warm. Strange solitude was there, and silence.
A mightier charm than any in the Tower
Possessed the courtyard. They were changing guard,
Soldiers in line, young English countrymen,
Fair-haired and ruddy, in white tunics. Drums
And fifes were playing “The British Grenadiers.”
The men, the music piercing that solitude
And silence, told me truths I had not dreamed,
And have forgotten since that beauty passed.
EDWARD THOMAS.
For those who have actually felt the supernatural quality of nature dogmatic atheism seems absurd. But Marvell is right: it is easy to make mistakes when one is reading “Nature’s mystic book.” It is easy, as Thomas implies, to rationalize, quite arbitrarily, in terms of some ready-made philosophy, feelings which, in themselves, are dim and indescribable. (Thomas’s strict honesty is rare; few poets have been content to set down baldly what they felt without at the same time expounding or implying some cosmic theory to explain why they felt it. Thus, Hopkins is moved by the spectacle of the stars and accounts for his emotion by the hypothesis that “this piece-bright paling shuts the spouse Christ home.”)
What most “nature-poets” are apt to forget is that the immediately apprehended quality of things is not invariably a quality of supernatural beauty; it is also, on occasions, a quality of supernatural evil, supernatural ugliness. And even the loveliness is sometimes supernaturally remote and uncaring. The owlet atheism shuts his eyes not only to the glorious sun in heaven, but also to the dark malignities of jungle and swamp and arctic desert. He is unaware of the heavenly loveliness of flowers or a landscape; but he is also unaware of the hellishly ironic irrelevance of their loveliness. Hardy’s eyes were wide open to this aspect of the world; Baudelaire’s too.
Quelquefois dans un beau jardin,
Où je trainais mon atonie,
J’ai senti comme une ironie
Le soleil déchirer mon sein;
Et le printemps et la verdure
Ont tant humilié mon cœur,
Que j’ai puni sur une fleur
L’insolence de la nature.
Baudelaire would have been very much happier if he could have dropped his lids and held them close against the sun.
Beneath is spread, like a green sea,
The waveless plain of Lombardy,
Bounded by the vaporous air,
Islanded by cities fair;
Underneath Day’s azure eyes
Ocean’s nursling, Venice, lies,
A peopled labyrinth of walls,
Amphitrite’s destined halls,
Which her hoary sire now paves
With his blue and beaming waves.
Lo! the sun upsprings behind,
Broad, red, radiant, half-reclined
On the level quivering line
Of the waters crystalline;
And before that chasm of light,
As within a furnace bright,
Column, tower, and dome, and spire,
Shine like obelisks of fire,
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies;
As the flames of sacrifice
From the marble shrines did rise,
As to pierce the dome of gold,
Where Apollo spoke of old.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
No sound is uttered,—but a deep
And solemn harmony pervades
The hollow vale from steep to steep,
And penetrates the glades.
Far distant images draw nigh
Called forth by wondrous potency
Of beamy radiance, that imbues
Whate’er it strikes with gem-like hues.
In vision exquisitely clear
Herds range along the mountain side;
And glistening antlers are descried;
And gilded flocks appear.
Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal eve!
But long as god-like wish, or hope divine,
Informs my spirit, ne’er can I believe
That this magnificence is wholly thine.
From worlds not quickened by the sun
A portion of the gift is won;
An intermingling of Heaven’s pomp is spread
On ground which British shepherds tread.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
A sunrise and a setting . . . both supernatural; for Shelley vaguely so, in terms of a classical allusion; for Wordsworth definitely and unequivocally. The supernaturalness of that transfiguring evening hour, which he renders with such precision and force, is an article of Wordsworth’s metaphysical faith.
The horizontal light of evening causes the world to shine with such an unusual, such a goldenly improbable radiance, that, looking, we are startled out of our ordinary purblind complacency; we are almost forced to see things as they really are and not as we imagine them to be. Or rather, since we cannot see things as they really are, we are forced to become aware of our immediate impressions and to forget the phantom generalizations and symbols which constitute our everyday universe.
Hence the supernaturalness of evening.
Those British shepherds in the last line come very near to blighting, retrospectively, the whole of Wordsworth’s poem. Words change their meaning and, still more, their flavour. In Wordsworth’s day, “British” was primarily associated with King Arthur and Boadicea and the Druids. Its flavour was romantic, antiquarian. The self-conscious imperialism which has made it, for modern palates, so extremely distasteful, had not yet been thought of. To-day, the romantic, antiquarian word would be “English.” We are justified in emending the last line accordingly.
What’s that which, ere I spake, was gone?
So joyful and intense a spark
That, whilst o’erhead the wonder shone,
The day, before but dull grew dark?
I do not know; but this I know,
That, had the splendour lived a year,
The truth that I some heavenly show
Did see, could not be now more clear.
This too I know; might mortal breath
Express the passion then inspired,
Evil would die a natural death,
And nothing transient be desired.
And error from the soul would pass,
And leave the senses pure and strong
As sunbeams. But the best, alas!
Has neither memory nor tongue.
COVENTRY PATMORE.
The night is full of stars, full of magnificence;
Nightingales hold the wood, and fragrance loads the dark.
Behold what fires august, what lights eternal! Hark!
What passionate music poured in passionate love’s defence.
Breathe but the wafting wind’s nocturnal frankincense!
Only to feel this night’s great heart, only to mark
The splendours and the glooms, brings back the patriarch
Who on Chaldaean wastes found God through reverence.
Could we but live at will upon this perfect height,
Could we but always keep the passion of this peace,
Could we but face unshamed the look of this pure light,
Could we but win earth’s heart and give desire release,
Then were we all divine, and then were ours by right
These stars, these nightingales, these scents; then shame would cease.
LIONEL JOHNSON.
What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean, where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds and other seas,
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Here at the fountain’s sliding foot
Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root,
Casting the body’s vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide;
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Then whets and combs its silver wings;
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.
ANDREW MARVELL.
Par les soirs bleus d’été j’irai dans les sentiers,
Picoté par les blés, fouler l’herbe menue;
Rêveur, j’en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds,
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.
Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien,
Mais l’amour infini me montera dans l’âme;
Et j’irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la Nature—heureux, comme avec une femme.
ARTHUR RIMBAUD.
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
I walk, I lift
