With a split body and most ridiculous pace,
Prong after prong, disgracer of all grace,
Long-useless-finned, haired, upright, unwet, slow!
O breather of unbreathable, sword-sharp air,
How canst exist? How bear thyself, thou dry
And dreary sloth? What particle canst share
Of the only blessed life, the watery?
I sometimes see of ye an actual pair
Go by, linked fin by fin, most odiously.
The Fish turns into a Man, and then into a Spirit,
and again speaks
Indulge thy smiling scorn, if smiling still,
O man! and loathe, but with a sort of love;
For difference must its use by difference prove,
And, in sweet clang, the spheres with music fill.
One of the spirits am I, that at his will
Live in whate’er has life—fish, eagle, dove—
No hate, no pride, beneath nought, nor above,
A visitor of the rounds of God’s sweet skill.
Man’s life is warm, glad, sad, ’twixt loves and graves,
Boundless in hope, honoured with pangs austere,
Heaven-gazing; and his angel-wings he craves:—
The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear,
A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,
Quickened with touches of transporting fear.
LEIGH HUNT.
The world below the brine,
Forests at the bottom of the sea—the branches and leaves.
Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds—the thick tangle, the openings, and the pink turf,
Different colours, pale grey and green, purple, white and gold—the play of light through the water,
Dumb swimmers there among the rocks—coral, gluten, grass, rushes—and the aliment of the swimmers,
Sluggish existences grazing there, suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom:
The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray or disporting with his flukes,
The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray,
Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes—sight in those ocean depths—breathing that thick breathing air, as so many do.
The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us, who walk this sphere:
The change onwards from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.
WALT WHITMAN.
The queer, the dubious, the not-quite right—in a word, the fishy.
Popular imagination has always recognized the peculiar remoteness of fish. Cats, dogs, horses, mice, cows—these have, or seem to have, something human about them. But fish—no! Each time we catch a fish we draw up out of the sinister subaqueous world a piece of pure strangeness. The fish is for us an emblem of that beautiful, terrifying and incomprehensible universe in which (though we contrive, most of the time, to ignore the fact) we have our precarious being. Leviathan and Behemoth are God’s emblems for grand occasions; fish are the celestial heraldry for ordinary days.
These three sonnets of Leigh Hunt—by far the best things their author ever wrote—render with an extraordinary subtlety, beauty and precision, the essential strangeness of fish and their significance for us as symbols of other modes of being than our own. Less intensely and sharply, with a heavier eloquence, Whitman expresses the same idea. Most “nature poets” unjustifiably moralize and humanize the object of their worship. Hunt’s “legless, unloving, infamously chaste” monsters come with a salutary reminder that the world is, after all, unmoral. Whitman’s “sluggish existences grazing there” on the pink turf startle us into realizing what familiarity with our surroundings too often makes us forget—that nature is incredibly foreign to us and that one of the main “points” of her, so far as we are concerned, consists precisely in this disquieting and stimulating inhumanity.
Man and Behemoth
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS.
The necessary ignorance of man explains to us much; it shows us that we could not be what we ought to be, if we lived in the sort of universe we should expect. It shows us that a latent Providence, a confused life, an odd material world, an existence broken short in the midst are not real difficulties, but real helps; that they, or something like them, are essential conditions of a moral life to a subordinate being.
WALTER BAGEHOT.
Are they shadows that we see?
And can shadows pleasure give?
Pleasures only shadows be,
Cast by bodies we conceive,
And are made the things we deem
In those figures which they seem.
But these pleasures vanish fast
Which by shadows are exprest.
Pleasures are not if they last;
In their passage is their best;
Glory is most bright and gay
In a flash, and so away.
Feed apace, then, greedy eyes,
On the wonder you behold:
Take it sudden as it flies,
Though you take it not to hold:
When your eyes have done their part,
Thought must length it in the heart.
SAMUEL DANIEL.
Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound;
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws?
Passion and Reason, self-division’s cause.
Is it the mark or majesty of power
To make offences that it may forgive?
Nature herself doth her own self deflower
To hate those errors she herself doth give.
But how should man think what he may not do,
If Nature did not fail, and punish too?
Tyrant to others, to herself unjust,
Only commands things difficult and hard.
Forbids us all things which it knows we lust,
Makes easy pains, impossible reward.
If Nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.
We that are bound by vows and by promotion,
With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,
To lead belief in good and still devotion,
To preach of heaven’s wonders and delights;
Yet when each of us in his own heart looks,
He finds the God there far unlike his books.
FULKE GREVILLE.
O cruel goddes, that governe
This world with binding of your word eterne,
And wryten in the table of adamaunt
Your parlement and your eterne graunt,
What is mankinde more unto you holde
Than is the sheep that rouketh in the folde?
For slayn is man right as another beste,
And dwelleth eke in prison and arreste,
And hath siknesse and great adversitee,
And ofte times gilteless, pardee!
What governaunce is in this prescience
That gilteless tormenteth innocence?
And yet encreaseth this all my penaunce,
That man is bounden to his observaunce,
For Goddes sake, to letten of his wille,
Ther as a beste may al his lust fulfille.
But when a beste is dead, he hath no peyne;
But man after his death moot wepe and pleyne,
Though in this world he have care and woe.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER.
Never, I think, has the just man’s complaint against the universe been put more forcibly, worded more tersely and fiercely than in Hopkins’s sonnet. God’s answer is to be found in that most moving, most magnificent and profoundest poem of antiquity, the Book of Job. Man and the universe are incommensurable. Leviathan and Behemoth—these are the heraldic beasts of God. The universe is vast, beautiful and appalling; by all our human standards monstrous; but, precisely because of its monstrousness, divine and to be worshipped. And if the nature of things were not a Behemoth, if it treated the just man according to his merits, where would those merits be? They would be nowhere. Just as “pleasures are not if they last,” so virtues are not if they are rewarded. In a humanly acceptable universe, as Bagehot has pointed out in the admirable essay from which I have quoted, the just man would be non-existent. For the essence of virtue is disinterestedness. But there could be no disinterestedness in a world which automatically rewarded virtue and punished vice. Men would be good by conditioned reflex and calculation. In other words, they would not be good at all. There can be no humanity except in an inhuman world, no virtue except against a background of Behemoths and Leviathans.
An unpleasant background; and the condition of humanity is wearisome indeed. And perhaps, Chaucer suggests, the gods are deliberately cruel; perhaps Behemoth is not brainless but consciously malevolent. But this, surely, is to pay the monster too high a compliment.
Earthly Paradise
Whenas the rye reach to the chin,
And chopcherry, chopcherry ripe within,
Strawberries swimming in the cream,
And schoolboys playing in the stream;
Then, O, then, O, then, O, my true love said,
Till that time come again,
She could not live a maid.
GEORGE PEELE.
Now the lusty spring is seen:
Golden yellow, gaudy blue
Daintily invite the view.
Everywhere, on every green,
Roses blushing as they blow
And enticing men to pull,
Lilies whiter than the snow,
Woodbines of sweet honey full:
All love’s emblems, and all cry:
“Ladies, if not plucked, we die!”
Yet the lusty spring has stayed:
Blushing red and purest white
Daintily to love invite
Every woman, every maid.
Cherries kissing as they grow,
And inviting men to taste,
Apples even ripe below,
Winding gently to the waist:
All love’s emblems, and all cry:
“Ladies, if not plucked, we die!”
JOHN FLETCHER.
In an arbour green, asleep whereas I lay,
The birds sang sweet in the middès of the day;
I dreamèd fast of love and play:
In youth is pleasure, in youth is pleasure.
R. WEVER.
For that same sweet sin of lechery, I would say as the Friar said: A young man and a young woman in a green arbour in a May morning—if God do not forgive it, I would.
SIR JOHN HARRINGTON.
It is better to love two too many than one too few.
SIR JOHN HARRINGTON.
Spatiari dulce est
per loca nemorosa;
dulcius est carpere
lilia cum rosa;
dulcissimum est ludere
cum virgine formosa!
ANON.
Venus, and young Adonis sitting by her,
Under a myrtle shade began to woo him;
She told the youngling how god Mars did try her,
And as he fell to her, so fell she to him.
“Even thus,” quoth she, “the warlike
