These works all discuss the beauty of nature as well as the freedom that nature exhibits. The authors also discuss the constraints that the human world and the human mind place upon the thoughts and actions of human beings, and how humans differ from the creatures that exist in nature. These works also express what is going on with the author personally and how their thoughts and feelings are being projected onto nature.Throughout the semester we have also talked about what the definition of the sublime, and how it differs from that of the picturesque. In class on February 18th, we discussed that the sublime is not just about what the viewer (or reader in our case) is seeing, but rather about what is makes the viewer feel. The sublime is essentially something that is so beautiful that it brings out the feeling of terror, but not horror. As Burke stated, the sublime should bring about “a pleasing terror” because what is being encountered is so beautiful and emotionally jarring. In these works, the authors discuss the freedom and beauty of nature, and the non-human creatures that live within the frame of the natural world. The authors all comment on the envy that they feel for nature and the seeming ignorance of death that the animals are unaware of.
This work is entitled “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” and was created in 1818 by Caspar David Friedrich. This painting exemplifies the thesis of my paper by showing a man looking at nature and projecting his thoughts onto it. The natural landscape depicted in the painting is beautiful, with the rocks of the mountains peaking up through the fog. However this painting is disturbing and draws terror out of the viewer because the man is standing dangerously close to the edge while he is looking out onto the beauty that if he were to jump out into it, he would die. This painting is also a great example of the definition of the sublime that is being utilized in the works that I will be analyzing in my essay.
In “Ode to a Nightingale” Keats discusses how the nightingale is happy flying in the forest singing his song and is unaware of the death that will one day await him. Keats claims that he is not envious of the bird, stating “'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,” (line 6) but he is in fact envious. Keats is pointing out the freedom that nature experiences and wishes to be free from “The weariness, the fever, and the fret” (line 23) of existing as a human in the world. Keats wishes that he could be as free and happy as the nightingale, or as another creature existing in nature and be “among the leaves that hast never known” what he knows. As a human being, Keats is aware of things that the nightingale is not, such as the knowledge that death will come to claim all living things and that one can find love and will still die. In class, we discussed the fact that Keats had found a woman that he loved, but was going to die soon. We learned that during the time that he wrote this poem that he knew he was dying and could not be with the woman that he loved because his death was looming over him. As a result, Keats began to project his emotions and thoughts about life and death onto nature, and became envious of the nightingale for being so free and happy. The nightingale knew nothing of these very human concerns, and Keats longed to feel and experience the world in the way that the nightingale does.
Keats then expresses how he feels that the nightingale is immortal in the sense that each nightingale sings the same song.
“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”
That for thousands of years human beings have heard the song of the nightingale and have felt the same emotions and heard the same song sung by the bird. Essentially, Keats realizes his place in the world and feels connected to not only nature but to the other humans that have heard the song of the nightingale. That the image of the nightingale flying and singing his song throughout history is sublime and is the connection of life and death in the world.
Another work that explores nature is “To Autumn” also written by John Keats. In this poem, Keats personifies the season of autumn and parallels the transition of autumn to winter as the transition between life and death. In this work, Autumn is personified as a conspirer that is on a mission to lead things living into winter, which leads to their death. In the first stanza, Keats describes the season of Autumn as a “close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; conspiring with him” (lines 2-3) in order for the crops, plants, and animals “think warm days will never cease,” (line) and die in winter, unexpectedly. The image that Keats has developed for the reader is sublime in the sense that “fruit with ripeness to the core,” (line) and land with “plump hazel shells with a sweet kernel; to set budding more” is so beautiful, but the reader knows that the beauty of these natural things is in vain. Keats stated in the first two lines of the stanza that Autumn is conspiring with the maturing sun before winter approaches and kills all of these things budding for the harvest. The first stanza is a reflection of life being lived and then death swooping in and destroying and killing the things that had just been bearing fruit. Essentially, Keats is depicting how life is being lived by a person one minute, and then death comes and takes life and leaves nothing but a skeleton. This is similar to how winter comes and kills the leaves on a tree and all that is left behind is the naked trunk and branches. Through this image, Keats exposes the sublimity of the beauty nature shows as the foreboding of winter looms just ahead in the same way death looms before a human life is ended.
Although Keats is a great example of an author exploring the freedom of nature and the human longing to experience that freedom, Percy Bysshe Shelley is as well. In 1819, Shelley wrote “Ode to the West Wind” which also explores the personification and human beings relationship to nature. Throughout this poem, Shelley includes the sublime imagery of industrialism along with nature’s reply to human industrial progression. This is evident mainly in the second stanza:
Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
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Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning! there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
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Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
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Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: O hear!
Shelley’s “Ode to a West Wind” examines the constraints of what humans can do about industrialism and its effects on the environment. Around the time this poem was written by Shelley, in the 1820’s, people began to notice the damaging effects that industrialism was beginning to have on not only the human beings working in the factories, but on the environment as well. This poem exposes how helpless people felt about changing not only the conditions that industrial workers were working in, but what the toxic chemicals and smog was doing to the Earth. The sublime imagery of industry “the dome of a vast sepulchre, vaulted” (line 23) and nature retaliating against humanity that Shelley included in this poem is simultaneously beautiful and jarring. “Ode to the West Wind” exploits not only the harm of industrialism in regards to humans but to the Earth, and what could happen if this trajectory keeps traveling down the same path. Like Keats’s poem “To Autumn”, this work is a true work of sublimity in the sense that it shows the beauty and the looming danger of what is to come. This poem shows Shelley’s concern about the increasing speed of industrialism and how nature will eventually reply.
In class, we discussed this painting entitled “Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps” by Joseph Mallord William Turner. This painting was created during the Romantic period to illustrate the meaning of the sublime. I found this painting to be applicable to this poem in particular because it is showing nature rising up and retaliating against humanity. In this particular painting, nature is striking against Hannibal and his army. This image resognates in “Ode to a West Wind” by illustrating nature’s reply to the way that humanity has been treating it through the spread of industrialism. This is what I imagine when I read the lines “Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere, Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: O hear!” (lines BLANK). This painting illustrates and explicates the dangerously beautiful idea of sublimity.
The last work that relates to the troupe of the sublime and reflection of humanity onto nature is “The Thorn” by William Wordsworth. This poem was written in 1789 and personifies something that grows in nature, a thorn, as an old woman. This is evident in the first stanza of the poem:
“There is a Thorn—it looks so old,
In truth, you’d find it hard to say
How it could ever have been young,
It looks so old and grey.
Not higher than a two years' child
It stands erect, this aged Thorn;
No leaves it has, no prickly points;
It is a mass of knotted joints,
A wretched thing forlorn.
It stands erect, and like a stone
With lichens is it overgrown.
Wordsworth discusses how it would be hard to imagine the thorn when it was young, just like it might be difficult to imagine what an old person was like when they were young. Wordsworth explains how the thorn “stands erect” (line 6) and how “it is a mass of knotted joints, a wretched thing forlon,” (lines 8-9) but at one time it was young and beautiful. Wordsworth is creating a sublime image through this description of the thorn by using the thorn as a metaphor of humans aging. At one time the thorn was beautiful and young, but as the torn ages, death grows nearer and begins to take the beauty of the thorn away, All that is left is the skeleton of the thorn, like in “To Autumn” all that is left of the tree once winter comes is the naked trunk and branches of the tree. Wordsworth is expressing his fear of aging and fear of death, and being like the thorn. Standing “erect, like a stone with lichens it is overgrown” (lines 10-11).
All three works are similar in the sense that they explore sublime imagery and the projection of human emotion and acceptance onto the natural world that surrounds the author.
Works Cited:
Black, Joseph, ed. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature- The Age of Romanticism. 2nd ed. Vol. 4. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2010. Print.
http://romanticism.voices.wooster.edu/page/3/
http://www.bc.edu
