FullReads

“But the snow is still
Along the walls and on the hill.
The days are cold, the nights forlorn,
For one is here and one is gone.
‘Tut, tut. Cheerily,
Cheer up, cheer up;
Cheerily, cheerily,
Cheer up.’

“When spring hopes seem to wane,
I hear the joyful strain–
A song at night, a song at morn,
A lesson deep to me is borne,
Hearing, ‘Cheerily,
Cheer up, cheer up;
Cheerily, cheerily,
Cheer up.’ “

The poetic interpretation of nature, which has come to be a convenient phrase, and about which the Oxford professor of poetry has written a book, is, of course, a myth, or is to be read the other way. It is the soul the poet interprets, not nature. There is nothing in nature but what the beholder supplies. Does the sculptor interpret the marble or his own ideal? Is the music in the instrument, or in the soul of the performer? Nature is a dead clod until you have breathed upon it with your genius. You commune with your own soul, not with woods or waters; they furnish the conditions, and are what you make them. Did Shelley interpret the song of the skylark, or Keats that of the nightingale? They interpreted their own wild, yearning hearts. The trick of the poet is always to idealize nature,–to see it subjectively. You cannot find what the poets find in the woods until you take the poet’s heart to the woods. He sees nature through a colored glass, sees it truthfully, but with an indescribable charm added, the aureole of the spirit. A tree, a cloud, a bird, a sunset, have no hidden meaning that the art of the poet is to unlock for us. Every poet shall interpret them differently, and interpret them rightly, because the soul is infinite. Milton’s nightingale is not Coleridge’s; Burns’s daisy is not Wordsworth’s; Emerson’s bumblebee is not Lowell’s; nor does Turner see in nature what Tintoretto does, nor Veronese what Correggio does. Nature is all things to all men. “We carry within us,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “the wonders we find without.” The same idea is daintily expressed in these tripping verses of Bryant’s:–

“Yet these sweet sounds of the early
season
And these fair sights of its early
days,
Are only sweet when we fondly listen,
And only fair when we fondly gaze.

“There is no glory in star or blossom,
Till looked upon by a loving eye;
There is no fragrance in April breezes,
Till breathed with joy as they
wander by;”

and in these lines of Lowell:–

“What we call Nature, all outside
ourselves,
Is but our own conceit of what we see,
Our own reaction upon what we feel.”

“I find my own complexion
everywhere.”

Before either, Coleridge had said:–

“We receive but what we give,
And in our life alone doth Nature live;
Ours is the wedding-garment, ours
the shroud;”

and Wordsworth had spoken of

“The light that never was on sea or
land,
The consecration and the poet’s
dream.”

That light that never was on sea or land is what the poet gives us, and is what we mean by the poetic interpretation of nature. The Oxford professor struggles against this view. “It is not true,” he says, “that nature is a blank, or an unintelligible scroll with no meaning of its own but that which we put into it from the light of our own transient feelings.” Not a blank, certainly, to the scientist, but full of definite meanings and laws, and a storehouse of powers and economies; but to the poet the meaning is what he pleases to make it, what it provokes in his own soul. To the man of science it is thus and so, and not otherwise; but the poet touches and goes, and uses nature as a garment which he puts off and on. Hence the scientific reading or interpretation of nature is the only real one. Says the SOOTHSAYER in “Antony and Cleopatra:”–

‘In Nature’s infinite book of secrecy a
little do I read.”

This is science bowed and reverent, and speaking through a great poet. The poet himself does not so much read in nature’s book– though he does this, too–as write his own thoughts there. Nature reads him, she is the page and he the type, and she takes the impression he gives. Of course the poet uses the truths of nature also, and he establishes his right to them by bringing them home to us with a new and peculiar force,–a quickening or kindling force. What science gives is melted in the fervent heat of the poet’s passion, and comes back to us supplemented by his quality and genius. He gives more than he takes, always.