Beauty Is Truth - Romantic poetry

Ecologist, The, Sept, 2000 by Lucy Moore

The writings of Britain's Romantic poets show that environmental sensibilities are nothing new. Lucy Moore delves into the minds of the ecologists of two centuries past.

The prevailing image of a Romantic poet is that of William Wordsworth, walking through his beloved Lake District and chancing upon a hillside covered with daffodils. Later, remembering this unexpected blaze of gold, Wordsworth is transported back to a mood of simple happiness and gratitude. With this poem, Wordsworth did much to bring into the British consciousness an appreciation of the picturesque, and a sense that nature, in the abstract, has a meaning that goes beyond the day-to-day provision of man's needs.

Until the eighteenth century, man looked on nature as a resource to be harvested to supply his needs. Only the very rich, and even then only in times of peace, had time to spare worrying about gardens and hunting. But with trade and with the first rumblings of the Industrial Revolution emerged a leisured, town-based middle class. People began to think about recreation, and about escaping from the dirty, cramped cities in which they lived. This was the age of the novel, of clubs; of landscaped gardens in the country and pleasure gardens in the city. While men like Capability Brown enabled their rich patrons to feel they could control nature, transporting whole villages to achieve rolling acres of parkland, the urban middle classes took to rambling and nature walks. When the Reverend William Gilpin published his Observations on the River Wye... Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty: Made in the Summer of the Year 1770, a new craze was born. For the first time, nature became an object, instead of being taken f or granted; and this may be the moment the modern environmental movement began.

Although William Wordsworth was a popular poet, even appointed Poet Laureate in 1843, in his lifetime his writings on the Lake District far outsold any of his volumes of verse. His guide to the beauty of the hills and lakes in which he was brought up and lived most of his adult life not only made him famous but brought to the area a host of visitors. It became fashionable to go on walking holidays -- and even more fashionable to have encountered Wordsworth or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the two most famous residents of the area, along the way. Coleridge described carving his name on a rock atop a peak in Cumbria, where other climbers had carved their names, and seeing a party a moment later coming across it. 'That must be the poet Coleridge,' said a man importantly to his female companions, pointing it out.

In some ways the Lake District's sudden popularity -- making his wild landscape almost crowded -- must have saddened Wordsworth, whose poetry describes the rapture he experienced through solitary contact with nature:

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

In On the projected Kendal and Windermere Railway he further lamented: 'Is then no nook of English ground secure / From rash assault?'

Wordsworth's use of the word 'sublime' in the first extract is key to an understanding of the Romantics. In the dictionary its meaning is given as lofty, elevated by joy, exalted in character; awakening or expressing an uplifting emotion, producing a sense of elevated beauty, nobility, grandeur, solemnity or awe. Its best pictorial representation comes in the work of JMW Turner, in his Studies from Nature (another manifestation of the fashion for the picturesque) and, most resonantly, in his watercolours, which seem almost to capture the essence of light.

The Romantic poets saw nature as a powerful redemptive force, a form of purification and transcendence. In Frost at Midnight, Coleridge, with his young son at his side, muses on his own childhood in London, where he 'saw nought lovely but the sky and stars / But thou, my babe!' he continues, 'shalt wander like a breeze', seeing in all of nature's wildest shapes and sounds the 'eternal language, which thy God / Utters, who from eternity doth teach / Himself in all, and all things in himself'.

If we think of Wordsworth in a field of daffodils, our abiding image of Coleridge is of the poet perched on a rocky, windswept crag, wearing an open- necked shirt, thick breeches, worn hob-nailed boots, with a stick beside him and an old leather knapsack containing paper and pens, and a night-cap.

Coleridge, unable to be moderate in his passions, loved the wildness of nature. 'The farther I ascend from animated Nature, from men, and cattle, and the common birds of the woods, and fields, the greater becomes in me the intensity of the feeling of Life,' he wrote to his friend and patron Thomas Wedgwood in 1803. 'Life seems to me then a universal spirit that neither has nor can have an opposite'.

For Shelley, as for Coleridge, wilderness expressed an inner yearning, the sense that man's potential was limitless: