Rachel Egoian
Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue and lyric poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” creates an unsettling apocalyptic world, caused by human destruction and the polluted makings of the industrial footprint. The dialectical discourse from Nature strives in obtaining obsolete change in order to ease Nature’s cries of pain and suffering. However, Nature’s dissection of the body lays out grotesque and unsettling imagery, revealing Nature’s interior self full of disease and decay. As Nature’s rotting body and not so-quiet-voice linger, this quest of breaking the cycle of fatalism and nihilism offers the anxiety of humanity as a threat to Nature and vice versa, Nature as a threat to humanity. For Alfred Tennyson’s hypnotic lyric poem In Memoriam, the personification or allegorizing of a feminine Nature encapsulates a mystifying voice – one that demands a reaction to the supernatural element of the grotesque slime. In another similar representation of Nature’s body and self, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s musically sound lyric poem “Sea and the Skylark” assumes the position of the anxiety of Nature’s destruction and its consequences of creating more slime. As the forefront of human damage against Nature, slime seems to be what is reproduced or what is left from Nature’s pain and suffering. The Victorian Era’s popular interest with ecology and natural theology helps to gain further insight as to why Nature’s aggression seems to be well represented in each of the poems. In addition, Darwinism’s ideas of cataloging species through to the Victorian Era’s anxieties of human destruction on nature. How do each of these Victorian poets –Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Alfred Tennyson–preserve Nature’s body and self? Through what lens do they seek to suggest Nature’s suffering of the self and body? How do these Victorian poets differ from one another in approaching the topics of ecology and natural theology in order to address the decay of nature? Through conveying the revolting and bilious nature as an aggressive force, it reluctantly sits in the background only to then unveil itself to the underlying issue human destruction and industrial nature. Therefore, in what appears to be lying dead in the background, but really at the forefront of the fight, Nature’s self and the body relinquish supernatural power that reproduces a metaphorical slime of aggression.
I. Robert Browning’s Nature of the Anthropocene Body and Self
In this section, the discussion of Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland and to the Dark Tower Came” introduces Browning’s different representations of the pain and suffering of Nature’s body and self. Closely analyzing stanzas ten through twelve of the poem the speaker, Childe Roland, reveals conscious agency as he imagines an apocalyptic consciousness of Nature’s landscape (MacDuffie 315). Childe Roland’s observations of Nature projects the similar anxieties of the Victorian writers who sought out the awareness of preserving natural history through studies of ecology and natural theology. The Victorian Era popularized ecology and natural theology as a result of industrial growth and urbanization of cities. Eugene Stoermer’s term “Anthropocene” addresses the geological time of human influence on the climate change in which Charles Lyell’s term of “deep time” and Charles Darwin’s natural selection and evolution are concepts that greatly impacted the Victorian Era. To set a presence of the Victorian Era’s fascination with Western ecology, the framework/framing of the criticism from The Machine in Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America by Leo Marx provides similar perspective to the Victorian society’s cosmology and Nature’s moral landscapes through the understanding of the Frontier hypothesis (Marx 84).
In stanza ten, Nature is first introduced by the speaker, Childe Roland, through a sudden shock of its unhealthy character. At least through the speaker’s perspective, he discovers the physical signs of Nature’s starvation and therefore fatalism which reinforces the unsettling lack of growth of this imagined landscape. Childe Roland visualizes Nature’s entity into parts, almost as if he sees Nature’s physical form as a body that is costumed with limbs. However, this suggestion to Nature’s body parts illustrates the grotesque image of decay as stanza ten suggests:
So, on I went. I think I never saw 55
Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve:
For flowers – as well expect a cedar grove!
But cockle, spurge, according to their law
Might propagate their kind, with none to awe,
You’d think; a burr had been a treasure-trove. 60 (Browning lines 55-60)
The first line indicates that the speaker never saw a worse state of Nature; however, what follows is his visual experience of examining Nature and thus deconstructing Nature’s poorly conditioned body. The “starved ignoble nature” is concerning, especially if compared to Marsh’s view on the geological epoch of Anthropocene, arguing that “‘[t]he earth is fast [in] becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant’” (MacDuffie 320). Marsh’s argument emphasizes the change in Nature’s authoritative position on earth in which literary texts of mythology have made symbolic connections to Nature as a supernatural/allegorical presence that has dominance over humans and their fates. Dissecting Nature’s body into parts by first noticing the flowers’ inability to thrive suggests Nature’s illness. Still practicing the categorization of species, Childe Roland visually notes the different flowers and scarce plant life. “Spurge” from the Oxford English Dictionary is defined as, “One or other of several species of plants belonging to the extensive genus Euphorbia, many of which are characterized by an acrid milky juice possessing purgative or medicinal properties” (Oxford English Dictionary). Another species of flower that Childe Roland references is “cockle” which the Oxford English Dictionary describes as the seed part of the purple flower or a corn poppy (Oxford English Dictionary). Mentioning the parts suggests a deconstruction of Nature’s body or limbs. From the Encyclopedia Britannica, corn poppy flowers were used as red dyes in medicine. This might symbolize Nature’s artifice. Also, the corn poppy was known to be a weed in cultivated fields. The speaker’s observational skills help reinforce the inclusion of legal terms such as “law” and “propagate” to establish a serious tone to Nature’s pain and suffering. By establishing legal terms, the poem places responsibility onto humanity in which the audience can participate and acknowledge these ecological issues. Moreover, Childe Roland emphasizes this serious tone through its connections to “none to awe” with natural art that beauty or “awe” is lost in Nature’s decay. Furthering the anxiety around Nature’s fertility, the speaker provides more seed imagery of “burr” as a hopeful lens of digging its way out of fatalism and nihilism. However, the next stanza quickly seizes or halts this notion.
In the following stanza, the speaker’s exalting concerns of Nature’s decay persist with further description of a personified Nature with an attachment of a dialectical voice created through instances of dialogue. Browning provides a vocal response from Nature because it is fitting to allegorize and thus personify it by gifting an aggressive and powerful voice that fights back against the harmful acts of humanity. Stanza eleven dramatically stresses these instances of dialogue as the following:
No! penury, inertness and grimace,
In some strange sort, were the land’s portion. “See
Or shut your eyes,” said Nature peevishly,
“If nothing skills: I cannot help my case:
’T is the Last Judgement’s fire must cure this place, 65
Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.” (Browning lines 61-66)
Here, the stanza shifts from the previous characterization of a “starved ignoble nature” to Nature’s dialogue, presenting an authoritative voice that directs a command at the audience with “See or shut your eyes.” However, Nature only provides two options, and the rhetorical choice should be to look. Browning’s lexical motif of “skills,” used as a verb, insists on the audience’s responsibility of action which needs precise change or an obsolete separation (Oxford English Dictionary). Nature’s drastic need of action to change or separate is further negotiated through its ties to natural theology in which the “Last Judgement’s fire” references the fall or Revelation. Through the dialectical perspective of Nature, the quest to cure fatalism and this apocalyptic imagined world creates an unsettling awareness of the anxieties of ecological studies.
Stanza twelve provides further visual descriptions of Nature’s pain and suffering by conveying a material world that Childe Roland speculates as a territory that was abused and diseased without a claim of who the actual abuser or the original infested carrier is:
If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
In the dock’s harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk
All hope of greenness? ’t is a brute must walk 70
Pashing their life out, with a brute’s intents. (Browning lines 66-71)
Shockingly, the speaker only addresses the physical violence in the first and second lines with the physical actions of “pushed” and “the head was chopped” (Browning lines 66-67). “Above its mates” creates an unsettling factor that all this harm happens amongst its friends. However, the vile outcome involves the lack of knowledge of who is the abuser that does the chopping and the making of “holes and rents” (Browning lines 67-68.
II. Alfred Tennyson’s Death to Nature In Memoriam
The second section of this essay will reveal the distinctions of how the pain and suffering of Nature’s body and self is portrayed in Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam. In canto fifty-six, Nature is first presented through a Darwinian perspective of categorizing and labeling of the species. In a scientific lens, order poses onto Nature as a threatening response to the humanitarian industrial movement, where usually it is vice versa to Nature being a threat to humanity. Tennyson’s In Memoriam differentiates from Browning and Hopkins’s perceptions of Nature’s body and self, where Nature takes on a different position as the feminized “claw and tooth” entity.
In canto fifty-six, Tennyson designates a female voice to Nature. Nature is presented as an allegorical female figure with an authoritative presence of dialogue. The dialectic addresses a discourse of the anxieties of Darwin’s natural selection as climate change persists toward animal extinctions:
“So careful of the type?” but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, “A thousand types are gone;
I care for nothing, all shall go.
“Thou makest thine appeal to me. 5
I bring to life, I bring to death’
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more.” And he, shall he, (Tennyson lines 1-8)
Nature’s rationalization of the extinction of species seems to respond as a surrendering position to its unauthoritative and subversive voice. Nature’s interior self further deteriorates in pain in reference of her “cries”’ and by stating that “the spirit does but mean the breath” (Tennyson lines 3 and 7). In “Varieties of Geological Experience: Religion, Body, and the Spirit in Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Lyell’s Principles of Geology,” Michael Tomko presents the controversies between uniformitarian notions of deep time and the separation of the melancholic spiritual self and the empirical scientific body of nature. The Uniformitarian concept of deep time is defined as another name for the Anthropocene epoch, which is the geological time of the change in the earth’s crust. Tomko makes connections between Nature’s body and soul by suggesting that “Tennyson affirms Lyell’s hermetically sealed division between physical and moral, translating it into a consolatory split between body and soul whose articulation is crucial to the form of his elegy” (Tomko 122). As in the next stanza, “psalm” reveals an alternative reception of Nature’s body and soul, expressing:
Man her last work, who seemed so fair, 10
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, (Tennyson lines 10-13)
The first notable distinction of engendering the stanza, with “Man” and then “her” mirroring each other or positioned side by side of each other, reinforces the questionable power position of humanity’s threat against Nature and Nature’s threat against humanity. The laboring aspect of Nature with “work” at first suggests tension, but then shifts the work into a craft or creation through references to this work as “fair” and with “splendid purpose.” The speaker presents Nature’s bodily shape through the religious view as God’s creation of Nature, rather than Nature as its own creation. “Man” and God seem to take over Nature’s authorial presence in which the engendering of a feminine Nature is further addressed, not only through forms of the “She” pronoun, but in references to “fruitless prayer.” Furthering the engendering of the feminine Nature, James Eli Adams argues in his critical article, “Woman Red in Tooth and Claw: Nature and the Feminine Tennyson and Darwin,” that:
in representing an older, anthropocentric worldview, however, the personification also allowed Tennyson to contemplate the destruction of that older view as a transformation in conceptions of gender. To question the nature of “nature” as In Memoriam does is inescapably to question the nature of woman. More precisely, it is to ask what has become of those conventionally feminine attributes that have so long distinguished “Mother Nature.” (Adams 8)
Therefore, this dialectical discourse emphasizes the concerns of Nature’s fertility as another religious and moral awareness to studies of ecology and natural theology.
However, Nature’s transgression from religious to supernatural characterizations makes explicit the fantastical and imaginary sphere of Nature’s pain and suffering of the body. For many critics, these specific stanzas, from lines thirteen through twenty-eight, introduce a different persona of Nature:
Who trusted God was love in indeed
And love creation’ final law –
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw 15
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed –
Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal’d within the iron hills? 20
No more? A monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match’d with him.
O life as futile, then, as frail! 25
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil. (Browning lines 13-28)
Here, legal terminology and the supernatural fuse together in representing Nature. Similar to Browning’s Nature in his poem “Childe Roland and to the Dark Tower Came,” fantasy also inhabits this natural yet imagined space. As MacDuffie’s critical reading in the previous section references:
Even the fantastical images bear the traces of conscious agency…anchored in a
situation brought about by human design and embedded in the u-versus-them
dualism of the crusading past. like the quest narrative, Childe Roland’s moral
imagination is something of an anachronism in his landscape, since
environmental breakdown is not traceable to an organized will in the ordinary
sense; instead, it is the indirect product of complex network of human actions
motivated by an even more complex array of desires, objectives, imperatives,
and reactions to environmental pressure. (MacDuffie 323)
Originally, Nature’s exterior suggests a carnivorous beast. However, it morphs into a monster of a dream characterized from the medieval or mythical creatures of “Dragons of the prime,/ That tare each other in their slime”, yet this also suggest prehistoric that “prime” is in reference to dinosaurs, and gets back to the deep time theory (Tennyson lines 23-24). However, this imagined state of Nature begins to decline as its decay and rot forms of “desert dust” and “slime.” The issues with Nature’s fluid state of being creates a disruption through religious and legal terminology in the stanzas that suggest “creed,” “final law,” “True,” and “Just.” The last stanza seems so appealing in its “redress” of Nature’s body and self, and the repeated lines “behind the veil, behind the veil” are what is left of Nature’s subversive voice. Therefore, the last stanza reveals fantasy’s worst case imagined of fatalism and fragility of the future.
III. Hopkins and Nature’s Slime
This final section will focus on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s view of Nature’s body and self. Hopkins’s poem “The Sea and the Skylark” unveils the unsettling truth about the destruction of Nature. Continuing to produce intrinsic awareness of ecology and natural theology, Hopkins’ influence of Ruskin’s aesthetic of nature allows a different perspective of the Victorian Era’s anxiety about climate change from the consequences of the industrial age and urbanization. In Criticism addressing nature’s architectural landscapes as the moral/religious self allow the lens to form intellectual connections of natural art and muse. “The Sea and Skylark,” Hopkins captures both a visual and auditory experience of Nature’s aggression and response to humanity’s threat.
On ear and ear two noises o old to end
Trench – right, the tide that ramps against the shore,
With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar,
Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend.
Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend, 5
His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeined score
In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none’s too spill nor spend.
How these two shame this shallow and frail town!
How ring right out our sordid turbid time, 10
Being pure! We, life’s pride and cared-for crown,
Have lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime:
Our make and making break, are breaking, down
To man’s last dust, drain fast towards man’s first slime. (Hopkins lines 14)
Immediately, the speaker sets a particular lens for the audience through instructing them to listen to two perspectives about natural history and humanity’s consequences. Natural theology also inhabits a space for a discourse that addresses the history of natural disaster through reference to Noah’s ark and the flood (Genesis 6-9). Furthermore, faint representation of “deep time” and the Anthropocene geological epoch are suggested when the speaker says “How these two shame this shallow and frail town!/How ring right out our sordid turbid time,/Being pure! We, life’s pride and cared-for crown” (Hopkins lines 9-11). These previous lines can be compared to the Victorian Era’s “acute ecological crises” about which McDuffie claims that “[a]s many Victorians were discovering reckless resource consumption, unchecked pollution, rapid forest-clearing, and other destructive incursions could set off extensive, unpredictable consequences, in turn, imperiled human communities, vital ecosystems, and even, for some, the biosphere itself” (MacDuffie and 317). Furthermore, in the critical article, “Ways of Understanding Nature: Ecology in Hopkins Ecology Formation” from Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination, John Parham connects to Ruskin’s influence on Hopkins, referencing “Ruskin’s aesthetic of nature; an interest in architecture that brought about the conservatism of his religious and political beliefs, and an understanding of how Victorian society was re-shaping its natural and human environments; a familiarity with contemporary science that gave an unmistakably ecological quality to his understanding and representation of nature” (Parham 105). Both MacDuffie and Parham emphasize the Victorian Era’s concerns of climate change that does indeed shift or add tension to the political and religious beliefs of that society.
As a result, Hopkins’ influence from Ruskin’s “The Moral of Landscapes” reinforces his writerly desire to use Patricia M. Ball’s concept of the “‘nineteenth-century tradition of factual observation’” (Parham 107). Hopkin’s awareness of natural theology emphasizes why he is fascinated by discovering the underlying truth of Nature’s consequence to slime. MacDuffie further explains the approach of natural theology, addressing “[t]he natural theology tradition imagined the entire natural world as a homeostatic system designed to provide a secure and stable home for humanity” (MacDuffie 318). However, Hopkins’ discovery of the truth through factual observation ultimately reveals Nature’s decayed form of dust and slime, and fault is placed on “Our make and making break, are breaking, down/ To man’s last dust, drain fast towards man’s first slime” (Hopkins lines 13-14). In the article, “Hopkins, the Humanities, and the Environment,” Jerome Bump also connects the deterioration of the “frail town” back to Hopkins’ theme of the vulnerability of man and nature. Bump asserts that, “the town seemed ‘frail’ both because its temporal existence seemed so negligible beside the apparent immortality of nature itself, and because the seeming infinite power of the sea…on the other hand, man posed a serious threat to nature’s frailty” (Bump 238).
IV. Final Thoughts
All three Victorian poets—Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins—introduce significant distinguishing representations of the pain and suffering to Nature’s body and self. what drove me to seek out Victorian writers’ intent of exploring ecological awareness was the notable depictions of Nature’s aggression and powerful voice that was alluded to as its response to humanity’s destruction. What I found was that, on the contrary, Browning, Tennyson, and Hopkins sought to inform and explore Western ecology, while at the same preserving a consciousness to natural history. If provided the opportunity to further extend on this topic, my interest would be to connect the contemporary writing of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series to develop thoughts of modernity through Browning’s influence of his dramatic monologue and lyric poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Through a humanitarian perspective, the challenges that would arise are closely analyzing King’s natural and apocalyptic landscapes, while encoding his imagined world from the interior and exterior consciousness.
Works Cited
Adams, James Eli. “Woman Red in Tooth and Claw: Nature and the Feminine in Tennyson and Darwin.” Victorian Studies 33.1 (1989): 7-27. Web.
Browning, Robert, James F. Loucks, and Andrew M. Stauffer. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Robert Browning’s Poetry: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2007. Print. Norton Critical Edition.
Bump, Jerome. “Hopkins, the Humanities, and the Environment.” The Georgia Review 28.2 (1974): 227-244. Web.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, and Catherine Phillips. “Sea and the Skylark.” The Major Works. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Print. Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford University Press).
MacDuffie, Allen. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” and the Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Philological Quarterly 93.3 (2014): 315-38. Web.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Oxford University Press USA – OSO, 1967. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sfsu/detail.action?docID=431100.
“cockle, n.1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2019. Web. 23 May 2019.
“spurge, n.1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2019. Web. 23 May 2019.
“skill, v.1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2019. Web. 24 May 2019.
Parham, John. Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination, BRILL, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sfsu/detail.action?docID=587931.
Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert W. Hill. “In Memorium.” Tennyson’s Poetry: Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Print. Norton Critical Edition.
Tomko, Michael. “Varieties of Geological Experience: Religion, Body, and Spirit in Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Lyell’s Principles of Geology.” Victorian Poetry 42.2 (2004): 113-33. Web.
Interpretations: Journal of the Graduate Literature Association 