MIND-NATURE LANDSCAPE IN

WORDSWORTH AND FROST

O. P. BHATNAGAR

Nature poetry has always presented the following basic paradox arising out of the Mind-Nature relationship whether Mind sees what the Nature reveals itself of it or Nature is what the Mind sees of it. It will be no use setting this situation against the background of abstract speculations of metaphysics and philosophy. It will have to be examined only against the poetry dealing with this paradox. The two great poets in the tradition have been William Wordsworth and Robert Frost, who have not only projected this paradox but have struggled to resolve it poetically.

The first premiss brings forth the landscape of nature and the second, the landscape of mind showing the basic difference between the poet of nature and the poet of mind on nature. The bulk of Wordsworthian criticism from George Wilbur Meyer, through Arthur Beatty, Bennet Weaver, J. R. Watson, Enid Welsford and Russell Noyes establishes Wordsworth passing over from the landscape of nature to the landscape of mind poetry. My contention in this paper is that Wordsworth was basically a poet of the landscape of mind taking an evening walk through nature. Whereas Robert Fross was a poet of the landscape of nature giving morning walk to his mind, Wordsworth began as a poet of simple and direct observation of Nature as can be seen from the following excerpts:

And on you summit brown and bare,

That seems an island in the air,

Who, bounding round with frequent bark,

Now leaps around the uncovered plain,

Now dives into the mist again.

–The Vale of Easthwaite

Or

And, fronting the bright west, you oak entwines

Its darkening boughs and leaves, in stronger lines.

–An Evening Walk

Or

Here half a village shines, in gold array’d,

Bright as the moon, half hides itself in shade,

From the dark sylvan roofs the restless spire,

In constant glancing, mounts like springing fire,

There, all unshaded, hlazing forests throw,

Rick golden verdure on the waves below.

–Descriptive Sketches

and rejoiced ecstatically in the offered beauty of Nature:

How blessed, delicious scene: the eye that greets

Thy open beauties, or thy lone retreats.

--Descriptive Sketches

But soon Wordsworth was to pass over from the realm of Nature to these regions of mind where he could dissolve the shape, the form and the colour of Nature and drown himself in the intoxicating brew of pantheistic mysticism. Such a change is observable at a very early stage of his poetic career in the following manner:

……..For I had an eye

Which in my strongest workings, everymore

Was looking for the shades of differences

As they lie hid in all exterior forms.

–Descriptive Sketches

Until he reaches the Apocalypse in Nature:

The immeasurable height

Of woods decaying, never to be decayed

The stationary blasts of waterfalls,

And in the narrow rent at every turn,

Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,

The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky.

The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,

Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light

Were all the workings of one mind, the features

Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,

Characters of the great Apocalypse,

The types and symbols of Eternity,

Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.

–The Prelude, VI, LL. 556-72

and in “Tintern Abbey” –

The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion! the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, nor any interest

Unborrowed from the eye,

till his mystic mind superimposes itself on his poetic

vision receding Nature into background:

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.

–Tintern Abbey

From all these passages it becomes clear that Wordsworth from the beginning was struggling to free himself from painting the landscape of Nature and create a so-called sublime art of painting the landscape of Mind. The more free he became of the form, the shape, the colour and other manifestations of Nature, the more he became a victim of the abstractions of Mind leading to a deterioration of his art and vision of Nature poetry. This fact is easily discernible from the passages quoted above showing a gradual loss of music, rhythm, ease, clarity and intimacy. Compare the passage from The Vale of Easthwaite or Descriptive Sketches to the one from Tintern Abbey only to discover the blurting of the landscape of Nature followed by a terseness of syntax resulting from Wordsworth’s attempt to switch over from the landscape of Nature to the landscape of Mind.

Wordsworth had gradually tended to talk more about himself and the growth of his mind as he himself confessed in The Prelude:

I will forthwith bring down

Through later years the story of my life.

And again:

...for my theme has been

What pass’d within me.

He was more concerned with books, religion, morals, politics, wisdom, spirit and the transcendental than Nature. Therefore, even William Blake remarked that whatever Wordsworth “Writes valuable is not to be found in Nature.” Mr. Raymond Cowell in his Critics on Wordsworth and M. H. Abrams in his Romanticism Reconsidered go to the extent of saying that the poetical principles of Wordsworth’s poetry were solely based on his political principles. He expected his poetry to reform men, society and his times rendering Nature secondary to his total poetic vision. He invested Nature with a role, a purpose, a message and a mission fading his focus on Nature. For him Nature became a theme, a subject, a vehicle for a distant objective. His perception of Nature as “fact” weakened, giving way to mystery and metaphysics. He came to read meanings into the landscape of Nature:

...a sense sublime

Of Something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns.

It may not be wrong here to hold that Nature for him had become a “trope” and that it was his egotism which made him identify nature with his own thoughts. It is not to disparage his poetry and poetic genius but to correct the fallacy that he was a poet of the landscape of Nature.

But Robert Frost was well aware of the snares of mind and the mischief and harm it can do to the poetic vision and art of the poet as described in his beautiful poem All Revelation:

Head thrusts in as for the view,

But where it is it thrusts in from

Or what it is it thrusts into

By that Cyb’laean avenue,

And what can of its coming come.

And whither it will be withdrawn,

And what take hence or leave behind,

These things the mind has pondered on

A moment and still asking gone,

Strange apparition of the mind.

But the impervious geode

Was entered, and its inner crust

Of crystals with a ray cathode

At every point and facet glowed

In answer to the mental thrust.

Eyes seeking the response of eves

Bring out the stars, bring out the flowers,

Thus concentrating earth and skies

So none need be afraid of size.

All revelation has been ours.

The poem dwells on the nature and the genesis of the human mind and clarifies that although the Mind is capable of bringing out the stars and the flowers and probing into the mystery of Nature but what it ultimately brings out is not Nature but its own self. And even while it discovers and ponders as to “what take hence and leave behind,” it does so only for “a moment and still asking gone.” Frost believed in poetry as a direct communication between the eye and the object uninterrupted by Mind. He never asserted any metaphysical correspondence between Mind and Nature. According to him, Mind had nothing to reveal except what Nature revealed of itself. The Mind also must not worry to reveal what lies Behind the form, shape, colour and other manifestations of Nature. For, if Nature has anything to reveal it must speak out to us in unmistakable terms. Revelation crystallizes the same idea as follows:

We make ourselves a place apart

Behind light words that tease and flout

But oh, the agitated heart

Till someone really find us out.

“T is pity of the case require

(Or so we say) that in the end

We speak the literal to inspire

The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play

At hide-and-seek to God afar,

So all who hide too well away

Must speak and tell us where they are.

And any attempt to assert anything more than that on the part of the poet amounts to deceiving not only himself but his readers with mere pretence of what he has found in Nature.

He halted in the wind, and what that

Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost?

He stood there bringing March against his thought

Any yet too ready to believe the most.

“Oh, that’s the Paradise in Bloom”, I said;

And truly it was fair enough for flowers

Had we but in us to assume in March

Such white luxuriance of May for ours.

We stood a moment so, in a strange world,

Myself as one his own pretence deceives;

And then I said the truth (and we moved on).

A young leech clinging to its last year’s leaves.

–A Boundless Moment

Frost also warned against the snares of the Mind leading to philosophising, mysticism and transcendence in moments of the withdrawal of senses resulting in a trance in In the Most of it:

...it was the embodiment that crashed

In the cliff’s talus on the other side,

And then in the far-distant water splashed,

But after a time allowed for it to swim,

Instead of proving human when it neared

And someone else additional to him,

As a great buck it powerfully appeared,

Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,

And landed pouring like a waterfall,

And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,

And forced the underbrush–and that was all.

And such a moment offers precious little, an unmystic Buck and a feeling of “that was all.”

The Nature in its variety of forms, shapes, sounds, colours and movements was at the heart of his poetry. His poetry partook of Nature only to the extent to which Nature partook of human life shedding all Wordsworthian sentimentality of Nature sharing in the joys and sufferings and the fate of man. The artless irresistibility of his Nature poetry can be seen from the following passages:

By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.

Sought for much after that, it will be found

Either to have gone groping underground

(And taken with it all the Hyla breed

That shouted in the mist a month ago,

Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)–

Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,

Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent

Even against the way its waters went.

Its bed is left a faded paper sheet

Of dead leaves stuck together by the heart–

A brook to none but who remember long.

This as it will be seen is other far

Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.

We love the things we love for what they are.

–Hyla Brook

Or

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.

Ice-storms do that.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

–Birches

Come when the rains

Have glazed the snow, and clothed the trees with ice;

While the slant sun of February pours

Into the bowers a flood of light...

Look! the massy trunks

Are cased in pure crystal, each light spray,

Nodding and thinking in the breadth of Heaven,

Is studded with its trembling water-drops,

That stream with rainbow radiance as they move.

But round the present stem the long low boughs

Bend, in a glittering ring, and arbors hide

The grassy floor.

–A Winter Piece

The merging poetic concentration and intense delight under lying the description of nature in these lines issue out of his artistic principle of portraying the observed phenomenon more than recording the reactions of his own mind or “soul” as Wordsworth would have called it. For this reason Frost distrusted all books, schools, academics and systems of thoughts intruding direct perception, revealed in Latham’s Interviews with Robert Frost. He was definitely not a zealot after reforms, conversion or salvation nor fond of spiritual-kite-flying, prophetic visions or epiphanies. In one of his letters he wrote “you wish the world better than it is... ...I would’nt give a cent to see the world ... ... made better. I have no quarrel with the material.” He knew well how to live with facts, surroundings and nature mending walls.

Till the end Frost remained a poet of the landscape of Nature disallowing any obscuring intrusion of Mind to pollute his poetry. Although Wordsworth confessed as late as 1843 to Miss Fenwick that there can be no other basis of poetry than direct observation, he had already crossed the threshold of Nature to dwell in the mystic alleys of the Mind. For him Nature had become a living post but for Frost it was a living present. Wordsworth always slipped from the realm of Nature to the abstract regions of his Mind, whereas, Frost took every opportunity to slip out of his Mind so see the living Nature. In my opinion, therefore, Wordsworth was a good poet of Mind revealing Nature and Frost a better poet of Nature revealing Mind.

Frost gave nature poetry a new turn and made it natural. He freed nature from the tyranny of mind and intellect and turned it into a fact than an idea ripe for unending speculations. That is why, the contemporary nature poetry of Stevens, Mirianne Moore, Ted Hunghes, Mervin and Roethke is “mindless.” The latest vogue for “animal poetry” is an attempt to provide a link between the conscious and the unconscious, the animate and the inanimate aspects of existence–a device to guard against committing the “pathetic fallacy.”

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