Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw
I pulled this from canto 56 because we began to discuss how Tennyson was affected by the theory of evolution. I feel like this line is rendering this entire psyche of a push an pull feeling that the ideas of natural selection, extinction, and evolution put on someone of Tennyson's time. Scientific discoveries of the time shook people's faith, and Tennyson expresses this personal struggle.Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life;
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But I would like to add that at the end of this poem... it is important to note that Tennyson's faith in God is restored*... so what's really going on with the whole "nature, red in tooth and claw"?
ReplyDelete*End of poem:
No, like a child in doubt and fear:
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying knows his father near;
In the line "So careless of the single life," Tennyson seems to be describing nature as a governing life force that is cold, uncaring and lacking compassion. His closing description of a child lost in doubt and fear is fairly analogous to an individual lost in the struggle of thought between Nature and God. In terms of restoring his faith in God in the context of this section, it seems that Tennyson consciously chooses to maintain his faith in order to avoid Nature, who cares not of the individual, as his sole overseer.
ReplyDeleteI think another way Tennyson comes to peace with the tension between the idea of nature as careless with individual life and his faith in a loving God is to stop focusing on the individual and focus on mankind as a collective. In various sections he discusses how Halem has "lived on" by influencing him, and there is a sense that he believes humankind is evolving. I think he also takes comfort in the idea that earthly life is only a chapter in our overall existence since he believes in life after death. In multiple cantos he talks about how unfair it was that Halem, who had so much to offer, has died before his time. Yet he muses that perhaps Halem is accomplishing great things in the afterlife.
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