In our discussion of the picturesque, we read a chapter from Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth in which he claimed “Is human consciousness part of nature? For the picturesque theorist, it is not: the perceiving, dividing eye stands above and apart from its “prospect” (Bates 148) in contrast to the ecological approach we saw in Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature, where “Nobody likes it when you mention the unconscious…because then it becomes conscious. In the same way, when you mention the environment, you bring it into the foreground…it stops being environment.” (Morton 1). Many of the poems we have read this semester have encorporated some aspects of the environmental or ecological approach as they look at the changing role of the individual in nature and how portrayals of nature in poetry were linked to humanity. In The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Mariner learns that he is not separate from other living things and he tries to pass on this lesson to the wedding guest, though at the same time the Mariner is forcing the wedding guest to separate himself from the other people at the wedding. In Robert Browning’s Caliban on Setebos, however, Caliban is already part of nature and he muses on how living things are connected under Setebos and whether Setebos actively tries to help or hinder his creations. The idea of “the other” is not necessarily just linked to “Nature” though: in Byron’s Darkness it is the dark itself that is other, in Wordsworth We Are Seven it is death, but still humans must learn to understand the other if they want to understand themselves. Although these poems may create an “other”, they also suggest ways in which the other is essential to the existence of the “I” and vice versa, with neither being successful without knowledge of their seeming opposite.
One of the most prominent examples of how the presence of man changes nature and how the “I” and “other” work together was found in our discussion of the Sublime, a concept based on the ideas of thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke . John Ruskin
also claimed the Sublime involved the emotional effect contemplation of a scene had on a person, as opposed to the objective beauty of a place, therefore both “I” and “other” (in this case nature) are needed for the Sublime to exist.
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/resourcesd/fri_wand.jpg
Wanderer in a Sea of Fog
Caspar David Friedrich
Our discussion regarding the Sublime focused heavily on two pictures. In the first, the man is an observer of the sea of fog, he looks down upon it, but being an observer of necessity separates him from the subject of his observation. The colour contrast between the dark rock he stands on and the blue and white before him emphasises this separation. However, it also creates another layer of separation, with that band of darkness at the front of the painting also separating the outside viewer from the sea of fog. There is not just a barrier between the figure in the painting and nature, but that figure is also a barrier that separates the viewer from nature. Any thought we have about the natural scenery in that picture is going to be influenced by the presence of the man.
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/resourcesd/fri_chalk.jpg
Chalk Cliffs over Rouen
Caspar David Friedrich
The second picture works in a similar way: the sea is given scale by the single boat that floats on it, but whoever sails the boat probably does not know that he is watched by the people on the cliff, just as they do not know they are watched by the person looking at the painting. In this picture, there is also the addition of the trees, almost as a frame, emphasising this idea of a separate world being seen through a window, just as the cliffs frame the view of the sea given to the people in the painting, creating layers of “other”.
Even outside of the Sublime, a narrator or character that attempts to separate man and nature, or certain aspects of man and nature, or the reader and the poem’s subject, can be seen in texts we have studied this term. In We Are Seven by William Wordsworth, the narrator attempts to create a separation between the girl and her dead siblings “life in every limb / What should it know of death?” (Wordsworth 3-4) though the fact he describes the child as “it” suggests he does see her as “other” to him, even though they are both living humans. She refuses to accept his definition, however, for her there is no other and her and her dead siblings are equal “We are seven” (64) and “Nay, we are seven!” (Wordsworth 69) are her repeated statements, emphasised with more vehemence each time. The “other” created here can also be linked to nature as well as death: the narrator talks about the wildness of the girl’s appearance “She had a rustic, woodland air, / And she was wildly clad;” (Wordsworth 9-10) and the dead are now part of nature “Their graves are green, they may be seen,” (Wordsworth 37). The narrator is separate and “other” from nature because he does not understand this connection “ye are only five.” (Wordsworth 36) and he sees death as other from life, not realising both are natural.
In Caliban on Setebos by Robert Browning, however, the poem is told more from the perspective of the “other”, the little girl rather than Wordsworth’s narrator. In The Tempest, Prospero is the main character and Caliban is other, not quite trustworthy and not as human as the men Prospero seeks revenge on. Even this poem, told from Caliban’s perspective, does not make Caliban the “I” because as even Caliban talks about himself in the third person “Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire,” (Browning 2). If he is flat on his belly he is closer to the ground, he is in the “mire” or the mud and combined with his third person narration, this suggests Caliban is doing all he can to make himself part of and inseparable from nature. Later in the poem, he talks about how he, like everything else in nature, is subject to the arbitrary whims of his God, “Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.” (Browning 103). Destruction is not brought about for any meaningful reason, but because Setebos does not look upon nature as worth protecting. However, it is impossible for nature to be completely other to Setebos, because the degree of power he has means he will influence nature whatever he does.
Power over the other is a major theme in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, though, in this case, there are several “others” portrayed at various points. To begin with, although the first few stanzas of the poem are told by an outside narrator, not an “I” who is part of the story, we could expect the Mariner to be the other. With his “glittering eye” (Coleridge 3) and the way the wedding guest describes him as “grey-beard Loon!” (Coleridge 15), the impression given is of a slightly unnatural old man, a figure to inspire fright and anger. However, the Mariner is the one with power over the wedding guest, he has a “skinny hand,” (Coleridge 13) but still “hath his will” (21), in which “will” could refer to the Mariner’s will, which he is enacting, or the wedding guest’s will that has been taken away (class discussion, 3/10/11), but with either meaning the Mariner is in control. Then, when the Mariner begins to tell his tale, he becomes the “I” and it is his relationship with the “other”, his perception of nature, which changes throughout his story to become the moral of the poem. The wedding guest is now also an “other”, as “The Bride hath pac’d into the Hall,” (Coleridge 37) but he is still outside, in a separate world to the rest of the wedding party.
To begin with, when the Mariner tells his story, it is “did we drop” (Coleridge 6) and “it play’d us freaks” (Coleridge 47). At this point, the Mariner is not an individual, but just one member of the ship’s crew using “we” and “us”, first person, plural pronouns. When the albatross appears “an it were a Christian Soul,” (Coleridge 63), just as the sailors are, “We hail’d it in God’s name.” (Coleridge 64). All the sailors, not just the Mariner, greet the albatross together and they all greet it as a fellow amongst God’s creatures, so there is no other. This changes when the Mariner kills the albatross and therefore makes a gulf both between him and the bird and between him and those sailors who did not kill the albatross, whose punishments will not be the same as his. The other sailors die “And every soul it pass’d me by,” (Coleridge 213), they pass the Mariner and therefore are separate from him, leaving him alone. When he is compelled to tell his tale, he is, in some ways, trying to bridge that gap between him and the rest of humanity by bringing them into his story and teaching them the necessity to “loveth well / Both man and bird and beast.” (Coleridge 647), to not see anything as I and other, but instead see all living things as equal, for “God…made and loveth all.” (Coleridge 650). The Mariner has travelled “Alone on a wide wide sea:” (Coleridge 631) and now “’Tis sweeter far to me / To walk together to the Kirk” (Coleridge 635-636), with “together” the key word, with the gap between him and the other closed and the Mariner the happier for it.
The idea of man learning from his perceptions of what is other can also be seen in Lord Byron’s Darkness. It starts with “I had a dream” (Byron 1) which immediately creates an “other”, a dream world as opposed to a real world. However, the dream belongs to the narrator, it is part of him, so it is not completely separate and the second half of the first line is “which was not all a dream.” (Byron 1), which partially negates the separation between dream world and real world. Instead, in this poem, the main separation is between the men and the darkness, as Dr Seuss suggests in this blog post “As a personification, Darkness…here represents the nothingness of what the Universe and existence is after our human existence (and thus our ability to evaluate and explain the Universe) ends.” (Dr Seuss). Darkness is something outside and other to humanity, but because of this it provides a new way to look at ourselves.
Therefore, a recurring theme in the poetry we have studied this semester is how man can interact with and understand what he perceives as other. According to an ecological standpoint, this is the only way to protect nature, but it is also the only way from man to reach true understanding of both nature and himself. Whilst man may instinctively create an “other” when looking at nature, it is the interaction between the “I” and the “other” that creates the perception of the “other” and allows the “I” to learn and eventually, if at all possible, to bridge the gap between the two to improve the both of them.
Works Cited:
· Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Great Britain: Picador, 2001. Print.
· Browning, Robert. “Caliban on Setebos.” The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume 2B, The Victorian Age. 4th edition. Ed. David Damrosch and Kevin J. H. Dettmar. Pearson Education, Inc. 2010. 1366-1372. Print.
· Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere.” Lyrical Ballads. Ed. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter. Canada: Broadview Press, 2008. 51-72. Print.
· Lord Byron. Darkness. “The Works of Lord Byron, Poetry. Volume IV.” Project Gutenberg. Web. 14th December 2011.
· Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007. Print.
· Wordsworth, William. “We Are Seven.” Lyrical Ballads. Ed. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter. Canada: Broadview Press, 2008. 100-102. Print.
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