Power

God, nature, and man, and the relationships among them, are the subject of much of literature, poetry, and art, and, as well, have been a central focus of this course. God is portrayed in the works we have studied largely as the all-powerful being who creates, destroys, loves and nurtures, and is all-knowing. Especially preceding evolutionary theories developed by Charles Darwin and related advances in science and technology, all that was impossible to understand and impossible to explain could be “understood” through one’s faith in God and acceptance that He is all powerful and also, ultimately, unknowable. Accepted as beyond human understanding, God is the power, force and logic behind all the good and bad in the world. Nature, often portrayed anthropomorphically in Romantic poetry as another being, though more god-like than man-like, is also a powerful force, and perhaps equally “unknowable” as God. Oxymoronically, nature represents both chaos and order: unconstrained destruction through natural disasters and yet also an order knowable, at least in part, through the natural laws discovered by the science that governs it. Nature is portrayed in the works we have studied both as creating and sustaining life but also as capable of taking it away – thus, powerful as God is powerful. Nature is the natural world around us, but whether we are separate from or a part of it has been the topic of many discussions in this course. As Raymond Williams notes, “The most critical question, in this matter of scope, was whether nature included man,” (Williams, 74). How we define ourselves in relation to nature influences how we treat it, and also how it is treated in literature and art. As the third element of this trinity of God, nature and man, we as humans are also a powerful force. Like God and nature, we have the ability to create life and to destroy it. We care about the earth we live on, and yet we also can and do devastate it. God, nature, and man together have the ultimate power of creation and ruin. In the texts we read throughout the semester, along with the discussions from class and on this blog, these three forces have proven at times to be at odds and other times to be in harmony with each other. Distinguishing man from God and nature, however, is man’s ability to create literature, poetry and art: we have the ability to exert our influence over man’s experience and understanding of God and nature through the creation of art. Can poetry bring the three together for good? Can poetry save the earth?

Literature and art throughout the ages have tried to depict God, and through such depiction to define him. However, defining the indefinable, unknowable and all-powerful is often accomplished through stories of conflict, contradiction and journeys of faith. God as a supreme power in whom people put their faith but of whom there is no proof of existence is a challenge to define. In the Christian religion, God is the source of and reason for life, and he provides the comfort of assurance of a life after death. He forgives men’s sins on earth and offers salvation in heaven. In the Bible, God is portrayed as the creator of the world and all its living things. Men pray to God and trust in him to lead them on the right path to a meaningful life. However, if God disapproves of human behavior, he intervenes, as he did in the story of Noah’s Ark. He has the potential for great destruction. So, God is portrayed in the Bible as both creator and destroyer. Gods in other faiths are similar. The Greek god Zeus punished with storm, thunder and lightning, controlling the weather to exact his retribution through human destruction. In my blog post on Robert Browning’s “Caliban upon Setebos,” I discuss how Caliban relates to his god Setebos. I say that Caliban is strong and brutal like Setebos, and that “he is made in God's image just like man is made in God's image in the Bible.” Caliban sees himself in Setebos, but he knows his place under Him: “His thunder follows! Fool to give at Him! / Lo! ‘Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!” Caliban loves his God but ultimately fears his God’s superior might. In “In Memoriam,” Alfred Tennyson grapples with his faith in God. As Devon says in her post, Tennyson questions whether “the seemingly random viciousness of nature … negates the existence of a loving God.” God represents all the living things he creates. When they are cruel, it follows that He is cruel. When natural disasters destroy life, it follows that He destroys life. In his journey of faith Tennyson eventually, by the end of his poem, regains his faith: “That God that ever lives and loves … To which the whole creation moves,” (Epilogue 141-144). By depicting God through contradictions – i.e., both as creator and destroyer, both as forgiving and as vengeful, and both as an object of love and of fear – these poets in a sense empower God in their works: their complete faith and utter fear define his power.

Similar to God, nature is portrayed in the works we have studied as an all-powerful force that cannot be controlled by humans. This deification of nature and “wonder at the ordinary was often achieved in making the natural appear supernatural,” (The Norton Anthology) or God-like. Though wondrous in its beauty and bounty, nature, like God, also produces natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, hurricanes, and tornados, which are beyond the power of human intervention. If nature turns on us, we suffer the consequences. In “Darkness,” Lord Byron describes a dream world where “the bright sun was extinguished” and mankind eventually dies out because of it. As Victoria notes in her post, Byron seems entranced by the reality of the inevitability of the destruction of the world. He is in awe of nature, reveling “in Nature's grand and awe-inspiring aspects, in the vast space of silent heaven, in the boundless expanse of ocean, in the gloom of dark forests or in the more terrifying manifestations of tempest, thunder and avalanche,” (Guha-Thakurta). In Joseph Mallord William Turner’s “Inside of Tintern Abbey” painting, below, nature takes over a building and reclaims it. The Abbey is in a state of deterioration, overrun by weeds and natural growth. Nature has the power to destroy what man has made and to take it back. But unlike God, nature can also be affected by human intervention, and the result is never portrayed as positive, as discussed below.

Humans are also depicted as a powerful force in Romantic poetry and art. Like God and nature, humans both create and destroy. “To a Mountain Daisy,” by Robert Burns illustrates man’s capacity for destruction. The narrator crushes the slender stem of the innocent mountain daisy. Devon says in her post that this shows man’s “power to eliminate something small but beautiful, yet he does not have the power to save nature and reverse the damage he has done.” As Dr. Seuss points out in his post, the poem “intertwines mankind’s fate with that of the Daisy: ‘That fate is thine–no distant date.’” The narrator kills the daisy, but he will eventually die, too. In “The Rime of the Ancient Marinere,” Coleridge intertwines man’s fate with nature as well. The mariner kills the Albatross and shares his same doom, forced to confess his story to people over the world as a sort of penance for killing the innocent bird. As I say in my blog post, the mariner “intervenes in nature … and pays the price.” In Bill Mckibben’s The End of Nature, he describes how nature, in its definition as separate from humanity – wild, beautiful, and tranquil – is ending because of humans’ imposition on it. The deforestation and production of CFCs that contribute to global warming “deprives nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning,” (Mckibben 58). With industrialization, a product of the technological advances of mankind’s most brilliant thinkers, we are destroying our planet with pollution. Only a large global effort to curb carbon emissions will even begin to slow down global warming. As Devon and Dr. Seuss both suggest and as Mckibben emphasizes, it may be too late for man to save nature after he has harmed it. One must question, have science and technology made us too powerful? Is man’s power over God and nature heading inevitably to our own destruction, not by an all-powerful God or nature but by our own hand?

In spite of the fact that human’s intervention in nature is depicted by Romantic poets as well as modern day environmentalists as having a perhaps irreversible adverse impact, from another perspective man’s impact on the world can be viewed as positive. Man impacts the world through creative expression, the creation of innovative works and ideas, and this power of creation is derived from the immense capacity of the human mind. For Maryclaire’s poem recitation, the class discussed Percy Shelley’s “To a Skylark.” We spoke about the pure joy the sky-lark experiences in his own creative expression and the freedom that comes from that. As I discuss in my blog post, Shelley “asks the bird to ‘teach me’ his gladness, his ‘harmonious madness,’ so Shelley can then teach the world using his own harmonious madness, poetry.” Through the intellectual pursuits of literature, art, and poetry, and the expression of human perspective in original forms that are dispersed to the world (one thinks here, as well, of social media, and of its impact on our world as a result of the wide and easy dispersal of ideas), man achieves the power of influence over thought, perception, discourse and even action (think, Occupy Wall Street and other Occupy movements throughout the world, as well as the Arab Spring). If man shares the same fate as all living things in nature, death, then his creative expression is rendered all the more powerful because it is his only means of making a lasting impression – or, indeed, having a lasting impact – on the world.

God, nature, and man are each powerful. But which is the most powerful? Which has dominion over all? After examining the texts we have studied, it becomes clear that none of the three is singularly the strongest: they each have their own power to create and destroy and will relentlessly be at odds with one another. But will they always be at odds? Or can they be harmonious? In Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” he portrays himself as one with God and nature, declaring that harmony is possible. I say in my blog post that Whitman “revels in himself, his body, his soul, nature, all mankind, all animals and plants, the heaven and earth and sea, the dead and the living, good and evil, the past and the present, because it is all one, merged together, celebrated both in its separate and distinct detail and its unity.” He states: “I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least, / Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. / Why should I wish to see God better than this day? / I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, / In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass.” Whitman writes with a religious fervor, but his religion is far from orthodox. He worships all that is natural and of this world, at the same time imbuing it with a spirituality: “I believe in the flesh and the appetites, / Seeing hearing and feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. / Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from; / The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer, / This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.” Whitman sees himself as encompassing all and being one with the universe. In Thomas Cole’s “The Voyage of Life: Manhood,” below, God, man, and nature come together. A distraught man about to hit rough waters prays in his boat to God. Is God, nature, or he himself in control of his fate? Are God, nature, and man all one and the same? To the extent that they are concepts created or believed in by man, they can be melded together as the symbol of all that is powerful, life-giving and life-taking. Poetry itself cannot save the earth (for what can mere words physically do?), but perhaps the thought process and human impulse that enables the production of poetry, that impels us to look deeper into the close relationship of man to nature/God and leads us to understand better the damage that is caused by disharmony, perhaps that together with creating and disseminating an articulation of that greater understanding, can.

Works Cited

Guha-Thakurta, P. "Nature-Cult in Romantic, Poetry - A Modern Study." Web. 14 Dec. 2011. .

MacKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. London: Viking, 1990: 1-91. Print.

"The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Age: Review: Summary." Home | W. W. Norton & Company. Web. 14 Dec. 2011. .

Williams, Raymond. "Ideas of Nature." Culture and Materialism, Selected Essays (2005): 67-85. Print.