I am an amateur gardener, and by amateur I mean novice. And by novice I mean newbie, and by newbie I mean, well, you get the point. I’ve recently begun working at the Temple Terrace Community Garden and it has been a great experience. I’ve always sought a connection with the natural world. As a kid I enjoyed camping, and hiking, fishing, all of those outdoorsy kinds of things. As a teenager I liked Thoreau and read and re-read Kerouac’s “Alone on a Mountaintop,” and while I long ago lost my enchantment with both writers my desire to be connected to the natural world continues. When I think back on it, I realize I first encountered the Kerouac piece in a composition class. I was sixteen and taking classes at the University of Southern Colorado (now CSU-Pueblo) and signed up for a comp 2 class centered around nature and humanity’s place within it. We used Constructing Nature: Readings from the American Experience edited by Richard Jenseth and Edward E. Lotto as our primary anthology. I still have that text, and think of it fondly, for amongst other things introducing me to the writing of Michael Pollan. It is still in print, and a quick Google search demonstrates it is still used by comp instructors fifteen years after I encountered it. That text, and the course which assigned it, introduced me to the idea that nature is something we human beings conceptually construct, dividing ourselves from nature and in a sense placing human-made things in the realm of the unnatural. These boundaries and our understandings of them are conceptual constructions, which is something Oscar Wilde understood at the end of the nineteenth-century. He playfully writes in “The Decay of Lying” :

Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of Art. You smile. Consider the matter from a scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right. For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.

While, this is on one level Wilde being his charming and witty self, on another level it is keenly focused on the way our conceptions shape our understanding of the world, in this case the natural world. We pay attention to the beauty of fogs, because Monet and others have taught us to pay attention to them. We view nature as a mother, because that is the metaphor we use to speak about it.

 Waterloo Bridge, the Fog Claude Monet, 1900

The major nineteenth-century touchstone for discussion of nature is of course Wordsworth, whose visions of the natural world echo throughout the century to today. Wordsworth was Poet Laureate well beyond the Romantic era from 1843 until his death in 1850, and he casts a shadow over the entirety of the period, Romantic and Victorian alike. I suppose I came to realize his impact more fully this past semester while teaching British Literature 1780-1900, when we kept returning to his work when similar subjects were addressed by other writers. Even writers who fail to find a sense of peace in the natural world, such as Matthew Arnold reference Wordsworth.

I’m not the greatest fan of Wordsworth, though as I’ve said, I can’t fail to acknowledge his importance. It always seems to me, as if Wordsworth has gotten one-half of the picture of the natural world right, with his visions of nature as a beautiful transcendent force. But there is little violence, danger, or even sublimity in Wordsworth’s vision of nature (despite his continual usage of the term sublime.) There is little of what Tennyson will call “Nature, red in tooth and claw.”

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a friend of mine not too long ago about the environs we both currently live in: Florida. He specifically was talking about the Everglades which I had made a brief trip out to that day. He mentioned how inhospitable the swamps are, that they, unlike many other natural places we had mentioned were dangerous. That is something that many of us miss when we view nature through the rose tinted glasses forged (in part) by our separation from it.

A certain remedy to Wordsworth’s own rose tinted view is found in some of the work of his fellow Romantics. Percy Bysshe Shelley in “Mont Blanc” writes of the sublime immensity of the Alps and the slow but unyielding destructive force of the glacier:

Power dwells apart in its tranquillity,
Remote, serene, and inaccessible:
And this, the naked countenance of earth,
On which I gaze, even these primaeval mountains
Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep
Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,
Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice,
Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power
Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,
A city of death, distinct with many a tower
And wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destined path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks ‘ drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost. The race
Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream,
And their place is not known.

Here nature is in full destructive force, attesting to its power as more than just the font of memory and impression that Wordsworth finds in it. The glaciers destroys the safe abodes of animals and threatens mankind. They are “poised like snakes” and will rain down destruction in perpetuity. Shelley finds a certain parallel in Lord Byron’s conclusion to Child Harold’s Pilgrimage where in the “Apostrophe to the Ocean” he writes:

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,
Calm or convulsed–in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving;–boundless, endless, and sublime –
The image of Eternity–the throne
Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee:  thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

This vision of the ocean also has theological resonances. Nature, specifically the ocean, is a mirror to God, and thus God to again quote Tennyson who wrote these lines some thirty years after Byron completed Child Harold, God too must be “red in tooth and claw.”

And now, some bonus Neko Case, on this entry’s theme: