mother nature or haunted house: approaches to nine teenth century

MOTHER NATURE OR HAUNTED HOUSE: APPROACHES TO NINE­
TEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN NATURE WRITING
A5
3G
A Thesis submitted to the faculty of
San Francisco State University
In partial fulfillment of
The Requirements for
The Degree
.^6-3
Master of Arts
In
English: Literature
By
Keith Raymond Roche
San Francisco, California
May 2016
CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read Mother Nature or Haunted House: Approaches to Nineteenth
Century American Nature Writing by Keith Raymond Roche, and that in my opinion this
work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree: Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State
University.
Lynn waraiey
Professor of English
Wai-Leung Kwok
Professor of English
MOTHER NATURE OR HAUNTED HOUSE: APPROACHES TO
NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN NATURE WRITING
Keith Raymond Roche
San Francisco, California
2016
In this study I have shown the ways in which Susan Fenimore Cooper, Emily
Dickinson, and Walt Whitman all succeed in writing about nature from an ecocentric
standpoint, denoting a nature centered, rather than human-centered, system of
values. These writers share a similar perspective that places intrinsic value on all
living organisms and their natural environment, writing in new and imaginary ways
about nature. These authors give us images and figures that broaden our
perspective of nature, and tell us who and what we are, and where and how we
inhabit our space. Their move towards a nature-centered global vision that does not
subject the earth to human schemes is a vision that helps further develop the
ecocritical canon.
I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the contents of this thesis.
Date
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to thank Lynn Wardley for the generous amount of time she had allocated
for this study, and the valuable advice that helped this thesis along. Thank you WaiLeung Kwok as advisor during my studies in the graduate program. I also would like to
extend thanks to the Professors of Literature and Composition Studies at San Francisco
State University. Finally, thank you mom for cultivating the discipline of study and also
to brother Jim and sister-in-law Alethea, for their inspiring example as Literary elites here
at San Francisco State.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction:.............................................................................................................................. 1
Chapter One: Natural Knowledge, Observation, and Humility: Susan Fenimore Cooper’s
Rural Hours and the Birth of American Bioregionalism.............................8
Chapter Two: “A Route of Evanescence: Emily Dickinson’s Elusive Grammar and
Nature’s Magic” ............................................................................................ 35
Chapter Three: “I Am Large...I Contain Multitudes”: Whitman’s Vision of Cosmic
Dwelling..........................................................................................................63
Conclusion:..............................................................................................................................83
References:.......................................................................
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1
INTRODUCTION
When I use the term "approaches” in the title of this work, I do not just mean
the word as taken as a noun, as a way of dealing with something, but also as a verb,
to come near or nearer to something in distance. Nature writers have always dealt
with the challenge of accurately describing natural phenomena in either non-fiction
prose, for example, the nature essay, or through fictional realities, like
environmental poems. Yet complete definiteness of replication of the environment
in textual representation is itself a fiction; nature writers continuously grapple with
the dream of accuracy. The best these writers can hope to realize in their
representations of the environment is to come nearer to a sense of insight to his or
her specifications.
In addition to the problems of accuracy is the controversy of what best
constitutes an environmental text. Lawrence Buell, the well-respected literary critic
and a pioneer of ecocriticism, (the study of literature and the environment from an
interdisciplinary point of view), sets up a criterion of points for this assessment.
Buell states in The Environmental Imagination? that by this criteria "few works fail to
qualify at least marginally, few qualify unequivocally and consistently" (8). Buell
contends that in order for a work to best exemplify an environmental text, it needs
2
to be represented from an ecocentric point of view by taking human centrality out
of the text. For Buell, most of the clearest cases for an environmental text are from
nonfictional works. Buell contends that these writings are unparalleled for depicting
nature as autonomous, and writing from nature's position for its own sake.
Proponents for environmental poetry, on the other hand, feel that if a poet can
transfigure the facts and not lose the perceived quality of the natural phenomena
they seek to depict, the poetry will retain a measure of value in an environmental
sense. Angus Fletcher, in A New Theory fo r American Poetry, avers that
environmental poetry is a dynamic technique that, while grounded in nature and
science, can supersede environmental prose. Yet Fletcher defines environmental
poetry as one that is not about natural environments but as something that environs
the reader. As such, the reader enters the poem as an environment. Fletcher insists
that although prose naturalism is extremely rich and culturally influential, nature
poetry "takes environmental concerns to a higher level, at least in one respect.
Unlike most prose discourse, poetry expresses close personal involvements, and
hence pertains to the way we humans respond, on our own, to environmental
matters" (3). Fletcher is telling his audience that an art like poetry that enhances the
presence of the individual is bound to be central in showing how we should
understand our environment.
3
The nineteenth-century "American Renaissance" is commonly viewed as the
beginning of an essentially ecological vision of nature in American culture.
Nonfiction authors such as Emerson and Thoreau are seen as writers who advocate
for greater attention to the details of nature and for its preservation. Buell
constructs the entire text of The Environmental Imagination around Thoreau, giving
the reader an understanding of the place of nature in the history of Western
thought, and a new understanding of Thoreau's achievement through these other
environmental texts. As noted above, Buell champions the nonfiction text for the
best ecocentric nature writing. As such, Buell tends to use examples of fictional
reality to show how it does not measure up to nonfictional accounts of the
environment as nature centered.
In this thesis I argue how Thoreau's contemporaries, Walt Whitman, Emily
Dickinson, and Edgar Allan Poe, use fictional description to make an imaginary leap
in rethinking humanity's relationship towards nature, each writing from an
ecocentric standpoint, and that their unique forms of descriptive technique elicit
environmental understanding in ways that enhance environmental nonfiction. As a
springboard for this study 1 begin with Susan Fenimore Cooper, a nonfiction nature
writer who I believe exemplifies a greater calibrated environmental sense than
4
Thoreau, writes from a more ecocentered perspective, and is integral in bringing
about bioregionalism to American nature literature. The purpose of this
stratagem is to complicate Buell's assertion of nonfictional dominance in
environmental writing. Even though Cooper has such a strong sense of viewing
nature as having a value in itself, and calls for the preservation of forests, she could
not entirely avoid the dominant American attitudes towards nature. Cooper
occasional drifts into abstract metaphor in her attitude for nature: confidence in
American progress, and the use of nature to refine human behavior and taste. I use
Cooper to show how difficult it can be in any genre to depict nature without a
certain disjunction between world and text, how our reconstructions of the
environment cannot be other than skewed and partial. Cooper nonetheless gives a
superb rendition of the nature she observes, and I further argue that Whitman,
Dickinson, and Poe achieve similar success in depicting actual phenomena through
aesthetic language. Unlike Fletcher's perspective, I argue poets like Whitman and
Dickinson draw towards description as a mode that imaginatively connects their
speakers to actual natural places, which elicits in the reader a close personal
involvement to their natural world.
In a chapter devoted to a sense of environmental place in literature, Buell
laments how sparse a representation of place we find in even so-called realistic
5
fiction. He then uses a segment from an Emily Dickinson poem to accentuate his
point about how poetry expresses less of a place orientation. As Dickinson's poem
has it, to make a prairie requires only a clover, a bee, and reverie—and "reverie
alone will do, / If bees are few” (254). It is as if Buell is implying that poets are too
busy lost in their thoughts to write detailed accounts of a specific place. Of course
Buell cherry-picked this verse to serve a greater argument, so I do not fault him for
this excerpt. Yet Buell, later discussing what makes an author's texts canonical,
explains that only some of a successful writer's works usually serve to canonize that
writer. Buell states, "Emily Dickinson" means, effectively, one or two hundred lyrics.
(371) There are roughly one thousand, eight hundred and seventy nine Emily
Dickinson poems in print, excluding multiple alterations of poems that can be found
in a Variorum. Dickinson indeed writes a great deal in these poems from a sense of
place, and disregarding her oeuvre while making general claims about Dickinson's
work is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
In Chapter Two I examine Dickinson's unique, elusive grammar, and how her
poetic style and form replicates how she perceives nature as a mystical entity.
Ironically, this mystic quality in no way supersedes Dickinson's ability to recreate
nature's biota as specific living things in a specific designated place. Dickinson's "A
6
Route of Evanescence," for example, better illustrates in verse a single event in a
single location of the flight of a hummingbird, so realistic in its rendering that it
overrides any nonfictional account of any bird 1 have ever read in nonfiction.
Typically, an imaginative excursion for a female American poet would be on
undomesticated ground. For Dickinson, she often finds a civil wilderness, like the
hummingbird, right in her back yard, demonstrating for the reader just how much
there is to see in our local place, and more importantly, how much detail we are in
fact not cognizant of.
Buell claims that Whitman’s treatment of nature in general is a screen for
something else. Referencing "Song of Myself,” Buell says Whitman ""may insist that
"I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of grass," but there is no grass, no
summer, no loafer. No, there is only an image, a symbol, a projection, a persona...""
86). I demonstrate in Chapter Three how Whitman's speaker's attention to an
inconspicuous leaf develops into a journey of interest in a catalogue of multifarious
natural minutia, and then continues outward to encompass a national
expansiveness that unites all living things in a universal web, all without claiming
authority over nature and without overwhelming the integrity of individual living
things. Whitman's account of nature in "Song of Myself' details natural phenomena
as real, factual things, and situates itself squarely into the ecocritical canon because
7
ecology is predicated on the way everything is connected to everything else. Also
examined is Whitman's poem, "This Compost," in which the poet is in awe of
nature's ability to take diseased and sickly materials, specifically human corpses,
and transform them into regeneration, beauty, and cleanliness. "This Compost" does
not even make it into Buell's The Environmental Imagination, though Whitman is
writing here from the perspective of deep ecology: he is recognizing the intrinsic
value of nature rather than its utility.
This study concludes with a brief look at Edgar Allan Poe's literary images of
human beings in their interaction with nature, and ominously, how the things of
nature act upon them.
In the following pages I endeavor to offer a straightforward argument that
Buell's environmental imagination cannot stand by Thoreau alone, and that the
writer's I discuss, contrary to locating themselves in an environ, in the phrasing of
their art leap beyond the page, helping us notice exactly where we are.
8
CHAPTER 1
NATURAL KNOWLEDGE, OBSERVATION, AND HUMILITY: SUSAN FENIMORE
COOPER"S RURAL HOURS AND THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN BIOREGIONALISM
I imagine Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894) returning from a sojourn to a
meadow on the outer edge of the small, rural village of Cooperstown, New York on a
bright June day. Cooper faithfully pens her impressions of the landscape during the
walk in a journal while these perceptions are fresh in her mind, building a seasonal
record of her north-eastern home that will be later compiled and published as an
environmental text, Rural Hours.
In his work The Environmental Imagine, Buell sets the criteria for an
environmentally orientated text in four main points, all of which Cooper
demonstrates in her journal entries in Rural Hours. According to Buell, in an
environmental text the landscape is represented not merely as a framing device but
is implicated in human history, the human interest is not central to the work,
accountability to the environment is present in the text, and the work depicts nature
as a process rather than an unchanging entity (7-8).
Let's look back at Cooper's passage of that June day, the nineteenth, to see how
she formulates substance for her careful observations, mixing acute environmental
mindfulness with the artist’s eye for composition. Cooper never fails to instruct the
9
reader about how to approach nature in order to best ascertain its nuances. As
if she is describing a work of art, Cooper suggests that a meadow is best
encountered when viewed from a little distance. From this vantage point one can
mark how the season varies its coloring, how the atmosphere throws shadows
across the grain, and the way the breezes shift and sway the grasses. Cooper likens
this spectacle to "a piece of shaded silk which the salesman throws off a little, that
you may better appreciate the effect” (76). Cooper alerts the reader to the process of
seasonal variation and enriches the description through metaphor. The effect of
realism is not undermined by this metaphor; the salesman displays the meadow to
best advantage, and this image does not lead away from nature but accentuates the
sense of actual depiction of natural elements. Cooper urges the reader of Rural
Hours to take an active interest in the fauna and biota of their surroundings in order
to truly know and understand the attributes of a region. This entails experiencing
nature first-hand with a careful eye to natural detail, which Cooper excels in. Cooper
next councils that in order to understand the merits of the "delicate embroidery of
colors" in this meadow, "One must bend over the grass," and get very close to it.
Again, like our self-appointed art docent, Cooper guides the reader in how to
identify certain aspects of the landscape to best appreciate nature for its own sake.
Cooper itemizes the flowers in this meadow, indicating when they typically bloom,
10
compelling her readers to take advantage of their wonderful fragrance before
"the mowers come with their scythes." Although we are not able to accurately
determine why this particular meadow will be mowed, (perhaps it will be
cultivated), Cooper here relates how human activity is intricately involved in natural
developments. Cooper also subtly suggests the dark side of man towards nature, the
"scythe" dispatching what is held dear.
Cooper next exhibits an ethical orientation concerning the environment when
she states that natural grasses are becoming scarce because of farming practices
that favor grasses of foreign origin. This June’s entry continues the conversation
about imported species, as Cooper catalogues the various introduced clover plants
and alerting the reader that the only indigenous clover to the area is the buffalo,
which is also found in the western part of the state and further westward (77).
Cooper here shows an understanding of bioregional sensitivity at the intersection of
culture and environment and additionally perceives how the health of the local
environment extends and is related to the outlying areas. Typical of Cooper's
construction of most journal entries is the way she works from minute observation
of the local and then bridges that introspection onto the global, exhibiting an ecoconsciousness that entails the connection of all things.
11
This excerpt from Rural Hours represents an ecocentric standpoint that
Cooper maintains throughout the text and additionally focuses on the
bioregionalism of Coopers home in Otsego County, New York. Along with the book’s
seasonal structure, which makes nature itself the framework of Cooper’s narrative,
the text is unified by the theme of progress and its inevitable conflicts. Cooper
demonstrates through assiduous records that nature's seasonal rhythms provide a
template for human activity, and that people need to be environmentally aware of
any dramatic changes in the ratio of local fauna through careful observation of their
surroundings from seasonal year to year. Cooper writes in a style that Lawrence
Buell calls for in today's rereading of America's nature writing; insisting upon a
renewed attention to bioregionalism, and reconsideration to natural realism and
detail, and an exclusion of human centrality from a text in order to find a new way to
understand nature and humanity's relationship to it. Cooper says that a recent turn
for "all descriptive writing, on natural objects” becoming "more definite and
accurate" has come about because of the people’s need to experience "something
more positive, more real" about the truth of their environment, which is a step
towards "moral and intellectual progress" (208).
Rural Hours, 1argue, is the first American work of bioregionalism that
highlights the unique ecology of Cooperstown and argues that nature, humans, and
the home are kept in harmony through ethical, sustainable use of the land. Cooper
12
teaches us how to become native to a place, how to accommodate ourselves to
a specific locale by giving privilege to nature in order to ensure that we preserve the
beauty of the world for future generations. Rural Hours is also a work that
encompasses a variety of modes. In the era of Cooper's writing, the natural history
essay was the standard, expected form of nature writing, which includes such works
as William Howitt’s The Book o f the Seasons (1831), Ralf Waldo Emerson's Nature
(1836), and Henry Ward Beecher's Plain and Pleasant Talk about Fruits, Flowers•,and
Farming (1859). When Susan’s famous father, the author James Fenimore Cooper,
reviewed the text of Rural Hours before its publication, he praised its "purity of
mind, the simplicity, elegance, and knowledge," but predicted that its success would
not be immediate because the public "would not know what to make of it"
(Correspondence, II, 673). This comment must relate to Susan Cooper’s practice of
combining narrative odes in Rural Hours, with a focus on bioregionalism. Readers of
nineteenth-century nature writing would expect this writing to be in essay form and
supposedly would not know what o make of Rural Hours because the genre of
viewing nature based on naturally defined areas, or bioregions, was not self-evident.
Yet the early success of the work (after just four and a half years of its first edition,
Rural Hours appeared in six separate editions), and Cooper's achievement attests
that nature writing should not be understood as a category sealed off from other
genres. Cooper expands the stylistic scope of nature writing, synthesizing the
13
natural essay with the seasonal journal and sketches of country living and
folklore. As Cooper swerves away from current details of locality in order to discuss
the natural history of the region, she is able to paint a picture for the reader of how a
specific place is being slowly changed by inroads of man's advancement and extend
that recognition to the country at large. Although Cooper takes a humble attitude in
the Preface of this work, calling her field work "the simple record of those little
events which make up the course of the seasons in rural life," and referring to her
natural perceptions "trifling observations," Cooper replicates the work of a trained
botanist, ornithologist, and ichthyologist as she explicates an extensive coverage of
plant and animal life around the surrounding Otsego hills near Cooperstown, New
York. As Cooper comments on the climate or on some aspect of natural detail she
will often connect her observations to the universal, bringing bibliographic
resources of the global to bear on her native environment.
Cooper’s vast use of print material grounds the local environment as a specific,
unique place in relation to the larger world. Nina Baym, in American Women o f
Letters in the Nineteenth-Century notes that "Cooper's use of scientific texts remakes
the township as an item in a global survey, with the result that excursions in
Cooperstown become a gateway to the world" (73). Cooper's texts include natural
history, official surveys of New York State, newspaper items, statistical reports,
scientific journals, and the Bible among others to connect bibliographical resources
14
to her local outings. Observation of an unusually large, local spider inspires
Cooper to spin a long essay about spiders of its kind found in the Palace of Hampton
Court, in England, which are honored with the sobriquet, "Cardinals," after its
former resident, Cardinal Wolesy (61). Cooper can be seen interleaving the literary,
the scientific, and the descriptive as she describes the interplay of leaves of several
tree species on a summer's day. Not feeling a breeze that can explain the dancing
motion of the leaves, Cooper imaginatively suggests that "one might fancy
Puck...sitting astride a stem, shaking his sides with laughter at the expense of the
bewildered spectator” (103).
In a footnote Cooper mentions that the book is offered "to those whose interest
in rural subjects has been awakened" as "a sort of rustic primer, which may lead
them, if they choose, to something higher" (330). One senses that Cooper here is
principally addressing middle to upper class women residing in rural environments.
Cooper instructs these women in how to shape America's future according to her
rural ideology; if the landscape can be looked after responsibly, this can institute
shifts in cultural habit. Vera Norwood, in Made from This Earth: American Women
and Nature, contends that some nineteenth-century American women participated
in naturalist activities that sought to define the value of nature "because they
believed that the particular environmental agendas supported values deriving from
domestic culture." As an example, Norwood explains that it was an accepted practice
15
to describe America’s biota in terms of the native household. In effect, "as
keepers of the home, women gained some standing in the attempt to domesticate
the continent” Norwood then adds that these women had a public voice because
their middle-class values of domestic life combined with the domestication of the
landscape in order "to justify [any] expansionist goals" (277). Stacy Alaimo, in
Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space, asks her readers to
reevaluate this statement because for Norwood to argue that female naturalists
gained space in nature through their domestic roles, recasting the domestic realm
into nature, "forecloses the possibility that women entered the wilderness, literally,
or imaginatively, precisely in order to throw off—or complement, subvert, or
bracket—their domestic roles" (15). Alaimo claims that many women entered into
naturalist activities in order to critique and/ or escape the bounds of the domestic.
Cooper is arguably positioning herself in between Norwood and Alaimo's
claims in her Introduction of The Rhyme and Reason o f Country Life. Cooper writes
that she wants to contribute, and help other women contribute, to the "national
progress" towards "country life in its better form" (Quoted in Essays 40). This gives
women opportunities to be active in strengthening their culture. Nature excursions
also become a means of liberating oneself from the domestic hearth, at least
temporarily. Cooper was conservative and believed I American progress, yet the
main tenet one sees continuously in her writings about nature is a critique about the
16
need for progress coupled with common-sense responsibility in development
that implements sustainability, which strengthens her eco-ethical resonances.
Nature exists as a place that Cooper, and the middle-class women to addresses, can
temporarily recast their role away from domestic confinement while not
undermining the conventional "place" for women. In this way women gained a sense
of agency by becoming stewards of the environment that reflects the idea of
demonstrating domestic duties by tending to "others." Baym avers that:
the purpose of Cooper's work is to model country life as a constant
intellectual, civilized, rational pleasure and therefore to show ladies a
rational, civilized way of being ladylike. Country ladies demonstrate their
class by reconstituting their rustic surroundings through a combination of
literary and scientific knowledge. (75)
Baym sees Cooper intending to disrupt the traditional association of women with
physical nature by showing them how to think about physical nature, so as to
perform themselves as intellectual beings (77).
Cooper Stakes Her Claim in Early American Bioregionalism
i
While it is Thoreau who represents our earliest representative of modern
American nature writing, Cooper's work in Rural Hours reflects a writer addressing
17
nature more ecocentrically, with a nature centered, as opposed to a humancentered, system of values. Thoreau struggles to arrive at an environmentally
responsive vision. He writes from an androcentric standpoint because Walden is an
exercise in communing with nature for self-improvement. Thoreau's social criticism,
reflected in the chapters "Economy," and “The Bean Field," underscores that
Thoreau retired temporarily into nature as a means to demonstrate how a
simplified lifestyle spiritually liberates one from the oppression found in a
civilization increasingly bent on acquisition. Thoreau's return to the society he
critiqued demonstrates that his excursion to Walden was an experiment in living.
Unfortunately, when thinking about whom best represents early American nature
writing, the American perception finds Thoreau invariably at Walden. Cooper, on
the other hand, extolls rural living as the most favored place to spend one’s life and
orients the landscape as central to human refinement. Also a champion of simple
living. Cooper concludes in her Introduction of Rhyme and Reason:
the moment has come when in American society many of the higher
influences of civilization may rather be sought in the fields, when we may
learn there many valuable lessons of life, and particularly all the happy
lessons of simplicity. (Quoted in Essays 44)
18
Cooper's commitment to a specific place, her decades of attention to
details about the abundance or scarcity of all living things great and small in her
region, gave her both an understanding and sense of affinity for place that Thoreau
would not have been able to achieve with a two year escape into Walden. Cooper's
dedication to the Oswego region of Cooperstown manifests with her literal record of
how a landscape and its wild inhabitants have altered with each season over the
years, and the future consequences to the local environment if people continue to be
unmindful about the health of the natural area through uncontained development.
As Cooper gathers seasonal data about the conditions in Cooperstown and the
surrounding area in 1850, this information becomes the standard on which to
measure the extent of change that occurs later in the region seen in her work, Otsego
Leaves more that twenty-five years later. Cooper laments the scarcity of birds nests
and representative bird species from what she recorded from the same trees and
area twenty years before, and calls for immediate measures to check their
disappearance, such as laws against random shooting of birds by young boys and
refraining from wearing hats adorned with their feathers (Otsego Leaves in Essays).
This analysis of her local place makes Cooper an early proponent of environmental
history and places Rural Hours as a founding text of environmental writing in
American literature.
19
Buell explains that Thoreau's canonicity has lead to constraints in
American naturism, reinforcing the tradition of the concept of the "androcentric
pastoral escape" (25). Walden falls under the genre of the autobiographical; nature
itself is Cooper's predominant concern. Thoreau's narrative speaks from the
position of "I" while Cooper narrates from the locus of the first person plural
pronoun "We," as a member of observers humbly approaching the environment
ecocentrically. Cooper's is a narrative of community, an entire eco-cultural network,
rather than a written account of one's individual thoughts. Buell says that Cooper
was more ideally capable of speaking in a less "self-orientated narrative and write in
a more environmentally sensitive manner" because of the cultural conventions for
women writers at the time. Women were expected to write with an effacement of
ego and to concentrate on the details of observation, a methodology that is optimal
for an ecocentric sensibility (177).
Another salient point that demonstrates Thoreau's undeveloped ecocentric
stance is his tendency to personify, especially when he describes Walden Pond.
Thoreau often describes Walden as a living thing. He notes, "the lips of the lake on
which no beard grows. It licks its chaps from time to time" (1076); the lake is
"earth's eye," and the "fuviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes"
(1078); Squaw Walden had her revenge (1134); and quite surprisingly, it also
"whoops and farts" (1072). Compare Cooper’s lake description:
20
The lake very beautiful; there is often, at this time of year, a delicacy and
softness in the waters, produced, no doubt, by the atmosphere of as still
spring day, which is in beautiful harmony with the season. (36)
The spring season takes central stage as the regulator of the pond's tranquil
condition, and nowhere does Cooper feel the need to personify any aspect of the
lake's qualities. Cooper appears to be deliberately self-conscious about using
anthropocentric comparisons while addressing nature. One day in spring, Cooper
writes; "the birds seem to have collected there for our special amusement, but in
reality, were attracted, no doubt, by some insects from the water" (40). When
Cooper addresses human "progress" and the ways that man reacts to nature, she
calls for preservation, urging "progress" to be coupled with responsibility. An
ecological awareness manifests itself as she emphasizes the interconnectedness of
phenomena and on natural processes occurring in seasonal time. Nature itself
remains the central focus whenever Cooper reflects on the force of movement as
civilization overcomes the landscape. Cooper is also clearly ecological minded when
she acknowledges that education about the local and global environment is integral
for people to maintain a reciprocal relationship with nature, and a view towards a
sustainable world.
Rural Hours and its Intertexual Significance
21
Rural Hours is the first major work of environmental nonfiction by an
American woman writer and precedes Walden by four years. Thoreau alludes to
Cooper briefly in his journal on October 8th, 1852, after having been amazed at a
loon's ability to dive down to the depths of Walden and remain underwater for so
long. Thoreau mentions a newspaper account that says a loon was caught in Seneca
Lake, New York at a depth of eighty feet on hooks set for trout, then adds, "Miss
Cooper has said the same" {Journal (380). Cooper relates this event and several
other fine points of the local population at Cooperstown in the second entry in Rural
Hours, an attention to detail Thoreau must have appreciated. Thoreau makes use of
the seasons in a deliberate way in his writings and may have been influenced by the
way Cooper brought realism and force to her depictions of a specific rural place
through the variability and changeability that come with the seasons. Michael P.
Branch, in "Five Generations of Literary Coopers," is bold enough to declare that
"circumstantial evidence hints that some of the most memorable passages in Walden
may have been suggested by several of Cooper's own passages on loons, wild
berries, the perceived bottomlessness of the lake, and the seasonal breaking up of
the ice” (Quoted in New Essays on Rural Hours and Other Works 68). What is
important here for me is not the extent Thoreau was influenced by Rural Hours as
much that it emphasizes that there is a long tradition of environmental nonfiction of
which Thoreau draw upon. Buell claims that Thoreau was working through the
22
androcentric cultural constraints of the time in Walden to establish an
"environmentally responsive vision" that can be seen in his later works (23). I feel
Thoreau had access to models like Cooper that demonstrates a more coherent
ecocentric position, but he had a different agenda in composing Walden. Thoreau
deliberately chose to write about nature as a springboard for his meditations about
society and how nature can be used for spiritual rejuvenation. Environmental
mindfulness is not Thoreau’s final goal in Walden; a guide for human betterment is
the objective.
Walden is very self-reflective; everything that Thoreau tells us about nature
tells us as much about his own thoughts about humanity as about the phenomena he
observes. When listening to screech owls in the chapter, "Sounds," he likens their
hooting to "mourning women," "a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual
consolations of suicidal lovers," that reflect for Thoreau mortality and nature’s way
to "stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a human being."
Not disturbed by the owl's call, Thoreau exults that these creatures express our
mourning for unsatisfied questions about life's passing, and exclaims; "Let them do
the idiotic and maniacal hooting fo r men "(1047 emphasis added). In the chapter,
"Brute Neighbors," Thoreau comes across a war between two races of ants, "red
republicans on the one hand, and black imperialists on the other," and meditates
about how much they behave like men. Thoreau sees an Achilles and Patroclus in a
23
couple of ants, imagines that each army has "their respected musical
bands...playing their national airs" and were undoubtedly fighting for a principle" of
some sort (1100-01). Thoreau's ant war symbolizes the way humans can become
brute neighbors with each other, and his reflection that the owl’s call connotes
human mourning are not instances of a naturalist's thinking; it is a way to use
nature as a gauge to reflect human experience. This is not to say that Thoreau did
not share his concerns about an increasingly depleted landscape and the lack of
local inhabitants o become familiar with local nature's particular elements, only that
Walden’s foremost message is to align our lives through Nature's lessons to live
more simply and spiritually.
Cooper, like Thoreau, is concerned that there is not much experiential
knowledge of nature. In Cooper's Introduction to John Leonard Knapp’s Country
Rambles in England, or, Journal o f a Naturalist, in an effort to get her American
readers to become acquainted with their local habitat, Cooper laments; "As a people,
we are still, in a sense, half aliens to the country Providence has given us; there is
much ignorance among us regarding the creatures which held the land as their own
long before our forefathers trod the soil" (Quoted in Essays 20). Environmental
consciousness starts with a sense of one's own place. Cooper accentuates this point
with the dictum; "Persuade a careless, indolent man to take an interest in his
24
garden, and his reformation has begun" (Rural 8 1 ).1 Cooper also calls on
numerous texts in her discussions about nature because even one's own local
environs are incomprehensible without textual clarification.
Seasonal Construct of Rural Hours
Cooper uses the seasons and its processes as the central organizing device in
Rural Hours as a means to demonstrate the way phenomena and natural elements
shape and regulate human activities, which in turn helps her readers to see their
connection to the environment in a more ecocentric manner. Cooper achieves an
environmentally orientated voice by withdrawing herself as much as possible from
the narrated scene and becoming merely a recorder of natural phenomena.
Describing the late transition of seasons on an early spring day, Cooper documents:
The snow is going at last; the country has the dappled look belonging
properly to March in this part of the world; broad openings of brown earth
are seen everywhere, in the fields and on the hillsides. The roads are deep
with mud; the stagecoaches are ten and eleven hours coming the twenty-two
miles over the hills from the railroad north of us. (8)
1 While scanning for the original of this dictum I came across the phrase in The
Genesee Farmer A Monthly Journal Devoted to Agriculture and Horticulture (1851),
which attests to Cooper's practice of keeping up to date with contemporary print
about ecological concerns.
25
Here nature, not man, is the protagonist. Cooper shows us how human activity
is governed by seasonal cycles, which often cannot be predicted. The late spring
thaw bogs down human traffic, thus conditioning people to its seasonal whims. The
unpredictability of nature and the control it has over human affairs lends a
reverential tone to Cooper's journal. The seasons in the northeastern United States
are well delineated and representative of the systematic unfolding of temporal time.
Winter can be freezing while summer blistering. Spring and the fall constitute
transitions of renewal and maturity respectively. The seasons can be counted upon
in its basic sequence of events, yet Cooper continually reminds the reader that the
seasons are not static, and are infinitely unpredictable, and cautions us against
season categorizations. In her essay, "A Dissolving View," Cooper describes autumn
as "Variable, changeable, not alike twice in succession, gay and brilliant yesterday,
more languid and pale today" (Quoted in Essays, 4). In late March, Cooper relates
how the coming spring keeps the inhabitants of Cooperstown in suspense
concerning its lackadaisical arrival, and that it best serves "those who are content to
await the natural order of things" by observing the little signs of its eventual return,
like "her presence in the sky, now in the waters, with the returning birds, upon some
single tree, in a solitary plant" (13). Cooper emphasizes the lack off control we have
over the seasons that entangle our lives, and ascribes a humble approach to ecoconsciousness, inciting an observation of minute phenomena that serves as
26
emissaries of the coming spring, deepening one's sense of the connectedness of
environmental parts to the whole.
Often Cooper expresses awe about things in the face of seasonal vagaries;
"Every object here has a deeper merit than our wonder can fathom; each has a
beauty beyond our full perception," Cooper considers as she contemplates "the
humble moss beneath our feet" to the "sky gleaming above in sacred blue" (125-6).
Cooper describes a "singular appearance" at the close of a warm summer’s day as
her little traveling party regarded a rainbow that spanned the valley, only to spy at
the next moment "two other fainter bows...the principle arch was visible, perhaps,
half an hour, fading slowly away with the twilight" (107). Nobody in this party had
seen anything of the kind before, and this grand display must have left the party
impressed with the way nature can astound when seen in its particulars. On a cold,
early spring day, spring in name only, Cooper and company passed under some
maple trees and:
observed several with small icicles hanging from their lower branches,
although there was neither ice nor snow on the adjoining trees; [they] broke
one off, and it proved to be a congealed sap, which had exuded from the
branch and frozen there during the night; natural sugar candy, as it were,
growing on the tree. (4-5)
27
Unexpected events take on a somber tone when Cooper voices her
disappointment in the way people can thoughtlessly act upon nature. Two days
before the delightful discovery of nature's "sugar candy," Cooper becomes
disconcerted when she finds "several noble pines, old friends and favorites, had
been felled unknown to us during the winter; unsightly stumps and piles of chips
were all that remained" where those majestic trees had once stood. Cooper laments
that their fall has "changed the character" and "altered the whole aspect" of the
surrounding landscape (6). Cooper strikes a cord here about the sense of
permanence of man's incursion on a specific habitat. The loss of a single group of
trees has the power to transform an area aesthetically and ecologically. The “stumps
and piles of woodchips" are likened not only as a corporeal remnant of the trees'
demise but also manifests as their spiritual essence as Cooper recalls them as "old
friends and favorites." Nature is other but intricately connected to those with ecoconsciousness. While the seasons can create minor disturbances for the people as
the weather constrains certain activities for them, with patience and humility all can
be content that in the natural order of things nature will relent and equilibrium
reached. Not so for the pines, which took hundreds of years to mature.
Nature's proceedings are often unforeseen. For this reason we strive to make
inferences about the apparent structure of nature to endeavor to gain a sense of the
world's workings. Throughout Rural Hours, Cooper can be seen doing this as she
28
elicits the seasonal networking and ecological connectedness of all natural
phenomena through careful observation of seemingly simple occurrences. Heavy
rains in summer create muddy pools that in turn attract butterflies (124). The
Virginia Creepers turning cherry red are the first leaves to change and indicate the
coming of autumn (184). Cooper describes how a local flower, the Blue bell, may
have gotten its name; "their flowering about the time when birds collect in flocks,
preparatory to their flight southward, as though the blossoms rung a warning chime
in the woods, to draw them together” (176). These excerpts reflect Cooper’s
attempts to discover greater truths through particulars in an environmental
framework.
As stated above, Cooper's narrative spotlights a seasonal view of time where
human interaction with nature proceeds on nature's own terms. All nature
participates in these cyclic patterns, and by taking a careful yearly inventory of the
change of seasons and its manifestations on the local landscape of Cooperstown,
Cooper can make qualified reports about seasonal continuity. This continuity is
grounded in the cycle of death and renewal of natural processes. Cooper reflects
that even the trees, which has the longest existence in the forest, "know the changes
of life and death" and "have their allotted period when the mosses of Time gather
upon their branches; when, touched by decay, they break and crumble to dust" Life
and death are found concurrently in presence to one another in many of Cooper's
29
excursions. As if she is delivering a sermon about nature’s life cycles, Cooper
continues with a homily:
We raise our eyes, we see collected in one company vigorous trunks, the oak,
the pine, firm in the strength of maturity; by their side stand a young group,
elm, and birch, and maple, their supple branches playing in the breeze, gay,
and fresh as youth itself; and yonder, rising in unheeded gloom, we behold a
skeleton trunk, and an old fir, every branch broken, every leaf fallen,—dull,
still, sad, like the finger of Death. (126)
Cooper remarks that "the perpetual presence of death” should give us reason to
pause and contemplate the graces of nature’s cycles, "but this subdued spirit is far
from gloomy or oppressive, since it never fails to be relieved by the cheerful
animation of living beauty." Spring brings new growth, which goes unchecked.
Young plants overwhelm the fallen shattered log, bringing elegance and "softening
the gloomy wreck" of the fallen tree. Cooper continues to describe the rejuvenation
of life and its splendor, concluding the need to experience nature's "noble harmony"
(127).
Changes in a landscape as well as seasonal variability can seem imperceptible
to most of us who do not inspect their environs on a regular basis. Yet even Cooper,
in her meticulous, daily survey of nature is confronted from time to time with
seasonal inconsistencies that help her reexamine any assumptions made about
30
seasonal "order" she may have had. On October 5th, Cooper, describing the
autumn's foliage, relates, "Although there are certain general rules regarding the
coloring of trees, they still vary with different seasons." However, Cooper is
completely surprised by what she finds in a lone aspen:
the general color of this tree is a decided yellow, nor do I ever remember to
have seen its foliage pink before this instance; still there was no mistake
about the matter, the leaves belonged to the large aspen, and they were
clearly pink. (197)
For Cooper, rethinking these seasonal expectations about the color of leaves serves
to elicit a sense of humility concerning what we think we know about nature, a
humility Cooper wants the reader to share in order to grasp that assumptions of
nature's processes should not be taken for granted, and that there is always more to
be learned about natural cycles.
Cooper accentuates how our perceptions of time limits our ability to see how
man’s ostensible small actions in development actually take on a great toll in
retrospect: "whenever we pause to recall what has been done in this secluded valley
during the lifetime of one generation, we must needs be struck with new
astonishment" It only takes a few minutes, says Cooper, to bring down a stately
tree; it would take centuries to have a seed of this years cone to produce its equal on
the same spot (134). Preservation entails the human concept of time to coordinate
31
itself with seasonal time. Inherent in this idea is to slow down and take time to
experience and get a better understanding of nature, which begins in one's own
environmental place.
As Cooper narrates specific changes she has witnessed in a distinct place, she
calls upon us to likewise witness the changes in our own local environments. Cooper
believes that common sense should tell us that since humans are tied to the land, it
benefits us to take an interest in its conservation. She understood that trees can be
intelligently cultivated for use and be sustained through conservative measures, and
deplores how "mature trees, young saplings, and last year's seedlings, are all
destroyed at on blow of the axe or by fire...without any attempt at cultivation, or any
endeavor to foster new wood" [132). Cooper knew that human expansion is
inevitable, but she also understood before many of her contemporaries that any
development should not exceed the land's ability to sustain itself, and that an
awareness of the natural cycles of the land would insure that nature could continue
to bestow its gifts upon mankind. Finally, Cooper underscores the moral benefits of
ecological mindedness; the health of one's local environment reflects the highprincipled health of the culture; "When planting a young wood, in preserving a fine
grove...we look beyond ourselves" in gratitude to the land (134).
32
Susan Fenimore Cooper demonstrates an ecocentric point of view
through early American bioregionalism in what was an original style when she
delivers her message concerning sustainability and the conservation of the land. The
last printing of Rural Hours appeared in 1876 and slowly faded from scholastic
attention soon after. The rediscovery of Cooper’s work in the late twentieth-century
helped scholars reevaluate the tradition of nineteenth-century nature writing and
how authors influence, and are influenced, by other writers. Another contemporary
writer who sets herself apart from other women writers of her genre is Emily
Dickinson, whose poetry subverts the expected conventions about the ways of
experiencing and relating to nature. We should not neglect to glean from Dickinson
her contributions to the conversation of nature and culture in nineteenth-century
America. Cooper saw the love of nature "found in the character of American verse,”
and asks the reader to recognize the "natural riches" these writers contribute to an
ecological sensitivity. Often, Cooper states, one happens upon some pleasing verses
from pens unknown that show "a deeply-felt appreciation of the beauty of the
natural world" (41 Rhyme and Reason, quoted in Essays).
Emily Dickinson's poems were first seeing the light of day in 1891, when most
of the reviews were critical of her unconventional faulty rhymes, skewed syntax,
and jumpy rhythms, but slowely in the following decades the public came to
appreciate Dickinson’s originalities. Dickinson's verse brought a new kind of nature
33
poet, one who can articulate reverence and awe for nature's beauty yet voices
puzzlement about the ambiguity that one must constantly confront when
contemplating the inherent meaning of the natural world and our intrinsic
relationship to it. Like Cooper, Dickinson is known for having an especially keen eye
for capturing the local natural phenomena, but Dickinson nevertheless was no
bioregionalist. Dickinson's appreciation for nature comes in lyrical meditations of
rich metaphorical suggestiveness, and in a voice more anthropocentric than
Cooper's, yet it is not incompatible with deep environmental sensitivities.
Dickinson's powerful but cryptic landscape poetry does not hinder nor erase
nature's relevance as an actual living environment, an important subject in its own
right.
/
34
CHAPTER II
A ROUTE OF EVANESCENCE: EMILY DICKINSON'S ELUSIVE GRAMMAR AND
NATURE AS MYSTICAL ENTITY
New England offers one of the most beautiful natural performances as
autumn's foliage changes from green to brilliant tones of red, vibrant yellows, and
muted brown and tans. The eye is astonished as it beholds landscape panoramas
resembling a mixed palate of striking colors. Come winter the quiet shimmering
snow creates mystical scenes as it blankets the earth. When the countryside
reawakens in spring, a plethora of luxurious flowers greet the grateful observer who
enjoys them throughout the summer.
Each season in New England has its own character and appeal. The Victorian
American culture of Emily Dickinson's age sought to project their relationship to
nature, and to God through these natural processes. Dickinson's Congregational
Christian upbringing stressed the conception of nature as a visible manifestation of
God and that nature instructs us about our ultimate fate through the change of
seasons that replicate the life cycle. Winter, in this sense, mirrors old age and death.
Spring is the expression of resurrection promised in heaven if the believer humbly
adheres to the dictates of Christianity.
35
Dickinson lived in a home and community heavily indoctrinated in these
Congregational Christian precepts, yet she never converted to the church. Dickinson
did not find consolation in the biblical promises as shown through the seasons, and
did not see in nature evidence of God’s promises there. For Dickinson, nature cannot
be fully understood; nature has the power to conceal or reveal. In her nature
poetry, Dickinson attempts to seek out the hidden spirit on the face of the landscape
and express its secret essence. In effect, nature becomes a metaphor for art, in which
Dickinson reciprocates aesthetically the magic envisioned in the real world. The
seasons are likened to spiritual prop-men who shift the scenery around in everunpredictable ways, but the reader comes away with the understanding that the
speaker of these nature poems is awed by the inexplicable splendor of the display.
These speakers resemble a fascinated beholder witnessing a magic act: nature’s
beautiful and mystical performance. Emily Dickinson’s poetical freedom allowed her
to write unconventionally about being a spectator of an enigmatic nature removed
from scriptural meaning, while creating a space for herself as an empowered female
poet of cryptic abilities. Dickinson unsettles the idea of human knowledge and
control over nature, offering an ecopoetic perspective of natural phenomena as
autonomous.
36
This chapter reveals the formal and stylistic techniques Emily Dickinson
uses in her poetry to depict nature as showcasing a mystical performance. Like the
nature that is expressed in the world, Dickinson never fails to surprise the reader
with poetic ingenuity when describing natural scenes. To better understand how
Dickinson works her own mystical representations, the reader needs to examine
this idiosyncratic verse through Dickinson's experimental grammar. Dickinson's
poetry becomes elusive by incorporating compression, which creates a dense
narrative while also accelerating movement between stanza stages (Miller 24).
Disjunction and unexpected grammatical breaks undermine the reader’s
expectations, yet in Dickinson's nature art, the outcome is a splendid rendering of
natural phenomena. Additionally, her reduced syntax and parallel structures result
in obscure relationships between subject and object, depicting nature's complex
interrelatedness as difficult to ascertain and inspiring a sensibility of environmental
humility. Also examined in this chapter is Dickinson's use of irony and humor in
poems to destabilize what can be known about nature, and the grammar Dickinson
uses to describes nature as a “process" in order to reflect its mutability and magical
connotations. This magic-like process is created by Dickinson's imagery of motion,
lights, and color. A look at Dickinson’s particular situation and attitudes in
conjunction with other contemporary women poets in Victorian New England will
37
give a sense of Dickinson's decision and ability to subvert expected conventions
and write unconventionally about nature as a mystical entity.
Publication in nineteenth-century America was dominated by men in a culture
that expected women poets to restrict their writing to domestic themes. In order to
be published and recognized, women needed to adhere to the demands of these
publishers. Some appropriate themes and topics available to women poets were the
consolation poem, sentimental poems of noble deeds, a woman’s secret sorrow for a
lost love, and reflections on and about nature. The changing seasons was a topic
used by these poets to reflect their changing moods and feelings about the society in
which they lived. Yet, these poets were expected to uphold the patriarchal social
values of the time. Cheryl Walker explains in her study, American Women Poets o f
the Nineteenth Century, that, "unlike the moderns, nineteenth-century women poets
typically saw the role of art as an intensification of familiar aspects of life rather
than as a separate realm with its own, sometimes antisocial, values and resonances"
(xxvii). Although Emily Dickinson used the same tropes as seen in this period’s
female poetry, she did not allow herself to be restrained by what she wanted to say
in her writing. As a private, unpublished poet, Dickinson did not need to use art as
an intensification of the familiar patriarchal social values of the culture, but reserved
for herself the agency to create at times a different realm with her own set of values
and beliefs. Dickinson's perceptions of nature can almost be seen as blasphemous,
38
as if she re-creates the world in defiance of Christian dogmatic belief. As Charles
R. Anderson states in Emily Dickinson: Stairway o f Suspense:
These perceptions are given expression by her novel
use of language which she is convinced has creative
power, like God’s. They are magical transformations,
which the consciousness can make out of the world by a
new union of word, thing, and thought (87).
Writing for private catharsis as well as for family and friends, Dickinson had the
freedom and power to express herself in an original way, often subverting the
accepted convictions of Victorian, New England America. Dickinson's treatment of
nature is at odds with the Christian tradition of her upbringing and the society in
which she lived.
Dickinson's Congregational religious education and the popular conventional
Romantic literature about man's relationship to nature both infer a benevolence
manifested in the natural world that is free of deception and understandable by
mankind. As Cynthia G. Wolff states in her biography, Emily Dickinson, "the
Congregational faith of Dickinson's youth had consistently instructed conscientious
Christians to scrutinize the Book of Nature in order to find evidence of God’s
promises there" (282). Nature here is represented as outside of God, and subject to
do God's bidding. In this theology nature's symbols and emblems exhibited through
natural processes had been created by God to illustrate Christian teachings. Nature’s
39
unwavering, consistent laws are taken as proof of God controlling the universe,
which serves to bring consolation to believers. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s popular
lecture and essay Nature, transformed in secular manner man's relationship to
nature. Emerson claims that nature is an expression of the divine and a means of
understanding it. As manifestations of creation, each individual holds a key to
unlock the mysteries of nature. William Wordsworth avers in his Preface to Lyrical
Ballads, that "man and nature [are] essentially adapted to each other," and that there
are “volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe," which
signify a cognitive willful nature (Norton, 292). Wordsworth maintains that a
receptive observer, adapted to nature, is able to gain an understanding about
nature. Both the regional religious teaching and popular literature of Dickinson’s
Victorian American culture taught of a beneficent reciprocal relationship with a
nature that is knowable. A look at Dickinson's nature poetry and personal letters
alluding to nature convince the reader that Dickinson is astonished about natural
phenomena, that she sees nature as a separate, unknowable entity, both impersonal
and unpredictable.
Dickinson opens the poem, "What mystery pervades a well!" by exclaiming the
inscrutability of even the most commonplace things, and then turns to the larger
sphere of nature in general:
What mystery pervades a well!
The water lives so far—
40
A Neighbor from another world
Residing in a jar
Whose limit none have ever seen,
But just his lid of glass—
Like looking every time you please
In an abyss's face!
The grass does not appear afraid,
I often wonder he
Can stand so close and look so bold
At what is awe to me.
Related somehow they may be,
The sedge stands next the sea
Where he is floorless
And does no timidity betray—
But nature is a stranger yet;
The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost.
To pity those that know her not
Is helped by the regret
That those who know her, know her less
The nearer her they get. [F 1433]
The speaker claims that there is much beneath the surface of things that
obscures her understanding of what is visualized. Even a nearby object, like a "well,"
has an abstract quality about it that makes it a thing of "mystery." The well is quite
familiar to us visually, "A Neighbor," yet ironically its abstract quality, a "limit none
have ever seen" beneath the surface "lid" makes it comparable to an entirely
unknown entity, "an abyss." The speaker is awed by the anomaly of the space and
41
distance felt when contemplating the simple things of nature, and feels a sense of
separation with this well "from another world." The third and fourth stanzas
demonstrate that unlike the speaker who feels like an outsider, nature is
comfortable with itself in all things great and small; the grass does not “timidly
betray" when in proximity to the well or the "floorless" ocean. The speaker next
ridicules those like Wordsworth and Emerson who wrote profusely about nature
while claiming a reciprocal affinity with it. The speaker implies that these writers
familiarize themselves with what is pleasing and tranquil in nature but do not look
at the complete picture; that there are "haunted," or ominous things about nature
that these writers have not been able to capture and have not "simplified" the spirit,
or "ghost" of, like death. As death is an integral part of the life cycle, and nobody has
ever visited and returned in a corporeal way, "those who know her most" really
deceive themselves about full knowledge of nature's processes. The speaker also
critiques scientific inquiry. With every breakthrough of understanding about natural
phenomena, "The nearer they [scientists] get" to "know" about natural processes,
the more additional questions arise to be answered.
Dickinson enunciates her opinion of nature as an unknown, ethereal being in
many of her correspondences. A letter Dickinson sent to the publisher, T. W.
Higginson, in 1876 states; "Nature is a Haunted House—but Art—a House that tries
to be haunted" (Johnson, Selected Letters, 236). The image of nature as haunted
42
suggests that Dickinson imagines nature observing her, ghost-like, while she in
turn observes its processes. Nature then has an essence, which intentionally puts on
a show for anyone who wishes to observe closely. Dickinson, through her speaker in
the poem, claims that nature is not knowable, that it reveals but also conceals things
about its processes. The observers in Dickinson's nature poetry consistently express
a sense of awe and surprise for the enigmatic performance nature puts on. Unlike
the cocksure nature writers who presume to know nature and "cite her most,"
Dickinson attempts to capture nature's elusive spirit, or "ghost" and express that
sense of obscurity in her poetry. As a poet who values language as a means of
expressing her individuality, Dickinson's rejection of nature as knowable in a large
part has to do with patriarchal linguistics and the prevailing contemporary notion of
nature as "other," while feminizing the natural world as "Mother Nature."
Critics Margaret Homans and James McIntosh both treat the subject of a
masculine based language projected toward a feminine nature, and examine
Dickinson's acuity in realizing that this connection shackles female ability to express
a separate individuality from this constraining language. In Homans’ Women Writers
and Poetic Identity, the dominant male tradition sees otherness in anything outside
of his subjectivity. Nature, and obviously women fall into this category. An
43
added difficulty for women's subjective individuality is the propensity of
referring to nature as "Mother Nature." Associating women with nature reinforces
women’s otherness linguistically. For Dickinson to be identified with nature would
be to restrict her ability to write subjectively about nature (12-14). Dickinson
personifies nature in her poetry, interchangeably referring to nature as both male
and female, thus eliminating a static representation of nature as feminized. In the
poem above, nature is described as male in the first four stanzas and as female in the
last two. Yet there is evidence that this version of the poem had originally been
intended to depict nature as male throughout. An altered version of this poem in
Johnson’s Variorum edition of The Poems o f Emily Dickinson reveals that Dickinson
substituted "But Sue is a stranger yet" for the word nature, which complicates the
reader's understanding of the author’s intention. Was Dickinson merely jesting with
her sister-in-law, and did Dickinson intend this alteration to be a final copy? It is
more likely that Dickinson enjoyed the power to alter languages’ potential for
meaning mid poem. Dickinson understood that metaphors involved in language are
Active and thus was able to free herself, like a wizard, from a woman's identification
with nature by writing in her own created language about a separate natural world
unknowable yet mystically enchanted. McIntosh points out in Nimble
44
Believing: Dickinson and the Unknown, that through Dickinson's separate
perspective on nature, she can "accurately observe natural phenomena" while being
in charge of inventing through her language reconfigurations of nature (149).
Personification of nature usually invokes the human urge to understand it on our
own terms, but significantly for Dickinson's poetry in an environmental light,
personification never fosters visions of understanding and control over natural
phenomena.
Unlike Dickinson's contemporary American women poets, her unique grammar
inverts and reverses the traditional patriarchal language, imaginatively depicting
nature in elusive imagery. Emily Dickinson's poetic style is contrary to the
conventions that contemporary female poets were expected to adhere to in order to
be published. Dickinson used various hymn and ballad meters, a feature of Isaac
Watts' blending of the two forms for Christian service in the seventeenth century,
which incorporates irregular rhymes. Dickinson creates ambiguity in her verse
through these irregular rhymes and is never consistent in tone or voice. Domestic
sentimentality may be replaced with a stoical male persona, a trusting or even
disgruntled child's voice, while some poems exhibit humor and others, pathos.
Dickinson becomes anyone or anything she chooses, and can metamorphose mid­
poem like a conjurer and surprise the reader’s expectations. Walker explains that
during the nineteenth century women wrote expansively not only in the genre of the
45
novel but also in poetry, with the aim to be digressive rather than concise (xxviii).
A major component to Dickinson's poetry, and a technique that increases the
ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning in a verse, and thereby lends to its mystical
properties is her use of compression.
Compression is a way of expressing more than the totality of a poem’s words.
Diction, imagery, metaphor, and symbols emerge when parts of speech like
prepositions and prepositional phrases are stripped down. Since these words and
phrases are not there to link ideas expressed, gaps of meaning occur, and at the
same time the syntax becomes complicated enough to multiply the possibilities for
interpretation in a poem (Miller 25-27). Dickinson’s poetical description of the
capriciousness of nature, its circus-like showcase in one moment and its magical
ability to vanish into thin air in the next, illustrates her use of compression:
I've known a Heaven, like a Tent—
To wrap it's shining Yards—
Pluck up it’s stakes, and disappear—
Without the sound of Boards
Or Rip of Nail—Or Carpenter—
But just the miles of Stare—
That signalize a Show’s Retreat—
In North America—
No Trace—no Figment of the Thing
That dazzled, Yesterday,
No Ring—no Marvel—
Men, and Feats—
Dissolved as utterly—
As Bird's far Navigation
Discloses just a Hue
46
A plash of Oars, a Gaiety—
Then swallowed up, of View. [F257]
This poem compresses many images together. An unspecified but exhilarating
display of nature likened to a traveling circus, silently packs and retreats from the
speaker's observation in a ghostly fashion as if it were a bird disappearing on the
horizon. Tucked into the first stanza is the image of Jesus the "Carpenter" who, like
the "Show" has likewise retreated from the observer and lends to the sense of loss in
the poem. The blending of the images of the retreating circus-like atmosphere and
an absent Christ allusion allows Dickinson to safely speak subversively about what
would be unacceptable to contemporary readers. It would take a disciplined reader
to discern the sacrilegious implication of Christ as abandoning man, while in no way
can it be maintained that the poet intended this interpretation. The difficulty lies in
determining what is stated to what is implied. As Christanne Miller states in Emily
Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar, compression "allows the poet to express more than
one thought at a time or to disguise on thought behind another" (26). Miller adds
that this compression also gives Dickinson the ability to speak like an oracle. The
reader needs to determine for herself where the meaning my lie in a poem with a
riddling quality (27-28). Words used such as "Carpenter" and "Shows retreat" are
not given a stable relationship in terms of what they define.
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Dickinson's use parataxis achieves this process of cumulative metaphors
that blur definitive interpretation. Parataxis increases the potentiality of meaning in
verse. Two images, unlike in comparison to each other, are juxtaposed without a
clear connection. In the second stanza in the poem above Dickinson layers idea onto
idea without explanation in a way that produces potential metaphors to an
interpretive reader. Just as nature’s wonderful performance has slipped away,
leaving "No Trace," along with the allegorical "Men, and Feats" which made the
spectacle up, the speaker also implies metaphorically that mankind and anything he
accomplishes on earth is lost to time and "dissolves as utterly" as a bird lost on the
horizon. In this poem Dickinson uses a speaker who mirrors an exhilarated
spectator of a magic feat who is then mesmerized with "miles of stare” after
witnessing a nature’s disappearing act with a bird. The speaker has difficulty
understanding how nature achieves this vacuity, yet is impressed. Dickinson has the
same effect on the reader of this poem, who needs to pay careful attention as the
poet moves rapidly from image to image, sometimes omitting an obvious
connection, like a sleight of the hand trick in these verses. The reader often suspects
she is missing something, but is always conscious that the poetry being read is
somewhat miraculous.
Dickinson also incorporates disjunction as a means of eliciting astonishment in
the reader and creating a bewitching image of nature. Breaks that are not expected
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in the middle of a thought, or the lack of punctuation that would otherwise
complete a thought grammatically, give Dickinson the power to offset the reader's
usual understanding of things and aid him in re-visualizing nature as Dickinson does
in her unique, imaginative way. Irony also complements the destabilization of what
can be known about natural processes in these nature poems. In Dickinson's poem,
"Delight is as the flight," a speaker concentrates on the ephemeral nature of life and
beauty:
Delight is as the flight—
Or the Ratio of it,
As the Schools would say—
The Rainbow's way—
A Skein
Flung colored, after Rain,
Would suit as bright,
Except that flight
Were Aliment—
"If it would last"
I asked the East,
When that Bent Stripe
Struck up my childish
Firmament—
And I, for glee,
Took Rainbows, as the common way,
And empty skies
The Eccentricity—
And so with Lives—
And so with Butterflies—
Seen magic—through the fright
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That they will cheat the sight—
And Dower latitudes far on—
Some sudden morn—
Our portion—in the fashion—
Done— [F 317]
The speaker of the first stanza is a wondering child who questions nature
about what is "common,” or to be expected concerning the natural world. The child's
incomplete thoughts jump from line to line as she attempts to order meaning in
what is seen. In the first stanza the speaker seems to be trying to 'figure nature out,'
as if she were doing classroom mathematics. The child pauses in between each
thought, shown in the poem as dashes; "Delight," or the enjoyment of something, is
the "Ratio,” or comparison of the distance, "Flight," to the arc of "The rainbow's
way." Delight in something, like an intangible rainbow, lasts as long as its duration,
or "way." Next, ambiguity arises when the speaker implies that "flight were an
Aliment," which means the duration and passing of something is supportive and
nourishing: the ephemeral nature of delightful things is what makes them special
when they come around again. Things like rainbows are magical occurrences. Yet
the quotation of the last line in the first stanza, "If it would last," brings to mind an
image of a child wishing with all her heart that the rainbow will stay and not
abandon her. The dash after Aliment presents this double interpretation, creating
two possible meanings. The child’s stance becomes clearer in the second stanza. The
speaker's childish imagination sees a "Firmament," a tangible attribute of the
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rainbow, and is astonished, an emotion Dickinson creates through the dash, as if
the child is taking in a deep breath of surprise. The child therefore takes the
imagined tangible rainbow as the expected occurrence, and "empty skies," a
perceptually ephemeral nothingness as the "eccentricity" of nature.
An older speaker in the last stanza ironically adopts this reversal of what
adults take to be known in the natural world. This new tone, which is a disjunction
from the previous child's tone, is sage-like, comparable to a teacher instructing
through metaphor about life's mutability. The reader is accustomed to imagine that
there are things in life that are common and stable and will be with us day to day,
like the "empty sky,” and that little wonders like a rainbow are a fleeting thing. The
speaker reminds the reader that in actuality it is our "lives" that are fleeting.
Disjunction in the final stanza creates what Miller describes as an unusual grouping
of images that nevertheless "allows for creative reordering of what formerly
appeared to be conclusively known" (46). The speaker groups the lives of people
and butterflies through the dash and anaphora: "And so with Lives-/ And so with
Butterflies"/, and says that, like magic, life is here today and gone tomorrow, that we
will move on to further "latitudes" one day. The reader needs to work carefully
through the last few lines to understand that the speaker, like an oracle, ironically
implies our separation from nature after death is an immanent part of our struggle
to understand life. "Seen magic," like the appreciation of an enchanting rainbow, is
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juxtaposed with the knowledge and "fright" that they will one day pass on to the
unknown and "cheat the sight” of other natural beautiful displays. As Anderson
relates, Dickinson "knew the ecstasy that makes the heart leap with the upsurge of
the year, and she found it salutary, but any temptation to transcendental union with
nature she punctuated with irony or humor" (83). The implication that we too, like
the rainbow or butterfly, will on a "sudden" magically metamorphose into another
"latitude" accentuates Dickinson’s vision that constant change in nature makes it
difficult to grasp and understand its processes. Indeed, it is "process" and timeless
action that make Dickinson's nature poetry resemble an unpredictable magic act.
Occasionally Dickinson will eliminate compression and disjunction in order to
intensify the impression of the constant and ongoing process of changeability in
nature's showcase. "Blazing in Gold and Quenching in Purple" is a poem that
describes the rise and fall of a personified sun as a dazzling performer, bursting on
stage and putting on an acrobatic performance:
Blazing in Gold and Quenching in Purple
Leaping like Leopards to the Sky
Then at the feet of the old Horizon
Laying her Spotted Face to die
Stooping as low as the Otter's Window
Touching the Roof and tinting the Barn
Kissing her Bonnet to the Meadow
And the Juggler of Day is gone [F321]
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Although personified, nature takes center stage in this poem. The chief
element of this poem that accentuates constant process and the changing of the day
from dawn to dusk are the verbs in present progressive tense: blazing, quenching,
leaping, laying, stooping, touching, tinting, and kissing. The action is unceasing and
inexorable. The energetic rush of the sun's light is continuous as it jumps and
executes visual feats of beauty. Time here is compacted and in accelerated
movement. The usual hours of day last a mere minute in this time-lapse sketch, and
the reader envisions life's processes and change with wonder. Like a "Juggler of
Day," the sun entertains with visual balls of color, "Gold and Quenching Purple" that
are constantly in motion, "Leaping like Leopards" that make it difficult for us to
grasp intellectually because of its phenomenal beauty, and physically, because of
lights' abstract quality. The speaker also implies our own swift journey through life
as we rapidly progress through time; the sun is likened to a woman with an aged,
"Spotted" face, "Stooping" like an elderly person, and "Kissing" the "Meadow" and
natural world for the last time before she is gone from this world. The sun’s
progress and time's control and changing effect over our corporeal bodies are things
we cannot contain or quite fully understand, but we can value the beauty and
wonder of life and nature if we stop to admire the performance.
Dickinson fully captures an instance of nature's dynamic process through a
poem about the wonderful vitality of a hummingbird in "A Route of Evanescence.”
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The visual imagery is delivered in blocks of discrete words, rendering a blending
of movement, color, and atmosphere, which create an obscure but magical rendition
of this exotic and elusive creature.
A Route of Evanescence,
With a revolving Wheel—
A Resonance of Emerald
A Rush of Cochineal—
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts it's tumbled Head—
The Mail from Tunis—probably,
An easy Morning's Ride— [F 1489]
"Evanescence" is the tendency for something to "fade out of sight," or "melt
into thin air" and disappear" (OED). The hummingbird's movement is so fast that
the human eye has difficulty picking it up, but what the eye does see is something
remarkably beautiful and otherworldly in this tiny bird's magical ability to hover
one second, and disappear into thin air the next. Dickinson conjures up in verse the
same attributes of elusiveness as the hummingbird does on our senses when we spy
it in nature. The reader at first has difficulty piecing together the fragmentary
snapshots of color, movement, and air in verse, but with patient observation the
image emerges and the reader is rewarded with a glimpse of the hummingbird's
elusive essence. The poem begins with action-orientated nouns that emphasize
vitality and evasive flight. A "Route," or path, of "Evanescence" is problematic for the
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observer who cannot see or comprehend how the sprite-like bird moves through
time and space so quickly. The hummingbird has a path it follows, but for the
observer it becomes illusionary. The bird's rapid wing action is likened to a
"revolving Wheel" that creates a "Resonance," or humming sound, and reverberates
the tiny body in a way that makes its beautiful colors appear as a blur. The
"Emerald" is a rare gem, just as witnessing the hummingbird is a rare treat, and
"Cochineal" is a scarlet dye extracted from an insect of the same name, reinforcing
the notion that an organic animal is generating this miraculous flight. The poet
suggests the hummingbird brings the flowers to life by the rapid movement of its
wings; every flower "Adjusts its tumbled [wind swept] Head" because the air
current of the wing's rapid movement creates turbulence. The hummingbird thus is
not only magic-like in itself, but has influence on things outside of itself, like the
impression it makes on the speaker of the poem and also the reader of the poem.
The final two lines aver that this otherworldly bird is so evanescent, so much
bordering on what is present to our senses as to what is absent, that it would be "An
easy Morning's Ride" for the hummingbird to get from New England to Tunis in a
jiffy. Dickinson's accentuation of action, processes, and changeability in nature
create abstraction, in what cannot be grasped about nature. A carnival-like
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wondrous day packs up and vanishes like a traveling circus; an uncommon
rainbow retreats to other latitudes just the same as everyday people and butterflies;
a juggler sun entertains us in an energetic rush, reminding us of how fleeting the
drama of life is; and the more we seek answers in order to know more about the
world, the more questions arise even for the self-proclaimed wisest men.
Miller claims that Dickinson "finds language's greatest power in abstraction, in
what cannot be found in nature,” and that this abstraction "of meaning and language
liberates her to speak as she might not otherwise dare" (153). Dickinson's
abstraction works to subvert Christian symbolism of nature. Those signs and
emblems that were believed to represent the Divinity's benevolent intentions,
makes the explicable inexplicable in Dickinson's hands. In a letter to the publisher,
Higginson, Dickinson states that her "Lexicon" was her "only companion" (Johnson,
Selected Letters, 172). Words give power to a poet who does not embrace society's
Christian patriarchal language, and Dickinson is able to reason freely in good
conscience by unshackling herself from that language. As Wolff efficiently states in
her biography of Dickinson; "The notion that an individuals command over words
was necessarily given over to God as concomitant of faith raise fundamental
problems for this girl whose "fall into language" had proved such a source of
strength" (92).
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Dickinson distances herself from the confining language of her society in
which unwavering faith in Christian teachings would limit her ability to freely
reason about nature as an unknowable entity. In the poem, "The Skies cant keep
their secret," the speaker not only claims that nature's secrets are not obtainable,
but that she prefers not to know, as if the wonder and mystery of creation holds
more attraction than bland predictability:
The Skies cant keep their secret!
They tell it to the Hills—
The Hills just tell the Orchids—
And they—the Daffodils!
A Bird—by chance—that goes that way—
Soft overhears the whole—
If I should bribe the little Bird—
Who knows but she would tell?
I think I wont—however—
It's finer—not to know—
If Summer were an axiom —
What sorcery had snow ?
So keep your secret—Father!
I would not—if I could—
Know what the Sapphire Fellows, do,
In your new-fashioned world! [F 213]
In this poem the speaker uses irony by saying the "Skies," or nature, is unable
to withhold "secrets” about its essentiality. The reality is that nature's separate
attributes speak openly amongst themselves, but the speaker, and humans in
general, are not privy to this information. The skies "tell it to the Hills" in the form of
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rain. The refreshed soils of the hills enliven the "Orchids” in an image of spring's
regeneration, or Christian rebirth, yet the speaker cannot, or will not, participate in
this conversation. The search for meaning in nature through God's signs reflected
there is offset by the speaker's reference to the bird flying "by chance." Nature's
laws and the creatures that make up the world should not operate by chance in an
ordered world created by God. Pondering if she should "bribe the little Bird" for
inside information about things like life and death, the speaker declares, "It's finer—
not to know—." Bribery entails giving a gift, or in this case, a "crumb,” to a recipient
in exchange for an alteration of her behavior. But the speaker does not want to alter
nature, and takes a humble, environmental stance that her interest does not, and
cannot, exceed nature's autonomy. She is happy with the way things are, a
wonderful mystery that elicits awe. "If Summer were an axiom —" and a self-evident,
predictable occurrence that never alters its arrival and duration, what magic, or
"sorcery" would there be in a designated arrival of "snow" in winter-time? The
attributes of surprise and mystery concerning the temperamental moods and
duration of the seasons are what make them fascinating. In the final stanza the
speaker extends a metaphor to include her refusal to know what happens after
death, when souls are reborn in the "new-fashioned world" beyond the present. The
answer may be less desirable than what is experienced in the present. The speaker
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does not want this otherworldly information revealed to her, and so too she does
not want to ask questions about the secrets of her existence now.
Like the speaker, Dickinson is more comfortable and feels an affiliation with
what she perceives through her senses in this world. A letter to her friend, Abiah,
when Dickinson was just sixteen, and at a time when the tug of the Congregational
faith had a stronger influence over her than in her mature years, demonstrates that
even at that early age Dickinson trusted the temporal reason over immaterial faith
of a Christian hereafter. Dickinson states that she is a "stranger" to Abiah’s Christian
beliefs, and she "feel[s] that the world holds a predominant place in [her] affections"
(Johnson, Selected Letters, 9). Even though nature has aspects about it that cannot be
known, it nevertheless is being experienced in the now with fascination. What
awaits us after death is entirely unknown, and there are no adequate tools to grasp
the concept other than with blind faith. Just as the unrevealed secret of a magic act is
what makes a spectacular performance, the speaker prefers a world with periods of
abstract and mystical wonder, to an afterworld of total abstraction.
Dickinson uses a distinct and personal supply of symbolic imagery to portray
these natural phenomena. Whether the proximity of a well paradoxically summons
deep, abysmal awe; a heavenly, carnival-like sky disappears into thin air; or the arc
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of a rainbow measures the ephemeral lives of men, Dickinson does not rely on
one standard set of symbols or metaphors to articulate nature's elusiveness. Wolff
affirms that Dickinson:
never assumes the existence of any coherent system of
symbols; nor does she undertake to invent such a
system. Thus each poem stands alone, an isolated
glimpse into an earthbound secret whose full extent
cannot be charted and whose particulars emerge at
such rare intervals that the essence of nature must
remain forever hidden. (490-91)
By maintaining an abstract, personal lexicon, Dickinson is able to control nature in
an aesthetic way, with the ability to create or destroy, reveal or conceal, just as she
sees nature magically doing. Miller assents that Dickinson's "trick as a poet is to
make the old words new. To do this, she trusts 'Philology/ not God or Nature..."
(147).
Emily Dickinson intends her nature poetry to be as obscure as the natural
phenomena she perceives. Dickinson understands that life, just like the seasons, is
unpredictable and fleeting. There is no way to predict the duration of the seasons,
when fate dictates the length of one’s life, and what mystery lies beyond death. Like
spectators at the world’s magical nature show, we are left to wonder at nature’s
splendor and surprises, without the knowledge of what finally becomes of
everything and everybody in nature's sorcerous hands. An important part of every
magician's performance involves words that have secrecy and exclusivity. Dickinson
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succeeds in matching nature’s obscurity through her personal aesthetic grammar.
As Dickinson’s speakers in her nature poetry exude awe and admiration for the
worlds' magical spectacles, so too does Dickinson’s imagination work magic on her
reader's sensibilities.
A contemporary poet of Dickinson who neither saw nature as alien or
discontinuous from ourselves, and who complements both her local depictions of
nature and Cooper’s regional realism in an alternative view of the natural world is
Walt Whitman. Whitman’s speaker takes the reader through a physical examination
of the earth's simple yet integral living organisms to a broader vision of our physical
environment, and sees the planet as an interconnected living place wrapped up
within the even greater cosmos.
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CHAPTER III
"I AM LARGE...I CONTAIN MULTITUDES”: WHITMAN'S VISION OF COSMIC
DWELLING
When Whitman looks at the things of nature he sees the whole of life in unity, a
fusion of the material and immaterial in a collapse of time. The poet of the age,
Whitman assures us, must be "open [to] the eternity which gives similitude to all
periods and locations and processes and animate and inanimate forms, and which is
the bond of time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness"
(Preface Leaves o f Grass 23). Whitman asks us to reimagine nature as he entices the
secret of existence from his natural surroundings and reveals the forces that define
the relation of individuals to their undivided position in nature, urging his readers
to accept this position in the eternal whole.
In the 1855 Preface of Leaves o f Grass, Whitman sees the totality of being in all
things, however small; "The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he
breathes into anything that was before thought small it dilates with the grandeur
and life of the universe" (10). As with the poet, Whitman rescues unappreciated
things and individuals and fuses them with the larger, collapsing the physical with
the spiritual:
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any miracle of affairs or persons inadmissible in the vast clear scheme
where every motion and every spear of grass and the frames and spirits of
men and women and all that concerns them are unspeakably perfect miracles
all referring to all and each distinct and in its place. (16)
He lectures us to cast aside our old preconceived notions about life's hypothetical
hierarchy in order for us to understand the unity of life and our position in the
natural world; "This is what you shall do:...reexamine all you have been told at
school or church or in any book" (11). Whitman urges his readers to see themselves
in all of nature, not as separate beings. Whitman's poetic investigations shuttle back
and forth from "a leaf of grass" to a catalogue of multifarious animals up through "a
journey-work of the stars," and emphasize that "I see in them and myself the same
old law" that governs the universe from time immemorial ("Song of Myself’ 27, 38,
57). Whitman then turns back to the leaf of grass as a demonstration that local
natural phenomena are intrinsically linked to outher regional geographies to
instruct his readers about their tie to the natural world. The poet continually
catalogues minute fauna and flora in "Song of Myself' before moving on, because he
is pulled toward larger realms; but the reoccurrence of references to nature's
minutiae reveal the importance of linking the local terrain to the global.
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In section Fourteen, the poet notices and records details of the wild gander's
call, claiming it has meaning, and that he "finds its purpose and place up there
toward the wintry sky.” The speaker understands the gander’s place in the cosmos,
that it has inherent integrity. This is followed by a roll call of distinct animals, the
moose, cat, chickadee, sows, and turkeys, all of which the poet again declares share
with him "the same old law" (38), the belief in the world’s unity in diversity.
Whitman affirms that these living things have just as much right as he to be taken as
the center of the universe. This natural tie helps shape human perception of their
relationship to their environment in a way that makes Whitman a forerunner of an
American poetry that expresses an ecological understanding, which I define in more
detail below. Whitman's bold assertions of local-global crossovers were inspired by
the progressive science of his time.
To communicate the impression of an interactive causal network operating
across space and time. Whitman used the word "kosmos," borrowed from the
Prussian naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt's influential treatise on science and
nature through five running volumes, Kosmos (1845-62). In Walt Whitman’s
America, David Reynolds notes that the way Whitman shuttles from the local
phenomena to the global expanse is synonymous to the way Humboldt had done
when explaining the infinite diversity but ultimate order of nature and the universe
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in Kosmos. Whitman read and emulated Humboldt's views; the poet's words
mirror those of the naturalist, who says today's scientist seeks "the contemplation of
all created things, which are linked together and form one whole, animated by
internal forces," and defines the cosmos and nature as "a harmony, or blending
together of all created things, however dissimilar in form and attributes, one great
whole animated by the breath of life" (Humboldt, cited in Reynolds 244). Just as
Humboldt’s theory imagines the universe as a whole animated "by the breath of
life,” Whitman, in his Preface, sees himself as the poet who "breathes [life] into
anything that was before thought small [and] it dilates with the grandeur and life of
the universe" (24).
In Laura Walls' The Passage to Cosmos, she points out that Humboldt's idea of
the cosmos as a natural whole "succeeded in bringing into being a discourse, a way
of speaking, about nature that we now call environmental: namely, a planetary
interactive casual network operating across multiple scale levels" (11). Humboldt's
science of nature's interconnections is a precursor of ecology, a branch of biology
that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and their physical
surroundings. It is important to understand that Humboldt needed to couple his
scientific observations with the imagination to envision nature and human
relationships on earth in its entirety. He can only theorize larger phenomena from
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the raw data he gathers from the local to hypothesize their relationships to the
global. Humboldt is interested in the way cultures over time viewed nature
subjectively, how that perception changes over generations and deepens. Christine
Gerhardt contextualizes this reliance on human imagination for understanding in A
Place fo r Humility. Quoting from Cosmos, and setting Whitman in that context,
Gerhardt claims that Whitman's work is fertile ground for discussions of ecology
because of its environmental scope and that Humboldt calls on his readers to use
"the power of fancy" and challenges the separation between the empirical sciences
and literature insofar as both are, to a degree, "rooted in the depth and feeling and
interwoven with creative force and imagination"(Humboldt quoted in Gerhardt
192).
Just as new scientific publications explicitly engaged the "imagination," so too
Whitman's poetry of local-global interconnections becomes legible as an
environmentally sensitive engagement of seeing nature anew in light of the earth as
a living whole. As Humboldt’s revolutionary Kosmos was assessable for poetic
adaptation, blending nature, intuition, and art, Whitman was only too willing to pick
up this interpretation of nature as a harmonious ordered whole and speak of new
perceptual experiences in a revolutionary poetic voice of "his country [that] absorbs
him as affectionately as he has absorbed it" (Preface 26).
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"Song of Myself’ and the Spirituality of Body, Soul, and Earth
Whitman’s Leaves o f Grass is an imaginative leap in the way an American poet
depicts nature. Understanding the difficulty of using words to represent universal
concepts, Whitman says: "folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty
and dignity which always attach to dumb, real objects...they expect him to indicate
the path between reality and their souls" (Preface 10). In the opening lines of "A
Song of the Rolling Earth," Whitman claims that the words we use to indicate what a
thing is do not capture the essence of that thing:
A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,
Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright
lines? those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the
ground and sea,
They are in the air, they are in you
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Were you thinking that those were the words, those delicious
sounds out of your friends' mouths?
No, the real words are more delicious than they (362-63)
Whitman's speaker claims that words are limiting and the things of nature cannot be
understood through labels. Spoken words are not "real words" and "the substantial
words are in the ground and sea," in their very being. Whitman tells us that he will
supply us with these substantial words, as his soul has been opened to "the channel
of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of
himself’ (Preface 14). While a person out of touch with the soul feels blocked off
from the flow of wholeness, Whitman’s soul crosses the boundary of ordinary life
and shares with the earth a language and meaning distinct from common usage.
Whitman's poetry will transcend the ordinary labels used to describe the
relationship between things in a way that we can better understand our relationship
within the things of our world.
In Section Five of "Song of Myself' the poet invites the reader to join him in a
memory as he summons his soul to take him on a journey that manifests into an
earthly communion in which the body becomes infused with the earth. The soul is
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likened to a lover that induces a drug-like effect on the speaker. The soul "gently
turn'd over" on the speaker and [you] "plunged your tongue to my bare-stript
heart." Immediately, the poet is saturated with a love for all things as the soul's
injection "Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass
all the argument of the earth...that a kelson of the creation is love" (30-31). The
Oxford English Dictionary defines kelson as a structural unit; a reinforcing timber
for the keel of a ship, to which it is bolted, so as to fasten the floor-timbers and the
keel together (OED). The kelson serves as the ship’s backbone, and offers an organic
imagery that everything in creation is supported and kept at a steady equilibrium by
a universal, benign spirit. Gerhardt posits that the speaker identifies so fully with
the universality of life that his male body replicates and becomes equivalent to the
local fauna about him; “And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, / And
brown ants in the little wells beneath them, / And mossy scabs of the worm fence,
heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed" (31). Gerhardt leaves the reader to
speculate about this association, but it can be surmised that moss reflects hair, "stiff
or drooping fields" connotes phallus symbolism, and stones replicate testicles. It is
in no way a stretch to equate Whitman’s words as sexually and symbolically
orientated because he consistently uses this devise in Leaves o f Grass as a way to
equate the world as a place of continual attraction and interaction, one virile with
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life. Yet the symbolism of the plants does not over-ride their importance as being
real botanical specimens. The poet is showing the reader through the more
"substantial words" of the soul that the body is continuous with the earth.
Whitman's use of symbolism that also reflects nature's realism is also seen in the
first chapter of this study, as Cooper’s metaphorical use at the meadow does not
undermine, but accentuates the actual depiction of natural elements. Additionally, in
chapter two Dickinson masterfully uses visible imagery in "A Route of Evanescence"
to convey to the reader what an actual hummingbird's flight looks like, however
exotic and elusive the creature may be.
The poet next confronts and critiques the way people insist upon categorizing
units of natural phenomena in a way that places it in a specific, separate context to
the rest of natural elements and counteracts the unification of all living things: "A
child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; / How could I answer
the child? I do not know what it is any more than he" (31). The child's curiosity
about his environment reflects humanity's ongoing struggle to make meaning of a
world that appears to be a separate entity. The poet proceeds with a series of
guesses-it could be "the handkerchief of the Lord, / A scented gift and
remembrancer designedly dropped, / Bearing the owner’s name someway in the
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corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?" (31). These lines have an
obvious theological sensitivity, the idea of relegating the grass as something a deity
“designedly dropped” to signal and remind us of His beneficence. More interestingly,
it can also represent the old game of attraction between suitors. A courtly lady
secretly and designedly drops a scented handkerchief in the path of a man she
admires. She wants him to see her initials engraved on it and to enquire about her
and seek her out. The handkerchief is a gift, and a reminder. Ultimately, they come
together, and are unified. Here, appreciating the gifts of the earth and seeking its
source manifests into becoming one with the earth. Additionally, the poet implies
that the source of the grass needs scrutiny; the answer is not obvious but resides
“someway in the corners." One has to be a good observer of nature's "scented" flora
in out of the way places to even begin to answer the riddle of the genesis of the
grass. This emphasis on looking closely at the local natural phenomena in order to
recognize the specifics and how it relates to the larger ecological sphere relates to
the opening of my first chapter in this study, and Susan Fenimore Cooper's view of
the meadow as "a delicate embroidery in colors which you must examine closely to
understand all its merits."
Other guesses that move us from theology to questions of science is that "the
grass is itself a child...the produced babe of the vegetation," and also that "it seems
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to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves" (31). Envisioning the self and the things
of the earth as indistinguishable, the poet sees in the blade of grass the cycle of birth
and death of human beings and their participation in the renewal of life; that natural
matter gives life through decay. Matter, here the grass, is reproduced through the
death and absorption of living things into the earth, an endless cycle. David S.
Reynolds describes Whitman as having read and raved about the discoveries in
organic chemistry by the German chemist, Justus Liebig in Chemistry in Its
Application to Physiology and Agriculture (1847). Whitman praised the discovery in
the Eagle, writing "Chemistry! The elevating, beautiful, study...Chemistry—which
involves the essence of creation, and the changes, and the growths, and formations
and decays of so large a constituent part of the earth and the things thereof!”
Liebig’s study of transferred chemical compounds found that decomposition brings
about the recombination of atoms in an organism, which give rise to "another
arrangement of the atoms of a body, that is, to the production of a compound which
did not before exist in it" (Liebig quoted in Reynolds 240). In effect, their atoms
become transferred to the earth’s vegetation, as Whitman describes in this section
of "Song of Myself." Humboldt's view of all living things linked together as part of a
united whole through internal forces coupled with Liebig's findings in organic
chemistry offered Whitman fertile ground to express himself as a forerunner of
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ecopoetics. Additionally, through the use of the physical, real grass used as a
symbol of life sprouting from death, Whitman offers a promise of immortality.
Asking where the dead have gone, Whitman answers "They are alive and well
somewhere; / The smallest sprout shows there is really no death" (32).
In his meditations on the grass, Whitman is able to coax through "substantial
words" the unspeakable secret of existence out of the natural world. Whitman
cannot answer the child’s question in a single reply because it is impossible to grasp
the complexity of meaning that in the common grass can be the translation of our
transmigration into immortality-after death we are changed into other things.
Dying then, really is no death, and therefore no threat for Whitman, who claims "to
die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier" (32). But even with the
support of newfound science, the complexities of nature's workings and the limits of
our ability to fathom earth’s dynamic cycle of life through death can often unnerve
those most receptive of these processes.
"Stranger Miracles” of Rebirth in Whitman's “This Compost"
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Although Whitman expresses a sense of comfort in "Song of Myself’ about a
continual resurrection through the exchange of substances inherent in nature, his
faith in natural cycles becomes temporarily shaken when he contemplates the
significance of the sheer volume of death and decay that is absorbed into the earth,
and the difficulty of envisioning himself as part of this cycle seemingly so toxic. In
"This Compost," the same poet who embraced nature and identified with it now has
a sudden revulsion to the earth: "Something startles me when I thought I was safest,
/ I withdraw from the still woods I loved.../ I will not touch my flesh to the earth as
to other flesh to renew me" (495). The speaker acknowledges the things of nature as
"other flesh," not wood or soil, because of our connection to the earth through
chemical recombination after decomposition, which he proclaimed in the third line
of "Song of Myself'; "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" (27).
Yet this feeling of kinship through shared flesh is threatened when the speaker
recognizes the implications of this shared chemistry; that he is surrounded by a
death-haunted landscape that has accumulated an unimaginable amount of corpses
through time. But the poet’s startling realization that the once comforting is now
disturbing, and what was once familiar is now possibly toxic is merely a springboard
in the speaker's intention to finally glorify nature for its remarkable regenerative
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abilities in order to portray to the reader that nature is worthy of our awe and
respect.
The speaker does not articulate what the "something" that startled him about
the woods is, although the following stanza tells us he is alarmed with the question
of earth’s capacity to deal with diseased, or distemper'd corpses:
Oh how can it be that the ground does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots,
orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within
you? (495)
The poet is haunted that the "continual" deposits of decomposing, "distemper'd”
matter in the "ground" will over-ride nature's ability to convert it to life, and is also
spooked that the ground will in turn "sicken" those who come in contact with it. Like
Dickinson in Chapter Two, "What Mystery Pervades a Well," both poets experience a
haunting feeling, a ghost-like quality about nature whenever there is something
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inexplicable about an environment they habitually have come to rely on for
comfort. The poet's concern about diseased corpses in this poem has led to criticism
that Whitman was, as Reynolds speculates, concerned with rising urban death rates
from unchecked epidemics, which threatened the health of Americans. Whitman
wrote in the Eagle in 1847, "As much as the present time is vaunted over the past, in
no age of the world have so many influences been at work, averse to health and to a
noble physical development, as are working in this age!" (Whitman quoted in
Reynolds 238). Reynolds avers that Whitman’s contemplation of death led to a crisis
of doubt, but was alleviated by the emerging science of Liebig, who wrote that "the
miasmas and certain contagious matters [that] produce diseases in the human
organism" become "not contagious" when the organism is absorbed into the earth"
(Liebig quoted in Reynolds (240-41). Thus the speaker can laud the earth as he
gazes on the plentitude produced from decay; "Behold this compost! behold it well!
/ Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet behold," as he
catalogues specific phenomena, from beans and onions, to the mulberry-tree and
willow-tree, and multifarious others that grew from the "strata of sour dead"(496).
In contrast to the journalistic prose that emphasizes Whitman’s concern to
connect human illness with human and organic waste, and how reformist efforts
may counter this, Whitman's poetic voice in "This Compost" instead shuns such
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human prescriptions, instead adopting nature-based models of human health
with its purifying properties. Unsettled in the first stanza, the poet says he will not
strip to meet his lover the sea. Realizing that the earth is uncontaminated and
sustains humanity, he later says with passion; "it is safe to allow it [the sea] to lick
my naked body all over with its tongues" (496). Nature again becomes a lover he can
trust. Nature itself is the ultimate purifying force of recovery and renewal. In "This
Compost” the speaker shows distaste for a human society he sees as needing
rehabilitation because of its greedy and wanton approaches to nature, asking the
earth, "Where have you disposed of their carcasses? / Those drunkards and gluttons
of so many generations?" (495). This is the only place in the poem where the poet
explicitly characterizes the people before they died and became corpses, which
shows evident frustration and dissatisfaction with human society. The poem's
tone turns from that of apprehension to that of wonder when it is found that the
earth indeed can "grow such sweet things out of corruptions" (496). The speaker,
troubled by society and relieved of nature’s healing properties, will again immerse
himself into nature, away from society.
The closing line of "This Compost" circles back to what I believe "startles" the
speaker at the beginning of the poem; "It gives such divine materials to men, and
accepts such leavings from them at last" (497). It is very easy to see what nature
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gives us, but out of fear, we ignore how much death is a part of life. The poet
understands that there is not a square inch of ground that escapes this inevitability,
and it is haunting. As the speaker works through to the conclusion that the earth
gives forth life through corrupted bodies, he comes to realize that death cannot be
as awful as imagined. The speaker concludes that "Now I am terrified at the earth, it
is that calm and patient," (496) but the following affirmative images at the beginning
of each successive verse, "It grows.../ It turns.../ It distills.../ It renews.../ It gives,"
attest that the poet envisions nature as a giving, and forgiving deity, that human life
is corrupt and fleeting, but nature, calm and patient, is perpetual. Nature is more
significant and more powerful than its parts, and the poet reveres this sublime
entity that he is embodied with. I suggest Whitman intended the poem to be a sort of
wake-up call to the multitude who are not terrified, or awe-struck, by the earth's
ability to convert decaying bodies to new life, who do not comprehend that they are
embodiments and have a relationship within the things of the world.
These images of human embodiment within nature push against criticism that
sees the speaker as expressing separateness from nature, regarding the landscape
as "Other." M. Jimmie Killingsworth, in Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in
Ecopoetics, claims that the "something" is a substance that the poet cannot
"categorize, or tame with a trope," which I agree with, as Whitman's speakers often
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express how nature's complexities are almost incommunicable. At the beginning
of this chapter I quote Whitman in his Preface, relegating nature's working as an
"inconceivable vagueness." In Whitman's lyric, "Poem of Perfect Miracles," the
speaker accentuates how everything around us, all the commonplace things and
ordinary experiences are rendered with significance, and are "unspeakably perfect
miracles" and significantly concludes, "what stranger miracles are there?" (514). Yet
Killingsworth equates this difficult engagement with the limits of language with the
poet's "understanding of the earth not only from the perspective of identity but
primarily as a thing unto itself." This encountering of nature as "Other,"
Killingsworth states, qualifies "This Compost" as an environmental poem, "where
nature retains its autonomy" (52). I argue that the speaker of "This Compost" is
initially startled at the beginning of the poem precisely because he identifies so fully
with his embodiment within the workings of nature, an involuntary synergy and
communion that is unspeakably difficult to fathom. The poet needs to enunciate this
communion with the earth through the "substantial" words channeled from his soul,
reflected in poetry.
Gerhardt, also envisioning the poet confronting a sense of otherness in nature,
relegates the speaker's feeling of separation as a problem with "the limits of an
organicist approach" to nature (139). Organicism is a view of the universe and its
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parts as organic wholes, either by analogy or literally, and therefore as living
organisms. Gerhardt contends that this organicist view, (Humboldt’s appeal) which
Whitman’s speaker utilizes throughout Leaves o f Grass, cannot fully explain nature’s
ability to create life from death, and although 'This Compost” is an homage to
Liebig’s theories which begin to answer this question, the poem "pushes against the
limits of organicism’s inherent mysticism" (140). I take “inherent mysticism" to
mean the sense of imagination Humboldt instructs the reader to combine with
empirical science for greater speculation. Gerhardt avers that this pushing against
these different theories was necessary to bring about ecology as a full-fledged
science, a more rational science explaining intricate living systems. But Gerhardt’s
argument rests on her assertion that speaker of “This Compost" indeed continues to
feel a disconnection from nature throughout the poem, notwithstanding organic
chemistry's renewing properties. Gerhardt says that the speaker momentarily
reengages with the earth after an intense moment of doubt, but that the tone
"culminates, however, in the surprising exclamation "What chemistry!" (140).
Gerhardt continues as if this exclamation certifies the speaker’s recurring sense of
alienation from nature. Yet Gerhardt undoubtedly should know that Whitman, as a
journalist of the Eagle, was exhilarated about Liebig's findings, which I have pointed
out earlier in this chapter. Whitman, I restate, calls Liebig's chemistry "elevating"
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and "beautiful," a study "which involves the essence of creation." Whitman comes
to find solace through the image of life sprouting from death: a resurrection, a
source of new life.
"This Compost" is recognized, Killingsworth says, as a major contribution to
the poetry of ecology because of its expression of awe through an encounter with a
non-human world, where nature retains its autonomy (52). I contend that "This
Compost" can, and should be read as poem of ecology because Whitman is weaving
a powerful new story in the mid nineteenth-century of how we are a part of nature
and not separate from it. He situates humans properly in the world, neither above it
nor diminished in global insignificance. We are part and parcel within nature, co­
creators with nature's elements in a material and spiritual universe. Yes, the
workings and things of nature are mysterious and strange, ("what stranger miracles
are there?"), and which Dickinson would undoubtedly agree, but Whitman gives us
images and figures of the strangeness of our world, and tells us who and what we
are, and where and how we inhabit our space.
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CONCLUSION
In this study I have shown the ways in which Susan Fenimore Cooper, Emily
Dickinson, and Walt Whitman all succeed in writing about nature from an ecocentric
standpoint, denoting a nature centered, rather than human-centered, system of
values. These writers share a similar perspective that places intrinsic value on all
living organisms and their natural environment, writing in new and imaginary ways
about nature and helping to broaden ecocritical thought.
An author that deserves to be in this conversation because he so interestingly
shares yet is diametrically opposed to Whitman's speaker in "Song of Myself' is
Whitman’s contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe. As I have pointed out at the beginning of
the last chapter, when Whitman looks at the things of nature he sees the whole of
life in unity, a fusion of the material and immaterial in a collapse of time. Similarly
with Poe, whether in the microcosms of his short fiction or in his prose poem of
cosmological scale, Eureka (1848), bodies converge in unity in a collapse of time.
Like Whitman’s "Song of Myself," Poe's speaker in Eureka utilizes both recent
empiricist findings of his time and a speculative imagination, offering a relation of
self and universe by an interdependence of the two.
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A brief synopsis of Eureka is as follows: The universe began in a center,
which is God. At his own will, a process of His own disintegration began, and He
expanded out in increasingly wider elliptical circles, creating everything. Eventually
over eons, man and everything in the universe along with it will fall back into Unity.
Eureka is the grand scheme of the cosmos. On the lower level of the cosmos, Poe’s
tales describe in a terrifying way how common objects in our environment "take us
in," forcing individuals to become subjected to those objects, thus fusing the two. In
both these tales and Eureka, Poe represents the fusion of subjects and environments
in a collapse. In this way, the non-human environment is a field in which discrete
selves disappear as material bodies into unknown entities.
What differs between these works of Whitman and Poe is what they choose to
focus on concerning this unity of self with nature. In "Song of Myself’ the speaker
asserts his individuality, "I celebrate myself," while acknowledging he is undivided
with the people and phenomena around him; “For every atom belonging to me as
good belongs to you" (27). Whitman celebrates life and his rich relationship with the
world around him. For Poe, unity of self with nature means disintegration of the
individual, the loss of personal autonomy: death. When Whitman's speaker in "This
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Compost" is startled by something in the once peaceful woods, he is haunted by
the knowledge of something more vast and infinitely startling. The speaker is
overwhelmed by the sense that there is more than that which he can immediately
comprehend, something that is a matter of life and death. The speaker knows that
life comes from death; it is just so difficult to fathom. Finding death all around him in
nature unsettles him, only momentarily. The poet refocuses on the life-giving
bounty of nature.
I believe Whitman, an embracer of life and human agency, would nonetheless
understand and commiserate with Poe's view of the fusing of the body with the
environment. Whitman saw first hand how individuals in New York City get "sucked
into" damaging and self-destructive behaviors as they try to survive in the city's dog
eat dog atmosphere. The alcohol takes the alcoholic. Venereal disease takes the
prostitute. Whitman would surely see what Poe sees here, things taking away
human independence.
Poe's contribution to this study unsettles the ecocritical focus that I examined
in regards to how Cooper, Dickinson, and Whitman foreclose the idea that human
selves are inherently distinct from their non-human environments. While Poe's
speaker is aligned with this concept, he is opposed to the notion that we can
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constructively lose ourselves to the world, experiencing nature's wonder with a
semblance of detached humility. For Poe and his speakers, if nature and its elements
impose a control over our bodies that we cannot circumvent, how are we able to
treat and have a nurturing, healthy relationship with this environment we are so
much subjected to?
However one takes Poe's view on the lack of human agency in his environment,
it seems apparent that it is the earth that is in trouble at the hands of mankind.
Would Poe see the destruction of earth's resources and the resulting imperilment of
the planets inhabitants as just another way of nature imploding in on itself?
Perhaps Poe and his contemporary American nature writers, Cooper,
Dickinson, and Whitman are all right in certain aspects of their ecological views.
Although Cooper respects nature as an entity in itself, she also believes we should be
good stewards of the land. But the idea of stewardship is a bit too human-centered,
and it certainly has not worked. Poe's vision, as stated, disallows a healthy,
reciprocal relationship with nature, yet allows for our integration in the seamless
web of life that binds all phenomena together. Dickinson and Whitman's speakers
are on the flip side of Cooper; they merely observe nature in a hands-off way, but
with an attitude of humility. Can a major part of the solution for ecological balance
be to continue to allow the earth to take care of us, its offspring, while we take only
what we need? I think so.
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