“In th’Immensity of Nature Lost!”: Vision, Nature, and the Metaphysical in the Landscape of Richard Lewis’s “A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis”

Abstract

The journey of spring day, along banks of Patapsco River and traversing colonial Maryland from an inland village to coastal capital of Annapolis, forms subject of once forgotten but recently revived poem by Richard Lewis (1700?-33?). A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis (1731) records depiction of New World's landscape by haggard language teacher, part-time colonial government functionary, Enlightenment-era amateur scientist, and Pedagogue of Art, (1) depiction that records nature of region and its inhabitants using aesthetic, pastoral, scientific, and spiritual discourses. The poem exhibits delightful attention to and appreciation of natural detail as well as surprising moments in which aspects of are repressed and ignored. Lewis, himself an immigrant who faced challenges of holding liminal class position in raucous social world of colonial Maryland, creates narrator who seeks identification within natural but who also wishes to read nature as text for scientific analysis and spiritual edification. Among those forces that shape poem are keen attention to aesthetics and concern for intersections between beauty and bounty. Yet in order to create work in which humans seemingly exist harmoniously with nature, poet must willfully excise grating elements from landscape, gesture that haunts narrator when he considers that which is beyond nature, an all-powerful deity who could as easily excise him from universe. The poem's two primary emphases--description of material nature and representation of spiritual crisis--have been basis of scholarly division in earlier criticism of poem. While most critics have selected one of those two aspects for examination, positioning other as secondary (Carlson 307; Johnson 117; Beyers, Augustan 209-12), we see Lewis as poet who purposefully juxtaposes earthly and heavenly themes. Lewis's epigraph, taken from Virgil's Georgies, suggests complex intertwining of natural and spiritual: Give me ways of wandering stars to know, / The depths of heaven above, and earth below. (2) Lewis's quest traverses material environment, while apprehending its metaphorical applications and its metaphysical implications. He brings to bear discourses of science, religion, and art as he examines nature, divinity, and ultimately himself. We assert that Lewis's poem requires careful attention to both materiality and spirituality, as well as to what is seen and unseen more generally in poem; therefore, our reading combines an ecocritical emphasis on materiality with an ecothoeological recognition of metaphysicality. LEWIS'S JOURNEY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY ECOCRITICAL LANDSCAPE Viewing Lewis's poem through an ecocritical lens reveals poet's struggle to envision and articulate his own position within nature he seeks to represent. Robert Kern identifies range of modes by which texts depict nature. He sees some literature as anthropocentric, blind to the possibility that nature might validly pursue its own goals and intentions, without need of human ... 'improvement' (267). At times, Lewis's poem seems blind in this way, performing work of an imperial gaze in sweeping appropriation of everything it sees. In contrast, ecocentric poem, Kern asserts, must be displaced, taken precedence over, virtually and grammatically, by what lies outside (272). Lewis's narrator engages in self-displacement while centering attention on more-than-human world, though identity and resource politics complicate this displacement; still, narrator's vision often exhibits an ecosensitivity that registers poem on ecocentric end of Kern's scale, since poem expresses a sort of neighborly solicitude for [the] more-than-human inhabitants of [the] local environment (Kern 273). Lewis and his narrator invoke series of contrasting methodologies to situate his poem. …