Tennyson's scarifying glimpse of nature in In Memoriam as a scene of primordial violence revisits a weltanschauung as old as philosophy itself - an outlook famously summed up in 1651 by Thomas Hobbes when he asserted that condition of humanity is warre . . . of every man, against every man and that life in a state of nature is solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short (88-89). Ironically, Hobbes's own century would see emergence of natural theology, with its emphasis on nature as an incarnation of highest ethical ideal, summed up by third Earl of Shaftesbury as morality, justice, piety, and natural religion (Cooper 1: 301-02). It was this view that would dominate English nature poetry well into Romantic era, when - as next installment of irony - Hobbesian strain would resurface with singular vigor and trenchancy in philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, Tennyson's older contemporary. affinity between poet's fleeting visions of animal savagery and philosopher's sustained ruminations on it is salient. Tennyson considers awful possibility that mankind is linked, as an even more degenerate monster, with Dragons of prime, / That tare each other in their slime (56.22-23). And here is Schopenhauer on the observable life of animals: we see only momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, omnium, everything a hunter and everything hunted, pressure, want, need and anxiety, shrieking and howling, and this goes on in saecula seculorum, or until once again crust of planet breaks. (World 2: 254) Tennyson, of course, would recant in favor of a revised natural theology by poem's end, but outlook so mercilessly articulated by Schopenhauer would become more compelling as modernist perspectives gradually impinged on Victorian intellectual milieu. Both Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence, inheritors and elaborators - in their very different ways - of Tennyson's primordial vision, would admit to basic affinities with German philosopher's thought.(1) This thought finds its fullest poetic realization, however, in our own time, in verse of Ted Hughes. His menagerie - hawk, jaguar, shark, and their ilk - fits even better than Lawrence's birds, beasts, and flowers into Schopenhauer's bellum omnium of predation. A paradigm case is cannibalistic pike, driven by appetites and killer instincts so fierce that poet is able to find two of them, six pounds each, over two feet long, / High and dry and dead in willow-herb - / One jammed past its gills down other's gullet (Pike, Lupercal). human animal figures prominently in this company of killers. In Mayday on Holderness, for instance, a pierced helmet and Cordite oozings of Gallipoli explicitly evoke The expressionless gaze of leopard / coils of sleeping anaconda / nightlong frenzy of shrews (Lupercal). But affinity between Schopenhauer and Hughes runs much deeper than their mutual obsession with animal savagery. From his first principle of der Wille - will - which he sees as generating not only phenomenon of hunter and hunted but all other phenomena of existence, Schopenhauer articulates a complex ontology and epistemology that in illuminating ways poet's instinctual assumptions about what nature fundamentally is and how we perceive it.(2) When Michael Bell speaks of language philosophy of Ernst Cassirer as providing an explicatory parallel or an appropriate conceptual analogy to work of Lawrence, he is describing interpretive dynamic I am assuming here - outlining of a sort of philosophical force-field that brings out internal cogency and complexity of given author's conceptions (3-4). aspects of Hughes's work that I wish to examine in this regard are his fabulation of a fierce feminine presence as presiding deity of natural order, his projection of some sort of consciousness onto vegetable and mineral realms, his esoteric renditions of sheer dynamic process, and his stylistic evolution from explicit interpretive frameworks to implicit ones. …
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Sep 7, 2006
Jan Morbach + 2
Open Access