"We receive but what we give,
And in our life alone doth Nature live;
Ours is the wedding-garment, ours
the shroud;"
and Wordsworth had spoken of
"The light that never was on sea or
land,
The consecration and the poet's
dream."
That light that never was on sea or land is what the poet gives us,
and is what we mean by the poetic interpretation of nature. The
Oxford professor struggles against this view. "It is not true," he
says, "that nature is a blank, or an unintelligible scroll with no
meaning of its own but that which we put into it from the light of
our own transient feelings." Not a blank, certainly, to the
scientist, but full of definite meanings and laws, and a storehouse
of powers and economies; but to the poet the meaning is what he
pleases to make it, what it provokes in his own soul. To the man of
science it is thus and so, and not otherwise; but the poet touches
and goes, and uses nature as a garment which he puts off and on.
Hence the scientific reading or interpretation of nature is the
only real one. Says the SOOTHSAYER in "Antony and Cleopatra:"--
'In Nature's infinite book of secrecy a
little do I read."
This is science bowed and reverent, and speaking through a great
poet. The poet himself does not so much read in nature's book--
though he does this, too--as write his own thoughts there. Nature
reads him, she is the page and he the type, and she takes the
impression he gives. Of course the poet uses the truths of nature
also, and he establishes his right to them by bringing them home to
us with a new and peculiar force,--a quickening or kindling force.
What science gives is melted in the fervent heat of the poet's
passion, and comes back to us supplemented by his quality and
genius. He gives more than he takes, always.
V