Renaissance landscapes: English lyrics in a European tradition [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9783110816310, 9789027924704

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DE PROPRIETATIBUS LITTERARUM edenda curat C.H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana University

Series Practica,

52

RENAISSANCE LANDSCAPES English Lyrics in a European Tradition

by

H. M. R I C H M O N D University of California,

Berkeley

1973

MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1973 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 72-94501

Printed in Hungary

For my wife

CONTENTS

Introduction I. Origins , 1. The Evolutionary Outline 2. Inscriptions and Dedicatory Poems 3. Seasonal and Georgic Poems 4. Modern Prototypes II. Petrarch and Ronsard 1. Petrarch 2. Ronsard

9

:

13 13 16 24 33 38 38 55

III. The English Renaissance 1. The Elizabethans and Ronsard 2. Milton 3. Marvell

77 77 89 109

IV. The Inheritance 1. Wordsworth 2. Frost

130 130 143

Select Bibliography

154

INTRODUCTION

This essay was planned as a parallel study to The School of Love (Princeton, 1964), long before the current concern with ecology and the nature of man's interaction with his environment reached its height, but I should be happy if my material helped to clarify some phases in the genesis of our modern awareness of man's dependence on landscape for many of his deepest intuitions of his own identity, and for his understanding of his relationship both to society and to the world as a whole. I am convinced that Sir Philip Sidney was right in his Defense of Poesy when he asserted that the poet is superior to the historian or the philosopher in making the basic nature of human experience vivid and accessible. Nothing is superior to the poet's mastery of language as a means to record the nuances of human awareness as they develop from age to age. And if this literary finesse is consciously devoted to the exploration of the historical environment and the immediate subjective processes of thought of the poet himself, the results can sometimes be even more memorable and challenging than the high artifice of "purer" fictions. The literary patterns thrown up by the poets who interest me by such highly particularized recognitions of their own personality and place are by no means limited in the modes through which they are expressed. However, in most literatures such attitudes do tend progressively to create a recognizable topic or motif which becomes increasingly complex and self-sufficient. This can easily be isolated, no matter in what form it is framed, but often it crystallizes into fairly consistent genres, entirely devoted to exploring the potentialities of this particular subject. The methods of investigation of the material used here follow those of the Syncretic Criticism which was systematically discussed in The School of Love. In that study they achieved considerable acceptance and provoked few direct challenges from reviewers and scholarly readers, so I need make no further defense of them now. This study explores some of the significant points in the evolution

10

INTRODUCTION

of one such fairly defined genre, which I have called the landscape lyric, though its scale varies from that of an Horatian ode to that of 11 Penseroso. In its mature form, the poet characteristically exploits circumstantial detail of persona, place, and atmosphere to give to this kind of poem the appearance of autobiographical realism: thus he normally uses his own name and that of a real place. This air of historical particularity is a necessary part of the genre's aesthetic effect - a consideration which distinguishes it at least superficially from the more oblique, pastoral mode. Such particularized landscape lyrics probably rank next in public interest after the most popular kinds of lyric poems, amatory and religious ones; and indeed topographical lyrics bear some relation to both other kinds - if ultimately less to the first, as I shall try to show. As a recognized genre the landscape lyric has perhaps been too exclusively associated with the Romantics, and this phase has certainly been too well discussed to justify my attention to it in depth here. Rather, it is a major part of my present intention to restore an awareness of the distinction of some earlier masters of the genre, showing that its conception, development, and even perfection as a literary mode antedate the eighteenth century, and that such Romantics as Wordsworth and Keats depended on this perfected tradition in creating poems like Tintern Abbey and To Autumn. Furthermore, I will hint at the continued importance of preRomantic achievements in landscape lyricism for such later poets as Hardy and Frost. The close study of the particular genre of the landscape lyric is, however, also a critical device to pursue a broader issue: the exposition of the virtues of four important Renaissance poets - Petrarch, Ronsard, Milton, and Marvell. I hope to do something to expand the awareness in English speaking readers of the broad range of Petrarch's literary importance, which conventional English literary history has tended to associate a little too exclusively with his exquisite amatory compositions. Ronsard I hope to help restore belatedly to something closer to the poetic supremacy which he once clearly occupied in the minds of such English Renaissance poets as Drayton, Donne, and Shakespeare, as well as the two puritans, whose landscape poetry demonstrably rises from Ronsard's literary achievement rather than from presently favored but lesser sources like Gongora and Saint-Amant. By placing the various major poets in their context of the European literary tradition I also hope to do a little to clarify their individual excellences further, at least within the specific genre which I have chosen to pursue through the complex web of literary history. At very least, I think the poetry I shall quote and

INTRODUCTION

11

discuss is delightful enough to sustain a close rereading. Much of it has been somewhat neglected, at the cost of great pleasure to English readers, and with some loss of precision in English studies. I am indebted to numerous people and sources for the preparation of this text: to Professor and Mrs. J. H. Hanford for their early encouragement, reinforced by that of the late Mr. J. B. Leishman, whose guiding spirit clearly governs most of worth in these pages, and whose own delight in landscape reinforced mine. I could not have pursued my studies successfully without the excellent facilities of the British Museum, the sabbatical leaves and funds generously allowed me by the University of California, and the financial assistance of the American Council of Learned Societies which awarded me a research fellowship. To all these goes my gratitude, but my greatest appreciation goes to my wife, who shared with me the delights of exploring the scenes commemorated in these pages, recorded them more faithfully than I could hope to do, and restored femininity to its rightful central place in such beautiful settings. Paris, 1967.

H. M. R.

I ORIGINS

1. THE EVOLUTIONARY OUTLINE

It is a commonplace that European drama rises out of the ritual practices of religion. It is less obvious that many other literary forms also derive from genres originally serving rather different aesthetic and social ends from their offshoots. The landscape lyric is one example of this. To trace its origins requires the exploration of a variety of fragmentary precedents in earlier classical Greek verse, where most of its characteristic elements first appear. The Corpus Christi cycles found their germ in minor tropes like the Quern Quaeritis, which were embedded in the larger design of the Catholic mass. Similarly, some of the earliest models for landscape poems serve as epic similes, to illuminate the course of the Trojan War in the Iliad. Thus, at the end of Book VIII the Trojan camp-fires are compared to the stars on a clear night: tlx; 8' ST' ev oupavco dcaxpa si ¡xeXaiva ycfix, 07)ps? t ' opeaxcioi xal y£voc, [xsXi