NATURE AND THE POETS 



The poetic interpretation of nature, which has 

 come to be a convenient phrase, and about which 

 the Oxford professor of poetry has written a book, 

 is, of course, a myth, or is to be read the other 

 way. It is the soul the poet interprets, not nature. 

 There is nothing in nature but what the beholder 

 supplies. Does the sculptor interpret the marble 

 or his own ideal ? Is the music in the instrument, 

 or in the soul of the performer ? Nature is a dead 

 clod until you have breathed upon it with your 

 genius. You commune with your own soul, not 

 with woods or waters; they furnish the conditions, 

 and are what you make them. Did Shelley inter- 

 pret the song of the skylark, or Keats that of the 

 nightingale ? They interpreted their own wild, 

 yearning hearts. The trick of the poet is always 

 to idealize nature, to see it subjectively. You 

 cannot find what the poets find in the woods until 

 you take the poet's heart to the woods. He sees 

 nature through a colored glass, sees it truthfully, 

 but with an indescribable charm added, the aure- 

 ole of the spirit. A tree, a cloud, a bird, a sunset, 

 have no hidden meaning that the art of the poet is 

 to unlock for us. Every poet shall interpret them 

 differently, and interpret them rightly, because the 

 soul is infinite. Milton's nightingale is not Cole- 

 ridge's; Burns's daisy is not Wordsworth's; Emer- 

 son's bumblebee is not Lowell's ; nor does Turner 

 see in nature what Tintoretto does, nor Veronese 

 123 



