Words And Nature

              POEMS  AND  POETS

               33. Words And   Nature

Words are the common medium of poets, novelists,prose writers. But they do not use them in the same way- in sense or intensity. In prose and novels, words carry a precise meaning, which gives them power. But for a poet, words are a passport to a different world; they depend on their power to suggest something, beyond merely what is spoken about. It is mainly  this which constitutes the chief difference between prose and poetry.

Consider the opening scene from Macbeth.

Act I,Scene 1

Thunder and Lightning. Enter three witches.

First Witch

     When shall we three meet again?
     In thunder,lightning, or in rain?

Second Witch

     When the hurly-burly's done,
     When the battle's lost and won.

Third Witch
   
     That will be ere the set of sun.

First Witch

     Where the place?

Second Witch

     Upon the heath.

Third Witch

     There to meet with Macbeth.

Thunder, lightning, rain; hurly-burly, battle lost and won, sunset, heath- each of these has acquired a significance;quite ominous, because witches say it, meeting amid thunder and lightning. We know something is happening to Macbeth.

Great novelists achieve this poetic quality.
Consider this from Dickens's Bleak House: (1852)

" London. The Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn-hill . Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes-gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke ( if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon the crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest."

This is prose at its graphic best. Everything is brought before our eyes. Nothing is left to chance, or imagination.

Look at this from Thomas Hardy:  The Return of the Native:(1878)

A Saturday afternoon in November.... the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath...... The distant rims of the world  and of the firmament  seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to the evening. It could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden the noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.

 .....the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black fraternisation....

         The  untameable, Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon was now, it always has been. Civilisation was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation, its soil has worn the same unique brown dress,....In its venerable one coat  lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes.

Graphic enough; but the prose does something more. Coming in the beginning of the novel, it is not a mere description of a physical landscape: it induces a psychological landscape. Unenclosed wild, division in time, saddening the noon, anticipate the frowning storms, shaking and dread,untameable thing,satire on human vanity- all these add up to a strange uneasiness, that the place is going to be an active participant in the unfolding story, and it is not going to be kind to every one, especially to those with an eye or mind on the city, for civilisation is its enemy.  Those who read a novel for its action will hardly notice this, like the modern tourists who 'do' the many places, may be clicking the pictures in their mobile, but hardly registering the thing in their mind! But if you pause and keep step upon conscious step as you walk the heath, it can hardly fail to stir you in some strange fashion. Here, the prose has the effect of poetry- taking you beyond the words, or the mere action. It makes you focus on the inner landscape of your mind and psyche. Reviewing our own lives, we can certainly recall moments when some places have exercised such an influence.

( Incidentally, a heath here, as in Macbeth!)

Both Dickens and Hardy are describing an objective scene. But Hardy vests in it a subjective vision, through the power of suggestion. Dickens deals with man's place in London of his times, the social conditions emerging consequent on the industrial revolution. But Hardy is using a remote country locale to place man in the universe, and question his place in it, and its meaning for his life! Dickens deals with problems and situations relevant to a particular point in time, which can be tackled by man- and so they have been tackled since; but Hardy's questions are more intractable. They are bound up with our being human; they show a side of human condition where our very attempt to improve things seems to worsen the situation, as if the gods do not want man to outwit them! It looks intensely tragic at times, but many poets have alluded to it. Byron wrote:

There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away.

Perhaps this was at the back of his mind when our Kaifi Azmi wrote:

Ik haath se deti hai duniya,
Sau haathon se le leti hai,
Ye khel hai kab se jaari!

What the world gives with one hand,
It takes away with a hundred!
And this game has been going on since long!

Even Keats wrote in Endymion:

To sorrow
I bade good-morrow
And thought to leave her far away behind:
But cheerly,cheerly,
She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind.
I would deceive her,
And so leave her,
But ah! she is so constant and so kind!

All this is not said to depress us, but to induce a sense of detachment about the world. Be in the world, but not of it- easily said. All true religions teach us this in their own way. Keats himself said:

And then 'twas fit that from this mortal state
Thou shouldst, my love, by some unlooked for change
Be spiritualized.