Welsh Journals

Welsh Scenery in Shelley's Poetry. By Rev. Z- Mather. SHELLEY was a poet of Nature in a sense no other poet was; natural objects not only mirrored his thoughts, they also became a part of him. Nature was a "feeling" to him in a sense it could not have been to Byron. On this W. J. Dawson writes "Shelley seems to have sunk himself in Nature and made himself the translator of Nature's mute emotions. To use one of his favourite phrases, his being became 'inwoven' with the very life of the universe. We find it hard to realise him as a bodily presence; he is 'as the air invulnerable.' He did not live prose and write poetry; he was poetry from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot; a creature of imagination all compact." It is this that accounts for his indefiniteness which is both his weakness and his strength as a poet. Some one has described a poet as "one who sees the infinite in things," and of no poet can the words be more true than of Shelley, for he takes the reader to the boundless and the eternal. But if one were asked what the infinite and the eternal meant for him it would not be easy to answer. For him Love pervaded all things, united all things and beautified all things, and although he personified Love he would not have traced it to an infinite eternal personal Being who is the central life, the central love, and cen- tral beauty, of all things. And yet is not the "Sweet Heaven" to which he prays in the follow- ing lines the God of Love? Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts, if there should be No God, no Heaven, no Earth, in the void world; The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world." Shelley was a poet of Nature in a higher sense than Wordsworth, for he looked at Nature through the heart whilst the latter looked at her through the mind. For this reason she revealed more to Shelley than to Wordsworth; but the two poets are complementary to each other. In contrasting them, Stop ford A. Brooke says "As the poet of nature, Shelley had the same idea as Wordsworth, that nature was alive; but while Wordsworth made the active principle which filled and made nature to be Thought, Shelley made it Love. The natural world was dear then to his soul as well as to his eye, but he loved best its indefinite aspects. He wants the closeness of grasp of nature which Words- worth and Keats had, but he had the power in a far greater degree than they of describing the cloud-scenery of the sky, the doings of the great sea, and vast realms of landscape. He is in this, as well as in his eye for subtle colour, the Turner of poetry." And of his special gift in this respect David Masson writes: "Shelley is pre-eminently the poet of what may be called meteorological circumstance. He is at home among winds, mists, rains, snows, clouds, gorgeously coloured glories of sunrise, nights of moonshine, lightnings, streamers, and falling stars; and what of vegetation and geology he brings in is but so much that might be seen by an aerial creature in its ascents and descents." He visited Wales when his rare poetical facul- ties were beginning to unfold, and it is not easy to conceive with what force the beauty and grandeur of the scenery, and the atmospheric phenomena, some of which he then witnessed for the first time appealed to him. What he saw, heard and felt then in his lonely communion with Nature were to a more or less degree fused into all his poetical productions. He was in living ecstatic touch with the thrill of Nature and pictures and images of what he saw were hung up in the picture gallery of his imagination ready to express his thoughts and embody his ideas. What Ruskin says of Turner as a landscape painter may be said of Shelley as a poet of Nature "He seems never to have lost, or cared to disturb the impression made upon him by any scene,-even in his earliest youth. He never seems to have gone back to a place to look at it again, but, as he gained power, to have painted and repainted it as first seen associating with it certain new thoughts or new knowledge, but never shaking the central pillar of the old image. And the dominant influence of Welsh scenery on Shelley was similar to that of Yorkshire on Turner. Of the latter Ruskin writes: "I do not know in what district of England Turner first or longest studied, but the scenery whose influ- ence I can trace most definitely throughout his works, varied as they are, is that of Yorkshire. Of all his drawings, I think those of the York- shire series have the most heart in them, the most affectionate, simple, unwearied, serious finishing of truth. There is in them little seeking after effect, but a strong love of place, little exhibition of the artist's own powers or peculiaritiies, but intense appreciation of the smallest local minutiae." So the constant references in Shelley's Poems of nature to mountain peaks, craggy hills, preci- pices, caves, chasms, rivulets, brooks, lakes, ravines, cataracts, &c., show how deeply he had been impressed by Welsh scenery and that all his descriptions of natural scenery would have been different if he had not visited Elan Valley and Tremadoc. But for all that, all his ideal word pictures are perfectly true to nature even when he magnifies natural objects to express and symbolise his exalted feelings and sublime ideas. In referring to this, Professor W. J. Alexander says "Here with a tendency analogous to that exhibited in his treatment of human life, he turns from scenery of an ordinary character to the