The Influence of Nature on Victorian Poetry

The significance of nature is apparent in Victorian poetry. There are Victorian poets who view the connection to nature of human beings. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Coventry Patmore, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti exemplify nature as being exuberant, indifferent, and sorrowful in a variation of their poetry.

In Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Splendor Falls,” nature is vividly depicted as being alive. Tennyson uses many active verbs to illustrate his view of nature clearly. In the first four lines of stanza one, nature is portrayed as splendid. The beginning of the first stanza states: “The splendor falls on castle walls / And snowy summits old in story; / The long light shakes across the lakes, / And the wild cataract leaps in glory” (Negri 23). Viewing the environment in a wonderful way, Tennyson paints the picture of a glistening castle in the winter. However, Tennyson slowly contrasts this vivid imagery with the fall of reverberations known as echoes. “Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying” (Negri 23). He uses repetition in the last line of each stanza to emphasize the “dying” of the echoes that answer to the bugle being blown. At first, the repetition of the word “dying” made the scene of nature depressing in a sense. However, if examined carefully, these echoes are dying because of how great nature is. As shown in stanza three: “O love, they die in yon rich sky” (Negri 23). Tennyson, in logic, makes it seem as though the echoes pass away as soon as it hits the prosperous sky.

In another one of Tennyson’s poems, “Flower in the Crannied Wall,” a human is influenced by nature, unlike “The Splendor Falls,” which focuses specifically on nature. The person in this poem pulls at the environment, taking a flower from...

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...ssing image of the world. “As the world's heart of rest and wrath, / Its painful pulse is in the sands. / Last utterly, the whole sky stands, / Grey and not known, along its path” (Negri 148). The last stanza of “The Woodspurge,” compared to the lines just mentioned, also reveals a sense of depression. “From perfect grief there need not be / Wisdom or even memory: / One thing then learnt remains to me,-- / The woodspurge has a cup of three” (Negri 147). Giving significance to the woodspurge, Roseetti accentuates the times of pain that people recall through ordinary details in this stanza.

Nature in Victorian poetry was not really worshipped as it was in Romantic poetry, but more so referred to as being noticeable. As shown, it was exemplified for revealing a bigger purpose. Conclusively, it was about the influence that nature had, not the focus on nature.