'There Is No Wisdom Here; Seek Not For It!'

A reader objects to my frequent dismissal of nature mysticism. I say this as someone who has spent much of his life tramping through woods and fields, collecting insects and plants and studying biology. I’m happiest among trees and one of their byproducts, books. I just find mushy paeans to nature naïve and tiresome. Somone capable of responding to the natural world only by way of New Age “spirituality” might as well be blind. My professor of English Romanticism distinguished Shelley and Keats like this: If the pair of poets were walking together in the woods, Shelley would be effusing about spirit and sensitive plants, and Keats would frequently pause to study a flower or a butterfly. 

I’m no hardcore adherent to scientism. The world remains a mystery and our knowledge is forever limited. I’m with Keats, the one-time medical student, in his “Negative Capability” letter: “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” No admirer of Keats or Shelley, Yvor Winters writes in his chief critical work, In Defense of Reason (1947):

 

“The Romantic theory of human nature teaches that if man will rely upon his impulses, he will achieve the good life. When this notion is combined, as it frequently is, with a pantheistic philosophy or religion, it commonly teaches that through surrender to impulse man will not only achieve the good life but will achieve a kind of mystical union with the Divinity . . .”

 

Such themes are frequently present in Winters’ poems. In “On Rereading a Passage from John Muir,” he writes:

 

“This was my childhood revery: to be

Not one who seeks in nature his release,

But one forever by the dripping tree,

Paradisaic in his pristine peace.”

 

And in “The Manzanita,” about the arbutus or madrone, a tree common on the West Coast, Winters writes:

 

"This life is not our life; nor for our wit

The sweetness of these shades; these are alone.

There is no wisdom here; seek not for it!

This is the shadow of the vast madrone."

 

I’ve recently happened on a poem with a similar theme by a very different sort of poet, John Wain. Here are the final lines of “Reason for Not Writing Orthodox Nature Poetry”:

 

“To moderns who devoutly hymn the land.

So be it: each is welcome to his voice;

They are a gentle, if a useless, band.

 

“But leave me free to make a sterner choice;

Content, without embellishment, to note

How little beauty bids the heart rejoice,

 

“How little beauty catches at the throat.

Simply, I love this mountain and this bay

With love that I can never speak by rote,

 

“And where you love you cannot break away.”