Term Paper on "Compare the Use of Nature With Male and Female Poets"

Term Paper 5 pages (1744 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Women and Men: Differing Poetic Views of the Natural World -- Byron, Barrett Browning, and Bishop

Women are nature. Men observe nature. Women are controlled by nature. Men are in control of nature. Women are 'of' nature. Men are artistically empowered and inspired by nature. Women are metaphors of the natural world. Men make metaphors about women and the natural world.

These assumptions about male/female dichotomies of meaning in relationship to the natural world have haunted female poets throughout Western culture. There remains a pervasive assumption that men are the craftsmen of artistic work, and women are the muses and mere subjects of artistic work. This idea was particularly pervasive in much of 19th century Western poetry, when the Romantic poet Lord Byron, George Gordon wrote, as well as the Victorian female poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. However, despite the equating of women with nature in poems such as "She Walks in Beauty like the Night," some female poets of the day, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning still were able to deploy nature in an effective fashion in their works.

But Browning's sonnet "How do I love thee," although she was a later contemporary of Byron, shows that while women were still able to express themselves poetically about the natural world, they did so by referencing the soul in an abstract form rather than the natural world in a concrete or metaphorical form. Nature was something women had to define themselves against in a radical fashion, to disarm the common cultural association of women as passive recipients of meaning, like nature, and thus could not write. It took another century, as evidenced in the work of the 20th century American poet Elizabeth Bishop, author of "The Fish," to create a more flexible use of femininity in relationship with, rather than 'of' or 'against' the natural world.

The idea of women as nature is perhaps most obviously expressed in George Gordon, Lord Byron's poem: "She Walks in Beauty like the Night." This poem is an extended simile, or comparison between the women of the title and the night of the natural world. "She walks in beauty like the night/of cloudless climes and starry skies;" begins the verse. The woman of Byron's lyric is like the night because her beauty is muted, not gaudy. Her loveliness is, "Thus mellow'd to that tender light" of the moon, rather than the sun because she is a brunette. Her temperament is reflected in her appearance, just as her appearance becomes synonymous with nature over the course of the poem. Byron's poem, although lyrical in its tone, and beautiful in its easy ebb and flow of words also is highly conventional in its rendition of female, dark beauty, noting the subject's raven tresses, for example, like the darkness of the night. Her hair cascades in waves, like dark water, the poet notes, again equating the natural world's beauties with mute, feminine beauty.

Dark nature is beautiful in nighttime, although this beauty is often overlooked, says Byron. A dark woman's beauty likewise is often overlooked, suggests the poet. But she, like the night and nature is still lovely. "One shade the more, one ray the less," would impair or cover up this delicate beauty, suggests Byron. As daylight may impede night's beauty, so too would any greater lightness in this woman's face and complexion. Like night too, the apparently dark and alien quality of not possessing lightness, upon closer observation, fades, for "How pure, how dear their dwelling-place," of the thoughts that cross this woman's face.

Even thoughts dwell upon the woman's face, not as a process of thinking, or as subjects of the woman's brain, but as surface qualities of beauty -- something that might be observed like the natural world itself. The poet concludes that as nature is pure and innocent, so is the dark woman. Like nature itself, this innocence is manifest not in what the way the woman speaks, or thinks, or any action she performs -- simply by 'being' she is innocent, as an object of untouched purity. "The smiles that win, the tints that glow," writes Byron, marveling at the woman's face like her physical flesh was an object of adoration. The natural qualities of the woman are manifestations of this woman's goodness. In other words, the pure tints of her untouched appearance are equated with her morals. Yes, she is dark, but she does not add to her beauty with cosmetics to lighten her beauty. Her mind is at peace, and her heart is innocent, because of the woman's passive, natural acquiescence to what she is, simply a woman, and a dark object of adoration, loveliness and beauty in the eyes of the male spectator.

Thus, for Byron, as nature is passive, so is a good and beautiful woman. Women and nature are synonymous, in the poetic construction of simile and metaphor, for both their untouched appearances reveal truths about their innate qualities. Yes, the poet must plumb the depths of the night and the dark beauty of the woman to show that darkness can possess loveliness and innocence, but the surface is always revealing of the moral interior in of both nature and women -- hence, women are more 'of' nature, and can be analyzed on their surfaces and made into metaphors, like the natural world.

In contrast, Elizabeth Barrett Browning makes a contrast between her speaking, female poetic soul and nature. Her poetic soul is superior to nature, for it will last in love even after death. Rather than referencing nature, Elizabeth Barrett Browning begins her poem with a reference to the female poet's own mind, " How do I love thee? / Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight/for the ends of Being and ideal Grace." Barrett Browning suggests that she does not need nature, for even by "sun and candlelight" she loves her beloved. By natural and 'man made' light the poetic voice can think and love. Thus, she is not merely of nature.

The female poet attempts to locate herself outside of nature in a transcendent fashion, to gain the authority of speaking as a lover and as a poet, and even as a woman, rather than merely existing as an observable object -- although interestingly enough, the sex of the author is not revealed in the poem as either male or female, rather Barrett Browning constructs herself in an almost genderless fashion. "I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;" she says, although she is silent on the question of her maleness or femaleness. Men, "turn from praise," at least good men, but so does the author, whether male or female -- she leaves the reader, tantalizingly in doubt.

Finally, the final line of the sonnet, " I shall but love thee better after death," suggests that the poet and her love will transcend the natural laws of the world. Unlike nature, neither she, nor her love -- nor the poem will die. Thus Barrett Browning's sonnet finally attempts to deny the equation of women with nature, simply via the act of writing, by denying nature and supposedly natural associations about passivity and receptivity in nature. Her love is free, right, and willed as if turning from praise. Her love, far from the helpless, romantic heart of a female, is against nature and the natural laws of death in a positive fashion. Her love is active, of breath, smiles and tears, rather than consisting of beauty and being. However, other women attempted to neither acquiesce to the male equivalence of femininity with nature, nor attempt to be like men in the construction of their prose.

The speaker of the 20th century poem "The Fish," the female poet Elizabeth Bishop, begins her poem with the masculine, penetrating action of catching a fish. "I caught a tremendous fishand held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook," she writes, assuming an almost male persona. But unlike Byron, she does not focus on how the fish makes her feel, nor sees the fish as alien to herself, a part of nature that she, as a constructed male poetic persona merely observes and is absent from. Rather, the female poet Bishop feels sympathy for the caught fish, "battered," as she describes him, and "venerable and homely."

Unlike Byron, the poet Bishop does not see nature as immediately beautiful, rather this male fish is "speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice," and is extremely ordinary in its immediate apperance. But because she as a poetic speaker can percieve a beauty in the motley texture of this fish's scales, she cries out several times, "rainbow" and must let the fish go, now that she has seen the connection between herself and the fish. Thus, unlike Byron, Bishop is not a detached poetic observer. She is of nature, and sees nature, and unlike Barret Browning,… READ MORE

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