19th Century Redefines the Natural

‘19th -Century poetry profoundly redefines the limits of the natural’. Discuss with reference to the work of AT LEAST TWO of the studied poets.

The poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud sought to revolutionize the parameters of the natural, by rooting their work in the experiences of horror, guilt and death. Unlike the Romantics before them, who were passionately preoccupied with nature as a sublime ideal, both Baudelaire and Rimbaud negotiate the natural world as a medium to promote anxieties, meaninglessness and suffering.

Rimbaud’s exploration of death in the natural world is most strikingly portrayed in a variety of poems taken from the Illuminations. These poems seem to express an awareness of the attraction between the grounded, natural man and a human longing of a mystical nature, a transcended yearning for union with the living world but which is pathetically satisfied only in the fusion between earth and human body occurring in death.

The sense of a cosmic fulfilment in nature through death is expressed frequently throughout Rimbaud's work. For example, in Illuminations, we can turn to the poem Marine which evokes Rimbaud’s experience of a sea crossing, a vast movement of tide. Each succeeding line marries sea and land, mingling the two mediums in parallelisms. Rimbaud’s symmetrical wordplay is portrayed through the association of the nouns ‘les chars’ and ‘les proues’. In this way, Rimbaud likens a ships prow to plow blades which physically cut and probe their way through soil. The poem continues in a similar manner, ‘les courants de la lande’,  ‘les orniers immenes du reflux’ enumerating in a magnificent explosion of light, ‘des tourbillons de lumière’. The noun ‘tourbillon’ employed by Rimbaud is truly evocative of the wider lexical field of turbulence, as both the reader and poet are swayed by a mouvement irrépressible. Through the apparent fusion of both sea and land, it is easy to believe that the established duality of the natural is reconciled. Yet, Rimbaud’s versification in Marine portrays this transcended vision as only a statement, not as a poetic movement. Penned as one of the two poems in free verse within the Illuminations, Marine is free from any structural limitations, written with no rhythmical or syntactic obstacle to overcome, the poem is bound exclusively at the level of a proposition, rather than a complete idea. In the field of nature, Marine only succeeds in making the reader mystically aware of the apprehension surrounding man.

Thus, in Rimbaud’s worldview, man can only truly participate in the immersion of nature through death. This theme is most strikingly elucidated in the poem Soleil et chair. It takes the tone of an expected holy hymn, a prophetic paen to the sun and earth, yet subverts this with overt sexual overtones. In terms of poetic form, Rimbaud constructs his piece in four different parts, religiously sticking to the Alexandrin or 12 syllable per line format. Despite the poem being structurally representative of classical antiquity, thematically the topics are carnal in nature. The poem begins with Rimbaud’s personification of ‘la terre’ as ‘nubile’, as it receives the climax of ‘l'amour brûlant’ du soleil. The use of the adjective ‘brûlant’ suggests an intense sexual fervour, and partnered with the reference to ‘son immense sein’ sets an overwhelmingly salacious tone. Indeed, the earth is often portrayed as a cultivator of life and vitality, but this titillating association is startling, even for the modern reader.  Rimbaud portrays a physical fusion with nature, a communion between ‘d’ame’ of man, and ‘le monde infi’.  Rimbaud invokes his Romantic and Parnassian ancestors in passionately lamenting the modern man’s alienation from nature: his exclamatory remark that ‘l'Homme est Roi, L'Homme est Dieu !’ perfectly encapsulates his vision of the ugliness of contemporary existence. Rimbaud expresses that ‘l’Homme’ is ignorant of his own origin and end, deeming himself both ‘Roi’ and ‘Dieu’. In this way, man thinks that he rules both the celestial world as God, and the physical aspect of nature as King. Rimbaud suggests that perhaps his desire for oneness with nature can be satisfied only by the loss of personal existence and a return to the original order of mankind. Through continually contrasting the suffocating nature of monotheism, with the primitive form of religious feeling within polytheism, Rimbaud rhythmically repeats the phrase, "Je regrette le temps de", assigning the poem a lyric like quality, the chorus to which Rimbaud systematically returns as he portrays the diversity of life, nature and the world that has disappeared with the loss of pantheistic faith.

The theme of the attraction to union with nature, seen as only being accomplished tragically only in death, is consistent in Rimbaud's poetry. Yet, whilst Rimbaud searches for a unification with nature, conversely, it is his inspiration Charles Baudelaire, who seeks to divorce himself from it. The battle between nature and art is a recurring theme in the writings of Baudelaire, whose vision of the artist contains two extremes – one in which the artist dominates nature, the other in which the artist is dominated by nature.

Baudelaire's hostility to nature was an extremely stylized and self-conscious creation which evolved throughout his lifetime. His rejection of nature was not only an ideological one born out of theory, but a real-life fear of the unknown other, the natural world, with which he had little interaction as an urban resident.

Unlike in the tradition of the Romantic poets, nature rarely appears as the salient poetic subject in Baudelaire’s work, but rather more predominantly as a catalyst to trigger senses, memories and feelings. This idea is portrayed through the poem penned ‘Correspondances’, the title itself being a tool to describe the correspondences between objects in Nature and the symbols that populate our psyches. Here, Baudelaire opts for the sonnet form, conventionally used in the canon of love literature, to highlight the coupling of man and the natural world. The poem opens by describing ‘la nature’ to have ‘de vivants piliers’, Baudelaire evokes the image of a forest, rich with blended sensations and symbols. The use of personification in detailing the ‘piliers’ as ‘vivants’ is reminiscent of an Ancient Druid ceremony, the trees are laden with mysticism, and even further, Baudelaire suggests that the natural world is imbued with symbols of moral meaning. The association of nature as ‘un temple’ undoubtedly elevates the physical world into the realm of a holy meeting place, whilst Baudelaire equally grounds the symbols in temporal familiarity, or ‘des regards familiers’. This is to say that such symbols have not been foisted upon him by some external force but rather communicate personally to him via a personal and inward-tending significance.

Unlike his contemporaries, Baudelaire truly manages to redefine the natural, and cement his place in modern literature, due to the newly established metaphysical realm within his work. Through the second stanza, the senses begin to merge and integrate into one collective unconsciousness. ‘Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.’ The use of the reflexive verb ‘se répondre’ emphasizes the symmetric positioning, interconnectedness and unison of existence. Baudelaire seems to be able to perfectly perceive that which is.  This is further amplified by the synesthetic descriptions of the next stanza, des parfums ‘frais’, ‘doux’, ‘corrumps’ . Through the plethora of adjectives, Baudelaire depicts the ineffable, likening scents to sound, and colour to touch. Thus, in Baudelaire’s reformulation of nature, the parameters are extended to the metaphysical plane – specifically to accommodate for the sensation and pure comprehension of the moment.