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Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell – By Diane Kelsey McColley

2009; Wiley; Volume: 43; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1094-348x.2009.00210_4.x

1094-348X

William Shullenberger,

Religion, Ecology, and Ethics

Diane Kelsey McColley . Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell . Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, Vermont : Ashgate , 2007 . xii + 252 pp. ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-6048-4 . $89.95 (cloth ). In the course of my reading and ruminating about Diane McColley's Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell, I found myself reading articles or watching television shows about a wide range of environmental events: the water pollution resulting from fish farms in China and elsewhere; the destruction of the local fisheries of West Africa's coastlines by Europe's factory fishing fleets; the European Union's proposed ban on imports of certain Latin American and Asian biofuels because of the environmental harm and greenhouse gases caused by their production; the ways in which the first world's growing hunger for beef has devastated the forests and grasslands of the global south; the gradual extinction of the native longhorn cattle of the western Ankole region of Uganda by their hybridization with holstein DNA strands that are more productive of milk but more destructive of grasslands, and have less resistance to the harsh challenges of the equatorial climate. The list could be extended, but I inventory these few instances because I attended to these stories with my eye and understanding considerably sharpened by McColley's reading of seventeenth-century poetry, natural philosophy, experimental science, theology, and social improvement proposals. Most of these stories vividly illustrate the law of unintended consequences—a good intention put into practice sometimes causing more difficult and intractable problems than the one it was intended to solve—but the sharpening of her readers' ecological awareness and motivating them to practical action are surely intended consequences of McColley's project, at least equally as important to her as her ardent and frequently compelling explication of the ecological dimensions of seventeenth century poetry in its historical and discursive contexts. There is nothing new under the sun. McColley effectively demonstrates that many contemporary concerns about environmental degradation are anticipated in seventeenth-century debates about urban expansion, air pollution and acid rain, fossil fuel (coal) versus biofuel (wood), deforestation, ditching and hedging and the privatization of common lands, strip mining, draining of wetlands, animal experimentation, and wanton species-destruction. She shows that the poets were sharply attuned to these arguments, and embedded them in their work, from Cavendish's “A Dialogue between an Oake, and a Man cutting him down,” to Marvell's ecological survey of the grounds of Appleton House and the witty ecocriticism of “The Garden” and the Mower poems, to the sacrificial inventory of the organic materials that went into the production of Vaughan's “The Book,” to the panoramic ecosystem of Milton's Eden. Linking her own study to groundbreaking works by Stephen Fallon and John Rogers on poetry and philosophy in the period, she repeatedly speaks of her poets as “monistic vitalists,” recognizing the indissolubility of spirit and matter, whose own words can “put us in right relation to the natural world” and teach us “how to speak without appropriation” (8). One could imagine McColley supplementing this work of criticism with an anthology of environmentally engaged seventeenth-century English texts. Such an anthology would include the poets she attends to—mostly familiar names, Milton, Marvell, Vaughan, Herbert, Traherne, Cavendish, Cowley—as well as the wide range of naturalists, scientists, and philosophers she introduces—among them her hero (for his advocacy of ecologically restorative public works), John Evelyn, as well Bacon, Robert Hooke, Henry Power, Richard Bentley, Samuel Hartlib, Nehemiah Grew, Godfrey Goodman, John Ray, and others. Poetry and Ecology provides a rich source-book of materials on ecology, science, and poetry in the seventeenth century for a full term undergraduate or graduate course on the subjects, but McColley could simplify the labors of teachers inspired by her book by organizing the primary materials in a single collection for them. McColley undergirds her historical framework by grounding it in biblical exegesis, in particular, God's granting of dominion over the earth and its creatures to humanity (Gen. 1.28). She acknowledges the long and shameful Christian tradition of treating this commission as a sanction for exploitation and destruction, leading to several trenchant contemporary critiques of Christianity as an ecoclastic religious ideology. McColley argues for an earth-friendly counter-reading: “In view of the injunction to ‘dress and keep’ the garden, dominion (lordship) is primarily intrepretable as stewardship: God's human gardeners taking care of their domain of earth as the habitat of all the creatures God has just blessed” (143). McColley shows how this conflict of interpretations became deadly serious in the slipstream of the “new philosophy” of experimental science, as human impact on the environment was multiplied by the designs of scientists, engineers, and politicians, and by the technology invented to implement these designs. Although she acknowledges the human benefits resulting from experimental science, particularly in the field of medicine, she understandably stresses the deficits, and attributes them to the powerful conjunction of ultimately destructive intellectual paradigms. In McColley's eco-narrative, the holistic principles of the seventeenth-century poets, monism, vitalism, “the conservation of entities,” and “philosophical justice” square off in Manichean struggle against “the combination of dualism in natural philosophy, experimentalism in natural history, Aristotelianism, Calvinism, and Royalism [which] worked together against ethical and spiritual compassion of fellow sentient beings” (73). There are a lot of “isms” in this book, many of them bad. Although dualism is itself a target of McColley's criticism, she constructs a dualistic narrative of her own, in which Francis Bacon, as the intellectual godfather of these scientific trends in the early modern period, as well as René Descartes, as the inaugurator of modern philosophic and psychological dualism, become the anti-environmental arch-villains. The generalizing oversimplification of her paradigm, and of some of her moments of intellectual denunciation, raises the question of whether, and how, McColley's environmental advocacy affects her scholarship and her reading. Diane McColley has long been one of our most finely tuned and intellectually compelling readers and interpreters of seventeenth century poetry. Her ability to let the “gust” of the poem breathe itself through her critical prose has been beautifully joined to a deft analytic touch and strong grasp of larger structures of poetic architecture. Readers anticipating fresh demonstrations of McColley's skill and knowledge will find plenty of delights in the readings of this book. The extensive treatment of Marvell's Upon Appleton House as a processive and holistic way of perceiving a humanly managed environment as a complex and integrated habitat resounds with political as well as literary wisdom: McColley observes that in Marvell's poem, as in Paradise Lost, “the Edenic model incorporates the georgic,” and that the estate becomes, in the wake of General Fairfax's military accomplishments, “a republic of animate nature” (14). She persuasively and deftly refocuses our understanding of a range of lyrics by Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne by making explicit what has been somewhat overlooked in previous readings of their texts: that they are, in different ways and at different moments, resisting “Bacon's program of human empire over nature” (55) and critiquing “the commodification that debases nature and diminishes each human soul” (56). With his vast design and insistent “monist animism” (118), Milton is, not surprisingly for McColley, the ultimate source and touchstone for the greening of seventeenth-century literature. She writes quite beautifully of the environmental awareness of the Lady of Comus that for her, “temperance is the field in which justice is sown,” and that “justice to human beings [should be] founded on justice toward ‘innocent Nature’ ” (201-202). In Paradise Lost, McColley beautifully demonstrates how language itself is a “habitat” (214) and Eve and Adam exemplify, not only in their low impact gardening but in their lyricism, an “ecocentric self” that McColley would identify as well with their author Milton. No one, to my knowledge, has explained as vividly as McColley the “kinetic” effects and political implications of Milton's prosody in Paradise Lost, the way that his language so uncannily and orphically embodies, enacts, and politicizes what it describes. Of the creation of land animals (PL 7.468-74) she writes When “clods . . . calve” the alliteration concurs with the relatedness of earth and offspring. The lion's rupture from earth, like the bird's from its shell, is a struggle and liberation we feel in the syntax as it delays and then leaps into swifter syllables, and the enjambments at “free / His hinder parts,”“mole / Rising . . . from under ground / Bore up” and the weightily alliterated “Behemoth biggest born . . . upheaved / His vastness” also reproduce this sense of struggle and liberation: Milton mimes the birth of the animals as consonant with his politics and theology. (159-60) On the other hand, the argument becomes heavy-handed at times when her ecological point overrides the passage from which she draws it. Take, for instance, her observation that Adam and Eve were given all the fruit- and nut-bearing trees in the garden to eat from “except one, reserved as an exercise in temperance and faith, a reminder that trees are not mere timber” (98). One cannot dispute the first proposition here, that the Tree of Knowledge is a sign that marks and tests human obedience and temperance. But the second seems quirky, as if spoken by the whimsical speaker of Marvell's “The Garden,” for whom trees have become the be-all and end-all of desire. Milton tells us in De Doctrina Christiana that the forbidden fruit is in itself a “thing indifferent,” and so, it seems, would be the tree on which it flourishes. To notice this is not to devalue the tree as a creature; it is to resist the temptation to overvalue it, which is what McColley perhaps does here. The point of the original prohibition is not to prohibit random logging and deforestation, although McColley is right to stress that reverence for our fellow creatures would be one beneficial consequence of humanity's primal obedience. Her reading confuses consequence for cause, and in so doing comes dangerously close to what C. S. Lewis recognized Eve was doing in her first postlapsarian speech, “worshipping a vegetable.” There are other passages in which ecological insistence seems to flatten the tone of a lyric moment. Of Herbert's wistful and sweetly comic “I reade, and sigh, and wish I were a tree” (“Affliction 1,” 57), she earnestly remarks “Sometimes Herbert wants to be a tree . . .” (112), as if this were a statement of longing for organic unity rather than of frustration with being human. Of Marvell's startling “Or turn me but, and you shall see / I was but an inverted Tree” in Upon Appleton House, she notes, “Marvell literalizes the metaphor [of man as an upside-down tree]; he is not only nearly metamorphosed into a tree, but is thus returning to his true nature” (125-26). These commentaries may be valid extensions of the argument that McColley is pursuing, in this case about “hylozoic poetry” and its fascination with what Stevie Wonder would also lyricize as “the secret life of plants”; but are they well tuned to the humor and playfulness of these moments in the poems? I was saddened to see poor Ben Jonson tarred with guilt by association with commercial songbird-herders, for proposing, in “Inviting a Friend to Supper” that he might just possibly be able to get larks for the table (156-57). One might, by the same logic, castigate Milton's “uncouth swain” for his wanton destruction of laurel, myrtle, and ivy in the opening of Lycidas. On the other hand, surprisingly, McColley offers no treatment of Marvell's “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn,” a poem that powerfully and legitimately decries in literal as well as symbolic ways the sinful human disposition toward wanton destruction of other, innocent creatures. These are fairly infrequent moments in an ambitious book of readings that are sweetly tuned to poems and to the philosophic, theological, and political discourses circulating within and around them. But there is something more, of which these isolated off-notes are a symptom, that slightly troubles me about Poetry and Ecology. In McColley's previous work, the passionate advocacy of groundbreaking and sometimes controversial positions could not be characterized as polemical. But in this book, polemical insistence sometimes overshadows the nuance and intelligence of the analysis and explication. Some particularly strong instances of this polemical effect: “One kind of language promotes delight; the other, when taken beyond the needs of human survival, promotes extinction” (152); “the planet is still dependent on those who imitate the ant and damaged by those who imitate Caligula and Heliogabalus” (166); “If the court, the owners of great estates, and global adventurers had followed the teachings of Pythagoras and Plutarch, would their society and ours have been better preservers of the health of nature and less prone to human bloodshed, as these philosophers claimed?” (191-92). I am not sure that McColley's purpose as an ecocritic is well served by these occasional moments of drum-beating. I suspect that most of her readers and acolytes are likely to be, like me, liberal middle-class academic types who are already aware of our carbon footprint and trying to monitor and discipline our practices of consumption, from what we eat to what we wear to what we drive. We will find much of Poetry and Ecology revelatory to us as readers, teachers, and critics of seventeenth-century English literature, and work on the “greening” of our classes and our studies as a consequence of her inspiration. But is the most effective way to challenge us to the next level of ecological commitment and self-discipline to chide us about how we have not taken Ovid's Pythagoras seriously enough, or warn us about the dangers of imitating Caligula? At her best, McColley has always eloquently shown us how poems do their work, as she does also, in rich and surprising ways, in this book. Here her explication of poems of Milton and Marvell and Cavendish and Vaughan and others heightens our knowledge of and joy in the “inscapes” (Hopkins) of creatures and the integrated plenitudes of gardens, forests, and poems. But she does not leave it at that. She does not seem entirely to trust the poems as ecological testaments to persuade their readers to the reformation of their lives of complacency and consumption. That lack of trust tempts her to an occasionally shrill insistence that risks distracting us from the power of her explication and of the poems that she brings to our attention.