Alfred, Lord Tennyson is the one who coined the phrase about naturing being "red of tooth and claw." Since then it's been used to illustrate the point about nature being cruel. It certainly is true that living beings in the wild can fall prey to any number of awful fates. And our own violent natures―more pronounced in men―has evolutionary roots.
Still, there's another side. The consolations of nature are constant. Rain remains rain, and continues to have that soothing sound. Different types of birds sing us to sleep and sing us awake. We can count on the different winds of the four seasons.
In the end I think we live in a world that loves us and forgives us.
2 comments:
It appears you've come to the same conclusion as Tennyson in his poem "In Memoriam", just one of a number of poems he wrote describing the grief he suffered at the loss of his best friend Arthur Hallam. The England of Tennyson's youth was largely agrarian and as he matured and aged it was the first industrial/steam driven country in the world - the Victorian Age. His use of the phrase 'nature red in tooth and claw' most definitely refers to individual creatures and even species who die unmourned.
But as you say, the consolations of nature are constant even as individuals pass away. Tennyson eventually moved towards acceptance when he came to the conclusion that he and Arthur will be reunited in heaven later on. What makes it a great poem (possibly Tennyson’s masterpiece) is the way that he transmutes a private grief into a universal and meaningful response to death.
I enjoyed reading a rather long composition about Alfred, Lord Tennyson's life and work. You cane check it out here if you want,
I have to confess that I needed to look up the source of the initial quote. I haven't read a lot of Tennyson since college, even though I remember being impressed with a lot of his poetry. That's something that maybe I should fix. It is very true that he saw England go through a lot of changes. The Romantic poets saw the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution while the next generation--Tennyson's--saw how it played out. I think he spent a lot of his life trying to deal with the vertigo resulting from that transformation.
Hallam was also a poet. He died at a very young age, about 22. It's not too hard to see how this would be devastating to Tennyson. It's a blessing that he was able to create a work of beauty afterwards.
Kind of wild to read in that Poetry Foundation article how epilepsy used to be thought of as the result of sexual excess. Somebody wasn't clear on the difference between correlation and causation.
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