Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and science

thing beloved" (LII, 2), then conversely the profane love of positivist
science summons "evil dreams" from an abject Mother Nature that is "red
in tooth and claw" (LVI, 15). An affront to God, such science "shriek'd
against his [i.e. humanity's] creed" (LVI, 16) and found its originary myth
for humankind not in Genesis but in the prehistoric world of the dinosaurs
that was disclosed by fossil remains:

Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

No more? A monster then, a dream,

A discord. Dragons of the prime,

That tare each other in their slime,

Were mellow music matched with him. (LVI, 9-12, 21-24)

Toward the close of the poem, the poet feels free to state his acceptance of a
Lyellian view of the earth: "They melt like mist, the solid lands, / Like
clouds they shape themselves and go" (CXXIII, 7-8). The original idealists
Parmenides and Plato confidently equated such flux with unreality. Parme-
nides (c. 515-after 45 0 BC) uses strict logic to establish that Being is one,
unchanging and consistent with itself, so that conversely the principles of
multiplicity and change must be illusory. Plato (428-34 7 BC) develops this
logic in his doctrine of the Forms, which posits the necessary existence of
pure, unchanging ideas that are understood only through reason and exist
separately from the fluctuant world of sensible things. Tennyson struggles
to work within this idealist tradition: "What hope of answer, or redress? /
Behind the veil, behind the veil" (LVI, 27-28). By bringing classical idealist
criteria to bear upon the thin "veil" of appearances privileged by positivism,
he diminishes this view of the world and strengthens his conviction in a
private vision: "But in my spirit will I dwell, / And dream my dream, and
hold it true" (CXXIII, 9-10). Truth is dreamed here. It is a seemingly
arbitrary matter of self-will and personal conviction: a private refuge from
a world increasingly colonized by positivistic science.

II

Many English Romantics sought to escape from the effects of British
practical science - the factories, crowded cities, and railways of the
industrial revolution - by entering into a self-affirming dialogue with
nature. Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"
(composed 1798, published 1807) dramatizes this flight from modern life,