from ‘Windsor Forest’
See! from the brake the whirring pheasant springs,
And mounts exulting on triumphant wings:
Short is his joy; he feels the fiery wound,
Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground.
Ah! what avail his glossy, varying dyes,
His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes,
The vivid green his shining plumes unfold,
His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold?
[…]
In genial spring, beneath the quiv’ring shade,
Where cooling vapours breathe along the mead,
The patient fisher takes his silent stand,
Intent, his angle trembling in his hand;
With looks unmov’d, he hopes the scaly breed,
And eyes the dancing cork, and bending reed.
Our plenteous streams a various race supply,
The bright-ey’d perch with fins of Tyrian dye,
The silver eel, in shining volumes roll’d,
The yellow carp, in scales bedrop’d with gold,
Swift trouts, diversify’d with crimson stains,
And pykes, the tyrants of the watry plains.
As these lines demonstrate, Alexander Pope had a rare ability to capture the visual beauty of nature. But he wasn’t a nature poet in the manner that Wordsworth would later become, because he didn’t describe nature as being separate from humanity. People are busy in Pope’s landscape: a fisherman seen on the river-bank, and the shooter who is hidden from view but whose actions are visible in the spectacle of the dying pheasant. There are no mute mountain worshipers here.
That doesn’t mean that Pope’s figures are just part of the scenery, living in harmony with nature. Notice how Pope invites us to appreciate the animals in the forest. The trout is resplendent with ‘crimson stains’, and the carp is ‘bedrop’d with gold’, while the pheasant’s breast is ‘flamed with gold’. The eel is ‘silver’. The animals gleam like the creations of some fantastic jeweller.
We lose something by regarding the animals in this way. How can we reconcile our appreciation of their resemblance to shimmering craftsmanship with our knowledge that they are living things like us?
Pope recognises this gap and exploits it. A savage thrill comes from reading of the pheasant’s death. The image of the colourful bird, which, as it struggles, flashes before us in snatches of ‘vivid green’, ‘scarlet-circled eyes’, ‘shining plumes’ and ‘gold’, is mesmerising. But we are reminded by the blood, the panting and the beating on the ground that this spectacle (and our pleasure from it) depends on pain and death. The shooter has come into the wood to cause that pain, and we have come to enjoy watching it.
Something similar is true of the fisherman. He is ‘patient…silent…intent…unmoved’, an emblem of the tranquillity of ‘genial spring…Where cooling vapours breathe along the mead’. But to the fish, he is a hunter, a death-bringer no less fearsome than the pikes who are ‘the tyrants of the watry plains’.
Man goes into the forest in search of peace, but brings violence with him. Is this because we are a part of a violent natural world just like the tyrannous pikes, or do we corrupt the landscape by exploiting its beauty? The refined hunter might appear admirable at first, but how complete is a way of life that views the landscape only as a resource for civilised living? Especially if that civilised life is based on recreational killing? As so often in Pope’s poetry, a surface brilliance covers a searching attempt to understand man’s place in the world.
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