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Short Story: The creation story from The Silmarillion

Essay: The Poetic Feeling Awakened by the World of Nature, from The Poetic Interpretation of Nature by J.C.Shairp

"The tendency to isolate Nature and to regard it as a self-subsisting thing cut off from other existence, has been strong ever since man came to be clearly conscious of his own distinctness from the world. ...A few, we may believe, there have been in every age, and more perhaps in this than in former ages, to whom, in spite of the prosaic atmosphere that surrounded them, Nature was something more than a dead machine, something even worthy of affection. Poets, too, were born from age to age, favorite children of

“Gaudentes rure Camœnæ,”

who had their hearts opened in a preëminent degree to receive the love of Nature themselves, and to awaken it in other hearts by the music[38] which they lent to it. Yet neither the poets, nor the few apprehensive spirits who sympathized with them, could do much to make head against the prosaic ways of thinking by which they were surrounded. It was only with furtive and occasional glances that even the poets of past ages were allowed to look at Nature as they would, only by a kind of sufferance that they were allowed to express the tender love they felt for her. The feelings which they had in her presence were put down to imagination, which was a faculty of falsehood, and the words which they used regarding her were supposed to be tropes and hyperboles that had no meaning. The science and the philosophy, as well as the common belief which surrounded them, had settled it, that Nature was as inanimate as any piece of man’s manufacture. And what were a few poets, with their weak singing, a few dreamers, with their flimsy fancies, that they could withstand the tyrant tradition, even though, half unconsciously, all their highest inspiration witnessed against it? The instinctive faith of the poet cannot be vindicated till, not in Poetry only, but by Science and Philosophy also, the unity and the life that is in Nature are fully recognized,—till the whole visible world, not in trope and figure, but in literal truth, is felt to be the embodied thought of a mind which is in Nature and above it, and which fills the Universe. Not till this conviction has come home to man as a sober truth of reason, can we feel that Nature
 is intended to minister no furtive, but a legitimate delight to the eye, to furnish an interest to the understanding, beauty and suggestiveness to the imagination, calm and restoration to the heart. Otherwise she becomes, none the less for all her beauty, to those who fain would love her, a cruel and all-devouring Sphinx."

"The poet is in his proper place, not when he scrutinizes nature as an analyst, but when he unreservedly accepts all her concrete appearances as they come to him. Forms and colors are given him through the eye; sounds as they reach him through the ear; fragrances as wafted to his sense of smell. On this side of analysis there is enough, and more than enough, for him. The outward appearances he feels more intensely, and renders into words more graphically than ordinary men,—no other describes them so to the quick,—yet he does not rest in them, but passes with them inward and brings them into relation with his own being, or rather with the universal heart of man. The ethereal blue of the sky on a fine spring day delights every man, and something of the delight is no doubt due to the mere eye, to the adaptation of the object to the visual organ; but how much more—who shall say?—is due to the endless suggestiveness of the sight, even though of its manifold meaning nothing may shape itself into words. But it is the poet’s privilege not only to describe the outward image, but to draw out some of the many meanings that lie hid in it, and so render them as to win response from his fellow-men. It matters not,el therefore, if it be true, that all men can know of Nature is the sensations it produces in himself. Even if this be all, it is enough for the poet. Leaving to others to deal with its physical uses as the feeder and supporter of the body, it is his to note how it exhilarates the animal spirits; how it passes into the imagination and there becomes rich in suggestiveness; how it entwines itself round the affections; how fruitful it is in resemblances and contrasts to human destiny; what large contemplations and high truths it presents to the reason; how even for conscience, though it contains no direct teaching of moral law, it supplies in its order and harmony the best visible images thereof. In fact, quite endless is the wealth of meaning that lies hid in Nature, the interchange of appeal and response that is possible between the world without and the world within. There is in Nature just as much, or as little, as the soul of each can see in her. And in order to see, the soul must have been trained for it both by habitual converse with the outward world, and also by converse with other regions of being, with other teachers. For other teachers are not less necessary than the beauty which lies in the face of Nature.

The book was published in 1900. I absolutely love everything in it that I have read so far.

Poem:

Aside

by R.L. Thomas

Cold beach, solitary

sea with its monotone

on the shingle; the ring

in the rock prohibiting

the conviction that no one

has been here before.

Man, is there anywhere

you can say this, peering

into the future under

the mushroom cloud? Mixed

with our oldest bones are

disturbing relics, too contemporary

to be there. In pre-history

someone came to this threshold

on which you hesitate

and crossed it, incinerating

the planet, leaving it

to life to lick its wounds

thousands of years. Thought

is as fast as light,

to exceed that brings annihilation

upon us.

   

                         Yet wisdom

is at our elbow, whispering,

as at his once: Progress

is not with the machine;

it is a

turning aside,

a bending over a still pool,

where the bubbles arise

from unseen depths, as from truth

breathing, showing us by their roundness

the roundness of our world.