NATURE IN POEMS (1851)

Meredith was a poet first and last: ‘I began with poetry and I shall finish with it’, he told his friend Edward Clodd in later life. Eager to impress with his debut volume, the young man dedicated it to Peacock, and quoted from Horne's popular epic Orion on its title page. Then he presented copies to various other men of letters.With amixture of pride and humility, he told A. J. Scott, Professor of English at University College, London, that he wished the poems ‘to be considered more as indications than accomplishments’. Later, however, he dismissed the whole thing as his ‘boy's book’ (Letters I: 18, 110), destroying his unbound copies of it. Critics have generally accepted the later verdict, but William Sharp was not alone in appreciating its freshness, while Mark Pattison recognized early on that his mature poetry developed ‘germs’ from it (CH, 249).

What it reveals most clearly is his focus on nature, not just as his inspiration or even as his spiritual guide. He finds its forces made manifest in his own being. His feelings as a young man in love are both derived from it, and directed towards it, so that union with it is partly a given, and partly a longed-for goal. In ‘Song’ (‘Love within the lover's breast’), for example, the human emotion is expressed in a run of simple comparisons with nature:

The analogies pile up, as they do in his prose, forcing him into some awkward accommodations: in the following lines he expresses his own response, saying, ‘As the song unto the bird, / On my lips thy name is heard’, with ‘unto’ apparently serving as ‘of’, to suit the metre. But another effect is to suggest that love, when given and returned, is elemental and dynamic, a natural phenomenon like the others that animate our universe. In ‘Twilight Music’, the bigger picture, in this case the natural harmony of spheres, stars and landscape, comes first.