Romanticism & Ecology

Wordsworth's "The Haunted Tree" and the Sexual Politics of Landscape

Tim Fulford, Nottingham Trent University

In 1819 Wordsworth began to write a short poem that he published in 1820. He called it "The Haunted Tree." Unusual within his corpus in that it is fancifully mythological and playfully erotic, this poem is nevertheless an evocation of a particular oak-tree in the familiar landscape of Rydal Park, Grasmere.¹ Wordsworth dwells upon the tree in a manner that links the poem to "The Thorn" and to the poems on the naming of places. The poem is part of a kind of arboreal sub-genre within Wordsworth's nature verse and continues the modification of the eighteenth-century Georgic he had previously made in "Yew-Trees" and The Excursion.

Here is the text of the poem:

Those silver clouds collected round the sun
His mid-day warmth abate not, seeming less
To overshade than multiply his beams
By soft reflection—grateful to the sky,
To rocks, fields, woods. Nor doth our human sense
Ask, for its pleasure, screen or canopy
More ample than the time-dismantled Oak
Spreads o'er this tuft of heath, which now, attired
In the whole fulness of its bloom, affords
Couch beautiful as e'er for earthly use
Was fashioned; whether by the hand of Art,
That eastern Sultan, amid flowers enwrought
On silken tissue, might diffuse his limbs
In languor; or, by Nature, for repose
Of panting Wood-nymph, wearied with the chase.
O Lady! fairer in thy Poet's sight
Than fairest spiritual creature of the groves,
Approach;—and, thus invited, crown with rest
The noon-tide hour: though truly some there are
Whose footsteps superstitiously avoid
This venerable Tree; for, when the wind
Blows keenly, it sends forth a creaking sound
(Above the general roar of woods and crags)
Distinctly heard from far—a doleful note!
As if (so Grecian shepherds would have deemed)
The Hamadryad, pent within, bewailed
Some bitter wrong. Nor it is unbelieved,
By ruder fancy, that a troubled ghost
Haunts the old trunk; lamenting deeds of which
The flowery ground is conscious. But no wind
Sweeps now along this elevated ridge;
Not even a zephyr stirs;—the obnoxious Tree
Is mute; and, in his silence, would look down,
O lovely Wanderer of the trackless hills,
On thy reclining form with more delight
Than his coevals in the sheltered vale
Seem to participate, the while they view
Their own far-stretching arms and leafy heads
Vividly pictured in some glassy pool,
That, for a brief space, checks the hurrying stream!
(Wordsworth 291)

In the nineteen eighties, a number of critics suggested that Wordsworth's nature poetry is a flight from political issues into the sublime area of his own subjectivity—that it reveals a loss of faith in political and social argument. For Marjorie Levinson it is an "evasion," for Alan Liu a "denial," of history.² The concept of "displacement"—originally Raymond Williams's but revived by David Simpson—is more subtle but still, I shall argue, not wholly adequate as a formulation of Wordsworth's poetic relationship with the political and social issues of the early nineteenth century since it presumes that landscape functions as a secondary stage on which issues that arose elsewhere can be depicted in controlled form (Simpson 15-20).

I begin by examining the use made of landscape-imagery in political argument. Both radical opponents and conservative defenders of Britain's unreformed constitution employed nature-imagery to render their arguments appealing. Trees figured prominently in that imagery after John Locke had used the oak to illustrate organic unity.³ Oaks' longevity, rootedness and strength made them suitable emblems for writers who portrayed an ancient constitution secured in the heritable property of land and capable of gradual change as a growth of English soil.⁴ Edmund Burke depicted Britain's form of government as tree-like, of ancient growth: it "moves on through the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation and progression" in "the method of nature" ("Reflections" 120). The people were "great cattle reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak" (181). Burke was opposed by Thomas Paine and other radicals who employed the political iconography of the French Revolution, in which the Liberty tree was an emblem of the new growth possible once ancient injustices had been uprooted. Like an oak Burke's constitution was rooted in the land, time honored, slow to change and grow, protective of the subjects who sheltered beneath it. Wordsworth characterized Burke himself as a tree, acknowledging the power of his symbolic oak as an anti-revolutionary naturalization of conservative politics:

I see him,—old, but vigorous in age,
Stand like an oak whose stag-horn branches start
Out of its leafy brow, the more to awe
The younger brethren of the grove . . .
While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by Custom; and with high disdain,
Exploding upstart Theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born.
(The Prelude, VII.519-30)

Price's fellow theorist Richard Payne Knight, also a Herefordshire Whig squire, both planted oaks and poeticized about their political significance. He portrayed the oak tree as a symbol of a constitutional British monarch paternally sheltering lesser trees grouped around it: "Then Britain's genius to thy aid invoke / And spread around the rich, high-clustering oak: / King of the woods!" The cedar by contrast was shown to be "like some great eastern king", destroying everything in its shade, "Secure and shelter'd, every subject lies; / But, robb'd of moisture, sickens, droops, and dies" (V.61-63; V.111-20).

Wordsworth's "The Haunted Tree" depicts the oak in a similar way. His tree is an image of the English gentry's authority, rooted, paternalist, like Burke's tree-like constitution. Like Knight, Wordsworth opposes his English tree to an Oriental monarch—to a Sultan—a standard figure of political and sexual despotism:

Nor doth our human sense
Ask, for its pleasure, screen or canopy
More ample than the time-dismantled Oak
Spreads o'er this tuft of heath, which now, attired
In the whole fulness of its bloom, affords
Couch beautiful as e'er for earthly use
Was fashioned; whether by the hand of Art,
That eastern Sultan, amid flowers enwrought
On silken tissue, might diffuse his limbs
In languor; or, by Nature, for repose
Of panting Wood-nymph, wearied with the chase.
(lines 1-15)

The politics of "The Haunted Tree" are more complex than are Southey's Tory polemics. Wordsworth examines, when Southey does not, the power relations implicit in the Burkeian model of authority. He shows these power relations to be constructed upon sexual oppositions. His oak is a sublime male sheltering a beautiful female, whose presence tempers and mollifies his masculine authority: it "affords / Couch beautiful" for the Lady of the poem. Burke had understood political authority in these terms: Caesar, in Burke's discussion of the sublime, had achieved political power by combining the awe-inspiring masculinity of the warrior with attractive feminine qualities ("Philosophical Enquiry" 111). The man of sublime authority had, furthermore, a duty to protect the vulnerable and weak (170-71). Wordsworth's poem sexualizes nature in similar terms: masculinity is awe-inspiring and sublime, femininity tender and beautiful. It places this gendering of power, adapted from Burke, against a potentially aggressive masculinity whose power is that of unsocialized self-assertion, threatening rape. Burkeian paternal masculinity, tempered by the feminine, confronts the Oriental Sultan, a figure of Eastern political and sexual despotism. The paternal authority that the Burkeian oak symbolizes is "dismantled" by age and tempered by the beautiful. It is protective rather than subordinative, traditional and rooted rather than aggressive and despotic.

There was a political context for the poem, not immediately apparent today. In July 1819 the first two cantos of Byron's Don Juan were published. To Wordsworth their licentious wit and sexual theme were dangerously corrupting. In a letter of January 1820 he called Don Juan "that infamous publication" and referred to the "despicable quality of the powers requisite for [its] production," adding "I am persuaded that Don Juan will do more harm to the English character, than anything of our time; not so much as a Book;—But thousands who would be afraid to have it in that shape, will batten upon choice bits of it in the shape of Extracts." He bemoaned the fact that the close association of its editor with Byron had prevented the Quarterly Review from defending the threatened "English character": "every true-born Englishman will regard the pretension of the Review to the character of a faithful defender of the Institutions of the country, as hollow" (William and Dorothy Wordsworth II: 579).

In Don Juan, as in the earlier Bride of Abydos, Byron was widely thought to have poeticized his own sexual history. He used Oriental figures to image himself as one who preferred sexual conquest to Wordsworthian solitude-in-nature: "By solitude I mean a Sultan's (not / A Hermit's), with a haram for a grot" ("Poetical Works," Don Juan I.87). He had also portrayed Orientalism as "the only poetical policy" guaranteed to achieve commercial success, as an undemanding literary trend ("Letters and Journals" II: 68):

Oh that I had the art of easy writing
What should be easy reading! could I scale
Parnassus, where the Muses sit inditing
Those pretty poems never known to fail,
How quickly would I print (the world delighting)
A Grecian, Syrian or Assyrian tale;
And sell you, mix'd with western sentimentalism,
Some samples of the finest Orientalism!
("Poetical Works," Beppo 51)

The second canto of Don Juan contains an Orientalist erotic fantasy in which the young Juan, washed ashore on an island governed by a pirate, meets the pirate's daughter Haidée "the greatest heiress of the Eastern Isles" "and like a lovely tree" (II.128). Dressed by Haidée in Turkish clothes, Juan becomes the object of her desire and, when her father leaves the island on a voyage:

Then came her freedom, for she had no mother,
So that, her father being at sea, she was
Free as a married woman, or such other
Female, as where she likes may freely pass,
Without even the encumbrance of a brother,
The freest she that ever gazed on glass
I speak of Christian lands in this comparison,
Where wives, at least, are seldom kept in garrison.
(II.175)

They feared no eyes nor ears on that lone beach;
They felt no terrors from the night; they were
All in all to each other; though their speech
Was broken words, they thought a language there, —
And all the burning tongues the Passions teach
Found in one sigh the best interpreter
Of Nature's oracle—first love,—that all
Which Eve has left her daughters since her fall.
(II.189)

The Regent's extravagance seemed truly Oriental: he spent £155,000 on adding pagodas, minarets, onion-shaped domes and Indian columns to Brighton Pavilion. Thousands more were spent on interior decoration which made the place resemble a seraglio. Rather than display the paternal restraint of his father, the Prince accrued debts of £335,000 and entertained a succession of mistresses, whilst his estranged wife, Caroline, toured Europe, dressed in fashionable Oriental costumes, having numerous affairs. She returned to England in 1820, and Lord Liverpool's Tory Ministry, acting on the King's instigation, had her "tried" before the House of Lords, attempting to produce enough evidence of her sexual misdemeanors to enable it to deny her the title of "Queen" and the accompanying rights and privileges. The trial caused widespread fears of revolution and caused street protests—a crowd gathered outside the house of the Duke of York viewed Caroline as a victim of George's "Oriental" despotism, shouting "We like princes who show themselves; we don't like Grand Turks who shut themselves up in their seraglio."⁷ Radical and labouring-class protest was accompanied by opposition from middle-class women, who clearly understood that the affair had implications for the sexual politics of the nation: an address to the Queen from the "Ladies of Edinburgh," printed in The Times on 4th September, noted

As your majesty has justly observed, the principles and doctrines now advanced by your accusers do not apply to your case alone, but, if made part of the law of this land, may hereafter be applied as a precedent by every careless and dissipated husband to rid himself of his wife, however good and innocent she may be; and to render his family, however, amiable, illegitimate; thereby destroying the sacred bond of matrimony, and rendering all domestic felicity very uncertain
(qtd. in Smith 106).

In those contexts "The Haunted Tree" can be seen as an oblique answer to the Orientalist fashion, and the poetic, political and moral corruption which, for Wordsworth, that fashion manifested at the heart of Regency Britain. It revives and revises a rural rather than metropolitan, Burkeian rather than Byronic understanding of gender, sexuality and power. It attempts to govern desire by defining masculinity as a benevolent paternalism properly protecting women in particular and the land in general. It implicitly rejects Byron's depiction of the Lake poets as worshippers of the Sultan's eunuchs, whilst seeking to provide a more stable (and ostensibly native) model of masculine power than that provided by the "Sultans" George IV and Byron himself.

Having outlined the political and aesthetic debates which "The Haunted Tree" addresses I turn now to a detailed close reading of the poem. In the opening lines the threats that characterize the sublime are evoked as possibilities, but are soon banished by the actual scene:

Those silver clouds collected round the sun
His mid-day warmth abate not, seeming less
To overshade than multiply his beams
By soft reflection—grateful to the sky,
To rocks, fields, woods. Nor doth our human sense
Ask, for its pleasure, screen or canopy
More ample than the time-dismantled Oak
Spreads o'er this tuft of heath, which now, attired
In the whole fulness of its bloom, affords
Couch beautiful as e'er for earthly use
Was fashioned; whether by the hand of Art,
That eastern Sultan, amid flowers enwrought
On silken tissue, might diffuse his limbs
In languor; or, by Nature, for repose
Of panting Wood-nymph, wearied with the chase.
(lines 1-15)

The poem attacks the sexual politics of the Regent then, in that a Burkeian masculine sublime, an English sheltering tree defined against the possibly violent masculinity of Greek and Turk, makes a space for a feminine and erotic beautiful which can then flower under its protection. The beautiful both softens the tree's masculine authority (as Burke said the beautiful should soften the sublime ("Philosophical Enquiry" 111, 157)) and allows it an erotic satisfaction defined as looking. The feminine is still governed by and defined for the satisfaction of the masculine, but in an affectionate yet formal address: the narrator can offer the tree to the Lady as a place of peace and show himself doing so, subsuming troubling intimations in social generosity:

O Lady! fairer in thy Poet's sight
Than fairest spiritual creature of the groves,
Approach;—and, thus invited, crown with rest
The noon-tide hour: though truly some there are
Whose footsteps superstitiously avoid
This venerable Tree; for, when the wind
Blows keenly, it sends forth a creaking sound
(Above the general roar of woods and crags)
Distinctly heard from far—a doleful note!
As if (so Grecian shepherds would have deemed)
The Hamadryad, pent within, bewailed
Some bitter wrong. Nor it is unbelieved,
By ruder fancy, that a troubled ghost
Haunts the old trunk; lamenting deeds of which
The flowery ground is conscious. But no wind
Sweeps now along this elevated ridge;
Not even a zephyr stirs;—the obnoxious Tree
Is mute; and, in his silence, would look down,
O lovely Wanderer of the trackless hills,
On thy reclining form with more delight
Than his coevals in the sheltered vale
Seem to participate, the while they view
Their own far-stretching arms and leafy heads
Vividly pictured in some glassy pool,
That, for a brief space, checks the hurrying stream!
(lines 16-40)

Yet those troubling intimations are present: the Burkeian tree is haunted by the temptations attendant upon the equation of sublimity, masculinity, and political authority. These are the temptations of masculine self-assertion—the violent rapes committed by Greek gods. But the rootedness of the tree allows these temptations to remain as ghosts, laid to rest or at least confined within the tree by the poet-narrator, like Sycorax by Prospero. Wordsworth raises and then confines the ghosts. He lays the demons of male power by aligning that power (including his own as a male poet) with the stable and safe ground of a known and little-changing English landscape/landscape of Englishness. He does so by a carefully self-cancelling syntax: the phrase "Nor is it unbelieved" establishes a disturbingly unattributed half-belief in ghosts which taints the beautiful—as is indicated by the lines "lamenting deeds of which / The flowery ground is conscious." Yet the phrase "no wind / Sweeps now along" then counters this. The repeated negative forms a positive, cancelling the dangerous negative forces of lament and thereby restoring the flowery ground for the Lady to approach. Or, to put it another way, the poem raises the possibility of the defloration of the ground (and of the Lady), only to allay fears by confidently asserting that such violence is absent for the moment. It is a spot (and a poetry) won back from sublime threat and from an intimation of the threatening violence of male desire, in favor of an erotic but also decorous beautiful. Desire will be expressed not as rape but by an entreaty to the Lady which seeks her confidence by preparing the (peaceful) ground. And desire will be satisfied by the voyeurism of the tree watching her "reclining form" and of the narrator imagining them both. Since the whole scene is imagined for the Lady it acts, at the same time, as a gift to her in which offers for a more direct and intimate relationship are encoded, an encoding which, if understood, might lead her actually to accept.

The difficulty of containing the violence traditionally inherent in masculine authority is apparent in the word "obnoxious." Meaning principally "vulnerable to harm," "subject to authority," the word also meant, then though more commonly now, "harmful."⁹ The vulnerable "time-dismantled" tree remains haunted by intimations of harm and violence: it may be "mute" but a silent ambiguity remains. What also remain, although the poem works hard to contain them, are allusions to other poems. These trouble the serenity that the poem seeks. The ancient and lone tree on "this elevated ridge" and the "Wanderer of the trackless hills" recall the bleak and disturbing pairing in "The Thorn" of the tree and the lone woman in a landscape haunted by violent death. Working against such allusions, however, are others which show that disturbance can lead to a greater harmony: "it sends forth a creaking sound / (Above the general roar of woods and crags) / Distinctly heard from far—a doleful note" (lines 22-24) echoes Coleridge's "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," in which the senses "keep the heart / Awake to Love and Beauty" and the "last rook" "flew creeking o'er thy head, and had a charm / For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom / No sound is dissonant which tells of Life" (lines 63-4, 74-6). Further echoes, of Home at Grasmere's "sheltered vale" and of Coleridge's "Dejection: an Ode," in which solitary melancholy is overcome by appealing and dedicating the verse to a Lady, also help to incorporate disruptive intimations within a harmonious social community in nature. It is an allusive strategy designed to temper the visionary power of the solitary sublime, which Wordsworth had explored in 1802 in the "Immortality" ode in reaction and contradistinction to Coleridge's "Dejection", with "Dejection's" beautiful appeal to feminine sympathy.

The last eight lines of the poem replace the troubling sounds of the tree with the loving look of a male unbending his solitary uprightness, as Burke had declared he should, because entranced and completed by the female that he shelters in her appealingly available beauty: "in his silence, would look down. . ." This scene complements, rather than rejects, Coleridge's less paternal and more desperate appeal to female sympathy in "Dejection." This scene is more delightful for the male tree than are—in the poem's very last lines—their own reflections for the "coeval" trees in the sheltered vale. Yet viewing those reflections is itself a powerful act, since it allows a momentary self-knowledge "vividly pictured" out of the flux of "the hurrying stream" of time and space:

...while they view
Their own far-stretching arms and leafy heads
Vividly pictured in some glassy pool,
That, for a brief space, checks the hurrying stream!
(lines 37-40)

The narrator lays his sole and potentially violent possession of masculine authority to rest in a sexualized nature, making of the object world a mythical place in which the sublime violence of rape and metamorphosis is replaced by a beautiful viewing. This viewing completes and delights the independent male and offers the female secure sensual pleasure (no apples to pluck). She is, of course, in a subordinate position as were all women and most men in the oak-like paternalist constitution that Burke and Wordsworth supported.

The landscape of "The Haunted Tree" is not an evasion or denial of political and social issues. It is not a displacement of such issues into some secondary area of nature. On the contrary, it is a modification of an eighteenth-century tradition in which the landscape was treated as a testing ground for the moral and social health of the nation, as the place upon which proper authority could be measured. That tradition was itself founded on the fact that the politics of local landscapes were also national politics: it was the ownership of land which gave the nobility and gentry political power and which defined their duties in the state. The politics of nature in Regency Britain were not substitutes for some more fundamental level of politics but were vital in a nation in which reform of a parliament still dominated by the landed gentry was the most important issue. Burke, Cowper and Price had redefined and reasserted the authority of the gentry in their iconography of landscape. To this Wordsworth added an anti-Byronic anti-Regent redefinition of the sexual politics of the Burkeian sublime. In doing so he countered Orientalist fashions and the corruption they revealed in the contemporary aristocracy.

"The Haunted Tree" achieves what I think it is appropriate to call a mythologization of nature. Like Greek myth it places issues of power and desire at the heart of the national landscape. In a critique of Greek myth, however, it founds English nature not on rape and metamorphosis, but sensual playfulness (including the playful language of the poem itself)—on a looking but not touching. This playfulness flourishes when the ghosts of male violence that haunt the scene have been confined within the oak of masculine self-restraining strength. Narrator and Lady, poet and reader can then meet in a land safe for loving play (or at least for voyeuristic looking). It is a poetic land in which one encounters the human as if it were natural and the natural as if it were human—a dreamy and langorous land of representation poised between self and other, subject and object, power and love, violence and peace, sight and sound. It is a land, Wordsworth suggests, in which poetry must make men live lest the solitary man, like a despotic ruler or usurping poet, hear in all things only his own violent desire, see only his own beloved self. It is a green land and, Wordsworth would have us believe, a pleasant one too. But within its greenness, within the ecological and social harmony it would teach us, is a paternalism that should give us pause. To love nature, Wordsworth shows, involves remaking it in our own image—an image in which traditional hierarchies and inequalities not only persist but are desired. Wordsworth's green England, by 1820 at least, is not Bate's but Burke's, not revolutionary but conservative, not red but blue.