Topographical Poetry - Political Charge and Social Ideology Prior To English Romanticism

Political Charge and Social Ideology Prior To English Romanticism

Though predicated on the description of a landscape or piece of scenery, topographical poetry often, at least implicitly, addresses a political issue or the meaning of nationality in some way. The description of the landscape thus becomes poetic vehicle through which the political message is delivered. For example, in John Denham's "Cooper's Hill," the speaker discusses the merits of recently executed Charles I:

Here should my wonder dwell, & here my praise, But my fixt thoughts my wandring eye betrays, Viewing a neighbouring hill, whose top of late A Chappel crown'd, till in the Common Fate, The adjoyning Abby fell: (may no such storm Fall on our times, where ruine must reform.) Tell me (my Muse) what monstrous dire offence, What crime could any Christian King incense To such a rage? (ll. 111-119)

The chapel and abbey in ruin on top of a nearby hill, referenced spontaneously such that the speaker appears to articulate what the landscape first speaks to him, leads to the contemplation on the righteousness of Charles I and monarchy in general.

Later, Alexander Pope infused pastoral with political in "Windsor Forest." He contrasts pastoral language, the "green Retreats" of pre-Norman England with the "gloomy Waste" of post-Conquest England suffering the "Despotick Reign" of rulers like King William. "Father Thames" suggests that Britain would benefit if public policy strove for the pastoral ideal. The combination of political argument and pastoral language underscores the Tory allegory of Windsor Forest.

James Thomson's long poem The Seasons (1726–30) appeals to a class-specific social ideology by placing the landed gentry's authority on parallel with the order of nature. The fierce snowstorm in "Winter," for example, is awe-inspiring but only dangerous for the generalized rustic shepherd struggling through it rather than reading about it, and the sympathy engendered through the former only serves to reaffirm the sensibility and political righteousness of the gentry. Thus, the importance and inevitability of submitting to the authority of nature is connected to the importance of maintaining social order, which the landed classes can do from their relatively safe position in the schema of the poem. In later editions of The Seasons, Thomson becomes increasingly explicit about his political message, using the language of the sublime in nature to flatter Whig politicians, a move based in the dedication or compliment to a patron common to topographical poetry in the early 18th century. The prospect-view was central in the early 18th century to the landed estates' relationship with poetry. It suggested that the natural scene corresponded with political dominance, and the presentation of a disinterested but shared value, a non-threatening aesthetic one, socially legitimized this dominance. Yet for this same implicit social and political message and the way it was connected to nature, landscape poetry became a vehicle for Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the later romantics to offer new ways of understanding the landscape's relationship with poetry and politics.

Indeed, "Tintern Abbey" marks a change in the course of the genre on both the aesthetic and political registers. Increasingly, the landscape and the issues implicit in it once registered by the poet's external sight become internalized and subject to inward contemplation of the poet's soul; the poet may not sort out or pronounce on the issues, but feel complicated and unresolved because of them:

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with any eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. (ll 44-48)

Charlotte Turner Smith's "Beachy Head" is an example of a topographical poem that constantly shifts from the external views inspiring national pride and the internal views to which they give way, bringing thoughts on slavery, identity, differing voices.