The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern TimesBiese, Alfred
History
The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times
Biese, Alfred
Nature; Nature in literature
There is little about Nature in this beautiful avowal of love and
longing, but the whole colouring of the mood forms a background of
feeling for his longer descriptions. His very long and tedious poem
about the bridal journey of Gelesiuntha, the Spanish princess, who
married King Chilperic, shews deep and touching feeling in parts. She
left her Toledo home with a heavy heart, crossing the Pyrenees, where
'the mountains shining with snow reach to the stars, and their sharp
peaks project over the rain clouds.' In the same vein as Ausonius,
when he urged Paulinus to write to him, she begs her sister for news:
By thy name full oft I call thee, Gelesiuntha, sister mine: with
this name fountains, woods, rivers, and fields resound. Art thou
silent, Gelesiuntha? Answer as to thy sister stones and
mountains, groves and waters and sky, answer in language mute.
In troubled thought and care she asked the very breezes, but of her
sister's safety all were silent.
Fortunatus, like Ausonius, not only looked at Nature with sympathy,
but was a master in description of scenery. His lengthy descriptions
of spring are mostly only decorative work, but here and there we find
a really poetic idea. For example:
At the first spring, when earth has doffed her frost,
the field is clothed with variegated grass; the mountains
stretch their leafy heads towards the sky, the
shady tree renews its verdant foliage, the lovely vine
is swelling with budding branches, giving promise that
a weight of grapes shall hang from its prolific stems.
While all joys return, the earth is dead and dull.
And:
The soft violets paint the field with their own purple, the
meadows are green with grass, the grass is bright with its fresh
shoots. Little by little, like stars, the bright flowers spring
up, and the sward is joyous and gay with flecks of colour, and
the birds that through the winter cold have been numb and silent,
with imprisoned song, are now recalled to their song.
He describes the cold winter, and a hot summer's day, when
Even in the forests no shade was to be found, and the traveller
almost fainted on the burning roads, longing for shade and cool
drinks. At last the rustle of a crystal stream is heard, he
hurries to it with delight, he lies down and lays his limbs in
the soft kisses of the grass.
His poems about beautiful and noteworthy places include some on the
Garonne and Gers (Egircius):
So dried up by heat that it is neither river nor land, and the
grumbling croak of the frog, sole ruler of the realm from which
the fish are banished, is heard in the lonely swamp; but when the
rain pours down, the flood swells, and what was a lake suddenly
becomes a sea.
He has many verses of this sort, written with little wit but great
satisfaction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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