Chapter 3

Orientalist poetics and the nature of the Middle East

Thus far, this book has been concerned mainly with orientalism’s Orient as an arena for poetic experimentation, especially experimentation at the boundaries of mimesis. The current chapter, in contrast, probes the qualities that enabled the Orient to serve this important purpose throughout the nineteenth century and thereby to displace nature as a poetic origin. Specifically, I will argue that the Orient’s perceived unnaturalness is the crucial feature that produces the Orient as an amimetic locus. In this respect, my argument will diverge from that of Saree Makdisi, who sees nature (chiefly defined as the outdoor environment) and the Orient as instances of “anti-modern otherness” — “self-enclosed and self-referential enclaves of the anti-modern” — that operate in parallel as places of shelter from the anxieties of modernization.¹ Although there is no doubt that both the Orient and nature stand apart from modernity and its processes, it is also important to take into account the interaction between these two entities. As this chapter will show, nature and the East function in opposition to one another aesthetically, even if, as Makdisi proposes, they are at the same time working in tandem as counterpoints to the modern. Although the Orient and nature are each capable of serving as a poetic origin, they generate disparate poetics. Using William Wordsworth’s articulation of the oppositional relationship between European nature and Middle Eastern nature as a point of departure, I will show how a range of nineteenth-century poets — Felicia Hemans, Charles Leconte de Lisle, Théophile Gautier, Matthew Arnold, and Alfred Tennyson — develop this relationship, often as the basis for an alternative to mimesis.

The question of the Orient’s relationship with nature is especially significant if one considers that the concept of nature is central to Western aesthetics. When E.J. Chételat and his anonymous correspondent complain of Victor Hugo’s failure to imitate nature, they are calling upon a tradition of criticism rooted in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. That tradition has not, of course, been stable through the centuries; as M.H. Abrams explains in his classic study of romantic-period criticism, The Mirror and the Lamp, poets’ and critics’ understanding of both the value and constitution of “nature” have varied dramatically.² Opinions on the aesthetic significance of nature have also been far from uniform. Still, nature — however variously constituted and evaluated — remains vital to any formulation of nineteenth-century French and British poetics.

Most critics have generally accepted Abrams’s contention that in the early nineteenth century, English poets started to value poetry more for its expression of poets’ feelings and emotions than for what Chételat’s correspondent praises as the faithful imitation of nature.³ As my analysis of Hugo’s Les Orientales suggests, French poetry follows a similar developmental course despite its slightly later starting point. Abrams explains that the old concern with accuracy undergoes a metamorphosis: “the first-order criterion now becomes the relation of a poem to the feeling and state of the mind of the poet; and the demand that poetry be ‘true’ [...] gives way to the demand that poetry be ‘spontaneous,’ ‘genuine,’ and ‘sincere.’“⁴ More recently, some critics have complicated Abrams’s now-conventional interpretation. Frederick Burwick, for example, suggests that Abrams overemphasizes “the shift from art as imitation to art as expression” while neglecting “the interplay of imitation and expression” in romantic poetry.⁵

Yet even within the more limited delineation espoused by Abrams, nature continues to serve as a fundamental source of poetic inspiration. Indeed, elevated by what James Heffernan labels “the Wordsworthian doctrine that rural experience alone can teach the heart how to feel,”⁶ nature actually assumes a new importance as higher status is granted to the poet’s emotional reaction to the contemplation of nature. Nature’s function as a standard of moral and aesthetic rightness also remains essential.⁷ When, for instance, Marilyn Butler says of Wordsworth that “his vision of nature represented England as still a pastoral society, which was comforting,” she is calling on nature both as an object of contemplation and as a standard of rightness.⁸ Paul Fry explains that “[b]y Wordsworth’s time, ‘nature’ was a ‘technical term’ [...], referring to the laws and operations of the physical world.” He adds, however, that “[t]here is also the ontology of nature: its mode of being, its status as beings or as a being, its relation to human being, and the being of its being.”⁹ Yet even in this expansive ontological sense, and even granted “the almost inevitable confusion anyone is likely to feel when trying to say what nature is,” the basis for the nineteenth-century British and French concept of nature is inevitably nature as known in Europe.¹⁰ The Orient functions as nature’s other, placing it at the center of nineteenth-century aesthetics.

William Wordsworth and the nature of the Middle East

Wordsworth’s later contemporary Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) assumes that the East is incompatible with a European ideal of nature. This assumption forms the foundation of his proposal that orientalism itself obstructs the proper relationship between poetry and nature. In his famous 1820 critical essay “The Four Ages of Poetry,” Peacock singles out “that egregious confraternity of rhymesters, known by the name of the Lake Poets,” whose “return to nature” he finds simplistic and hypocritical. They appear, he says sarcastically,

to have ratiocinated much in the following manner: “Poetical genius is the finest of all things, and we feel that we have more of it than any one ever had. The way to bring it to perfection is to cultivate poetical impressions exclusively. Poetical impressions can be received only among natural scenes: for all that is artificial is anti-poetical. Society is artificial, therefore we will live out of society. The mountains are natural, therefore we will live in the mountains. There we shall be shining models of purity and virtue, passing the whole day in the innocent and amiable occupation of going up and down hill, receiving poetical impressions, and communicating them in immortal verse to admiring generations.”¹¹

Despite this supposed devotion to nature, however, even “Mr. Wordsworth, the great leader of the returners to nature, cannot describe a scene under his own eyes without putting into it [...] some [...] phantastical parturition of the moods of his own mind.”¹² To meet the demands of current fashion, poets busy themselves “wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown babies of the age.”¹³ Peacock’s contention is that “barbaric manners and supernatural interventions” — such as those Southey incorporates into Thalaba — are the essential factors destroying the legitimacy of the return to nature.¹⁴ Given that, as we have seen, both barbarism (foreignness, difference, otherness) and the supernatural are among the Orient’s dominant characteristics in English and French poetry, Peacock could accept neither the Orient as a subject nor the possibility of orientalism as an aesthetic approach.

Peacock proceeds to list the offending poets: Walter Scott, George Gordon Byron, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Moore, and Thomas Campbell. Southey and Moore are cited explicitly for their orientalism. Byron and Campbell are charged with other types of exoticism, but both (like Scott and Coleridge) would have been recognized by contemporary readers for their orientalist endeavors as well. Of the seven poets on Peacock’s list, Wordsworth is the only one not criticized for exoticism. Indeed, Wordsworth is among those romantic poets least attracted to the Islamic Orient. He has no poems devoted entirely to Middle Eastern subjects, and only a handful — including “Septimi Gades,” which I will discuss in detail shortly — that even make reference to the Middle East. Aside from the famous Dream of the Arab episode in book 5 of The Prelude, the best known of these poems is “The Solitary Reaper” (1807), which strongly resembles “Septimi Gades” in its use of the Arabian desert as the unnatural counterpart of a European outdoor scene.¹⁵ In both poems, the stature of the natural European landscape is enhanced by comparison with the desert, and the value of the European figure’s intimacy with the natural setting is increased by the desert travelers’ inability to emulate it. Thus despite its rarity, Wordsworth’s use of the Islamic Orient as a subject, and especially of an unnatural Eastern nature juxtaposed to the European landscape, is important in the context of an aesthetic philosophy and a body of work that depend so heavily on a certain conception of nature.¹⁶

Since European nature remains the undisputed standard in poems such as “The Solitary Reaper” and “Septimi Gades,” one could fairly propose that any environment that did not share Europe’s physical characteristics would be judged unnatural and even morally deficient. Thomas McFarland offers an analysis along these lines, in his reading of the Georgian landscape in Wordsworth’s “Ruth” (1800), for example.¹⁷ Such an argument for the essential similarity of all “exotic” sites is pursued even further by Alan Bewell, who shows how, in the Enlightenment tradition to which Wordsworth is heir, the various “‘savage’ peoples,” including Arabs, along with Indians, Eskimos, and Hottentots, are united in their original difference from Europeans.¹⁸ Even Bewell, however, remarks on the specificity of the Enlightenment’s — and Wordsworth’s — assumptions about Arabs and about the Middle Eastern environment. Bewell argues that “the popular representation of the desert wastes of the Middle East indicated [...] the enormous power of despotic governments or ‘destructive nations’ to lay waste nature.”¹⁹ In making this argument, Bewell proposes a link between a political morality familiar from our reading of Percy Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam and the natural environment of the Middle East (“desert wastes”). Further, as Bewell suggests in his reading of the Dream of the Arab, the Arabian desert is “no ordinary landscape” not merely because of its physical characteristics but also because it is “a world where human life has made little difference.”²⁰

There are at least two factors, then, that give the environment of the Middle East (and the desert particularly) special significance, making it exemplary as no other area of the nineteenth-century world.²¹ First, the desert’s physical traits remain important. Its dryness, heat, and desolation, the extraordinary contrast between it and its oases, the total absence of familiar vegetation or scenery, all contribute to an impression of unnaturalness that seems unparalleled in Wordsworth’s depictions of other types of landscape, even those equally lacking in what McFarland calls the “criteria of the sublime.”²² Second, the peculiarities of the Middle Eastern landscape are irrevocably tied to assumptions about human connections with that landscape, and ultimately to claims about the human relationship with nature in general.

While acknowledging the important, substantive differences among romantic poets even within England alone, we can at least follow Abrams in presuming that, for the romantics, the natural environment’s great purpose is to inspire some human feeling that can be transmuted into poetry. Wordsworth, who is Abrams’s prime example here, goes so far as to make nature the “cardinal standard of poetic value.”²³ Typically, nature in this context is rural and sparsely inhabited by simple people. These simple people who live in nature are superior, and their habits and characteristics comprise the norm of what is societally “natural.”²⁴ For Wordsworth in particular, then, the adoption of nature as a moral standard is inseparable from the concept of nature as environment.²⁵ In other words, when we think of nature in Wordsworthian romanticism, we need to think of two coexisting and interconnected phenomena, one mainly environmental (mountains, valleys, streams, vegetation), and the other human and social, a norm of feelings, behaviors, and moral sentiments.

When European romantic poets write about the Middle East, though, they must confront the fact that nature in the conventionalized Middle East does not look like nature in France or Britain. Nor is Middle Eastern nature an environment amenable to the cozy yet exalted relationship with people that is assumed by Wordsworth and his like-minded colleagues. This difference becomes very clear in Wordsworth’s “Septimi Gades,” which foregrounds the contrast between nature in Europe and nature in the Middle East.²⁶ The assumptions about nature and about human interaction with nature that underlie Wordsworth’s other attempts at exotic settings, such as the Georgian savannah of “Ruth,” are evidently already well formed in “Septimi Gades,” written when Wordsworth was only twenty. Thus even at this extremely early point in Wordsworth’s career, the Middle East has already become an archetypal setting within which he proposes and elaborates the notions that emerge later at the center of his poetics.

The first natural landscape depicted in “Septimi Gades” is that of the Rhone region in France; the second is the area around Grasmere, England. The two scenes share their crucial elements: a rural dwelling (“humble shed,” “lone grey cots” [13, 22]), sharp inclines (“mountains,” “purple slopes [...] and pastoral steeps” [15, 20–2]), and a body of water (“streamlet,” “deeps” [16, 23]). Despite the fact that the English scene is initially offered as a counterpoint to the French one, the poem’s speaker presents the two places as functionally interchangeable, explaining that “if the wayward fates deny” (19) him the opportunity to revisit the Rhone, then his “willing voice shall hail” (21) Grasmere. As a result, the two locations are in effect conflated into a single image of a fertile, mountainous area, well watered but sparsely populated. This is exactly the type of setting that Butler describes as Wordsworth’s ideal: “it is an aesthetic landscape, empty of people.”²⁷

This image has little in common with the one presented next, that of Arabia. Where England and France have “orchard blooms,” “purple slopes,” and “azure sky” (17, 20), Arabia is merely “pale” (26). There is no topographical elevation and no water, since the landscape consists only of flat, “thirsty sands” (26). Although in both cases the human inhabitants are few, the position of human beings in the two sets of landscapes differs sharply. In the European settings, people (whether the speaker or the presumed inhabitants of the “lone grey cots”) are comfortably, albeit passively, situated in their surroundings. Even in the poem’s last stanza, which depicts the harshness of a European winter, the nasty weather outside simply accentuates the coziness inside, and the storm “rock[s]” (75) the speaker’s home as if it were rocking some sort of cradle. One senses no antagonism whatever between humans and nature. In contrast, the “faint and heartless” (25) traveler through the Arabian desert stands in an oppositional relationship with his environment. Even as he recollects his last stop at an oasis, where his physical needs were met, there is no emotional bond comparable to that of the speaker with his environment. As the use of the present tense verb “seems” (27) shows, any emotional connection between the traveler and the oasis environment is purely retrospective, nostalgic. As he stands “heartless,” having lost courage in the face of the extremes of nature that assault him, it seems impossible that his experience of the desert environment could yield the sort of inspiration and comfort that the poem’s speaker anticipates finding at Grasmere.

Since the traveler’s identity (national or otherwise) is never specified, we can only conclude that his experience of nature differs from the speaker’s principally because of the difference in the environment that each encounters.²⁸ On the European landscape, Wordsworth says, nature

Has showered her various wealth;

There Temperance and Truth abide

And Toil with Leisure at his side,

And Cheerfulness and Health (45–8)

But the desert has no such moral attributes and stands instead as nature devoid of virtue: an unnatural nature. This is as true of the oasis as it is of the desert, for the bounty of the oasis is as intemperate as the desert’s barrenness. The oasis is a place of relief from mortal suffering more than one of “Cheerfulness” or “Health.” It is all “Leisure,” just as the desert is all “Toil.” Thus not only is the Middle Eastern environment presented as physically dissimilar to European nature, but it is also lacking in the moral qualities that make nature central to romanticism.²⁹

Comparing Jane Austen’s representations of landscape with Wordsworth’s, John Rieder doubts that “Wordsworth’s exalted faith in nature can be understood unless it is held next to the still viable association of land ownership with classical virtue and paternalistic order in Austen.”³⁰ This linkage of nature with land ownership is inapplicable to the Orient as Wordsworth knew it; indeed, Norman Daniel argues convincingly that the Islamic Middle East’s lack of a landed gentry was one of the essential factors in Western discomfort with the Ottoman world.³¹ Although Wordsworth’s speaker does not aspire to the grandeur that Austen’s characters do, his depiction of European nature in “Septimi Gades” strongly implies the presence of “a solid, self-justifying social order” of the sort Rieder finds in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813).³² In contrast, Wordsworth’s Middle Eastern landscape exists without either the social structures or the natural features that allow spiritual and aesthetic engagement with the outdoor environment.

Felicia Hemans’s ambivalence

If Wordsworth uses the Orient mainly as a counterpoint by which to clarify humanity’s relationship with European nature, Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) assumes a less pragmatic, more ambivalent approach to the nature of the Orient, in both its environmental and moral senses. Hemans also writes far more often than Wordsworth on foreign topics. Her collection Lays of Many Lands (1825) is composed almost entirely of poems with various foreign settings and includes two poems on Middle Eastern subjects.³³ The subject matter of her Records of Woman (1828) is mainly foreign as well.³⁴ In addition, oriental allusions — Middle Eastern and even more commonly Indian — are frequent in her poems, regardless of their setting.

Typical of Hemans’s orientalism is her poem “The Traveller at the Source of the Nile” (1826), which chronicles Scottish explorer James Bruce’s arrival at what he supposed to be the source of the Nile.³⁵ “The Traveller” takes Middle Eastern nature — the Nile specifically — as its starting point. The landscape is intensely attractive, even sublime:

In sunset’s light o’er Afric thrown,

A wanderer proudly stood

Beside the well-spring, deep and lone,

Of Egypt’s awful flood. (1–4)

Bruce is inspired by the scene: “his heart beat high” (11), “The rapture of a conqueror’s mood / Rush’d burning through his frame” (13–14). As night falls, though, he begins to experience an anticlimax. “[A]nd is this all?” (24; emphasis hers) he asks in a panic, and then answers his own question, becoming more despondent by the moment:

No more than this! — what seem’d it now

First by that spring to stand?

A thousand streams of lovelier flow

Bathed his own mountain land!

Whence, far o’er waste and ocean track,

Their wild, sweet voices call’d him back. (25–30; emphasis hers)

After another stanza elaborating on the nostalgic appeal of the Scottish landscape, Hemans sharpens the contrast between Bruce’s current surroundings and his memories:

But, darkly mingling with the thought

Of each familiar scene,

Rose up a fearful vision, fraught

With all that lay between;

The Arab’s lance, the desert’s gloom,

The whirling sands, the red simoom! (37–42)³⁶

Bruce then bursts into tears, and the poem ends primly with the moral: “— Oh, happiness! how far we flee / Thine own sweet paths in search of thee!” (53–4).³⁷

“The Traveller” presents European nature not only as Bruce’s literal point of departure but also metaphorically as the basic standard by which experience is to be judged. Although the landscape at issue in the poem is the Scotland of Bruce’s childhood, Hemans identifies it only ambiguously as “mountain land” (28).³⁸ Because she does not specify a nationality, she appears to be generalizing the opposition between the Nile region and its European counterpart. The Middle East is an alternative to Europe, a site of exploration, but in the end its difference alienates rather than attracts. As is the case for the speaker of Wordsworth’s “Septimi Gades,” there is no substitute for the recollected European landscape as the origin of the protagonist’s satisfaction, but that landscape’s irreplaceability is confirmed only by contrast with the East. The unnaturalness of the East is produced in turn both by comparison with idyllic European nature and by its own characteristics. The poem’s depiction of the desert is essential to this development; the desert is “a fearful vision,” typified by violence — the Arab has a lance, the sand is whirling, the sandstorm is red. Yet even the first stanza’s apparently sublime description of the Nile’s source foreshadows the denaturalization of the environment; the stark contrasts and a sense of anxiety (“deep and lone,” “awful flood”) have little in common with the calmness and hospitality ascribed to the European landscape in this poem or in “Septimi Gades.”

At no point, moreover, is Bruce’s relationship with the Middle Eastern environment anything but oppositional. Both his confidently imperialist “conqueror’s mood” and the terrified despair to which it gives way are grounded in an unquestioned antagonism towards the landscape. In contrast, the poem stresses the mutual affection between Bruce and the Scottish scenes he remembers. The Scottish landscape is portrayed as actually yearning for him as much as he for it; three times it “call’d him back” (30, 31, 35). The poem never raises even the possibility of such an attachment between the explorer and the landscape near the Nile. The poem’s only other human figure, the Arab with the lance, is so completely integrated into his surroundings that it makes no sense to speak of an attachment between distinct entities. This effectively marks both him and his environment as unnatural. The natural and proper (romantic) role of a human being is to experience nature, not to participate in it as if on a par with climatic phenomena like sandstorms. Correspondingly, nature is to stand apart from human beings so as to sustain or inspire them, not to assimilate them as the desert has done to the Arab. Even if we read this scene from a culturally relativistic perspective, granting that, like Bruce, the Arab evidently enjoys an intimacy with his native environment, we cannot deny the inability of the desert — and by extension of the Middle East as a whole — to function within the romantic parameters of the natural.

In both “Septimi Gades” and “The Traveller at the Source of the Nile,” then, the Middle East is unnatural as a physical environment and as a moral matrix. To adopt Fry’s terminology, it is ontologically unnatural where Europe is ontologically natural, however marred Europe may be by increasing urbanization and modernization.³⁹ European landscape remains not only primary but distinctly preferred, both for its own attributes and for the type of relationship with humans that it offers, and even for the type of humanness it enables. Wordsworth’s oriental references serve chiefly to clarify the status of nature and of the human-nature relationship in Europe; in a classic orientalist move, they define the natural by juxtaposing it with its unnatural other. Hemans joins Wordsworth in his rejection of the Orient, and specifically of oriental nature, as an alternative to the European standard. But “The Traveller” also engages in an understated metacommentary on orientalism. The poem is, in effect, a chronicle of European attraction to, and ultimate disenchantment with, orientalism. The Nile region, including the desert, stands in for the entire Orient, and Bruce for the orientalist, whose devotion to his subject falls away into despair.⁴⁰ By the end of “The Traveller,” the Orient is an alternative that fails to deliver despite its glorious promises and that is to be supplanted — as at the end of Hugo’s “Novembre” — by a domestic vision that is its counterpart from the outset.

Truth in illustrating Robert Southey and Thomas Moore

Following Raymond Schwab, Saree Makdisi proposes that as Europeans expanded their knowledge of Eastern literatures, they “benefitted] from the discovery and commodification of [...] new sources of inspiration or versification. And yet, [...] the great value of such an intellectual commodity lies not merely in its beauty, its inspiration, its charm, but in its sheer difference from the standard European classics.”⁴¹ In other words, the East contributed a valuable and previously lacking “sense of alterity.”⁴² As we have seen, Wordsworth and Hemans enlist alterity to reinforce the borders of the culturally defined self. Robert Southey, on the other hand, engages the alterity of the Orient with evident enthusiasm — rather like Bruce during his conquerer’s high. For all three poets, as for many of their contemporaries, the Orient’s pervasive unnaturalness is the determining element of its otherness, but whereas Hemans’s and Wordsworth’s poems reveal a discomfort with that unnaturalness, Southey’s Thalaba exploits it consistently.

For Southey, the Orient’s unnaturalness is an essential source both of its appeal and of its aesthetic value. Because the Orient is always already unnatural, it readily supports his mingling of natural and supernatural, and of materials from disparate or even conflicting sources. But these are only instances of a greater, general benefit: in an epistemological world where nature remains the cardinal standard of truth, orientalism frees Southey from the confinement of this standard of truth.⁴³ Even where Thalaba claims to be offering authentic portrayals of Middle Eastern nature, its readers would lack an empirical basis for judging the accuracy of its depictions. The commandment to imitate nature has little force where obedience to it cannot be verified. Similarly, orientalism shields Southey from the early-nineteenth-century version of authenticity that shifts the standard for truth in poetry away from external nature and towards the poet’s inner feelings. Because an orientalist poem such as Thalaba does not pretend to express any particular emotion on the part of the poet, this gauge of truth cannot pertain to it. As a result, the new, romantic emphasis on the sincere expression of feelings proves to be as ineffective a measure of truth as the old standard of external nature mimetically represented. In effect, then, the use of the Orient as a subject provides a third course in addition to these two, one that allows poets to step outside the presumed linkage between poetry and truth, whether based on external nature or on an expression of human nature. At the same time, it offers them an extraordinary opportunity to create and represent a new “truth,” a truth that benefits from a presumption of authenticity but that is, paradoxically, unverifiable by definition.

Fig. 1

Thalaba the Destroyer (1846)

I suggested in chapter 1 that this peculiar dance of authenticity and verifiability is played out in the text of Thalaba, as Southey’s tremendous footnotes form an elaborate apparatus of authentication that turns the impulse towards verification always inwards in the direction of (more) text, rather than outwards in the direction of any empirical Middle Eastern reality. But I would like to turn now instead to a Victorian-era illustration of Thalaba in which the odd relationship between authenticity and verifiability emerges with a different twist (see fig. 1). This illustration, from an 1846 edition of his works, is meant to depict a scene from Thalaba’s idyllic youth with his foster sister and future wife Oneiza; the caption reads: “How happily the days / Of Thalaba went by!”⁴⁴ The fit between the illustration and the poem is not good. The lush, almost junglelike surroundings are not consistent with the text, which mentions a stream but emphasizes the desert environment of Arabia. Thalaba is both too pudgy and too richly dressed to be the athletic foster son of an average bedouin, as he is described in the poem. While the quiver of arrows lying next to him might be plausible, the European gentleman’s hat is not, nor are the Egyptian pyramid and the North American tepee in the background. The impression left is that of a conglomeration of primitivist elements, not a natural landscape in the customary sense.⁴⁵

If we compare this illustration with one from the 1839 edition of Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, we see that it is a different version of the same image (see fig. 2).⁴⁶ In this case, it represents a deathbed scene rather than an idyllic childhood; the illustration is captioned: “Nay, turn not from me that dear face — /Am I not thine — thy own lov’d bride — / The one, the chosen one, whose place / In life or death is by thy side?”⁴⁷ The arrows and the tepee are missing, and a peri has appeared to care for the souls of the departed. The costumes of the two figures are quite compatible with the story. Even the pyramid is plausible, given the poem’s Egyptian setting. The plentiful vegetation hardly resembles the “fresh and springing bower” of orange trees described in the poem, but at least the text does indicate fertile surroundings. Moreover, the human import of the scene is much more consistent with this poem than with Thalaba. The two sad-looking figures are posed to suggest a death scene; the man’s hand is contorted as he sinks back in weakness, with the woman supporting his lolling head.

Fig. 2

Laila Rookh (1839)

While it is impossible to determine on purely technical grounds which of these two illustrations is the original, the image’s greater compatibility with the Moore poem certainly suggests that it began its life with Lalla Rookh rather than Thalaba.⁴⁸ The Southey edition’s appropriation of the picture was probably motivated by financial considerations; it would have been much cheaper to have a plate made from an existing drawing than to commission a new drawing. However, we may safely speculate that there was also an aesthetic justification — or at least an excuse — for the reuse of the drawing. Whoever was responsible for selecting illustrations (almost certainly not Southey himself) would have been seeking an image of a young couple in an oriental setting. Defined in these terms, the adoption of the Lalla Rookh picture seems absolutely reasonable, but it also reveals the great extent to which the criterion of orientalism was allowed to override all others. The result is an illustration that misrepresents both the physical details and the emotional content of the text. Regardless, its blatant orientalism obviates the need to verify its relation either with Southey’s text or with the Middle Eastern scene it purports to depict.

The origin of this paradoxically unverifiable authenticity may be found in the notion of the Orient as unnatural. Nature in the orientalist Middle East is functionally absent because the natural environment of the Orient is not perceived or presented as being in the same category as the nature upon which the classical connection between truth and nature is based. The Orient’s undifferentiated unnaturalness, ontological as well as visual, means that one oriental image will do as well as any other. The recycling of Lalla Rookh’s illustration in Thalaba and Southey’s use of the incongruous or implausible both derive from the same conception of the Middle East. The assumption of oriental unnaturalness authorizes both the poet and the pirate press to neglect mimeticism’s doctrine of the faithful imitation of nature.

Leconte de Lisle: “Le Désert,” “le désert du monde”

Middle Eastern (un)nature is once again central to the orientalist poetry of Charles Leconte de Lisle (1818–1894). Leconte de Lisle’s intellectual roots were in the romanticism of Victor Hugo, but he later became a leader in the Parnassian movement. Although Parnassian poets as a group tended to rely on chronologically and geographically distant settings, Leconte de Lisle was especially attracted to exotic subjects from the beginning of his career. His opus includes numerous orientalist poems; there are five poems with explicitly Middle Eastern subjects or settings in his Poèmes barbares [Barbarian Poems] alone.⁴⁹ His Creole family background and his birthplace on the southeast African island of Réunion (also his home for extended periods) opened the possibility of a more intimate connection with the exotic than any other nineteenth-century orientalist poet could have shared. Within his poems, however, his affiliation with the French literary tradition seems largely to have outweighed his personal associations with the exotic. It would be difficult to detect any consistent or substantive linkage between his poetic use of the Orient and his own status as an “exotic.”

While Leconte de Lisle’s attachment to the exotic is inclusive, he finds the Orient especially inspirational, noting late in his life that his first reading of Hugo’s Les Orientales had caused him to have a “vision d’un monde plein de lumière. [...] Ce fut comme une immense et brusque clarté” [vision of a world full of light. ... It was like an immense and sudden brightness].⁵⁰ Although his movement away from romantic moralism and towards the Parnassian vision of art for art’s sake is motivated by a broad aesthetic and spiritual idealism, he expresses it in his poems mainly through the representation of exotic places and times. As I will show through a detailed reading of his “Le Désert” [“The Désert”], the unnatural nature of the Islamic Orient becomes the basis for a generalized vision of the human condition, and thereby also for the poetics formulated around this vision.

“Le Désert” begins by setting the scene and introducing the poem’s bedouin protagonist.⁵¹ The framework for this introduction is a lengthy question, reminiscent of Hugo’s “La Douleur du pacha” in its inclusion of relatively unmotivated and plentiful local color:

Quand le Bédouin qui va de l’Horeb en Syrie

Lie au tronc du dattier sa cavale amaigrie,

Et, sous l’ombre poudreuse où sèche le fruit mort,

Dans son rude manteau s’enveloppe et s’endort,

Revoit-il, faisant trêve aux ardentes fatigues,

La lointaine oasis où rougissent les figues,

Et l’étroite vallée où campe sa tribu,

Et la source courante où ses lèvres ont bu,

Et les brebis bêlant, et les boeufs à leurs crèches,

Et les femmes causant prés des citernes fraîches,

Ou, sur le sable, en rond, les chameliers assis,

Aux lueurs de la lune écoutant les récits? (1–12)

[When the bedouin who is going from Horeb to Syria / Ties his emaciated mare to the trunk of a date palm / And, in the dusty shade where the dead fruit withers, / Wraps himself in his rough cloak and falls asleep, / Does he see again, for a respite in his scorching toils, / The distant oasis where figs ripen, / And the narrow valley where his tribe camps, / And the flowing spring where his lips have drunk, / And the bleating ewes, and the oxen at their mangers, / And the women chatting near the cool cisterns, / Or, on the sand, the camel drivers sitting in a ring, / Listening to tales in the gleam of the moon?]

There are two distinct environments here, both stereotypical of orientalist depictions of Middle Eastern nature. The first is the desert, dry and harsh, with a date palm as its only vegetation. Much like the desert in Wordsworth’s “Septimi Gades,” this desert world is antagonistic to its inhabitants, the exhausted bedouin and his skinny horse. The other environment represented is that of the oasis, which is situated as a kind of hypothetical recollection, a memory that the bedouin could be having but is not. Like Wordsworth’s oasis, this is a fertile place, with ripening figs and plenty of fresh water. While less exaggeratedly lush than Wordsworth’s, it still offers a sharp contrast with the image of the desert, both physically and in terms of human beings’ interaction with it. The desert’s unnaturalness is accentuated by contrast with the relatively temperate environment of the oasis.

In turn, despite its distinctive vegetation, the oasis appears to approximate the rural European outdoors. The women chatting next to a reservoir and the camel drivers sitting on the sand seem to have a very comfortable relationship with the natural environment around them. However, if we examine the structure of this passage, a more complicated situation emerges. The heart of the passage consists of four lines beginning with “Et” [And] plus the definite article. The first of these locates the tribe’s camp; the construction of this line parallels the preceding one, which creates a conceptually appropriate linkage between “La lointaine oasis” [The distant oasis] and “l’étroite vallée” [the narrow valley] at the beginning of each line. The second halves of the lines appear mismatched, though, since “où rougissent les figues” [where figs ripen] corresponds with “où campe sa tribu” [where his tribe camps]. This puts the camping of the tribe into the same category as the ripening of the figs, as if both were equally part of the processes of nature. This striking incorporation of the human into nature recurs in the subsequent lines. The flowing stream, bleating ewes, and chatting women are presented as syntactic equals, each following its own “Et” without any acknowledgement of the women’s humanity.

It is possible to interpret these bedouins as fully integrated into their natural environment, as if enacting the Wordsworthian ideal of, in McFarland’s words, “[f]ull humanity” achieved “where person and nature are symbolically conceived as interpenetrating one another.”⁵² But other factors suggest a significant divergence from Wordsworth’s vision. First, “Le Désert” seems to move beyond a “symbolic interpenetration”; the human figures are presented as if actually part of the oasis’s natural environment. As a result, they stand to lose much of their human status. Such a loss is definitely not part of Wordsworth’s ideal, which requires that the human being remain a separate, independent consciousness able to experience nature. Leconte de Lisle gives no indication of such an experiential relationship between his bedouins and their surroundings. Both the women and the camel drivers seem to use natural features (the reservoir, the sand) as outdoor furniture more than as objects of conscious contemplation. In turn, the poem’s presentation of the bedouins as if they themselves were features of the landscape contaminates nature with the human, in effect “denaturing” it.⁵³

While this integration of human beings into the Middle Eastern environment may reflect a racist inability to accept the bedouins as truly human,⁵⁴ I would propose instead that “Le Désert” is moving towards a different ideal of human interaction with the natural environment, one that aspires to the unselfconsciousness of Eden more than the deliberative engagement with nature to which the romantics subscribed. In this context, the Middle East’s difference from Europe allows it to serve Leconte de Lisle as a kind of test case; the conventionally unnatural nature of the Middle East gives him the opportunity to experiment with an alternative, counterromantic relationship between humans and their environment.⁵⁵

The next section of the poem, in which the speaker answers the question asked in the first dozen lines, emphasizes the Middle East’s unnaturalness as well, but this time in relation to supernatural and mythological phenomena. The bedouin protagonist, wrapped up asleep in his cloak, does not dream of the hypothetical oasis just described, but instead experiences a distinctly Islamic vision in which he is carried to Paradise. His mount is the same miraculous creature who bore Muhammad on his nighttime journey to Jerusalem and to the seven heavens:

Non, par delà de cours des heures éphémères,

Son âme est en voyage au pays des chimères.

Il rêve qu’Al-Borak, le cheval glorieux,

L’emporte en hennissant dans la hauteur des cieux;

Il tressaille, et croit voir, par les nuits enflammées,

Les filles de Djennet à ses côtés pâmées.

De leurs cheveux plus noirs que la nuit de l’enfer

Monte un âcre parfum qui lui brûle la chair;

Il crie, il veut saisir, presser sur sa poitrine,

Entre ses bras tendus, sa vision divine. (13–22)

[No, as the ephemeral hours pass, / His soul is traveling to the land of myths. / He dreams that Al-Borak, the glorious horse, / Carries him neighing into the heights of the heavens; / He trembles, and believes he sees, in the blazing night, / The girls of Paradise swooned at his sides. / From their hair, blacker than the night in Hell, / Rises a pungent perfume that bums his flesh; / He cries out, he wants to seize, to press against his chest, / Between his outstretched arms, his divine vision.]

Inevitably, the bedouin is denied fulfillment as his dream slips away:

Mais sur la dune au loin le chacal a hurlé,

Sa cavale piétine, et son rêve est troublé;

Plus de Djennet, partout la flamme et le silence,

Et le grand ciel cuivré sur l’étendue immense! (23–6)

[But on the dune far away the jackal howled, / His mare stamps, and his dream is disturbed; / No more Paradise, everywhere the heat and the silence, / And the high coppery heavens over the immense expanse!]

The poem’s narrative scheme establishes this (lost) Paradise as a correlate of the (never recalled) oasis. Not only are Paradise and the oasis alternate answers to the same questions (Of what does the napping bedouin dream?), but certain details of the oasis reappear transformed in Paradise. “Les filles de Djennet” [The girls of Paradise] stand in the stead of the oasis’s chatting women. Swooning at the bedouin’s sides, they form a circle of bodies that resembles the group of camel drivers sitting “en rond” [in a ring] in the sand of the oasis. The description of the oasis is dominated by the concluding nighttime image, which absorbs two lines while no other detail is granted more than one. Night is the prevailing motif in the description of Paradise as well; “nuit(s)” is the only noun used more than once in the entire ten-line passage. Night is also at the center of the passage’s only explicitly figurative moment, in which the girls’ hair is said to be “plus noirs que la nuit de l’enfer” [blacker than the night in Hell].

Yet despite these significant links between the oasis and Paradise, equally important connections may be drawn between Paradise and the desert. Horses are significant in the descriptions of both the desert (the bedouin’s mare) and Paradise (Al-Borak, although the equine identity of this creature is not undisputed in Islamic tradition). With the pungent perfume of the girls’ hair, Paradise burns much as the desert scorches and desiccates. Moreover, while “nuit” is the only noun shared between the oasis and Paradise, several essential words recur from desert to Paradise: “rêve,” “flamme”/”enflammées,” “ciel’V’cieux.” “Ciel” [Heaven] is the most crucial of these, since it characterizes both the exalted location of the bedouin’s vision (“la hauteur des cieux”) and the harshness of the desert to which he returns (“le grand ciel cuivré”). Finally, the very first line of the poem explains that the bedouin protagonist is on a journey from Horeb (Mt. Sinai) to Syria; in line 14, his soul is described in the same way, as being “en voyage.” The bedouin’s trip from Horeb (in the south of the Sinai Peninsula) to Syria parallels on a smaller scale that of Muhammad from Mecca (in the western part of the Arabian peninsula) to Jerusalem. Both are south-to-north journeys with a destination in the Levant. Each journey is in turn associated with an ascension (mïrâj) to the heavens.⁵⁶ Thus the bedouin’s journey on the ground becomes fundamentally inseparable from his soul’s dream journey, as well as from Muhammad’s own legendary journey, which has become the poem’s emblem of Islamic culture.

While “Le Désert” depicts three disparate environments — the desert, an oasis, and Paradise — there is in the end no firm boundary between them. The desert and the oasis remain physically distinct from one another, but they are joined through the bedouin’s supernatural vision of Paradise. The parallel between his earthly journey and his dream journey symbolically allows traveling through the desert to become equated with traveling to Paradise, and the oasis (possible earthly destination) with Paradise (actual dream destination). These multiple connections act to subvert the original opposition between oasis and desert. Both are in the end closely tied to Paradise, and to a paradise that is not only supernatural but also unquestionably Islamic, from its name (Djennet) to its mode of transportation (Al-Borak) and its female inhabitants (the houris). The result is a circular situation, in which the Middle East is characterized by its unnaturalness (climatic extremes, peculiar relationship between human beings and the environment, susceptibility to visions and the supernatural), but each instance of unnaturalness is itself constructed as Middle Eastern, and as Islamic in particular.

In its later versions, “Le Désert” ends here, having created a symbolically laden composite of the unnatural Middle East. The strength of this composite is reinforced by the title itself, which gathers both of the nondesert environments (the oasis and Paradise) into the category of desert. In the original version of the poem, however, the title is given a more culturally universal twist by eight additional lines:

Dans sa halte d’un jour, sous l’arbre desséché,

Tout rêveur, haletant de vivre, s’est couché,

Et comme le Bédouin, ployé de lassitude,

A dormi ton sommeil, ô mome solitude!

Oublieux de la terre, et d’un coeur irrité,

Il veut saisir l’amour dans son éternité;

Et toujours il renaît à la vie inféconde

Pâle et désespéré dans le désert du monde. (27–34)

[In his day’s resting place, under the parched tree, / Every dreamer has lain down, worn out with living, / And like the bedouin, yielding to weariness, / Has slept your sleep, oh dreary solitude! / Unmindful of the earth, and of an angered heart, / He wants to seize love in its eternity; / And always he rises to barren life / Pale and desperate in the desert of the world.]

In these lines the desert acquires a metaphorical significance that exceeds the bounds of the Middle East, Islam, and even external nature.⁵⁷ The desert is not simply what one encounters between Mt. Sinai and Syria; it is “le désert du monde” [the desert of the world], and by extension the Middle East now stands for the sorry condition of the whole world. The Islamic Orient offers a context for the dreamer’s dejection, much as it provided a counterpoint for the speaker’s confidence in Wordsworth’s “Septimi Gades.” As in Wordsworth’s poem, this tactic is effective only because of the Middle East’s predetermined unnaturalness. The failure of the desert (including the oasis and Paradise) to find a place along the continuum of the natural enables it to represent the dreamer’s extraordinary state of mind. Although the rhetorical impact of the desert as an emotional point of reference continues to derive from its implied contrast with the standard European vision of nature, that traditional, domestic standard is nowhere evident in “Le Désert.” It has been effectively supplanted by the alternative to it: the desert and oriental unnature. Thus the Orient has displaced nature from this poem.

Rather than seek an ideal in nature, as Wordsworth, Hugo, and even Hemans do, Leconte de Lisle seems to look for his “Paradise” in the Orient. The ideal he proposes is that of the oasis and the Islamic “Djennet,” places in which relations between the individual and the world are uncomplicated by consciousness. It is a paradigm that Wordsworth, Hugo, and Hemans would find discomfiting, reliant as they are on the ability of consciousness to organize experience. Unlike his predecessors’ ideals, which are envisioned as existing within empirical reality, Leconte de Lisle’s Paradise never leaves the realm of the imagination. When it is vested in the oasis, it is a hypothetical memory, not a genuine recollection. When it is vested in the Islamic heaven, it is a dream, part of the bedouin’s “vision divine.” This forced intimacy between Paradise and the imagination suggests an equally forced, but also significant, intimacy between the Islamic Orient (locus of both oasis and Paradise/”Djennet”) and the imagination, such that the Orient appears as a product of the imagination, while at the same time the Orient becomes the sole domain of the imagination.⁵⁸

The source of this formulation may be sought in Hugo’s idea of the East as the locus of “pure poésie.” However, as we saw in chapter 2, Hugo ultimately directs his imagination outside the East, whereas for Leconte de Lisle in this poem, the imagination seems to remain bound to the Orient. Leconte de Lisle evidently shares some of Hugo’s final disappointment in the Orient; the Middle Eastern desert is after all the model for “le désert du monde.” But instead of resorting once again to Europe and mimesis, as Hugo does, Leconte de Lisle stays with the Orient. From it he creates a totalized, universalized figure for both the idealism and the despair of the human condition. Mimesis too is distanced, as each apparently mimetic move is filtered to dispel any sense of concrete reality; however clearly depicted, the bedouin’s stay in the oasis is a false memory, his trip to Paradise is a fading dream, and he himself is (especially in the longer version of the poem) more archetypal than real.

Théophile Gautier: the composite desert

In a career that, like Leconte de Lisle’s, moved away from romanticism and towards a Parnassian aesthetic, Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) shared his contemporary’s long-standing devotion to oriental subjects. The impact of Hugo’s Les Orientales was as powerful for him as for Leconte de Lisle.⁵⁹ Like Leconte de Lisle, whom he influenced, Gautier tended to see the Orient as free of the perversions of modern life, a place where humankind might regain a more ideal state of being.⁶⁰ Although he is now recognized primarily as a prose writer, Gautier’s numerous orientalist poems are of significant interest.⁶¹ He was one of several major nineteenth-century French writers, including François-René de Chateaubriand, Gustave Flaubert, and Gerard de Nerval, to have visited the Middle East, but he was perhaps the only one to have fancied himself a kind of switched-at-birth Middle Easterner.⁶² Partly because of this feeling of personal affiliation with the exotic (pretended in his case), but mainly because of his intense engagement with the evolving French literary tradition, his sensibilities appear very like Leconte de Lisle’s.

It will be no surprise, then, that Gautier’s 1838 sonnet “La Caravane” [“The Caravan”] relies on virtually the same figurative use of the unnatural desert as the longer version of Leconte de Lisle’s “Le Désert,” which may have been influenced by it.⁶³

La caravane humaine au Sahara du monde,

Par ce chemin des ans qui n’a pas de retour,

S’en va traînant le pied, brûlée aux feux du jour,

Et buvant sur ses bras la sueur qui l’inonde.

Le grand lion rugit et la tempête gronde;

A l’horizon fuyard, ni minaret, ni tour;

La seule ombre qu’on ait, c’est l’ombre du vautour,

Qui traverse le ciel cherchant sa proie immonde.

L’on avance toujours, et voici que l’on voit

Quelque chose de vert que l’on se montre au doigt:

C’est un bois de cyprès, semé de blanches pierres.

Dieu, pour vous reposer, dans le désert du temps,

Comme des oasis, a mis les cimetières:

Couchez-vous et dormez, voyageurs haletants.

[The human caravan in the Sahara of the world, / Along that track of years that makes no return, / Disappears dragging its feet, burned by the fires of day, / And drinking on its arms the sweat which drenches it.

The big lion roars and the storm rumbles; / On the fleeing horizon, neither minaret nor tower, / The only shade one has is the shade of a vulture, / Which crosses the sky looking for its filthy prey.

One moves always forward, and here one sees / Something green that one points out with a finger: / It is a cypress wood, strewn with white stones.

To refresh you, in the desert of time, God / Has put cemeteries like oases: / Lie down and sleep, worn travelers.]

The desert depicted in this poem conforms in its key respects to deserts portrayed in the other poems discussed thus far. It is a hot, dry, harsh environment through which any travel is grueling and dangerous.⁶⁴ Human interaction with the desert is inevitably adversarial, never spiritually privileged as it is with the European nature envisioned by Wordsworth, Hemans, and Hugo. Moreover, what might at first seem to offer relief from the desert ultimately disappoints as well. Here the cypress wood turns out to be strewn with stones; the poem’s final stanza figures it as a cemetery rather than as the expected oasis. Like the oases of “Septimi Gades,” “The Traveller at the Source of the Nile,” and “Le Désert,” this (anti)oasis fails to provide relief. Its betrayal is also compounded at the level of signification. The “Quelque chose de vert que l’on se montre au doigt” [Something green that one points out with a finger] appears at first to be a sign whose referent is an oasis. But the “real” referent turns out to be the cemetery of cypress trees interspersed with white stones.⁶⁵ This bait and switch becomes a metaphor of the Orient’s subversion of mimesis. The desert oasis, a quintessentially unnatural Middle Eastern environment, resists a straightforward linkage of sign with referent just as, in other contexts, the Orient resists a solid connection between representation and reality.

The lack of description in “La Caravane” also carries an antimimetic function. The desert is described as if already visualized, so that only certain identifying reference points need be noted. For example, the declaration that neither minaret nor tower is visible presupposes that minarets and towers are to be expected on the horizon at the edge of a desert. The desert’s heat is similarly taken for granted; its effects (fatigue, perspiration) are emphasized, but the heat itself is named only indirectly, in the phrase “feux de jour” [fires of day]. Finally, the transformation of the cypress wood from a potential oasis into a cemetery relies upon a conventionalized vision of the relationship between deserts and oases, such that a glimpse of green off in the distance must of course be an oasis. Thus Gautier’s approach here runs counter to mimesis both in its reluctance to represent directly and in its unstated incorporation of the (un)natural landscape into a fundamentally textual universe, that of orientalist allusion. Grant Crichfield’s comments on Gautier’s Constantinople clearly apply to “La Caravane” as well: “Gautier rarely speaks of the East without anchoring his discourse in an Occidental system of allusions. It is virtually impossible for him to write Asia in its own terms; his text on Turkey becomes a set of references primarily to European representation and knowledge.”⁶⁶ Nor is Gautier concerned with such porousness of boundaries between text and empirical reality. As he says of his visit to Egypt, “La scène qui allait se passer devant nous réellement, nous l’avions imaginée et décrite par avance dans la Roman de la momie” [the scene that was about to pass before us in reality we had already imagined and described in the Novel of the Mummy].⁶⁷

In “La Caravane,” the various conventional details of desert portrayal are combined to create an impression of “desert.” But this is a composite, not a portrait of a physically plausible desert; in a real desert, for example, sweat would probably evaporate before it could be drunk. This composite desert image becomes a model of disappointment, despair, and death. Missing from Gautier’s rendition is the possibility of idealism entailed in the oasis and dreamed Paradise of Leconte de Lisle’s “Le Désert.” Elements of “Le Désert”’s environment at least hold out hope for the nourishment of the human spirit typically provided by European nature, even though Middle Eastern nature as depicted by Leconte de Lisle does not meet European specifications overall. Gautier’s desert is instead a metaphor for mortality. Thus, as in “Le Désert,” the Middle East functions as a totalized figure for the human condition, with the difference that Gautier’s view of that condition is uniformly cynical.⁶⁸

There is no place for nature in Gautier’s paradigmatic, composite desert. Yet, like the landscape of Leconte de Lisle’s “Le Désert,” Gautier’s natureless desert plays virtually the same role that romantic poetics assigns to European nature. Gautier uses his desert to gain access to and to express an inner emotion (desolation), much as a romantic poet such as Wordsworth might do with a European outdoor scene. However, Gautier positions himself at an ironic distance from the romantic model. The landscape he depicts is far removed from both the uplifting sublime and the comfortable domesticity of romanticism. It is by no means the uncontaminated object of contemplation idealized by the romantics, nor does the speaker of the poem ever locate himself in the act of contemplating the landscape he describes. Gautier has dispensed entirely with the notion of a mimetic (or even consistently verisimilar) representation of nature. Instead, he puts forward an oriental landscape that is from the beginning firmly embedded in metaphor and textuality, but that is able to perform the same poetic function as its natural, European counterpart.

“In deserto”: European nature in absentia

Gautier’s poem “In deserto” (1842) follows a different course towards much the same end.⁶⁹ As Michael Riffaterre says, the poem “represents something that is not the desert to which the description is [...] referring.”⁷⁰ On the other hand, the description of the desert environment in “In deserto” remains intensely invested in the minute details of the landscape. The poem begins by delineating the landscape’s large geological landmarks:

Les pitons des sierras, les dunes du désert,

Où ne pousse jamais un seul brin d’herbe vert;

Les monts aux flancs zébrés de tuf, d’ocre et de mame,

Et que l’éboulement de jour en jour décharne;

Le grès plein de micas papillotant aux yeux,

Le sable sans profit buvant les pleurs des cieux,

Le rocher refrogné dans sa barbe de ronce,

L’ardente solfatare avec la pierre-ponce (1–8)

[The peaks of the sierras, the dunes of the desert, / Where not a single blade of green grass ever grows; / The mountains with flanks zebra-striped in tuff, ochre, and marl, / And which landslides strip day by day; / The sandstone full of mica flashing before the eyes, / The sand vainly drinking the heavens’ tears, / The crag frowning in its beard of thorns, / The fiery sulfer vent with the pumice stone]

This long description ends at last in an intersection with the speaker’s hardened emotional state. All these features of the desert, he declares,

Sont moins secs et moins morts aux végétations

Que le roc de mon coeur ne l’est aux passions.

Le soleil de midi, sur le sommet aride,

Répand à flots plombés sa lumière livide,

Et rien n’est plus lugubre et désolant à voir

Que ce grand jour frappant sur ce grand désespoir. (9–14)

[Are less dry and less dead to vegetation / Than the rock of my heart is to passion. / The noonday sun on the arid summit / Pours out its livid light in leaden waves, / And nothing is more lugubrious and desolate to see / Than that great day striking that great despair.]

Riffaterre sees this shift from landscape to emotion as the beginning of a transition from mimesis to semiosis.⁷¹ As in Wordsworth’s “Septimi Gades,” the desert is offered as a standard against which the speaker’s own emotional status may be expressed and quantified. The mainly figurative function of the desert, though, corresponds more closely to that of the longer “Le Désert” and “La Caravane.” As in the latter, the metaphoric function of the landscape overwhelms its function as setting.

Once the relationship between the two functions is established, the speaker goes on to delineate the smaller-scale characteristics of this now-figurative landscape:

Le lézard pâmé bâille, et parmi l’herbe cuite

On entend résonner les vipères en fuite.

Là, point de marguerite au coeur étoilé d’or,

Point de muguet prodigue égrenant son trésor;

Là, point de violette ignorée et charmante,

Dans l’ombre se cachant comme une pâle amante:

Mais la broussaille rousse et le tronc d’arbre mort,

Que le genou du vent comme un arc plie et tord;

Là, pas d’oiseau chanteur, ni d’abeille en voyage,

Pas de ramier plaintif déplorant son veuvage:

Mais bien quelque vautour, quelque aigle montagnard,

Sur le disque enflammé fixant son oeil hagard,

Et qui, du haut du pic où son pied prend racine,

Dans l’or fauve du soir durement se dessine. (15–28)

[The fainting lizard yawns, and in the burned grass / One hears echo the fleeing vipers. / There, no daisy with the starry golden heart, / No lavish lily of the valley letting go its treasure; / There, no ignored and charming violet, / Hiding itself in the shade like a pale lover: / But [instead] reddish underbrush and the trunk of a dead tree / That the wind’s knee twists and bends like a bow; / There, no singing bird, nor traveling bee, / No plaintive dove deploring its widowhood: / But indeed some vulture, some highland eagle, / Fixing its haggard eye on the fiery disk, / And who, from the peak’s height where its foot takes root, / Stands out boldly in the evening’s tawny gold.]

Although this description is minutely detailed, its terms emphasize absent as well as actually perceived traits. We learn almost as much about what the desert landscape does not contain (five lines) as about what it does (eight lines).⁷² In addition, the poet’s choice of these absent features is significant for their specific association with European nature. The daisies, lilies of the valley, violets, songbirds, bees, and doves are (at least by convention) not to be expected in the desert, but they are (just as conventionally) part of a European image of nature that is grounded in the pastoral tradition and assimilated by the romantics.⁷³ The poem clearly portrays the desert environment in terms set by its European counterpart; the desert is thereby constituted as unnatural. Yet the two environments turn out to share certain characteristics. For instance, at the very beginning of Gautier’s list of absent traits is the “marguerite au coeur étoilé d’or” [daisy with the starry golden heart]; in the last line of the section, gold appears once again, but this time in the desert landscape, as “l’or fauve du soir” [the evening’s tawny gold]. In addition, all of the desert’s missing European features are either plants or winged creatures. The passage’s final image of the desert combines these two categories when the highland eagle’s foot takes root as if the bird were a plant.

The presence of these few shared characteristics suggests once again the interchangeability that enables the desert, while in opposition to an implied Europe, to substitute for Europe in the speaker’s figurative framework. As in Leconte de Lisle’s “Le Désert” and in Gautier’s “La Caravane,” the desert is cast in nature’s role as a medium for expression. The impenetrable, inhospitable “roc de mon coeur” [rock of my heart] finds its metaphoric counterpart in the oriental desert. The abnormal, unhealthy state of the speaker’s feelings matches the unnatural, unwholesome environment of the desert, just as European nature might correlate with healthier emotional conditions. This match supports a more fundamental correspondence at an aesthetic and philosophical level, as the Middle Eastern environment takes the generative place of European nature without reproducing it.

To say that oriental (un)nature can displace European nature within poetic practice is not, of course, to imply a binary opposition between the two such that the one appears as a reflection of the other. This becomes clear in “In deserto” when one considers the perspective from which the desert landscape is presented. Whereas in a poem such as Wordsworth’s famous one beginning “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (1807), which depicts a landscape very much as an observer might experience it, the physical characteristics of Gautier’s desert could not possibly be experienced as they are presented. It is unlikely that a single observer could notice, simultaneously or even in quick succession, all of the features to which the first eight lines of the poem allude: peaks, dunes, mountainsides, thorns, sulfur vents, etc. Even if one made the dubious assumption that each individual element of the depicted landscape were accurately represented as a natural phenomenon, the image of the desert that emerges is a hypothetical, totalized one, quintessential rather than documentary. The effect here is desertness, not a desert. As Riffaterre observes, such “details [...] are contradictory only as descriptions, only if we keep trying to interpret them as mimesis; they cease to be unacceptable when we see them as the logical and cogent consequences of the positivization of the desert code.”⁷⁴

The final section of the poem reinforces this idea of the desert as quintessence rather than topography, but it also gives this quintessence an emphatically Middle Eastern value:

Tel était le rocher que Moïse, au désert,

Toucha de sa baguette, et dont le flanc ouvert,

Tressaillant tout à coup, fit jaillir en arcade

Sur les lèvres du peuple une fraíche cascade.

Ah! s’il venait à moi, dans mon aridité,

Quelque reine des coeurs, quelque divinité,

Une magicienne, un Moïse femelle,

Traînant dans le désert les peuples après elle,

Qui frappât le rocher dans mon coeur endurci,

Comme de l’autre roche, on en verrait aussi

Sortir en jets d’argent des eaux étincelantes,

Où viendraient s’abreuver les racines des plantes;

Où les pâtres errants conduiraient leurs troupeaux,

Pour se coucher à l’ombre et prendre le repos;

Où, comme en un vivier, les cigognes fidèles

Plongeraient leurs grands becs et laveraient leurs ailes. (29–44)

[Such was the crag that Moses, in the desert, / Touched with his rod (so that) its exposed flank, / Trembling suddenly, let spout forth in an arc / A cool cascade onto the lips of the people. / Ah! If there came to me in my aridity / Some queen of hearts, some divinity, / A magician, a female Moses, / Dragging the people after her into the desert, / Who would strike the crag in my hardened heart, / One would see, as from that other boulder, / Gush out sparkling waters in jets of silver, / Where plants’ roots would come to drink; / Where wandering shepherds would drive their herds / To lie down in the shade and rest; / Where, as in a fishpond, faithful storks / Would dip their great bills and clean their wings.

The composite and quintessential character of the desert is reinforced in these lines by the introduction of Moses, which allows the Spanish desert depicted to assume the figurative value of the conventional Middle Eastern desert.⁷⁵ The link between the hypothetical female Moses and the desert is affirmed by the poem’s syntax. The final, defining view of the desert is that of the highland eagle discussed above; the female Moses is introduced in almost exactly the same terms: “quelque vautour, quelque aigle montagnard” [some vulture, some highland eagle] versus “Quelque reine de coeurs, quelque divinité” [Some queen of hearts, some divinity]. By relating the female Moses to this eagle who exemplifies the union of bird and plant motifs in the poem, Gautier firmly establishes the orientalized Spanish desert as the correlate of European nature. The remainder of the poem confirms the desert’s ability to fill the place of nature, again through the use of bird and plant motifs. Gautier begins with “les racines des plantes” [plants’ roots], a formulation that cements the link between the eagle (described earlier as rooted) and the flowers absent from the desert. He ends the poem with another bird image, that of storks grooming their wings in the flood of the speaker’s released emotions. The speaker’s movement from despair to the possibility of psychological health is accompanied by a transformation in the desert environment. The arrival of water and storks signals the naturalization of a landscape whose unnaturalness had been marked by the absence of both water and birds (other than the eagle). The fidelity of storks is a European stereotype; that these storks are faithful (“cigognes fidèles”) implies a concomitant Europeanization of the landscape. But whether barren or newly fertile, Middle Eastern nature is as able as the conventionally fertile European version of nature to prompt or to organize human emotions.

Given the thematic centrality of human emotion, the absence of actual humans or human activity in this scene is striking. As already discussed, the observer implied at the beginning of the poem cannot reasonably be a single human being. Nor does the first-person speaker ever position himself within the scene. Moses is introduced in a simile that interprets the scene rather than being part of it, and he is in any case too legendary to count as a real person. The female Moses is both hypothetical and supernatural. The shepherds and the female Moses’s followers are human, but they form undifferentiated, hypothetical groups altogether lacking in psychological development. Indeed, Gautier seems even to have idealized such a human-free desert. In comments on Eugène Fromentin’s Un été au Sahara [A Summer in the Sahara], for instance, Gautier concludes: “Aussi notre idéal est-il celui de M. Fromentin — un ciel sans nuage sur le désert sans ombre! Le désert! — ‘c’est Dieu sans les hommes’“ [Thus our ideal is that of Mr. Fromentin — a cloudless sky over the unshaded desert! The desert — “it is God without men”].⁷⁶

Although Gautier’s praise for such an antimodern, depopulated, aesthetic landscape appears oddly Wordsworthian, Wordsworth would not perceive the desert as a possible manifestation of his ideal landscape.⁷⁷ Gautier’s exclusion of human beings also contrasts with Leconte de Lisle’s depiction of a Middle Eastern environment in which humans and nature are unnaturally indistinguishable. Yet the two views are similar in a couple of key respects. First, both present a relationship between nature and human beings that differs profoundly from the conventional, romantic (Wordsworthian, Hugoesque) one. Second, despite its very different relationship with human beings, the desert is, in each case, able to fulfill the aesthetic function conventionally assigned to European nature: to inspire and structure experience and its expression. In neither case is the desert able to do this because it, like a forest or a glade, is a natural phenomenon. Rather, the desert is useful to Gautier and Leconte de Lisle precisely because it is unnatural. In their poems, the protagonists’ affiliation with the Orient, that place of desolation, unnaturalness, abnormality, and barbarism, is also a rejection of the optimism, emotional engagement, and domesticity of romanticism.

Riffaterre offers Gautier’s “In deserto” as an example of an apparently descriptive poem that “ceases to be descriptive, ceases to be a sequence of mimetic signs, and becomes a single sign, perceived from the end back to its given as a harmonious whole, wherein nothing is loose, wherein every word refers to one symbolic focus.”⁷⁸ His analysis traces the poem’s progression from apparent mimesis to semiosis, a state in which “the text is no longer attempting to establish the credibility of a description.”⁷⁹ However, Riffaterre does not acknowledge orientalism’s crucial contribution towards the poem’s antimimetic trend. As my reading shows, it is as impossible to segregate the oriental from the unnatural as it is to disengage the unnatural from the antimimetic.

Out of the desert: Byron’s “Turkish Tales”

Nineteenth-century orientalist poems tend to concentrate the Islamic Middle East’s unnaturalness in its deserts, as we have seen. However, unnaturalness is evident even in oriental landscapes whose physical or visual difference from a European standard is far less pronounced. The rest of this chapter will consider two such landscapes: first, the varied rural scenery of Byron’s The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Giaour (1813), and The Corsair (1814); and second, the urban settings of poems by Matthew Arnold and Alfred Tennyson. In each case, the environment is, like the desert, clearly differentiated from its European counterpart. None of these environments attains a relationship with people comparable to that of the rural European landscape as depicted by Wordsworth or Hemans. Nonetheless, each of these oriental settings shares with the Middle Eastern desert the capacity to displace nature by usurping its poetic function.

The settings of Byron’s so-called Turkish Tales are typically more lush than those discussed thus far.⁸⁰ Seascapes are common, as are fertile inland landscapes. The Bride of Abydos, for instance, begins:

Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle

Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime,

Where the rage of the vulture — the love of the turtle —

Now melt into sorrow—now madden to crime? —

Know ye the land of the cedar and vine?

Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine,

Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppressed with perfume,

Wax faint o’er the gardens of Gùl in her bloom;⁸¹

Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit,

And the voice of the nightingale never is mute;

Where the tints of the earth, and the hues of the sky,

In colour though varied, in beauty may vie,

And the purple of Ocean is deepest in die;

Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine,

And all, save the spirit of man, is divine —

‘Tis the clime of the East — ‘tis the land of the Sun —

Can he smile on such deeds as his children have done? (1.1–17)

Like Gautier’s desert scenes, this landscape is clearly a composite of conventional traits. Although its fertility and variety distinguish it from the desert, its paradoxical relationship with human beings is not the one glorified by Wordsworthian romanticism. On the one hand, the speaker presents the landscape as a figure for human emotions and actions (“the cypress and myrtle / Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime”). On the other, he implies a fundamental disjunction between the beautiful outdoor landscape and the violent “spirit of man” that inhabits it. Neither of these positions approximates the one Wordsworth and Hemans idealize.

The ending of The Bride of Abydos confirms the difficulty of postulating a fulfilling relationship with the outdoor environment of the Orient. Selim, the poem’s rebellious “hero,” is killed in a battle at the seacoast. As he expires,

Fast from his breast the blood is bubbling,

The whiteness of the sea-foam troubling;

If aught his lips essayed to groan

The rushing billows choked the tone! (2.579–82)

After Selim’s death, his body lies on the shoreline so that he is

shaken on his restless pillow,

His head heaves with the heaving billow —

That hand — whose motion is not life —

Yet feebly seems to menace strife —

Flung by the tossing tide on high,

Then levell’d with the wave —

What recks it? though that corse shall lie

Within a living grave? (2.605–12)

As his corpse becomes carrion for scavenging birds, Selim is united with nature in a highly practical but unsavory fashion that has nothing in common with the spiritual and intellectual engagement applauded by Byron’s more Wordsworthian contemporaries in their nonorientalist poetry. The failure of such an engagement is made explicit in the “rushing billows” that choke off anything that Selim’s “lips essay’d to groan.” Thus although this coastal setting is physically dissimilar to the desert, its deleterious effects upon Selim suggest a functional correspondence between the two environments. That correspondence is implied earlier by Selim himself when he compares “My tent on shore” with “my galley on the sea” (2.390). He casts the two in equivalent roles: “Borne by my steed, or wafted by my sail, / Across the desart, or before the gale, / Bound where thou wilt, my barb! or glide, my prow” (2.392–4). Even in this moment of (false) confidence, however, Selim’s attitude towards both sea and desert suggests dominance rather than receptivity to inspiration or even comfortable coexistence.⁸²

When Selim attempts a more typically romantic interaction with the outdoors, he is unsuccessful, although the blame is perhaps due as much to his own lack of sensitivity as to the deficiencies of the landscape. At one point, he looks out “o’er the dark blue water, / That swiftly glides and gently swells,” but he is too distracted to appreciate it: “he saw nor sea nor strand” (1.242–3, 245). On another occasion, he complains that

to view alone

The fairest scenes of land and deep,

With none to listen and reply

To thoughts with which my heart beat high

Were irksome (1.59–63)

Neither Selim’s difficulty concentrating nor his need for a human interlocutor finds any parallel in the focused and mutually sufficient relationship between natural scenery and human beings that Wordsworth and Hemans propose for their poems’ protagonists. Whereas Hemans’s Bruce hears clearly the summons of the Scottish highlands, Selim is oblivious to the outdoor environment’s efforts to communicate with him. In the first lines of canto 2, for example, “rising gale,” “breaking foam,” “shrieking sea-birds,” “clouds,” and “tides” all warn him not to go, but “He could not see, he would not hear” (2.8–12).

Like The Bride of Abydos, The Giaour and The Corsair present Middle Eastern nature as an attractive, productive environment whose unnaturalness consists chiefly in its excess and in its conflicted relationship with people. The setting of The Giaour is a “Fair clime” (7), one of the “Edens of the eastern wave” (15), a region

where Nature lov’d to trace,

As if for Gods, a dwelling-place,

And every charm and grace hath mixed

Within the paradise she fixed (46–9)⁸³

Far from appreciating this wondrous place, “man, enamour’d of distress” has “mar[red] it into wilderness” (50–1). Moreover, nature too can kill, in the form of “the Simoom, / [...] / Beneath whose widely-wasting breath / The very cypress droops to death” (282–5). Even if the potential for destruction is balanced, it ensures a mutual antagonism between human beings and their outdoor surroundings. Communion between the setting and the characters exists only in that the scene correlates with the emotional makeup of its population. As the title character confesses, “The cold in clime are cold in blood, /[...]/ But mine was like the lava flood / That boils in Aetna’s breast of flame” (1099–102). However, climate and region are tropes; there is no psychological or spiritual linkage between them and the speaker of these lines.

Such a linkage seems possible at first for The Corsair’s Conrad, who displays a close attachment to his home, a “lone, but lovely dwelling on the steep” (1.509) reminiscent of the rural habitations in Wordsworth’s “Septimi Gades.” But unlike the speaker of that earlier poem, Conrad must turn away from the sight of his home in order to maintain his emotional stability: he “shrunk whene’er the windings of his way / Forced on his eye what he would not survey” (1.507–8). When the landscape appears to speak with him as the Scottish mountains do with Bruce, it speaks treacherously, for the rocks, dolphins, and sea bird can offer only a false welcome in the absence of his beloved Medora (3.555–88). Finally, The Corsair also participates with its fellow “Turkish Tales” in the aestheticization of the explicitly oriental landscape. For instance, the extended description of sunset that opens canto 3 frankly distinguishes this extraordinary sight from any European version; the sinking sun is

Not, as in Northern climes, obscurely bright,

But one unclouded blaze of living light!

O’er the hush’d deep the yellow beam he throws,

Gilds the green wave, that trembles as it glows. (3.3–6)

Despite its beauty, the scenery does not offer its human observers the intellectual and spiritual benefits readily provided by European natural settings. Although Makdisi is right to point out that Byron is drawn to such landscapes precisely for their otherness, that otherness seems inevitably to dislocate characters from setting at least as much as it promotes what Makdisi describes as “the desire (however chimerical) to experience the East ‘as such.’“⁸⁴ In other words, the denaturalization of nature in the East may emblematize the experience of otherness, but that experience comes with a price.

The Middle Eastern landscape’s function as a manifestation of nature is compromised further in The Corsair by the inclusion of elaborate architectural elements into the scenery. A description of nightfall, for example, lists columns, a minaret, a mosque, a turret, and a kiosk alongside moonbeams and olive, cypress, and palm trees (3.37–46). There is no distinction made between natural and constructed components of the scene. The Giaour includes a similar nighttime scene in which the title character “looks [...] o’er the olive wood” but sees a mosque with crescent and lighted lamps (221–3).⁸⁵ The apparently unproblematic intrusion of the built environment into otherwise rural, natural scenery accentuates the Orient’s unnaturalness. In The Bride of Abydos, this process is neatly encapsulated in the reference to a “pictured roof (1.272), accompanied by Byron’s note that “The ceiling and wainscots, or rather walls, of the Mussulman apartments are generally Painted, in great houses, with one eternal and highly coloured view of Constantinople.”⁸⁶ This decoration of interior space with outdoor images collapses the distinction between scenery and design, and with it the possibility of the Islamic Middle East as a place where nature can exist as a discrete and independent entity.

In all three of these poems, the abundantly described Middle Eastern settings clearly define the subject matter’s essential difference. Like the other poems of this chapter, the “Turkish Tales” display this difference as unnaturalness. Because Byron’s Orient is rarely a desert, that unnaturalness is less immediately physical, but it remains evident in the exaggerated beauty of the poems’ composite landscapes and in the dysfunctional relationships between characters and their surroundings. The Orient’s unnaturalness thus extends beyond the features of its physical environment to encompass the social structure of the Islamic Middle East, as is apparent as well from the political critique advanced in poems such as The Bride of Abydos. Rather as the desert of Gautier’s “In deserto,” the unnatural surroundings of Byron’s “Turkish Tales” are able to organize the experience of the characters they contain. This function is virtually indistinguishable from that of European nature in Wordsworthian romanticism, although the experience at issue is quite distinct from that favored by Wordsworth. In this important respect, oriental unnature acts in the same capacity as European nature, thereby displacing it as a poetic origin.

The excessiveness inherent in the aestheticization (and occasionally the demonization) of oriental unnature in these poems disqualifies it as the basis for a mimetic approach to representation. There can be no empirically verifiable referent for The Giaour’s “Edens,” for example, yet that poem is plentifully supplied with authenticating footnotes. The notes add both another layer of discourse (as Diego Saglia argues in the case of Southey’s Roderick)⁸⁷ and another level of narrative disjunction, compounding the discontinuities already inherent in the fragmentary structure of The Giaour, and to a lesser extent of the other “Turkish Tales.” As I explain in chapter 2, the fragment as a form tends to work outside of mimesis. Here, the fragment’s relationship with mimesis is further strained by the gap between the compulsive mimeticism of the footnotes’ descriptions and the clearly antimimetic excess of the poems’ descriptions. Oriental unnature necessitates both: mimeticism because the oriental oddity must be documented, and antimimeticism because the unnatural is not subject to representation as an experientially available referent would be.⁸⁸ Thus it is in the relationship between (fragmentary) poetic text and documentary footnote that the Orient as unnatural becomes most obviously central to the poetics of the “Turkish Tales.”

Matthew Arnold in Bukhara: nature in the Middle Eastern city

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) envisions a contentious and unstable relationship between nature and humanity and finds nature itself an unreliable source of guidance and inspiration. Like the other poets of this chapter, he uses the Islamic Middle East as an arena in which to elaborate his views of nature and its relations with both poetry and humanity. He too sees the relationship between people and nature as especially awkward in the Orient, but he does not assume that the conventionally natural environment of Europe automatically enables human beings’ productive engagement with their outdoor surroundings. In this respect, his approach has more in common with his French contemporaries (Gautier, Leconte de Lisle) than with his British predecessors (Wordsworth, Hemans, Byron). Arnold has a reputation as a Victorian with an atypically non-Anglocentric, even multicultural view; this may play a role in his willingness to look skeptically at his own cultural inheritance, although it is important to recall that Arnold’s intellectual range is, for the most part, limited to Europe.⁸⁹ In any case, Arnold produced a small but significant corpus of Middle Eastern poems, including “The Sick King in Bokhara” (1849), to which I will turn shortly.⁹⁰ I will begin for the sake of comparison with Arnold’s “In Harmony with Nature,” a nonorientalist sonnet published in the same year as “The Sick King.”⁹¹

“In Harmony with Nature” explores humanity’s rapport with nature in a nonorientalist context. The speaker of the poem strongly criticizes the advice alluded to by the poem’s original title: “To an Independent Preacher, who preached that we should be ‘In Harmony with Nature.’“ He lectures this “restless fool” (1) of a preacher:

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,

And in that more lie all his hopes of good.

Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood;

Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore;

Nature is fickle, man hath need of rest;

Nature forgives no debt, and fears no grave;

Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest.

Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;

Nature and man can never be fast friends.

Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave! (5–14; emphasis his)

Arnold follows the romantics and their classical forebears in acknowledging nature as the fundamental standard from which human moral development must depart, yet he argues against basing human standards on natural ones. Instead, he presents his speaker as a man in search of a new (and as yet undefined) relationship with nature. The speaker recognizes not only the “impossibility” of being truly in harmony with nature but also the undesirability of such a goal. “Nature and man can never be fast friends,” he concludes.

The alternatives are as he sets them out in the poem’s final line: either remain subordinate to nature or surpass her, presumably in a spirit of greater moral advancement. However, although Arnold writes here of “pass[ing]” nature, the body of the poem advocates a more adversarial relationship. Even while “man” can be cruel and unforgiving, the speaker emphasizes human mildness, even weakness; nature, on the other hand, shows no such capacity for gentleness. In juxtaposing humankind and nature in these lines, he is undoubtedly implying that whatever hope there is for human beings lies more in their divergence from nature than in their ability to “pass” nature on the same track. This ambiguity of message is irresolvable within the text, but the basic philosophical question underlying it is nonetheless clear: what, the poem asks, is the proper relationship between nature and humankind? Romanticism has already replied to that question; by raising it again, Arnold suggests dissatisfaction with romanticism’s answer.⁹²

Arnold returns once again to the same question in “The Sick King in Bokhara.”⁹³ This longer poem (232 lines) tells the story of a “Moollah” who presents himself to the king as his own accuser, claiming to have cursed his own mother and demanding to be put to death according to Islamic law. Twice the king rejects his plea and has him driven out as a madman. On the third occasion, the king is forced to turn the case over to the “Ulemas,” who sentence the mullah to death by stoning. The king orders the sentence carried out, but charges that the man be allowed to escape if he attempts to do so. The man does not, and is killed; the king then has the body brought to him, and he begins to prepare it for burial in his own royal tomb. The poem, which takes the form of a conversation, begins with the court poet, Hussein, narrating the story for the king’s vizier, who has been ill and is unaware of the situation. As the body is carried in, the vizier and the king then debate the appropriateness of the king’s grief for the dead mullah.

Editors Kenneth Allott and Miriam Allott state that “[t]he subject interested [Arnold] for its suggestion that the moral law may transcend rational expediency and yet be sanctioned by the individual conscience.”⁹⁴ However, this formulation should be investigated further, especially in light of the moral uncertainty of “In Harmony with Nature.” Superficially, the moral law here is the law of Islam, the law that requires (all extenuating circumstances aside) the death of a son who curses his mother. But if we compare this notion of law to that of “nature” in the preceding poem, we find a strong parallel, one that suggests that the law portrayed in “The Sick King” is relevant beyond the narrow bounds of (supposed) Muslim doctrine. Nature in “In Harmony with Nature” is “cruel” (7), “stubborn” (8), unforgiving, fearless, and harsh. Law in “The Sick King” could easily be described in precisely the same terms.

Moreover, the relationship postulated between nature and human beings in “In Harmony” very much resembles the relationship that develops between the king and the law in “The Sick King.” “In Harmony” announces that “man is sick of blood” (7), “man hath need of rest [...] and fears [the] grave” (9–10), and “Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest” (11). This composite picture of “man” closely matches the more detailed (though still somewhat generic) portrait of the king. The king’s struggles with the law can easily be predicted on the basis of this correspondence; his decision about the mullah’s fate should be, must be, “in harmony” with the law, yet his own moral bent strongly opposes such a decision. If the mullah who yearned for compliance with the law is a “fool” (40) and a “madman” (91), such compliance is, in the king’s view, equally foolish and equally mad — but also unavoidable.⁹⁵ Nature and law appear, then, to be filling the same slot in Arnold’s moral universe. Both nature and law lack pity, that essential human quality which Arnold presents both in this poem and in “In Harmony” as humankind’s only saving grace. Neither law nor nature offers a suitable guide for human behavior.

The virtual interchangeability of law and nature in this context is reinforced by the relative absence of outdoor scenery from “The Sick King in Bokhara.” The only natural scene described is that of a tiny pool, which the mullah is delighted to find during a time of drought:

Now I at nightfall had gone forth

Alone, and in a darksome place

Under some mulberry-trees I found

A little pool; and in short space,

With all the water that was there

I filled my pitcher, and stole home

Unseen (65–71)

This little pool fills the role customarily assigned in orientalist literature to an oasis, providing water to the needy. Like oases in other nineteenth-century poems I have discussed, this mini-oasis is depicted as clearly separate and distinct from its surroundings. Unlike its counterparts, though, this place is almost threatening; it is “darksome,” and the mullah, who is obviously apprehensive about being there, shows none of the desire to linger that is so characteristic of visitors to other literary oases. The place becomes yet another example of the motif of the unsatisfying oasis as the plot of the poem reveals that this pool is in fact the source of the mullah’s current predicament. Had he not found the pool, he would not have had extra water to hide at home. He would then have had no reason to curse his mother when she drank the precious water.

While the pool is the immediate cause of the mullah’s difficulty, the climate and geographic location of Bukhara bear the real blame. The mullah explains the circumstances:

Thou know’st, how fierce

In these last days the sun hath burned;

That the green water in the tanks

Is to a putrid puddle turned;

And the canal, which from the stream

Of Samarcand is brought this way,

Wastes, and runs thinner every day. (58–64)

Nature is presented much as in “In Harmony with Nature,” but here “In Harmony”‘s generalities (cruelty, harshness, etc.) are given a concrete — and specifically oriental — manifestation. Arnold’s city of Bukhara becomes a version of the conventional Middle Eastern desert, within which the pool serves as an oasis. The heat and dryness of Bukhara are emphasized in the succeeding lines, to the exclusion of other characteristics.⁹⁶ Thus while the outdoor environment may appear not to have a prominent place in this poem, it is at the very root of the mullah’s problem, and therefore of the king’s moral dilemma as well. This version of nature is, as I have shown, distinctly Middle Eastern. The same is true of law; the poem’s central moral deliberation depends upon the supposed inflexibility and unforgiving character of Islamic law. In effect, unnatural Middle Eastern nature forms a conceptual complex with Islamic law in “The Sick King,” a complex that corresponds closely to European nature as depicted in “In Harmony” but not to the conventional romantic vision of nature.

In the European context (romantic or not), nature is presumed to be an external force, a phenomenon largely independent of human beings even when they interact with it. However, this boundary is not cleanly maintained when law substitutes for nature. Although law may be understood to originate outside of humankind (in this poem, God is the source), the law — unlike nature — cannot function without human beings; indeed, the poem’s moral dilemma devolves precisely from this fact. Moreover, the limited and compromised depiction of nature in “The Sick King” is further removed from a European model by the mingling of purely natural elements with those bearing a human stamp; this is the same tactic we have already observed in Byron’s orientalist poetry, but it is pursued far more consistently here. For instance, the most sustained portrayal of nature in this poem is the description of the pool, yet references to the mullah’s house (its roof, a door) are interspersed throughout the description. And the natural phenomenon of the pool is incorporated into a very explicitly urban setting, thereby once again smudging the line between nature and human design. Like Byron’s “Turkish Tales” and Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam, “The Sick King” explores universal political and moral problems within an explicitly Islamic Middle Eastern setting,⁹⁷ but Arnold’s complex deployment of law adds a conceptual dimension lacking in his predecessors’ work.

“The Sick King” shows the interlocking of the human and the natural in two ways: by positioning law (which requires human implementation) as nature (which does not), and by presenting a totalized environmental image in which the products of nature are inseparable from those of human activity. This image has little to do with mainstream romanticism’s model of pure, European nature. The skeptical attitude towards nature that Arnold expressed in “In Harmony with Nature” comes to fruition here, mediated by oriental (un)nature. Like Leconte de Lisle and Gautier, he sees the East as a place of moral desolation. As they do, he uses this image of the Orient not only to articulate and explore an emotional crisis, but also to reflect upon an aesthetic crisis in his relationship with his romantic forbears.⁹⁸

Alfred Tennyson’s Basra: natural phenomena and urban construction

Alfred Tennyson’s concern with the poetic function of nature and with the relationship between humans and nature is, like Arnold’s, revealed through his portrayal of a Middle Eastern city. Tennyson (1809–1892) also joins Arnold in using the conventions of orientalism to establish his own aesthetic position vis-à-vis romanticism. Tennyson’s “Written by an Exile of Bassorah, while sailing down the Euphrates” (1827), one of a number of Middle Eastern poems clustered in the early part of his long career, depicts the obstacles to a fulfilling relationship between the landscape and its inhabitants. The unnatural urban environment of the East informs the poem’s stance much as rural nature informed that of Wordsworth’s “Septimi Gades,” but the resulting poetics diverge sharply from Wordsworth’s.⁹⁹

Tennyson’s “On a Mourner,” which depicts European nature without reference to the Orient, offers a useful point of comparison for “Written by an Exile.”¹⁰⁰ Although “On a Mourner” takes a less wary view of nature than Arnold’s “In Harmony with Nature,” the two poems share the assumption that nature is external to and independent from humankind — not, as in the oriental context of “The Sick King,” inseparably linked with it. “On a Mourner” begins by giving nature divine status, proclaiming its glories:

I

Nature, so far as in her lies,

Imitates God, and turns her face To every land beneath the skies,

Counts nothing that she meets with base,

But lives and loves in every place;

II

Fills out the homely quickset-screens,

And makes the purple lilac ripe, Steps from her airy hill, and greens

The swamp, where hummed the dropping snipe,

With moss and braided marish-pipe;

III

And on thy heart a finger lays,

Saying, ‘Beat quicker, for the time Is pleasant, and the woods and ways

Are pleasant, and the beech and lime

Put forth and feel a gladder clime.’

IV

And murmurs of a deeper voice,

Going before to some far shrine, Teach that sick heart the stronger choice,

Till all thy life one way incline

With one wide Will that closes thine. (1–20)

The remaining three stanzas continue this lesson, revealing nature as both comfort and inspiration to the “sick heart” of the mourner:

V

And when the zoning eve has died

Where yon dark valleys wind forlorn, Come Hope and Memory, spouse and bride,

From out the borders of the mom,

With that fair child betwixt them born.

VI

And when no mortal motion jars

The blackness round the tombing sod,

Through silence and the trembling stars

Comes Faith from tracts no feet have trod,

And Virtue, like a household god

VII

Promising empire; such as those

Once heard at dead of night to greet

Troy’s wandering prince, so that he rose

With sacrifice, while all the fleet

Had rest by stony hills of Crete. (21–35)

Tennyson’s vision of nature in “On a Mourner” diverges from Wordsworth’s in two respects. First, much as the notion of art “imitating” nature diminishes art’s stature, the poem’s opening reference to nature “imitating” God places nature in a secondary rather than a primary position. Second, as in the Arnold poems just discussed, nature is assumed to be entirely independent of humans despite the great benefits it offers them. Otherwise, however, the poem’s effect resembles that of Wordsworth’s “Septimi Gades.” “On a Mourner” presents nature as an outdoor phenomenon first and foremost, although it includes in this image some standard moral and mythological components. The poem’s view of human engagement with nature is also much closer to the conventional romantic ideal than is Arnold’s; Tennyson shows the mourner deriving comfort and direction from nature in a way that neither the foolish preacher nor the assorted characters in “The Sick King” are able to do.¹⁰¹

Like “On a Mourner,” Tennyson’s “Written by an Exile of Bassorah” frames an expression of grief in terms of the natural environment.¹⁰² Although more melodramatic in tone, the first two stanzas do not diverge markedly from the standard of “On a Mourner:”

Thou land of the Lily! thy gay flowers are blooming

In joy on thine hills, but they bloom not for me;

For a dark gulf of woe, all my fond hopes entombing,

Has rolled its black waves ‘twixt this lone heart and thee.

The far-distant hills, and the groves of my childhood,

Now stream in the light of the sun’s setting ray;

And the tall-waving palms of my own native wild-wood

In the blue haze of distance are melting away. (1–8)

The reference to “tall-waving palms” identifies this landscape as non-European, but the scene’s relationship with the exile appears comparable to that described between nature and the mourner in the preceding poem. The natural environment exists unto itself in each case, despite its pronounced effect on human beings: solace for the mourner and anguish for the exile. The independence of nature from humankind appears even more emphatic in the exile’s case; he laments, for example, that the flowers “bloom not for me.”

On the other hand, the presence of this lament suggests the possibility of a more intimate relationship between nature and human beings than could be accommodated in “On a Mourner.” This possibility is confirmed throughout the remaining stanzas:

I see thee, Bassorah! in splendour retiring,

Where thy waves and thy walls in their majesty meet;

I see the bright glory thy pinnacles firing,

And broad vassal river that rolls at thy feet.

I see thee but faintly — thy tall towers are beaming

On the dusky horizon so far and so blue;

And minaret and mosque in the distance are gleaming,

While the coast of the stranger expands on my view.

I see thee no more: for the deep waves have parted

The land of my birth from her desolate son;

And I am gone from thee, though half broken-hearted,

To wander through climes where thy name is unknown.

Farewell to my harp, which I hung in my anguish

On the lonely palmetto that nods to the gale;

For its sweet-breathing tones in forgetfulness languish,

And around it the ivy shall weave a green veil.

Farewell to the days which so smoothly have glided

With the maiden whose look was like Cama’s young glance,¹⁰³

And the sheen of whose eyes was the load-star which guided

My course on this earth through the storms of mischance! (9–28)

The exile’s spiritual closeness to the landscape before him may recall the mutuality of the romantic relationship between nature and human beings. However, the scene Tennyson describes here is not natural in the sense of Hemans’s image of the Scottish highlands or Wordsworth’s of the Rhone. The exile’s depiction of the city of Basra mingles natural phenomena (the river, the horizon) with elements of the built environment (walls, towers, minaret and mosque), following the pattern set by Byron and retraced by Arnold.¹⁰⁴ Whereas European nature is typically defined in contradistinction to human productions like urban buildings, the environment of the exile of Basra does not maintain such a boundary. He perceives his beloved city as a composite of natural and constructed elements.¹⁰⁵ His devotion to it does not appear to be qualitatively different from his attachment to the strictly natural environment he describes in the first two stanzas. Moreover, the exile experiences the same acute separateness from the scene, regardless of the level of human contribution to the landscape.

While the poem, which is based upon the 1001 Nights story of Nûr al-dîn’s banishment to Baghdad, never spells out the reason for the speaker’s exile, it certainly leaves the impression that his departure is not voluntary.¹⁰⁶ The exiled speaker’s inability to remain in contact with the landscape makes a very unlikely scenario according to the standard romantic model, where nature is reliably present and available to be appreciated by those who desire to do so. Thus not only does the environment depicted in this poem not satisfy the usual romantic criteria because of its contamination by urban elements, but the poem’s central human figure is unable to maintain his relationship with this environment, despite his desire for it. The poem’s theme is his grief at this loss; in larger terms it also expresses dismay at the prospect of losing the handy, comfortable, inspirational romantic relationship with nature.

Pauline Fletcher argues that “[a]s he matured, Tennyson moved [...] toward landscapes that included or reflected human society.”¹⁰⁷ “Written by an Exile” is of course not at all a poem of Tennyson’s maturity, yet it exhibits just such a landscape. Randy J. Fertel observes a similar movement away from a romantic vision of nature in Tennyson’s late Idylls of the King (1862), in which he says that “Tennyson adopts an antipastoral strategy: the subtle subversion of pastoral conventions to illuminate pastoral’s false idealism, hollow sentimentality, and vicious passivity.”¹⁰⁸ Again, however, we find this same tendency in the very early “Written by an Exile,” as the poem emphasizes both the corruption of the natural environment and the impossibility of a sustained engagement with nature. In short, at the very beginning of his career, Tennyson seems to be already experimenting with ideas that would blossom only years later, ideas that would define his place as a Victorian, rather than a romantic, poet. That he should choose a Middle Eastern subject for this experiment in poetics not only confirms the significance of orientalism in the evolution of Tennyson’s poetics but also suggests once again orientalism’s potency as an aesthetic alternative for nineteenth-century poets.

Orientalist poetics, Oscar Wilde

The seven poets of this chapter — Wordsworth, Hemans, Leconte de Lisle, Gautier, Byron, Arnold, and Tennyson — certainly do not form a unified group of like-minded individuals. Yet each writes poems in which the outdoor environment of the Middle East differs so significantly from European nature, in its features and in its relationship with human beings, that it is no longer fundamentally natural according to European standards. In each case, despite its difference, Middle Eastern nature can anchor a poem much as European nature does, but, because of its difference, the poem will not repeat the European pattern. The result is orientalist poetics, a theory and practice within which poets experiment with alternatives to the representation of nature.

Given the enormous significance of the concept of nature in the British and French poetic traditions, it is important to consider further what difference it makes to a poem to be grounded not in the representation of nature but instead in the representation of the Orient as an (unnatural) nature. The question to be answered is whether (or how) the resulting poem will reveal its differences from the romantic standard. Does the choice not to represent nature in its purer and more limited sense of “the natural world” have an impact on the poetic function of nature in its grander classic sense, in which mimesis is the representation or imitation of nature? In other words, how is the representational or mimetic character of poetry affected by the absence of nature as a solid aesthetic foundation?

Writing near the end of the Victorian era, Oscar Wilde gestures towards an answer to this question. In “The Decay of Lying” (1889), an essay whose thesis is that nature and human life are properly the imitators of art (rather than vice versa, as is conventionally theorized), Wilde extols orientalism as a model for art that “break[s] from the prison-house of realism.”¹⁰⁹ He outlines

the struggle between Orientalism, with its frank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention, its dislike to the actual representation of any object in Nature, and our own imitative spirit. Wherever the former has been paramount, as in Byzantium, Sicily and Spain, by actual contact or in the rest of Europe by the influence of the Crusades, we have had beautiful and imaginative work in which the visible things of life are transmuted into artistic conventions, and the things that Life has not are invented and fashioned for her delight. But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting.¹¹⁰

Curtis Marez argues that for Wilde, “non-Western ornament could serve as raw material inspiring the artist-critic, but it could not itself be classified as art.”¹¹¹ Even so, when Wilde volunteers “Orientalism” as an emancipator from the requirements of “Life and Nature,” he is clearly promoting oriental artwork as an anti-mimetic ideal with the potential, as Marez says, to “inject [...] new life into a moribund aesthetic tradition.”¹¹² He expresses none of the regret that Arnold and Tennyson, and to a lesser degree Leconte de Lisle and Gautier, reveal at foregoing a romantic view of nature.¹¹³ Wilde instead looks with pleasure to the Orient as the basis for an art liberated from the preoccupation with the representation of nature.¹¹⁴ He differs from Thomas Love Peacock and EJ. Chételat only in his attitude; Wilde sees such freedom as highly desirable, while Peacock remains suspicious and Chételat hostile.

That Wilde should concur on this fundamental point with critics writing sixty and seventy years earlier is evidence of orientalism’s role as the nineteenth century’s predominant aesthetic other. Orientalism’s distinctive and persistent presence as the embodiment of the unnatural is important to the evolution of poetics throughout the century. Orientalism functions as a medium for a succession of avant-garde poetic experiments, independent in varying degrees from the imitation of nature.

Notes

¹ Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism 10, 12.

² Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1953) esp. chs. 1, 10. See also Joseph Beach, The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (New York: Pageant, 1956) esp. ch. 1. For a more recent overview of nineteenth- and twentieth-century critical thinking on nature and Romantic poetry, see Paul H. Fry, “Green to the Very Door? The Natural Wordsworth,” Studies in Romanticism 35.4 (1996): 535–43.

³ Chételat, ed., Les Occidentales 10.

⁴ Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp 298.

⁵ Burwick, “The Romantic Concept of Mimesis” 179. Other critics who have questioned Abrams’s formulation include Thomas McFarland, who relies upon Kant and the German romantics (to whom both Abrams and Beach also allude) to argue that art’s imitation of nature does indeed remain paramount in romanticism, but as part of a distinctly romantic “doctrine of organic form”; see McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin 36–43. Numerous critics have also countered Abrams by stressing the heterogeneity of Romanticism. See for example Butler, “Romanticism in England,” Romanticism in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988) 37–67; and Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson, eds., At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994).

⁶ James A.W. Heffernan, “Wordsworth’s London: The Imperial Monster,” Studies in Romanticism 37.3 (1998): 429.

⁷ For a summary of influences on and origins of this development, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. M.H. Abrams (New York: Oxford UP, 1960) 3–5. See also Christopher Thacker, The Wildness Pleases: The Origins of Romanticism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983) 1–3, 12, 192, 235.

⁸ Butler, “Repossessing the Past” 68.

⁹ Fry, “Green to the Very Door?” 538, 539.

¹⁰ Fry, “Green to the Very Door?” 537; emphasis his. In arguing that Wordsworth is indeed a “nature poet,” Fry implies but never problematizes the European basis for the concept; for example, in asking (tongue in cheek) “whether the nature poetry of Wordsworth is green [for trees] or gray [for rocks and stones],” he leaves no place for non-European landscape forms such as deserts, steppes, or prairies (548; emphasis his).

¹¹ Peacock, “The Four Ages of Poetry,” Memoirs of Shelley and Other Essays and Reviews, ed. Howard Mills (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970) 127.

¹² Peacock, “The Four Ages of Poetry” 128.

¹³ Peacock, “The Four Ages of Poetry” 128.

¹⁴ Peacock, “The Four Ages of Poetry” 128.

¹⁵ Four lines of “The Solitary Reaper” are relevant here:

Beer addresses briefly the orientalism of both “The Solitary Reaper” and the Dream of the Arab episode; see “Fragmentations and Ironies” 262–3. Other Wordsworth poems with orientalist components include a sonnet beginning “The fairest, brightest, hues of ether fade” (1815) and a poem on the Crusades, “The Armenian Lady’s Love” (1835).

¹⁶ Heffernan makes a similar argument for the importance of London in the development of Wordsworth’s approach to nature; see “Wordsworth’s London” 423. The aesthetic implications of Wordsworth’s orientalism will be addressed more fully in chapter 4.

¹⁷ McFarland, “Green Savannahs: Wordsworth and the Moral Bonding with Nature” European Romantic Review 3.1 (1992): esp. 53.

¹⁸ Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989) 21–2. Along the same lines, Heffernan concludes that “[b]y 1800 wild beasts and non-Caucasian racial groups [...] had become equally exotic and almost interchangeable” (Heffernan, “Wordsworth’s London” 436).

¹⁹ Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment 241. Bewell’s examples are Volney’s Ruins of Empires and Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”

²⁰ Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment 258. See also Donald Wesling, Wordsworth and the Adequacy of Landscape (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) esp. 18, 59, 75, for discussion of the high status Wordsworth accords to the inclusion of the human in depictions of nature.

²¹ One might compare the Middle East’s role in the nineteenth century with that of Tahiti in the eighteenth. While Tahitïs exemplary function had more to do with sexual freedom than with political repression, Tahitïs natural environment was as much interconnected with its symbolic identity as the Middle East’s was. For further discussion, see Thacker, The Wildness Pleases ch. 9.

²² McFarland, “Green Savannahs” 53. Compare Graeme Stones’s argument that the desert does in fact constitute a sublime place, but nonetheless an “un-Wordsworthian” one (Stones, “‘Upon a dromedary mounted high,’“ Charles Lamb Bulletin 104 [1998]: 150).

²³ Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp 105.

²⁴ See Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp 105. For a summary of precedents for this view, see Beach, The Concept of Nature 18–19; and Thacker, The Wildness Pleases 29–30.

²⁵ For further background and elaboration, see Beach, The Concept of Nature 13, 187–9, 199–203. Alan Bewell points out the historical underpinnings of this view, as well as the complex relationship between nature and human agency in Wordsworth’s thinking; see Wordsworth and the Enlightenment 239–42. The intricacy of Wordsworth’s treatment of nature in its real and moral aspects is further discussed in Mark Jones, “Double Economics: Ambivalence in Wordsworth’s Pastoral,” PMLA 108.5 (1993): esp. 1108. See also Dan Latimer, “Real Culture and Unreal Nature: Wordsworth’s Kingdom of Dissimilitude,” New Orleans Review 14.1 (1987): 45–54, for a reinterpretation of Wordsworth’s views on culture and nature in light of Schiller’s philosophy.

²⁶ “Septimi Gades” was composed about 1790 but was not published in the poet’s lifetime. The title quotes the first two words of Horace’s Ode II.vi, upon which Wordsworth’s poem is loosely based. “Septimi” is a form of the name of the friend to whom Horace addresses his poem; “Gades” (“Gadis” in Horace) is Latin for Cadiz. Although the English poem as a whole is rather derivative, its reference to the Arabian desert is Wordsworth’s own.

My source for Wordsworth’s poetry is the 1977 Poems, edited by John O. Hayden. For more information on the text and context of the poem, see Wordsworth, Early Poems and Fragments, 1785–1797, ed. Carol Landon and Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997) 264,760–7.

²⁷ Butler, “Romanticism in England” 54.

²⁸ Such a conclusion runs counter to Bewell’s view that Enlightenment anthropology (and, with certain qualifications, Wordsworth’s approach as well) sought to “emphasize [...] and accentuate [peoples’] difference” (Wordsworth and the Enlightenment 29), even while attempting to explore universal human questions. Also significant here is the fact that Wordsworth includes the traveler simply as a figure for the speaker, not to create any symbolic antagonism between the two or to suggest one’s inferiority to the other.

²⁹ Makdisi observes a more polarized articulation of this contrast in early-nineteenth-century rhetoric on India: “the region becomes [...] a degenerate and perverse — sick — version of Europe, plagued with all the [...] associations of European ‘illnesses’ and ‘weaknesses’“ (Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism 115).

³⁰ Rieder, “Wordsworth and Romanticism in the Academy,” At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, Ed. Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994) 35.

³¹ Daniel, Islam, Europe and Empire 11.

³² Rieder, “Wordsworth and Romanticism” 35.

³³ These are “Moorish Bridal Song,” the first poem in the collection, and “The Suliote Mother.” The remaining poems may be categorized as follows: seven European, five Greek, three ancient Briton, two North American, one Brazilian, and one Indian. Poems of note in other collections include: “The Crusader’s Return” (Levant/Italy), “The Mourner for the Barmecides” (Baghdad), “The Captive Knight” (Levant), “The Palm Tree” (unspecified East), “The Sleeper on Marathon” (Persia/Greece), and “An Hour of Romance” (Levant). I will discuss “The Mourner for the Barmecides” and “An Hour of Romance” in chapter 4.

My source for Hemans’s poems is The Poetical Works of Felicia Dorothea Hemans (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1914).

³⁴ Ten of these poems are set in continental Europe, four in Britain, three in North America, one in Greece, and one in India. No Middle Easterners are included, although the Indian poem does have Muslim characters (“The Indian City”).

³⁵ In 1770, Bruce (1730–1794) came upon the source of the Blue Nile, which he misidentified at the time as the true Nile. As Hemans acknowledges in a brief note following the poem, “The Traveller” (first published in the Monthly Magazine, or British Register) is based on Bruce’s record of his adventures. Bruce, a Scot educated in London, published his account, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 & 1773, in 1790 (London: G.G.J, and J. Robinson). Other major editions appeared in 1805 and 1813, along with at least four abridgments between 1790 and 1826. Hemans might have used any of these, since the abridgments tend to preserve this climactic scene more or less entirely.

³⁶ A simoom is a violent sandstorm, by this time a common trope in British orientalist literature.

³⁷ Here Hemans makes her only substantial departures from Bruce’s account. Bruce does not admit to weeping. And far from resolving on a domestic happiness, he reaffirms the value of his project, mainly in imperialist terms. For a related reading of Hemans’s poem in light of the intersection between imperialism and domesticity, see my “Florence Nightingale, Felicia Hemans and James Bruce’s ‘Fountains of the Nile,’“ Journal of African Travel Writing 5 (1998): 53–69.

³⁸ In his own account, Bruce emphasizes the Scottishness of his recollections by mentioning Scottish rivers by name before listing several other European rivers whose beauty also rivaled the Nile’s.

³⁹ See Fry, “Green to the Very Door?” 539.

⁴⁰ The degree to which Hemans is self-critical, or critical of her age, has been debated, with some claiming that her poetry is superficial, and others answering that it is merely “superficially superficial”; see Anne Mack, J.J. Rome, and Georg Mannejc, “Literary History, Romanticism, and Felicia Hemans,” Modern Language Quarterly 54.2 (1993): 225–31. There may be strong justification for reading “The Traveller” much as Mack reads Hemans’s 1827 “The Homes of England”: “Hemans’s is a poetry of quotation, a conscious elevation of various inherited and signifying signs. [...] Hemans executes a remarkable critique of the ideology of cultural endurance, a critique all the more stunning for its domesticity and lack of pretension” (230). For comparable arguments, see Diego Saglia, “Epic or Domestic?: Felicia Hemans’s Heroic Poetry and the Myth of the Victorian Poetess,” Rivista di Studi Vittoriani 2.4 (1997): 129, 146–7; and Susan J. Wolfson “‘Domestic Affections’ and ‘the spear of Minerva’: Felicia Hemans and the Dilemma of Gender,” Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, Ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994) 130.

⁴¹ Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism 108.

⁴² Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism 108.

⁴³ Here I would disagree with Mohammed Sharafuddin, who argues that in Thalaba Southey “seeks [...] the disclosure of the right relationship between man and nature. [...] Nature is not only pure in itself, but it can help man gain virtue and purity. The Arabian desert thus forms an appropriate setting for a moral epic” (Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism 107). Sharafuddin is right to recognize the importance of the “relationship between man and nature,” and also to understand the great extent to which Middle Eastern nature stands in contrast to its “pastoral” European counterpart. But he interprets the natural environment of the Middle East as merely another kind of nature and so fails to perceive its essential unnaturalness and the important moral and aesthetic implications of that unnaturalness.

⁴⁴ Southey, The Complete Poetical Works 247.

⁴⁵ Of course, nonorientalist poems are also afflicted with incongruous illustrations in nineteenth-century editions. Carl Woodring notes, for instance, that the mood of illustrations to Wordsworth often conflicts with the sense of the poems, as when “The boy who commits ravage in the poem Nutting gazes naively in the engraving toward a picturesque tree” (Woodring, “Wordsworth and the Victorians,” The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1987] 268–9). Similarly, Thacker mentions more than one instance of confusion between different categories of the exotic in painting; see Thacker, The Wildness Pleases 182. Still, this image of tepee and pyramids in the jungle seems an extreme misconstruction.

⁴⁶ Thomas Moore (1779–1852) was an Irish poet active in London. Although the main story of his remarkably successful Lalla Rookh is set in India, the poem contains embedded tales set elsewhere in the East. The tale illustrated by this image is set in Egypt. The illustration appears in Moore, Lalla Rookh, An Oriental Romance (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans; and Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1839).

⁴⁷ Moore, Lalla Rookh 164.

⁴⁸ Print Curator Marjorie B. Cohn informs me that the Southey illustration is an engraving, while the Moore is an etching. The two were definitely made from different plates. She conjectures that the Southey image is a pirated one based on the same drawing that had been etched for the Moore volume. (Personal conversation with Marjorie B. Cohn, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; June 19, 1995.) Cohn’s view is supported by the presence of acknowledgments in the London and Philadelphia edition of Lalla Rookh. There is a second title page which adds: “From the nineteenth London edition”; and the illustration’s caption is followed by: “London. Published by Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans. Paternoster Row / and Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia.” A pirate user would be unlikely to make such acknowledgments.

⁴⁹ These are: “La Verandah” [“The Veranda”], “Le Désert” [“The Desert”], “La Fille de l’Emyr” [“The Emir’s Daughter”], “Le Sommeil de Leïlah” [“Leila’s Sleep”], and “L’Oasis” [“The Oasis”] (1872 edition). This collection also contains poems set in ancient Egypt, the biblical Levant, and India, as well as many on other exotic but not oriental subjects. Poèmes tragiques [Tragic Poems] (1886 edition) includes “L’Apothéose de Mouça-al-Kébyr” [“The Apotheosis of Mouça-al-Kébyr”] (the first poem of the collection), “Le Suaire de Mohammed ben-Amer-al-Mançour” [“The Shroud of Mohammed ben-Amer-al-Mançour”], and “Les Roses d’Ispahan” [“The Roses of Ispahan”] as well as several other poems with Eastern subjects. “L’Orient” [“The Orient”], which I discuss in chapter 4, is the second poem in the posthumous Derniers poèmes [Last Poems]. Of Leconte de Lisle’s four major collections, only Poèmes antiques [Ancient Poems] (1881 edition) has no Middle Eastern poems, its oriental poems being mainly Indian.

My source for Leconte de Lisle’s poems is Oeuvres de Leconte de Lisle, ed. Edgard Pich, 4 vols. (Paris: Société d’édition “Les belles lettres,” 1976).

⁵⁰ Discours de réception à l’Académie Française [Acceptance Speech at the French Academy], delivered on March 31, 1887; cited in Alison Fairlie, Leconte de Lisle’s Poems on the Barbarian Races (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1947) 5. Leconte de Lisle would have been about twenty at the time he describes. Schwab’s general analysis of Leconte de Lisle’s orientalism is useful in this context; see The Oriental Renaissance 404–6, 418–20.

⁵¹ “Le Désert” appeared originally in Leconte de Lisle’s Poèmes et poésies [Poems and Poetry] of 1855 and was later included in the 1872 edition of Poèmes barbares, his most noted collection. The 1855 version was reprinted in 1857 and 1858. “Le Désert” was not included at all in the first edition of Poèmes barbares in 1862. When it appeared there in 1872 and thereafter, it was missing its final eight lines; the difference between the two versions will be discussed below. For further information, see Oeuvres de Leconte de Lisle, ed. Edgard Pich, 2: viii-xiii, 125. For a discussion of the reception of Poèmes barbares, see Joseph Vianey, Les Poèmes barbares de Leconte de Lisle (Paris: Nizet, 1955) ch. 13.

⁵² McFarland, “Green Savannahs” 42.

⁵³ It is interesting to compare this literary depiction of humans in nature with visual portrayals of humans in oriental architectural spaces. In an 1840s image of the Alhambra reproduced by Rae Beth Gordon, for instance, a man and a boy stand in an elaborately decorated archway that frames a symmetrical series of additional archways receding from view (see Gordon, Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire 9). Another man (like the first two, in Middle Eastern dress) is seated between the second and third archways. While the first two figures are clearly interacting with one another, the third appears silent and abstracted. His pose mirrors that of the archway behind him, such that his body completes the curve of the arch in reverse. He seems very much part of the massive yet delicate architecture surrounding him. This figure’s absorption into his surroundings corresponds in many respects with that of Leconte de Lisle’s bedouins into their environment.

⁵⁴ See Said, Orientalism 102, 108, 161 for comments on such racist tendencies.

⁵⁵ Robert O. Steele approaches this problem from a complementary perspective, arguing that in general, Leconte de Lisle “denied the notion that Nature could have any direct relationship to Man” (“The Avant-gardism of Leconte de Lisle,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 17.3–4 [1989]: 322). Certainly, “Le Désert” presumes nature’s absolute indifference to human beings.

⁵⁶ The legend of Muhammad’s trip to Jerusalem and ascension into the heavens is based on a very scant reference in Sura 17 of the Qur’an. In subsequent traditions and in literature, the basic story and its spiritual significance become much elaborated. See R. Paret, “Al-Burâk,” The Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1958-); B. Schrieke, J. Horovitz, and J.E. Bencheikh, “Mïrâdj,” The Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed.; W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1961) 81; and Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975) 27, 41, 48, 148, 204,218.

⁵⁷ Pich discusses this ending but reads the entire poem as an expression of hopeless love; see Leconte de Lisle et sa création poétique: Poèmes antiques et Poèmes barbares, 1852–1874 (Paris: Chirat, 1975)219–21.

⁵⁸ As I will discuss in chapter 4, the exclusive connection between the Orient and the imagination proves fundamental to the evolution of the idea of art for art’s sake.

⁵⁹ See Tennant, Théophile Gautier 39, 40, 45, 106; and Joanna Richardson, Théophile Gautier: His Life and Times (London: Max Reinhardt, 1958) 20.

⁶⁰ See Tennant, Théophile Gautier (London: Athlone, 1975) 17; and Denise Brahimi, Théophile et Judith vont en Orient (Paris: La Boîte à Documents, 1990) 91.

⁶¹ For a summary of orientalism in Gautier’s poetry, see Jacques Lardoux, “L’Orient dans les poésies de Théophile Gautier” L’Orient de Théophile Gautier, vol. 1 (Proc. of International Colloquium, May 1990, Monte Cristo) 213–29. Gautier’s poems on Middle Eastern subjects include: “Les Souhaits” (1830; see chapter 4); “La Caravane” and “Le Nuage” (1838); “Le Cheik” and “A l’Alhambra moresque” (c. 1840); “In deserto” (1842); “La Fuite,” “Gazhel,” and “Sultan Mahmoud” (1845); “Le Bedouin et la mer” (1846); “Nostalgies d’obélisques” (1851); “La Fellah” (1861); “L’Esclave noir” (1863); and “L’Odalisque à Paris” (1867) [“The Wishes,” “The Caravan,” “The Cloud,” “The Sheikh,” “At the Moorish Al-Hambra,” “In deserto,” “The Flight,” “Ghazal,” “Sultan Mahmoud,” “The Bedouin and the Sea,” “Nostalgia for Obélisques,” “The Fellah,” “The Black Slave,” “The Odalisque in Paris”]. Among Gautier’s works of orientalist fiction are: “Une nuit de Cléopâtre” (1838), “Le Pied de momie” (1840), “La Mille et deuxième nuit” (1857), and Le Roman de la momie (1857) [“A Night of Cleopatra,” “The Mummy’s Foot,” “The Thousand and Second Night,” The Novel of the Mummy]. Gautier also composed an orientalist ballet, La Péri [The Peri], in 1843.

My source for Gautier’s poetry is René Jasinskïs 1970 edition of Poésies complètes de Théophile Gautier.

⁶² Several biographers mention Gautier’s tendency to see himself as a Middle Easterner, in sexual and spiritual matters particularly; see for instance Brahimi, Théophile et Judith 17–18, 115; and Richardson, Théophile Gautier 23, 37–8, 51, 111–2. Gautier’s travels in the region were extensive. Following a visit to Spain in 1840, he traveled to Algeria in 1845, Turkey in 1852, and Egypt and Algeria in 1869. His stay in Turkey yielded a complete travel account (Constantinople, 1853); the first Algerian trip was the source for numerous pieces, collected in 1865 as Voyage pittoresque en Algérie [Picturesque Travels in Algeria]. He wrote several articles about his journey to Egypt, now reprinted along with other materials as Voyage en Egypte [Travels in Egypt] (ed. Paolo Tortonese [Paris: La Boîte à Documents, 1991]). This reconstructed Voyage contains the second volume of an 1877 prose collection entitled L’Orient (2 vols. [Paris: Charpentier]). The first volume of this collection gathers various pieces written by Gautier about the Orient, defined very broadly; only a minority have to do with the Middle East. For further information about Gautier’s travel and travel writing, see Tortonese’s introduction to Voyage en Egypte; and Brahimi, Théophile et Judith 7–115.

⁶³ “La Caravane” first appeared in Gautier’s collection La Comédie de la mort [The Comedy of Death]. Editor René Jasinski notes that the poem is a “pessimistic reply to the ‘human caravan’ of Jocelyn” (Alphonse de Lamartine’s 1836 work; see Poésies complètes de Théophile Gautier 1: lvii).

⁶⁴ Similarly desolate deserts appear in Gautier’s short story “Une nuit de Cléopâtre” (written in the same year as “La Caravane”) and in his 1840 travel account, Voyage en Espagne [Travels in Spain].

⁶⁵ Cypress trees seem to have a morbid or funereal connotation during this period.

⁶⁶ Grant Crichfield, “Decamps, Orientalist Intertext, and Counter-Discourse in Gautier’s Constantinople,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 21.3–4 (1993): 306. Kubilay Aktulum’s argument is similar; see Aktulum, “Les Stéréotypes dans Constantinople” 40–5. Both Aktulum and Crichfield are following Said’s line of argument.

⁶⁷ Gautier, “Egypte — Vue générale,” L Orient 99. Compare Thomas Moore’s boast that “Although I have never been in the East myself, yet every one who has been there declares that nothing can be more perfect than my representations of it, its people, and life, in ‘Lalla Rookh’” (cited in C. Edmund Bosworth, “Arabic Influences in the Literature of Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Britain,” Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Language and Literature, ed. J.R. Smart [Richmond, UK: Curzon P, 1996] 159; his emphasis).

⁶⁸ In this sense, Gautier’s poem can be seen as a precursor of Charles Baudelaire’s second “Spleen” poem (1857), which ends:

(Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Marcel A. Ruff [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968] 85.) For a general analysis of Baudelaire’s reactions to Gautier’s orientalism, see Luc Vives, “Les Poèmes de la momie: influence de l’imaginaire orientaliste et égyptisant de Théophile Gautier dans l’oeuvre de Charles Baudelaire,” Bulletin de la Société Théophile Gautier 21 (1999): 53–70.

⁶⁹ One of a number of poems based on Gautier’s trip to Spain in 1840, “In deserto” appeared first in the Revue de Paris and was then included in Gautier’s 1845 Poésies nouvelles.

⁷⁰ Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978) 10.

⁷¹ Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry 7–8.

⁷² Gautier’s tactic of emphasizing the absent/negative rather than the present/positive strongly resembles Hugo’s in “La Douleur du pacha.”

⁷³ Riffaterre comments particularly on the absence of flowers; see Semiotics of Poetry 59.

⁷⁴ Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry 11; he is speaking of the final passage of the poem, but his comment is equally applicable here. Constance Gosselin Schick’s analysis of Gautier’s description in Venice suggests a complementary reading: “With each added detail, with each added bit of supposedly precise, exact visual notation, Gautier’s descriptions effect a move away from that kind of mimesis or effet de réel which seeks to make itself forgotten as medium, transparent as mediation and moves towards the hyperbolic and self-gratifyingly poetic” (Schick, “A Case Study of Descriptive Perversion: Théophile Gautier’s Travel Literature,” Romanic Review 78.3 [1987]: 364).

⁷⁵ The association between Spain and the Orient is not Gautier’s invention; once again, he relies upon convention rather than creating a new relationship among elements in his poem. As Michael Cotsell says, “the East began in Spain” (Cotsell, ed., Creditable Warriors, 1830–1876 [Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Ashfield, 1990] 34). Nor is Gautier’s depiction of a Spanish desert as if it were Middle Eastern unique to this poem. For instance, another of his poems, “L’Escurial” (1840), describes its Spanish setting in terms of a Middle Eastern standard, which it meets easily:

During the visit to Spain that prompted “In deserto,” Gautier seems to have been especially attracted to Spain’s Moorish relics (see Richardson, Théophile Gautier 45–7). Both Brahimi and Kathleen Bulgin cite Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne in this regard: “L’Espagne [...] n’est pas faite pour les moeurs européennes. Le génie de l’Orient y perce sous toute les formes, et il est fâcheux peut-être qu’elle ne soit pas restée moresque ou mahométane” [Spain is not made for European customs. The genius of the Orient pierces it in all its forms, and it is perhaps unfortunate that it has not remained Moorish or Mohammedan] (Brahimi, Théophile et Judith 24; and Bulgin, “L’Appel de l’Orient au voyageur en Espagne,” L’Orient de Théophile Gautier, vol. 1 [Proc. of International Colloquium, May 1990, Monte Cristo] 155). For further discussion, see Brahimi, Théophile et Judith 23–7; and Bulgin, “L’Appel de l’Orient” 153–60.

⁷⁶ Gautier, “Le Sahara,” L’Orient, 2: 372; this was probably written in 1854 or shortly thereafter.

⁷⁷ See for comparison Marcel Voisin’s argument that Gautier’s privileging of the Orient “represents his continuous flight from the modern ugliness and surliness born of industrialization and triumphal capitalism” (Voisin, “La Pensée de Théophile Gautier,” Relire Théophile Gautier: le plaisir du texte, ed. Freeman G. Henry [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998] 81).

⁷⁸ Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry 12.

⁷⁹ Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry 10.

⁸⁰ A number of critics supply more comprehensive analyses of orientalism in Byron’s “Turkish Tales” than mine. See especially Butler, “The Orientalism of Byron’s Giaour,” Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1988) 78–96; Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East ch. 1; and Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism ch. 4.

⁸¹ Byron footnotes “Gúl” as “the rose”; the word is Persian. My source for the “Turkish Tales” is The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome McGann, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981); reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.

⁸² See 2.345–8 for a further example of Selim’s attitude of domination.

⁸³ A similarly idyllic landscape description occurs in lines 388–97. For comments on the paradisic associations of Byron’s Orient, see Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism 132; and Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism 231.

⁸⁴ Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism 120, 133.

⁸⁵ See The Giaour 449–52 and The Corsair 1.598 for additional descriptions of illuminated mosques.

⁸⁶ Byron, The Complete Poetical Works 3: 438.

⁸⁷ See Saglia, “Nationalist Texts and Counter-Texts” 444.

⁸⁸ Both Makdisi and Sharafuddin argue that Byron’s Orient is in fact experientially available. Although both acknowledge the continuing influence of literary orientalism, Sharafuddin characterizes Byron’s orientalism as “realistic” (Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism 214); Makdisi suggests that “Byron’s Orient seems to be the Orient’s Orient — the real Orient ‘out there,’ and not some vaguely-realistic figurative landscape produced by a Western imagination” (Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism 133). Byron’s comparatively extensive travels in the region no doubt counteracted to a significant degree whatever received ideas he may have had about the East. However, in presenting the Orient as Edenic, for example, he makes an unmistakable move away from realism and into the realm of the imagination. Inevitably, this move entails a shift from mimesis as the representation of the empirically knowable and towards a kind of referentiality in which the referent is not securely derived from reality.

⁸⁹ Park Honan emphasizes Arnold’s “Europeanism” in this context; see Honan, “Matthew Arnold: Europeanism and England,” Creditable Warriors, 1830–1876, ed. Michael Cotsell (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Ashfield, 1990) 143–57. Isobel Armstrong’s comments on “cultural boundaries” and “territorial margin[s]” in Arnold’s poetry are also useful in this context; see Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993) 207. For further information on Arnold’s work on non-European topics, see Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981) 291, 313, 367. Arnold’s 1871 lecture on “A Persian Passion Play” (to which Honan refers briefly) is an especially interesting example. The bulk of the lecture offers an extremely favorable assessment of the Persian genre, yet Arnold ends by asserting that the Islamic play’s message is a “strong [...] testimony to Christianity” (Arnold, Essays in Criticism: First Series, ed. Thomas Marion Hoctor, S.S.J. [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968] 157). John D. Yohannan comments perceptively on the mix of spiritual attraction, imperialism, and racism that characterizes Arnold’s orientalism; see Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America: A 200-Year History (Delmar, NY: Caravan, 1977) ch. 8, esp. pp. 78–80.

⁹⁰ Arnold’s other major orientalist poem is Sohrab and Rustum (1853). Related poems include “A Summer Night” (1861); “East and West” (1867); and two items of juvenilia, “Inspired by Julia Pardoe’s The City of the Sultan” and “Constantinople.”

My source for Arnold’s poetry is The Poems of Matthew Arnold, Ed. Kenneth Allott and Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1979).

⁹¹ “In Harmony with Nature” was probably composed 1844–47, and “The Sick King of Bokhara” 1847–48. See The Poems of Matthew Arnold, Ed. Allott and Allott, 44, 79. “In Harmony” is a popular poem among Arnold’s twentieth-century interpreters and critics. See Beach, The Concept of Nature 398–9; William E. Buckler, On the Poetry of Matthew Arnold: Essays in Critical Reconstruction (New York: New York UP, 1982) 40–2; Honan, Matthew Arnold 322; Thaïs E. Morgan, “Rereading Nature: Wordsworth between Swinburne and Arnold” Victorian Poetry 24.4 (1986): 430–1, 433; Alan Roper, Arnold’s Poetic Landscapes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1969) 116, 118, 188, 193, 200; Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt, “The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: Nature and the Oriental Wisdom,” University of Dayton Review 17.3 (1985–86): 42; William Thesing, “Matthew Arnold and the Possibilities of the Nineteenth-Century City,” CLA Journal 24.3 (1981): 290; and Woodring, “Wordsworth and the Victorians” 270.

⁹² Useful comments on Arnold’s view of nature and his relationship with romanticism may be found in: Beach, The Concept of Nature ch. 14; Buckler, On the Poetry of Matthew Arnold 12–17, 90–102, 180–2; A. Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold (New Haven: Yale UP, 1966) 1–17; Pauline Fletcher, Gardens and Grim Ravines: The Language of Landscape in Victorian Poetry (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983) ch. 3; Morgan, “Rereading Nature”; and Shurbutt, “Matthew Arnold’s Concept of Nature: A Synthesist’s View,” Victorian Poetry 23.1 (1985): 97–104.

⁹³ See The Poems of Matthew Arnold, Ed. Allott and Allott, pp. 79–80, for information on Arnold’s sources for this poem. Bokhara (modern spelling “Bukhara”) is located to the northeast of Iran in Uzbekistan; in Arnold’s time, the city was the capital of the Bukhara Khanate, a state that became a Russian protectorate in 1868.

⁹⁴ The Poems of Matthew Arnold, Ed. Allott and Allott, p. 80.

⁹⁵ For discussion of “The Sick King”’s moral position, see Allott and Allott, “Arnold the Poet: (ii) Narrative and Dramatic Poems,” Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (Athens: Ohio UP, 1976) 75, 82, 84–8; Buckler, On the Poetry of Matthew Arnold 34–7; Culler, Imaginative Reason 105–13; Honan, Matthew Arnold 175–6; John Woolford, “The Sick King in Bokhara: Arnold and the Sublime of Suffering,” Matthew Arnold: Between Two Worlds, ed. Robert Giddings (London: Vision, 1986) esp. 113–4.

⁹⁶ This poem contains a few other references to natural phenomena, but the hot, dry environment retains its dominance. See lines 193–204, in which the king describes his various attempts to counteract this environment, with sherbets and orchards and cisterns — and all, he says, “in vain.” See also the king’s description of his tomb (222–3), which is on a hill near a stand of apricot trees; again, however, this more benign version of nature appears to be helpless, associated with death rather than life.

⁹⁷ Shelley’s poem calls upon the Middle East’s reputation for the tyranny of kings and of religion very much as Arnold’s does. On the other hand, Arnold appears cognizant of, and interested in, the sorts of moral ambiguities and complexities that Shelley’s polarized approach tends to elide. Rather than preach like The Revolt of Islam, “The Sick King” queries, explores, and debates. The law remains paramount, but there are many ways of responding to its demands.

⁹⁸ See for comparison James Najarían’s comments on Arnold’s “anti-romantic aims” in Sohrab and Rustum (Najarían, “‘Curled minion, dancer, coiner of sweet words”: Keats, Dandyism, and Sexual Indeterminacy in Sohrab and Rustum,” Victorian Poetry 35.1 (1997): 23–4.

⁹⁹ Tennyson set a number of poems in India, Africa, and pharaonic Egypt, as well as the biblical Levant. “Persia” (1827), “The Expedition of Nadir Shah into Hindostán” (1827), “Recollections of the Arabian Nights” (1830; see chapter 4), and “Fatima” (1832) are especially noteworthy. Also of great interest is “Locksley Hall” (1842), which does not have a Middle Eastern setting but is patterned after the Mu’allaqa of Imru’ al-Qays, perhaps the most famous poem in Arabic literature. Tennyson traveled widely within Europe, but never to the Orient, although he expressed the desire to do so; see Susan Shatto, “The Strange Charm of ‘Far, Far Away’: Tennyson, the Continent, and the Empire,” Creditable Warriors, 1830–1876, ed. Michael Cotsell (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Ashfield, 1990) 113–4. While Shatto gives little attention to the Middle East per se, her discussion of Tennyson’s approach to other non-European settings is useful. See also John McBratney, “Rebuilding Akbar’s ‘Fane’: Tennyson’s Reclamation of the East,” Victorian Poetry 31.4 (1993): 411–7; Marion Shaw, “Tennyson’s Dark Continent,” Victorian Poetry 32.2 (1994): 157–79; and Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America ch. 9.

My source for Tennyson’s poems is The Poems of Tennyson (1987), edited by Christopher Ricks.

¹⁰⁰ “On a Mourner” was written in 1833, just after the death of Tennyson’s dear friend Arthur Hallam. It was not published until 1865, and then only with two of the poem’s most intimate stanzas suppressed. See The Poems of Tennyson 1: 610; and Ricks, Tennyson, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1989) 111–3.1 will discuss the 1865 version of “On a Mourner.”

¹⁰¹ For further analysis of Tennyson’s view of nature, especially in the context of his reaction to romanticism, see esp. Timothy Peltason, “Tennyson, Nature, and Romantic Nature Poetry,” Philological Quarterly 63.1 (1984): 75–93; and Fletcher, Gardens and Grim Ravines, ch. 1.

¹⁰² Bassorah (modern spelling “Basra”) is a city in southeastern Iraq, near the Persian Gulf.

¹⁰³ “Cama,” Tennyson may have had in mind the Hindu god of love, although it is unlikely that many residents of Basra would have known of this deity.

¹⁰⁴ Fletcher emphasizes the importance of public gardens in the Victorian recognition of nature’s presence in urban surroundings; see Fletcher, Gardens and Grim Ravines 98. The case here is quite different, however. Whereas the point of a public garden is its separateness from the industrial city that surrounds it, the effect of Tennyson’s depiction of Basra (like Byron’s and Arnold’s) is to diminish, even eliminate, any such separateness between natural phenomena and urban, human construction.

¹⁰⁵ Tennyson’s description of Iran in his 1827 poem “Persia” is, like that of Basra here, based on a combination of urban structures and natural features (hills, valleys, plains, rivers, vegetation). Although thematically the two poems bear little resemblance to one another, they make very similar use of their settings.

¹⁰⁶ See W.D. Paden, Tennyson in Egypt: A Study of the Imagery in His Earlier Work (Lawrence, KS: U of Kansas Publications, 1942) 130–1. According to Paden, Nûr al-dîn was banished from Basra for seducing a girl who was supposed to enter the king’s harem. Tennyson’s only reference to this element of the 1001 Nights’ story (the “maiden” of the final stanza) is remarkably chaste.

¹⁰⁷ Fletcher, Gardens and Grim Ravines 18.

¹⁰⁸ Randy Fertel, “Antipastoral and the Attack on Naturalism in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King,” Victorian Poetry 19.4 (1981): 337.

¹⁰⁹ Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” 981.

¹¹⁰ Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” 979. This point belongs to Wilde’s character Vivian, who is discussing the decorative arts, with reference as well to drama and the novel. Wilde’s impression of “Orientalism” (he uses the term to connote the oriental rather than the orientalist) is drawn largely from stereotypes of Eastern art. Both Arabic script calligraphy and the Islamic prohibition on the representation of the human figure were well known in nineteenth-century Europe; both have repeatedly been held up as an example of oriental art’s antimimetic bias.

¹¹¹ Curtis Marez, “The Other Addict: Reflections on Colonialism and Oscar Wilde’s Opium Smoke Screen,” ELH 64.1 (1997): 266.

¹¹² Marez, “The Other Addict” 279. Zhou Xiaoyi makes a very similar argument but emphasizes the importance of Japan as “an artistic Utopia” to the virtual exclusion of other oriental locations and artistic traditions (“Oscar Wilde’s Orientalism and Late Nineteenth-Century European Consumer Culture,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 28.4 [1997]: 52). Jeff Nunokawa’s argument is comparable; see Nunokawa, “Oscar Wilde in Japan: Aestheticism, Orientalism and the Derealization of the Homosexual,” Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Jonathan Freedman (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996) 153–7.

¹¹³ For discussion of Wilde’s aesthetic position as antiromantic, see Neil Sammells, “Wilde Nature,” Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, ed. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (London: Zed, 1998) 125–6, 131.

¹¹⁴ Marez offers a more politicized reading of Wilde’s stance, arguing that “Wilde in effect sustained his identification with the British Union and European culture by racializing ornamental otherness as a subsidiary adjunct to an Aesthetic Empire” (Marez, “The Other Addict” 258).

To a degree, William Jones’s aesthetic philosophy prefigures Wilde’s. Like Wilde, he looks to Asia for the rejuvenation of “our European poetry[, which has] subsisted too long on the perpetual repetition of the same images, and the incessant allusions to the same fables,” as he explains in “An Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations” (1772). But whereas Wilde, like the other nineteenth-century critics and poets I have discussed, sees an East valuable (or distasteful) for its movement away from nature as the ultimate aesthetic model, Jones finds instead in the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literary traditions a laudable devotion to the representation of nature. For instance, Jones asks rhetorically “where can we find so much beauty as in the Eastern poems, which turn chiefly upon the loveliest objects in nature?” and he later praises the Persian epic poet Ferdüsî by saying that, like Homer, he “drew [his] images from nature herself (Jones, Works 10:359, 332, 355; emphasis his). Thus despite his partial deprivileging of mimesis in his “Essay on the Arts, Commonly Called Imitative” (1772), it is Middle Eastern poetry’s fidelity to nature that he offers as a remedy for neoclassicism’s mannerist tendencies.