This week's poem, "The Two Deserts", is by a writer I consider to be among the great Victorian poets, equal to Tennyson in musicality and to the Brownings in intellect and humanity. But posthumous reputation is no longer guaranteed by a writer's quality: increasingly, it depends on the vagaries of fashion, biographical curiosity or politics. Coventry Patmore's domestic epic, "The Angel in the House", much admired in the first years after publication, ran aground on Virginia Woolf's icy, post-Victorian wit, and was sunk by the banalities of 20th-century gender politics, taking Patmore's reputation down with it. Blandly plotted, perhaps, for modern tastes, it remains a marvellously readable verse-novel: elegantly structured, rich in social observation and insights into the psychology of passion. Its idealised view of women is stifling if understood prescriptively, but only a fool would imagine that it encoded sexist insult:
"Female and male God made the man,
His image is the whole not half;
And in our love we dimly scan
The love which is between himself."
An analysis of "The Angel in the House" would need more space than a blog. Besides, Patmore subsequently grew into a rather more adventurous and edgy writer. "The Two Deserts" is from a later collection, The Unknown Eros, in which the poet has found a new, flexible form, one that seems to emerge from his view that "the best poet is not he whose verses are most easily scanned" but the one "who preserves the living sense of metre, not so much by unvarying obedience to, as by innumerable small departures from, its modulus". The form resembles that of a short ode, blending variable metres and rhyme-patterns to create an organic stanzaic unit. Rather than viewing Patmore as an enemy of feminism, we could fruitfully look at these poems in the light of l'écriture féminine, as little, living, breathing bodies.
Many, such as "The Azalea", "The Toys", and "Departure", are intense and moving personal narratives, reflecting the death of Patmore's "Angel": his first wife, Emily. "The Two Deserts", though similar in shape, is more of a verse-essay, crisp and impersonal. Typical of the writers of his age, Patmore is concerned to put scientific ideas into an aesthetic and religious framework. Though he cuts the telescope and the microscope down to size, here, and labels their visions "deserts", the lively imagery he produces suggests a real encounter with his imagination.
There was, of course, no concept of space-time, no multiverse, no Big Bang, no singularity, when Patmore wrote this poem, but science had begun to map the breadth of the macrocosm ("five thousand firmaments beyond our own") and the intricacy of the microcosm – "the torment of innumerable tails" contained in a drop of water. Dismissive, faintly amused by these attainments, the narrator seems to prefer the naked eye. But this eye is hardly unambitious: it is the eye of poetic vision.
Again, Patmore's prose is worth quoting: "The interest of what is called descriptive or representative in real poetry and all real art is always human, or, in other words, 'imaginative'. A description by Wordsworth, Coleridge or Burns, a landscape by Crome, Gainsborough or Constable, is not merely nature, but nature reflected in and giving expression to a state of mind. The state of mind is the true subject, the natural phenomena the terms in which it is uttered ... Nature has no beauty or pathos but that with which the mind invests it. Without the imaginative eye it is like a flower in the dark, which is only beautiful as having in it a power of reflecting the colours of the light."
This seems to be the nub of that conception of art's superiority over science. Science, for Patmore, ignores "the imaginative eye". No doubt at that time it was actually harder for the lay person to visualise the wonders technology reported. For us, with our advanced photographic and simulation techniques, Patmore's feelings about lifeless deserts are difficult to share. The notion of billions of galaxies beyond ours has become thrilling and terrifying; the study of the microcosm of human consciousness is perhaps even more enthralling, though harder to visualise, than the multiversing of the astronomers. But I'm also reminded of the warnings uttered by the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield when she talks about the dangers of reducing our intellectual worlds to virtual reality. We living bodies need to see faces and hear voices. Patmore hymns imaginative perception of local realities at the expense of scientific discovery: the reverse position is today's default. The poem, despite itself, illustrates how to combine the two.
****
The Two Deserts
Not greatly moved with awe am I
To learn that we may spy
Five thousand firmaments beyond our own.
The best that’s known
Of the heavenly bodies does them credit small.
View’d close, the Moon’s fair ball
Is of ill objects worst,
A corpse in Night’s highway, naked, fire-scarr’d, accurst;
And now they tell
That the Sun is plainly seen to boil and burst
Too horribly for hell.
So, judging from these two,
As we must do,
The Universe, outside our living Earth,
Was all conceiv’d in the Creator’s mirth,
Forecasting at the time Man’s spirit deep,
To make dirt cheap.
Put by the Telescope!
Better without it man may see,
Stretch’d awful in the hush’d midnight,
The ghost of his eternity.
Give me the nobler glass that swells to the eye
The things which near us lie,
Till Science rapturously hails,
In the minutest water-drop,
A torment of innumerable tails.
These at the least do live.
But rather give
A mind not much to pry
Beyond our royal-fair estate
Betwixt these deserts blank of small and great.
Wonder and beauty our own courtiers are,
Pressing to catch our gaze,
And out of obvious ways
Ne’er wandering far.
COVENTRY PATMORE