Solace Through Nature in Keats and Shelley

The idea of receiving solace through nature permeates the writing of the Romantic period. John Keats expresses this theme in his poems "Ode to a Nightingale" and "To Autumn." Mary Shelley's characters, both Victor Frankenstein and the creature he creates, also receive comfort from nature in her novel Frankenstein. Although these works differ in that Keats' are poetry and Shelley's is prose, both authors express the same longings for the sublime. "Ode to a Nightingale" expresses the idea of nature as an escape from the harsh realities of life, which mirrors Victor Frankenstein's idea of nature. "To Autumn" illustrates nature as a comfort and a provider, which more closely reflects the creature's thoughts about nature.

In "Ode to a Nightingale," the speaker is enthralled with the song of this bird because the song transports the speaker away from challenges of everyday life to another world. The speaker wants to "quite forget / What thou amongst the leaves hast never known, / The weariness, the fever, and the fret" (21-23), and the nightingale's music transports the listener, in a sublime, stolen moment, away "on the viewless wings of Poesy" (33). The speaker escapes to a place in his imagination where "there is no light, / Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown / Through verdurous glooms and the winding mossy ways" (38-40). Keats uses the imagery of nature to take the reader to a dark, fertile place, "Wherewith the seasonable month endows / The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild" (44-45). The speaker is so enchanted by the song that its departure leaves him wondering: "Was it a waking dream?" (79).

Keats develops the theme of escaping to a grander, richer place with the words he chooses. He frequently employs names harkening back to classical mythology: Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, Lethe, a river in Hades, Hippocrene, the fountain of the Muses, and Bacchus, the god of wine. Keats mentions far away places and names, like Provencal, in France, and Ruth, from the Bible. He speaks of queens, fairies, ancient days, emperors, and clowns. He evokes images of flight, fading away, quiet night, perfumed darkness, magic, and "faery lands forlorn" (70). The words and images Keats uses speak of places infinitely removed from a place "where men sit and hear each other groan" (24). These elements exist only in one's mind, and Keats' escape is not to a physical place. The song of the bird frees the speaker's imagination. Keats creates a dreamlike world that the pain of reality cannot touch. In that way, the speaker escapes because of a brief encounter with nature.

The speaker's escape is as brief as the encounter. As quickly as the speaker flies away, his thoughts land him again: "Forlorn! the very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!" (71-72). The speaker realizes he was only dreaming; the bird is gone and its song now is "buried deep / In the next valley-glades" (77-78). But even as the bird flees, the speaker is left pondering that brief, sublime moment. The solace that nature provides is temporary at best, yet it is still a tangible relief.

Keats also uses the theme of solace through nature in "To Autumn" but in a different way. Here, nature does not provide a fleeting moment of ecstasy but a quiet sense of contentment. Each stanza provides a different angle of the same picture of nature as an abundant, comforting provider. The mood of the poem is relaxing, confident, and without worry.

The first stanza speaks of the generous bounty of autumn: "to load and bless / With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run" (3-4), and "To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells / With a sweet kernel" (7-8). The second stanza personifies autumn and tells of autumn working to bring in the harvest, or watching apple cider ooze from the press. The third stanza develops the many different songs of autumn: "in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn / Among the river sallows" (27-28), "full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; / Hedge-crickets sing" (30-31), and "The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; / And gathering swallows twitter in the skies" (32-33).

Keats carefully creates pictures that support the bountiful imagery: "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" (1), trees heavy with apples, fully ripened fruit, budding flowers, bees, and fields ready for harvest. Autumn personified is unhurried and unworried about the coming winter, because the speaker describes autumn as "sitting careless on the granary floor" (14), "on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, / Drows'd with the fume of poppies" (16-17), or "by a cyder-press, with patient look, / Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours" (21-22). No one has anything to fear about the future because everything has been provided. Nothing is more peaceful than the sun setting in a rosy sky over a stubble field: the harvest is in and it is time to relax. At this point, the sounds of autumn burst forth. The river water is slow-moving enough to allow willows to grow and gnats to hover, the wind is light enough for the swallows to gather and sing. The mood is quiet and serene.

Nature in "To Autumn" brings comfort because it provides. Everything is ready to face the harsh days of winter, and the poem even recalls the warm days of summer. Nature provides solace in this poem by giving generously of its bounty and creating a lasting, deep contentment in tangible, real ways that directly affect the receiver of the bounty for months to come.

The creature that Victor Frankenstein creates in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein finds solace through nature most like the way Keats describes this solace in "To Autumn," while Victor himself gleans comfort in the way that Keats describes it in "Ode to a Nightingale." Nature is a place where Frankenstein frequently retreats for temporary relief from his burdens.

Frankenstein mentions nature many times in his testimony to Robert Walton, the man he meets in Arctic. He grows up noticing and appreciating the beauty that surrounds him in Geneva: "the sublime shapes of the mountains, the changes of the seasons, tempest and calm, the silence of winter, and the life and turbulence of our Alpine summers" (22). Frankenstein loves nature and does not need to seek it as a refuge as he grows up because he does not need to escape from his world; he is supremely content and happy, even when he goes to school and becomes a scientist. When Frankenstein is in the midst of creating the creature, he does not have time for nature. He recalls that "It was a most beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more plentiful harvest or the vines yield a more luxuriant vintage, but my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature" (39-40).

But when he plays with the immutable laws of nature, his life becomes miserable and stressful, and he frequently turns to nature as an attempt to escape his present torture. It is ironic that he seeks solace from the entity whose laws he crossed in bringing about his own troubles, but as the novel progresses, he often reflects on the splendor of nature to raise his troubled spirits.

Frankenstein returns home soon after he learns of the death of William, but he cannot bear to face the home he left six years earlier, so he stalls for several days, quite agitated, at Lausanne. While there, he says, "I contemplated the lake; the waters were placid, all around was calm, and the snowy mountains, 'the palaces of nature,' were not changed. By degrees the calm and heavenly scene restored me, and I continued my journey towards Geneva" (59). Nature does not relieve Frankenstein of his troubles, but it helps him relax and have the strength to face them. Soon after this incident, Frankenstein visits the place of William's murder. He encounters a thunder storm and of it he says: "This noble war in the sky elevated my spirits" (60). After Justine dies, framed for William's murder, he feels guilty because he knows that the creature he created committed the act, not Justine. He and his family go the Belrive, where he says he "Often, after the rest of the family had retired for the night, . . . took the boat and passed many hours on the water" (75). Frankenstein admits to himself at this point that he will never again be completely free of guilt, but he still needs nature as a place of refuge when it overwhelms him.

He leaves his family to retreat alone into nature and he says, "The weight upon my spirit was sensibly lightened as I plunged yet deeper into the ravine of Arve. . . . It was augmented and rendered sublime by the mighty Alps, whose white and shining pyramids and domes towered above all, as belonging to another earth, the habitations of another race of beings" (78). Like Keats, Shelley uses the imagery of distant worlds to show an escape from reality. Despite his pain, Frankenstein says that "A tingling, long-lost sense of pleasure often came across me during this journey" (79). Frankenstein hikes to the top of Montanvert, and there he marvels at a sea of ice below him, and at the sight, he says, "My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy" (82). Nature provides a temporary relief from his constant pain.

At this point, he meets his creature and the creature demands that Frankenstein create a companion for him, which causes more suffering in Frankenstein's life as he agonizes over whether to do it. Sometimes he gets so upset that "a devouring blackness overcast the approaching sunshine" and at times like these, "I took refuge in the most perfect solitude. I passed whole days on the lake alone in a little boat, watching the clouds and listening to the rippling of the waves" (135). These escapes into nature, he says, "seldom failed to restore me to some degree of composure, and on my return I met the salutations of my friends with a readier smile and a more cheerful heart" (135). Though he can never completely free himself from his bondage, nature provides a tangible change of mood.

Frankenstein retreats to the Scottish highlands to finally finish his project and holes himself up in a miserable shack on a nearly deserted island. When he is not working, he comforts himself by walking along the beach and dreaming of the beauty of Switzerland, an example of Wordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquility" (Norton 250).

By the time he finally destroys his newest creation and confronts his creature, he has so much misery placed upon him that he is barely sane. After the creature murders Elizabeth, Frankenstein embarks on a mad chase around the world through the harshest climates. At this point, nature is no longer a refuge for him but another adversary as he battles cold and fatigue. By the time he meets Walton, Frankenstein's only refuge is sleep, when he can dream of his departed loved ones. Although nature ceases to provide comfort for Frankenstein, Walton remarks that "The only joy that he can now know will be when he composes his shattered spirit to peace and death" (193). When Frankenstein dies, he finally escapes for good the misery that plagues him since the creation of the creature. The speaker in Keats' poem is pulled from thoughts of death by the nightingale's song, but at the end of Shelley's novel, Frankenstein's misery is too much even for a sublime nature to overcome.

Frankenstein's creature also leads a miserable life and he also gains some degree of solace from nature. The creature's solace is like the solace described in "To Autumn" because nature provides for the creature by giving him food and shelter when mankind rejects him.

The creature tells Frankenstein, "The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. . . . The caves of ice, which only I do not fear, are a dwelling to me. . . . These bleak skies I hail, for they are kinder to me than your fellow beings" (84). Without exception, every person the creature meets recoils from him in horror, forcing him into nature for solace and comfort. He draws a contrast between trying to force himself into human society, wreaking havoc and misery, or withdrawing into the wilderness, where he finds more comfort than men will bestow upon him, when he tells Frankenstein, "On you it rests, whether I quit forever the neighbourhood of man and lead a harmless life, or become the scourge of your fellow creatures and the author of your own speedy ruin" (85).

Nature does not reject the creature; it feeds him and shelters him, which is more than he can ever hope to receive from any human. Upon awakening, he is alone and bewildered with no clue as to what to do. He even weeps out of misery, spending his first hours of life in cold and pain. But then he notices the moon, a "gentle light," that "stole over the heavens and gave me a sensation of pleasure" (88). The first entity of comfort in his bleak life is from nature and by its light he searches for berries, his first meal. Shelley creates a distinction between men and nature, and the creature chooses nature because men reject him. He manages to survive his first winter and at the dawn of spring, he notices that "The birds sang in more cheerful notes, and the leaves began to bud forth from the trees. Happy, happy earth!" (100). Nature is not completely benign, and he does suffer at times from cold and hunger, but it provides enough for him to survive and does not reject him.

After the De Laceys reject the creature, his one attempt at joining human society, he flees to the forest because he has nowhere else to go. Only nature allows him to exist as he is and does not react with violence at the sight of him. He says that "The pleasant sunshine and the pure air of the day restored me to some degree of tranquillity" (122). The creature has no reason left to associate himself with humanity, so despite the harshness and wildness of nature, it is the only place he belongs. He wants Frankenstein to create for him a companion, and together they will live in the wilderness where their lives "will not be happy, but they will be harmless and free from the misery that I now feel" (131). He tells Frankenstein, "I will go to the vast wilds of South America. . . . acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. . . . We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man and will ripen our food" (131). He promises to never bother men again and remain completely in the wilderness. The creature can never be completely happy, but he can be content, and this contentment can only be found in nature, where he will have all he needs.

After Frankenstein destroys the companion and the creature kills Elizabeth, they begin their chase around the world and the creature travels through the harshest places on the earth. He finds shelter and survival in nature while Frankenstein suffers greatly and barely manages to remain alive. He is not as impervious to the cold as the creature is, who declares himself impassive to it. As the creature finally prepares to die, he tells Walton that he will go to the farthest northern point of the globe, one of the remotest places on the earth, to die. Even as he kills himself, he does it deep in the wilderness and far from humanity. In the creature's brief, miserable life, the only comfort he ever feels comes from nature. The comfort does not come in fleeting moments. It is rather, like in "To Autumn," a sense of satisfaction; the creature knows that he can rely on nature to provide for his needs and accept him as he is.

The theme of finding solace through nature is a theme that weaves its way through both Keats' and Shelley's works. They both show different ways one can find solace through nature. Nature provides both a fleeting yet memorable moment of pure happiness, and a lasting sense of comfort and calm, because it provides what is needed. Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" and Shelley's Victor Frankenstein illustrate the brief, renewing encounter with nature, while Keats' "To Autumn" and the creature show finding contentment with the provision of nature.