| Tennyson's
lines are perhaps the most well known poetic expression of the sorts of
anxiety that were being generated by fossil remains. Here are his famous
stanzas from In Memoriam, published nine years before Darwin's
Origin
of Species by Means of Natural Selection:
So careful of the type?"
but no.
From
scarped cliff and quarried stone
She
cries, "A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing,
all shall go.
"Thou makest thine appeal
to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The
spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more."
And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who
seem'd so fair,
Such
splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who
roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of
fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love
indeed
And
love Creation's final law--
Tho'
Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd
against his creed--
Who loved, who suffer'd
countless ills,
Who
battled for the True, the Just,
Be
blown about the desert dust,
Or seal'd within the
iron hills?
No more? A monster then,
a dream,
A discord.
Dragons of the prime,
That
tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match'd
with him.
O life as futile, then,
as frail!
O for
thy voice to soothe and bless!
What
hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind
the veil.
. . .
They say,
The solid earth whereon
we tread
In tracts of fluent heat
began,
And
grew to seeiming-random forms,
The
seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the
man;
Who throve and branched from
clime to climb,
The
herald of a higher race . . .
. . . [Whose] life is not as idle ore,
But iron dug from central gloom,
And
heated hot with burning fears,
And
dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And battered with the shocks
of doom
To shape and use. Arise and
fly
The
reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward,
working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.
(1851, LVI, CXVIII)
But Tennyson was not the first poet worried about fossil remains. Here
are lines by Percy
Shelley, writing almost four decades earlier, in 1816:
. . . even these primaeval mountains
Teach the adverting mind. The
glaciers creep
Like snakes that watch their
prey, from their far fountains,
Slow rolling on; there, many
a precipice,
Frost and the Sun in scorn
of mortal power
Have piled: dome, pyramid,
and pinnacle,
A city of death . . .
. . . The dwelling-place
Of insects, beasts, and birds,
becomes its spoil
Their food and their retreat
for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is
lost. The race
Of man flies far in dread;
his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the
tempest's stream,
And their place is not known.
("Mont Blanc," ll. 99-105, 114-120)
In Prometheus Unbound (1819), Shelley likewise reveals his awareness
of previous forms of life (including human life) that have occupied the
planet and catastrophic forces that have led to their destruction (cf.
Cuvier):
dead Destruction, ruin within ruin!
The wrecks beside of many a city vast,
Whose population which the earth grew over
Was mortal but not human; see, they lie,
Their monstrous works and uncouth skeletons,
Their statues, homes, and fanes; prodigious shapes
Huddled in grey annihilation, split,
Jammed in the hard black deep; and over these
The anatomies of unknown winged things,
And fishes which were isles of living scale,
And serpents, bony chains, twisted around
The iron crags, or within heaps of dust
To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs
Had crushed the iron crags;--and over these
The jagged alligator and the might
Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once
Were monarch beats, and on the slimy shores
And weed-overgrown continents of Earth
Increased and multiplied like summer worms
On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe
Wrapt Deluge round it like a cloak, and they
Yelled, gaspt and were abolished (iv. 295-316)
Of course, these passages from both Tennyson and Shelley also reveal the
extent to which fossil evidence for evolution and extinction was being
confirmed by parallel discoveries in geology
and the earth sciences. (A.N.) |
