The Ecopoetics of Charles Harpur

Ecopoetics has to do with the realisation of the relationship between human beings and the rest of the biosphere. It reflects on what it might mean to dwell with the earth. Before one’s country can become accepted as a dwelling place for the writer’s imagination, it must first be discerned, experienced, expressed, and as it were fully engaged. The foreignness of the Australian environment as envisaged by the early European settlers, together with the exploitive ideology of colonialism, proved challenging for colonial writers such as Charles Harpur who felt a sense of connection to the place. This paper examines Harpur’s work to determine if it qualifies as ecopoetics as understood in recent studies of literature in relation to the environment. It also seeks to establish his work as a resource for current environmental thinkers, as a point of reference for the consideration of the pre-colonial communicative exchange with this land. His emphasis is on vision: both in a temporal and a transcendental sense.


CASSANDRA JULIE O'LOUGHLIN University of Newcastle
Ecopoetics has to do with the realisation of the relationship between human beings and the rest of the biosphere. It reflects on what it might mean to dwell with the earth. Before one's country can become accepted as a dwelling place for the writer's imagination, it must first be discerned, experienced, expressed, and as it were fully engaged. The foreignness of the Australian environment as envisaged by the early European settlers, together with the exploitive ideology of colonialism, proved challenging for colonial writers such as Charles Harpur who felt a sense of connection to the place. This paper examines Harpur's work to determine if it qualifies as ecopoetics as understood in recent studies of literature in relation to the environment. It also seeks to establish his work as a resource for current environmental thinkers, as a point of reference for the consideration of the pre-colonial communicative exchange with this land. His emphasis is on vision: both in a temporal and a transcendental sense.

Listening to the 'Muse of the evergreen Forest'
Charles Harpur was born in Windsor, New South Wales (then known as Green Hills), in 1813. His parents, Joseph Harpur and Sarah Chidley, were convicts. Windsor, which is situated in the Hawkesbury River district, was first established as a settlement in 1794 to help alleviate the shortage of food and other supplies in the colony. Joseph and Sarah were emancipated and sent to the area to help work the land, and to improve the image of the colony. By the time Charles was born, his father had been installed as a schoolmaster. From a young age the boy had access to literary books, albeit a limited selection, which he devotedly read. He augmented his learning by studying and experiencing the natural world. As expressed by Wright, 'nature' for Harpur provides the place of learning for the soul: learning from Nature 'in the Wordsworthian sense'. (Charles Harpur 23). Michael Ackland convincingly argues that Harpur's work, despite the Romantic influence, is (along with that of Henry Kendall) should be seen 'not as derivative and inept, but as independent utterances of local genius' ('Nature' 74).
Harpur's notes (which will be discussed later in relation to naming the various entities of nature) are a valuable addendum in that they supplement the philosophies and attitudes of his poetics. In his preface to 'The Kangaroo Hunt', for example, he describes the feelings he experienced during the writing process. Initially, he refers to the individual entities of nature (all that which is other-than-human) as objects in the pictorial composition of the poem. After he beholds them 'through an imaginary process of self-diminution' in the process of his understanding, nature 'becomes savagely sublime' (Works 456). From then on he refers to nature not as object, but as subject. 'Thus,' he says, 'it [the poem depicting nature] is truth sublimated, compressed, epitomised;-truth raised to its height . . . direct from Nature' [sic] (Works 456-457). Nature is the essential subject; he, the poet, is the conveyor of sublime truth. On the nature of Truth he adds: In fine, if the Poet has been wholly true to his missionary insight . . . and to his recreative instincts . . . the licence taken, and the modifications made by art, will reach only to its pictorial manner and assemblage of objects: in its spirit it will still be very Nature . . . it will be Something yet more precious . . . . (Works 457) Ackland argues that Harpur sees the individual observer, and in particular the poet, 'as a centre of spiritual regeneration in an age presided over by scientific advancement and soul destroying materialism' ('Nature' 79 The worldly and the spiritual are shown to be mutually informing. As will be discussed later, however, empirical recording is also important for this poet. To establish that Harpur is a naïve poet (in the sense that Schiller uses the term in his essay 'On the Naïve and the Sentimental in Literature' (1795)) is essential since it confirms his sense of oneness with the natural world. The argument for this paper, however, complicates Schiller's approach to the analysis of naïvety in that Harpur appears to possess an intuitive belief in his poetic role and in this sense he is naïve, yet he also seems to be an idealist with a sense of his own divinely appointed destiny to communicate the natural world. He, however, complies with other aspects of Schiller's analysis of naïvety. Schiller says: 'It is a prerequisite of the naïve that nature is victorious over art' (24). In the short poem 'Art: Labour and Nature' (Works 555) Harpur asks 'what can give beauty to a forest tree / Or a vast lake with mountain scenery?' He answers 'Nature alone-dame Nature, working lonely,' not 'Art and Labour's wisdom.' He acknowledges that art is subordinate to Nature. Schiller determines that the naïve poet acknowledges the existence of nature according to its own unalterable laws (21) . This 'taking of measure' and writing in a way that is 'fourfold' (involving earth, sky, divinity and mortals) as suggested by , applies also to Harpur's work. One example of these concepts is evident, for example, in the poem 'Happiness and Faith.' He says: 'Love, so mighty in itself, / So God-like, and thence capable to make / And keep the heart's integrity divine' (Works, 287): the godhead is the measure by which Harpur assesses his dwelling. He lovingly maintains his place of habitation and 'saves' the earth in that he is, in a Heideggean sense, freeing something into its own 'presencing' ('Building' 148). In his poem 'The Poet', Harpur writes: The poet,-he whose glorious gift, Free of the world, and making free, Heavenward on wings of melody Can all things lift! (Works 356) Here, his poetry presents a kind of mandate based on individual perception of a natural world in which the individual entities work in symbiosis: there is an interactive domain operating between humans and the rest of nature. Personal reflection on the relationship between the observer and the observed is a facilitator of natural experience. This is evident in his long poem 'A Poet's Home'. It begins: As erewhile pictured in a sweet day-dream Amid the cloudlands of Hope's vernal sky, In soul-born colours-such as only beam, To enhance all beauty, through the Poet's eye. (Works 224) Sometimes it seems the natural world is not presented for its own sake alone but also as impetus for the poet to engage in thinking and pondering. This type of poetry engages with meditations and feelings. In 'Dawn in the Australian Forest' the narrator says: Harpur also recorded his opinion on the metrics of poetry, saying: I conceived that such an unconfined many-metered structure of verse as might be varied and paragraphically moulded (after the manner of a musical movement) to the peculiar demands of every occasion, and appear therefore to result spontaneously from the very nature of things depicted . . . (Works 457) It could be said that Harpur saw his poems' musicality as 'a recurring cycle, a heartbeat', as 'an answering to nature's own rhythms, an echoing of the song of the earth', as expressed by Jonathan Bate (Song 76). In understanding his work we might come to see his poiesis as a path to our oikos, our place of dwelling.
Harpur is stimulated by natural phenomena and is primarily concerned with human experience within the natural world. As with many of his poems, the aesthetic experience, which involves sensuous perception, is paramount. In 'The Poet's Home,' for instance, aesthetic experience distils the essential nature of being in the world. There is a keen sense of the moment lived in a great cognisant domain, the actual world as it reveals itself. The plants, the poultry and other animals and insects appear dynamic, and vibrantly present. They are more than backdrop and much more than symbol; the details act as a kind of communication, offering a tapestry of information in which the modality of poetry operates. To use one of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's idioms, Harpur's poetry discloses the 'intertwining' of the visible rational world, and the invisible, as revealed through the senses; there is a 'bond between the flesh and the idea' (Visible 130-155). As is the case in the more somnambulant poem, 'A Mid-Summer Noon in the Australian Forest' (Works 199), the human observer is as if absorbed in the world; s/he is part of it. Out of the mighty brooding stillness unexpected complexities of nature emerge. Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception, says perception brings into play sensory spheres and 'primitive complicities with the world' (448). And for it to enter our lives, as Merleau-Ponty points out, each natural object 'must be made of colours and of tactile and sonorous qualities' (363). Harpur uses sensuous perception to connect all things.
He looks at things in terms of their own essence, their own 'indwelling spirit', their power to exist in the sense suggested by Friedrich von Schelling (1807), bringing to bear a 'spiritual eye that penetrates their husk and feels the force at work within them' ('Concerning' 327). In 'A Mid-Summer Noon', for instance, it seems as Schelling suggests that 'the spirit of nature is liberated from its bonds and feels its kinship with the soul' ('Concerning' 342). This is established by the 'cool murmur' of the rill and tranquil play of gentle movements. Nature is allowed the faculty of feeling. Harpur's metaphor for the poetics of revelation awakens the inner voice of nature: Tired Summer, in her forest bower Turning with the noontide hour, Heaves a slumberous breath, ere she Once more slumbers peacefully. (Works 200) Poetically refining the essential sense of being in the world while acknowledging the right of the other-than-human to exist in terms of its own being, I propose, identifies true ecopoetics. This will be discussed later in relation to the pastoral. Perhaps Kate Rigby might agree poems such as this lean toward the recovery of the earth as a 'locus of the holy' (Topographies 114). The poet is connecting with the natural world, providing a way to rescue humanity from the perceived post-industrial and colonial sense of alienation from its source of divine Being. Nature, for Harpur, is not alien but a component of his life, a refuge for his consciousness. He is doing more than what Rigby calls 'constructing' a view (Topographies 77). What matters in poems such as 'A Mid-Summer Noon', and what constitutes ecopoetry for Rigby, 'is not verisimilitude but ambience: the intimation of what happens when the boundaries of subject and object become blurred and the self is radically opened to a circumambient natural world' (Topographies 226).
It is in and through the phenomenology of the natural world that Harpur finds expression for poetic language: his consciousness is presence in the world; and space is experienced through bodily presence. These concepts of presence and experience are in keeping with what Gernot Böhme comprehends as the 'production of atmospheres' ('Atmosphere' 116). Böhme's new aesthetics regards perception as 'the experience of the presence of persons, objects and environments' (116). Harpur produces atmospheres. In discussing Böhme's theory of aesthetics, Rigby acknowledges that Harpur's verbalisation of the 'atmospheric experience of place and season' in the companionship of ants, grasshoppers, locusts, hornets, beetles and the murmuring rill in 'A Mid-Summer Noon', invites readers to 'share in the feeling of quietude invoked by his words' (Ecocritical Theory 148). There is a certain atmosphere produced that can influence the reader's feelings, and alter his/her mood. Harpur's nature poetry provides an infinite supply of images for the expression of human thoughts, feelings, and interactions. He is guiding the reader through an emotional space, reminding them of their own emotional susceptibility.
He also produces atmospheres that are perceived as not agreeable. There is tension between environment and culture in his poetry: the colonists struggle for survival in environs outside the settlement; from a colonists perspective these areas are true wilderness. Threats to humans are evident, for instance, in 'A Storm in the Mountains' (Works, 181-187), 'The Bush Fire' (Works,(173)(174)(175)(176)(177)(178)(179)(180), and 'The Creek of the Four Graves' (Works 161-172). In the latter, the reader is invited to behold a wonder as chaos is eclipsed by the 'conglobing' moon. In this poem, nature is potentially a hostile stranger, bent on its own processes, heedless of the circumstance humans find themselves in: it is 'the perilous vast wilderness / That lay around them like a spectral world' (164). All of nature, including the moon and the stars, goes silently about its business untouched by the dire predicament of the men in that poem who, after much tribulation, lose their lives. The environment is presented as a process; it absorbs everything, including humans. When the story-teller, Egremont, seems to have vanished into the bush, the natives are fear-struck. They identify him as part of their legend about the creek; he becomes part of the wilderness. Later he emerges from the natural world as if reborn. As pointed out by Mitchell, Harpur reveals the 'confrontation between the old and new cultures, the European sensibility and the local place-sense' (Harpur xxvi). In these poems, the domestic is pitted against the extremities of the natural world (the other-thanhuman); the narrator (and the reader) must stand by as natural processes take their course. From Harpur's white-centric perspective, the natural world always resists human control.
The events that unfold for the four men in 'The Creek of the Four Graves' occur because they venture beyond the known area of settlement.

An Ecocritical Reading of Harpur's Pastoral
In 'The Creek of the Four Graves', a settler and his four shepherds travel into unknown territory to find water and pasture. In relation to this poem Ivor Indyk claims a 'magnification and inversion of the pastoral order' primarily because the Australian natural environment is not responsive to human needs ('Pastoral' 839). I suggest Harpur, in that poem, intentionally overthrew the pastoral conventions; he knew the potential for dramatic affect. He, after all, understood how to successfully capture the pastoral mode in poems such as 'A Mid-Summer Noon in the Australian Forest' in all its Wordsworthian tranquility (as in 'What a mighty stillness broods'), in minute pastoral detail, the scene replete with pastoral comfort. I propose that rather than being, as Indyk suggests, an 'unpopulated pastoral', given that 'the elements of nature take on the roles normally played by humans in the pastoral', or that the poet considers the Aboriginals as 'improper subjects' ('Pastoral' 839), Harpur has populated the poem with powerful components of nature to augment the drama. Indyk states that he has traced the existence of the Aboriginal in white Australian writing as 'a disturbing force, reordering or exceeding the pastoral code' ('Pastoral' 850). I suggest Harpur intended the Aboriginal people to be part of the wild element; perhaps all the entities of nature, including the Aboriginal, are meant to unsettle and negate pastoral priorities.
Harpur also inverts anthropocentric reason: he moves beyond familiar experiences which are identified by logical and utilitarian categories by giving vision and voice to the otherthan-human. The sun, the waters, the trees and the Indigenous people all contribute to the atmospherics of the poem. They do usurp human characteristics. It is the sun whose 'last glances fell / into the gloomy forest's eastern glades'; the waters possessed of 'sylvan eyelashes' gleam and bicker 'Between the margins of some eager stream'; the four men bedded down under the 'dark arms' of the 'circling forest trees' in the 'perilous vast wilderness'; and the Aboriginals issued their 'dire cries, so terrible to hear'. This is the world of 'presence culture' (as opposed to 'meaning culture') as described by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht where the entities of nature keep coming closer and where humans can inscribe their bodies into the rhythms of the surrounding cosmology: the cosmology 'of which these humans consider themselves to be part' (Production 82-3).

The Relevance of Place
The sense of identifying with a place where we feel we belong is established in dwelling: the inhabitant associates with the happenings of the place. The outsider might appreciate only the outward appearances while the resident will connect with 'inside' knowledge. The use of the indigenous names for the animals, birds and the other entities of the natural world in 'The Kangaroo Hunt', for example, points to Harpur's inside knowledge of a people and language that seem embedded in the natural world. These names (along with detailed information) can be found in the notes as recorded in Works (491-510). They include, but are not limited to, the kindyne (the 'ring-tailed' possum), the bidawong ('the flying squirrel'), gooburra (the 'Laughing Jackass' or the 'Settler's Clock', commonly known now as the kookaburra), warragl (the native dog, or dingo), teleltella (the 'bell-bird'), the yerowala (the blue-mountain parrot), and the duaralli (the 'kangaroorat'). Euroka, a word which Harpur uses several times in his poetry, is an aboriginal name for the sun. According to Wright, many of the Aboriginal names for these animals and birds survive now only in Harpur's poems and notes (Charles Harpur 31).
In his notes the poet implies that the indigenous people lived in harmony with the natural environment. The Hawkesbury region is the ancestral home of the Darug people. Harpur observed the diminishing number of Indigenous people in the wake of colonialism, and claims that for this reason the balance of nature was upset. The goanna, for instance, was no longer consumed in sufficient numbers to check their increase. He writes: . . . our future ornithologists will look in vain for many kinds of birds which they will find mentioned in earlier Colonial records . . . . The unchecked increase of the large tree-climbing gwana [goanna] in the waste portions of those districts in which the aboriginal have become extinct or nearly so, is a main cause of the extinction as well of many kinds of our native birds. (note e, Works 501-2) In the poem 'Aboriginal Death Song' he refers to the Indigenous man as 'Brother' (Ackland, Charles Harpur 86). In a swipe against the exclusions and excesses of colonialism he says in 'Eden Lost': 'Excluding brotherhood / He only with disnatured mind, / becomes the Tyrant of his kind' (Works 406). Humanity, after all, is the common denominator.

Conclusion
Discerning via the historical and literary writings the feelings some settlers experienced with this land supports and reinforces current efforts towards environmental connection and discussion. Retrieving, referencing and reassessing the poetry of writers such as Charles Harpur is an important starting point. His poems are irreplaceable: they are unique as an environmental text of the time. By recording Aboriginal words and their meanings in his text and by recognising the perceptive, agential gift of these first inhabitants to relate to the land-people who have invoked the land poetically for millennia-Harpur's writing has the capacity to relocate the European settler, as well as others of our cosmopolitan nation, within a network of established symbiotic relationships. His extensive notes support his credentials as an ecopoet. He is not as articulate or eloquent as Wordsworth, the poet he admired and tried to emulate; his approach, however, is fresh, and it reveals an original ecopoetics. For Harpur, human history is forever implicated in natural history: he recognises the interconnectedness of all things. His work is foundationally relevant for Australia in this environmentally conscious age. It has the capacity to hold up the image of areas as yet unaltered by nonindigenous people in this country, and to remind us of the vulnerability of natural habitats and their other-than-human inhabitants.