'Lord, give me new earth':

The earthly bias

In 'Wuthering Heights' Catherine describes her love for the two men in her life in the following terms:

"My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary."

I've come back to this passage because it has a significance that transcends the interest of the story. When Catherine compares her love for Linton to sylvan foliage, she refers to the temporal, superficial aspect of earth. But in likening her love for Heathcliff to the imperishabe, indispensable and subterranean rocks she reveals a deeper, more vital and elemental connection with the earth. The intense emotion generated by a love that cannot be denied is instinctively linked with a profound and equally undeniable attachment to the earth.

This attachment is explicitly stated only a couple of pages earlier in a dream that Catherine relas to Nellie:

"If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable....I dreamt once that I was there...I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke up sobbing for joy."

Katharine Tynan

That this fierce loyalty to the earth, this deep-seated preference for it over heaven, is not merely fictionally and romantically attributed to Catherine can be seen in Emily Bronte's poetry, where her thoughts are directly expressed. In 'Stanza' she writes:

"Often rebuked, yet often back returning To those first feelings that were born in me...I'll walk where my own nature would be leading....More glory and more grief than I can tell: The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling Can centre both the worlds of heaven and hell."

Her bonding with the earth, both innate and spontaneous, proves to be her mainstay in the time of grief. This is a tie that even the prospect of death cannot undo, as can be seen in "When I Sleep':

"Oh, for the time when I shall sleep Without identity. And never care how rain may steep, Or snow may cover me! No promised heaven these wild desires Could all, or half fulfil; No threatened hell, with quenchless fires Subdue this quenchless will!"

Thus, it is evident that the hopes and desires of the author herself were centred on the earth. It represented for her the promise not only of the life of the present but of the life to come after death. And this in spite of the fact that she was a clergyman's daughter who would have been brought up to entertain the traditional expectation of an afterlife in heaven.

Nor is this linkage of spirituality with an attachment to the earth confined to Emily Bronte. We can discover it in no less a representative of orthodox religion than Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ. Consider, from among so many examples of his verse, these lines from 'Ribbesdale':

"Earth, sweet Earth, sweet landscape, with leaves throng And louched low grass, heaven that dost appeal To with no tongue to plead, no heart to feel; Thou canst but only be, but dost that long - Thou canst but be, but that thou well dost; strong Thy plea..... And what is Earth's eye, tongue, or heart else, where Else, but in dear and dogged man? -- Ah, the heir To his own selfbent so bound, so tied to...reave (plunder) both our rich round world bare And none reck (care) of world after..."

Earth appeals to heaven for its preservation since man, who is meant to be its custodian, instead of fulfilling his role despoils the earth. In the process he jeopardises his afterlife prospects. The implication is that man's hope of eternity is dependent on his treatment of the earth that is his heritage. Wordsworth was first and foremost a poet of nature. For him nature was an actual 'presence' that completely fulfilled whatever spiritual need he may have had. He spoke of it as his "nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being." Yet nature was never to him a transcendent reality in the sense of its being something that exceeded the limits of the earthly realm. Here are the climactic lines of the poem from which we have already quoted, 'Tintern Abbey':

"And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things."

The experience is rapturous, even mystical, but it is not transcendent. It simply does not transport the poet's 'mind' beyond the sunsets, skies, oceans and atmosphere of the earth. Even the reality of death does not occasion unearthly thoughts in Wordsworth. On the contrary, he says of the dead child in 'A Slumber did my Spirit Seal': "No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees, Rolled round in earth's diurnal course With rocks and stones and trees."

For Wordsworth, like Emily Bronte, death does not end man's vital connection with the earth but consummates it. And Lawrence expresses his own expectation of death in very similar fashion. As he says in 'Shadows': "And if tonight my soul may find her peace In sleep, and sink in good oblivion....then I shall know that my life is moving still With the dark earth, and drenched With the deep oblivion of earth's lapse and renewal."

To be 'man alive', as Lawrence described the re-integration of man's personality through giving its intuitive side free rein, meant to rediscover one's vital connection to the earth. This accounts for Lawrence's fascination for birds, beasts, reptiles, flowers, fruits and trees, all of which appear in his poetry as reflective in their individual ways of the mystery of the earth. Hence the attraction of the snake in the best-known of these poems, where the repeated reference to its subterranean abode (vide Catherine's 'eternal rocks beneath') may be noted:

"But I must confess how I liked him, How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless, Into the burning bowels of this earth...honoured still more That he should seek my hospitality From out the dark door of the secret earth." It is interesting that the poetic imagination, whether it belong to layman or clergyman, male or female, the religious or the non-religious, should be so influenced by the earthly realm. Even the contemplation of death, seemingly, cannot lessen this preoccupation by transferring its attention to a non-earthly realm in deference to orthodox beliefs. Indeed, it would seem that in many cases the poetic imagination conceives of the earth as the rightful future home of mankind. And nowhere is the case for this more clearly put than in this insufficiently known poem of the poet cum novelist, Katharine Tynan, who was a contemporary of Yeats. It is entitled 'She Asks for New Earth', and is reproduced here in its entirety. It reads like a more rational, though no less emotionally affecting version of the other Catherine's dream!

"Lord, when I find at last Thy Paradise, Be it not all too bright for human eyes, Lest I go sick for home, through the high mirth---For Thy new Heaven, Lord, give me new earth.

"Give of Thy mansions, Lord, a house so small Where they can come to me who were my all; Let them run home to me just as of yore, Glad to sit down with me and go out no more.

"Give me a garden, Lord, and a low hill, A field and a babblng brook that is not still; Give me an orchard, Lord, in leaf and bloom, And my birds to sing to me in a quiet gloam...

"There shall no canker be in leaf and bud, But glory on hill and sea and the green-wood, There, there shall none grow old but all be new, No moth nor rust shall fret nor thief break through. "Set Thou a mist upon Thy glorious sun, Lest we should faint for night and be undone; Give us the high clean wind and the wild rain, Lest that we faint in thirst and go in pain. "Let there be Winter there and the joy of Spring, Summer and Autumn and the harvesting; Give us all things we loved on earth of old Never to slip from out our fond arms' fold."Give me a little house for my desire, The man and the children to sit by my fire, And friends crowding in to us, to our lit hearth-For Thy new Heaven, Lord, give me new earth!"

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