The Child of Nature

Print of Shepherd Boy, After Thomas Gainsborough, Late 18th Century

In addition to consistently portraying his childhood as a contented, formative period, Edgar Allan Poe also resorts to a poetic device commonly used by Romantic poets, the “child of nature.”

Poe actually labels the depiction as such in an early version of “Tamerlane,” wherein he calls this image “The child of Nature, without care.”

In the early poem “Stanzas” (1827) Poe quotes Lord Byron, whom Poe admired, for a succinct summation of the Romantic fascination with humanity’s relationship with nature, which Poe then seeks to claim for himself (here, speaking of himself in the third person):

In youth have I known one with whom the Earth 

In secret communing held, as he with it, 

In day light, and in beauty from his birth: 

Whose fervid, flick’ring torch of life was lit 

From the sun and stars, whence he had drawn forth 

A passionate light-such for his spirit was fit

Like the English Romantics, Poe claims that he derived his life force directly from the cosmos (“From the sun and stars”); one recalls Wordsworth’s exuberance in his “Intimations of Immortality” (“trailing clouds of glory do we come”).  In “Alone” (1829), Poe declares that he received his rearing,

From the red cliff of the mountain — 

From the sun that ’round me roll’d 
In its autumn tint of gold — 

From the lightning in the sky 

As it pass’d me flying by — 

From the thunder, and the storm — 

And the cloud …

As it turns out, the theme has some basis in biographical reality and is not merely a poetic artifice or artefact.  Edward M. Alfriend, an acquaintance of Poe, would recall that “Poe’s love of nature amounted to a passion.”    He quoted Poe as having once said that, “Nature rests me, I always find a calm with nature that I seek in vain everywhere else, and no matter how great my perturbation, she never fails to bring me peace.”

Alfriend cited as one of several examples of Poe’s love of nature how he frequented “several islands in the James River, between Richmond and Manchester … amid beds of great granite rocks, over which the river leaps and bounds.”  Poe confirms this account in “The Lake” (1827), wherein Poe relates,

In spring of youth it was my lot 

To haunt of the wide world a spot 

The which I could not love the less — 

So lovely was the loneliness 

Of a wild lake, with black rock bound, 

And the tall pines that towered around.

This “spot” has also been identified as Lake Drummond (also known as the Great Dismal Swamp) in Norfolk, Virginia.  However, in his verse, Poe does not limit his interaction with nature to simply acts of recreation so much as an integral part of his creation and formation.  And so, in “Tamerlane” (1827), he boasts,

On mountain soil I first drew life: 

The mists of the Taglay have shed 

Nightly their dews upon my head, 

And, I believe, the winged strife 

And tumult of the headlong air 

Have nestled in my very hair.

Nature itself leaves its indelible stamp, molding him.  Although “Tamerlane” is Poe’s idealized telling of the story of a 14th Century Mongol conqueror, his application of the “nature boy” motif is relevant because he uses the same device to describe his own childhood.  For example, in “Romance” (1829), he writes,

To me a painted paroquet 

Hath been — a most familiar bird — 

Taught me my alphabet to say — 

To lisp my very earliest word 

While in the wild wood I did lie, 

A child — with a most knowing eye.

Here, the description borders on that of a “feral child,” raised and reared by animals.  The premise has implications for other themes later taken up by Poe: his view of himself as an outcast, his inability to relate to human society, the pantheistic inclination to look to the supernatural and to the spirit world, to name a few.  It may have additional relevance to Poe’s identify as an orphan, not raised in a traditional household with his natural parents, but in various places, often fending for himself.  At the same time, It dovetails with the other descriptions of Poe’s childhood contained in his poems, in which he describes his younger years as ones in which he felt himself to be in his element, in an adulterated state of happiness, whose loss he would continually mourn thereafter.

For I was not as I had been; 

The child of Nature, without care