To a Gentleman, on his Design of Cutting Down a Shady Walk
In plaintive Notes, that tun’d to Woe
The sadly sighing Breeze,
A weeping Hamadryad mourn’d
Her Fate-devoted Trees.
Ah! Stop thy sacrilegious Hand,
Nor violate the Shade,
Where Nature form’d a silent Haunt
For Contemplation’s Aid.
Canst thou, the Son of Science, train’d
Where learned Isis flows,
Forget that nurs’d in shelt’ring Groves
The Grecian Genius rose.
Beneath the Platane’s spreading Branch,
Immortal Plato taught:
And fair Lyceum form’d the Depth
Of Aristotle’s Thought.
To Latian Groves reflect thy View,
And bless the Tuscan Gloom:
Where Eloquence deplor’d the Fate
Of Liberty and Rome.
Within the Beechen Shade retir’d,
From each inspiring Bough,
The Muses wove unfading Wreaths,
To circle Virgil’s Brow.
Reflect, before the fatal Ax
My threatened Doom has wrought:
Nor sacrifice to sensual Taste
The nobler Growth of Thought.
Not all the glowing Fruits, that blush
On India’s sunny Coast,
Can recompense thee for the Worth
Of one Idea lost.
My Shade a Produce may supply,
Unknown to solar Fire:
And what excludes Apollo’s Rays,
Shall harmonize his Lyre.
There’s an even more expansive version of the title of this week’s poem. Dating, I’d guess, from the poem’s anthology publication in 1763, the later title allows the gentleman a tiny fragment of exculpation: “To a Gentleman, on his intending to cut down a Grove to enlarge his Prospect.” It’s a subtle piece of editing. An intention is less incriminating than a “design” and the general merit of enlarging a prospect should be taken into account by readers before deciding that tree destruction is a capital offence.
James Uden tells us all about Elizabeth Carter’s poem in an entertaining, scholarly and wide-ranging essay, beginning with a portrayal of Carter herself. On an outing with “gentlemen” companions, she sets off ecstatically alone to the top of a wooded hill: the boys call her Pegasus, and “aerobates” (air-walker) add quips about witches and broomsticks. On another occasion she steals some laurel from Pope’s Twickenham garden. Carter comes across as “a character” – and these glimpses suggest her letters would be great fun to read.
Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806) was the leading female classical scholar of the period. She was educated by her clergyman father, and learned Hebrew and the classical languages at a young age. The educational regimen was strict, and, possibly, the memory of being confined indoors for study is a personal context for the poet’s praise of shade as conducive to ideas.
From stanza two onwards, the poem’s speaker is the “weeping Hamadryad”. The Hamadryades were the tree nymphs of classical Greek mythology. Such a nymph was “one with” her tree: not so much a spirit inhabiting it, as the tree psyche itself. So “Fate-devoted”, Carter’s unexpected compound adjective, seals the identification of tree and nymph: the tree’s fate must be her own. When the tree is cut down, the hamadyrad perishes. Uden cites Ovid and the story of axe-wielding Erysichthon in Metamorphosis. The tree-chopper, Carter implies, could be in for severe retribution.
Maybe, in “Fate-devoted Trees”, Carter is also enjoying a joke with her friends, brilliant women warned by society to accept their fate as women, and not at all inclined to do so. Then again, the note of fatalism may remind us that Carter translated the complete works of the Stoic philosopher, Epictetus.
Carter’s “green” focus is on the intellectual “growth” and “fruits” afforded by shade. She references Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Virgil (stanzas four, five and six) as recipients of their intellectual illumination from that source. As Uden points out, their “shades” inhabit the woodlands and groves for Carter: the “Walk” is “shady” in this way, too. Carter’s light touch may nonetheless conceal the anxiety of a woman about her freedom to explore intellectual ideas, to branch out, to risk being cut down.
The “platane” reference is interesting, not only in connection with Plato. In Handel’s aria, Ombra mai fu, Xerxes praises lovingly the plane-tree that shades him as he rests on his march from Asia to conquer Greece. Xerxes is no “Grecian genius” but I can’t help wondering if Carter might have heard Handel’s opera performed in London, and if that exquisite melody could be threading distantly through the stately quatrains of her shade-enchanted poem.
The identity of the gentleman in question is known: it was Dr Walwyn of Canterbury, who wanted to cut down the trees so the fruit he was growing could get more sunlight. Uden warns us against reading the poem as a verse letter directed to Walwyn, arguing that Carter wrote the poem principally for the eyes of her “bluestocking” friends. Walwyn probably didn’t see it, but if he did, it made no difference. Intent on his prospect-enlarging fruit production, he went ahead and cut down the trees.
