Robert Bloomfield on the Aeolian Harp: ‘Nature’s Music’, by Hugh Underhill

‘The Bard whom Nature greets as all her own…. artless is, like thine, his song’. [1] 

For the later eighteenth-century, ‘Nature’s Music’ or ‘The Music of Nature’ were phrases to conjure with. They engage a clutch of the period’s intellectual and imaginative preoccupations, and in evolving ways the adjective ‘Aeolian’, and imagery associated with the Wind Harp, were to continue to exercise a fascination over the literary mind during much of the nineteenth century. Robert Bloomfield may have known of the Harp from an early age. His short poem ‘Aeolus’ appeals to the breeze on a sultry day to ‘Arise’ and, bringing country airs with it to the city, to perform on what is presumably one of the harps made by himself. He wishes that the harp’s ‘soft vibrations’ should ‘whisper love / And fancied choirs of heavenly song.’ [2]  This diction and imagery is consistent with much that he quotes in his pamphlet ‘Nature’ s Music’. His intention appears to be to endorse such rhapsodizings, but I think that the pamphlet is likely to strike us now as illustrating how ready-to-hand that language and sentiment had become by the date of its compilation in 1808. I want ultimately to address how redundant, in fact, the best of Bloomfield’s own writing makes them. As Marion Walker wrote, ‘Other men’s music rang in his ears’, [3]  yet his own world of experience and manner of registering it in verse are distinctive.

The instrument itself had already been known for a long time. Jonathan Mansfield in his Design and Construction of an Aeolian Harp has an Italian illustration dating from circa 1650. [4]  It had been a fashion item, or what Geoffrey Grigson tartly calls a ‘toy’, in prosperous English households since mid-century. [5]  The instrument-makers Alan and Nina Grove possess a harp made by William Banks of Salisbury dated 1787, the oldest existing English Aeolian harp, and ‘probably the oldest dated harp in Europe.’ [6]  Grigson gives reasons for thinking that the instrument was ‘launched’ in London between 1741 and 1748 when James Thomson published The Castle of Indolence; certainly from about that date it acquired an emblematic status among poets. By 1806 (perhaps some years previously) Bloomfield was making and selling harps himself. His patron Capel Lofft refers in a letter of that year to a harp ‘constructed by yourself’, and asks ‘Can you give me a hint in what respect your construction differs?’ In a letter of the following year Bloomfield complains of ‘the accumulating plagues which arise from my Harp trade’. [7]  The Groves believe that he indeed made important innovations in the design of the harp, and his ‘Nature’s Music’, though presented with his customary openness and modesty, and in his usual unaffected prose, witnesses both to researches of considerable thoroughness, and to an interest in the harp at once practical and technical, and poetic and musical (albeit he more than once calls himself ‘no musician’).

He begins his ‘book of extracts’ with prose passages which include accounts of the history of the harp and its figurations in myth, as well as ‘practical observations’ (as the title-page has it) on its construction, and speculation about the ‘principles’ on which it performs. He then moves on to his ‘poetical testimonies’. For all his immediate commercial and practical worries, and fascinating as the sounds produced by the wind on the harp often were and are found, it is, I think, the preoccupation discussed by Grigson in his essay with the harp as ‘an image and a property in poetry’ that most strongly emerges from Bloomfield’s pamphlet. The early-established conceit that for Giles ‘The fields [were] his study; Nature was his book’ is at the heart of The Farmer’s Boy. So the appeal for Bloomfield of that ‘Music of Nature’[8]  which was widely taken to materialize in the sounds from the harp is obvious. There would have been plenty in Bloomfield’s reading to familiarize him with traditional commonplaces about Art and Nature, of ‘nature’ standing in opposition to ‘art’ and ‘culture’. Readers of Addison earlier in the century had been instructed that ‘If we consider the works of Nature and Art, as they are qualified to enter the imagination, we shall find the last very defective in comparison with the former….’ (Spectator, 414). In his ‘Argument’ summarizing Book I of The Task (1785), William Cowper describes ‘The works of nature’ as ‘superior to and in some instances inimitable by art.’ (In that poem, he also uses the phrase ‘Nature’s music’: Book III, line 600.) Some such distinction is felt throughout Bloomfield’s selections. Charles Bucke distinguishes between ‘the Eolian lyre’ as the only ‘natural’ instrument and all others which are ‘artificial’ (p. 121). William Mason (a friend of the poet Gray who had made a harp for himself) hears in the harp ‘…many a warble wild and artless air’ (p. 133), while lines from Mrs. Opie resolve that ‘when art’s labour’d strains my feelings tire, / To seek thy simple music shall be mine’ (p. 139). But this felt opposition makes the title-phrase ‘Nature’s Music’ an oxymoron, the implications of which, I suggest, are either lost on most of Bloomfield’s ‘poetical testimonies’, or which they are disinclined to probe. By contrast, it seems to me, Bloomfield’s own verse, by means I shall indicate later, actually confronts that oxymoron and collapses the traditional dichotomy. He is breaking the mould.

The harp in Spenser’s The Ruins of Time (III.2) which produces ‘most heavenly noise… of the strings, stirred by a warbling wind’ is noted more than once, but Bloomfield judges Thomson’s in The Castle of Indolence (where Thomson imitates and parodies Spenser) the ‘most true and most delightful’ description of the Aeolian Harp’s music:

          Behoves no more
Than sidelong, to the gentle waving wind
To lay the well-tuned instrument reclined;
From which, with airy, flying fingers light,
Beyond each mortal touch the most refined,
The God of Winds drew sounds of deep delight:

these sounds being ‘Wild warbling nature all, above the reach of art.’ (I, xl-xli; Remains, p. 129). But Bloomfield’s extracts, in that period when, it often feels, any educated person of sufficient leisure could turn his or her hand to a sonnet or an ode, all draw on the same commonplaces and verse-conventions, and on the fashionable idiom of Sensibility. He himself comments on the way these ‘verses… exhibit a similarity’. ‘Warbling’ and ‘zephyrs’ are almost obligatory, and the notion of sounds beyond the ‘mortal’, as well as above the reach of ‘art’, colluding with imagery of spirits and angels, is everywhere. Mrs. Opie has a ‘rapt enthusiast’ who ‘thinks the melting strains / A choir of angels breathe… / …to the gale their silken pinions stream, / While in the quivering trees soft zephyrs sigh’ (p. 139). ‘Pinions’, ‘ethereal’ and ‘celestial’ have a high popularity rating: ‘Methinks I hear the full celestial choir’ (Thomson again); ‘Ten thousand Sylphs, on lightest pinions borne, / To realms ethereal on your murmurs fly’ (p. 126). The lines Bloomfield cites from ‘Goodwin’ (p. 135) are virtually a compendium of all this, and the writer speaks fancifully of listening to the harp ‘far retired from the busy throng, / In vine-clad cottage’ where ‘Thy murmurs mingling with the moss-fringed brook / Should lull my soul to happiness and peace!’ The poetry of rural retreat, drawing on classical models and the tradition of Pastoral, had been produced in some quantity throughout the eighteenth century; but this is a significantly modified tone. We are verging here on ‘the romantic Nature of the individual soul’ (Grigson, p. 29), rather than the rational Nature of the Augustans. Some extracts acknowledge also the power of the harp’s music to alarm rather than soothe, or to be melancholy rather than rapturous, even, in one ‘testimony’, ‘portending death’. Mrs. Opie finds the music to veer between the two: ‘…but shrill and swift, the tones / In wild disorder strike upon the ear. / Pale Frenzy listens, kindred wildness owns…’ (p. 138). Both the desire for states of mind in which the ‘soul’ could feel in harmony with nature – a withdrawal from the troubled world – and for thrilling effects – wild, frenzied, even frightening – register the current running towards Romanticism.

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Brown and Boyle’s survey (see note 4) and Grigson’s essay both augment Bloomfield’s ‘testimonies’ among English writers and show interest in the harp in this period extending throughout European literature. If Bloomfield’s tally has omissions, what is remarkable, given his situation and background, is how far his reading stretched. Striking, though, is the absence of Coleridge, whose ‘The Eolian Harp’ of 1795 and ‘Dejection; An Ode’ of 1802 were both, in addition to a number of other poems which mention the harp, in the public realm by the time Bloomfield wrote his pamphlet. Coleridge explored, with characteristic volatility of mood as well as imaginative range beyond any of Bloomfield’s testifiers, both extremes of response to the music. In the earlier of these poems, ‘that simplest Lute, / Placed length-ways in the clasping casement’ ‘pours such sweet upbraiding’ as well as ‘long sequacious notes’ which ‘Over delicious surges sink and rise, / Such a soft floating witchery of sound / As twilight Elfins make….’ The harp sounded by the wind is a symbol of the creative impulse, of the imagination which for Coleridge synthesises all into unity. In the later ‘Dejection; An Ode’, that touchstone of the Romantic temper, the harp, far from having power to console, sends forth ‘a scream / Of agony by torture lengthened out’. Its sounds are ‘mad’ and ‘tragic’. Neither does Bloomfield, though he had certainly read Lyrical Ballads, [9]  seem to have known The Prelude of 1805. There Wordsworth, too, takes the harp’s music as emblematic of Nature’s power to affect mood and shape meditation. At I, lines 101-7 his soul encounters ‘Aeolian visitations’ but the harp’s ‘harmony’ falls to silence (as it would with a lack of a breeze); and at III, l. 137 he describes himself as ‘obedient’ to Nature as ‘a lute / That waits upon the touches of the wind.’ Other extensions of the Aeolian image into Romantic thought such as Shelley’s could not have been known by Bloomfield: the Defence of Poetry of 1821, at the outset of which Shelley defined poetry as ‘the expression of the imagination’ by reference to the Aeolian harp, or a passage of Prometheus Unbound (1820: Act IV, 185-8) which also employs the imagery.

The process of mystification involved in this oxymoron, this idea of ‘nature’s music’, is called by Grigson ‘a pleasant convenient act of self-deception. Man, by artifice if not art, arranges several strings on a rectangular pine-wood box, the wind moves the strings; and the man-arranged music is not man-made, but made from Nature, is Nature’s music, made audible’ (p. 29). The initiators of the process, such as Thomson and Christopher Smart, show a certain Augustan appreciation of the paradox of an instrument constructed by man and then played by nature. (The latter’s ‘Inscriptions on an Aeolian Harp’, first published in 1750, fits Bloomfield’s testimonies well but was apparently unknown to him; his ‘Jubilate Agno’, with its reference to the harp at 1.250, remained unpublished until 1939). [10]  But any intellectual bite in that paradox slipped away in the harp’s popularization. The idea of its music became merely a loose image, facilitating an easy projection of self into ‘nature’. The music could be put at the service of any kind of mood, and could stand in almost to order as token of ‘inspiration’, short-circuiting the exigencies of ‘art’. It must be said that the contents of Bloomfield’s pamphlet, and his own ‘Aeolus’, indicate no interest in an explicit critique. He was conscious that in certain respects he was doing something different, [11]  but I don’t think he had the means to conceptualize, even had he wished to, how radical a departure a composition like The Farmer’s Boy was making from the ways of perceiving and feeling ‘Nature’s Music’ documents.

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We will find plenty of evidence – in such poems as ‘To His Wife’ (‘Thou know’st how much I love to steal away / From noise, from uproar, and the blaze of day … This is the chorus to my soul so dear’, lines 17-18, 31) or ‘Shooter’s Hill’ (‘ To hide me from the public eye, / And keep the throne of Reason clear… I took my staff and wander’d here’, lines 17-18, 20) – of Bloomfield withdrawing from the turmoil of city life to harmonize his ‘soul’ with nature. But how interestingly here he is poised, with that reference to ‘the throne of Reason’, between the rational nature, with its essentially civic ethos, of the eighteenth-century pastoralists, and the Romantics’ nature of the ‘individual soul’. Bloomfield is retreating at once like the former from the corruption, excess, and vanity of the city, and like the Romantics from the London of the industrial revolution. Yet his ‘wander’d’ suggests little of the Wordsworthian inner quest; I don’t think Bloomfield would have known what to make of the massive subjective enterprise of The Prelude. And Bloomfield was not only unequipped by education for the realms of metaphysical speculation into which the harp’s music carries Coleridge, but the physical concentration of his verse puts them out of the question. His temper is anti-romantic; there is never that intensity of concentration on self. In the stanzas of ‘Shooter’s Hill’ he is concerned not only with a repudiation of wealth and fame echoing that of the eighteenth-century moralists, but about ‘disease’, ‘want’ and lack of ‘liberty’ afflicting others as well as himself. Bloomfield’s ‘soul’ is only one in a community of souls, seeking to re-establish contact also with the harmonies and rhythms of a lived and toiled-in countryside, where he locates an ideal of ‘amity and social love’ (The Farmer’s Boy, IV, 8) – a version of the civic, in other words. His cast of mind, sober and sociable, is formed by the eighteenth-century, and his language and often style preserve those of its later decades, not by any means free of the stock diction, of borrowings and echoes, or of the standard rhetorical procedures such as personification and invocation. Yet, formed as he may be in that mould and admiring of its products, and though his ‘book of extracts’ reflects the shift in the meaning of that complex word ‘nature’ away from its connotations for Enlightenment rationalism, it is hard to relate his ‘testimonies’ to his own poetic practice. The writing and sentiments there possess an artificiality which looks vacuous beside his own naturalness and down-to-earthness, and are settled within well-worn verse-forms with a certain decorous complacency which the freshness and resourcefulness he brings to a remarkable range of established forms make look tired and uninventive.

Certainly we will find the ‘pinions’, for instance, so beloved of those testimonies: ‘The cawing rook his glossy pinions spreads’ (‘To His Wife’). But these ‘pinions’ are very material wings, not celestial ones. He is always so close in to his very earthly subjects; rather than ‘angels breath’, we have the ‘warm exhalations’ of the animals’ breath as they crowd round Giles waiting to be fed in winter (The Farmer’s Boy, IV, l. 40). Thomson, from whom he takes his model of a ‘seasons’ poem, was constantly, despite his painterly emphasis on the visual, moving away from particularity toward generalization, a formal distancing which disallows the active, intimate relationship with the observed scene we find in Bloomfield – or, one might add, in John Clare’s ‘seasons’ poem, The Shepherd’s Calendar. We’re much more likely to hear the geese raising ‘Their morning notes of inharmonious praise’ (my italics) than any of those fleeting harmonies of his ‘testimonies’. We’ll find no ‘rapt enthusiast’ in Bloomfield, no flights of ‘fancy’. (‘Fancy’ is sometimes invoked but held at a distance and even seen as likely to ‘deceive’, as at The Farmer’s Boy IV, 289.) The poor mad girl Ann, in ‘Autumn’ (line 109 ff.) is oblivious to the health-giving ‘terrestrial bliss’ of the sunbeams: it isn’t ‘ethereal’ uplift that is looked to by Bloomfield, but the blessings of the terrestrial, the domestic and the communal. More perhaps than he knew, he was amending ‘Nature’ to mean the material circumstances and ‘natural’ affections of daily life, while at the same time crafting his verse vehicles with so deliberate an art that those circumstances and affections are made concrete and pointed for his reader. For many of his readers, to judge by the printed ‘tributes’ to him, [12]  it was indeed what was taken to be his artlessness that was found appealing. Yet his verse-forms are not to be found, after all, in ‘Nature’; they are made – like music, which we customarily speak of ‘making’. The couplets of The Farmer’s Boy were, he said, adopted as a practical recourse, but they move between picture or narrative-in-miniature and reflection with an unpretentious ease; the poem is built of small blocks of couplets, each wound up and fixed in place with a full-chiming rhyme; this allows much flexibility but at the same time the poem is kept pinned to the realities of daily labour and of a lived and populated world. Whether the traditional ballad or other stanza-form, he makes something of his own of it. ‘The Widow to her Hour-Glass’ even comes close to ‘altar’ or ‘pattern’ poetry, where the shape of the stanza imitates the subject of the poem. One could multiply examples; he seldom if ever seems defeated by the form he has chosen. What is often remarkable is the transparency Bloomfield imparts to his forms; however intricate, they don’t draw attention to themselves, hardly ever seem other than the apt form, the poem’s voice sitting so naturally within it that it’s easy to overlook how subtle and skilful such verse-writing is.

In The Castle of Indolence (II, l. 19) Thomson had invoked an Augustan equilibrium: ‘Nature and Art at once, delight and use combined’. But that seems an abstract idealization beside the realized engagement of art with nature Bloomfield’s verse at its best exemplifies. ‘Nature’s Music’ has particular value as a report on cultural process and the state of taste, manifested in this fascination with the idea of the Aeolian Harp, at the turn of the century, and for the access it gives to Bloomfield’s life and concerns. But already before he wrote the pamphlet, his own writing was significantly in advance of the kinds of productions he documents. He saw the world from a robustly individual angle, with an exact first-hand knowledge of his subject both human and natural, a direct feel for the life and textures of the material world, without the romantic baggage of the supernatural (belief in which he invariably deflates), of thrill-seeking or obsessive introspection, and the unforced but deliberative craftsmanship with which he embodies this vision make his at its best a new, and different, kind of writing.

Notes

[1] ‘Tributary poem’ to Bloomfield included by Joseph Weston in The Remains of Robert Bloomfield (London: 1824; see I, p.140). BACK

[2] Remains, I, pp. 62-3. It seems likely that Bloomfield never intended `Aeolus’ for publication. BACK

[3] Bedfordshire Magazine, Summer 1954, 205. BACK

[4] Vol. 1 of Stephen Bonner (ed.), Aeolian Harp (Duxford, Cambs.: Bois de Boulogne, 1968-74). The other volumes are: 2. The history and organology of the Aeolian harp, by Stephen Bonner; 3. The Aeolian harp in European literature, 1591-1892, by Andrew Brown, with additional material by Nicholas Boyle; 4. The acoustics of the Aeolian harp: supplement to vols 1-3, by Stephen Bonner and M.G. Davies, line drawings by Vic Woodward. BACK

[5] Grigson’s very useful and interesting essay is in The Harp of Aeolus and other Essays on Art, Literature and Nature (London: Routledge, 1947, pp. 24-46). BACK

[6] John Goodridge, ‘Bloomfield & the Aeolian Harp: A Conversation with Alan and Nina Grove’, The Robert Bloomfield Society Newsletter, No. 3, March 2002, 11. BACK

[7] The letter from Capel Lofft can be found in Selections from the Correspondence of Robert Bloomfield, ed. W.H. Hart (London, 1870, Letter 41); Bloomfield’s letter appears in The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and his Circle, ed. Tim Fulford, Romantic Circles Electronic Editions. Other letters concerning this ‘trade’ are reprinted in Newsletter, 3. BACK

[8] See the ‘Sonnet’ on p.126 of The Remains, Vol. I. All subsequent page references to ‘Nature’s Music’ are to this text. DIGTIAL EDITION OF NATURE'S MUSIC BACK

[9] See Remains, II, pp. 111, 119. BACK

[10] Karina Williamson in Christopher Smart: Selected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) comments: ‘…”Inscriptions” is one of the first poems to use the Aeolian harp as a trope for spontaneous lyrical utterance.’ BACK

[11] For example, in his ‘Advertisement’ prefacing Good Tidings he speaks of writing on a subject which `appeared… peculiarly unfit for poetry’: vaccination. DIGITAL EDITION OF GOOD TIDINGS BACK

[12] In addition to that by Maria Hester Park on p. 140 here, other tributes are included in the Remains, Appendix to Vol 1, pp. 147-86, and in Tributary Verses to the Memory of Robert Bloomfield, the Suffolk Poet (Woodbridge: B. Smith, 1823). BACK