Paper short abstract:

This transdisciplinary paper explores how the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's figures of trees sound out human and nonhuman harmony and discord. Anticipating works of modern arboreal ecology, the treescapes of Shelley's poetry are transhistorical sites of communication and interconnection.

Paper long abstract:

This paper contributes to the developing intersections between the arboreal humanities and Romantic Studies with particular attention to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘botanical poetry’, recently defined by Cian Duffy as ‘poems which not only have a plant as their ostensible subject, or which develop extended plant imagery, but which also engage, either explicitly or implicitly, with contemporary botanical discourses and practices’. Shelley’s ‘botanical poetry’ demonstrates an ecological awareness that complements contemporary environmental discourses around human and nonhuman connections, especially through his figures of trees. Anticipating modern landmark works on arboreal ecology by Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohlleben, Shelley's 'botanical poetry' emphasises interconnectedness and communication.

Shelley's treescapes are sites of human and nonhuman harmony and discord, from 'the Norway woodman' who 'quells' the 'howling' pine forest, to the 'woodman, whose rough heart was out of tune' with the 'singing' forests ('Lines Written among the Euganean Hills', 1818; 'The Woodman and the Nightingale', 1820-21). Extending Frederike Middelhoff’s focus on ‘the nonverbal soundscapes of poplar articulations’, where ‘the Romantics developed a poetics which acknowledged poplar articulations as part of the process of…historicizing the present’, to Shelley’s treescapes, this paper reveals how the poet echoes Mary Wollstonecraft’s communion with Scandinavian forests in ‘Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark’ (1796). Wollstonecraft’s witnessing of landscapes transformed by the eighteenth-century timber trade in Norway grate against her ‘poetical images’ of ‘audible—nay, musical’ aspens and pines. This discord shapes Shelley’s arboreal soundscapes, culminating in the pines of his last lyrics that ‘echo all harmonious thought’ (1822).