The Victorian poetry is divided in two main groups of poetry: The High Victorian Poetry and The Pre-Raphaelites. Dealing with the first group, “the major High Victorian poets were Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barret Browning, Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins.”

(cf.< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_poetry#Victorian_poetry. >).

Queen Victoria's reign made the idea of empire appear in poetry, and one of the poets who used it was Tennyson. For Robert Browning, the dramatic monologue was a great innovation, but Alfred Tennyson and Dante Rossetti invented and used it too (in the Pre-Raphaelites). ”T o be a dramatic monologue a poem must have a speaker and an implied auditor, and that the reader often perceives a gap between what that speaker says and what he or she actually reveals”, but there are some poets that does not agree with this last idea as Glenn Everett who “proposes that Browninesque dramatic monologue has three requirements (1.The reader takes the part of the listener. 2. The speaker uses a case-making, argumentative tone. 3. We complete the dramatic scene from within, by means of inference and imagination.)”. Elizabeth Barret Browning's poetry was important for the feminist literature because before her poetry there were not too much poetry about feminism. Matthew Arnold was “influenced by Wordsworth” and “often considered a precursor of the modernist revolution.” And Hopkins wrote in an unusual style and influenced a lot of the 1940s' poets.

(cf.<http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/dm1.html>)

Victorian poetry does not have a topic in the poems about love and worship of Nature as the Romantics had in their poetry. It is because the Romantics loved Nature and it was shown through their poems adoring and blessing her as if she were God. But, in the Victorian poetry we have not found themes related to the topic of this paper, love and worship of Nature because the Victorians do not talk about her in their poetry. Therefore, we will not relate this topic with the Victorians, but we will talk about the Nature that the Victorian poets refer to in the descriptions of places in the poems and the love and worship of God in comparison with love and worship of Nature, Nature understood as part of God, created by Him, maybe as a personification of God himself in the Earth.

First of all, it can be mentioned that, the selection of poems has been made taking only the topic of this work into account and not the importance of the poem itself in the poet's poems. Then, we are going to show some of the poems of the most important High Victorian poets that refer to Nature or that have some aspects related with Nature:

Tennyson was a poet laureate of England by the Queen Victoria, and became very popular in the Victorian public. He makes a reference to Nature in the poem Song: ‘The winds, as at their hour of birth':

The winds , as at their hour of birth,

Leaning upon the ridged sea ,

Breathed low around the rolling earth

With mellow preludes, ‘We are free.'

The streams, through many a lilied row

Down-carolling to the crisped sea ,

Low-tinkled with a bell-like flow

Atween the blossoms , ‘We are free.'

(<http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/lippi/iwama6.html .>)

This poem is about that freedom that Nature gives us. When we look at Nature we feel free, without any tie that binds us to live as happens in society, because we live with rules and we have to follow them. Therefore, this freedom only can be found in Nature, looking at the sea and the earth with its flowers (lilies and blossoms). In Tennyson's poetry his polished verses seem to express the important cultural, social and religious concerns of the Victorians.

Browning got married with Elizabeth Barrett (another Victorian poet who appears in this work too). Browning's poetry presents a wide variety of voices. He broke the mold of conventional Victorian poetic style and thus became an especially important influence on the great moderns. He makes another reference to Nature in the poem “Fra Lippo Lippi” , whose name makes reference to an Italian Renaissance painter, Fra Filippo Lipi :

[...] 286 You speak no Latin more than I , belike;
However, you're my man, you've seen the world
-- The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades,
290 Changes, surprises, — and God made it all!
-- For what? Do you feel thankful, ay or no,
For this fair town's face, yonder river's line,
The mountain round it and the sky above,
Much more the figures of man, woman, child,
295 These are the frame to? What's it all about?
To be passed over, despised? Or dwelt upon,
297 Wondered at? Oh, this last of course! — you say. [...]

(<http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/lippi/iwama6.html>)

Elizabeth makes a reference to Nature in the Sonnet XLIV that appears in Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), a sequence of sonnets where is detailed her love with Browning (her husband):

XLIV

Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers

Plucked in the garden , all the summer throught,

And winter , and it seems as if they grew

In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers . [...]

http://www.everypoet.com/Archive/poetry/Elizabeth_Barret_Browning/elizabeth_browning_sonnets_44.html

Arnold was an English poet who criticized the materialism of the Victorian age and laments the fargility of love, but he also describes scenes of natural beauty that reminds one of the Romantic poets. He makes a reference to Nature in Lines Written in Kensington Gardens:

[...] 5 Birds here make song, each bird has his,

Across the girdling city's hum.

How green under the boughs it is!

8 How thick the tremulous sheep -cries come!

[...] 13 Here at my feet what wonders pass,

What endless, active life is here!

What blowing daisies , fragrant grass !

16 An air-stirr'd forest , fresh and clear. [...]

(<http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/94.html>)

Hopkins was an intellectual who was captivated by the ritual of Roman Catholicism. He makes reference to Nature in the poem The Windhover where we can read the note (To Christ our Lord) which means that the poem is addressed to God:

1 I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

Dom of daylight's dauphin , dapple-dawn-dwan Falcon , in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air , and striding

Hight here, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

5 In his ecstacy! Then off, off forth on swing.

As a skat's heel sweeps smooth on bow-bend:

The hurl and the gliding

Rebuffed the big wind . My hearth in hiding

Stirred for a bird , --the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

•  Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air , pride, plume, here

•  Buckle! And the fire [...]

(http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hopkins/hopkins10.html )

BIBLIOGRAPHY:  

•  Alfred Lord Tennyson's Poetry : < http://home.att.net/~tennysonpoetry/index.htm>17/12/06

•  Bristow, Joseph. The Cambridge Companion to Poetry. Cambridge University Press 2000. (xv Preface)

•  Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Every Poet . Home: < http://www.everypoet.com >

<http://www.everypoet.com/Archive/poetry/Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning/elizabeth_browning_sonnets_44.html>17/12/06

•  Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Archive of Classic Poems. Home:

< http://www.everypoet.com>

<http://www.everypoet.com/Archive/poetry/Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning/elizabeth_browning_sonnets_44.html>17/12/06

•  Representative Poetry Online . The University of Toronto Libraries:

< http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/display/index.cfm >

< http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/94.html >17/12/06

•  The Victorian Web: Home: < www.victorianweb.org >

< http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/dm1.html>17/12/06

< http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/lippi/iwama6.html>17/12/06

< http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hopkins/hopkins10.html>17/12/06

•  The Wikipedia Web: Home: < www.wikipedia.org >

“Victorian Poetry” The Wikipedia Web.

< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_poetry#Victorian_poetry >17/12/06

< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_poets >17/12/06