Addison, Horace, and The Flood

Abstract

Joseph Addison's neo-Latin poem in praise of Thomas Burnet's The Sacred Theory of the Earth describes the primordial deluge by which the surface of the earth was reshaped. The poem refashions language and metre drawn from Horace's Odes in order to accentuate the exorbitant nature of the phenomena it describes. Its distinctively lyric features—apostrophe, present tenses, metre—draw readers into an imaginative involvement with its subject. Readers are thereby enabled to experience their own temporality being informed by the temporal processes that the poem describes. My reading explores the ecocritical possibilities of this experience.

Can we attend to the configurations of the earth in pre-anthropocene lyric poetry in a manner that both does justice to the poetry's distinctive formal and intellectual features, and is responsive to the crisis that encompasses human subjectivity in an age of anthropogenic planetary derangement?¹ If so, what might be the critical benefits of doing so? In offering a (cautiously) positive answer to the first question, I attempt to offer an answer to the second that avoids the lure of falsely consolatory aestheticization, the inertia of melancholy, and the facile reassurance that the pleasure we take in such poetry makes us better, more responsible, inhabitants of the earth.² My claim is that a crucial aspect of lyric's ecocritical potential resides in its capacity to imagine the processes by which human subjects are constituted by their terrestrial environment. I pursue this claim by examining a neo-Latin poem by Joseph Addison. Composed in Horatian alcaeics, the poem celebrates the account given of the primordial Flood in Thomas Burnet's The Sacred Theory of the Earth.³ I argue that the poem urges readers to experience their inner temporality as impinged upon by the temporal rhythms of the earth, even as the poetic articulation of these rhythms marks them as fundamentally and recalcitrantly alien.

The workings of Addison's poem are instances of the capacity to fashion junctures between inner experience and exterior phenomena, a capacity that Charles Altieri identifies as a distinctive feature of lyric poetry. Such junctures occur at moments when "the self's concentrative powers become a means of appreciating how we are modified by our connections with other people and with the natural world" (Altieri 2001.270). Lyric gives particularly affective purchase to such connections, on Altieri's account, by soliciting the intimate involvements that take place when readers lend their voices to the poem and thereby allow themselves to be occupied by the forms of personhood and experience on which voice supervenes. By creating such intimacies, lyric can

sharpen our awareness of the intricate ways we feel our attention and care becoming contoured to other existences. Voicing offers a clear paradigm. We feel intensely what it means to enact the situations of others within our own beings. Analogously we can appreciate in dynamic form how our investments are solicited by the conditions calling forth these voices (Altieri 2001.270).

Addison's poem both accommodates and challenges this understanding of poetic voice. It turns on the relation between a fascination with earth's collapse as a process of destructiveness almost unimaginable in its scale and power, and a drive towards integrating that collapse into an intellectual structure. The poem's descriptions and apostrophes draw readers into "enact[ing] the situation" of a speaker as he wrestles with this paradoxical relationship. Yet when it confronts readers with the vast phenomena of the primordial earth, the poem "contour[s] … attention" to exterior, non-human "existences" that readers can scarcely accommodate, if they can do so at all. Voicing, at such moments, becomes a medium in which readers experience their perturbed temporal conjunction with the earth and its inhabitants.

The poem also creates an opportunity for an ecocritically inflected re-examination of some canonical interpretative concepts: in particular, intertextuality, the sublime, and mimesis. In order to examine these elements, I begin by sketching out the uneasy relationship between conceptual mastery and affective complexity which the poem creates, before considering Addison's reworking of Horace as an instance of this relationship. I then turn to the interactions between metre and language which the poem sets in train, in order to pursue an anti-mimetic reading of its formal constellations.

I. TO CREATE NEW WORLDS

Thomas Burnet's The Sacred Theory of the Earth was originally published in Latin as Telluris Theoria Sacra in 1681; an English version followed in 1684, and the work went through numerous editions throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The Sacred Theory combines the explanatory mechanism of "natural causality" with a detailed reading of scripture in order to demonstrate that the Bible's account of the earth's early history is intellectually coherent. For Burnet, however, this account is adumbratory and reflects the "Design of Providence" to "incite … Curiosity and Inquisitiveness" about the means by which the world was formed (1719.94).⁴ The biblical narrative, therefore, can and should be elaborated and clarified. In pursuing this elaboration, Burnet allies observation and measurements of the materials which compose the earth with probabilistic inferences in order to demonstrate, first, how the earth evolved and, second, that its material form is a reflection of God's providential ordinance.⁵ The result is a narrative that confronts readers with phenomena which can be comprehended according to a logic of material causation and yet occur on a scale that strains the imagination's capacities.⁶

Among Burnet's most significant arguments was that, when it was first created, the earth's surface was smooth and that mountains only came into existence after the Flood. Likewise striking was his central thesis, that the seas were originally encased within the earth and that the Flood was caused not only by rains, but by the surface of the earth cracking open and releasing the waters which had been pent within (1719.72–104). Both Burnet's readings of the Bible and his physics prompted numerous forceful rejoinders. Representative was Herbert Croft, who attacked Burnet for producing "a new and strange interpretation of Scriptures" (1685.59). Croft identified the argument that mountains were a postdiluvial phenomenon as one of the numerous points at which Burnet contradicted the Bible (1685.47–48), while John Keill, in a work published in the same year as the first version of Addison's ode, elaborated a detailed geographical objection, arguing that mountains, being the sources of rivers, are essential to human life and must therefore have existed before the Flood in order to support the early generations of men (1698.54–61).⁷

Addison leaps into this controversy with an ode that accentuates and celebrates Burnet's most provocative ideas. An address (1–12) that commends Burnet's understanding and devotion to "seeking the truth" (veritatem quaerere, 9) is followed by an extensive description of the Flood (13–44) and an anticipation of the new world that will follow the Resurrection and the honour that will be accorded to Burnet (45–56). Of particular relevance to the poem is the objection of some early readers that Burnet downplayed the role of miracles. Croft set the tone for later debate by accusing him of coming dangerously close to a pagan, and specifically Epicurean, outlook, and for envisioning a world in which too much causal force was given to "Nature" acting autonomously.⁸ Addison takes up this gauntlet by focusing almost exclusively on the physical elements of the Flood and by eschewing any explicit emphasis on the Flood as a means employed by God to punish sin (cf. Rappaport 1997.141). Several of the poem's allusions to classical literature can be readily understood as casting Burnet's intellectual explorations not as a disturbingly pagan materialism, but as procedures that put natural philosophy at the service of God's glory.⁹ Nevertheless, the poem's emphasis on material phenomena also opens it to interpretations which privilege the relationship between those phenomena and the finitude of the understandings which human subjects bring to them.

The poem is structured around a relation of near identity between the earth as an historical entity and the earth as an intellectual construct produced by Burnet's mind. The relation reaches its acme in the final stanza, in which terms used to characterize the earth are employed of Burnet himself. The earth's "wide embrace" (gremio capaci, 8), the "mighty" sound that issues when the deluge begins (ingens … fragor, 13), and the weight of the landmass that drives the waters apart (gravis, 16) are compressed into the laudatory apostrophe "o pectus ingens! o animum gravem, | mundi capacem!" ("O mighty heart! O weighty mind, embracing the world!" 53). The collocation into three terse phrases of language previously dispersed across stanzas and narrative segments practices a formal control that acts as a sensuous correlate for Burnet's transmutation of obscure primordial processes into a carefully structured, causally intelligible, narrative. Closing with the hopeful claim that the remade earth will claim Burnet as a civis ("citizen") and thus enact a more potent version of the poem's own regard, the poem appears to articulate a provisionally hopeful trajectory in which the intellectual grasp of geological phenomena manifest in Bur-net's work offers a buttress against the almost unimaginable terror of what the text describes.

Elsewhere, however, the details of poetic form oppose to this structural ordering a dispersal of the reading subject into depersonalizing whorls of affective involvement, as when the power of the deluge as spectacle (13–20) gives rise to an intensely felt response (25–32):

quae pompa vocum non imitabilis!qualis calescit spiritus ingeni!  ut tollis undas! ut frementem    diluvii reprimis tumultum!

quis tam valenti pectore ferreusut non tremiscens et timido pede                    30  incedat, orbis dum dolosi    detegis instabiles ruinas?

What an inimitable parade of words! What spirit of genius warms! How you raise the waves! How you curb the clashing tumult of the flood! Who could be so steely in his vigorous heart, that he would press on without fear, without timorous tread, while you uncover the sliding ruins of the doleful earth?

The "warmth" of authorial inspiration, couched in language lightly reminiscent of sexual desire (calescit), presages the elevating thrill which flutters through the reader's senses when confronting that inspiration's results. Admiration giving way to fear (tremiscens) marks the interruption of the reader's capacity to assimilate Burnet's narrative. Longing for adequacy to the events Burnet describes takes the form of a desire for the comprehension with which he grasped them, which comprehension is so extraordinary that it can be figured not only as "inimitable" but as enacting its subjects (ut tollis undas). But glimpses of this capacity are interleaved with its lack, as timido pede | incedat makes reading a progress checked by fear transfused through the tremulous body, its halting intervals incongruous with earth's gargantuan materials.¹⁰ No sooner has reading been parcelled out into hesitant steps than the "sliding ruins" undo the metaphor's valence and allow only its evacuation to be dissipated across surfaces which it cannot traverse.

In this stanza, therefore, the possibility of conceptual mastery over the Flood as intellectual material, enacted in Burnet's compound of narrative and argument, finds a counterweight in abyssal divagations. Readerly attention is ruptured not only by the obviously sublime features––sounds, distances, and forces of almost unthinkable magnitude (13, 14–20, 45)––which Burnet himself often points to as challenging readers' understanding of his account, but by details such as timido pede, which resist being assimilated into an interpretation that has a securely distanced knowing subject for its vehicle. In the next part of my reading, I analyse a larger manifestation of the relationship between knowledge and affective involvement which is produced by Addison's employment of the Horatian alcaeic stanza.¹¹

II. OF WATERS DARK AND DEEP

Differentiation from Horace is a keystone of Addison's poem. Employing an ancient form as the vehicle for modern philosophical revelations discharges a conventional encomiastic function by suggesting that Burnet's work is worthy of the stanza's august, time-honoured, valence, and by implicitly according him an importance equivalent to the subjects of Horace's encomia.¹² Yet while Addison borrows form and language from Horace, and repurposes well-known Horatian stances such as a disdain for misguided popular opinion (see, e.g., C. 2.16.39–40), his poem's grasp of the deep past and prediction of the future look like a repudiation of Horace's ethics, which often emphasise the importance to human contentment of not striving to look beyond one's immediate situation.¹³ The most important intertextual feature of the poem for my argument, however, is an inconcinnity between the literary associations of the Horatian stanza and the events which Addison uses that stanza to document. These events emerge from a more primordial past and are of a magnitude and significance that outstrip the referential capacity of the terminology and idioms on which Addison draws.¹⁴

Characteristic in its manufacture of disequilibrium between subject matter and inherited rhetorical gesture is the stanza which describes the deluge spilling out and covering the land (17–20):

impulsus erumpit medius liquor,terras aquarum effusa licentia  claudit vicissim; has inter orbis    reliquiae fluitant prioris.

The water in the midst is driven on and leaps out. In turn, the outpoured violence of the waters shuts in the lands, between which flow the remainders of the former earth.

Addison's medius liquor quotes from the passage in Horace Odes 3.3 in which Juno anticipates the power that Rome will have providing that the Romans do not attempt to refound Troy: "horrenda late nomen in ultimas | extendat oras, qua medius liquor | secernit Europen ab Afro" ("may she, being feared, spread her name to the farthest shores, where the sea that lies in their midst sunders Europe from the African," C. 3.3.45–47). Addison changes the meaning of medius liquor from a strait or sea that lies between two continents into a body of water, as glossed by Burnet, which had been penned within the earth's shell, thus equating Horace's phrase to the language used in the Biblical account of the Flood: "the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened" (Genesis 7:11).

A more extensive intertextual juxtaposition is also legible, in which a rupture manifests itself not only between phenomena, but between the means by which they are accorded significance. Roman might is belittled by an exorbitantly greater phenomenon: an extension of power that leaves geographical and cultural boundaries intact (Europen secernit ab Afro) is displaced by an extrusion (erumpit) that brings about both a temporary (claudit) and a permanent change in the earth's character. Juno's earlier reference to the sea is similarly recast: Rome will remain intact, she says, "while the long sea rages between Ilium and Rome" ("dum longus inter saeviat Ilion | Romamque pontus," C. 3.3.37–38). Whereas Horace's poem envisions a force whose predictable, enduring containment (despite saeviat, which names a bounded action) is the assumed premise of Juno's self-interested narrative, Addison's liquor is radically disruptive, the medium through which God intervenes into geological time in order to begin the moral renovation necessitated by postlapsarian iniquities.¹⁵

When Addison evokes Horace's own account of the deluge at the beginning of Odes 1.2, he subjects his ancient antecedent to a similar pressure. Addison's picture of God bringing the world to its final end ("nimbis rubentem sulphureis Iovem | cernas," "you will behold Jove reddening with sulphurous clouds," 37–38) amplifies Horace's picture in his poem's opening stanza of "father" Jupiter "terrifying" Rome with his "glowing-red right hand" ("pater et rubente | dextera … terruit urbem," C. 1.2.2–4). More subtle is the interaction between the two poems' accounts of the experiences that the deluge makes possible. Whales, previously shut within waters enclosed by earth, can now see upwards to the heavens (21–24):¹⁶

nunc et recluso carcere lucidambalaena spectat solis imaginem,  stellasque miratur natantes,    et tremulae simulacra lunae.

Now, its prison opened, the whale sees the clear image of the sun, and marvels at the swimming stars, and at the apparitions of the trembling moon.

Addison here offers an alternative to the account of the deluge in Odes 1.2.5–12. Such is the dread which Jupiter strikes into Horace's contemporaries that the "snow and hail" (1–2) he sends are feared to presage a return of the primordial flood, when Deucalion and Pyrrha beheld humans born from rocks and Proteus found himself shepherding sea-creatures among the mountains (C. 1.2.5–12):

          … grave ne rediretsaeculum Pyrrhae nova monstra questae,omne cum Proteus pecus egit altos    visere montis

piscium et summa genus haesit ulmo,nota quae sedes fuerat columbis,                    10et superiecto pavidae natarunt    aequore dammae.

… lest there return the terrible age of Pyrrha, who lamented new marvels, when Proteus drove his whole herd to look on the high mountains, and the race of fish clung to the top of elm trees, which had been the seat of doves, and when frightened deer swam in the flood that covered all.

To Horace's picture of a sensory world that is both disordered and homogeneous: the patterns of life and perception upended by "fish" and "deer" being forced to endure the same aqueous displacement that is characterized by "lament" and "fear," Addison opposes interruptive change as experiential opening. The whale's "wonder" (miratur) is a pure openness to phenomena in their self-disclosure, untrammelled by the practical, purposive considerations that make the deer fearful and lead the fish to search for shelter among the treetops. The newly disclosed heavens are Horace's nova monstra which the whale can marvel at without grief (questae).

Not content with denoting this "wonder," Addison's stanza transports readers into the whale's experience by articulating it in time. Whereas Proteus's creatures direct a single perception towards the unfamiliar "mountains" (altos | visere montis), the whale's initial looking (spectat) develops into a continuing "wonder" (miratur), the contents of which are sketched as the stanza develops. The "clear image of the sun" is succeeded by the "swimming stars"—the qualification given additional point by its revision of Horace, whose deer swim (natarunt) in a forced adaptation to an unfamiliar medium. The stellas … natantes seen by the whale, by contrast, are a blazon of expanding apprehension, in which, as the stars' movement is inflected by that of the water which channels their larger courses into momentary gestures, relational contiguities briefly predominate over the distances and differences that structure the cosmos. The final line conducts us towards a still more subtle involvement. Like the stars, the moon also announces itself through the sea's incessant undulations; its "trembling" (tremulae) assimilates it to the apparitions (simulacra) through which it is revealed as they are scattered through the water in ceaseless but circumscribed oscillation.¹⁷ The stanza thus adumbrates a sensory version of the larger illuminations which the poem documents (ignota pandis, "you lay open things unknown," 10; see n. 9 above), by making the movement from day to night trace a perceptual intensification: the feeling of a world being invaded by successively finer, more delicate, traces of light. As we articulate this process in reading, we reach towards the world as it disclosed itself in the whale's perceptions and lend ourselves to the contours of that world as they echo in us.

The sensory granularity with which this stanza holds open wonder as a congregation of perceptual intensities occurs in juxtaposition with another, very different intellectual trajectory. When read against the background of seventeenth-century responses to classical antiquity, some elements of Addison's Horatian language can be readily interpreted as laying claim to a truer, more developed understanding of the world than was available to ancient pagan authors. The notion that pagan poetry and philosophy adumbrated the truths that were revealed in the Bible has a long history¹⁸ and is the premise on which Burnet bases his assessment of such works' evidential value (1719.5):

'Tis true, the Poets, who were the most Ancient Writers amongst the Greeks, and serv'd them both for Historians, Divines, and Philosophers, have deliver'd some Things concerning the first Ages of the World, that have a fair resemblance of Truth, and some Affinity with those Accounts that are given of the same Things by Sacred Authors, and these may be of use in due Time and Place.

With his evocation of Horace's version of the Flood, which itself descends from more ancient "Things concerning the first Ages of the World,"¹⁹ Addison invites readers to see that, thanks to Burnet's exposition of biblical revelations, he can improve on the "fair resemblance of Truth" which Horace Odes 1.2.5–12 contains.²⁰ More forcefully still, Addison's medius liquor makes pagan vocabulary accommodate a new referential domain.

As my earlier readings have begun to suggest, however, other elements of the poem complicate recourse to the attentional mode on which such a developmental interpretation is premised, namely, that of the analytical reader who enjoys an affectively uniform pleasure and is insulated by temporal distance from the perturbations which the subject matter occasions.²¹ The present tense verbs that describe the deluge (13–20) and the whale's response (spectat … miratur, 22–23) emphasise that the poem itself, as Jonathan Culler argues (2015.226–29), constitutes an event, as well as evoking or representing exterior occurrences. The poem's thrilling, unsettling texture of attention enters into, and gains purchase on, readers, remaking the experiential "now" that they inhabit. The poem's intertextual relations similarly implicate the reader's historicity. When attending to echoes of Horace's poetry, readers encounter a tension between recollections of the historically specific formalization of attention and understanding which the Horatian idiom manifests, and a grasp of reality that attempts to pull itself away from that idiom's limitations in order to be adequate to what it attempts to uncover.²² Even as they suggest intellectual development, therefore, these echoes remind readers that the resources with which knowledge of classical literature equips them can be brakes on understanding as well as imaginative affordances. Simultaneously, the referential limitations inscribed within Horatian language suggest that the phenomena denoted by phrases such as medius liquor might elude full parsing by any form of cognition brought to bear on them, regardless of how thoroughgoing an understanding that cognition might produce.

By juxtapositing these temporal registers––the experiential present in which the whale's wonder resonates, the historical associations of the Latin language, and the intellectual history in which Burnet's work is situated, the poem puts the temporality of the reader at issue. Attending to the poem entails positioning oneself within the providential narrative asserted in the poem's final stanzas and accommodating one's understanding of the past to Burnet's arguments. But it also entails experiencing one's own present time as the site of imaginative reversions that could complicate, or perhaps even undo, aspirations to philosophically developed understanding. When subject to the whale's wonder, the reader's time is also felt as a medium of depropriation, a dimension that can be given over to and reshaped by the temporalities of others as they are fashioned by the poem. In the final part of my reading, I turn to the poem's metrical form in order to consider the ecocritical ramifications of this last type of temporal involvement.

III. ENVIRONING RELATIONS

The account of the whale marvelling at the heavens is a particularly subtle instance of metre being wrought into new significance. When the reader versed in Horace's metrical artistry hears the short syllables of the stanza's final line (et tremulae simulacra lunae, – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ – –) that contrast with the heavier measure that precedes (– – ⏑ – – – ⏑ – –), a familiar partitioning of time emerges alongside the hint of an equally familiar stylistic gesture. Readers attuned to the parallels between sound and sense that Horace often suggests with this pairing of lines,²³ and trained in the critical tradition of finding mimetic significance in such parallelism,²⁴ can readily detect an apt fit between the quavering movement denoted in tremulae … lunae and the hastening of the voice drawn across the line's light syllables. The metrical sequence punctuates and inflects experience, differentiating the eye's diffusion among the simulacra from the action of the previous line, in which elongation of breath is matched with the longer courses and transfixed lingering of stellasque miratur natantes.

Other elements of these lines, however, tell against their being read as the stable recycling of a familiar mimetic mechanism and its associated affective register. Perhaps most obvious is the sheer strangeness of the psychological encounter we are projected into when confronted by the wonder which the whale feels. The lines have more than a hint of comic incongruity, but a wholly wry, amused response is forestalled by the grandeur of the vistas on which they open. To take this wonder as a contentless, superficial intensity in which we should find only a spur to our own, more capacious, thinking, would risk missing not only the invitation to relate to the whale's lifeworld as singular, and therefore valuable in giving rise to a singular form of attention,²⁵ but also the interruption wrought in us by the emergence into our consciousness of the unassimilable temporal depth from which that wonder issues. Alongside this wrenching of our imaginative capabilities, we find ourselves involved in the dispersion of perception across the fluctuating surfaces in which the simulacra manifest themselves. Taken in concert, these incitements to thought are such as to obviate the positing of a transparently available action or process that the rhythm enacts or imitates. If, in Charles Altieri's terms, we find here our "attention … becoming contoured to other existences" (2001.270), this is a process in which established forms are subjected to a particular pressure by the imaginative trajectories the lines afford: to hear rhythm's familiar repetition being fraught with the unrepeatable and unprecedented.

We can trace a continuation of this process in later iterations of the stanza-ending line. In the lightly alliterative ripple of saxa fluunt resoluta valles (44; see n. 19), another instance might be heard of a summons to mimetic listening deformed by the exorbitant reality that the line points to. Recalling John Sallis' remark that "Stone comes from a past that has never been present, a past unassimilable to the order of time in which things come and go in the human world" (Sallis 1994.26), we might hear this rhythm as the site of a disjunction between this inassimilable time, which combines the deep past which the saxa belonged to and the future in which God destroys and refashions the world again,²⁶ and the human measure against which it must resonate in order to be apprehensible. But an interpretation committed to the poem's drive towards eschatological consolation could equally find in the line a transfigurative subordination of material to form that lightens into the blossoming energy of flamina, perpetuosque flores ("breezes, and ever-renewed flowers," 52), before finding closural assurance in the restorative cadence of the poem's final line. Alternatively, this sequence might be heard as framing an unsettling accumulation of heterogeneous associations that resist such closural subsumption.

Rhythm, in other words, constitutes a formalization of time. It segments distended temporal processes into a series of attentional templates, models for how we might attend to and be impinged upon by phenomena. Yet what is chiefly revealed by these templates, characterized as they are not just by multiple interpretative possibilities, but also by their forestalling of transparent mimetic relation, is the extent to which their articulations of time are riven by alterity. A useful means of conceptualizing this formal process can be found in Timothy Clark's discussion of the ecocritical potential latent in Derrida's concept of the trace. If, as Derrida claims, the "the trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general" (Derrida 1974.70), Clark suggests that

"originary environmentality" might seem a stronger term of deconstruction than the familiar "originary trace": its immediate inference is multidimensional, a circle or environing sphere of relations, whereas "trace" still suggests a residually linear figure, a trail, marked line, or path (Clark 2018.88 n. 23).

The evental opening, the disequilibrium of experience and form, and the unsettling relation of the reader to the deep past that resonate within the significational texture of Addison's poem constitute its particular "environing sphere of relations." Thus conceived, the poem's language is more readily grasped as an "opening" onto an "exteriority." What traces itself into and through that language is not only signification drawn from within language itself, but the worlds, and means of relating to them, that make themselves felt in the readerly construal of the poem's facture. The partitioning of attention that the poem affords is such as to allow its measures, its rhythmical disposition of time, to be freighted with a particularly dense, "multidimensional" version of "originary environmentality" and to draw readers into an awareness of that relation.

It is now possible to see more clearly that the poem's fashioning of this unsettled temporality complicates both the developmental notion of intellectual history which the poem adumbrates and its discourse of the sublime. Just as intertextual associations discompose claims to epistemic authority, so the poem's invasion of the present militates against readers seeing themselves as occupying a straightforwardly privileged position in a developmental sequence. Synoptic of this process is the line with which the account of the deluge proper begins (auditur ingens continuo fragor, "immediately a mighty crash is heard," 13; see above p. 312).²⁷ By confronting us with the flood's immense scale, the line reminds us that while our ability to have a more granular recourse to the ignota of the deep past results from the revelations of Scripture and Burnet's insights, it is also concomitant with our openness to interruption by phenomena that we can only apprehend tentatively. In Addison's handling, the flexibility of Latin word order becomes the vehicle for such interruption. Beginning with an impersonal verb (auditur) that figures listening undifferentiated by situation or point-of-view as an exposure to an enveloping environment, the line proceeds to recognize a sheer magnitude (ingens) which overwhelms the subject before it is grasped as having a specific content and shape. That magnitude disrupts the temporal rhythm occupied by an imagined listener (continuo), before the line closes with an incipient organization of experience into recognizable phenomena (fragor). The line's unfolding in time, therefore, adumbrates the process which occurs when phenomena shape the rhythms and tenor of the apprehension they bring about and thereby transforms a momentary, imagined assailing of the senses into a permanent resource from which readers might derive an aspect of their subjectivity. Even as the line makes the reader's present into the site of a past that he or she cannot assimilate, its formalization invites reconsideration of what experiencing any given present might entail.

The passages which I have examined likewise complicate any putative movement we might find in the text towards a distantiated spectatorship in which sublime phenomena precipitate a simple reflective enjoyment. In this respect, the poem relates obliquely to the accounts of imaginative response which Addison elaborates in The Spectator. Whereas "a Prospect of Fields and meadows" can afford an onlooker "a kind of Property in every thing he sees" (Ross 1982.369), the "ruins" crossed by the poem's "timorous tread" (see above p. 313) are recalcitrant to imaginative possession,²⁸ and even the "ever-renewed flowers" (52; see above p. 323) of the penultimate stanza tax the imagination by drawing it out over dizzyingly extended spans of time.

Likewise, although the whale's wonder is a distant relative of the "pleasing Astonishment" Addison finds in the contemplation of "Greatness," it is also offered to our attention as an experience which we cannot replicate and that, therefore, disrupts our sense of ourselves. This is not simply an experience "that is too big for [the Imagination's] Capacity" (all quotes Ross 1982.371), but one that might add to and change the ideational co-ordinates of which the imagination is composed. In each case, the specific sources of the experience that the poem affords, in both planetary and poetic history, encourage resistance to the interpretative manoeuvre of sublimating the abyssal into the sublime as a pure affective plenitude, a kind of atemporal ne plus ultra into which we might project ourselves as an alternative to our traffic with the world. Instead, the poem exposes us anew to the world and its history by showing the experience we might have of our inner time conjoined with and informed by the time of rocks and sounds and seas.

IV. CONCLUSIONS

I have been concerned with the poem's capacity to impinge on, direct, even overmaster, readerly attention. My readings are premised on an understanding of attention as what Lucy Alford terms a "medium" from which "inner experience" is fashioned (Alford 2020.270). Throughout, I treat the poem, understood as "a constructivist object in which the reader [or viewer] is embedded" (Morton 2008.183), as projecting a larger manifestation of such attention, a temporal aggregate disclosed in self-awareness and characterized by its porousness to the temporal formations that the poem configures. These formations, I argue, ask to be grasped as formalizing approximations that trace the resistance of worldly temporalities to aesthetic transfiguration, even as they assert their own world-making force.²⁹

The temporal aspect of this relation is a large part of what makes Addison's poem a valuable affordance for ecocritical thought. Its formalizations of time constitute a mode of attention that we are invited to be open to, even to make our own. In enacting such openness, we recognize the conjunctive and plural nature of our temporality by being brought to the realization "that the event of subjectivity always draws from temporal and immaterial registers that exceed [its immediate] localities" (Yusoff 2015.401). But we are likewise confronted with what Ted Toadvine calls "the abyssal character of deep time," namely, "our experience of its anachronous interruption of lived temporality from within" (2020.152). The specific agents of this interruption are the disequilibrium between form and phenomena that ripples through phrases like saxa fluunt resoluta valles, and which manifests itself in the poem's rhythmical texture, which is the sensuous correlate of an apprehension of time's passing being informed by a radically expanded range of "environing relations."

In a recent discussion of contemporary poetic responses to climate change, Min Hyoung Song emphasises that human agency "needs nurturing" if it is to grapple adequately with contemporary planetary conditions. Song finds resources for such nurturing in lyric's ability to "call forth shifting ways of apprehending a phenomenon that eludes familiar scales of comprehension" (2022.3). As a text which grapples with a similarly elusive "phenomenon," Addison's poem likewise productively destabilizes such "scales" and creates an imaginative space in which they might be reconceived. While I do not claim the poem as a proto-ecological discourse, I suggest that, by projecting the reading subject into experiences that cannot be readily stabilized as knowledge, and into temporal perturbations that disorder linear conceptions of history, the poem invites us to take seriously not only epistemic claims, but our own relatedness to the earth as a means of "nurturing" and reflecting on the agency that might be proper to us. A heightened awareness of such relatedness might not automatically produce a more responsible, self-critical attitude to our terrestrial situation, but it at least provides a more capacious base upon which such ethical stances might begin to be constructed.

That the poem is fashioned from canonically significant formal mechanisms––intertextuality, mimesis, sublimity––also makes it a rich resource with which to consider the opportunities and challenges of thinking ecocritically with pre-anthropocene poetry. Insofar as Addison makes Horatian lyric the vehicle of a philosophical understanding of the cosmos which was, for him, decisively modern, the poem's intertextual relations with Horace's Odes can readily be interpreted in Bloomian terms as a site of authorial competition. But they also afford other approaches. If medius liquor is emblematic of a revised philosophical approach to planetary history, it is also a reminder that understanding is open-ended, subject to sometimes disorienting shifts. The phrase exemplifies a proto-sublime register which invites consideration of how we might understand the phenomena that language evokes without dissolving them into a source of pleasure which we subordinate to anthropocentric ends. In the light of contemporary reflections on water as a "situating element" (LeVen 2022.307) by which human beings' embodied existence is comprised and surrounded, medius liquor might be felt newly—unsettlingly—meaningful: water's presence within us is comparably foundational to its role in the primordial earth as conceived by Burnet, and its recurrent refusals of containment within geographic partitions, lent new disruptiveness by anthropogenic climate change, gives new shape to the eruption which Addison's poem attempts to imagine. (I recall here Addison's licentia; see above p. 315, which might now be read as evoking an element of water's agency which has been distortively amplified by man's environmental transgressions). By presenting such language as a site of unforeclosed relation between phenomena and understanding, the poem accommodates and, indeed, invites such extensions. Dwelling on these moments, and lending ourselves to the poem's multidimensional rhythms, holds open an imaginative space in which "anachronous interruptions" might inform our self-awareness as subjects of terrestrial life and thereby inflect our readerly orientation towards the classical tradition.