Beware of “nature poetry.” It tends to be not about nature but the poet and his self-regarding epiphanies. Perhaps our finest nature poet is Yvor Winters. A basic understanding of biology is useful in discouraging pantheism and other forms of fashionable nature mysticism.
We finally
settled my brother in a Cleveland hospice and my nephew is keeping me updated. Next
visit he’ll bring the Scrabble set, a game my brother loves, along with books
of crossword puzzles. A little mental stimulation in a setting where the other
patients are also dying couldn’t hurt. In The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets
(ed. David Yezzi, 2009), I happened on what might be a nature poem by Deborah Warren,
“A Simple Thing”:
“A branch
that broke with the weight of the winter snow
went on with
April, blooming anyway,
its death
not having reached its hasty bud.
how simple—not
to stop or think or know;
to answer a
simple impulse with a drive
that assumes
the sap as a habit in the blood;
to carry on
with the business of the day
and eat the
light and call itself alive.”
This has
some of the tidiness of a covert syllogism. So much of life is momentum,
persistence.
For me, the poem by Mr. Frost conjoins ( how often may I use that word?:
ReplyDeleteWhen the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud. It was posted today on poem-a-day - occasionally, they choose real poets. It's called Acceptance - fitting word
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least, must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in its breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from its nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, “Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be be.”