'But No One Style, I Think, is Recommended'

A reader tells me of her disgust with most insects and reptiles, the small creatures, almost domestic, that surround us. She resents the “nature sentimentality” such “vermin” rouse in some people. They “make [her] skin crawl,” she writes – an idiom I’ve always found amusing. After all, our skin is powerless to crawl or do much of anything beyond keeping us intact. Think of the mess we would make without skin to hold us together. She makes an exception for butterflies and moths – everyone’s token favorites among arthropods. I share her disgust only when it comes to mosquitoes, and that’s less disgust than irritation. I have no compunction about swatting them. One of Guy Davenport’s many charming gestures was putting out dishes of sugar water to attract bees and wasps. 

This year in Houston we’re experiencing a bumper crop of anoles. They are the small lizards, green and brown, often mistakenly called “chameleons” because of their ability to change color. The cats and I watch them in the garden through our front window. They are disappearingly fast. The green ones favor the trunks of the pine and oak. The males have reddish-orange dewlaps which they inflate while doing what looks like pushups. It’s intended to make them look larger, attract females and intimidate potential predators. Human males do the same things with their biceps and pectorals. Anoles are prolific devourers of the above-mentioned mosquitoes. They are, in other words, our allies.

 

In his poem “A Wood,” Richard Wilbur addresses the hierarchy imposed by humans on flora, specifically trees. Oaks he calls “adumbrators to the understory, / Where, in their shade, small trees of modest leanings / Contend for light and are content with gleanings.” I remember a field along a road in Western Massachusetts bordered by maples and beeches under which the smaller flowering dogwoods in the spring grabbed all the attention. As Wilbur puts it:  

 

“And yet here’s dogwood: overshadowed, small,

But not inclined to droop and count its losses,

It cranes its way to sunlight after all,

And signs the air of May with Maltese crosses.”

 

I remember learning in a nature guide as a kid that American Indians and early European settlers used the bark of dogwood as a substitute for quinine to treat fevers, including mosquito-carried malaria. Wilbur encourages an egalitarian approach to human/natural-world interactions. His poem concludes:        

 

“Given a source of light so far away

That nothing, short or tall, comes very near it,

Would it not take a proper fool to say

That any tree has not the proper spirit?

Air, water, earth and fire are to be blended,

But no one style, I think, is recommended.”

 

Has anyone in all of human history ever likened a dogwood blossom to a Maltese cross? Wilbur’s poems work because he never discounts the particular when his object is the general. He reminds me of a line in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda: “Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy — in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.”

 

[“A Wood” was published in the May 6, 1967 issue of The New Yorker and collected in Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translations (1969).]