Reading modern poems about nature provides a double joy of learning and poetic appreciation. Most modern poets who write about nature are knowledgeable about it. These poets study nature; they don't merely romanticize it. And the more they study, the more they seem to discover its uniqueness and preciousness -- at a very deep core.
Themes About Man’s Relationship with Nature
The types of relationships that human beings have with nature can be sorted out, though these categories often overlap in actual literature because our relationship with nature, like all human relationships, is complex and multi-faceted. But for the sake of analysis, we can look at these relationships between human beings and nature:
- Man as a part of nature
- Man apart from nature
- Man in conflict with nature
- Man and nature separate but coexistent
- Man and nature separate and adversarial
- Nature superior to humanity
- Nature subordinate to humanity
- Nature and humanity equals
Questions Poets Pose About the Nature of Our Relationship with Nature
More than presenting themes, poets pose questions. Some of the questions poets have posed about our relationship with nature are listed below. Each question is profound and not susceptible to easy, either-or types of answers.
- Does mankind enhance nature, or does nature enhance man? Or does man degrade nature?
- Are man’s adaptations necessarily destructive to nature?
- Is God the same as nature
- Is man meant to be superior over nature, or is man meant to be the steward of nature?
- Was mankind exiled from nature, as in the Adam and Eve exile from Eden?
The Poems
Reproduced below are five poems on these ideas of nature, mankind and the relationship between the two. Each poet is modern or contemporary, but from very different regions and backgrounds: Langston Hughes, Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Robert Hass and Robinson Jeffers.
These poems lend themselves to consideration of the themes and questions mentioned above. Readers will have their own thoughts about each poem's take on those themes or questions. The main thing is to enjoy the imagery, euphony and beauty in each.
In Time of Silver Rain
In time of silver rain
The earth
Puts forth new life again,
Green grasses grow
And flowers lift their heads,
And over all the plan
The wonder spreads
Of life,
Of life,
Of life!
In time of silver rain
The butterflies
Lift silken wings
To catch a rainbow cry,
And trees put forth
New leaves to sing
In joy beneath the sky
As down the roadway
Passing boys and girls
Go singing, too,
In time of silver rain
When spring
And life
Are new.
---Langston Hughes
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The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry
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This World
I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it
Nothing fancy.
But that seems impossible.
Whatever the subject, the morning Glimmers it.
The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open
And becomes a star.
As for the stones on the beach, forget it.
Each one could be set in gold.
So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and beautiful silence
As comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we’re not too hurried to hear it.
As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
Even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe stars sing, too,
And the ants and the peonies, and the warm stones,
So happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
Locked up in gold.
--Mary Oliver
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The Problem of Describing Trees
The aspen glitters in the wind
And that delights us.
The leaf flutters, turning,
Because that motion in the heat of August
Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the leaf
Of the cottonwood.
The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem
And the tree danced. No.
The tree capitalized.
No. There are limits to saying,
In language, what the tree did.
It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.
Dance with me, dancer. Oh, I will.
Mountains, sky,
The aspen doing something in the wind.
----Robert Hass
Excerpted from Time and Materials (Ecco), copyright © 2007 by Robert Hass. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
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Robinson Jeffers might be considered the first American environmental activist. Robert Hass says he was, "in a rather grim way, an early environmentalist, perhaps the first American poet to grasp the devastating extent of the changes human technologies and populations were wreaking on the rest of the earth’s biological life" (Robert Hass, in Poetry Speaks ).
Inhumanism
Flowers wither, grass fades, trees wilt,
The forest is burnt;
The rock is not burnt.
The deer starve, the winter birds
Die on their twigs and life
In the blue dawns in the snow.
Men suffer want and become
Curiously ignoble; as prosperity
Makes them curiously vile.
But look how noble the world is,
the lonely-flowing waters, the secret-
Keeping stones, the flowing sky.
--Robin
son Jeffers
Sources:
- Oliver, Mary. Why I Wake Early: New Poems by Mary Oliver. Beacon Press: 2004.
- Poetry Speaks. Elise Paschen & Rebekah Mosby Eds., Sourcebooks, Inc: 2001.
- The Voice that is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. Ed. Hayden Carruth. Bantam Books: 1970.
Leah Abramovitz - Laura Bernell, Professional Writer since 1984; Community College Adjunct English Instructor since 1982.
