Collecting seeds
I’ve found myself at a tree nursery collecting seeds. While I should be keeping count and order, instead, I am categorising poetry into the descriptive or contemplative kind.
If we are going back to when this started I think began with my English teacher who would only teach the early romantic poems that revolved around nature. Nineteenth century poets loved writing about nature.
However, I can still distinctly remember sitting in class and thinking that the language felt so pretentious - I didn’t know what on earth half of these adjectives meant, and I felt a disconnect.
I’m sort of ashamed to say this first experience led me to believe for years, that nature poetry was not good poetry.
While I’m working in the Scottish Highlands and surrounded by nature I thought I’d revisit some of the classics and see if they feel any different now.
A lot of our common idioms come from nature and poetry - I think it’s because they are both universal things. A few words that convey a strong image often make much more sense to people, everywhere.
‘You are making a mountain out of a molehill’ - This is one of my favourites as quite nonsensical and this phrase seems appropriate.
Anyway, let’s start with one of the most infamous of the romantics – Wordsworth!
DAFFODILS is what you are probably thinking (or at least I was). It is one of, if not the, most well-known nature poems. Some of the common expressions are still being used today like wandered lonely as a cloud and dancing in the breeze.
These both appear to be a cliché descriptive phrases, but you must remember that at the time this was written, around 1804, it was anything but ordinary. It was showing that nature is alive. It goes on to describe the daffodils tossing their heads and being in a sprightly dance, momentarily it allows us to feel the freedom of nature.
In another poem written by Wordsworth - Lines Written in Early Spring – he uses the refrain What man has made of man to stress the greed and cruelty humanity is capable of and how it has led to our society becoming so far removed from nature.
Further on in the poem, the lines tis my faith that every flower / Enjoys the air it breathes. Here, we begin to question our destructive sense of entitlement - how it stands against the fundamental right of flora and fauna to exist and thrive alongside us and how nature should be protected with greater seriousness.
Moving on to Emily Dickinson – the dash queen! However, she did also write many poems about flowers, seasons, birds and mortality.
Written around 1862, the poem - A bird, came down the Walk is a beautiful vignette. If you’re unfamiliar, this basically means it drops the reader straight into a scene of observation.
The first stanza starts off with The bird bit an Angle Worm in halves /And ate the fellow, raw. I’m not sure why I found this so hilarious, maybe it’s the fact the earthworm has been described as a ‘fellow’, or it could be the contrast of this violent act with And then hopped sidewise to the Wall To let a Beetle pass. It’s as if the murder that the bird has committed can be mitigated by the fact it’s been polite by letting a beetle pass.
It keeps going with the observations of the bird’s activity, but the tone changes slightly and it grips you towards the end - The bird has now unrolled his feathers and as Oars divide the Ocean, Too silver for a seam. This description of the bird’s preparation to fly and then when in flight is incredibly evocative.
Last on the list is Ted Hughes, who was brought up in a village close to where I’m from, called Mytholmroyd. A lot of his poems centre around nature, and growing up with so much of it it’s easy to see how one would be inspired.
It is a windy day on the nursery, and so the poem Wind by Ted Hughes chose itself. It centres around being inside a house far out at sea, which seemed kind of similar to being in a little library cottage in the Scotland (maybe not).
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
The line Flexing like the lens of a mad eye is arresting. It fills you with the terror of being watched, by a stern and intimidating figure. The visceral image gets across that feeling of being sheltered somewhere, but something is looming outside the door.
You can see how in Hughes poem language has become slightly more surreal and gripping to the more modern reader. This poem was written in 1957. The Images are constantly, unexpectedly, twisting and weaving into each other. You start with the image of wind as a Blade-light. Here is a weapon, it is cutting and it has the power to harm and then merges into the lens of a mad eye. Now the wind has been personified, turning slightly horrifying and psychological.
What does any of this mean? It probably means my English teacher was trying to start with the romantics to teach not only pure nature poetry but how the landscape of our world has shifted.
Wordsworth was not just a decorative writer, but deeply conceptual. He viewed ourselves and nature as interconnected and placed value on non-human life. Emily Dickinson diverged from the ordinary Victorian grammar by liberally using the em dash. This matched her observations, the breathless and unpredictability of nature. Ted Hughes morphed the elements into visceral images that seem to only exist in a mind that’s so aware and porous. These are only a few of the well known nature poets but all very different writers in some respect.
I think any writer needs time to breathe and think, and this is what nature provides - even if you don’t necessarily write solely about the natural world. I have found since being away it has brought freedom to think and I’ve been doing more of this than I ever have, all while collecting seeds.