nature in poetry essay

Two red top mushrooms pushing though leaf litter in a forest.

How Sylvia Plath’s profound nature poetry elevates her writing beyond tragedy and despair

Final year PhD student researching Sylvia Plath's nature poetry, University of Huddersfield

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Nassim Jalali does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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I cannot stop writing poems! … They come from the vocabulary of woods and animals and earth.

From a letter from Sylvia Plath to her mother, 1956

Popular perceptions of Sylvia Plath tend to dwell on a deeply troubled version of the young poet due to her well-documented difficulties with depression and the morbid imagery found in some of her poetry. So the idea that nature inspired her writing may come as a surprise.

A young woman smiling at the camera with her arms folded.

This despairing Plath is a far cry from the poet I have come to know and admire – a poet who writes about the simple beauty of meadows and the tenacity of fungi as well as the splendours of rugged wilderness .

Plath’s fascination with the natural world began in childhood, as she makes clear in her essay Ocean 1212-W , in which she details the importance of the sea to her poetic imagination. This interest in nature continued into adulthood, when she read the work of biologists such as Rachel Carson, whom she writes about in her letters .

Any other poet with this background would at least be credited with a passing interest in the natural world. However, Plath’s untimely death by suicide has skewed much interpretation of her poetry. The well-versed argument that Plath only uses nature in her poetry as a “ mirror to look deeper into herself , has pervaded critical writing on her work from the 1960s to the 21st century.

It is this blinkered view of Plath which has led to an oversight of the ecological significance of her poetry. As we move past the 60th anniversary of Plath’s death, it is time to embrace more nuanced interpretations of her work and to reimagine what her poetic legacy might look like.

Grand-scale natural beauty

Plath loved the vast landscapes of national parks as well as smaller-scale wildernesses like those of England’s Yorkshire moors. In letters from 1956, she describes "the great luminous emerald lights” of the Yorkshire countryside, concluding that she has “never been so happy” in her life as among the “wild, purple moors”.

These excerpts from her letters resonate with the celebratory assertion in the poem Wuthering Heights that “there is no life higher than the grasstops or the hearts of sheep”.

She found similar beauty in the national parks of America and Canada, which she visited in the summer of 1959. In letters from this period, she remarks that she has never seen “such wonderful country anywhere in the world”. No doubt these experiences inspired the sublime depiction of the “dominance of rocks and woods” and “man-shaming clouds” in the poem Two Campers in Cloud Country as well as the spectacular “splurge of vermilions” she describes in the sunsets over Algonquin National Park in Canada.

Beauty in smaller places

However, it is not these grand poetic depictions of the natural world which resonate the most with me. Even the most ardent city enthusiast can pause for a moment of wonder in front of millennia-old mountains, but few among us can render the seemingly prosaic aspects of the natural world with the lyrical grandeur evident in much of her writing.

Plath’s journal entries , written from the Yaddo writers’ retreat in upstate New York in the autumn of 1959, demonstrate a sensitive interest in small details of the natural world which many deem mundane or insignifcant. Coming across a patch of toadstools in the gardens at Yaddo, she observes these “round battering rams” with their “orange ruddy tops” and “pale lemon stems”.

Her poem Mushrooms captures much of this detail with the “soft fists” of the mushrooms which heave aside the garden “bedding”. “Nobody sees us”, the collective voice of the mushrooms in the poem declares, before claiming:

We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot’s in the door.

In this poem, Plath emphasises the magnificent elements of the natural world that many of us overlook or disregard. She highlights the dangers, as environmental historian William Cronon suggests , in appreciating only the kind of big majestic landscapes found in national parks. By doing so, Plath infers, we neglect the significance of nature in more familiar and ordinary places.

While Plath may well be remembered for the melancholic despair of Sheep in Fog or the angry, flame-haired women of poems such as Lady Lazarus , it is also important that she is remembered for the ecological significance of her writing.

A wild rural Yorkshire landscape with a dry stane dyke and a few trees and hills in the distance.

Despite personal difficulties in her marriage and worsening mental health, Plath’s interest in nature continued to inspire much of her late poetry. Her 1962 poem Among the Narcissi , for example, captures a poignant but ordinary moment of kinship between an elderly man, who loves the “little flocks” of flowers in his garden, and the flowers themselves who “look up” from the flowerbeds towards him, “like children”.

Just like the small flock of lilac crocuses I was surprised to find growing amid the broken paving in my own much-neglected garden, Plath’s poetry continually surprises me with its uncanny ability to see the unseen in nature. Such deeply felt attunement to nature deserves to be recognised as part of the rich and multifaceted legacy of her work.

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Nature poetry engages with, describes, or considers the natural world.

From A Poet’s Glossary

The following definition of the term nature poetry is reprinted from A Poet's Glossary by Edward Hirsch.

The natural world has been one of the recurring subjects of poetry, frequently the primary one, in every age and every country. Yet we cannot easily define nature, which, as Gary Snyder points out in his preface to No Nature (1992), “will not fulfill our conceptions or assumptions” and “will dodge our expectations and theoretical models.” Yet the urge to describe the natural world — its various landscapes, its changing seasons, its surrounding phenomena — has been an inescapable part of the history of poetry. Wendell Berry provides a simple useful definition of nature poetry as poetry that “considers nature as subject matter and inspiration.”

Our concepts of nature are relative, historically determined. The nature poem is affected by ideology, by literary conventions as well as social and cultural ideas. Raymond Williams contends, “Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language.” The term nature is itself contested now because it seems to assume an oversimplified relationship between the human and the environment. “Nature” has been the site of so many different naïve symbolisms, such as purity, escape, and savagery. That’s why poets and critics often refer to green poetry or environmental poetry, which presupposes a complicated interconnection between nature and humankind.

The idea that the seasons structure the actual rhythms or symbolic passages of life goes back to antiquity. The Canaanite mythical "Poem of Aqhat" (fifteenth century BCE) rotates around seasonal change. Hesiod’s Works and Days (eighth century B.C.E.) takes special interest in agricultural practices. There is a long tradition of the pastoral, stemming from Theocritus’s idylls (third century BCE), which honor the simplicities of rural life and create such memorable figures as Lycidas, the archetypal poet-shepherd who inspired John Milton 's pastoral elegy “Lycidas” (1638). Virgil ’s Eclogues (37–30 BCE) define the tradition by characterizing the peaceful serenity of shepherds living in idealized natural settings. The Chinese Book of Songs (tenth to fifth century BCE) is rife with seasonal poetry and so is the Japanese haiku, which began as a short associative meditation on the natural world. Think of the Old English “Seafarer” and the Middle English “Cuckoo’s Song” (“Sumer is icumen in / Lhude sing, cuccu!”), of the passage of seasons in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (fourteenth century). In the Renaissance, urbane poets apprenticed themselves to poetry by writing pastoral soliloquies or dialogues, which construct and imagine rural life. The tradition is exemplified by Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1580) and Edmund Spenser’s The Shephearde’s Calender (1579), which uses the months of the year to trace the changes in a shepherd’s life. Rural poetry flourished in seventeenth-century retirement and garden poems, in landscape poems that delivered formal and structured descriptions of topography, such as John Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill” (1642).

James Thomson, the first important eighteenth-century nature poet, infused his lovingly detailed descriptions in The Seasons (1730) with his age’s sense of God’s sustaining presence in nature. As he writes in “Spring”: “Chief, lovely spring, in thee, and thy soft scenes / The SMILING GOD is seen; while water, earth / And air attest his bounty.” Alexander Pope leads his “Essay on Criticism” (1711) with the rule, “First follow Nature.” For him, “following nature” means honoring classical precedent: “Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem; / To copy Nature is to copy Them.” Pope describes these rules as “Nature Methodiz’d.” Writing at a time when English society was being transformed from an agricultural society to an industrial one, the romantic poets treated nature in a groundbreaking way, dwelling in its localities, praising its nurturing powers, spiritualizing it. Think of these summary lines from William Wordsworth ’s defining nature poem, “ Tintern Abbey ” (1798):

Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, — both what they half-create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.

John Clare was inspired by Thomson’s The Seasons to become a poet with a rural muse, and his more than 3,500 poems seek out the secret recesses of nature, a hidden, underappreciated, overlooked country, which he detailed with a sharp eye and a naturalist’s sensibility. “Poets love nature and themselves are love,” he wrote in a late sonnet. His poetry intimately chronicles a world that was rapidly disappearing, systematically divided up into rectangular plots of land, fenced off and restricted, enclosed. There is an ethic of reciprocity that he brought to his encounters with the natural world. Indeed, each of the English romantics had a particular view of that world, a singular way of describing it—they were sometimes solaced, sometimes frightened by its alienating majesty and inhuman force—and yet romantic poetry as a whole inaugurated a new ecological consciousness, a fresh way of treating human beings and nature as interdependent.

Henry David Thoreau is the guiding spirit of American nature writing in general and American nature poetry in particular. “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” he asks in Walden (1854). Ralph Waldo Emerson ’s Nature (1836) is foundational, but Walden is a forerunner and a reference point for green writing and reading, green thinking. It would take a volume in itself to track the ways that American poets have envisioned the environment—in Democratic Vistas (1871) Walt Whitman calls nature “the only complete, actual poem” —but I would pause over Emily Dickinson ’s garden poems and Whitman’s luminous meditation “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1860), over William Cullen Bryant ’s celebration of the prairie and Robert Frost ’s terrifying notion of “design,” over Robinson Jeffers ’s California poems that mourn “the broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth / Under men’s hands and their minds” (“The Broken Balance,” 1928) and Theodore Roethke ’ horticultural reminiscences, over A. R. Ammons ’s ecological lyrics (“ecol- ogy is my word: tag / me with that”), Wendell Berry ’s agricultural ideals, and Gary Snyder ’s lifetime of lyrics, which often turn to Native American models for a sense of right relationship with the earth. W. S. Merwin also invokes native peoples for a reaffirmation of our connection to the natural world. I wish I had time to compare North American nature poems, which are so often sympathetic to natural forces, with those of Canadian poets, who often manifest, as Northrop Frye points out, “a tone of deep terror in regard to nature.” There is an eco-feminist pastoralism that includes poetry in Susan Griffin’s Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978) and a recent anthology, Black Nature (2010), celebrates the overlooked tradition of African American nature poetry over four centuries. We are not yet done imagining the earth and envisioning the natural world.

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The Power of Nature: Exploring Ecocriticism in Modern Poetry

Ecocriticism is a relatively new field of literary criticism that has left a lasting impact – not only in poetry circles but in environmental and sustainability circles. Ecocriticism claims to examine the relationship between literature and the environment. It emerged on the scene in the 1990s, as environmental concerns became increasingly imperative. Ecocritics argue that poetry can play an important role in raising awareness of environmental issues and promoting environmentalism.

The evolution of ecocritical poetry.

Modern poetry is a rich source of ecocritical material. Many modern poets have written about the natural world, often in ways that are both lyrical and critical. Some of the most well-known ecocritical poets include W.S. Merwin , Gary Snyder , Adrienne Rich , Wendell Berry , among others.

Modern ecocritical poetry goes beyond mere descriptions of landscapes; it seeks to evoke a deeper connection between humanity and the natural world. Poets employ vivid imagery, sensory language, and metaphors to communicate their reverence for nature and address pressing environmental concerns.

W.S. Merwin: Merwin’s poetry is deeply rooted in the natural world. He often writes about the beauty and fragility of nature, as well as the threats that it faces. His poem “The Fall” is a powerful meditation on the destructive power of human activity.

Gary Snyder: Snyder is a poet, translator, and environmental activist. His poetry is often inspired by his experiences in the wilderness. He is a leading figure in the Deep Ecology movement, which advocates for a radical shift in human consciousness away from anthropocentrism (the belief that humans are the most important species on Earth) and towards a more holistic view of the natural world.

Adrienne Rich: Rich’s poetry is often concerned with issues of gender, class, and race. However, she has also written extensively about the environment. Her poem “Diving into the Wreck” is a powerful exploration of the relationship between humans and the natural world.

Wendell Berry: Berry is a poet, novelist, and farmer. His work is rooted in his deep love of the land. He is a leading figure in the local food movement, and his poetry often explores the importance of sustainable agriculture.

Themes Explored in Ecocritical Poetry

1. environmental awareness.

Ecocritical poetry serves as a powerful medium for raising environmental consciousness. Through their words, poets highlight the delicate balance of ecosystems, the consequences of human actions on nature, and the urgent need for sustainable practices. By blending scientific understanding with artistic expression, these poems create a sense of urgency and encourage readers to reflect upon their own ecological footprint.

2. Interconnectedness

One recurring theme in ecocritical poetry is the idea of interconnectedness. Poets emphasize the intricate web of relationships between humans, animals, plants, and the environment. They showcase how our actions reverberate throughout the natural world, emphasizing the importance of harmonious coexistence and the preservation of biodiversity.

3. Transcendence and Solace

Nature has long been viewed as a source of solace and transcendence, providing an escape from the complexities of modern life. Ecocritical poetry captures the transformative power of nature, inviting readers to immerse themselves in its beauty and find solace in its presence. Through their words, poets transport us to serene landscapes, reminding us of the inherent connection between the human spirit and the natural world.

4. The Relationship between Humans and Nature

Ecocritical poets often explore the complex relationship between humans and nature. They may question the anthropocentric view of the world (the belief that humans are the most important species on Earth), or they may explore the ways in which humans are interconnected with the natural world.

Impact and Significance

By weaving ecological concerns into their verses, poets contribute to ongoing discussions surrounding climate change, deforestation, and the preservation of the planet Earth. Their words evoke empathy, inspire action, and foster a sense of collective responsibility towards nature and the environment.

Some of the most well-known ecocritical poems include:

“The Fall” by W.S. Merwin: This poem meditates on the destructive power of human activity, and the ways in which we have alienated ourselves from the natural world.
“Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich: This poem explores the relationship between humans and the natural world, and the ways in which we can reclaim our lost connection to nature.
“The Clearing” by Gary Snyder: This poem celebrates the beauty of the natural world, and the ways in which it can provide us with a sense of peace and belonging.
“The Gift of Good Land” by Wendell Berry: This poem celebrates the importance of sustainable agriculture, and the ways in which we can live in harmony with the land.

Ecocritical poetry can be a powerful tool for raising awareness of environmental issues and promoting environmentalism. It can also help us to see the natural world in new ways, and to appreciate its beauty and fragility.

Ecocriticism in modern poetry serves as a testament to the enduring power of nature and its ability to inspire and transform. Through the medium of poetry, we are reminded of our intrinsic connection to the natural world and the responsibility we bear in preserving its splendor. As readers immerse themselves in the rich tapestry of ecocritical poetry, they are encouraged to engage with environmental issues, fostering a harmonious relationship between humanity and nature.

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The Concept of Nature in the Poetry of William Wordsworth and Robert Frost: A Comparative Study

2019, Frost

This research aims to investigate the different meanings for the term-nature‖. Moreover, it seeks to identify the major similarities and differences in the use of nature in the poetry of William Wordsworth and Robert Frost. Since this research is theoretical in nature, it depends primarily on reviewing already published works on the topic. The researchers consulted a significant number of published references on the topic as well as specialized literary dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and the internet. The research concludes that the term-nature‖ has not always had the same meaning or carries the same level of significance.

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Ahmad Mahbub-ul-Alam , Tasmia Moslehuddin

Nature has often been one of the prominent themes in literature. It has been the topic of celebration by the Romantics to have a way out from the hectic business of city life. On the other hand, the adaptation of the same subject has also been observed by the Modern poets to put emphasis on the realities and responsibilities of human existence. This paper aims at making a comparative study in the presentation of “Nature” by William Wordsworth, an English Romantic and Robert Frost, a Modern American.

Oeconomia Copernicana

Dr. Ambreen Kharbe

William Wordsworth, English Romanticist and Robert Frost, American National Poet celebrate nature as their subject matter. The paper tries to compare the ideas of nature and its philosophy in both poets writing. Though there are obvious similarities between the two poets' takes on the subject, their perspectives on Nature couldn't be more different. Wordsworth is without a peer when it comes to nature poets. He holds a high reverence for the natural world and considers himself a priest or devotee. He has developed an entire philosophical system, a fresh perspective on the natural world. However, Frost is not into nature for its own sake. Unlike Wordsworth, he does not perceive nature as a source of strength, happiness, or moral well-being. Nature provides the same inspiration for both writers but in very different forms. Frost keeps his distance as an artist while Wordsworth is invested in the themes of his poems. Frost appears uncomplicated but is quite complicated compared to Wordsworth. Frost is a realist, an observer of the world, and an opponent of romance. On the other hand, Wordsworth is a transcendentalist, romantic, and mystic. Compared to Wordsworth, whose poetry is equally delightful at its beginning and end, Frost's poetry is more joyful at the beginning and more wisdom at the end.

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation

Jannat E Hosne Ara

This paper attempts to investigate the depiction of nature in the poetry of Robert Frost and how this treatment simultaneously resembles and differs from that of romantic poetry. Though he belongs to the era of modernism, his poetry carries numerous characteristics of romantic poetry. The researcher tries to compare the poetry of Robert Frost and that of the Romantics how they are identical or dissimilar in the representation of nature. Robert Frost might be called the interpreter of nature and humanity. He shows that he is a close observer of both nature and people. On the other hand, Romantic writers see nature as a source of inspiration, solace in agony, healer in mental illness, rescuer in struggling period, etc. They treat nature as Mother Nature where their poetry tells us the beauty of green forestland, woods, hills and mountains, riverbanks, pastoral scenarios, breezes and winds, fresh air, sunrises, and sunsets, etc. Whereas Robert Frost always tries to make a bridge betwee...

isara solutions

International Res Jour Managt Socio Human

William Wordsworth is universally recognized as a great poet of Nature. But he was not content to be thought as poet of Nature only, singing the sensuous bliss of a life lived in natural surroundings, like Cowper in The task: “God made the country, and Man Made the town”. Wordsworth is an outstanding philosophical poet, whose ultimate theme was not Nature only, but the heart of Man also. And the poetry of man took in his hands a rapid development as the poetry of Nature. Whereas Robert Frost is also a great poet of Nature but he is even greater as a poet of man. His landscapes are all landscape with human figures. Frost himself once remarked that he had hardly written two poems without a human being in them. He has written on almost every subject. He has illuminated things as common as a woodpile and as common as a Prehistoric pebble, as natural as a bird singing in its sleep and as ‘mechanistic’ as a revolt of a factory worker. On the other hand, Wordsworth’s poetry shows how human beings fit into the midst the interplaying forces of Nature. He believes that there is a pre-existing harmony between the mind of Man and Nature. Both the poets Wordsworth as a Romantic and Frost as a Modern, have different attitudes towards Nature and its relation to human beings.

TJPRC Publication

The world of nature is very important to study of Frost's poetry. By using nature as a background of his poems, Frost clearly demonstrates meaning and values of life and often depicts some treatment of nature and the social situation that have included a characteristic portrayal of humanity. This study enables us to understand Frost's poetical theme and values that would explain his hidden voice of nature and examines human inner mind, exposing its conflicts and harmony through it. Some critics have identified him as a terrifying poet and others labeled him a pessimistic poet or, a dark naturalist. However, he has a constant vision of nature throughout the poems. More than anything else, the speaker of his poems uses sign and symbol of nature that take an identity of others. Furthermore, this study discusses his series of concrete images which echo his poetry and intensify clarification of human life on the conceptions of the world of nature.

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Dr Sunil K MISHRA , JAIVINDER SINGH

Most of the scholars are agreeing with the fact that William Wordsworth is rightly the greatest poet of the countryside and of the life of nature in its all manifestations and beauty of nature. He has rightly considered physical aspects as well as spiritual aspects of human life on this planet. However, poets earlier to William Wordsworth like Burns, Cowper, Crabbe and Goldsmith had exhibited a fine appreciation for the beauties of nature. Nevertheless, we can't ignore that they were adorers of nature's external charms without having any mystical and philosophical approach to its inner life and spiritual message. It was William Wordsworth who revealed the inner soul of nature in his poems and to make it a better teacher than moral philosopher of the present and past. Most of the poems written by William Wordsworth fall within the category of poets of nature and a lot of his poems express a sense of humanity and love with mankind and nature. In this paper the researcher has revealed the fact that William Wordsworth is a poet of nature above all.

International Journal of Social and Educational Innovation (IJSEIro)

Mariwan Barzinji

In recent years, studying connections between the human being and environment along with nature has been looked at as a topic of significant value for literary researchers. Thus, the emergence of eco-critical approach in the countries, which use English as their first language, holds the first position in this respect. This harmony of the two has been discussed for a while in world literature. This research studies literature review and pinpoints the positive view been presented by looking at eco-criticism. The methods used are textual analysis approach and eco-critical approach. The major points of this study are to investigate the main theme and shed light on it and the way William Wordsworth used his writings to protect the environment from destructions and the writer used eco-criticism or ecology in his works in his time. The environment and ecology in William Wordsworth's poems are the two things which have been dealt with because poems can serve human beings and make them aware of protecting the environment from pollution. This research consists of several essential points about the literature and nature as well as ecology. Besides, the paper presents an introduction about Englandin the nineteenth century, romanticism, and characteristics of romanticism as these are interrelated with eco-criticism.

US-China Foreign Language, USA & Sino-US English Teaching, USA ISSN: 15398080 & 15398072 David Publishing Company, 9460, Telstar Ave Suits, El Monte, CA 91731, USA.

Mohammad Moniruzzaman Miah

From time immemorial down to the present decade, poets, dramatists and fictionists have portrayed Nature in different ways in their works.Critics, so far, have pointed out the mystic, didactic and philosophical aspects of Wordsworth’s nature poetry.In the backdrop of global deforestation and environmental degradation, traditional approaches to the evaluation of Wordsworth’s nature poetry have lost charms and appeals to both the readers and the environmentalists. So, new approaches to the judgment of his poetry are a demand of the day. Keeping this demand in view, this article aims at delving deep into Wordsworth’s selected nature poems from eco-scientific point of view. Eco-scientific approach, sadly missed in the analysis of his poetry, may pave the way for opening up a new trend for the new generation of readers and critics. Keywords: ecocriticism, environment, nature, destruction, scientific, preserve, deforestation

International Research Journal Commerce arts science

In 1798, at the age of 28, Wordsworth claimed that he had long been a 'worshipper of Nature'. For many readers he became, and for some is still, its high priest. There was nothing new at that time in writing poems about nature; but, as Jonathan Bate has shown, there was something very new in the way Wordsworth wrote about it. He rejected the appropriation of nature into the realm of the aesthetic, the reduction of it to the merely picturesque. He transformed our experience of Nature into a religious experience. Moreover, he communicated that experience in terms which are strikingly in accord with our current language of deep ecology, of holistic thinking and biocentric consciousness.

apara sharma

This paper is inspired by a brief yet inspiring discussion with a senior academician who gave me a fresh insight into poetry. As I lamented about the freshness and sublimity of nature poetry of romantic poets especially Wordsworth and wondered how he managed such fertility of imagination and painted the pictures of benign nature, she encouraged me to look at contemporary writers like Ted Hughes who are equally capable to creating picture images in our mind while talking about the power of nature. That was a shift in my perspective towards nature poetry written by contemporary poets. This chance meeting challenged me to compare and analyze how the poets of these two genres approach nature. This paper envisages to explore the world of poetry of both the poets with special reference to nature.

A Summary and Analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Nature’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Nature’ is an 1836 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson explores the relationship between nature and humankind, arguing that if we approach nature with a poet’s eye, and a pure spirit, we will find the wonders of nature revealed to us.

You can read ‘Nature’ in full here . Below, we summarise Emerson’s argument and offer an analysis of its meaning and context.

Emerson begins his essay by defining nature, in philosophical terms, as anything that is not our individual souls. So our bodies, as well as all of the natural world, but also all of the world of art and technology, too, are ‘nature’ in this philosophical sense of the world. He urges his readers not to rely on tradition or history to help them to understand the world: instead, they should look to nature and the world around them.

In the first chapter, Emerson argues that nature is never ‘used up’ when the right mind examines it: it is a source of boundless curiosity. No man can own the landscape: it belongs, if it belongs to anyone at all, to ‘the poet’. Emerson argues that when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

Emerson states that when he goes among nature, he becomes a ‘transparent eyeball’ because he sees nature but is himself nothing: he has been absorbed or subsumed into nature and, because God made nature, God himself. He feels a deep kinship and communion with all of nature. He acknowledges that our view of nature depends on our own mood, and that the natural world reflects the mood we are feeling at the time.

In the second chapter, Emerson focuses on ‘commodity’: the name he gives to all of the advantages which our senses owe to nature. Emerson draws a parallel with the ‘useful arts’ which have built houses and steamships and whole towns: these are the man-made equivalents of the natural world, in that both nature and the ‘arts’ are designed to provide benefit and use to mankind.

The third chapter then turns to ‘beauty’, and the beauty of nature comprises several aspects, which Emerson outlines. First, the beauty of nature is a restorative : seeing the sky when we emerge from a day’s work can restore us to ourselves and make us happy again. The human eye is the best ‘artist’ because it perceives and appreciates this beauty so keenly. Even the countryside in winter possesses its own beauty.

The second aspect of beauty Emerson considers is the spiritual element. Great actions in history are often accompanied by a beautiful backdrop provided by nature. The third aspect in which nature should be viewed is its value to the human intellect . Nature can help to inspire people to create and invent new things. Everything in nature is a representation of a universal harmony and perfection, something greater than itself.

In his fourth chapter, Emerson considers the relationship between nature and language. Our language is often a reflection of some natural state: for instance, the word right literally means ‘straight’, while wrong originally denoted something ‘twisted’. But we also turn to nature when we wish to use language to reflect a ‘spiritual fact’: for example, that a lamb symbolises innocence, or a fox represents cunning. Language represents nature, therefore, and nature in turn represents some spiritual truth.

Emerson argues that ‘the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.’ Many great principles of the physical world are also ethical or moral axioms: for example, ‘the whole is greater than its part’.

In the fifth chapter, Emerson turns his attention to nature as a discipline . Its order can teach us spiritual and moral truths, but it also puts itself at the service of mankind, who can distinguish and separate (for instance, using water for drinking but wool for weaving, and so on). There is a unity in nature which means that every part of it corresponds to all of the other parts, much as an individual art – such as architecture – is related to the others, such as music or religion.

The sixth chapter is devoted to idealism . How can we sure nature does actually exist, and is not a mere product within ‘the apocalypse of the mind’, as Emerson puts it? He believes it doesn’t make any practical difference either way (but for his part, Emerson states that he believes God ‘never jests with us’, so nature almost certainly does have an external existence and reality).

Indeed, we can determine that we are separate from nature by changing out perspective in relation to it: for example, by bending down and looking between our legs, observing the landscape upside down rather than the way we usually view it. Emerson quotes from Shakespeare to illustrate how poets can draw upon nature to create symbols which reflect the emotions of the human soul. Religion and ethics, by contrast, degrade nature by viewing it as lesser than divine or moral truth.

Next, in the seventh chapter, Emerson considers nature and the spirit . Spirit, specifically the spirit of God, is present throughout nature. In his eighth and final chapter, ‘Prospects’, Emerson argues that we need to contemplate nature as a whole entity, arguing that ‘a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments’ which focus on more local details within nature.

Emerson concludes by arguing that in order to detect the unity and perfection within nature, we must first perfect our souls. ‘He cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit’, Emerson urges. Wisdom means finding the miraculous within the common or everyday. He then urges the reader to build their own world, using their spirit as the foundation. Then the beauty of nature will reveal itself to us.

In a number of respects, Ralph Waldo Emerson puts forward a radically new attitude towards our relationship with nature. For example, although we may consider language to be man-made and artificial, Emerson demonstrates that the words and phrases we use to describe the world are drawn from our observation of nature. Nature and the human spirit are closely related, for Emerson, because they are both part of ‘the same spirit’: namely, God. Although we are separate from nature – or rather, our souls are separate from nature, as his prefatory remarks make clear – we can rediscover the common kinship between us and the world.

Emerson wrote ‘Nature’ in 1836, not long after Romanticism became an important literary, artistic, and philosophical movement in Europe and the United States. Like Wordsworth and the Romantics before him, Emerson argues that children have a better understanding of nature than adults, and when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

And like Wordsworth, Emerson argued that to understand the world, we should go out there and engage with it ourselves, rather than relying on books and tradition to tell us what to think about it. In this connection, one could undertake a comparative analysis of Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and Wordsworth’s pair of poems ‘ Expostulation and Reply ’ and ‘ The Tables Turned ’, the former of which begins with a schoolteacher rebuking Wordsworth for sitting among nature rather than having his nose buried in a book:

‘Why, William, on that old gray stone, ‘Thus for the length of half a day, ‘Why, William, sit you thus alone, ‘And dream your time away?

‘Where are your books?—that light bequeathed ‘To beings else forlorn and blind! ‘Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed ‘From dead men to their kind.

Similarly, for Emerson, the poet and the dreamer can get closer to the true meaning of nature than scientists because they can grasp its unity by viewing it holistically, rather than focusing on analysing its rock formations or other more local details. All of this is in keeping with the philosophy of Transcendentalism , that nineteenth-century movement which argued for a kind of spiritual thinking instead of scientific thinking based narrowly on material things.

Emerson, along with Henry David Thoreau, was the most famous writer to belong to the Transcendentalist movement, and ‘Nature’ is fundamentally a Transcendentalist essay, arguing for an intuitive and ‘poetic’ engagement with nature in the round rather than a coldly scientific or empirical analysis of its component parts.

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How to write a poetry essay

August 26, 2023

Whether you love literature or are just curious, this guide will help you understand, enjoy, and talk about poetry. So, let’s start exploring the world of lines and symbols, where each one tells a story to discover.

Here are the steps on writing a poetry essay.

Choose a poem

The first step is, of course, to choose a poem to write your essay .

It should be one that you find interesting, thought-provoking, or emotionally resonant. It’s important to select a poem that you can engage with and analyze effectively.

Choose a poem that genuinely captures your interest. Look for poems that evoke emotions, thoughts, or curiosity when you read them.
Consider the themes addressed in the poem. It should offer ample material for analysis.

When choosing a poem

So for this guide, let’s choose Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death.” You’ll see a short excerpt of this poem for your understanding.

Poem example for poetry essay

Because i couldn not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality. We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility – We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess – in the Ring – We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – We passed the Setting Sun – The poem continues....

This poem is intriguing due to its exploration of mortality, the afterlife, and eternity. The imagery and language in the poem provide ample material for analysis, making it a suitable choice for a comprehensive essay.

After carefully choosing the poem that interests you, understanding the poem is the biggest key to writing an effective and nice poetry essay.

Understand the poem

Reading the poem several times to grasp its meaning is the most important part of a good analysis. You must first analyze the structure, rhyme scheme , meter and literary tools used in the poem.

For a solid understanding, you should:

Read the poem multiple times to familiarize yourself with its content. Each reading may reveal new insights.
Identify the central themes or messages the poem conveys.
Study the rhyme scheme and meter (rhythmic pattern) of the poem.
Consider how the structure, including its stanzas, lines, and breaks, contributes to the poem's meaning and impact.

For example

Remember, understanding the poem thoroughly is the foundation for a well-informed analysis. Take your time to grasp the poem’s various elements before moving on to the next steps in your essay.

Now that we have a clear understanding of the poem, let’s move into writing the introduction.

Write a catchy introduction

Begin with an attention-grabbing hook sentence that piques the reader's interest.
Provide the necessary information about the poem and its author. Mention the poet's name and title of the poem.
Offer some context about the poem's time period, literary movement, or cultural influences.
Present your thesis statement , which outlines the main argument or focus of your essay.

Poetry essay introduction example

Introduction

Thesis statement for poetry essays

A thesis statement is a clear and concise sentence or two that presents the main argument or point of your essay . It provides a roadmap for your reader, outlining what they can expect to find in your essay.

In the case of a poetry essay, your thesis statement should capture the central message, themes, or techniques you’ll be discussing in relation to the poem.

Why is the thesis important for a poetry essay?

By reading your thesis statement, your audience should have a clear idea of what to expect from your poem analysis essay.

When creating a thesis statement, keep these in mind:

Start by identifying the key elements of the poem that you want to discuss. These could be themes, literary devices, emotions conveyed, or the poet's intentions.
Based on the key elements you've identified, formulate a central argument that encapsulates your main analysis. What is the poem trying to convey? What are you trying to say about the poem?
Your thesis should be specific and focused. Avoid vague or broad statements. Instead, provide a clear direction for your analysis.

Poetry essasy thesis statement example

....(introduction starts) ....(introduction continues) ....(introduction continues) In "Because I could not stop for Death," Emily Dickinson employs vivid imagery, personification, and an unconventional perspective on mortality to explore the transcendence of death and the eternity of the soul. Thesis statement, which is usually the last sentence of your introduction

Analyze language and imagery

Language and image analysis in poetry involves a close examination of the words, phrases and literary devices used by the poet. In this step you must uncover the deeper layers of meaning, emotion and sensory experiences conveyed by the poet’s choice of language and imagery.

Why language and imagery?

Start by identifying and listing the literary devices present in the poem. These could include metaphors, similes, personification, symbolism, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and more.
For each identified device, explain its significance. How does it contribute to the poem's meaning, mood, or tone?
Analyze how the literary devices interact with the context of the poem. How do they relate to the themes, characters, or situations presented in the poem?
Discuss how the use of specific language and imagery influences the reader's emotional response and understanding of the poem.

Continuing with Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death,” let’s analyze the use of imagery:

Language and imagery analysis example

Lines chosen for analysis

Discuss themes in body paragraphs

Exploring themes helps you grasp the deeper meaning of the poem and connect it to broader human experiences. Understanding the themes allows you to uncover what the poet is attempting to convey and how the poem relates to readers on a universal level.

In this step, you will likely dedicate multiple body paragraphs to the analysis of various aspects of language and imagery. Each body paragraph should focus on a specific literary device, phrase, or aspect of language and imagery.

Here’s how you can structure the body paragraphs.

Poetry essay body paragraphs example

Body Paragraph 1: Identify and Explain Literary Devices

Body Paragraph 2: Context and Interaction with Themes

Body Paragraph 3: Reader's emotional response and understanding

Provide evidence from the poem

Providing evidence involves quoting specific lines or stanzas from the poem to support the points you’re making in your analysis. These quotes serve as concrete examples that demonstrate how the poet uses language, imagery, or literary devices to convey specific meanings or emotions.

Select lines or stanzas from the poem that directly relate to the point you're making in your analysis.
Introduce each quote with context, explaining the significance of the lines and how they contribute to your analysis.
Use quotation marks to indicate that you're using the poet's language.
After providing the quote, interpret its meaning. Explain how the language, imagery, or devices used in the quoted lines contribute to your analysis.

Providing evidence example

In your essay, you should include several quotes and interpret them to reinforce your points. Quoting specific lines from the poem allows you to showcase the poet’s language while demonstrating how these lines contribute to the poem’s overall expression.

Write a conclusion

Conclusion paragraph is the last sentence of your poem analysis essay. It reinforces your thesis statement and emphasizes your insights.

Additionally, the conclusion offers a chance to provide a final thought that leaves a lasting impression on the reader. In your conclusion, make sure to:

Start by rephrasing your thesis statement. Remind the reader of the main argument you've made in your essay.
Provide a concise summary of the main points. Avoid introducing new information; focus on the key ideas.
Discuss the broader significance or implications. How does the poem's message relate to readers beyond its specific context?
End with a thoughtful reflection, observation, or question that leaves the reader with something to ponder.

Poetry essay conclusion example

In your essay, the conclusion serves as a final opportunity to leave a strong impression on the reader by summarizing your analysis and offering insights into the poem’s broader significance.

Now, it’s time to double check what you’ve written.

Proofread and revise your essay

Edit your essay for clarity, coherence, tense selection , correct headings , etc. Ensure that your ideas flow logically and your analysis is well-supported. Remember, a poetry essay is an opportunity to delve into the nuances of a poem’s language, themes, and emotions.

Review each paragraph to ensure ideas flow logically from one to the next.
Check for grammar and punctuation errors.
Verify that your evidence from the poem is accurately quoted and explained.
Make sure your language is clear and effectively conveys your analysis.

By proofreading and revising, you can refine your essay, improving its readability and ensuring that your insights are communicated accurately.

So this was the last part, you’re now ready to write your first poem analysis (poetry) essay.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should i include in the introduction of a poetry essay.

In the introduction, provide background information about the poem and poet. Include the poem’s title, publication date, and any relevant context that helps readers understand its significance.

Can I include my emotional responses in a poetry essay?

Yes, you can discuss your emotional responses, but ensure they are supported by your analysis of the poem’s literary elements. Avoid focusing solely on personal feelings.

Is it important to understand the poet's background when writing a poetry essay?

While it can provide context, your focus should be on analyzing the poem itself. If the poet’s background is relevant to the poem’s interpretation, mention it briefly.

What's the best way to conclude a poetry essay?

In the conclusion, summarize your main points and tie them together. Offer insights into the poem’s broader significance, implications, or lasting impact.

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Power of Nature

Despite the efforts of humans to make a stamp on the earth, nature will always outlast everything:

‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert’
‘on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies’
‘Nothing beside remains.’
‘Round the decay of that colossal wreck’
‘The lone and level sands stretch far away’

Extract from the Prelude

During his journey in a boat, the young boy is forced to realise the awesome power of nature:

‘One summer evening’
Small circles glittering idly in the moon’
‘summit of a craggy ridge, The horizon’s utmost boundary’
‘far above Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky’
‘the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars’
‘measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me.’

Soldiers faced extreme weather conditions, whilst they were deployed at war.

Merciless iced east winds that knife us…’
‘Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles’
‘ait that shudders black with snow’
‘sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause and renew’
_‘wind’s nonchalance’ _
‘Pale flakes with lingering stealth come feeling for our faces-‘
‘His frost will fasten on this mud and us’
‘All their eyes are ice’

Storm on the Island

The storm reflects the power of nature and how manipulate the actions of humans:

‘leaves and branches Can raise a chorus in a gale’
It blows full Blast’
‘But there are no trees, no natural shelter’
‘You might think that the sea is company’
We are bombarded by the empty air’

Bayonet Charge

It is often forgotten that nature is also damaged, during times of conflict:

‘Stumbling across a field of clods towards a green hedge’
Threw up a yellow hare that rolled like a flame’
‘mouth wide Open silent, its eyes standing out.’

Nature is used as a symbol to communicate deeper meanings and concepts:

‘poppies had already been placed’
‘white cat hairs’
‘released a song bird from its cage’
‘a single dove flew from the pear tree’
‘The dove pulled freely against the sky’

Nature is powerful, because it has always existed and will continue long after generations of people:

‘The sun shines through their borderlines’
‘the marks that rivers make’
‘roads, railtracks, mountainfolds’
‘a grand design //with living tissue’
‘turned into your skin’

Exposure to nature reduces negative emotions and tension. The pilot changes his direction, because nature reminds him of the benefits of living:

‘he must have looked far down at the little fishing boats’
‘green-blue translucent sea’
‘arcing in swathes like a huge flag… in the figure of eight’
‘dark shoals of fishes… swivelled towards the sun’
‘turbulent inrush of breakers’
‘cloud-marked mackerel, black crabs, feathery prawns… whitebait’
‘tuna, the dark prince, muscular, dangerous’

The Beauty About The Nature

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

The Stars Awaken a Certain Reverence, Because Though Always Present, They Are Inaccessible;

but all natural objects make a kindred impression when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood. When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet . The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet . This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this, their warranty deeds give no title. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other;

who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.

Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,

— no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.

I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Chapter I from Nature , published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures

What Is The Meaning Behind Nature, The Poem?

Emerson often referred to nature as the "Universal Being" in his many lectures. It was Emerson who deeply believed there was a spiritual sense of the natural world which felt was all around him.

Going deeper still in this discussion of the "Universal Being", Emerson writes, "The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship."

It's common sense that "nature" is everything you see that is NOT man-made, or changed by man (trees, foliage, mountains, etc.), but Emerson reminds us that nature was set forth to serve man. This is the essence of human will, for man to harness nature. Every object in nature has its own beauty. Therefore, Emerson advocates to view nature as a reality by building your own world and surrounding yourself with natural beauty.

The purpose of science is to find the theory of nature.
Nature wears the colors of the Spirit.
A man is fed, not to fill his belly, but so he may work.
Each natural action is graceful.

"Material objects are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side."

This quote is cited in numerous works and it is attributed to a "French philosopher." However, no name can be found in association with this quote.

What is the main point of Nature, by Emerson?

The central theme of Emerson's famous essay "Nature" is the harmony that exists between the natural world and human beings. In "Nature," Ralph Waldo Emerson contends that man should rid himself of material cares and instead of being burdened by unneeded stress, he can enjoy an original relation with the universe and experience what Emerson calls "the sublime."

What is the central idea of the essay Nature, by Emerson?

For Emerson, nature is not literally God but the body of God’s soul. ”Nature,” he writes, is “mind precipitated.” Emerson feels that to realize one’s role in this respect fully is to be in paradise (similar to heaven itself).

What is Emerson's view of the Nature of humans?

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Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry to pursue a career in writing and public speaking. Emerson became one of America's best known and best-loved 19th-century figures. More About Emerson

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Early Emerson Poems

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Emerson Quotes

"Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson's Essays

Research the collective works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Read More Essay

Emerson's most famous work that can truly change your life. Check it out

America's best known and best-loved poems. More Poems

Aug 10, 2020
13 min read

Nature in Poetry: CSEC English B Poem Analysis and Comparison

Updated: Nov 5, 2020

An African Thunderstorm

Sonnet Composed Upon Westminster Bridge

God’s Grandeur

The presentations of nature vary across each of the poems above. In and of itself, nature is a concept that encompasses the Earth and all of its organic inner workings. The day to day shifts of natural occurrences are testaments to its constant regeneration and infinitely flowing fortitude. As expected of different artistic portrayals, each poem represents another facet of nature, ranging from its resilience to its insurmountable destructive power.

Describing the Expression of Nature

An African Thunderstorm relates the destructive power of nature. The persona suddenly finds himself and his village in the path of a terrifying thunderstorm, a chaotic amalgam of dark clouds and powerful winds. The clouds move with eager velocity, as stated in the line ‘ clouds come hurrying with the wind.’ The wind’s haphazard darting and turning in all directions builds up the sense of speed and anxiety. The movement of the wind is so frantic that the poet likens it to ‘a plague of locusts,’ revealing the definite ruinous potential such quick winds possess. Just like a plague of locusts, known for devastating crops and moving in a semblance of unison despite comprising several thousands of individual tiny creatures, the wind’s power holds the potential to destroy all in its path, despite being the summation of the chaotic movement of air particles in a low pressure weather system such as this thunderstorm. Moreover, the wind is said to ‘toss things up on its tail’ confirming its disruption of all that it passes. The poet reinforces the idea of its frantic, uncoordinated movement and cataclysmic potential by relating it to a ‘madman chasing nothing,’ a person lacking in depth of thought and thus, moving with no clear pattern and assuredly a danger to themselves and others. The clouds are described as being ‘ pregnant,’ personifying them to be like mothers with children growing within waiting to be released into the world. In the same way, the clouds are full of torrents of rain and bolts of lightning, like their own children of chaos to be deposited onto the land below. These clouds, high up in the sky, take on a level of dignity moving in the wind, as noted by the poet using a personification: ‘ [the clouds] ride stately on [the wind’s] back.’ Their slow procession appears now dignified, like a Lord entering his feudal manor on the back of a noble steed. The rain clouds gather ‘ to perch on hills like dark sinister wings,’ relating them to crows in their dark shade and an emanating sense of evil. The “trees bend to let [the wind] pass” as it whistles by, showing the sheer force of its movement- even forcing the strong, tall-standing trees to bend as though prostrating themselves before the wind’s undeniable power. The members of the village are bearing witness to the storm as it inches ever closer, eliciting different reactions. The children are delighted, screaming joyously at the prospect of something new occurring in their village. Though apparently out of place, their limited understanding of the world would lead them to find excitement in the novelty of abnormally quick winds and massive looming clouds. The women of the village seem to be mirroring the frantic movement of the wind from the previous stanza, daring ‘ about, in and out madly.’ In this anxious shuffle, they may be hurriedly attempting to make preparations for the storm, or are in a panic unsure of what to do in such an unforeseen circumstance. This fear exhibited by these women appears to be inherited by their babies, who are ‘ clinging on their backs,’ presumably out of trepidation as they too are buffeted by the powerful winds. The clothes of the people of the village are affected too, made to ‘ wave like flags’ as they are blown about and even off of their bodies by violent winds. All of this reinforces the idea of impending doom- inhabitants of the village are faced by this immensely powerful force of nature with no choice but to be subjugated and ruined by its arrival.

Sonnet Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 expresses nature’s striking beauty. The persona is simply awestruck by the existence of such a serene natural scene, complimenting profusely the elegant allure of the silent morning. This poem, in contrast to An African Thunderstorm, describes a scene that exemplifies nature’s power to inspire awe through its beauty rather than its power to destroy. The beginning of this sonnet is an exaggeration- the persona states that ‘ Earth has not anything to show more fair’ than the scene before him. So moved by the scenery, he proclaims that anyone able to pass by it without being compelled to admire it momentarily would be ‘ dull… of soul.’ Thus, the persona subtly conveys that the idyllic sight before him directly calls to the soul of the one admiring it. The speaker is looking out over the city, stating with the use of a simile that the landscape ‘ now doth, like a garment wear, the beauty of the morning.’ Like a dress, the city seems to be clothed or covered by something different from what the speaker is accustomed to. Although the city itself is the same, now clothed by the silent, elegant beauty of the morning, it takes on a new personality- a novel allure. The natural beauty of the morning is capable of even transforming manmade structures seen every day by our persona into a seemingly new scene capable of touching his very soul. The buildings ‘ lie open unto the fields, and to the sky,’ becoming a part of their natural surroundings through the omnipresent veil of the silent morning. Now, though so distinctly different in composition to organic structures, they too appear ‘ bright and glittering’ in air untainted by the smoke of industrial work created later on in the day. The poet’s ode continues- decreeing that the sun had never so beautifully ‘steep[ed] in his first splendour, valley, rock or hill,’ conveying that the sun’s appearance to him now, sitting at the very base of the sky like a teabag steeping in the bottom of a cup, is more beautiful and touching than he had ever seen it before. This alluring natural calm of the morning is one he had never yet felt or observed. Everything seems to be at peace in the eyes of the persona, even the river glides by ‘ at his own sweet will,’ unencumbered by watercrafts and humans disrupting its easy flow. Under the peaceful calm of the morning, ‘ the very houses seem asleep,’ as they, too, are at peace when the bustling of humanity is subdued in slumber. The ‘mighty heart’ of the city is ‘ lying still ,’ as much a part of the unshakeable calm as the natural scene around it. The poem exudes admiration in the speaker’s lavish expression of the tranquil scene before him. All seems calm, and his very soul is moved by it. Nature’s ability to refresh even such an industrial town with the stillness of morning is incredible to him, and shows a face of nature different to that expressed in An African Thunderstorm. Instead of seeing the tumultuous, chaotically powerful side of nature, he is exposed to its reinvigorating calm, able to create scenes of unmatchable majesty.

Orchids relates the poetic intrigue of nature’s resilience. An African Thunderstorm and Sonnet Composed view nature’s impact on a wider scale. Sonnet Composed is the speaker’s expression of nature’s ability to create beautiful, majestic scenes through the stillness of morning as he views the serene sight of Westminster wearing this veil of morning. An African Thunderstorm descriptively conveys the ruinous capabilities of nature- its potential to destroy and inspire fear as an inextricable force in the form of a storm. Orchids instead views a smaller scale impact of nature. The persona unwittingly bears witness to the resilience of the natural world in the form of a spray of strangely stubborn orchids. As the speaker clears their home to move after seemingly only five weeks, they have boxed this chapter of their life into pieces ready to be sent on ‘ to fill spaces in [their] future life.’ Now all that remains, with seemingly no place among the other boxed pieces, is a spray of orchids. The persona finds no importance in these flowers, because, even though they were given to her as a gift, it was by a person who gives flowers habitually. Thus, the gift seems meaningless, simply a product of this person’s perfunctory habits. What the orchids lack in fragrance, they make up for in visual appeal, as ‘ the purple petals draw you to look at the purple heart.’ The purple centres of these orchids, referred to as ‘hearts’ to create a clever allusion to the US military prize (purple heart), are appealing to the persona. Alluding to the US military prize of the purple heart suggests that these flowers, like the soldiers granted these awards, have done something brave and valiant in their existence. The speaker reveals that they had only watered the orchids once ‘ when the blossoms were full blown like polished poems, ’ showing that despite their acknowledgement of the orchids’ pristine and complicated allure, they still expressed indifference to their survival. So much so, in fact, that the persona says that they were ‘ sure they’d wilt, and [they would] toss them out with the five-week litter.’ The persona had expected that, in light of his negligence of their wellbeing, the orchids would succumb to the unpropitious state of their situation and die- becoming yet another thing to be discarded at the end of this chapter of his life. But, miraculously, valiantly even, they refuse to die. The persona ‘ starved them,’ possibly intentionally, to deny the vapid, ritualistic nature of the gift, but they persevere nonetheless. The morning the persona intends to leave, ‘ the bud at the stalk’s tip unfurled.’ Not only have the orchids survived in the face of adversity, they have thrived to the point at which the bud has bloomed in maturity. This curious turn of events motivates the speaker to preserve one of the blooms ‘ between pages of memory’ rather than discarding them, hoping to one day discover the ‘ peculiar poetry’ of the orchids once they dry and can be seen through (literally and figuratively). The speaker attempts to stifle the orchids through his own negligence, but is instead met head on by the remarkable resilience of nature. He is forced to notice these orchids despite initially writing them off as completely meaningless due to the nature of the gift and the giver of the gift. The peculiar poetry in the survival of these orchids communicates a fundamental idea surrounding the power of nature. In the poem, the persona experiences the valiant perseverance of these orchids- their survival and subsequent thriving- in the face of adverse circumstances created by an inattentive owner. In the same way, nature is capable of the same resilience, even when the humans within it ignore its wellbeing out of misguided indifference. In the short liminal time between shifts in a nomadic lifestyle, the persona encounters this curious circumstance and is taught a lesson of the resilience and bravery nature possesses through a stubborn spray of orchids.

God’s Grandeur examines nature from a religious standpoint, highlighting its undying regenerative quality which renews the world constantly despite the tireless attempts of humanity to tarnish its lustre. An African Thunderstorm created a scene of terror and impending doom highlighting the face of nature which holds cataclysmic potential. This is similar to the expression of God in the Bible when coupled with the facet of nature conveyed in God’s Grandeur. Nature, like God, transitions between periods of harsh destruction and sublime revitalizing calm. Sonnet Composed presents nature similarly to G od’s Grandeur, highlighting its majestic beauty in applying a new veil of calm to even the mighty, industrialized city in the morning, where God’s Grandeur intimates a wider view of the organic world’s regenerative property even when tainted by human pursuits. Orchids’ relation of nature mirrors that of this poem most closely, however. Orchids tells a tale of someone inadvertently bearing witness to nature’s resilience, with or without human interference- just like how God’s Grandeur highlights the ability of nature to regenerate daily even when trod upon by generations of selfish humans. This poem, however, is seen through the eyes of a persona who already understands this resilient natural world- and now expresses his admiration of it while relating the role of the spiritual source of this power. In God’s Grandeur, the persona declares with the beginning of the poem that the natural world is ‘ charged with the grandeur of God,’ indicating that nature is imbued with an innate energy related directly to God’s great power. The world is ‘ charged’ as though with an electric current, but an alternate reading of the use of the word ‘charged’ suggests that instead, the people of the world are given responsibility of God’s grandeur. The greatness of God is given a fulminant, volatile quality, as it will ‘ flame out, like shining from shook foil.’ It is in this ascription of the impressively beautiful and great grandeur of God that the poet introduces the point of perplexity for the speaker. This imposing strength, grandiose and fulminant for all the world to see, is understandably deserving of deference from all of creation. However, the speaker finds that humans do not accede to God’s divine authority. Instead, humanity is fixated on commercial pursuits and personal gain. The natural world, once untainted in the moment of God’s careful creation, is now ‘ seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil.’ Man’s obsession with industry has left its mark on the world. In pursuing gains through financial systems of his own creation, man throws the state of the natural world to the wayside to extract, manipulate and exploit it by all means necessary. Now, all ‘ wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell,’ showing that everything with which humanity has interacted in seeking self-satisfaction is besmirched by the mark of human industrialism. Everything has been impacted- nature is tainted by man’s pursuits. Once overgrowing with vegetation, ‘ the soil is bare now,’ exhausted from the exploitation of commercial agriculture and being crushed under the feet of apathetic humans. It appears that man has become numb to his own connection to nature, as their feet cannot even feel the earth below, ‘ being shod.’ Covered by shoes, they trample greenery without a second thought, unfeeling and indifferent. Despite all this, ‘ nature is never spent.’ The natural world is never completely exhausted, even when trod upon by generations of humans who taint their surroundings with the stench of industry. The persona intimates that deep down in everything ‘ lives the dearest freshness.’ This freshness is inherent to nature, charged with God’s insurmountable power, reinvigorating the world even through adversity. Even though night falls and the day comes to an end, ‘morning… springs,’ forward yet again. The world returns to fullness day after day, because, according to the speaker, the Holy Ghost, like a bird brooding over its eggs, protects the earth, warms it, and refreshes it every passing day, regardless of the abrasive impact of humanity.

South is a lot more complex in its presentation of nature. Instead of viewing nature from the perspective of the persona’s experience, nature is analysed in direct relation to the persona. The natural world has a direct bearing on the speaker, and thus, South expresses nature’s ability to affect feelings of detachment and nostalgia whilst representing a conduit for our own emotional changes. The poem opens with a triumphant statement of the persona’s reclamation of the ‘ bright beaches’ and ‘blue mist from the ocean’ of his homeland. This, the land of his birth, is characterized by a direct connection to nature. The scenery and ‘ sound of the sea’ breathes life into him, and is therefore always connected to emotions of happiness surrounding his childhood. When the speaker travels away from his homeland, the natural scenery around him changes- ‘ bright beaches’ are replaced with northern lands in ‘slanting sleet and… hail;’ the shores of the ocean are replaced by ‘saltless savannas,’ all devoid of the ocean and island scenery he so loves. His home is now in the forest, where ‘shadows oppress [him]’ and the sea is no where to be seen- the only water he has is the ‘rain and the tepid taste of the river.’ At this point, the persona has experienced several extremes of the manifestations of nature. His early life, lit up by sunshine, spiced by the salt of the sea and given ambiance by the sound of the waves is dear to him. So much so, that every place he goes, he highlights their lack of the salty ocean (‘ saltless’, ‘tepid taste’ ). Nature now has a direct bearing on his emotions- such a jarring shift from the life he once knew makes him feel oppressed and dejected. The river, he says, is no solace to him. The infinite flowing of the river mirrors his own unending longing for his home and the landscape which warms his heart. Nature reflects not only the thing for which he longs, but also the thing which mirrors his own yearning. When he denies the river and its ‘ cunning declension down to the sea,’ he also denies his own yearning. But, when he is finally able to accept it, understanding its natural flow as a chronicle of history, he is finally able to be where both he and the river end, the sea. In this way, the river works as a method of coping for a homesick man, constantly searching for his homeland wherever he goes and being constantly disappointed. Finally able to return- reminiscing joyously despite all the hardships he must pass in his memory- the speaker is revitalized. ‘ Bright waves splash up from the rocks to refresh’ the persona as he plunges headfirst into an idealized nostalgic visualization of his childhood home. Nature is no longer a mirror for his yearning, but rather a refreshing force which unencumbers him and remains as a pillar of the joy he recalls from childhood. ‘ Small urchins… look up from their traps to salute’ the persona. ‘ A starfish lies in its pool,’ relaxed and unburdened just like the lifestyle of the island. The persona has returned home in memory, able to experience the beautiful natural world unfold before him the way he remembers it. Nature becomes what reinvigorates him, and his progression from denial to acceptance allows him to indulge (in memory) a world of bright beaches and blue sea shells once more.

NB: On the CSEC English B Paper 2, the student is given a choice between two poetry essay questions. Since 2009 , these two questions have followed a basic formula: the first question names two poems and asks that the student compare them based on a theme or concept presented by both poems. The second question always asks the student select two poems on the syllabus that present the theme given (i.e. the poems are not named). Each question is then split up into 3 parts (a, b and c) with marks allocated in the ratio of 8:8:9 (total: 25 marks). The 3 question parts will always consist of a description question (i.e. relate/describe what the poem is about or a certain aspect of the poem); a discussion (or comment) question, which requires that the student introduce and argue their own views on the attitude of the speaker in a poem, the effects of a certain theme in the poem, the treatment of that idea/theme or which poem is more effective/appealing; and a poetic device question, (always valued at 9 marks) where the student must recall a poetic device from each poem which expresses the theme given and discuss its effectiveness along with the type of figurative device. Of course, there are several different ways that these questions can be expressed, but that is the basic structure of every CSEC poetry question since 2009.

As each CSEC question requires the comparison of 2 poems, there are 380 possible permutations (combinations) of 2. However, excluding repeated combinations in this calculated value, there are also poems that have no common themes (at least as interpreted in this document). So, for the purpose of efficiency, reason and organization, the poems will be compared and separated based on themes whilst highlighting theme-related poetic devices, describing the poem in relation to the theme and exploring possible discussions.

Comparisons will be made for every theme and then uploaded as a full document.

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The Topic of Nature in William Wordsworth's Poetry

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Published: Apr 11, 2022

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Nature Essay for Students and Children

500+ words nature essay.

Nature is an important and integral part of mankind. It is one of the greatest blessings for human life; however, nowadays humans fail to recognize it as one. Nature has been an inspiration for numerous poets, writers, artists and more of yesteryears. This remarkable creation inspired them to write poems and stories in the glory of it. They truly valued nature which reflects in their works even today. Essentially, nature is everything we are surrounded by like the water we drink, the air we breathe, the sun we soak in, the birds we hear chirping, the moon we gaze at and more. Above all, it is rich and vibrant and consists of both living and non-living things. Therefore, people of the modern age should also learn something from people of yesteryear and start valuing nature before it gets too late.

Significance of Nature

Nature has been in existence long before humans and ever since it has taken care of mankind and nourished it forever. In other words, it offers us a protective layer which guards us against all kinds of damages and harms. Survival of mankind without nature is impossible and humans need to understand that.

If nature has the ability to protect us, it is also powerful enough to destroy the entire mankind. Every form of nature, for instance, the plants , animals , rivers, mountains, moon, and more holds equal significance for us. Absence of one element is enough to cause a catastrophe in the functioning of human life.

We fulfill our healthy lifestyle by eating and drinking healthy, which nature gives us. Similarly, it provides us with water and food that enables us to do so. Rainfall and sunshine, the two most important elements to survive are derived from nature itself.

Further, the air we breathe and the wood we use for various purposes are a gift of nature only. But, with technological advancements, people are not paying attention to nature. The need to conserve and balance the natural assets is rising day by day which requires immediate attention.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conservation of Nature

In order to conserve nature, we must take drastic steps right away to prevent any further damage. The most important step is to prevent deforestation at all levels. Cutting down of trees has serious consequences in different spheres. It can cause soil erosion easily and also bring a decline in rainfall on a major level.

Polluting ocean water must be strictly prohibited by all industries straightaway as it causes a lot of water shortage. The excessive use of automobiles, AC’s and ovens emit a lot of Chlorofluorocarbons’ which depletes the ozone layer. This, in turn, causes global warming which causes thermal expansion and melting of glaciers.

Therefore, we should avoid personal use of the vehicle when we can, switch to public transport and carpooling. We must invest in solar energy giving a chance for the natural resources to replenish.

In conclusion, nature has a powerful transformative power which is responsible for the functioning of life on earth. It is essential for mankind to flourish so it is our duty to conserve it for our future generations. We must stop the selfish activities and try our best to preserve the natural resources so life can forever be nourished on earth.

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GCSE FULL MARKS, EDUQUAS 'DEATH OF A NATURALIST' NATURE POEM ESSAY

Subject: English

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Assessment and revision

Last updated

12 May 2024

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GCSE English Literature poetry anthology, analysis of the theme of NATURE in the poem ‘Death of a Naturalist’ by Seamus Heaney, FULL MARKS for WJEC Eduquas specification. 558 words. Introduction, 2 language comparison paragraphs and 1 structure comparison paragraph. Context imbedded throughout.

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Dante’s Inferno: a Deep Dive into the Allegorical Circles of Hell

This essay about Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno” examines the structured and symbolic representation of Hell in his epic poem. It describes Hell as nine concentric circles, each punishing different sins with precise moral justice. The analysis begins with Dante’s entrance into Hell, highlighting the emotional and spiritual punishments that await sinners, ranging from the virtuous pagans in Limbo to the deceitful in the lower circles. The essay discusses the allegorical nature of the punishments and the inclusion of historical and mythical figures to enrich the themes of guilt, justice, and human frailty. Dante’s guide, Virgil, symbolizes human reason, emphasizing the poem’s focus on reason and divine grace in navigating moral complexities. Ultimately, the essay asserts that “Inferno” serves as a reflection on the consequences of our actions and the importance of ethical living, making it relevant across ages.

How it works

The opening section of Dante Alighieri’s colossal epic poem “The Divine Comedy,” “Inferno,” transports readers profoundly through the several circles of Hell. The poem is a meditation on justice and human nature as well as a religious metaphor of the consequences of sin. Here, we explore the many levels of Dante’s Hell, looking at its organization, meaning, and continuing significance.

Nine concentric circles, each designated for a distinct category of sinners, are used to represent Dante’s Hell. These circles descend into the earth’s interior, where Satan is imprisoned in ice.

This arrangement reflects the poet’s moralistic conception of the universe, in which the complexity and harshness of divine vengeance are analogous to those of human wrongdoing.

The voyage starts in the shadowy woods when the protagonist, Dante, gets lost. This represents the spiritual disorientation that many experience when they deviate from their moral path. He discovers the entrance to Hell, which is marked with the well-known phrase, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” This lays the groundwork for the hopelessness and never-ending retribution that lie within.

The first circle, Limbo, houses virtuous pagans and unbaptized infants. It is a relatively peaceful domain where the only suffering is the absence of God’s presence. This circle introduces readers to the concept that not all punishments in Hell are physical; some are emotional and spiritual.

As Dante progresses to the deeper circles, the sins grow more severe, and the punishments more grotesque. In the second circle, the lustful are forever swept in a violent storm, unable to find peace, just as they allowed their passions to control them in life. This pattern of symbolic retribution continues through the circles. Gluttons lie in putrid sludge in the third circle, a representation of their filthy excesses, while the wrathful fight each other endlessly in the swampy waters of the fifth circle.

The deeper circles punish sins of malice and fraud, which Dante considers more heinous than sins of passion because they involve betrayal of reason and trust. The eighth circle, subdivided into ten ditches, houses a range of deceivers from seducers to counterfeiters, each group tormented in a manner befitting their crimes on earth. This meticulous matching of sin and punishment exemplifies Dante’s belief in divine justice, where Hell serves as the ultimate moral arbiter.

Perhaps the most poignant aspect of Dante’s Hell is its inhabitants. Each sinner has a story, which Dante uses to explore themes of guilt, regret, and justice. Historical figures and mythical characters are judiciously placed to either exemplify their sins or illuminate their human weaknesses. For instance, Ulysses, found in the eighth circle, is punished not for his famed adventures but for the deceit he employed.

Dante’s guide through this infernal landscape is the Roman poet Virgil, symbolizing human reason. Virgil’s presence underscores the poem’s emphasis on reason and knowledge as guides through the moral complexities of life. However, Virgil’s inability to enter Paradise also highlights the limits of human reason and the necessity of divine grace.

The relevance of Dante’s “Inferno” transcends its medieval origins. Today, it can be seen as a mirror reflecting our contemporary moral quandaries. Each circle forces readers to confront not only the darkness found in the poem but also the potential for darkness within themselves. It serves as a stark reminder of the consequences of our actions and the importance of living a life aligned with our ethical beliefs.

In conclusion, Dante’s depiction of Hell is not merely a grotesque spectacle of torment but a carefully constructed allegory that invites readers to reflect on justice, human nature, and the power of redemption. As we navigate through Dante’s Hell, we are compelled to consider the weight of our own choices and the ultimate quest for moral integrity in our lives. This journey, though harrowing, reinforces the timeless message that our actions have consequences, reaching far beyond the scope of our own lives into the cosmic scale of divine justice.

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B-Sides: The Poems of John Rollin Ridge, or Yellow Bird (Chees-quat-a-law-ny)

J ournalist, editor, lawyer, and activist John Rollin Ridge/Yellow Bird (Cherokee: Chees-quat-a-law-ny) was a complicated ideologue, best remembered today for The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, The Celebrated California Bandit (1854). He was right to think of that novel as a contribution “to those materials out of which the early history of California shall one day be composed.” Now considered the first novel published by an American Indian and one of the first written in California, it is also a telling critique of anti-Mexican racism following the Mexican-American War.

The works in his 1868 Poems, however, did more to construct the idea of California in his own day—and they should be better known, not least because they illustrate how fraught it was to be Cherokee (and American) at this formative time. Perhaps because it was published posthumously, or because many of its verses had already appeared in periodicals, Poems has largely been overlooked. True, several of its lengthier compositions are occasional verses, a genre often maligned as rote and sycophantic. These include poems he performed to celebrate the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable; the dedication of Oakland College; and Independence Day 1861. To make matters unimaginably worse for a verse-averse modern reader, most are in heroic couplets of the “All hail, the fairest, greatest, best of days! / With heaving hearts, and tongues attuned to praise” variety. Yet Ridge’s work deserves a second look because of both who he was and what he wrought.

Born to a mixed-race couple in 1827 in what is now Georgia, Ridge lived a life marked by murder, bigotry, and continual travel across the coalescing US. His family, who profited from the violent practice of slavery, broke with many other Cherokees by supporting cession of tribal lands to Georgia in 1835. For this his father and grandfather were assassinated in 1839, causing his mother to flee with him to Arkansas. In the 1840s, Ridge was educated in Massachusetts, then returned to Arkansas, where he met Elizabeth Wilson of Tennessee, whom he married and with whom he had a daughter. In 1849, Ridge killed a man he deemed complicit in his father’s murder. That also sparked a family flight, first to Missouri, then to California. Ridge arrived there in 1850, just before it became a state. Aside from representing the Southern Cherokee delegation in Washington, DC, in 1866 as part of post-Civil War treaty negotiations, Ridge spent the rest of his life in California. When he died in 1867, he was buried in Grass Valley.

Native Stories from Native Perspectives

I knew none of this when I first opened Poems. The more I learned, though, the more I came to see that volume as mapping out the new state, literally and figuratively. Like Ridge, I hail from the East Coast, so California’s Bay Area felt foreign to me when I moved there for grad school. Wherever I went, however, Ridge had a poem for that.

Take, for example, the 14 pages of couplets uninspiringly titled “Poem” that Ridge delivered in 1860 before the Agricultural, Horticultural, and Mechanics’ Society of the Northern District of California. Not a promising start.

But it’s his most thought-provoking poem. It tells a panoramic tale of human interaction with nature, from antiquity (“Roman tongue,” “Egypt’s kings,” “China’s wall,” “Parsee worshiper,” “Afric Carthage,” “Ninevah [ sic ],” “Babylon”) through the New World (“Montezuma’s golden reign,” “Cortez … with red right hand of war,” “Aztec genius,” “Inca’s sway,” “Alpacca’s [ sic ] fleece”) to the 19th century buzzing with electricity, telegraphs, steam engines, and irrigation. Ridge even marvels at

how science found New modes to fertilize the failing ground— Ammonia’s properties, the silicates, The strength of guano, phosphates, and their mates

Couplets aggrandizing actual scat-tering might smack of the occasional verse immortalized in anthologies such as Very Bad Poetry . Oh, the belabored cataloguing, the jingling rhymes, the didacticism! Still, consider that without such lowly chemicals, the new state would’ve been—would still be—unable to support its burgeoning population. Ridge isn’t afraid to muck in, as it were, to glorify mundanity itself. These were not just celebratory poems praising nature as the genre required, but practical ones recording California’s resources, peoples, and events. Ridge (like poets before him, stretching back to Homer with his “Catalogue of Ships”) was using known and predictable poetic forms as mnemonic devices geared toward knowledge dissemination. His performances delivered an eco-techno manifesto (silicates and Silicon) advising new residents on how not to screw things up in this promised and promising land.

As much as he praises 19th-century tech, however, Ridge recognizes its abuses in “Poem” too. His indictment of the cultural and technological exclusion of Indigenous peoples by Europeans still rings true: “Were peace and plenty but the Spaniard’s right? / The Aztec barbarous because not white ?” In building to the poem’s most emphatic line, he compares Euro-American civilization unfavorably with the “Peru Indian’s plan”:

Not all the Old World’s civilization vast, Nor yet our own, the grandest and the last, To that one culminating point has come— To give each man a competence and home .

A competence and home . Mundane but indispensable. Silicon Valley—its startups, social media, self-driving cars, and apps of all kinds—dominated my California, causing enormous economic inequality, often along racial lines. Employment, education, housing—the Bay Area I knew struggled to provide access to all of them. It still does.

Make no mistake, Ridge was deeply perplexing and blatantly racist. In addition to seeking revenge, he condoned and engaged in the brutal enslavement of Black people; he opposed Abraham Lincoln, even before his presidency, and later the Emancipation Proclamation; and he regarded California’s “Digger” Indians and Chinese immigrants as inferior. There’s no overlooking that. At the same time, he tirelessly extolled the Union; championed Cherokee statehood; and exalted the Indigenous peoples of Central and South America.

Ridge himself was a roiling amalgam of everything the U.S. comprised in the 19th century, and “Poems” documents that story.

In “Poem,” he also advocates for amalgamation, comparing the synergy of mixing races to that of cross-pollinating flowers:

The cultured flower expanding into size Unknown before and tinct with richer dyes, New forms assuming from the fecund dust Not left to chance and to the zephyr’s trust, But, like with unlike pollen mixed, till strange Creations bloomed and wonder marked the change; The human soul, the Man, expanded too. And found in realms of thought the strange and new.

These lines betray unmistakable prejudice: only “cultured” flowers, like “civilized” races, are encouraged due to Ridge’s espousal of assimilationism. Yet they also embrace the idea of a state where mixing is as vital to people as it is to nature. Ridge himself was a roiling amalgam of everything the US comprised in the 19th century, and Poems documents that story. Acknowledging “the beauty and the brutality” in this book therefore means acknowledging them in ourselves.

“Poem” is full of such prescient critiques for the 21st century, and so is Poems . The rest of the volume displays the extraordinary range of Ridge’s interests. His Greek, Latin, and biblical studies flavor his assessments of Washington, Adams, Clay, Jackson, Webster, and Douglas. He dedicates whole poems to analyzing “Mary, Queen of Scotts,” “The Arkansaw Root Doctor,” and a “Queen of the Gipsies.” He even wrote poetry about “The man twenty feet high, having the features of the Indian race, said to have been recently discovered in a cave somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.” (That last poem isn’t in the book, but how could I resist?) Anything was fair game for Ridge’s inquisitive, acquisitive, and vehement mind.

Ridge’s contemporaries recognized the importance of his poetry. He was one of the few poets whose work (an homage to Sappho’s fellow female poet, titled “Erinna”) was included in Gold Rush chronicler Bret Harte’s Outcroppings, being Selections of California Verse (1866). To boot, a historic marker placed on his grave in 1933 identifies him as a poet, not a novelist.

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COMMENTS

Poetry and the Environment
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In other words, an ecopoem is a kind of nature poem. But an ecopoem needs more than the vocabulary of nature. Consider John Ashbery's "River of the Canoefish": These wilds came naturally by their monicker. In 1825 the first canoefish was seen hanging offshore. ... in an essay or a poem. However self-aware and self-reflexive it may be, an ...
How to Write a Poetry Essay (Complete Guide)
Main Paragraphs. Now, we come to the main body of the essay, the quality of which will ultimately determine the strength of our essay. This section should comprise of 4-5 paragraphs, and each of these should analyze an aspect of the poem and then link the effect that aspect creates to the poem's themes or message.
PDF ROLE OF NATURE IN ENGLISH POETRY
nature all told of the poems and essays is truthfully a living character through which human identity is built either through the characters' alignment with the nature or their struggle against it. In the art work whether it is poetry, Nature plays a vital role but in background of it. For example as place or time or sometimes as theme.
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lighting the yard. read more about nature poetry. There are thousands of nature and landscape poems to read through the changing seasons; here is just a small sampling: "February: The Boy Breughel" by Norman Dubie. "Song of Nature" by Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Birches" by Robert Frost. "Mock Orange" by Louise Glück. "October" by Louise Glück.
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Wendell Berry provides a simple useful definition of nature poetry as poetry that "considers nature as subject matter and inspiration.". Our concepts of nature are relative, historically determined. The nature poem is affected by ideology, by literary conventions as well as social and cultural ideas. Raymond Williams contends, "Nature is ...
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This essay addresses the nature of the experience of nature, as evoked, in particular, by Coleridge, and the relationship between that experience and the impulse to speak of it, especially in poetry. Always a fascinated observer of his own responsiveness, he wrote to Thomas Wedgwood in 1802 that 'I never find myself alone within the embracement of rocks & hills, a traveller up an alpine road ...
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Ecocritical poetry captures the transformative power of nature, inviting readers to immerse themselves in its beauty and find solace in its presence. Through their words, poets transport us to serene landscapes, reminding us of the inherent connection between the human spirit and the natural world. 4. The Relationship between Humans and Nature.
(PDF) The Concept of Nature in the Poetry of William Wordsworth and
Moreover, it seeks to identify the major similarities and differences in the use of nature in the poetry of William Wordsworth and Robert Frost. Since this research is ... The following ideas come from Helen Bacon's essay on Frost entitled, Frost and the Ancient Muses: In 1927 Frost said, "I almost think a poem is most valuable for its ...
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 'Nature' is an 1836 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson explores the relationship between nature and humankind, arguing that if we approach nature with a poet's eye, and a pure spirit, we will find the wonders of nature revealed to us.
PDF The Role Of Nature In Romantic Poetry: A Study Of Wordsworth, Coleridge
The poem speaks to nature's ability to stimulate the mind, even in isolation, providing comfort and liberation despite physical constraints. Coleridge's relationship with nature is thus deeply intertwined with his fascination with the human mind, imagination, and spiritual realms. His portrayal of nature often transcends the physical, delving ...
Use of Nature in Poetry Essay example
1728 Words. 7 Pages. Open Document. Poetry Poets use many ways when they want to communicate something using poems. Poems are used as a means of passing ideas, information and expression of feelings. This has made the poets to use the natural things and images that people can relate with so that they can make these poems understandable.
(PDF) A Critical Analysis of Nature in Literature
This study aims to describe the romantic ideology manifestation in Acep ZamzamNoor's poems, in terms of: (a) romantic feelings, (b) romantic nature, (c) romanticimagination, and (d) romantic ...
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Poetry essay body paragraphs example. Body Paragraph 1: Identify and Explain Literary Devices. "Because I could not stop for Death" by Emily Dickinson employs various literary devices that contribute to the poem's themes. The poem employs personification, where Death is personified as a courteous carriage driver.
Power of Nature
During his journey in a boat, the young boy is forced to realise the awesome power of nature: 'One summer evening'. Small circles glittering idly in the moon'. 'summit of a craggy ridge, The horizon's utmost boundary'. 'far above Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky'. 'the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars'.
Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Chapter I from Nature, published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures. What Is The Meaning Behind Nature, The Poem? Emerson often referred to nature as the "Universal Being" in his many lectures. It was Emerson who deeply believed there was a spiritual sense of the natural world which felt was all around him.. Going deeper still in this discussion of the "Universal Being", Emerson writes ...
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Nature Poems. Poems about wide, wild open spaces. By John Felstiner. Illustration by Diana Sudyka. 1. Emily Dickinson, "A narrow Fellow in the Grass". Dickinson was annoyed when a friend published this poem as "The Snake"—she wanted no title, as if the poem were a riddle. Later, her family wasn't happy about her independent stance ...
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These juxtaposing thoughts show just how great man's lack of understanding is of the world around, and how far man is from understanding. The key idea Dickinson presents throughout her nature based poetry, is that man and nature are distant beings; no matter how much man may try to reach nature, he will never succeed.
Nature in Poetry: CSEC English B Poem Analysis and Comparison
South. The presentations of nature vary across each of the poems above. In and of itself, nature is a concept that encompasses the Earth and all of its organic inner workings. The day to day shifts of natural occurrences are testaments to its constant regeneration and infinitely flowing fortitude. As expected of different artistic portrayals ...
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Get original essay. Consistent throughout the poetry of William Wordsworth nature stands with a strong and important purpose that can help people become more deep and intensive rather than shallow or surfaced. Observing the largest looming mountains to the smallest flower encourages the brain to contemplate bigger, deeper, and more passionately.
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500+ Words Nature Essay. Nature is an important and integral part of mankind. It is one of the greatest blessings for human life; however, nowadays humans fail to recognize it as one. Nature has been an inspiration for numerous poets, writers, artists and more of yesteryears. This remarkable creation inspired them to write poems and stories in ...
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docx, 17.74 KB. GCSE English Literature poetry anthology, analysis of the theme of NATURE in the poem 'Death of a Naturalist' by Seamus Heaney, FULL MARKS for WJEC Eduquas specification. 558 words. Introduction, 2 language comparison paragraphs and 1 structure comparison paragraph. Context imbedded throughout.
Dante's Inferno: a Deep Dive into the Allegorical Circles of Hell
The essay discusses the allegorical nature of the punishments and the inclusion of historical and mythical figures to enrich the themes of guilt, justice, and human frailty. Dante's guide, Virgil, symbolizes human reason, emphasizing the poem's focus on reason and divine grace in navigating moral complexities.
B-Sides: The Poems of John Rollin Ridge, or Yellow Bird (Chees-quat-a
The works in his 1868 Poems, however, did more to construct the idea of California in his own day—and they should be better known, not least because they illustrate how fraught it was to be Cherokee (and American) at this formative time.Perhaps because it was published posthumously, or because many of its verses had already appeared in periodicals, Poems has largely been overlooked.