Anthology: Natural Forces

Nature. Nature can be a great influential element in our lives. Nature is present everywhere. It is such an important factor that even mankind attempts to replicate its properties in architectural moves to bring us closer. Man seeks to be with nature. In buildings, it is highly desired to have plenty of openings with views to the outside and to let the sun penetrate in. There are attempts of blurring the line between interior and exterior to create a more heightened experience with in the building.

Nature is also such a powerful force that even the smallest and most fragile forms of life can coexist with such harsh elements that mankind cannot withstand. There are the smallest life forms (worms) that thrive in the icy glaciers of Antarctica; insects that can freeze over during winter and thaw themselves out at the start of spring. Starfish can regenerate severed limbs. Even the roots of a “flower [can] split[ the hardest of] rocks” (Ferguson 1169). There are just so many wonders of nature it is mind boggling.

Nature can be serene and peaceful at times yet powerful and unpredictable at other times. There is so much that can happen that one cannot experience it all. But you can write about that particular instance and share it with the world.

There are several opportunities to write about the feelings that come forth when you have an experience with nature. Even the smallest and mundane events such as the wind whistling through the leaves can strike a chord and bring back the memories of the past. In Gary Snyder’s “Four Poems for Robin,” the story is based on a past love. His current encounters with nature (sleeping on the deck on a cool night) made him reminisce when they were together. The lovely settings set the mood- very romantic. The green rolling hills and the blue ocean front; the “thick autumn stars” (Ferguson 1707), smoky breath under the moonlit sky and “tall dry grass by the orchard” (Ferguson 1708). The one simple thing that seems to trigger all of these special memories is when he is outside admiring the night sky.

Everyday routines can become very entrancing. “The Fish” by Marianne Moore describes the simple tide crashing against the rocks. But Moore goes into much more detail of the life that happens in between. This is where the barnacles live. They are stationary and helpless against the rays of the sun and the power of the water pounding against the rocks. Their only defense is to open and close like “injured fan[s]” as the day passes by (Ferguson 1221). Ted Hughes’ “Relic” also speaks of the complexity of nature with his simple encounter at the beach. On the shore’s edge he found a jawbone. The sequence of events played like a film in his head. These are the remnants of the sea, the start and ending of a never ending cycle. The injured, weak, and old are the first to go. The strong and healthy strip the carcasses clean. The “indigestibles” are cast back onto the surface as time permits (Ferguson 1698). And what is left shows how much time has gone by. Conrad Potter Aiken’s “All Lovely Things” is also about the cycle of life. Everything has a beginning and an end, both the beautiful along with the unnoticeable things in life along. The flowers bloom and wither away. The rain comes and washes them away. But it is how nature works. The narrator outcries “come back, true love! Sweet youth, remain” (Aiken). As human beings we are able to see our futures. But there is not much you can do but to enjoy what time you have left because nature will take its course as time goes by.

Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” speaks of “something” that does not love walls- man made that is (Ferguson 1121). And that something is referring to nature. The earth freezes over and swells the ground under the wall, damaging it, creating cracks that make the wall no longer impenetrable. And what is the purpose of a fence if it is no longer viable at doing its job? But then Frost brings up the notion of the real purpose of a fence. His neighbor said that “good fences make good neighbors” (Ferguson 1122). But a fence’s sole purpose is to keep something either in or out. And the fence that they make annual repairs to is only separating an apple orchard and a field of pines. His neighbor has only erected the wall because his father has done so in the past and he is just replicating what he knows. But there is no real reason for the fence and that ‘something’ tears it down slowly every year and he knows this. As he in fills a gap in the wall he talks back to it, telling it to “stay where you are until our backs are turned” (Fergson 1122). The forces of nature are inevitable but at the same time unstoppable.

Nature can every easily lead to the imagination. Emily Bronte’s “The Night Wind” shows how powerful something small can lead to such great things imagined. In the cabin in the forest, the window is open at midnight. The sky is clear and the moon is full. The breeze is free to come in and out. Bronte animates the wind and transforms it into a spirit. It tries to convince her to go into the sinful forest, and out there she would be in the glorious heaven (earth is fair but only while asleep), but “the wanderer would not heed” her (Bronte). As she continued to reject the wind’s seductiveness, “its kiss grew warmer still” (Bronte). The wind reminds the narrator that they have been together since childhood, ever since she started to enjoy the beauty of the evening night, awaiting the evening song. The wind wants her to accept his love, because she is alone now as a mortal. If she rejects him now, she will lie lonely in her grave and he will be in mourning (They can only be lovers for the span of her mortal life).

Nature is wild and rugged. But mankind has the technology to tame it. Mary Colborne-Veel’s “We Go No More to the Forest” shows how mankind changes the landscape of nature over time. The woods are cut down and are “built into roof and sill and wall” (Colborne-Veel). The same are done with the “kauris” and “ratas” and “young wild things” (Colborne-Veel). They are turned into ships, fields of agriculture, and eventually a town. The forest land is totally transformed from a wooded area to an area of living space. But mankind can only do so much. There are natural disasters that can easily wipe out entire cities, such as volcanoes along with typhoons and such. Also nature tends to reclaim itself if allowed to over an extensive time period (ancient cities such as Pomei in Rome have been rediscovered. The city was destroyed by a volcanic eruption; the ashes covered the city with several layers of ash and several 100 years later was dug up).

William Carlos Williams

“A Sort of A Song”

Let the snake wait under

his weed

and the writing

be of words, slow and quick, sharp

to strike, quiet to wait,

sleepless.

---through metaphor to reconcile

the people and the stones.

Compose. (No ideas

but in things) Invent!

Saxifrage is my flower that splits

the rocks.

Gary Snyder

“Four Poems for Robin”

Siwashing It Out Once in Suislaw Forest

I slept under     rhododendron

All night    blossoms fell

Shivering on            a sheet of cardboard

Feet stuck   in my pack

Hands deep    in my pockets

Barely  able    to   sleep.

I remembered    when we were in school

Sleeping together   in a big warm bed

We were     the youngest lovers

When we broke up     we were still nineteen

Now our   friends are married

You teach  school back east

I dont mind     living this way

Green hills   the long blue beach

But sometimes           sleeping in the open

I think back    when I had you.

      A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji

Eight years ago this May

We walked under cherry blossoms

At night in an orchard in Oregon.

All that I wanted then

Is forgotten now, but you.

Here in the night

In a garden of the old capital

I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao

I remember your cool body

Naked under a summer cotton dress.

    An Autumn Morning in Shokoku-ji

Last night watching the Pleiades,

Breath smoking in the moonlight,

Bitter memory like vomit

Choked my throat.

I unrolled a sleeping bag

On mats on the porch

Under thick autumn stars.

In dream you appeared

(Three times in nine years)

Wild, cold, and accusing.

I woke shamed and angry:

The pointless wars of the heart.

Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.

The first time I have

Ever seen them close.

           December at Yase

You said, that October,

In the tall dry grass by the orchard

When you chose to be free,

"Again someday, maybe ten years."

After college I saw you

One time. You were strange.

And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have

Gone by: I've always known

         where you were--

I might have gone to you

Hoping to win your love back.

You still are single.

I didn't.

I thought I must make it alone. I

Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,

Does the grave, awed intensity

Of our young love

Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others

All crave and seek for;

We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had

Lived many lives.

And may never now know

If I am a fool

Or have done what my

        karma demands.

Marianne Moore

“The Fish”

wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices—
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, ink-

bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.
All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of
ac-
cident—lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is
dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.

Ted Hughes

“Relic”

I found this jawbone at the sea's edge:
There, crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed
To flap for half an hour and turn to a crust
Continue the beginning. The deeps are cold:
In that darkness camaraderie does not hold.

Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. And the jaws,
Before they are satisfied or their stretched purpose
Slacken, go down jaws; go gnawn bare. Jaws
Eat and are finished and the jawbone comes to the beach:
This is the sea's achievement; with shells,
Verterbrae, claws, carapaces, skulls.

Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these
Indigestibles, the spars of purposes
That failed far from the surface. None grow rich
In the sea. This curved jawbone did not laugh
But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.

Robert Frost

“Mending Wall”

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Emily Bronte

“The Night Wind”

In summer's mellow midnight,
A cloudless moon shone through
Our open parlour window,
And rose-trees wet with dew.

I sat in silent musing;
The soft wind waved my hair;
It told me heaven was glorious,
And sleeping earth was fair.

I needed not its breathing
To bring such thoughts to me;
But still it whispered lowly,
'How dark the woods would be!

'The thick leaves in my murmur
Are rustling like a dream,
And all their myriad voices
Instinct with spirit seem.'

I said, 'Go, gentle singer,
Thy wooing voice is kind:
But do not think its music
Has power to reach my mind.

'Play with the scented flower,
The young tree's supply bough,
And leave my human feelings
In their own course to flow.'

The wanderer would not heed me:
Its kiss grew warmer still:
'Oh Come!' it sighed so sweetly;
'I'll win thee 'gainst thy will.

'Were we not friends from childhood?
Have I not loved thee long?
As long as thou, the solemn night,
Whose silence wakes my song.

'And when thy heart is resting
Beneath the church-aisle stone,
I shall have time for mourning,
And thou for being alone.'

Mary Colborne-Veel

“We Go No More to the Forest”

WE go no more to the forest,
The rimus are all cut down.
They are built into roof and sill and wall,
Into floors that thrill to the last foot-fall
In the dancing of the town.

We go no more to the forest,
The kauris are all cut down.
They are built into ships so stout and strong,
Bearing their cargoes safe along,
Sailing from town to town.

We go no more to the forest,
The ratas are all cut down.
There are cornfields, golden and green and wide,
For the tangled depths where a world might hide,
And our lawns lie smooth in town.

We go no more to the forest:
Young, wild things are all cut down.
We are buying and selling and making love,
As the grown folk do, with a roof above,
And our hearts are at home in town.

Conrad Potter Aiken

“All Lovely Things”

All lovely things will have an ending,
All lovely things will fade and die,
And youth, that's now so bravely spending,
Will beg a penny by and by.

Fine ladies soon are all forgotten,
And goldenrod is dust when dead,
The sweetest flesh and flowers are rotten
And cobwebs tent the brightest head.

Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!--
But time goes on, and will, unheeding,
Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn,
And the wild days set true hearts bleeding.

Come back, true love! Sweet youth, remain!--
But goldenrod and daisies wither,
And over them blows autumn rain,
They pass, they pass, and know not whither.

Dante Alighieri

“Sestina”

I have come, alas, to the great circle of shadow,
to the short day and to the whitening hills,
when the colour is all lost from the grass,
though my desire will not lose its green,
so rooted is it in this hardest stone,
that speaks and feels as though it were a woman.

And likewise this heaven-born woman
stays frozen, like the snow in shadow,
and is unmoved, or moved like a stone,
by the sweet season that warms all the hills,
and makes them alter from pure white to green,
so as to clothe them with the flowers and grass.

When her head wears a crown of grass
she draws the mind from any other woman,
because she blends her gold hair with the green
so well that Amor lingers in their shadow,
he who fastens me in these low hills,
more certainly than lime fastens stone.

Her beauty has more virtue than rare stone.
The wound she gives cannot be healed with grass,
since I have travelled, through the plains and hills,
to find my release from such a woman,
yet from her light had never a shadow
thrown on me, by hill, wall, or leaves’ green.

I have seen her walk all dressed in green,
so formed she would have sparked love in a stone,
that love I bear for her very shadow,
so that I wished her, in those fields of grass,
as much in love as ever yet was woman,
closed around by all the highest hills.

The rivers will flow upwards to the hills
before this wood, that is so soft and green,
takes fire, as might ever lovely woman,
for me, who would choose to sleep on stone,
all my life, and go eating grass,
only to gaze at where her clothes cast shadow.

Whenever the hills cast blackest shadow,
with her sweet green, the lovely woman
hides it, as a man hides stone in grass.

Works Cited

Aiken, Conrad Potter. “All Lovely Things.” December 2, 2007. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/all-lovely-things-2/.

Alighieri, Dante. “Sestina.” December 3, 2007. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sestina-2/.

Colborne-Veel, Mary. “We Go No More to the Forest.” December 3, 2007. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/we-go-no-more-to-the-forest/.

Ferguson, Margaret; Salter, Mary Jo; and Stallworthy, Jon. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. ed 4. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1996. (Pages 1121-22; 1168-69; 1221-22; 1698; 1707-08).

Bronte, Emily. “The Night Wind.” December 2, 2007.