Earth Song: Poems that transport the reader to the wild places
I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
—William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey”
If anyone can articulate the power of nature to enliven and sustain, it’s William Wordsworth. Over two decades ago, I taught his poem “Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey” to a rowdy, bored, intense, and life-hungry class of teenagers — my first foray into the classroom, as a student teacher.
You never forget your first class, or what you tried to say, and I remember emphasizing: this poem isn’t really about how beautiful the waters of the Wye River ran through the woodlands of South Wales; it’s about the five years afterward. When Wordsworth returned to the bleakness of the city and the weary weight of daily life, he returned in thought to elevating moments in nature. He found in the memory of the bluff above the river valley “life and food for future years.”
That is one of the binding themes in this first section of Earth Song.
In her Preface, editor Sara Barkat explains that she has placed certain poems “back-to-back because of similarities in tone or theme, others because of subject, still others because of the effect of juxtaposition on those before and after.”
After Sara Teasdale’s opening verses that raise a question to pervade our reading of the whole book — Could we ever give up nature? (No!) — the first gorgeous clutch of poems offer up the Wordsworthian idea of the “inward eye.” Nature’s restorative powers aren’t just for the moments we’re walking the woods or sitting on the banks of a river or glimpsing a distant mountain range. They’re for afterward, too.
“For oft, when on my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood,” explains Wordsworth in “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” His walk along the waterside returns to mind, “and then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.”
“Places I love come back to me like music,” says Teasdale. “Hush me and heal me when I am very tired.” Then she expounds on those places, which are wood and valley in all seasons, and midnight ocean.
William Butler Yeats says he will “arise and go now” to the remote island of Innisfree and “have some peace there” — but he doesn’t mean in person. He travels to this place of beauty and rest while standing in the city “on pavements grey.”
But wait: there’s another thread running through. It’s the continuation of Teasdale’s idea that she could never live without the winter sky or summer rains. “What would the world be, once bereft, / Of wet and of wildness?” asks Gerard Manley Hopkins in the poem that I think sounded me most in this section. He closes with words that echo like an inner howl to me, some barbaric yawp drawn out of ache and need:
Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
We shift into talk of trees, specifically the sorrow of trees that have been felled. On the morning I read Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Binsey Poplars,” my husband and I visited St. Mary’s Cathedral in Oxford, England. We marveled in appreciation of the woodwork in the Chancel, and our tour guide explained that the king had given twenty oaks from his woods for the grand and lasting woodcraft surrounding us.
“All felled, felled, are all felled,” ran through my mind. “Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve / Strokes of havoc unselve” a tree.
I stood amid man-made beauty and wasn’t sure how I felt. Darwish and Kakabadze and Robert Burns pick up the same theme. (Sidenote: have you noticed how Barkat has arranged poets together in surprising ways that really work? Darwish shaking hands with Yeats, Blake nodding in friendship toward Jennifer Grotz.)
There isn’t time to go on, and I’m leaving out other threads: “dappled things” (beauty amid trash, avian friends in the unnatural hardware store); a turn toward particulars (a kingfisher sighting, a specific owl) and modern spaces (ATV’s, Domino’s Pizza, and — next week — JoAnn Fabric). There’s so much to think about. I, for one, will be returning to this collection for years and years, not least because it reminds me of the way Wordsworth concludes his Tintern Abbey poem:
“Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth”
Discussion Time
We’re reading Earth Song: a nature poems experience together. Join us in the comments for a discussion around this first section.
Themes: Which theme or topic speaks the most to you in this reading? The idea that we can’t do without nature; the concept that nature stays with us even after we’ve left it; the tragedy of trees coming down?
Also: What threads did I miss? What other topics and themes show up for you in these first poems?
Arrangement: Think about which poems partner each other. What was the most surprising or effective pairing for you?
The Poems Themselves: Were there particular favorites, new or old, that stood out to you in this section? Is there any one poem that captured you the most?
Lines and Rhymes: Far be it from me to leave out the chance to talk about lines that really ring and sounds that capture the ear in the way only poetry can do. Was there a line or two, a string of words, that “sounded you like a struck bell?”
Buy Earth Song
Reading Schedule
September 7th p. 13-41 (“From the Editor” through “The Woodpile”)
September 14th p. 42-66 (“Tornado Warning/Joann Fabric & Craft” through “Scent”)
September 21st p. 67-95 (“I Pity the Garden” through “Home and the Homeless”)
September 28th p. 96-126 (“The Oak Desk” through “The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs”)
Photo by Vinoth Chandar, Creative Commons license Via Flickr. Post by Rebecca D. Martin.
- Earth Song Book Club: Poems in the Silence - September 28, 2022
- Earth Song Book Club: Garden Poems - September 21, 2022
- Earth Song Book Club: Force of Nature - September 14, 2022
Megan Willome says
Frost’s “The Wood-Pile” was one I didn’t know. I had questions about it, so I had to journal through it — a process which always make a poem more mine than when I began.
I like “un” words, especially his “undeceived.”
Rebecca D. Martin says
Megan, I really like the idea of journaling through a poem, and I especially appreciate how you didn’t say you were trying to figure out “what it means,” but that you had questions about it and then made the poem – not entirely, but – more your own. That way poems have of unfolding themselves to us and becoming part of us, even as they maintain some opacity. (And thankfully are not puzzles to be solved; they’re more living than that.)
I’ve never thought intently about “un” words, but now I have, and I agree!
Will Willingham says
Megan’s way of poem reading highly influenced the way I read them. I want to say that she once said that what’s important is not what the poems means, but what the poem says *to you.*
Now, I might be mis-remembering that, but I’m applying the same principal to whatever it was she said and believing that’s what she said *to me.* Lol
Rebecca D. Martin says
Delightful, Will.
And now I’ve hopped over to Megan’s website and 1. discovered her Poetry for Life weekly poem journaling project, and 2. remembered that her book _The Joy of Poetry_ must be added to my reading list post-haste.
https://meganwillome.com/poetry-for-life/
https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Poetry-Poems-Masters-Living/dp/1943120145/
Megan, you inspired me about “un-” words. I included a couple of my own in the Week Two post. 🙂
L.L. Barkat says
Rebecca, this is so *entirely* rich. I love how much you saw in the arrangement of the poems. And how the arrangement lent the themes gravity and insight.
One of my favorite pairings was Darwish & Kakabadze…
Darwish: the cypress broke and everyone is having their turn about saying whether or not this matters (even Darwish himself weighs in at the poem’s end: “that is all there is to it: the cypress broke!”).
Then Kakadadze calls Darwish’s weigh-in into question, not with more philosophizing (as tends to happen not just in Darwish’s poem but with climate & earth conversations in general): “It’s been three years since my neighbor chopped down the fig tree….It’s been three years since my peach tree hasn’t flowered.” Focusing on reality instead of feelings.
Now, one of the things I do love about the collection is the way it gives generous space to feelings, without judging them as sentimental or that inconvenient thing that halts progress—while at the same time offering poems that are so matter-of-fact that they turn the conversation in a direction that’s hard to argue with. (And argue seems to be the dominant way everyone goes about climate & earth conversations.)
For the king who gave his oaks, I consider: what if he had also planted oaks in their stead? It is not a bad thing to want to build beauty into our world. But how we attend to where we take the raw materials from seems an apt question, always. (This does push us forward in Earth Song to Will’s poem “Dam”! 🙂 )
Thanks, Rebecca, for opening the Earth Song book club with such elegant prose & insight! 🙂
Rebecca D. Martin says
Laura,
What a gorgeous response! Thank you for bringing that Kakadadze/Darwish pairing to the fore and raising the question of feelings in poetry. I’d love to dive down a rabbit hole of how, on the one hand, poems are arbiters of powerful emotion . . . but sometimes most effectively so when they’re stripped of overt “feeling,” down to the barest images. I think of the early Twentieth-Century Imagists. Eliot and Pound: they give you the starkest picture and leave you wading through deep emotion, as a result.
Yes, about the oaks! “It is not a bad thing to want to build beauty into our world. But how we attend to where we take the raw materials from . . .” Yes.
Bethany Rohde says
Thank you for leading us out of the gate with this thoughtful post. Interesting to read your analysis and takeaways, as well as those of Megan, L.L., and Will, in the comments.
I have enjoyed Sara Barkat’s choice of poems in this collection. One of the pieces that particularly grabbed me was Jennifer Grotz’s, “Late Summer.” It got me thinking how although our world is full of great wastefulness, there is also much that can still be saved through attention and appreciation.
This is one of the things I love most about poetry. Its ability to help us hover over a detail that might otherwise be tossed out and forgotten. Even the crumbs.
When I got to that line about the man going through the trash, “Sunglasses! the man softly exclaims,” I felt a lift. It’s so genuine. He was surprised by his amazing find and it slipped out.
And then that beautiful phrase about the “gray rose of pigeons.” I’ve never thought of pigeons that way. We used to have scores of them roosting outside our apartment when I was growing up, and I did *not* appreciate them. But this image and language created a fresh perspective for me. I’m grateful to the poet for her attention to these ideas and for crafting this piece for us to ponder. And to Sara Barkat for gathering it here in Earth Song.
Bethany R. says
P.S. My library just got their copy of Earth Song in circulation! (I own the e-book version, but I am excited for my community to see this there.)
Rebecca D. Martin says
Well done! I have never had success with recommending books for libraries to order. One library, a number of years ago, actually blocked me from making suggestions. Didn’t they know I have impeccable literary taste?!? Ha ha.
Rebecca D. Martin says
Bethany, a delayed response. You’ve unpacked this poem beautifully! That “gray rose of pigeons” image had passed me by, and I’m glad you brought it to the fore.
This poem somehow makes me think of the song “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” as performed by the Indigo Girls. Forgotten things, including people, being held in mind.
Bethany says
Ooh, off to listen to it now…