Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

CARE IN SUCH A WORLD 5

to the eddies of the wind”—the other nimble, skeptical: “Touch lightly Na-
ture ’s sweet Guitar / Unless thou know’st the Tune.” Modern poets cover the
spectrum from embracing nonhuman nature to respecting its selfhood, with a
leaning toward the latter. “You have your language too,” Stanley Kunitz tells
a finback whale, “an eerie medley of clicks / and hoots and trills.” Elizabeth
Bishop hooking “a tremendous fish” sees “victory” fill her rented boat, then its
“pool of bilge... And I let the fish go.” “Looking down for miles / Through
high still air,” Gary Snyder makes out pitch that “glows on the fir-cones /...
Swarms of new flies.”
All too human as we are, we ’re still dealing with what God granted in Genesis:
“Have dominion... over all the earth.” Today this age-old question persists in
more poems than ever, some warmly human-centered, some firmly not, some
energized by that tension.

“Not man / Apart”

Although the Bible sets us front and center in our domain, it also tells a story of
earth’s untamable, unfathomable wildness. Who causes it “to rain on the earth,
where no man is?” God humbles Job. “Hast thou entered into the springs of
the sea?... Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?”—whence Herman
Melville ’s white whale, anything but human-centered. D. H. Lawrence in Sicily
comes on a snake, who “Writhed like lightning and was gone / Into the black
hole” of the earth. George Oppen’s ego-free “Psalm” simply says of the wild
deer “That they are there!” He ends

Crying faith

In this in which the wild deer

Startle, and stare out.

There ’s no telling whether they will bolt or stay. Robinson Jeffers looks to the
organic wholeness of all things: “Love that, not man / Apart from that.” A
telling line break!
Homo sapiens, a recent arrival, has to refigure its place on earth, much as the
Copernican revolution upset our geocentric universe. Are we a part or apart?
The ways we speak of environmental and ecologic concerns reflect these jostling
mindsets. Should water and wildland be managed foror protected frompeople?
The word “Environment” centers our surroundings on the human standpoint,
leading to “conservation” or “wise use” of “resources” for our benefit. “Ecol-
ogy,” a more recent term, sees a biosystem of interacting organisms needing
“preservation” for the sake of the whole.
Environmental and ecologic thinking, in poems and at large, ranges the