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

ANON WAS AN ENVIRONMENTALIST 29

Elemental as it is, “Western Wind” opens a way to endure time and circum-
stance, aloneness and longing, or at least to give them shape, grasp them in
rhythmic form, which is poetry’s perennial job.
Come at it sharp-eared, clear-eyed, deep-minded, and this late medieval
fountainhead of the English lyric tradition shows humankind conversingwith the
physical world. Such verse, brief as the greeting on an answering machine, has a
great deal going on: rhythm and meter, sound, rhyme, diction, voice, grammar,
metaphor, structure. We can take it as a model of how poems work at their purest.
Yoking nature to human doings, “Western Wind” has also handed down its
cadence and four-line format to venerable kinds of verse. In hymns, as in ballads
and nursery rhymes, we subconsciously recognize familiar 4-3-4-3-beat lines:

OGódourhélpinágespást,

Ourhópeforyéars tocóme.

Ourshélterfrómthestórmyblást,

Andoúretérnal hóme.

Steeped in that beat, Sundays at Amherst ’s Congregational church, Emily Dick-
inson would go home and bend the Protestant hymnal to her own skeptical
temper. “The Brain is wider than the Sky,” she writes, and more:

The Brain is deeper than the sea—

For—hold them—Blue to Blue—

The one the other will absorb—

As Sponges—Buckets—do—

Her pleasant rhyming, as in “Western Wind” and countless hymns, beguiles us
and disguises a subversive drift, boosting human imagination over God ’s first
creations, sky and sea. Finally, “The Brain is just the weight of God.”
A folk spirit moves the four-beat/three-beat ballad Samuel Taylor Coleridge
adopted for Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

The furrow followed free;

We were the first that ever burst

Into that silent sea.

And a Scots song by Robert Burns:

Ye flowery banks o’ bonnie Doon,

How can ye blume sae fair?

How can ye chant, ye little birds,

And I sae full o’ care?

More ancient yet, nursery rhymes fall into this pattern, sometimes (just like
“Western Wind”) dropping the initial unstressed syllable in line one: