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

SYLLABLES OF EMILY DICKINSON 81

leap from riverbanks and swim, with or without splashing? In any event, “Banks
of Noon” snaps our synapses, leaves us blinking into midday sun.
Birds, butterflies, and most often bees seize Dickinson’s attention, acting
out everything under the sun: “Buccaneers of buzz,” “Baronial bees,” “the
goblin bee,” “the lover bee,” “When landlords turn the drunken bee / Out of
the foxglove ’s door.” She ’s in fine company here: Coleridge ’s “Sycamore, oft
musical with bees,” Keats’s Autumn flowers “And still more, later flowers for
the bees,” and Yeats calling “honey bees / Come build” in his crumbling tower.
Maybe Plato swayed her, likening the imagination to bees—they fetch abroad,
then return and make honey.
Still she looks askance at all things great and small, including herself.
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

She doubts human sovereignty and Adam’s gift of naming.

“Nature” is what we see—

The Hill—the Afternoon—

Squirrel—Eclipse—the Bumble bee—...

Nature is what we know—

Yet have no art to say—

So impotent Our Wisdom is

To her Simplicity.

What would she have made of a recent discovery in Burma, a hundred-million-
year-old bee found in amber along with four tiny flowers it was sipping?
Questioning “Nature” so often makes Dickinson’s doubts even more pene-
trating:

But Nature is a stranger yet;

The ones that cite her most

Have never passed her haunted house,

Nor simplified her ghost.

Never simple, Nature is too mysterious for lyric beauty and too actual, in this
double negative:

Where melody is not

Is the unknown peninsula.

Beauty is nature ’s fact.

“Beauty is nature ’s fact”: six syllables subverting ages of human presumption.
Nature ’s oldest fact occasioned an animal poem that boggles mind and body