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

W. S. MERWIN’S MOTION OF MIND 303

This is the black sea-brute bulling through wave-wrack,

Ancient as ocean’s shifting hills, who in sea-toils

Traveling, who furrowing the salt acres

Heavily, his wake hoary behind him,

Shoulders spouting, the fist of his forehead

Over wastes grey-green crashing, among horses unbroken

From bellowing fields, past bone-wreck of vessels,

Tide-ruin, wash of lost bodies bobbing

No longer sought for, and islands of ice gleaming,

Who ravening the rank flood, wave-marshalling,

Overmastering the dark sea-marches, finds home

And harvest.

Here the Bible ’s Job and Jonah, Melville ’s Moby-Dick, Hopkins’s windhover
rebuffing the big wind, Lowell’s Atlantic where the “fat flukes arch and whack,”
take on the pagan beat of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse—Beowulf, “The Sea-
farer,” Ted Hughes’s “Hawk in the Rain.” And this is only its first sentence. So
much surging wordage feels like Adam going hog-wild when God brought the
beasts “to see what he would call them.” Otherwise humankind is absent from
this wrack and waste—“no gardens... no eye of man moving.” As “Leviathan”
closes, a breath-spirit hovers over the deep, the wild whale “soothes to stillness”
and, a day before Adam, “waits for the world to begin.”
A decade later Merwin returned to whales. By then Rachel Carson’s Silent
Spring had jolted awareness, Roger and Katy Payne had recorded the hump-
back’s forty-minute eight-octave songs, and “endangered species” entered our
vocabulary. “For a Coming Extinction” needs no maelstrom of words to speak
prophetic irony.

Wellfleet Whale

Now that we are sending you to The End

That great god...

When you will not see again

The whale calves trying the light

Consider what you will find in the black garden

And its court

The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas...

Join your word to theirs

Tell him

That it is we who are important

Another poem speaks of our “eating the earth” and ends, “If I were not human
I would not be ashamed of anything.” As of 2008, some gray whales are endan-
gered, and humpbacks, manatees, and gorillas are barely hanging on.
Learning one day about a creature far closer to extinction, Merwin did a