1630 Nature poems

[ Version 1: 1921 ] The quick sparks on the gorse bushes are leaping, Little jets of sunlight-texture imitating flame; Above them, exultant, the peewits are sweeping: They are lords of the desolate wastes of sadness their screamings proclaim. Rabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie Low-rounded on the mournful grass they have bitten down to the quick. Are they asleep? — Are they alive? — Now see, when I Move my arms the hill bursts and heaves under their spurting kick. The common flaunts bravely; but below, from the rushes Crowds of glittering king-cups surge to challenge the blossoming bushes; There the lazy streamlet pushes Its curious course mildly; here it wakes again, leaps, laughs, and gushes. Into a deep pond, an old sheep-dip, Dark, overgrown with willows, cool, with the brook ebbing through so slow, Naked on the steep, soft lip Of the bank I stand watching my own white shadow quivering to and fro. What if the gorse flowers shrivelled and kissing were lost? Without the pulsing waters, where were the marigolds and the songs of the brook! If my veins and my breasts with love embossed Withered, my insolent soul would be gone like flowers that the hot wind took. So my soul like a passionate woman turns, Filled with remorseful terror to the man she scorned, and her love For myself in my own eyes' laughter burns, Runs ecstatic over the pliant folds rippling down to my belly from the breast-lights above. Over my sunlit skin the warm, clinging air, Rich with the songs of seven larks singing at once, goes kissing me glad. And the soul of the wind and my blood compare Their wandering happiness, and the wind, wasted in liberty, drifts on and is sad. Oh but the water loves me and folds me, Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me as though it were living blood, Blood of a heaving woman who holds me, Owning my supple body a rare glad thing, supremely good. [ Version 2: 1928 ] The quick sparks on the gorse-bushes are leaping Little jets of sunlight texture imitating flame; Above them, exultant, the peewits are sweeping: They have triumphed again o'er the ages, their screamings proclaim. Rabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie Low-rounded on the mournful turf they have bitten down to the quick. Are they asleep? — are they living? — Now see, when I Lift my arms, the hill bursts and heaves under their spurting kick! The common flaunts bravely; but below, from the rushes Crowds of glittering king-cups surge to challenge the blossoming bushes; There the lazy streamlet pushes His bent course mildly; here wakes again, leaps, laughs, and gushes Into a deep pond, an old sheep-dip, Dark, overgrown with willows, cool, with the brook ebbing through so slow; Naked on the steep, soft lip Of the turf I stand watching my own white shadow quivering to and fro. What if the gorse-flowers shrivelled, and I were gone? What if the waters ceased, where were the marigolds then, and the gudgeon? What is this thing that I look down upon? White on the water wimples my shadow, strains like a dog on a string, to run on. How it looks back, like a white dog to its master! I on the bank all substance, my shadow all shadow looking up to me, looking back! And the water runs, and runs faster, runs faster, And the white dog dances and quivers, I am holding his cord quite slack. But how splendid it is to be substance, here! My shadow is neither here nor there; but I, I am royally here! I am here! I am here! screams the peewit; the may-blobs burst out in a laugh as they hear! Here! flick the rabbits. Here! pants the gorse. Here! say the insects far and near. Over my skin in the sunshine, the warm, clinging air Flushed with the songs of seven larks singing at once, goes kissing me glad. You are here! You are here! We have found you! Everywhere We sought you substantial, you touchstone of caresses, you naked lad! Oh but the water loves me and folds me, Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me, murmurs: Oh marvellous stuff! No longer shadow! — and it holds me Close, and it rolls me, enfolds me, touches me, as if never it could touch me enough. Sun, but in substance, yellow water-blobs! Wings and feathers on the crying, mysterious ages, peewits wheeling! All that is right, all that is good; all that is God takes substance! a rabbit lobs In confirmation, I hear sevenfold lark-songs pealing.

Behind the silo, the Mother Rabbit hunches like a giant spider with strange calm: six tiny babies beneath, each clamoring for a sweet syringe of milk. This may sound cute to you, reading from your pulpit of plenty, but one small one was left out of reach, a knife of fur barging between the others. I watched behind a turret of sand. If I could have cautioned the mother rabbit I would. If I could summon the Bunnies to fit him in beneath the belly's swell I would. But instead, I stood frozen, wishing for some equity. This must be why it's called Wild Life because of all the crazed emotions tangled up in the underbrush within us. Did I tell you how the smallest one, black and trembling, hopped behind the kudzu still filigreed with wanting? Should we talk now of animal heritage, their species, creature development? And what do we say about form and focus— writing this when a stray goes hungry, and away.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations 1 When the world turns completely upside down You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore; We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town, You’ll wear a coonskin cap coonskin cap A cap made from a raccoon pelt , and I a gown Homespun, dyed butternut butternut A shade of yellow similar to khaki. In the Civil War, some Confederate soldiers wore butternut-colored uniforms, leading them to be nicknamed Butternuts. Southern sympathizers in the North were also referred to as Butternuts. ’s dark gold color. Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor lotus-eating ancestor An allusion to the Lotos (Lotus) Eaters of Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus’ men who ate the lotos lost the desire to return home. In Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: “but those who ate this honeyed plant, the Lotos / never cared to report, nor to return: / they longed to stay forever, browsing on / that native bloom, forgetful of their homeland” (Book IX, lines 101-104). , We’ll swim in milk and honey milk and honey Attributes of the Promised Land mentioned several times in the Bible, first at Exodus 3.8, where God promises the Israelites “a land flowing with milk and honey” (New Revised Standard Version) till we drown. The winter will be short, the summer long, The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot, Tasting of cider and of scuppernong scuppernong A type of wine made from the scuppernong grape, native to the surrounding area of the Scuppernong River in North Carolina ; All seasons sweet All seasons sweet Echoes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s lines, “Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee”, from his poem “ Frost at Midnight ” , but autumn best of all. The squirrels in their silver fur will fall Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot. 2 The autumn frosts will lie upon the grass Like bloom on grapes of purple-brown and gold. The misted early mornings will be cold; The little puddles will be roofed with glass. The sun, which burns from copper into brass, Melts these at noon, and makes the boys unfold Their knitted mufflers mufflers Heavy scarves ; full as they can hold Fat pockets dribble chestnuts as they pass. Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover; A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year; The spring begins before the winter’s over. By February you may find the skins Of garter snakes and water moccasins water moccasins A venomous water snake, also known as cottonmouth Dwindled and harsh, dead-white and cloudy-clear. 3 When April pours the colors of a shell Upon the hills, when every little creek Is shot with silver from the Chesapeake Chesapeake The Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and Maryland In shoals shoals Sandbars new-minted by the ocean swell, When strawberries go begging, and the sleek Blue plums lie open to the blackbird’s beak, We shall live well — we shall live very well. The months between the cherries and the peaches Are brimming cornucopias which spill Fruits red and purple, sombre-bloomed and black; Then, down rich fields and frosty river beaches We’ll trample bright persimmons, while you kill Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and canvasback canvasback A wild duck “so called from the color of the back” (A Dictionary of Americanisms, 1951) . 4 Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones Puritan marrow of my bones The Puritans were a persecuted religious group of English Protestants, in the 16th and 17th centuries that wanted to reform or “purify” the Church of England from within. Some Puritans eventually came to New England in the 1630s and 40s, supporting the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. “Puritan” has been used as a pejorative term to describe strict moralists against all worldly pleasures. Marrow is a fatty substance found in the cavities of bones, where blood cells are produced. Marrow provides moisture to bones, which give them further strength. “Marrow of my bones” is a phrase common back to the Bible, referring less literally to the center or core of a thing or issue. There’s something in this richness that I hate. I love the look, austere, immaculate, Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones. There’s something in my very blood that owns Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate, A thread of water, churned to milky spate Spate Freshet or flood Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones. I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray, Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves Sheaves A bundle of cut stalks of grain tied together after reaping ; That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath, Summer, so much too beautiful to stay, Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves, And sleepy winter sleepy winter In the same volume,Nets to Catch the Wind, Wylie published the poem “Winter Sleep.” , like the sleep of death.

And how do you survive? Your long throat, your red-rag-to-a-bull head? You rise heavy in the night, stars drinking from your poppy neck. Your henna silks serenade me under the breadth of the Pyrenees. You move like an opera, open like sea anemones. You are earth’s first blood. How the birds love you, I envy your lipstick dress. You are urgent as airmail, animal red, Ash Wednesday crosses tattooed on your head. Your butterfly breath releases your scents, your secrets, bees blackening your mouth as your dirty red laundry all hangs out.

The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine-and-fifty swans. The nineteenth autumn has come upon me Since I first made my count; I saw, before I had well finished, All suddenly mount And scatter wheeling in great broken rings Upon their clamorous wings. I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore. All's changed since I, hearing at twilight, The first time on this shore, The bell-beat of their wings above my head, Trod with a lighter tread. Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold Companionable streams or climb the air; Their hearts have not grown old; Passion or conquest, wander where they will, Attend upon them still. But now they drift on the still water, Mysterious, beautiful; Among what rushes will they build, By what lake's edge or pool Delight men's eyes when I awake some day To find they have flown away?

There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for tearing gashes . . . a red tongue for raw meat . . . and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go. There is a fox in me . . . a silver-gray fox . . . I sniff and guess . . . I pick things out of the wind and air . . . I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers . . . I circle and loop and double-cross. There is a hog in me . . . a snout and a belly . . . a machinery for eating and grunting . . . a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go. There is a fish in me . . . I know I came from salt-blue water-gates . . . I scurried with shoals of herring . . . I blew waterspouts with porpoises . . . before land was . . . before the water went down . . . before Noah . . . before the first chapter of Genesis. There is a baboon in me . . . clambering-clawed . . . dog-faced . . . yawping a galoot’s hunger . . . hairy under the armpits . . . here are the hawk-eyed hankering men . . . here are the blonde and blue-eyed women . . . here they hide curled asleep waiting . . . ready to snarl and kill . . . ready to sing and give milk . . . waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so. There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird . . . and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want . . . and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness. O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.

for Joseph Cady Camden, 1882 Is it raining, Mary, can you see? I hear rain. Is the road black, is it shining? Dark, I can see for myself. Put on my red tie, red has life in it—most men I know dress like undertakers making sure they look mournful enough to manage their own funerals No accounting for taste: we should be grateful for that. Help me get to the window, I want to see Mickle Street. Don’t you hear it now, something like rain, off in the distance? My ear, maybe, is playing me tricks again; there was a rushing, like rain when it moves closer and starts a millstream in the trees. No? I guess my senses must be losing their touch. It was nothing. then, nothing more than a tantrum of the boneyard: best for me to hold still in this chair and listen to my beard grow. Now if hair was poetry, then your Walt Whitman would be a great success. I wear out trying to come to terms with the wrong weather— what you might call speaking terms. I don’t want to talk to much else. You tell them to go home, Mary, no visitors today—or one, just one: what else is a red tie for? Some English poet, keeps me up, coming all the way here from California, Colorado—coming to ask the usual questions. I don’t like questions that require answers: English questions. That’s a country of things answered. London is a city of things done with. Brooklyn is different, New Orleans, Washington they’re my cities of romance, all the cities of things begun. I may have been deliberate, even laborious, but I never looked for finish. Here, where’s his name? Bucke wrote about him after hearing one of his lectures. I had it somewhere. You let him in, Mary: no one else, no one ... I’m slipping—here it is, here’s the name!— slowly, maybe, but slipping. Who can say he has hold of what might be called a standing? That’s what they do say, though, all these visitors— they write, they call, and they stay: it makes a problem Doctor says: bar them. I can’t. I won’t. Still, they bother me. One young fellow walks in, says, “Walt, I should like to read you my epic and have your opinion of its worth.” “Thank you,” say I, “but I’ve been paralyzed once already.” Suppose someone took it in his head to come and sit here and say nothing! someone who knows even the first syllables of the great speech of silence ... Today’s visitor, maybe, will mind his tongue, maybe spare you the trouble of putting his latest tribute on the shelf with all the rest. Give me enemies rather than these disciples of mine. Best thing I ever heard of Browning is how he disapproves of all those Societies. Not that I quote Browning, or care for him, or read him: I’ve tried Browning on every way, but he don’t fit. Tennyson— now he has his place, a local English place: I don’t see how the world could make much use of him elsewhere— but the others: I conclude most literature was written on all fours, and the rest on stilts! ... There, Mary, the bell. I did hear that! I know my own bell, don’t I? Go on, go on down, bring the man up ... In here, Mr. Wilde. This room is not such a ruin as it seems: I find most things I search for without much trouble— found Dr. Bucke’s letter with your name, for instance. Found my red necktie as well. Come in, you cast a shadow where you stand. Come in, the chaos is more suspected than real. I suspect no chaos: I am convinced of the cosmos in your company, Walt Whitman! I greet you, sir, as America’s great voice.

Coleridge carefully wrote down a whole page of them, all beginning with the letter b. Guidebooks preserve our knowledge of their hues and shapes, their breeding. Many poems have made delicate word-chimes— like wind-chimes not for wind but for the breath of man— out of their lovely names. At the edge of the prairie in a cabin when thunder comes closer to thump the roof hard a few of them—in a corner, brittle in a dry jar where a woman’s thoughtful hand left them to fade— seem to blow with the announcing winds outside as the rain begins to fall on all their supple kin of all colors, under a sky of one color, or none.

All the trees kept their own counsel without any wind to speak of, until one lone limber pine began gesticulating wildly, as if it suffered from its own inner cyclone. It was like a lunatic in the courtroom of other trees. We forgot about the sunset and the dark coming on across the plain. Then the reason appeared: a mother antelope had twin newborns backed into the tree and fended off a pair of coyotes who darted in and feinted out, knowing she couldn't defend them both. The girl I was with shrieked, "Do something!" I thought of the rifle back at the house. I thought of a litter of coyote whelps in a den somewhere nearby. I thought of the three-hundred-yard sprint to the tree. The mother antelope would be first to bolt, and those coyotes would have the aplomb to make off with both twins. I said no. The antelope struck out with her forelegs, she butted the coyotes back, until one of them got the chance they had orchestrated and caught a twin and trotted off, dangling it by the nape as gently as if it were her own.

Out along the last curve in the brick walk the grass has begun to green, with the freezing cold and coming snow its certain fate. The cranes make the same mistake, fields of red capped heads attest their arrival just before the worst blizzard of winter makes it impossible to tell the field from the river. And we, too, have known these mortal mishaps, miscalculated our time, found ourselves out of step, arriving too early, staying on too late, misjudging the nearness, the vengeance of the storm. The cranes, the grass, they tell us: this can go on for millions of years.