To Nature

Unknown

To Nature

It may indeed be phantasy when I

Essay to draw from all created things

Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings;

And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie

Lessons of love and earnest piety.

So let it be: and if the wide world rings

In mock of this belief, to me it brings

Nor fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity.

So will I build my altar in the fields,

And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,

And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields

Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee,

Thee only God! and Thou shalt not despise

Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin


"So will I build my altar in the fields." This reminds me of Luci Shaw's poem May 20: Very Early Morning - in it the field itself speaks, and she wishes to emulate it - "make of our hearts a field to raise your praise."  Or even Dylan Thomas describing how he and his mother walked "through parables of sunlight, and the legends of the green chapels".  Nature as a place of worship, sacred, a place of praise, of mystery and stories, a chapel or a cathedral, is a theme I never tire of. (And that bit about the scent of wildflowers being like incense in an offering, I'm going to remember that the next time I walk past a foam flower or a wild violet.) I like Coleridge's "So let it be." Let people think what they want, let people laugh - his mind isn't changed. I'm with him on that, too.

Canal Bank Walk

Carl Larsson

Canal Bank Walk



Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.



Patrick Kavanaugh
from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin
 

“Grow with nature…” I like that. People as plants. I can’t say I comprehend this poem, but certain parts of it seem so true. (I’ve decided it’s good not to know everything, to be in the process of learning, and have a sense of my ignorance. We want answers, we think everything should be knowable, graspable, and as it were –masterable (not a word, I know). But what a miserable world that would be.)  The lines that really get to me are these – “O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web of fabulous grass and eternal voices…feed the gaping need of my senses…for this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven from green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.” I don’t know what Kavanaugh meant to say, but I do know that Eden-call, that longing for a world unworn, where I am new as well, clothed in field and sky, and growing with nature. Yes, I know that.

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire

Terry Watkinson, 'The Headland'

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-

Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,

Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare

Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature's bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark

                            Is any of him at all so stark

But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.

                            Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:

                            In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

                            Is immortal diamond.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin 

It was a good day for cloud-watching. Drama in skyland. It made me think of this poem. The clouds “they throng, they glitter in marches”  - that’s exactly it, and they most definitely “flaunt forth”. The poet seems here to have ripped into his storehouse of words for sounds and colours and movement and thrown everything at us. "Nature's bonfire", oh yes, he gives us a conflagration of words to embody his theme. It's a strain to read slowly when the movement is so driving. Nature truly is changing all the time, flaring up, flickering, dying out. The clouds demonstrate this daily. And we too, “how fast our firedint”, how quickly we burn and fade. Hopkins seems almost overcome by the thought until he forces himself to remember that this is not the end. Death will not extinguish him, will not” beat him level” while he holds to the hope of the resurrection, the hope that because Christ became mortal and died in his place, he has in turn taken on the immortality of Christ and will live forever. "Away grief's-grasping, joyless days, dejection"... Matchwood becomes diamond.