I thought you might enjoy some nature poem recommendations for laid-back light reading, along with my own comments about the poems. This is a season when many people are enjoying being outdoors, so nature poems seem appropriate. Here are links to 10 poems, including separate links to more specific information about each of the authors.
If you want to lay on the sand by the ocean, put up a beach umbrella, and read some inspiring, thought-provoking, relaxing poems, these might be perfect for that purpose. As I sit here writing this, I’m listening to a symphony of cicadas and crickets making their evening music outside my window.
On these lovely warm summer nights, you can sit out on your front steps and look up at the clear black star-flecked sky. We seem so small compared to the vast, huge, endless universe. When I was a child I used to collect fireflies in a jar at night. It wasn’t a nice thing to do, but then children don’t know how to respect and preserve all the creatures in nature. They are very self-absorbed at that age. I remember how the flies lit up the black sky and my fascination with them. Many of these poems address those same thoughts about the huge universe, our place in it, nature, and the wonders of Mother Earth.
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Below is the list of 10 poems with links.
A Moment’s Interlude by Richard Aldington is a sensitive and exquisite poem about a moment of peace in nature, in a life fraught with battles and war. He was in WWI and wrote a lot about war and trauma. He also was a member of the imagist movement. Here, he is happy to be alive and expresses his love for nature and the earth.
Azure and Gold by Amy Lowell celebrates the arrival of spring after a long cold winter. She uses a lot of rich imagery and metaphor. I love the way she refers to springtime as the jeweled crown (diadem) of Mother Earth (nature as jewelry). She was influenced by the imagist movement.
The Brook by Alfred Lord Tennyson is written in the first person with the speaker as the brook itself. The central theme is that human life is fleeting and impermanent, while nature (the brook) endures forever and is constant. We are mortal and die, but nature is eternal. The brook is also a metaphor for human life as it changes and grows and dies. When it joins with the river, that could be seen as death and the afterlife. The brook flows into a river, something greater than itself. Some unresolved tension here about an afterlife in Tennyson’s mind.
Song of the Open Road, 9 by Walt Whitman invites us to travel with him. “Let's go” (“Allons!”), he says. Nature is beautiful and divine, but don’t be enticed by comfortable surroundings. He advocates moving on and traveling through life. Don’t stay in one place too long. The open road beckons.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost expresses his love of the New England woods and nature. Its layered meaning and effect lie as much in the sound of the words as in the meditation on universal themes of death and nature vs. civilization. He was considered the “American Bard.” Frost wrote simple but deep poems that can be interpreted on many levels.
Crossed Threads by Helen Hunt Jackson is a comment about the woven threads of our fate. Crossed threads are like a crossed ill fate. She says there is nothing to tell us what path is the safest to take in our life. The breezes of fate blow us east and west in opposite directions.
Autumn Song by Paul Verlaine is about his sadness and depression that comes
with the arrival of autumn. He finds autumn a joyless, lifeless time. He was a French poet and leader of the symbolist movement. This poem has tremendous feeling expressed in few but active words that symbolize sadness: sighing violins, languorous and long sounds, drowned, pain, weep, broken, dead leaf.
The Gray Heron by Galway Kinnell is an environmentally themed poem. It shows his close observation of animals. They are like metaphors for human beings and our state on earth. The gray heron mutates into other things, just as we do. Kinnell merges science and art in his poems.
Nature Aria by Yi Lei, a leading figure in contemporary Chinese poetry who passed away last year. Her words show passion, energy, growth, and a love of nature. She has a traditional Chinese way of looking at nature. Much of her work is informed by a revolutionary rebelling against China’s repression of the individual.
The Praying Tree by Melinda Palacio is an observation of the beauty in a place she has been to many times. It speaks to religion and spirituality through the birds that sit in the tree and pray. Nature doesn’t have to worry about God’s forgiveness like human beings do. The birds live and die in a natural cycle. They need not fear getting burned by the sun as we do. Humans have problems of their own making that nature does not.
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