There are beautiful books and there are important books. Winter: Notes from Montana
Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts
In graduate school I wrote a paper comparing the way several distinct cultural collections of poems approached the concept of the 'other' or the supernatural that is found in nature. This post is not a summary of that paper, but an affirmation that a poet's sense that there is something 'else' in nature is almost always right, but that the poet runs the risk of missing the whole point if he or she focuses only on the feelings that nature elicits. I'll quote a few of the poems that I cited in my paper:
Paiute Ghost Dance Song
Snowy earth
comes
swirling
ahead
of the whirlwind
ahead
of the whirlwind
snowy earth
swirling
(this is a traditional song of the Paiute tribe that has been recorded as a poem)
Headwaters
Noon in the mountain plain:
There is a scant telling of the marsh –
A log, hollow and weather-stained,
An insect at the mouth, and moss –
Yet waters rise against the roots,
Stand brimming to the stalks. What moves?
What moves on this archaic force
Was wild and welling at the source.
(by N. Scott Momaday)
I could go on and on, but the point here is pretty clear - nature often catches us up and gives a sense that there is something other than ourselves. From these examples, it is a quick jump over to William Wordsworth, who codified the otherness of nature in his epic, "The Prelude" where he recounts times of physical illness and euphoria in response to his experiences in nature. All of these poets look at nature and sense something greater than and different from themselves. Where this gets interesting for me is that a common view of this experience is to say that religion has invariably sprung from a culture's association with nature. People and cultures, critics say, attempt to explain the vastness of nature by creating myths telling how the nature around them came to be and how to live in harmony with it. The theory is that the cradle of all religions is a desire to connect with and find explanations for an overwhelming experience (often a terrifying one) in nature.
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