POETIC LICENCE
Occasionally I find myself irritated when so-and-so is dismissed by some harsh critical voice as ‘only a nature poet’, as if there is something essentially trivial about the natural world, unworthy of the attentions of ‘real’ poets. Of course there are numerous simplistic descriptions of pretty scenes or bucolic idylls that can seem trivial. But to apply such an attitude to, say, Wordsworth, or to Mary Oliver, to WS Merwin or Wendell Berry seems to me almost imbecilic. William Blake’s famous advice from Auguries of Innocence sums up the vastness to be found within the tiniest of natural details by anyone with the desire and humility to seek it: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour”.
Yet I’m reminded of lines from Paul Simon’s The Sound of Silence: “People talking without speaking / People hearing without listening”. Too many of us rush through our lives without having any sense of the significance, the sheer luminosity, of what surrounds us in every moment. For nearly 40 years, the poet and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry has been collecting a series of short poems – reflective, philosophical, sometimes political – emerging from his solitary Sunday walks around his land. He calls them Sabbath Poems. Here is number VII from 2012.
Under the sign of the citizen’s pistol, under the sign of the corporate dozer, we meet again: the modest flowers of the woods, faithful to this place where they have belonged a few days every spring for years uncountable, and I, who have known them only for most of the years of a human life. Though I am worn with the years I have awaited them, they arrive each spring young as before. Where the native membership remains intact, the flowers cover the ground, in surplus of perfection, quietly radiant, unexplained. So much given, so few who know. So much beauty, so little love. Wendell Berry (From This Day:Collected and New Sabbath Poems, Counterpoint, 2013) But for those who, like Berry, allow themselves to be aware of such radiance there is a great deal to be harvested, and it’s not just prettiness – it’s wisdom. And here, as so often, comes Mary Oliver to confirm it:
The Sun
Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful
than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone ‒ and how it slides again
out of the blackness, every morning, on the other side of the world, like a red flower
streaming upward on its heavenly oils, say, on a morning in early summer, at its perfect imperial distance ‒ and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love ‒ do you think there is anywhere, in any language, a word billowing enough for the pleasure
that fills you, as the sun reaches out, as it warms you
as you stand there, empty-handed ‒ or have you too turned from this world ‒
or have you too gone crazy for power, for things?