Modes of Addressing Nature
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A poet's selection of a particular aspect of the relationship between humanity and nature often directs her/his choice of a mode of address. Various ways of addressing nature are examined here in four very different poems. In his ode To Autumn John Keats (1795-1821) personifies the season and, speaking to her directly, describes her beauty as consolation for the passing of the year which functions, in turn, as a metaphor for the passing of human life. Wallace Stevens (1875-1955) develops Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird as a display of the multiple reactions human beings can have in response to nature and the variety of reflections on human existence such reactions can inspire. John Hollander (1929-), in his poem Adam's Task, addresses the limits on human beings' attempts to master nature or to rule over it, as, traditionally, Western thinkers have held that they should. Finally, Herman Melville (1819-91) studied The Maldive Shark and its companion pilot-fish, offering an objective description of their relationship that becomes a meditation on the relationship between humanity and death. In each of these poems the speaker employs a different manner of addressing the object--ranging from objective description in Melville through speaking directly to an allegorical personification of a season in Keats, and from studying the range of possibilities suggested by observation, as in Stevens, to studying the limitations of people's language in classifying the world aroun
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he vastness of the still mountains, contrasts the organic and non-organic worlds. But, taking it one step farther, it also directs attention to the thing that takes in both the vast expanse and the minute object--the consciousness of the speaker.
In the second stanza, in a more playful mood the three blackbirds in a tree are simply handy as a simile for the speaker's being "of three minds". There is no great depth of reflection in this, instead there is simply a display of the speaker's facility with words--a quality which, perhaps very incidentally, the birds do not share. In each of the variants the speaker uses the blackbird as a point of departure to open out his own view of the world and of himself.
Hollander's Adam's Task is preceded by a quote from Genesis in which the first man, Adam, is described as giving names to all the animals. This task was, according to the Bible, given to Adam by God. But in Hollander's poem the mythical nature of this type of human control over nature is shown in the contrast between the story-book naming process that Adam engages in when he is the speaker, and the more serious reflections made by the alternating voice of the third-person narrator.
The names Adam gives the animals could
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Approximate Word count = 1940
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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