Nature as Inspiration for Three Poets

Nature is a source of inspiration for the poet, an nature is used for its imagery, for its symbolic meaning, and for its role as a powerful force in human life. Nature was elevated to a high position by the Romantic poets, but poets before that time. Several women poets show a particular affinity for nature, tending to delve into it as an example of fertility, a connection with the infinite, a symbol of human sexuality, and so on. This can be seen in the poetry of H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, and Emily Dickinson.

Readers of the poetry of Emily Dickinson have had several different images of the poet in mind, with perhaps the primary one being the "New England Nun," a version of her life which sees her as a heroic virgin who lived behind the walls of her father's house and renounced the world in order to nurture in sorrow the higher and purer love of someone who was absent forever. Much of this image is a myth, but the power of her poetry to convey emotions and a special sense of love and loss is not. Much of her poetry involves images of nature, images that are strongly sensual and concrete. Much of the myth of Emily Dickinson centers on the fact that she lived most of her life in one house, and the concept of home is central in her work and is also embodied with her ideas of love, love for family, love for nature, love for life. Dickinson's image of home is turned into an image of herself--her home is her world, and she has a perception of the architecture of the home tha

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e bees are a vital apt of nature, subsisting on "Fuzz ordained--not Fuzz contingent"--bees are the lifeblood of plant life, carrying pollen from one area of fuzz to the next. In these poems, Dickinson is talking about major issues of life and death and relating the home in which the soul lives (the body) to the home in which the body lives (the house) to the world in which the house is found. She connects the large and the small, and yet she tends to place the strongest passions and deepest meaning in the smallest creatures--the bee, the fly, the worm. The insect or the worm stand in for big concepts of love and sexual power. The service a single bee provides to a flower becomes a metaphor for the regenerative urge. The soul is conceived as a fly buzzing with life, seeking to immerse itself in passion, and in the end fleeing the body and escaping to the wider world. H.D. utilizes nature in her poems in terms of flowers such as roses, violets, an lilies and with reference to gardens and the plants found there. She finds in these plans both beauty and the fact that they are tortured by other elements in nature, such as water, wind, and frost, yet still they manage to survive. Nature for H.D. is oft a controlled environment

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