Nature in 6 Poems
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The examination of nature in poetry is a longtime convention, possibly as old as poetry itself. Nature in a poem can be a figure of speech, a symbol of an idea or emotion or person or other thing, or perhaps even an object of direct scrutiny. Alternatively, it can be something less concrete, something deliberately rendered elliptically to draw in the reader even as the reader is frustrated by an ambiguous meaning. One could say that these various effects are amplified with modern poetry, inasmuch as modern poetry is less likely than its literary antecedents to adhere strictly to traditional forms or rhyme schemes. 1. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" The symbolic potency of nature is evoked in Stevens's "Blackbird." In thirteen numbered stanzas varying from two to five lines, the poet presents an image of a blackbird in thirteen separate natural environments, or rather in thirteen different aspects. At the same time, the blackbird is present in frames of human activity or sentience, operating as something of a link between ordinary human experience and a rather cold natural world. For example, in the opening stanza (I), which has three lines, the blackbird has the life force, moving his eyes over an otherwise still and snowy landscape. That establishes the blackbird as a source of life within natural environment. However, it is obvious in stanza II, a three-line entry in which the poet declares himself as being of "three mines" and compares himself
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tes the dappled skies as well as "all things counter, original, spare, strange." The poem in large part is a tribute and paean to nature, but its subtext is articulated in the first and last lines: a praise of God, or more exactly, a prayer that celebrates the Creation. It is a celebration unmediated, even in its "contraries," and in that sense can be read as a naive acquiescence in the will of God. The very title of the poem bespeaks naïve rather than sophisticated understanding. Equally, it can be seen as an expression of faith in God as Providence who gives expression to divinity, or, as Hopkins has it, "fathers-forth" by means of Nature as a gift to sentient beings even though God is above and beyond beauty of any kind.
3. "The Armadillo"
In "The Armadillo," Elizabeth Bishop uses nature as a proxy for explaining the celebrity of Robert Lowell, the lionized poet celebrity, to whom the poem is dedicated, and whose forbears were poets and military heroes and whose work consistently achieved a high profile in the world. The poem consists of iambic quatrains of three, four, and five feet. Although there are persistent irregularities, the general rhyme scheme is abab and abcb. Bishop takes as her controlling image
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Stevens's Blackbird, Robert Lowell, Haddam Connecticut, Lament Springtime, Trees Cherry, Pied Beauty, Queen Victoria's, Nevermore VI, , Skunk Bishop, ed richard ellmann, introduction ed, ww norton 1989, modern poems, richard ellmann, poems norton, norton introduction, ed richard, modern poems norton, ellmann robert, poems norton introduction, york ww, norton introduction ed, ww norton, robert o'clair,
Approximate Word count = 2333
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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