Poetry about Nature | Elizabeth Bradfield .

Introspection and Poetry About Nature

Poetry about nature has the magnificent ability to evoke both the loud and majestic as well as the solitary and quiet beauty of nature.  Poems about nature celebrate the natural world around us but also allow for poets to be introspective.

Many poets who write poems about nature use the natural world to reflect upon their personal relationships—with the world, with friends, with themselves.  Two such poets include Elizabeth Bradfield and Mary Oliver.

Elizabeth Bradfield is a Cape Cod based poet whose poetry often reflects maritime adventures, the ocean, and living in Massachusetts.  Her poem “Concerning the Proper Term for a Whale Exhaling” beautifully and simply weaves nature into a story about whale-watching with her mother and father. 

http://www.ebradfield.com/poems/proper.shtml

Poof my mother sighs
as against the clearcut banks near Hoonah
another humpback exhales, its breath
white and backlit by sun.

Though the poem describes a family event and its ensuing interaction, Bradfield uses the backdrop of the ocean and language of whaling, which is connected to the history of Massachusetts and the Cape in particular, as a backdrop.  By doing this, she opens a personal experience into a story of interconnectedness through the history of place.

American poet Mary Oliver, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, American Primitive, is famous for her poems about nature.  Having lived in New England, many of her poems evoke the landscape of trees changing color during seasonal shifts and sounds of birds and animals as they live their lives.

In Oliver’s poems about nature, she manages to access a quiet reflection upon human existence. Oliver has spoken about her creativity is spurred by nature, by taking long walks and noticing the way the world interacts and making connections between the simple things found in nature with the grander scheme of life.

A great example would be Oliver’s poem, “Bone,” which is also a poem that features the ocean.  She opens the poem with a direct address to her reader explaining her search to understanding “what the soul is.”  While walking on the beach, the narrator finds an ear bone of a whale, and the poem works to draw a connection between the ear bone and the soul, postulating,

“the ear bone

is the portion that lasts longest

in any of us, man or whale

 … the soul

might be like this

so hard, so necessary”

http://thewritersworkspace.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/bone-by-mary-oliver/

Again, as Oliver’s poem reacts to nature and brings nature into the poem, she uses finding something from nature—in this case, the ear bone of a whale—to explore the individualistic experience of being one person living within an encompassing world, but also establishing undeniably we are linked with other creatures and with the world around us.

Both Mary Oliver and Elizabeth Bradfield celebrate the beauty of the natural world around us, often finding a small, easily overlooked item—the ear bone, the sound a whale makes—to remind us of how much we are a part of something bigger.  Both poets show how poems about nature allow for an intimacy to come into the poem, but speak to the power of sharing these intimate moments.

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