Short Poems About Nature 5r253r

Short Poems about Nature As imperceptibly as Grief The Summer lapsed away— Too imperceptible at last To seem like Perfidy—

A Quietness distilled As Twilight long begun, Or Nature spending with herself Sequestered Afternoon— The Dusk drew earlier in— The Morning foreign shone— A courteous, yet harrowing Grace, As Guest, that would be gone— And thus, without a Wing Or service of a Keel Our Summer made her light escape Into the Beautiful. – Emily Dickinson (poem: XLV)

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed–and gazed–but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. – William Wordsworth

My Heart Leaps Up My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. – William Wordsworth

Invitation With wind and the weather beating round me Up to the hill and the moorland I go. Who will come with me? Who will climb with me? Wade through the brook and tramp through the snow? Not in the petty circle of cities Cramped by your doors and your walls I dwell; Over me God is blue in the welkin, Against me the wind and the storm rebel. I sport with solitude here in my regions, Of misadventure have made me a friend. Who would live largely? Who would live freely? Here to the wind-swept uplands ascend. I am the Lord of tempest and mountain, I am the Spirit of freedom and pride. Stark must he be and a kinsman to danger Who shares my kingdom and walks at my side. By: Sri Aurobindo

On the Grasshopper and Cricket The poetry of earth is never dead: When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead; That is the Grasshopper’s–he takes the lead In summer luxury,–he has never done With his delights; for when tired out with fun He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. The poetry of earth is ceasing never: On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever, And seems to one in drowsiness half lost, The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills. – John Keats

THE ARBOUR

I’LL rest me in this sheltered bower, And look upon the clear blue sky That smiles upon me through the trees, Which stand so thick clustering by; And view their green and glossy leaves, All glistening in the sunshine fair; And list the rustling of their boughs, So softly whispering through the air. And while my ear drinks in the sound, My winged soul shall fly away; Reviewing lone departed years As one mild, beaming, autumn day; And soaring on to future scenes, Like hills and woods, and valleys green, All basking in the summer’s sun, But distant still, and dimly seen. Oh, list! ’tis summer’s very breath That gently shakes the rustling trees– But look! the snow is on the ground– How can I think of scenes like these? ‘Tis but the FROST that clears the air, And gives the sky that lovely blue; They’re smiling in a WINTER’S sun, Those evergreens of sombre hue. And winter’s chill is on my heart– How can I dream of future bliss? How can my spirit soar away, Confined by such a chain as this by: Anne Bronte (1820-1849) Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur.—Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. – William Wordsworth, (extract)

Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus According to Brueghel when Icarus fell it was spring a farmer was ploughing his field the whole pageantry

of the year was awake tingling near the edge of the sea concerned with itself sweating in the sun that melted the wings’ wax unsignificantly off the coast there was a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning – William Carlos Williams “Nature” Is What We See “Nature” is what we see— The Hill—the Afternoon— Squirrel—Eclipse— the Bumble bee— Nay—Nature is Heaven— Nature is what we hear— The Bobolink—the Sea— Thunder—the Cricket— Nay—Nature is Harmony— Nature is what we know— Yet have no art to say— So impotent Our Wisdom is To her Simplicity. – Emily Dickinson The Darkling Thrush I leant upon a coppice gate, When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. The land’s sharp features seemed to me The Century’s corpse outleant, Its crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind its death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervorless as I. At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead,

In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited. An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small, With blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew, And I was unaware. – Thomas Hardy Has flowered at last upon one happy branch? Why is thy dwelling in the pathless wood Far from the deeds thy glorious youth demands, Haunt of the anchorites and earth’s wilder broods, Where only with thy witness self thou roamst In Nature’s green unhuman loneliness Surrounded by enormous silences And the blind murmur of primaeval calms?” And Satyavan replied to Savitri: “In days when yet his sight looked clear on life, King Dyumatsena once, the Shalwa, reigned Through all the tract which from behind these tops ing its days of emerald delight In trusting converse with the traveller winds Turns, looking back towards the southern heavens, And leans its flank upon the musing hills. But equal Fate removed her covering hand. A living night enclosed the strong man’s paths, Heaven’s brilliant gods recalled their careless gifts, Took from blank eyes their glad and helping ray And led the uncertain goddess from his side. Outcast from empire of the outer light, Lost to the comradeship of seeing men, He sojourns in two solitudes, within And in the solemn rustle of the woods. Son of that king, I, Satyavan, have lived Contented, for not yet of thee aware, In my high-peopled loneliness of spirit And this huge vital murmur kin to me, Nursed by the vastness, pupil of solitude. Great Nature came to her recovered child; I reigned in a kingdom of a nobler kind Than men can build upon dull Matter’s soil; I met the frankness of the primal earth, I enjoyed the intimacy of infant God. In the great tapestried chambers of her state, – Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, (extract P. 642) Birches – Poem by Robert Frost

When I see birches bend to left and right Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay. Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning After a rain. They click upon themselves As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed So low for long, they never right themselves: You may see their trunks arching in the woods Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground, Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair Before them over their heads to dry in the sun. But I was going to say when Truth broke in With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm, I should prefer to have some boy bend them As he went out and in to fetch the cowsSome boy too far from town to learn baseball, Whose only play was what he found himself, Summer or winter, and could play alone. One by one he subdued his father’s trees By riding them down over and over again Until he took the stiffness out of them, And not one but hung limp, not one was left For him to conquer. He learned all there was To learn about not launching out too soon And so not carrying the tree away Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise To the top branches, climbing carefully With the same pains you use to fill a cup Up to the brim, and even above the brim. Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be. It’s when I’m weary of considerations, And life is too much like a pathless wood Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs Broken across it, and one eye is weeping From a twig’s having lashed across it open. I’d like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better. I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.