Vermont Spring

(Spring on the Oxtongue River, 1924, by Lawren Harris,
1885-1970, Canadian artist)

“We need the tonic of wilderness — to wade sometimes in the marshes where the bittern and the meadow hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wild and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed. and unfathomed by us, because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”

~ Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American writer and naturalist, from Walden

VERMONT SPRING

Walking in spring
never far from the sound
of rushing water
I came to a clearing
in the woods.
A silver birch stood
with me, silent.

A woodpecker beat time,
momentarily,
with my pounding heart,
and, in a marshy pond,
swollen with liquid snows,
something small, unseen,
broke the surface
to breathe the air.

Back in the brittle city,
where voices and corners
are sharp,
the surfaces concrete-hard —
important —
and silence is a memory,
something small, unseen
within me
breaks the surface
to breathe the wooded air.

~ Letha Elliott, American singer and poet

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Love Song

(Maligne Lake, at Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada,
by Lawren Harris, 1885-1970, Canadian artist)

The pathetic fallacy is a form of personification. Writers ascribe human feelings and thoughts to flora and fauna and all manner of inanimate things. Hence the name: “pathetic” from the Greek pathos or feeling, and “fallacy” for the mistaken notion that this is truly possible.

This rhetorical device is most useful to the poets, especially in declarations of love. It greatly expands the potential support they can enlist to their side. Any thing at all can now join the chorus.

LOVE SONG

Beloved,
I have to adore the earth:

The wind must have heard
your voice once.
It echoes and sings like you.

The soil must have tasted
you once.
It is laden with your scent.

The trees honor you
in gold
and blush when you pass.

I know why the north country
is frozen.
It has been trying to preserve
your memory.

I know why the desert
burns with fever.
It has wept too long without you.

On hands and knees,
the ocean begs up the beach,
and falls at your feet.

I have to adore
the mirror of the earth.
You have taught her well
how to be beautiful.

~ Henry Dumas (1934-1968), American poet and writer of novels and short stories

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Snow in the Suburbs

(Pine Tree and Red House by Lawren Harris, 1885-1970,
Canadian artist)

Take a walk in your neighborhood and you’ll come upon a pantomime.

SNOW IN THE SUBURBS

Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward, when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

A sparrow enters the tree,
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eyes,
And overturns him,
And near inurns* him,
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

The steps are a blanched slope,
Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
And we take him in.

~ Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), English novelist and poet

* inurn – to put in an urn, to entomb or bury

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Gathering Leaves in Grade School

(One-Room School, Canoe Cove, Prince Edward Island,
1880 by Robert Harris, 1849-1919, Canadian artist)

One day in Autumn, a classmate of mine, unfamiliar with the rule of “leaves of three, let them be,” brought in a collection of beautiful purple-gold leaves for an art project similar to the one described below. Fortunately, the school nurse was there with a bottle of calamine lotion.

GATHERING LEAVES IN GRADE SCHOOL

They were smooth ovals,
and some the shade of potatoes —
some had been moth-eaten
or spotted, the maples
were starched, and crackled
like campfire.

We put them under tracing paper
and rubbed our crayons
over them, X-raying
the spread of their bones
and black, veined catacombs.

We colored them green and brown
and orange, and
cut them out along the edges,
labeling them deciduous
or evergreen.

All day, in the stuffy air of the classroom,
with its cockeyed globe,
and nautical maps of ocean floors,
I watched those leaves

lost in their own worlds
flap on the pins of the bulletin boards:
without branches or roots,
or even a sky to hold on to.

~ Judith Harris, American poet

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The Paint Box

(Lake Superior, by Lawren Harris, 1885-1970,
Canadian painter)

THE PAINT BOX

“Cobalt and umber and ultramarine,
Ivory black and emerald green ─
What shall I paint to give pleasure to you?”
“Paint for me somebody utterly new.”

“I have painted you tigers in crimson and white.”
“The colors were good and you painted aright.”
“I have painted the cook and a camel in blue
And a panther in purple.” “You painted them true.

Now mix me a color that nobody knows,
And paint me a country where nobody goes,
And put in it people a little like you,
Watching a unicorn drinking the dew.”

~ E. V. Rieu (1887-1972), English poet

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