Nature Images in Poetry: Guest Post by Anique Sara Taylor, author of Civil Twilight

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 Anique Sara Taylor’s chapbook Civil Twilight is the winner of the 2022 Blue Light Poetry Prize.

Guest Post

The Nature of Nature in Poetry 

When we think of “Nature” in poetry, we often mean the beauty that nurtures us. The outer part of the universe that mirrors our own inner world and provides us with endless, glowing metaphors. 

I grew up beside a natural swamp that bordered hundreds of acres of wild forest, a lake with small islands and a waterfall. It wasn’t ours, but we were free to roam there for hours in all seasons. I knew many of the ancient trees and could climb huge boulders left by glaciers, inhale green fragrances of the pine forest, and scurry down the sharp side of cliffs. I’d lie down by the brook, soothed by its sounds. These were my favorite places where I was safe, and I could sing at the lake’s edge until I was calm again. 

I wondered about the other tribes that had lived there before us, what their lives had been like. In so many ways, these lands sustained me. But I also understood the lake’s thin ice, the black water with dark weeds just below the surface that could entangle us and pull us under. How one could fall in if we skated too close to the edge of moving water. Of woods so deep that if something happened, if we fell and couldn’t move, if night set in, we might never be found.         

It was years later that they fashioned a name for the strange childhood symptoms that had plagued me from the onset of double digits into adulthood. The undiagnosable symptoms that followed me as closely as a shadow through ensuing decades. I learned about the microscopic universes inside me, creatures that spun bacteria into a mutiny of cells gone wrong — chronic Lyme Disease.         

As beauty and challenge entwine in our world, I try to reflect it in my poems. Both the gifts and the challenges of nature. 

Poetic Tools Often Used in Relation to Nature: 

Metaphor: 

Poetry can often synthesize deep experience because of its non-linear form. Metaphor is one of its interesting tools. Without explaining, it links two things that are usually unrelated. This can open up unexpected layers of sensation or insight and bring about new possibilities. This can spark surprise or awaken, strengthen or animate life in a poem.

 Imagery: 

Imagery allows us, in a few almost picture-like words, to invoke vivid sensations. Visual, yes, but it can also call upon any of the senses. Plus, movement, emotion, and physical response. A tool of unfolding, it can trigger imagination to generate vibrancy. Minute details are often described. Nature imagery can parallel human experience and in that way intensify meaning. 

Personification: 

Although also a form of metaphor, personification is when we attribute human characteristics to something non-human. This assignment of our emotions, feelings, behaviors to the non-human can help frame an imaginative link between our own attributes and those of nature, to envision a more complex intimacy between us.

 A Note, the Speaker: 

People often tend to believe the “I” in poetry is the writer, implying that the poem is nonfiction. But the “I” in a poem can be the writer, or it can be the point of view of almost any entity the writer imagines. Therefore, in discussing a poem, the “I” in a poem is often referred to as “the speaker.” 

Below are examples of ways I’ve tried to work with metaphor, imagery and personification to create something more interesting and intimate without explaining it outright, as one would do in an essay. To leave a new brocade of word, thought and image, open and spinning. 

Excerpts

 Civil Twilight

Blue Light Press

• To describe the feeling of emotional emptiness that can be left by the loss of a loved one, by referring to stars:                   

“Now only the brightest stars will ever be enough.”

 • Using bird attributes to render the speaker helpless, as she tries to steady herself through daily-life anxiety: 

“Even lying featherless

in dusk, I carve each day with care.”

 • In asking April’s first-flower shoots if they question the meaning of their existence, as humans tend to do:

                                      “…Swollen pop of hollow reed, blushing

bones brake naked through bedrock crust,

…do they wonder what they came here for?”

 • Illness is also part of nature. How it circles inside us, not unlike planets in the outer universe.

                              “Invisible illness’ eccentric orbits buried inside marrow”

 • Even in graceful language, a bird falling can be the harbinger of human damage to Earth. Where metaphor allows us to talk about tragedy in a subtle way, and not hammer the reader with it directly. 

“A cardinal plummets to the ground

like fallen fire, reinventing the darkness.”

 • The speaker refers to self with bird-parts, reflecting that even with difficulties, she moves forward with whatever she has, the way she is:

“Clutching bundled words, I stumble

forward, neck frozen between beak & wing.”

 • The glory of eagles mating is straight forward here, but the metaphor is in calling their ritual a waltz. Waltz, a symbol of coupled grace, beauty in movement. A nod toward everything in the universe being connected. 

“Eagles grasp claws swirling

endlessly downward. Can you hear the waltz?” 

 Poetry and Our Own Nature Through the Prism of Nature

 I am thankful for the gifts of poetry that split apart linear thought. I am thankful for poetry’s relationship with nature that uses imagery, personification and metaphors

to enrich and enable the poem to enter a complicated experience with fewer words. How this can reflect cognitive dissonance, magically juxtaposing the fierce and the beautiful, the sinister and the ecstatic, at the same time. The macrocosm and the microcosm. And our place within it. Exquisite beauty, torment, death, nature-driven illness beside the geometric perfection of pattern repeats. (For a treat, look up the Fibonacci sequence in nature.) 

And what may be the strangest thing about this essay is that the more we look to nature to immerse ourselves in what is outside of us, the more it refers to us as an integral part of nature. Though we consider people to be separate entities in the world, examining our atoms, cells, tissue, even our motion through time, separation becomes more of an illusion. 

As you continue through your daily life, I hope you will experience our world with an unfolding awareness of how nature can be more than sun, moon, spring and flowers. 

I close with a devotion to Edna St. Vincent Millay who more than a hundred years ago in her poem “God’s World”, expresses an almost unbearable beauty: 

“Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.”

Thanks to the author for her guest post.

Anique Sara Taylor’s book Civil Twilight is Blue Light Poetry Prize 2022.  Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and her blog, her newsletter.