Eco-Poetry.org

NATURE the genlest mother,
Impatient of no child,

The feeblest or the waywardest, --
Her admonition mild.

In forest and the hill

By traveller is head,

Restraining rampant squirrel

Or too impetuous bird.

How fair her conversation,

A summer afternoon, --

Her household, her assembly,

And when the sun goes down

Her voice among the aisles

Incites the timid prayer

Of the minutest cricket,

The most unworthy flower.

When all the children sleep

She turns as long away

As will suffice to light her lamps;

Then, bending from the sky,

With infinite affection

And infiniter care,

Her golden finger on her lip,

Will silence everywhere.

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AN AWFUL TEMPEST mashed the air,

The clouds were guant and few;

A black, as of a specter'es cloak,

Hid heaven and earth from view.

The creatures chuckled on the roofs

And whistled in the air,

And shook their fists and gnashed their teeth,

And swung their frenzied hair.

The morning lit, the birds arose;

The monter's faded eyes

Turned slowly to his native coast,

And peace was Paradise!

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SOME KEEP THE SABBATH GOING TO CHURCH

I keep it staying at home,

With a bobolink for a chorister,

And an orchard for a dome.

Some keep the Sabbath in surplice;

I just wear my wings,

And instead of tolling the bell for church,

Our little sexton sings.

God preaches, -- a noted clergyman, --

And the sermon is never long;

So instead of getting to heaven at last,

I'm going all along!

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TO MAKE A PRAIRIE
it takes a clover and one bee, --

One clover, and a bee,

And revery.

The revery alone will do

If bees are few.

eco-poems by

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, the most iconic of all American women poets, is one of the most scientifically aware poets the USA has produced. Botany, chemistry, geology, ornithology, the science of her day is evident in her texts. If alive today, one imagines she would hold beliefs akin to those of Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, James Hansen, Rachel Carson, and Barry Commoner. In Dickinson's New England, Darwinian Humanism was just beginning to take root in intellectual circles, and one finds hints of it in her texts. Researching in her texts and scholarly biographies written about her, there's much evidence that she forsook organized religion and Calvinist fundamentalism for Emerson's Transcendentalism. She was in effect an American Transcendentalist like most of the profound intellectuals of her day, i.e. Emerson, Whitman, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, Thoreau,and others. Though born into Calvinism and educated in Puritanical dogma, from the times she attended Amherst Academy and wrote lovingly of the flora and fuana of the Pioneer Valley-- she seems always to have been more of a worshipper of Nature and Creation itself than of God, a mystery who did not truly speak with her. Her love of Nature, as for Emerson, was a kind of Pantheistic philosophy akin to current writings by ecologists." That Love is all there is, is all we know of Love..." was a profound spiritual belief of Dickinson, not just a Romantic saying. Dickinson believed that Nature was the proper study of humankind, more than scripture as literal. She declared that she kept the sabbath at home with a bobolink for a choirester an an orchard for a dome. She greatly admired Emerson's essays Nature and The Poet. (Cover of her first posthumous edition.)