Classic and Contemporary Poetry
NATURE, by EDGAR LEE MASTERS Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: Seas, mountains, rivers, hills, forests and plains Last Line: Rock us eternally under the infinite sky. Subject(s): Nature | ||||||||
Seas, mountains, rivers, hills, forests and plains, Our earth that floats in heaven's translucent sphere, And keeps us fosterlings, though man attains -- As a spider winds the nerve white gossamer From its own being, and unwinding sails The heights -- the secrets of the stars, the sheer Chasms of space, and tears the vaporous veils From Force and Distance. Nature! At the last Our breast of consolation! Man exhales Thereon the spirit which was on him cast From that same breast at birth. But what you are Remains, or on the mind of man is glassed As you, remaining; while the farthest star, The changing moon, the lessening sun, the sands Of buried cities toll our calendar Of dying days. Waters by star light, lands That slip or climb; leaves, blossoms, fruits contain The flesh of wonder perished, and the hands That sought with zeal or laughter, but in pain To know you and themselves. Still nourishing, Destroying, but unriddled, you remain! Immeasurable Arc! To which our brief existence Is a point, if relative, not understood. With you endowed with motion and persistence, Contained within you, is life evil, good? Is life not of you? Is there aught without By which to judge this restless brotherhood Of will and water, and to quiet doubt That life is good? And may the scheme deny Itself when it is all, and rules throughout, Knows no defeat, except as forces vie Within it, striving? But, O Nature, you Mother of suns and systems, what can lie As God beyond you, making you untrue To larger truth or being? You are all! And man who moves within you may imbrue His hands in war, or famine on him fall Out of your eyeless genius, yet what wrong Is wrought to your creating, magical Renewal, scheme? What arbiter more strong Than you are judges discord for the strife That stirs upon our earth, wherever throng Thoughts, forces, fires. What is evil? Life! Even as life is struggle, whether it smite, Or lift, as waves to waves in will are rife With enmity. Whatever is, is right. Like insects on a drift weed water tossed The sea of nature moves in man's despite, While generations flourish and are lost. Ether of the ethereal energy Which whirls the atoms: Will in man. And soul Which is to light as light to flame: the free Soaring of man's thought. This is the dole And tragedy of man: He has outgrown His kinship with the beasts that kept him whole, Through thought, which is not instinct, but would own The unerring realm of instinct. Like a sun He flares his thought in storms of fire, has flown His symmetry and sphere, has wandered, won No orbit for the beast's, which he has marred, Departed from; must finish what's begun, Until he be in spirit moved and starred, Instinct regained to thought, his sun created As far as flames have leaped; or leave the scarred Black cavities of his hopes to beings fated To grow therefrom to what he failed to reach. Something within him drew the gods, and mated His spirit to celestial powers. The breach Between him and the beast is fixed. He sinks In tangled madness, anger, railing speech, Below the ape, or else he rises, links His being to a life to which he climbs, A realm of thought harmonious, while he thinks. This is the tragedy of man, and Time's Colossal task laid on him: Roll he must The stone up to the peak against the slimes, And fasten it, or let it make him dust, Escaped his hand and crushing, still confess That you, O Mighty Mother, still are just Who fling him down to failure, nothingness. This is the tragedy of man: to learn Your secret wishes, having learned to press The heights of life, or ignorant still to burn With questioning; and on this stage of earth Live as they lived of old in a return, Endless of useless labor, madder mirth. Labor or Mirth! No matter -- but to man, And for an hour! And after that the sleep. Waking or sleeping man fulfills the plan Of you, O Mother. Other thought may creep On man's defeated spirit, make him say That you should weep, O Mother, if he weep. But we are but ephemera in a play Of tangled sun light, and the universe Of ages counts the minutes of our day, And makes them of the ages. And the curse That man deems his is not upon the far And infinite existence. It could nurse No evil in great spaces, sun and star As great as man's to man, and not lie down To death as man does. Hence if you unbar To us, O Nature, nothing better, crown Our hour with folly still, you give us rest Among the mountains, meadows, and unclown Our idiot brows, and on your infinite breast Rock us eternally under the infinite sky. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...INTERRUPTED MEDITATION by ROBERT HASS TWO VIEWS OF BUSON by ROBERT HASS THE FATALIST: HOME by LYN HEJINIAN WRITING IS AN AID TO MEMORY: 17 by LYN HEJINIAN LET US GATHER IN A FLOURISHING WAY by JUAN FELIPE HERRERA IN MICHAEL ROBINS?ÇÖS CLASS MINUS ONE by HICOK. BOB BREADTH. CIRCLE. DESERT. MONARCH. MONTH. WISDOM by JOHN HOLLANDER VARIATIONS: 16 by CONRAD AIKEN UNHOLY SONNET 13 by MARK JARMAN SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY: ALEXANDER THROCKMORTON by EDGAR LEE MASTERS |
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