Celebrate National Poetry Month with Nature Captured in Poetry

Welcome to National poetry month, celebrated in April in many countries. April is significant in countries where it is the time to emerge from the grip of winter. For example, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, begins with

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote 
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, 
And bathed every veyne in swich licour 
Of which vertu engendred is the flour; 
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

 The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer

For those of us educated in British schools, this brings back memories of deciphering Middle English as we swatted for university entrance exams. How little April in England has changed since Chaucer’s time.

Corsino Fortes

Let us take pleasure in the way nature is evoked in the poignant poetry of Corsino Fortes (1932 – 2015), an eminent Cape Vedean writer and poet. This son of the West African island nation, officially the Republic of Cabo Verde, an archipelago of 10 volcanic islands in the Atlantic ocean. Fortes illuminated his country’s haunting landscape with his poems.

Corsino Fortes as well as being a writer and a poet, was also a lawyer, Judge and Cape Verde’s first ambassador to Portugal. His first book Pao e Fonema, was published in 1974.

The Caesarean of Three Continents

In his hauntingly beautiful poem, The Caesarean of Three Continents, which summons not only the geological beginning but the transformations within nature which give birth to its many wonders.  One can imagine the poet, on the windswept shores of Mindelo, on Cape Verde’s São Vicente island, conceiving the birth of his land.

 The Caesarean of Three Continents

by Corsino Fortes

Emily Dickinson

American poet, Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) was not well known in life, but she is much appreciated posthumously.

Emily Dickinson was an avid gardener who grew flowers, vegetables and had a green house. Many plants are featured in her poetry. She never published under her own name and led a reclusive life in her later years.

Her poem, Nature is What We See, reflects her understanding of the continuous presence of nature all around us:

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.

By Emily Dickinson

Camille T. Dungy

A true, nature poet, Camille T. Dungy is an American professor sharing her craft. Her deep sense of the interconnectedness of nature as an extension of ourselves holds throughout her work. She weaves words around landscape and culture. See how she blends ecology, environment, soaring with the birds, diving to the waters with land animals bringing it back to a reintroduction to the self in Trophic Cascade.

Trophic Cascade

After the reintroduction of gray wolves
to Yellowstone and, as anticipated, their culling
of deer, trees grew beyond the deer stunt
of the mid century. In their up reach
songbirds nested, who scattered
seed for underbrush, and in that cover
warrened snowshoe hare. Weasel and water shrew
returned, also vole, and came soon hawk
and falcon, bald eagle, kestrel, and with them
hawk shadow, falcon shadow. Eagle shade
and kestrel shade haunted newly-berried
runnels where deer no longer rummaged, cautious
as they were, now, of being surprised by wolves. Berries
brought bear, while undergrowth and willows, growing
now right down to the river, brought beavers,
who dam. Muskrats came to the dams, and tadpoles.
Came, too, the night song of the fathers
of tadpoles. With water striders, the dark
gray American dipper bobbed in fresh pools
of the river, and fish stayed, and the bear, who
fished, also culled deer fawns and to their kill scraps
came vulture and coyote, long gone in the region
until now, and their scat scattered seed, and more
trees, brush, and berries grew up along the river
that had run straight and so flooded but thus dammed,
compelled to meander, is less prone to overrun. Don’t
you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this
life born from one hungry animal, this whole,
new landscape, the course of the river changed,
I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time
a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same.

“Trophic Cascade” from Trophic Cascade © 2017 by Camille Dungy.
Published by Wesleyan University Press.

Find the Poet in you

Now that you have seen how nature has moved the creative juices of poets, it is your turn to find the poet in you with nature as your guide. You can use the same methods outlined for nature photography or whatever works best for you.

In Canada, the League of Canadian Poets has deemed the weather to be the theme for 2024. This theme is part of the Canadian identity as the winters are long and weather can be extreme, with fires in the summer, floods or landslides in the spring. With that being said, there is always beauty and grace brought by the weather. So grab your journals and get writing. To lead by example here is my weather themed poem: