How to Write Poetry and Live Poetically

Free E-Course Lesson 26

Chapter 9: Rituals and Celebrations
Part 5: Personal Rituals

Join now! Find details about this free E-course at Lesson 1

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The whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”

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Nature is the opposite [that is, reflection] of the soul, answering to it part for part…. The ancient precept, “Know thyself,” and the modern precept, “Study nature,” become at last one maxim. —Emerson, “The American Scholar”

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Journalist and child advocate Richard Louv discusses the problem of nature deficit disorder in his new book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder. “Never before in our history have children been so separated from nature,” Louv tells Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith….

Louv claims that, according to recent research, lack of direct contact with nature is connected to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). He also cites statistics showing [that] children who play in nature perform better at school….

“Biologically, we are still hunters and gatherers…. What happens to the human organism when you take nature away from it and replace it with television and computers? I call that ‘cultural autism’ where children’s use of the senses is reduced to the size of a screen, like a computer. Only in nature are we using our full senses all at the same time in a positive way.” —CBS, The Early Show, May 9, 2005

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See More Sunrises

You know those bromides people use to cheer you up? Tomorrow is another day. It’s always darkest before the dawn. Hope springs eternal. Every rose has its thorns. Every cloud has a silver lining. Into every life a little rain must fall. Above the clouds the sun is shining. After the rain comes the rainbow.

Don’t they just make you want to spit?

When you’re wallowing in discontent (for whatever reason, from a bad hair day to a compound fracture), do you really want to hear Ethel Merman booming, “I’ve Got the Sun in the Mornin’ and the Moon at Night” or have some perky Pollyanna reminding you that he is happiest who hath power to gather wisdom from a flower? Why do people say these things?

Because they’re true

After we’ve been living on earth for a while, observing the patterns and cycles of nature—day and night, summer and winter, storm and sunlight, decay and renewal—we begin to internalize and generalize from the natural world. We learn to take certain things for granted and to not be disconcerted by them—thunderstorms, for example (unless we are a certain type of dog that perceives every storm as a New and Completely Unexpected Type of Event and quivers under a bed until it’s over).

The same is true of the household routine. Mom and Dad go out for dinner and Mrs. Featherstone, who makes us go to bed immediately because she doesn’t want to be disturbed during Jackpot Bowling on television, comes to baby-sit, and we put our goldfish, Wilbur IV, who has recently died, into her purse. But we endure Mrs. Featherstone because we know that Mom and Dad will come home while we’re asleep and Mrs. Featherstone will go back to her cave.

So when I read about these children who have been locked in closets and basements for years, I am doubly appalled. Besides the general horribleness of it, imagine what it must be like to have no firsthand knowledge of the basic cycles of life and nature—to literally not know that every morning brings a new dawn.

Millions of tiny diamonds

On a magnificent summer morning I watched the sun rise over the Missouri River and the prolific farmland of western Iowa. The hills across the river were invisible under a great white pillow of cloud through which poked a few church spires and grain elevators. So much vapor rose from the river itself that it might have been on fire. Gradually the bright green and yellow fields came into view and the vapor turned crystalline, like millions of tiny diamonds ascending, hovering, and rising again. It dawned on me, as it were, that such displays are always available and much more satisfying than whatever I am usually doing when the sun comes up (sniffing at a pile of clothes to see if they’re clean, licking the bottom of a frozen-yogurt carton, looking in the mirror and frowning at my jowls).

I vowed to spend more time outside the closet I keep myself in… to watch more sunrises and remember that we really are new every morning… to grow more flowers and walk outdoors in every kind of weather except “obscenely cold” or “the U.S. Weather Service has issued a tornado warning for eastern Douglas County because a funnel cloud has been sighted in the general vicinity of Mary Campbell.” But, hey! I live in a basement. 

Adapted from Unfamiliar Territory, by Mary Campbell

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The world is too much with us…

This is one of William Wordsworth’s most famous sonnets:

    The world is too much with us; late and soon,
      Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
      Little we see in Nature that is ours;
    We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
    This sea, that bares her bosom to the moon;
      The winds that will be howling at all hours
      And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
    For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
    It moves us not–Great God! I’d rather be
      A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn;
    So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
      Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
    Have sight of Proteus, rising from the sea;
      Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

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Assignment 26.1

1. What are the meter and rhyme scheme of Wordsworth’s poem?
2. Read “Morning Ritual” at Sister Alma Rose Has the Last Word.
3. Please e-mail your assignment to Mary@LifeIsPoetry.net. I will not grade your work, but I will return your assignment to you with comments.

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