Nature: concepts, characteristics, and applications

Nature in Poems by Frost, Marlowe and Thomas

Nature is often praised and celebrated in poetry. Three poems by three different authors all illustrate this well: "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas, "Birches" by Robert Frost, and Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." While each poet has a different purpose, all three choose in their poems to focus on joy in life rather than despair, and use the beauty of nature to justify their optimism. In addition, all three poets present living within nature as a life of freedom and joy.

Robert Frost is perhaps the most obvious of the deliberate optimists. He looks at birch trees that have nearly been killed by ice storms and instead sees the beauty. He knows logically that the trees are gracefully curved to the ground by nature's destructive forces. He says,

"EThey are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the groundE"

He prefers to imagine, however, that the trees have been bent by the gleeful joy of young boys climbing to the top and swinging on the springy trunk from sky to ground and back again. He longs for that childhood freedom again, and says at the end, "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."

According to Leibman (1996), Frost disliked being described as a "romantic" poet, but his image of childhood joy bounding between Earth and sky, combined with his yearning to return to the simplicity of childhood, certainly suggests a romantic bent to this poem.

Parini (2002) reports that Frost had strong opinions about what made a good poem. He preferred the language "used by men and women in ordinary conversation" and that poetry should not "willfully confuse" the reader. He believed that good poetry stirs emotions, although humor was appropriate as well. Most significantly, he believed that it should have a "sense of place."

This "sense of place" is also reflected in Marlowe's and Thomas' poems, and, like "Birches," the place is within nature, not man-made structures. Marlowe's poem is a marriage proposal, but he never once mentions a house to live in. Instead, he celebrates the natural surroundings they will enjoy, and how they will be surrounded with everything they need:

"And I will make thee beds of roses,

And a thousand fragrant posies,

A cap of flowers and a kirtle

Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle:

A gown made of the finest wool,

Which from our pretty lambs we pull;

Fair lined slippers for the cold,

With buckles of the purest gold:

A belt of straw and ivy buds,

With coral clasps and amber studs;

And if these pleasures may thee move,

Come live with me and be my love."

In fact he seems to only want the young lady if she prizes nature more than material things. Again we see the great optimism that in nature, life is both sweet and uncomplicated.

The poem of Dylan Thomas, "Fern Hill," reflects Frost's yearning to return to the joys of childhood using more complex imagery than used by Frost. Thomas describes an idyllic childhood:

"Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb

Golden in the heydeys of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns