Oct 2021 – Earth and air

We all agreed that finding poems about ‘Earth’ and ‘Air’ had been considerably more challenging than ‘Fire’ and ‘Water’. However, we rose to the challenge.

‘Earth’ appeared as landscape and the natural world generally, as well as literally earth as in Christina Rossetti’s sonnet ‘Rest’. The landscapes were evoked by Edward Thomas in ‘The combe’, Kevin Barry in a poetic prose extract from the short story ‘Ox Mountain death song’, and Thomas Hardy in ‘Where the picnic was’. Two Native American poems urged care for the planet; Chief Seattle’s ‘This we know’ and John Hollow Horn’s poem beginning ‘Some day the earth will weep…’.

Gerard Manley Hopkins ‘Pied beauty’ celebrates the variety of the natural world in thrilling language. We heard this excellently recited from memory. Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ yielded a short extract concerning the mining of the ‘precious bane’ – gold – by the fallen angels, to build Pandemonium (Book 1 lines 670-692). Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality was also mined for an extract (verses 3 and 4) which suggests that as we grow we lose our innate joy in the natural world – are indeed brought down to earth. But Seamus Heaney in ‘Poem (for Marie)’ asks his new wife to help him grow beyond his childish delight in digging clods and clabber.

Rudyard Kipling’s ‘When Earth’s last picture is painted’ was drawn to our attention but left unread. I find that it hasn’t really got anything more to do with Earth – as also Wordsworth’s ‘ Earth has not any thing to show more fair…’.

Simon Armitage’s splendid poem ‘In praise of air’ was displayed in Sheffield on a banner coated in titanium dioxide which catalyses the destruction of atmospheric pollution. You can find him reading it on YouTube. Mark O’Brien’s ‘Breathing’ has further striking images of our dependence on air. And the poet is gasping for air in James Nash’s sonnet beginning ‘My lungs…’.

The poets are of course often inspired by wind, especially the west wind!

John Masefield’s ‘The west wind’ is a simple poem of romantic nostalgia. But for A E Housman in ‘The winds out of the west land…’ (no38 of A Shropshire Lad), the wind carries only the names of his dead friends.

In Shelley’s ‘Ode to the west wind’ (verses 1 and 5) the wind scatters not only the dead leaves but the sparks of his words. The wind uses the forest as a lyre, and ‘Beech’ similarly considers that a stand of beech ‘gives the wind speech’; this acrostic poem by Robert McFarlane is from The Lost Spells, beautifully illustrated by Jackie Morris.

‘The wind’ (Ted Hughes) threatens to tear the poet’s house up by the roots. Luckily, in Calcutt the air was still as we journeyed home.