Let’s start with a handful of examples. There’s this, from Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening:”
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
And this from John Keats’ “To Autumn:”
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
And Emily Dickinson weighs in, too, of course:
There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields –
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum:
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!
And when Shakespeare wants to discusses a loved one’s impact on him, it’s the natural world he uses for inspiration: “But thy eternal summer shall not fade,” he says in “Sonnet 8.”
The point is that nature has long provided the imagery poets use. Whether you’re writing about love, friendship, sadness, longing, politics, war, or anything else, you can almost certainly find a metaphor in nature.
Submit a poem of your own that uses natural imagery. It can be any length and on any subject, so long as nature is prominent. We’ll select a few to publish in next month’s Insights.
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