2014–2015

Literature

RESOURCE GUIDE

Annie Dillard’s
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,
Nature Writing, and
Environmental Literature

Acadmic Decathlon®

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SECTION I

Critical Reading

Critical reading is a familiar exercise to students, an exercise that many of them have been engaged in since the first grade. Critical reading forms a major part (more than fifty percent) of the PSAT, the SAT, the ACT, and both Advanced Placement Tests in English. It is the portion of any test for which students can do the least direct preparation, and it is also the portion that will reward students who have been lifelong readers. Unlike other parts of the United States Academic Decathlon Test in Literature, where the questions will be based on specific works of literature that the students have been studying diligently, the critical reading passage in the test, as a previously unseen passage, will have an element of surprise. In fact, the test writers usually go out of their way to choose passages from works not previously encountered in high school so as to avoid making the critical reading items a mere test of recall. From one point of view, not having to rely on memory actually makes questions on critical reading easier than the other questions because the answer must always be somewhere in the passage, stated either directly or indirectly, and careful reading will deliver the answer.

Since students can feel much more confident with some background information and some knowledge of the types of questions likely to be asked, the first order of business is for the student to contextualize the passage by asking some key questions. Who wrote it? When was it written? In what social, historical, or literary environment was it written?

In each passage used on a test, the writer’s name is provided, followed by the work from which the passage was excerpted or the date it was published or the dates of the author’s life. If the author is well known to high school students (e.g., Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jane Austen), no dates will be provided, but the work or the occasion will be cited. For writers less familiar to high school students, dates will be provided. Using this information, students can begin to place the passage into context. As they start to read, students will want to focus on what they know about that writer, his or her typical style and concerns, or that time period, its values and its limitations. A selection from Thomas Paine in the eighteenth century is written against a different background and has different concerns from a selection written by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Toni Morrison writes against a different background from that of Charles Dickens.

Passages are chosen from many different kinds of texts—fiction, biography, letters, speeches, essays, newspaper columns, and magazine articles—and may come from a diverse group of writers, varying in gender, race, location, and time period. A likely question is one that asks readers to speculate on what literary form the passage is excerpted from. The passage itself will offer plenty of clues as to its genre, and the name of the writer often offers clues as well. Excerpts from fiction contain the elements one might expect to find in fiction—descriptions of setting, character, or action. Letters have a sense of sharing thoughts with a particular person. Speeches have a wider audience and a keen awareness of that audience; speeches also have some particular rhetorical devices peculiar to the genre. Essays and magazine articles are usually focused on one topic of contemporary, local, or universal interest.

Other critical reading questions can be divided into two major types: reading for meaning and reading for analysis. The questions on reading for meaning are based solely on understanding what the passage is saying, and the questions on analysis are based on how the writer says what he or she says.

In reading for meaning, the most frequently asked question is one that inquires about the passage’s main idea since distinguishing a main idea from a supporting idea is an important reading skill. A question on main ideas is sometimes disguised as a question asking for an appropriate title for the passage. Most students will not select as the main idea a choice that is neither directly stated nor indirectly implied in the passage, but harder questions will present choices that do appear in the passage but are not main ideas. Remember that an answer choice may be a true statement but not the right answer to the question.

Closely related to a question on the main idea of a passage is a question about the writer’s purpose. If the passage is fiction, the purpose, unless it is a digression—and even digressions are purposeful in the hands of good writers—will in some way serve the elements of fiction. The passage will develop a character, describe a setting, or advance the plot. If the passage is non-fiction, the writer’s purpose might be purely to inform; it might be to persuade; it might be to entertain; or it might be any combination of all three of these. Students may also be questioned about the writer’s audience. Is the passage intended for a specific group, or is it aimed at a larger audience?

The easy part of the Critical Reading section is that the answer to the question is always in the passage, and for most of the questions, students do not need to bring previous knowledge of the subject to the task. However, for some questions, students are expected to have some previous knowledge of the vocabulary, terms, allusions, and stylistic techniques usually acquired in an English class. Such knowledge could include, but is not limited to, knowing vocabulary, recognizing an allusion, and identifying literary and rhetorical devices.

In addition to recognizing the main idea of a passage, students will be required to demonstrate a more specific understanding. Questions measuring this might restate information from the passage and ask students to recognize the most exact restatement. For such questions, students will have to demonstrate their clear understanding of a specific passage or sentence. A deeper level of understanding may be examined by asking students to make inferences on the basis of the passage or to draw conclusions from evidence in the passage. In some cases, students may be asked to extend these conclusions by applying information in the passage to other situations not mentioned in the passage.

In reading for analysis, students are asked to recognize some aspects of the writer’s craft. One of these aspects may be organization. How has the writer chosen to organize his or her material? Is it a chronological narrative? Does it describe a place using spatial organization? Is it an argument with points clearly organized in order of importance? Is it set up as a comparison and contrast? Does it offer an analogy or a series of examples? If there is more than one paragraph in the excerpt, what is the relationship between the paragraphs? What transition does the writer make from one paragraph to the next?

Other questions could be based on the writer’s attitude toward the subject, the appropriate tone he or she assumes, and the way language is used to achieve that tone. Of course, the tone will vary according to the passage. In informational nonfiction, the tone will be detached and matter-of-fact, except when the writer is particularly enthusiastic about the subject or has some other kind of emotional involvement such as anger, disappointment, sorrow, or nostalgia. He or she may even assume an ironic tone that takes the form of exaggerating or understating a situation or describing it as the opposite of what it is. With each of these methods of irony, two levels of meaning are present—what is said and what is implied. An ironic tone is usually used to criticize or to mock.

A writer of fiction uses tone differently, depending on what point of view he or she assumes. If the author chooses a first-person point of view and becomes one of the characters, he or she has to assume a persona and develop a character through that character’s thoughts, actions, and speeches. This character is not necessarily sympathetic and is sometimes even a villain, as in some of the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Readers have to pick up this tone from the first few sentences. If the author is writing a third-person narrative, the tone will vary in accordance with how intrusive the narrator appears to be. Some narrators are almost invisible while others are more intrusive, pausing to editorialize, digress, or, in some cases, address the reader directly.

Language is the tool the author uses to reveal attitude and point of view. A discussion of language includes the writer’s syntax and diction. Are the sentences long or short? Is the length varied—is there an occasional short sentence among longer ones? Does the writer use parallelism and balanced sentence structure? Are the sentences predominantly simple, complex, compound, or compound-complex? How does the writer use tense? Does he or she vary the mood of the verb from indicative to interrogative to imperative? Does the writer shift between active and passive voice? If so, why? How do these choices influence the tone?

SAMPLE PASSAGE TO PREPARE FOR CRITICAL READING

In order to prepare for the critical reading portion of the test, it may be helpful for students to take a look at a sample passage. Here is a passage used in an earlier test. The passage is an excerpt from Mary Shelley’s 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein.

      “We will each write a ghost story,” said Lord Byron, and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us. The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our

(5)    language than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole—what to see I forget: something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry¹, he did not know what to do with her and

(10)   was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task.

      I busied myself to think of a story—a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling

(15)   horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered—vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. “Have you thought of a story?” I was asked each morning, and each

(20)   morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.

      Mary Shelley

      Introduction to Frankenstein (1831)

      1. Tom of Coventry—Peeping Tom who was struck blind for looking as Lady Godiva passed by.

INSTRUCTIONS: On your answer sheet, mark the lettered space (a, b, c, d, or e) corresponding to the answer that BEST completes or answers each of the following test items.

  1.   The author’s purpose in this passage is to

       a.   analyze the creative process

       b.   demonstrate her intellectual superiority

       c.   name-drop her famous acquaintances

       d.   denigrate the efforts of her companions

       e.   narrate the origins of her novel

  2.   According to the author, Shelley’s talents were in

       a.   entiment and invention

       b.   diction and sound patterns

       c.   thought and feeling

       d.   brightness and ornamentation

       e.   insight and analysis

  3.   The author’s descriptions of Shelley’s talents might be considered all of the following EXCEPT

       a.   accurate

       b.   prejudiced

       c.   appreciative

       d.   detached

       e.   exaggerated

  4.   The author’s attitude toward Polidori is

       a.   amused

       b.   sincere

       c.   derisive

       d.   ironic

       e.   matter-of-fact

  5.   The author’s approach to the task differs from that of the others in that she begins by thinking of

       a.   her own early experiences

       b.   poetic terms and expressions

       c.   the desired effect on her readers

       d.   outperforming her male companions

       e.   praying for inspiration

  6.   At the end of the excerpt the author feels

       a.   determined

       b.   despondent

       c.   confident

       d.   relieved

       e.   resigned

  7.   “Noble” (line 2) can be BEST understood to mean

       a.   principled

       b.   aristocratic

       c.   audacious

       d.   arrogant

       e.   eminent

  8.   All of the following constructions, likely to be questioned by a strict grammarian or a computer grammar check, are included in the passage EXCEPT

       a.   a shift in voice

       b.   unconventional punctuation

       c.   sentence fragments

       d.   run-on sentences

       e.   a sentence ending with a preposition

  9.   In context “platitude” (line 11) can be BEST understood to mean

       a.   intellectual value

       b.   philosophical aspect

       c.   commonplace quality

       d.   heightened emotion

       e.   demanding point of view

  10.  “The tomb of the Capulets” (line 10) is an allusion to

       a.   Shakespeare

       b.   Edgar Allan Poe

       c.   English history

       d.   Greek mythology

       e.   the legends of King Arthur

ANSWERS AND EXPLANATIONS OF ANSWERS

1. (e) This type of question appears in most sets of critical reading questions. (a) might appear to be a possible answer, but the passage does not come across as very analytical, nor does it seem like a discussion of the creative process but rather is more a description of a game played by four writers to while away the time. (b) and (c) seem unlikely answers. Mary Shelley’s account here sounds as if she is conscious of inferiority in such illustrious company rather than superiority. She has no need to name-drop, as she married one of the illustrious poets and at that time was the guest of the other. She narrates the problems she had in coming up with a story, but since the passage tells us that she is the author of Frankenstein, we know that she did come up with a story. The answer is (e).

2. (b) This type of question asks readers to recognize a restatement of ideas found in the passage. The sentence under examination is found in lines 3–6, and students are asked to recognize that “diction and sound patterns” refers to “radiance of brilliant imagery” and “music of the most melodious verse.” (a) would not be possible because even his adoring wife finds him not inventive. “Thought and feeling,” (c), appear as “ideas and sentiments” (line 3), which according to the passage are merely the vehicles to exhibit Shelley’s talents. Answer (d), incorporating “brightness,” might refer to “brilliant” in line 4, but “ornamentation” is too artificial a word for the author to use in reference to her talented husband. (e) is incorrect, as insight and analysis are not alluded to in the passage.

3. (d) This question is related to Question 2 in that it discusses Shelley’s talents and the author’s opinion of them. The writer is obviously not “detached” in her description of her very talented husband. She is obviously “prejudiced” and “appreciative.” She may even exaggerate, but history has shown her to be accurate in her opinion.

4. (a) This is another question about the writer’s attitude. Some of the adjectives can be immediately dismissed. She is not ironic—she means what she says. She is not an unkind writer, and she does not use a derisive tone. However, there is too much humor in her tone for it to be sincere or matter-of-fact. The correct answer is that she is amused.

5. (c) This question deals with the second paragraph and how the author set about writing a story. Choices (a), (b), (d), and (e) may seem appropriate beginnings for a writer, but they are not mentioned in the passage. What she does focus on is the desired effect on her readers, (c), as outlined in detail in lines 13–16.

6. (b) This question asks for an adjective to describe the author’s feeling at the end of the excerpt. The expressions “blank incapability” (line 17) and “mortifying negative” (line 20) suggest that “despondent” is the most appropriate answer.

7. (b) This question deals with vocabulary in context. The noble author is Lord Byron, a hereditary peer of the realm, and the word in this context of describing him means “aristocratic.” “Principled,” (a), and “eminent,” (e), are also possible synonyms for “noble” but not in this context. Byron in his private life was eminently unprincipled (nicknamed “the bad Lord Byron”) and lived overseas to avoid public enmity. (c) and (d) are not synonyms for “noble.”

8. (d) This is a type of question that appears occasionally in a set of questions on critical reading. Such questions require the student to examine the sentence structure of professional writers and to be aware that these writers sometimes take liberties in order to make a more effective statement.

They know the rules, and, therefore, they may break them! An additional difficulty is that the question is framed as a negative, so students may find it a time-consuming question as they mentally check off which constructions Shelley does employ so that by a process of elimination they may arrive at which construction is not included. The first sentence contains both choices (a) and (e), a shift in voice and a sentence ending in a preposition. Neither of these constructions is a grammatical error, but computer programs point them out. The conventional advice is that both should be used sparingly, and they should be used when avoiding them becomes more cumbersome than using them. The sentence beginning in line 14 is a sentence fragment (c), but an effective one. Choice (b) corresponds to the sentence beginning in line 6 and finishing in line 11, which contains a colon, semicolon, and a dash (somewhat unconventional) without the author’s ever losing control. This sentence is not a run-on even though many students may think it is! The answer to the question then is (d).

9. (c) Here is another vocabulary in context question. Knowing the poets involved and their tastes, students will probably recognize that it is (c), the commonplace quality of prose, that turns the poets away and not one of the loftier explanations provided in the other distracters.

10. (a) The allusion to “the tomb of the Capulets” in line 10 is an example of a situation where a student is expected to have some outside knowledge, and this will be a very easy question for students. Romeo and Juliet is fair game for American high school students. Notice that the other allusion is footnoted, as this is a more obscure allusion for American high school students, although well known to every English schoolboy and schoolgirl.

Occasionally, a set of questions may include a grammar question. For example, an item might require students to identify what part of speech a particular word is being used as, what the antecedent of a pronoun is, or what a modifier modifies. Being able to answer demonstrates that the student understands the sentence structure and the writer’s meaning in a difficult or sometimes purposefully ambiguous sentence.

With diction, or word choice, one must also consider whether the words are learned and ornate or simple and colloquial. Does the writer use slang or jargon? Does he or she use sensual language? Does the writer use figurative language or classical allusions? Is the writer’s meaning clearer because an abstract idea is associated with a concrete image? Does the reader have instant recognition of a universal symbol? If the writer does any of the above, what tone is achieved through the various possibilities of language? Is the writing formal or informal? Does the writer approve of or disapprove of or ridicule his or her subject? Does he or she use connotative rather than denotative words to convey these emotions? Do you recognize a pattern of images or words throughout the passage?

Some questions on vocabulary in context deal with a single word. The word is not usually an unfamiliar word, but it is often a word with multiple meanings, depending on the context or the date of the passage, as some words have altered in meaning over the years.

This set of ten questions is very typical—one on purpose, a couple on restatement of supporting ideas, some on tone and style, two on vocabulary in context, and one on an allusion. Students should learn how to use the process of elimination when the answer is not immediately obvious. The organization of the questions is also typical of the usual arrangement of Critical Reading questions. Questions on the content of the passage, the main idea, and supporting ideas generally appear first and are in the order they are found in the passage. They are followed by questions applying to the whole passage, including general questions about the writer’s tone and style. Students should be able to work their way through the passage, finding the answers as they go.

Additional questions on an autobiographical selection like this passage might ask what is revealed about the biographer herself or which statements in the passage associate the author with Romanticism.

Since passages for critical reading come in a wide variety of genres, students should keep in mind that other types of questions could be asked on other types of passages. For instance, passages from fiction can generate questions about point of view, about characters and how these characters are presented, or about setting, either outdoor or indoor, and the role it is likely to play in a novel or short story.

Speeches generate some different kinds of questions because of the oratorical devices a speaker might use—repetition, anaphora, or appeals to various emotions. Questions could be asked about the use of metaphors, the use of connotative words, and the use of patterns of words or images.

The suggestions made in this section of the resource guide should provide a useful background for critical reading. Questions are likely to follow similar patterns, and knowing what to expect boosts confidence when dealing with unfamiliar material.

SECTION II

Nature Writing, Environmental Literature, and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Introduction

When we consider a timely theme such as “New Alternatives in Energy: Ingenuity and Innovation,” we probably think of solar panels, wind turbines, hybrid automobiles, and public transportation systems, or of super-insulated homes with wood stoves and triple-glazed argon-filled windows. Or, if we are interested in efforts to mitigate global climate change, we may wonder about how rising sea levels will affect our lives in the future, just as they are already affecting the lives of people in faraway island nations. Perhaps we speculate about how the growing global population of humans will feed itself in the coming centuries. Whatever our perspective on issues pertaining to energy and innovation, in our increasingly technocratic society we tend to gravitate toward technical and technological solutions to our problems. Yet the topic of energy does not merely pertain to burning fossil fuels or devising new ways to harness the sun’s rays. Energy, in short, is not merely an issue of science and technology. An alternative does not have to be a solution; it can also be a new perspective.

Energy use is a human issue, one that is intimately connected to the way we live our lives and think about our role here on this planet. Human beings are meaning-making animals, not just problem-solvers, and the topic of new alternatives in energy is not just a scientific and policy issue, but also an artistic and spiritual issue. Great writers can help us do this kind of thinking. Thus, one important way to think about this year’s Academic Decathlon® theme is through a humanistic approach, through the medium of literature, which enjoins us to see the world through fresh eyes and to consider alternative perspectives. The study of languages and literatures necessarily entails thinking otherwise, or entertaining modes of thought other than one’s own familiar patterns. Literature offers an unparalleled means of putting oneself in someone else’s shoes—of trying out new ways of looking at the world. The word “alternative” comes from the Latin root alter, meaning “other.” The goal of this resource guide, then, is to introduce you to a great work of literature that is all about considering new perspectives to our understanding of everyday life.

The literary themes of nature, place, and landscape play a major role in this country’s best-known literature, particularly in the creative nonfiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. American poets, too, have made significant contributions to environmental literature. Many of these writers wrote in response to historical developments, such as the Industrial Revolution, that changed the physical landscape of the young United States. Others penned notable responses to environmental destruction. Together, the literary works discussed in this resource guide are intended to form a representative, but not a comprehensive, sampling of great American works of modern environmental literature.

This section of the resource guide is intended to help you read and understand author Annie Dillard’s nonfiction book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. After reading the book, and with the assistance of this resource guide, you should be able to discuss the literary form and thematic content of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in depth. Roughly two-thirds of this section of the resource guide consists of background information that will help you understand the life and times of the author and the contextual significance of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The remaining third (approximately) consists of chapter summaries and interpretation meant to broaden and deepen your engagement with the book as you read it. Each subsection can be read independently (you may choose to jump to a section that interests you) or in sequence, as an expository essay on Annie Dillard and her best-known book.

American philosopher/poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1859. The publication of Emerson’s essay Nature in 1836 led to the emergence of nature as a major theme in American literature.

The Natural History Essay and the Romantic Movement

In the early nineteenth century the development of the natural history essay, combined with the emergent Romantic movement, caused a new kind of writing to flourish in the young American republic, particularly in New England. This emergent body of literature tended to celebrate the intricacies of particular places and found meaning—often religious or transcendental meaning—in the workings of the natural world. By the early nineteenth century a body of writing about nature existed in the English-speaking world. Naturalists such as William Bartram (1739–1823) and John James Audubon (1785–1851) had written of nature’s wonders on the North American continent, and the Englishman Gilbert White (1720–93) had written The Natural History of Selborne, a detailed account of natural processes in the author’s small English region.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature

It was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s (1803–82) idealistic essay Nature, originally published as a brief book, that made nature a central topic of interest for intellectuals of various kinds. We can trace the emergence of nature as a major theme in American literature to the publication of Emerson’s essay in 1836. Emerson’s Nature investigates multiple ideas about and definitions of nature, moving between the philosophical idealism of Neo-Platonism, which sees the natural environment as the expression of deeper realities, and a more materialist approach that sees nature as a spiritual and material resource to be enjoyed and appreciated by people. Nature is in no way a work of environmentalism in the current sense of the term, for Emerson had no interest in describing the negative effects of human activities on the natural world or urging people to tread lightly. Yet Emerson’s call, on the first page of Nature, for “an original relation to the universe” certainly inspired his disciple Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), who took a different approach to the idea of nature than did his teacher, emphasizing instead the spiritual discipline of simplicity, physical labor, and paying careful attention to natural phenomena.

Ambrotype of Henry David Thoreau from August 1861. Thoreau’s Walden became the great American classic of nature writing.

Henry David Thoreau’s Walden

If Emerson’s Nature made the natural world a central topic in American intellectual life, it was Thoreau’s Walden that would become the great American classic of nature writing. Overwhelmingly influential on the intellectual life of the United States, Walden has had an impact well beyond national borders and the boundaries of modern environmentalism. It is a book that inspired Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King as well as several generations of post-World War II counter-cultural movements. The central theme of Walden is the rich relationship between human beings and the natural environment. Thoreau constantly enjoins readers to open their eyes to natural processes and their spiritual effects on the self. Our spiritual condition, Thoreau insists, reflects in our material lives—in the ways we make a living, eat, travel, and live. Material life, for Thoreau, is part and parcel of spiritual life, and dedicating oneself to a rigorous attention to simplicity and material minimalism can lead to spiritual uplift.

This 1840 engraving by Edward Goodall (1795–1870), Manchester, from Kersal Moor, is based on a painting by W. Wylde. The lush, natural scenery of the countryside provides a stark contrast to the polluted, chimney-filled sky of the industrialized city.

Subsequent writers have heeded Thoreau’s words. Annie Dillard, whose Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the long text selected for this year’s literature curriculum, offers a twentieth-century reprise of the major themes and ideas in Walden. Dillard’s writing amply demonstrates the ongoing currency of nature, the environment, and serious intellectual inquiry in American literature. But nonfiction nature writing does not encompass all of American literature’s discussion of these themes, nor does American literature contain all of the major statements on the subject. Anglophone (English-speaking) poets from a variety of national traditions have also created powerful works of literary art that reflect on the natural world. In the selection of short works included in section III of this resource guide, the emphasis is on well-known works of modern American and British poetry, ranging from two sonnets by the English poet William Wordsworth to recent poems by living Americans. These poems have been selected to fit with this year’s curricular theme.

Historical Context

The Industrial Revolution is a phrase that denotes an ongoing process of rapid technological advancement accompanied by massive social, economic, and political change, beginning in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century and continuing to this day. Its long-term effects on the biophysical environment of this planet, forms the major historical context for English Romantic poetry, nineteenth-century American nature writing, and modern environmentalism. With rapid and largely unplanned growth of cities, suburbs, factories, and the social problems that accompanied them, growing numbers of artists and intellectuals in eighteenth-century and especially nineteenth-century Britain, and later in the United States, voiced concerns about humanity’s transformation—and, often, destruction—of beloved landscapes and ecosystems, such as woods, fields, and coastlines.

One well-known example of the way human efforts to harness energy have affected the environment is the London smog (a word derived from “smoke” and “fog”). Even before the Industrial Revolution accelerated air pollution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, London’s foul air was the topic of much discussion. As the scholar Ken Hiltner has discussed in a series of recent studies, people living in the London area long suspected a connection between the burning of sea coal (a soft bituminous coal that produces a great deal of smoke) and the increasingly polluted air in the region of the city. In the Middle Ages people on the east coast of England gathered sea coal (which washed up on the coast, often from underwater coal deposits) to burn as fuel for cooking and heat. Over time London’s smog worsened, and with the development of the Industrial Revolution, the burning of coal on an unprecedented level became a public health threat. Smog in some industrial areas was occasionally so dense and lasting that many citizens had trouble breathing and in some cases developed lung illnesses. The stagnant and extremely unhealthy air that hovered over London on windless days was (rightly) blamed for numerous health problems as early as the mid-seventeenth century.¹

Smog is an early, local example of anthropogenic climate change, the transformation of the natural world (in this case air) by human means. Other forms of human-induced environmental degradation proliferated as the Industrial Revolution gained historical momentum. By the nineteenth century, the polluted Thames River, filthy streets, and sooty facades of buildings reminded Britons daily of the toll of the Industrial Revolution. The effects of the Industrial Revolution motivated poets such as William Wordsworth (1770–1850) to decry “what man has made of man,” while writers of prose fiction, such as Mary Shelley, wrote fantastic cautionary stories, such as Frankenstein, in response to these rapidly changing historical conditions.

The ongoing discovery of new means of harnessing energy made the Industrial Revolution possible; in particular, the development of the steam engine made human pursuits—from mining and manufacturing to travel—more efficient and more environmentally destructive. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, scientists and innovators created steam engines of increasing efficiency. Between 1763 and 1775 the Scotsman James Watt created a steam engine efficient enough to replace animal labor (horses, in this case) in industrial production (first mining, then other industries), thus accelerating the Industrial Revolution. For, in time, steam engines would perform spectacular functions such as propelling steam locomotives and steamships. Steam engines were the first instance of widespread automation, and as they became more available, innovators created ever-more efficient ones.

By the middle of the twentieth century industrial production, energy use, and the explosive growth of the human population was beginning to be perceived as an emergent global threat by scientists, writers, and policy-makers. The counter-cultural social movements of the sixties and seventies prepared the way for a wide variety of American readers to think seriously about nature and the environment in a new light. In the early sixties Rachel Carson’s (1907–64) landmark book Silent Spring had a major effect on public opinion about pollution, inciting the Kennedy administration to hold hearings about the use of chemical pesticides, while a number of well-publicized environmental disasters were transforming public opinion about the anthropogenic impact on various aspects of the natural world. The next decade, the seventies, was a time of rapidly increasing public awareness about a host of environmental issues and increased government willingness to respond—to pollution, war, extinctions, and unchecked exploitation of natural resources. The environmental sciences were focused increasingly on mitigating the human degradation of nature, and writers, artists, and intellectuals, as well as politicians were becoming increasingly concerned about how to preserve and treasure the biosphere.

Annie Dillard, the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, this year’s long text selection (published 1974), was born at the start of the post-WWII baby boom, and her ideas and opinions were shaped in the post-war context. The late 1950s and 1960s in the United States were an era that saw the rise of transformative social movements in reaction to mainstream culture, society, and politics. Many of these movements were counter-cultural, such as the Beats, the hippies, the back-to-the-landers, the Black Power and gay rights movements, feminism, the anti-war movement. This was a moment when Americans, like some people living in other parts of the developed world (such as Sweden and France), were becoming acutely aware of the crises that were being caused by the increasing exploitation of the world’s resources. At the same time the American public had become impatient with (and in many cases disgusted by) the Vietnam War, a losing military campaign in which weapons and military technology caused an enormous loss of human life, as well as immeasurable environmental destruction in Southeast Asia. The human and environmental effects of Agent Orange (an herbicide and defoliant used by the U.S. military during the war), for example, continue to be felt in Vietnam and are one instance of what the scholar Rob Nixon has termed “slow violence,” the often-unremarked unfolding of environmental catastrophe in poor communities.

Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, published in 1962. Silent Spring had a major effect on public opinion about pollution and the environment.

In this context, Dillard’s profound personal reflections on nature’s spiritual value struck a timely chord. The United States federal government passed most of its landmark environmental legislation in the seventies, including such bills as the Endangered Species Act (1973), the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972), the Clean Water Act (1972), and major updates to the Clean Air Act (1967, 1970, 1977), among others. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was published at a moment that can reasonably be designated as the peak of the twentieth-century environmental movement. Pilgrim was a timely book, and even if its primary focus was not on environmental advocacy, it was clearly motivated by the same forces that produced these noteworthy federal bills.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is an erudite dialogue with classics, religion, and science; it is also a passionate response to the issues of the era in which it was written and published. The historical context of Pilgrim’s publication cannot be overstated, particularly with regard to the growth of the environmental movement in the United States, which profoundly influenced Dillard’s thinking about the natural world, created a national audience for her work, and provides a clear context for her contribution to literature. Nevertheless, her writings are not works of environmental advocacy in the tradition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or Peter Matthiessen’s Wildlife in America. Annie Dillard is less an environmentalist than a philosopher whose work harkens back to early modern thinkers engaged in what was then called natural theology, the study of the natural world for signs of divine purpose. Natural theologians believed they were interpreting the mind of the deity; Dillard, too, looks at the natural world for signs of spiritual significance. For her the environment is saturated with spiritual meaning, and her primary interest is not so much the human degradation of nature—the primary theme in books of environmental advocacy, such as Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature. Rather, Dillard explores the enormous potential for spiritual self-discovery that is latent in the natural world.

We should not assume that such a Thoreauvian book as Pilgrim bespeaks the kind of concern for the fate of the environment characteristic of such pioneering works of environmentalism as Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, or Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature. These writers concentrate on the human destruction of the biophysical environment in an effort to raise consciousness and mitigate such destruction. Dillard does not share this primary focus; rather, she pursues her interest in biology, ecology, medicine, and perception in order to examine the material basis for her own spirituality.

Dillard often seems to be talking to herself, working out religious puzzles and riddles, rather than exhorting readers to take up arms against industrial modernity’s despoliation of the natural world. Dillard is not truly an environmentalist, first and foremost. As scholar Don Scheese argues:

…to examine the work of Annie Dillard is to reveal both the power and the limitations of the term ‘nature writer.’ The genre has traditionally been defined as a first-person nonfiction narrative based on an appreciative aesthetic response to a scientific view of nature. Much of Dillard’s writing meets this criterion. Other elements generally considered important to a definition of nature writing include a celebration of a particular place, an elegy to a lost or diminished wilderness, a polemic directed at despoilers of nature, and an argument for biocentrism over anthropocentrism. These other criteria, however, have not been central concerns of Dillard’s, leading some critics to wonder whether she should rightly be considered a nature writer.²

Indeed, the ways in which Pilgrim departs from the tradition of nature writing seem more striking than the ways in which it fits within that tradition. The book’s intellectual cosmopolitanism (it engages with writers and thinkers from various languages, nations, and traditions) sets it apart from the bulk of American nature writing.

President Richard Nixon, signing the Endangered Species Act of 1973 into law. The United States federal government passed most of its landmark environmental legislation in the seventies.

AP Photo.

Ultimately, Dillard is more concerned with the human condition—her own and her readers’ spiritual responsiveness to natural phenomena—than she is with the plight of the natural world. In her own words, “There’s usually a bit of nature in what I write, but I don’t consider myself a nature writer either.”³ This is a bit of an understatement, but there is more than a grain of truth here: Annie Dillard’s nonfiction books, and especially Pilgrim, approach nature and the environment not for their own sake but as vehicles for examining human spiritual experience. The same can be said of the literary selections in the short works section following the analysis of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Each of these shorter works is centrally concerned with the interactions of humans with the environment, but each examines those interactions through an aesthetic lens—through the poetic reshaping of language.

Keywords

The Sublime

The sublime is a conceptual category (complex definitional idea) from the philosophical discourse of aesthetics used to describe an overwhelming sensory experience in which the perceiver is awe-struck and emotionally transported by an immensely powerful experience of the natural world, such as an alpine or arctic landscape, a storm at sea, a cataract or waterfall, or anything containing immense energy and the power to destroy the perceiver. The effects of such an experience are understood as aesthetic, spiritual, and psychological: the perceiver of a sublime object (often a landscape or vista) undergoes a kind of inner struggle and emerges enriched by the experience, more in tune with nature than previously. In his 1764 treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, the philosopher Edmund Burke distinguished the sublime from the “merely” beautiful and picturesque. The sublime is a particularly powerful aesthetic experience defined by terror and awe. Sublime scenes or works of art are characterized by extremes, irregularity, and a correspondence between natural features and forces and deep emotions connected to the psychological unconscious. For nature writers, the sublime landscape can both cause powerful emotional feeling and reflect powerful feelings the writer may already be experiencing. The beautiful, on the other hand, is distinguished by calm regularity and aesthetic pleasure.⁴

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1817, painted by Caspar David Friedrich. For nature writers, the sublime landscape can both cause and reflect powerful feelings.

The Gothic

“Gothic” originally referred to the early Germanic Goths, who overran much of Europe (including large parts of the Roman Empire). This term was later used to refer to medieval themes. Gothic art contains danger, violence, the occult, exoticism, and other elements tied to the unconscious. Gothic art tends to be lurid, containing morbid and erotic themes. It is marked by an emphasis on the uncanny (strangeness in that which is familiar) and the exotic. In literature the gothic is a mode—a set of plot elements, themes, and motifs—that crosses genres (including novels, poems, short stories, plays, and movies). The Gothic first arose as a major aesthetic mode in the arts (as opposed to architecture, in which the Gothic means something different) in the eighteenth century as a cultural reaction to that era’s obsession with Enlightenment ideals such as neo-classicism, rationalism, empiricism, strict intellectual clarity, and the celebration of bourgeois values. In gothic literature the protagonist often finds herself or himself pursued by a mysterious antagonist with occult and violent tendencies who is cruel and driven by lust. The setting quite frequently evokes the Middle Ages—castles, crypts, and caves abound in gothic literature—and also France and Spain. Gothic novels include The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, by Ann Radcliffe, Vathek, by William Beckford, The Monk, by Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. The gothic stories of Edgar Allan Poe include “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” among others. Gothic poems include “Christabel,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and “Lamia,” by John Keats.

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution refers to the historical transformation of the material world that was fueled by the growth of new technologies, such as the compound steam engine, high-carbon steel, and the internal combustion engine, and new methods of production—particularly mass production. Beginning in Britain in the eighteenth century and spreading rapidly to other European nations and the United States, the Industrial Revolution saw the development of myriad new devices (such as the cotton gin, the steam locomotive, and railroads, steamships, and factories) and methods of production (mass production, mills, mines). The phrase is used to describe the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century expansion of production fueled by capitalism and its various markets and industries, as well as the political hegemony of the European bourgeoisie and the exploitation of non-European peoples for labor and natural resources. Some results of the Industrial Revolution were the depopulation of rural regions, the corresponding birth and expansion of cities, air and water pollution, and population expansion.

American Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism was a distinctly American literary, philosophical, and religious movement that began in 1836 with the formation of a Unitarian discussion group known as the Transcendental Club, composed of Boston and Concord intellectuals. Neither a coherent ideology nor a religious sect, Transcendentalism was a movement in the intellectual life of the young America that remained a force until the Civil War. The Transcendentalists emphasized the individual’s ability to apprehend truths that lay higher or deeper than mere experience could garner. They rejected the rationalism then prevalent at Harvard University, preferring instead the ideas (coming out of Germany and Britain) of idealist philosophers and Romantic poets. Major components of Transcendentalism were a revaluation of intuition and insight and a religious cosmopolitanism that included appreciation for Eastern thought (Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and to some extent Taoism and Confucianism). Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose short book (or essay) Nature was published in that year, is the most famous of the Transcendentalists. Others include Bronson Alcott, E.E. Channing, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, and Henry David Thoreau.

Modernism

Modernism is a movement in literature and the arts that began in Western European countries (particularly Britain, France, and Italy) just before World War I and lasted until just after World War II. Literary modernism is characterized by an emphasis on historical discontinuity and a commitment to newness; by technical experimentation and innovation on all levels (including, in poetry, the widespread use of free verse, and in prose stream-of-consciousness) and by the development of new aesthetic values; movements such as Futurism, Surrealism, and Expressionism; and a concern for the autonomy of the artist. Modernism was also characterized by avant-gardism (an aesthetic revolutionary spirit), the rediscovery and rewriting of mythology, and an emphasis on the psychology of everyday life. Modernists tended to reject or critique the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie, even if most were themselves of middle-class origin. The alienation of the individual (from society, institutions, or traditions) is a major modernist theme. One of the notable features of modernism is a marked interest in “the Orient,” particularly in Japanese, Chinese, and Indian art, which some modernists found inspirational. Notable British and American modernists include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, the late Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a term that initially was used to describe a shift in post-World-War II creative art and architecture that strove toward a new aesthetic sensibility in reaction to modernism. In some instances, postmodernism continued the experimentation of modernism, but in most cases it went in a markedly different direction. The term “postmodernism” is now more commonly used to describe art produced after the late 1960s. Postmodern art tends to put much less emphasis on universal knowledge than did modernism. Postmodernists stress the importance of the small-scale—the local, particular, and mutable as opposed to what the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has called the metanarratives (“grands recits,” in French) of modernism. In postmodernism there is often an emphasis placed on the role of ideology, including the ideology of art, over aesthetic form. Postmodern literary texts often emphasize pastiche (mixed artistic media), historical context, the local (as opposed to the international), and uncertainty as to setting, narrative persona, and plot. A postmodernist novel is likely to be an anti-novel and a postmodernist hero an anti-hero. Some theorists have linked postmodernism to the dazzling complexity of late-twentieth-century civilization, in which traditional social and cultural structures and relations break down, and a general sense of historical vertigo is produced. Much postmodern art evinces a sense of vertigo, disorientation, or displacement.

Creative Nonfiction

Creative nonfiction is nonfiction writing that uses the craft of the fiction writer or novelist, including such techniques as personification (especially of animals), anthropomorphism (near-personification), the development of a narrative persona, episodic narration, irony, apostrophe, symbolism, and so on.

Environmentalism

Environmentalism refers to any explicit concern for the effects of human activity on the natural world. Environmentalism also describes a widespread twentieth-century movement to limit, mitigate, or solve problems caused by the human degradation of nature galvanized by concerns about pollution.

Nature Writing

Nature writing refers to nonfiction essays of varying lengths, particularly those written after the late eighteenth century, that are characterized by a profound concern for a particular place and its biota and generally accompanied by spiritual or theological reflections (usually non-denominational). Nature writing is a highly evolved form of the natural history essay in which a reliable, highly present narrator introduces the reader to a set of natural attributes that characterize a particular place or region. Nature writing tends to rely heavily on the author’s unsystematic study of natural phenomena, often called “natural history,” signifying an approach to thinking about the natural world that can be traced to European Renaissance intellectuals seeking to understand the mind of God by interpreting the Creation for signs and symbols of divine intent. Nature writing is a privileged form of discourse associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, Mary Hunter Austin, Edward Abbey, and Annie Dillard.

Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) – Summary

On May 5, 1975, a young writer by the name of Annie Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. First published just over a year earlier, with excerpts appearing in the literary magazines Harper’s and The Atlantic even earlier, Pilgrim was Dillard’s second book (her first book was a collection of poems) and was the April selection of the Book-of-the-Month club. Not only did Pilgrim sell quite well, but its widely appealing subject matter, sympathetic narrative voice, vividly described episodes, and superbly crafted prose style won Annie Dillard immediate critical acclaim and a devoted following of readers among the general public. Soon Dillard began to receive fan mail, and offers to write for the movies, television, and theater poured in. She was invited to appear on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson. Not yet thirty years old, Annie Dillard was a literary celebrity. She has remained one ever since, with the reputation of her most famous book (Pilgrim) growing and expanding with time. Today Pilgrim at Tinker Creek stands as a classic work of twentieth-century American nonfiction.

The reverence that many of her admirers have for Annie Dillard and her writings is fervent. As Mary Cantwell wrote in a New York Times article published in 1992:

To her fans, Annie Dillard is an avatar, or at the very least … ‘the Mother Teresa of her particular genre.’ To critics, many of them anyway, she is an occasion for rhapsody—if not overkill. Browse through a stack of reviews from this newspaper alone and the names of those with whom she’s been compared leap out: Virginia Woolf, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, John Donne. Small wonder there hasn’t been a day since the publication of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1974 when Annie Dillard was out of print.⁵

After four decades, Dillard remains a significant figure in the pantheon of American writers.

Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is frequently taught in college English and Religious Studies departments, Environmental Studies Programs, and creative writing courses. If Pilgrim has become a staple of American literature in universities and colleges, outside of academia it continues to be read by individuals and book clubs around the world. The scope of Dillard’s reputation is now global, although her most ardent admirers tend to be educated North Americans. This global success might seem surprising, for Pilgrim is a book of personal meditations that mixes natural history (observations of specific phenomena in the natural world) with spiritual reflection. Described by its author as “a theology book,” Pilgrim mixes religious speculation with memoir, natural history, science writing, and intellectual history. It is an episodic dialogue between the self (a compelling, amusing, and sympathetic first-person narrator), the biophysical environment, and a large number of living and dead thinkers, from theologians to scientists to creative writers. The narrative moves from episode to episode with no real plot and no genuine character development beyond that of the narrative persona.

How is this book relevant to the topic of new alternatives in energy? Although Annie Dillard’s writing has little to say about power plants, climate change, fossil fuel use, or solar power, her writing is all about energy, both in terms of the ideas it entertains and its writing style. Not only does she write about vibrancy and vitality in the natural world, but her writing style itself crackles with energy and intensity. This is a book that investigates the spiritual connection between humans and the biophysical environment that we inhabit; as such, it is an inquiry into what makes people intellectually and spiritually aware. The front matter (the pages in the book that come before the first page of actual text) contains an epigraph (a brief quotation) from the Ancient Greek writer Heraclitus, known for his thoughts about the ever-changing nature of reality. The epigraph reads: “It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.”⁶ Thus Dillard introduces the reader to her own writing by invoking the element of fire (the classical elements were earth, air, fire, and water). Immediately, then, even before the first sentence of the first chapter, fire initiates the reader into two of Dillard’s great themes: energy and transformation. The immediate impression of the epigraph is one of mystery: what do these words from Heraclitus mean? What is “it”? Life? God? Energy? These words resonate throughout the rest of the book, just as any good epigraph should, lending the chapters that follow an air of mystery and a sense of classical reflection on the place of humanity in the universe.

Annie Dillard Biography

Annie Dillard is the nom de plume (pen name) of an author who was born Meta Ann Doak on April 30, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her parents, Frank and Pam, had three daughters. The eldest, who went by “Annie,” was named after her grandmother, Meta Waltenburger Doak. The Doak family was prosperous yet counter-cultural in an era when mass culture (television, radio, and advertising) was creating a new cultural uniformity in the United States. In this context the Doaks were ideologically liberal (politically left leaning) and encouraged their daughters to be intellectually independent and to pursue their own interests rather than fulfilling conventional expectations.⁷ Frank Doak’s favorite books were Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the latter of which he discussed frequently with his eldest daughter. In addition to reading and discussing classic American literature, one of the family’s favorite pastimes was memorizing jokes and sharing ideas about how best to deliver them, an attention to the nuances of language and expression that trained the ear of the young woman who would become the author Annie Dillard. As you may notice, her writings contain many memorable one-liners, not all of them punch-lines to jokes, but often memorable epigrammatic statements.

As a child, the future Pulitzer Prize-winning author was—like any other great writer—an avid and voracious reader. Above all she loved poetry, and her youthful diary reveals a taste for the French Romantics Paul-Marie Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, World War I poets Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, and the modernist poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and T.S. Eliot. Not surprisingly, the first book Dillard would publish (just before the publication of Pilgrim) was a poetry collection bearing the title Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, and throughout her career a dynamic tension between poetry and prose has animated Dillard’s work. Her prose tends to be pithy and economical, marked by careful word choice and efficient syntax. Many of the best passages she has written have the rhythm of a poem or, on occasion, of a good joke. She certainly writes with abundant good humor.

Canadian nature writer Farley Mowat. Like Mowat, Annie Dillard drew on her early interest in nature in all of her writings.

The young Annie Doak was an avid naturalist, collecting rocks and insects and poring over The Field Book of Ponds and Streams. Reading about the natural world, as well as investigating it, kept her occupied throughout her childhood and would remain a primary interest of the mature writer. This aspect of her early years connects her to other highly influential environmental writers of the twentieth century, such as Rachel Carson (author of Silent Spring and The Sea Around Us) and the Canadian Farley Mowat (author of A Whale for the Killing and Never Cry Wolf). Like them, the mature Annie Dillard draws on her early interest in nature in all of her writings. Her books frequently rely on detailed observations of natural phenomena and painstakingly examine their personal and spiritual significance. How best to find meaning in nature? Can biology and religion be reconciled, if at all? How should a careful observer respond to the violence and brutality of the universe? Again and again she returns to these questions, always with sincerity, intense curiosity, a willingness to entertain multiple perspectives, and a host of intellectual forebears. More than any other of Dillard’s books, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is replete with natural history observations and vignettes, tidbits about biology, ecology, and ethology.

In addition to natural history, the young Annie Doak took a primary interest in Christianity, a religion to which she has been attached all her life. Although her parents were not diligent churchgoers, Annie found Sunday school and religious services at Shadyside Presbyterian Church and at religious summer camps personally meaningful. But she always had doubts, and her questioning style of intellect would not allow her to remain a follower for long. When she temporarily left the church as a teen (she would later describe herself as “wild”), her minister brought her back into the fold by loaning her the writings of C.S. Lewis (1898–1963).⁸ Her particular style of Christian religiosity, like that of C.S. Lewis, involves an intensely intellectual dimension, and it connects her to a long tradition of intellectual theologians, from Augustine of Hippo (also known as St. Augustine, 354–430 CE) to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). Unlike Lewis, however, Dillard has never been an evangelizer, or one who wishes to spread the word and convert others. Instead, she emphasizes mystery, awe, and a personal spirituality, an approach that has been very appealing to readers who do not necessarily share her faith.

After high school Annie Doak chose to attend Hollins College for women in Roanoke, Virginia, an institution known at the time for its challenging academic curriculum and creative writing program. At this time (the mid-sixties) Hollins had a lively, accomplished faculty (of male professors) and a very talented student body. In fact, the intensely charged intellectual atmosphere at Hollins produced an unusual number of successful writers and scholars. Among Doak’s contemporaries in the class of 1967 were such future literary luminaries as Lee Marshall Smith, who would later become a celebrated writer of fiction, and feminist literary scholars Anne Goodwyn Jones and Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan. After college, Smith would win many literary awards, including two John Dos Passos Awards for Fiction, the Lila Wallace Award, the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction, and two O. Henry Awards (Smith’s preferred genre is the short story). Annie Dillard would win the Pulitzer Prize. This is a remarkable record of literary accomplishment for any undergraduate institution, and it is well worth remembering that in the middle decades of the twentieth century young women were just beginning to have the same opportunities—in higher education, athletics, professional careers, and social life—as young men. As Nancy C. Parrish examines in her book Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers, Hollins College was an institution that did an exceptional job of developing its students’ intellectual and artistic talents.⁹ At Hollins Annie Dillard shone. In her junior year she was selected for Phi Beta Kappa.

Lee Smith (left) and Annie Dillard talk to writer-in-residence Colin Wilson at Hollins College (now Hollins University) in Roanoke sometime in the mid-1960s when the two future writers were students.

Photo courtesy of Hollins University.

At the end of her sophomore year at Hollins Annie Doak married her writing professor, Richard Henry Wilde Dillard, who would be the first of her three husbands (she divorced him in 1975 but kept his name). Dillard was a professor and creative writer who wrote poetry, novels, and criticism and was an aficionado of horror films. (Annie Dillard’s fascination with what we might call the gothic side of nature may have been influenced by her husband.) Dillard’s influence on his young wife was enormous, as she herself has explicitly confirmed. Their relationship undoubtedly fostered her intellectual growth and established certain clearly recognizable themes in her writings.¹⁰

After graduating from Hollins in 1967, Annie Dillard earned a master’s degree in English literature there as well, writing her thesis on “Walden Pond and Thoreau” (her thesis title). In this forty-page essay she discusses Walden pond itself as a kind of lim-inal space between heaven and earth, a focal point in Thoreau’s thinking that links the material world with the spiritual. Dillard’s interest in Thoreau and his writing has been a lifelong fascination, and her books often invoke his work. In the post-college era of her life she also published poetry in literary magazines such as The Atlantic and the American Scholar. After several post-college years of searching and striving in various artistic media (she took up painting and continued to write), Dillard caught pneumonia in 1971 and nearly died. This near-death experience changed her outlook on life; indeed, her subsequent writing (all of her major work) is obsessed with mortality. She decided to write a book; she also embarked on a series of camping trips in western Virginia, generally alone, keeping a journal religiously. This was the genesis of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which remains Annie Dillard’s most celebrated book.

The enormous success of Pilgrim took its author off guard, and she struggled to come to terms with her new-found celebrity. In the aftermath of this success, with copies of Pilgrim selling exceptionally well, numerous positive reviews, and with her earlier poetry collection receiving favorable reviews as well, Dillard’s literary reputation was firmly established. But this did not mean that she had found stability in her life. After divorcing her husband, the young author chose to accept a position as scholar-in-residence at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, having been attracted by the region’s natural beauty, which combined coastal waters and high mountains. She would hold this position from 1975 to 1979 and again from 1981 to 1983.

Annie Dillard’s fame led to offers of employment from other institutions of higher learning, and in 1979 and then from 1983 to 2004 Dillard was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. In Washington state she married Gary Clevidence, an anthropologist at Fairhaven College (part of Western Washington University) and a novelist. Although they had a daughter, Cody Rose, their marriage was of short duration. In 1988, after having moved to Connecticut, Dillard divorced Clevidence and married Robert Richardson, whose biography of Thoreau she greatly admired. They met after she sent him fan mail. Theirs was a literary relationship from the beginning. For many years Dillard has spent her summers on Cape Cod (along with a host of other writers and artists), and the setting of her second novel, Provincetown, Massachusetts, reflects her abiding interest in this region.

Annie Dillard remains prominent in the world of American letters and continues to write new books. She has written stories and two novels (The Living, 1992, and The Maytrees, 2007), a prize-winning collection of short essays (Teaching a Stone to Talk), a memoir (An American Childhood), several books on writing (The Writing Life; Encounters with Chinese Authors), and several more nonfiction books that explore spiritual and scientific issues (such as Holy the Firm, 1977, Dillard’s personal favorite, and For the Time Being, 1999). Reviews of her work continue to be published in major newspapers and magazines.

Dillard’s Literary Influences

Writers are influenced consciously by those they admire and emulate as well as subconsciously or unconsciously by prior writers whose works are “in the air” or part of the zeitgeist (a German word meaning “the spirit of the times”). The poet and playwright William Shakespeare admired and emulated his medieval forebear Geoffrey Chaucer, but he also responded in his works to his contemporaries Christopher Marlowe, Benjamin Jonson, Thomas Kidd, and Michel de Montaigne. The English novelist Henry Fielding harkened back to the Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes, but he also engaged in his fiction with the novels of his contemporary Samuel Richardson as well as with the politics of his era. Henry David Thoreau responded to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson while also exploring Buddhist and Hindu themes. And modern environmental writers, from Edward Abbey to Annie Dillard and Terry Tempest Williams, have been deeply influenced by the writings of John Muir, John Burroughs, Rachel Carson, Peter Matthiessen, and other American writers who derived inspiration from the biophysical environment. The latter writers were all deeply concerned about the human impact on specific places, landscapes, or ecosystems. In this they differ in sensibility from Annie Dillard, whose major commitment is to the spiritual condition of the self.

Portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). Rousseau’s The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, originally published in French in 1782, had a significant influence on Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a book in dialogue with many writers, living and dead (mostly the latter), as well as with the fact of life itself and all its stages—birth, growth, procreation, suffering, injury, illness, and death. While the influence of prior writers on Dillard’s work is far too rich a subject to be explored in great depth here, and we certainly cannot catalogue all of the extra-literary influences on her writing, we will look at two examples of literary influence (neither of them very obvious) before moving on, in the next section, to a consideration of the enormous influence of Henry David Thoreau.

One of the books to which Pilgrim owes a debt is The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, originally published in French, in 1782 (as Les Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire), by the great philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). Rousseau is widely considered one of the most important and influential writers and thinkers of the eighteenth century, and he bridges the historical transition between the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Romanticism. Solitude is a major theme in Romantic writing, and in The Reveries Rousseau describes his walks in his native region (Geneva, Switzerland, and its environs). The book, which was never completed, is organized into ten “walks.” The narrator addresses the reader as an interlocutor, a familiar “I” or narrative persona sharing his profoundest thoughts.

Like Rousseau, Dillard employs an ever-present narrative persona, the “I” who addresses the reader, who recounts episodes from her quotidian life in rural western Virginia while meditating on the workings of nature. Both writers employ an intensely personal narrative persona, a speaker or voice that creates the impression of an intimate conversation or even, at times, a window into the author’s innermost thoughts. We should not be fooled, however, by this literary device (the confessional narrative persona), for it is an effect of the writer’s craft and every bit as artificial as the narrative voice of a novel.

Also like Rousseau, Dillard organizes each of her chapters around a central idea. Many of these chapters also begin with an outing or walk. Each is also a freestanding essay in the etymological sense of the term. The essai, which translates from the French as an “attempt” or “venture,” is a literary form developed by another great philosopher, Michel de Montaigne (1533–92). Montaigne’s “essais,” or essays, are brief, personal, quite subjective reflections on topics that vacillate between the mundane and the profound.¹¹ Dillard follows suit in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, each chapter of which is a freestanding essay, albeit one linked to each other chapter. (In fact, several chapters were published as freestanding essays before the book’s publication.) Both Montaigne and Rousseau were deeply interested in nature and human nature throughout their lives, and their writings reflect this interest. Dillard’s writings harken back to the writings of both of these eminent philosophers.

Many other literary influences can be discerned in the text of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; Dillard alludes to or cites philosophers, theologians, novelists, dramatists, essayists, and poets. Indeed, Dillard’s erudition has an immense scope. But a very important body of literature that the book also engages directly is nature writing. From Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, published in 1789, to Thoreau’s Walden, Henry Beston’s The Outermost House, and, much more recently, Rick Bass’s The Book of Yaak, nature writers have placed great emphasis on the similarities and interconnectedness between human beings and the non-human world while also decrying the human destruction of landscapes and ecosystems.

Portrait of Michel de Montaigne, one of the great writers of the French Renaissance. Montaigne’s essays, which were brief, personal, quite subjective reflections on topics that vacillate between the mundane and the profane, had a notable influence on Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

As discussed in the “Keywords” section, nature writing derives from the natural history essay, a nonfiction genre that has flourished since the Enlightenment. The American Transcendentalists put their stamp on this genre in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Ralph Waldo Emerson and his younger friend and student Henry David Thoreau, especially, made nature writing a significant part of American literature, and their works, especially Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden, resonate everywhere in Dillard’s work, from her master’s thesis to Pilgrim and beyond. The narrator in Pilgrim explicitly states her intention: to write “a meteorological journal of the mind,” which is a phrase borrowed explicitly from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau, as she also points out to the reader in Chapter One.

Pilgrim is frequently and justifiably compared with Walden, a major influence on the development of Dillard’s thinking and on her best-known book. At Hollins, Dillard wrote her master’s thesis on Walden, and she has never lost sight of the author who is perhaps this country’s most prominent voice of environmentalism and political dissidence. It is worth noting that Walden, a book that is full of theological reflections, was selling well at the time Pilgrim was first published. In all her writings one gets the sense that Dillard learned much from the crotchety pencil-maker’s son from Concord but also strove mightily to move beyond his vision of harmony between nature and mankind. Walden exemplifies American Transcendentalism, with its idealism, energetic sermonizing, and optimism. For Thoreau the material world and the workings of nature are reflections of a great, all-encompassing Mind—the mind of a universal deity (it is no accident the founder of Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a Unitarian minister).

Title page from the first edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854). Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is frequently and justifiably compared with Walden, a major influence on the development of Dillard’s thinking.

Like her guru Thoreau, Dillard writes about her observations of natural phenomena and then reflects philosophically on those observations; this is the rhythm of both writers’ works. But whereas the tradition for nature writers had been to seek harmony between the mind of the narrator and the phenomena observed, Dillard takes a very different path by insisting on the shocking, frightful, and even horrifying dimensions of nature and humanity’s relationship to it. She starkly reminds the reader of just how violent and uncaring the natural world can be by describing natural phenomena that do not fit with conventional notions of nature as a happy, green space. Her vision is darker, starker, and far more disturbing than Thoreau’s or Emerson’s. Dillard reminds the reader of the often sinister role humanity plays in transforming the natural world, sometimes with wonderful, even miraculous results, and sometimes to the opposite effect. But more frequently she describes the inexplicable violence of animals, insects, and human beings.

In part this near-obsession with violence and predation (which we will examine in Pilgrim) owes a debt to the idea of the sublime, which is a theory of aesthetic experience (defined in the “Keywords” section) that emphasizes the role of terror and awe in the human response to powerful natural phenomena as well as the role of the unconscious in that response. But Dillard does not approach the sublime in the traditional Romantic vein—she eschews the grand vistas and vast landscapes of her Romantic predecessors. Instead, she describes less visible natural phenomena and the workings of the biosphere on a much smaller scale—often, in fact, at the level of microscopic phenomena.

While Dillard clearly admires Thoreau and frequently invokes his writings, she also takes a very different approach to nature’s significance. Whereas for Thoreau the workings of the natural world are basically uplifting and invigorating, for Dillard they are mesmerizingly weird and awe-inspiring (and sometimes simply awful). Everywhere Thoreau looks in the natural world, at trees, ants, creeks, ponds, leaves, seasons, and bean fields, he sees correspondences between the world of nature and the world of human beings. Annie Dillard differs strikingly; instead, paying special attention to those aspects of nature that horrify, astonish, and surprise the human observer, she points to nature’s violence, unpredictability, and complete indifference to people. She observes natural phenomena and reflects on what she observes. In this Pilgrim resembles other works of American nature writing, but whereas traditional nature writers sought harmony between the mind of the narrator and the phenomena observed, here Dillard throws a wrench in the works, instead emphasizing the grotesque and incomprehensible dimensions of the natural world.

Notwithstanding her different approach to appreciating and describing natural phenomena, Annie Dillard’s commitment to the thought and writing of Henry David Thoreau goes well beyond her undergraduate and graduate studies. She is a lifelong student of Thoreau, and Pilgrim is by far her most Thoreauvian book. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Annie Dillard’s favorite biography—of any author, by any author—is Henry Thoreau: a Life of the Mind, by Robert D. Richardson, Jr.¹²

Theology and Theodicy

Annie Dillard’s religious thinking and beliefs have been discussed by readers, journalists, and scholars for several decades, and representatives of different religious groups have attempted to claim her as one of their own. But her theology is very much her own, a mish-mash of different traditions, Christian, Jewish (she particularly likes Hasidism), and Islam (the Islamic mysticism known as Sufism is near to her heart), and her manner of presenting it belongs very much to the realm of art, not organized religion. She draws on the Bible, religious history, esoteric religious movements, mysticism, and general knowledge of the history of religions. Nowhere does she proselytize (attempt to convert her readers to her own faith) or even assert any particular religious sect or dogma. Rather, she draws on the history of religions, particularly the Abrahamic religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Dillard’s observations about phenomena as simple and universal as a bird dropping from the sky or the behavior of predators tend to be presented as food for thought in a world without spiritual or religious certainty (“We don’t know what’s going on here”), directed at an audience willing to wonder along with her. The diversity of Dillard’s audience (her readers range from the devout to atheists and agnostics) seems to confirm the notion that she is a wildly independent theologian, a sort of preacher for the unorganized general populace, for some of her strongest adherents are atheists, agnostics, and dissenters. One can read any or all of her books for pleasure and profit without adhering to any particular doctrine. Her primary interest is not so much religion as it is general spirituality, and in this her theological thinking can be seen as an extension of American Transcendentalism’s interest in and openness to Eastern religions and philosophies—an internationalism that was developed further by the so-called Beats of the 1950s, including Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and others whom Dillard read and admired from an early age.

Dillard’s thinking cannot be contained or labeled comfortably with mainstream religious categories. Her sphere of reference, from the classics to esoteric theology to natural history and cutting-edge medical science, separates her interests sharply from those of popular religious movements. It would be fair to say that Dillard, like her favorite poet Emily Dickinson, experienced an intense and intensely personal spiritual awakening that animates her writing and her efforts to exhort readers to wake up as spiritual beings and pay closer attention to the inexplicable dimensions of the here and now. In Dillard’s case this spiritual awakening derives from her almost-deadly bout of pneumonia in 1971, but its roots are of course buried much more deeply in her childhood.

Beat writer Jack Kerouac, right, with his friend and road companion Neal Cassady in 1952. Dillard read and admired Kerouac and other Beat writers, and they influenced her theological thinking.

A major theme in Dillard’s work is the existence of evil in the universe. More precisely, she wonders how in the world monstrous violence and horrific accidents could be permitted by any divine intelligence. The question of how the divine can allow bad things to happen to good people is an old one; it motivated John Milton to attempt to “justify the ways of God to men” in his epic poem Paradise Lost. The term for this kind of inquiry is “theodicy,” and it forms a major theme in all the writings of Annie Dillard. In Pilgrim, Dillard’s theodicy moves forward by means of exploring existential questions, shocking descriptions of natural phenomena, and profound theological probing. She offers no easy answers for theologically curious readers. The close attention she pays to natural horrors (such as ants eating chicks in the nest) is a departure from the generally rather sunny, romantic notions of mainstream American nature writers. In her other writings, such as Holy the Firm (1977) Dillard describes horrific events and asks how any god could permit such things to happen.

Dillard has described herself as having been “spiritually promiscuous,” and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek lives up to this description. In addition to framing the book in terms of her own interest in being an anchorite (a medieval religious ascetic, generally female, dedicated to thought and prayer), she frequently mentions Christianity and the Bible, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam (particularly Sufism, or Islamic mysticism), and the spiritual practices of the Inuits (“Eskimos”). Dillard continues to be a religious seeker. Although she converted to Roman Catholicism in mid-life, her official website proclaims her religious affiliation as “none.”

Organization and Structure

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a carefully crafted work of creative nonfiction, every bit as deliberately organized and attentive to language and structure as a novel, such as James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! When we approach it as readers, we should do so with the same mindset we might adopt in reading great works of fiction. We should be attentive to the nuances of expression and remain constantly aware that, in the words of the cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message.” In other words, a work of creative writing never simply tries to convey content or teach us something; it also needs to be seen as a work of art in its own right, much like a statue or a painting. Thus, in sitting down to read Annie Dillard, we should not merely pay attention to what she says, but to how she says it. As we continue to read, we should look for patterns of thought and expression, repeated words, images, and phrases. We should also be willing to use reference books—a dictionary or an encyclopedia (or both)—when we come across concepts that are new to us.

What we might call the architecture of Pilgrim, its structure and organization, follows a deliberate and traditionally meditative pattern. As Linda L. Smith points out in her 1991 book Annie Dillard, the first seven chapters of Pilgrim follow the theological tradition of a via positiva, a positive path (or way) toward understanding the beauty and power of the natural world (synonymous in traditional Christianity with the Creation). The second half of the book, Chapters Eight through Fifteen, follows a traditional via negativa, or negative path, which investigates the horrors of this world and entertains the question of why any god would allow these horrors to persist, much less create them. This scheme, however, exaggerates the differences between the two halves of the book, which are very similar to each other. In fact, the entire narrative is so episodic—moving from episode to episode, vignette to vignette, without a definite climax or denouement—that any attempt to map its structure seems oddly inappropriate. For it is Dillard’s powerful, personal, and at times ecstatic (a word whose etymology means “standing beside oneself”) voice that holds the narrative together.

Pilgrim loosely follows the pattern of the seasons. In this it owes a debt to Walden, which purports to describe a year “in the woods.” (In fact, Thoreau lived in his cabin at Walden Pond for two years, frequently visiting the Emerson household for Sunday dinner and conversation with local literary notables.) Dillard does not insist very strongly on the yearly cycle of the book; rather, it lies in the background of each chapter, occasionally moving to the foreground. While Dillard frequently—pervasively even—refers to natural phenomena, from a gibbous moon to the mating habits of the praying mantis, she makes no effort to convince the reader of her affinity for wilderness. The wild for her can be found everywhere and anywhere in nature; it is not a place or a space so much as a way of perceiving the natural world. The overall impression conveyed by the writing is one of literary “sauntering,” as Thoreau defines the term in his great essay “Walking”: being equally at home everywhere.¹³ Dillard saunters around the landscape observing natural phenomena and reflecting on her own spiritual condition.

Like Walden, too, the text of Pilgrim was culled from a larger body of work—in both cases the authors’ journals. And while Dillard nowhere mentions it, another similarity between the two books is the somewhat suburban setting of both. Neither Concord nor Tinker Creek is very far from a city (Boston and Roanoke) and neither could reasonably be called a wild place. In both instances the focus on an interstitial place, an overlooked spot, leads the author to meditate on the unseen profundities of everyday life, human and non-human. In both texts the natural cycles—seasonal, migrational, diurnal—form a kind of low-level background rhythm, not a front-and-center order or scheme.

Narrative Persona

Every story has a storyteller, and this dimension of Pilgrim stands out as one of its most memorable features. Annie Dillard’s voice is so distinctive and fresh that one often gets the impression of having a conversation with a brilliant storyteller. Dillard’s voice is casual, irreverent, and at times howlingly funny. Her voice seems, at times, to whisper and at other times to shout. The net effect of an hour of reading Pilgrim is to feel that one has just made the acquaintance of a deeply curious person with a highly developed sense of wonder. As Robert Finch and John Elder point out in The Norton Book of Nature Writing, “Annie Dillard possesses one of the most recognizable voices in contemporary American prose. Her energetic and eclectic style, ranging from that of the religious mystic to that of the stand-up comedian, reflects her perception that existence embraces both the sublime and the absurd.”¹⁴ This apt characterization of Dillard’s writing gets to the heart of what makes it distinctive: an “energetic and eclectic style.” Literary style is not easy to define. It is the combination of habits, talents, and tendencies that makes a writer’s voice distinctive. As readers have acknowledged for decades, Annie Dillard has one of the most distinctive voices in American literature today. Her writing style is personal, allusive, vivid, energetic—occasionally even breathless—and both disciplined and somewhat wild.

Photograph of Annie Dillard, by Phyllis Rose.

Courtesy of Russell & Volkening, Literary Agents.

After only a few pages of reading, and certainly after reading more, one starts to realize that Annie Dillard’s voice, her narrative persona (the character of the book’s narrator), is a carefully crafted feature of the text itself. Even as Dillard’s narrative voice seems to speak in the genuine tones of personal sincerity, that voice is as much an artistic creation as anything else in the book. As many readers have noted, she is a supreme literary stylist, worthy of comparison to the likes of Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Herman Melville, and Ernest Hemingway. The comparison to writers of fiction is particularly apt, for storytelling, or the art of narrative, is famously unreliable. It can be challenging to separate fact from fiction in any story. Even works of nonfiction have their literary tricks, secrets, and subterfuges, and in this Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is no exception. What may come as a surprise for some readers is the degree of artifice that Dillard employs, for not all is as it seems in the narrative. Years after its publication the author would reveal, in an interview, that she had in fact never owned the “old fighting tom,” the cat in the first chapter, and never experienced the bloody symbolic clawing on her chest that she describes so vividly. In fact, Dillard borrowed the entire episode from someone else, a student of hers (whom she rightly asked permission to use the episode).

The persistent and engaging voice of the “I-witness” narrator, therefore, is in fact a construct based on a certain amount of subterfuge or misrepresentation. Such may be the case with all fiction, but Pilgrim has been billed as nonfiction (and won the Pulitzer for “general nonfiction”). How much fiction is acceptable in nonfiction? How creative should creative nonfiction be? The episode of the tomcat is but one of several examples in which Dillard plays fast and loose with the facts. In the same chapter (Chapter One) she later claims to have witnessed a giant water bug sucking the internal organs, and the life, out of a frog; she records the occasion with fascination and horror. Yet this “event,” it turns out, never happened either—at least, it did not happen to her. Nevertheless, like the opening passage about the tomcat, the water bug vignette is one of the most riveting and significant passages in the entire book, and Dillard’s thoughts on both phenomena are what matter. Still, we must step back and consider the relationship between fictional and (putatively) nonfictional narrative.

What if “nonfiction” turns out to differ very little from fiction? Where do we draw the line between acceptable versus unacceptable misrepresentation? One is reminded of the opening of Herman Melville’s great classic Moby-Dick, in which the narrator famously exhorts the reader, “Call me Ishmael.” In doing so Melville signals to the reader that fictional narratives are constructs that require the participation of readers and that readers should be aware of their own participatory roles. Dillard, in contrast, provides no such signal of an implicit reader–narrator “contract”; instead, she simply asks us to follow a story that she presents as having come from her own experiences. But this is not the case. Rather, she engages the reader in a personal, first-person narrative that makes claims about what happened—“I used to have a cat”—when in fact we cannot be certain if it happened to her.

A debate over the ethical status of this literary ruse, or technique (depending on how you view it), has continued ever since the exposure of Dillard’s borrowing episodes from other sources and then representing them as events that actually happened to her. Some readers and critics take the position that Dillard’s misrepresentation of her own experiences is unacceptable and diminishes her achievements as a writer; others are entirely unconcerned by the fact that great creative writers tell stories. What does it matter if Dillard ever saw a giant water bug sucking the life out of a frog? That is what those insects do every day. Similarly, does she need to have experienced those bloody paw prints on her skin to imagine it happening and to reflect on what such an occurrence might suggest about bodily and spiritual truths? Whatever your feelings about how much weight the “creative” part of creative nonfiction should have, Dillard’s creative writing contains descriptive passages that are not always factually accurate.

One way to think about Dillard’s narrative unreliability is through the lens of postmodernism, a concept (defined in the “Keywords” section) that helps makes sense of narratives in which the coherence of the narrative persona, or of the narrative itself, is rendered problematic or uncertain. Postmodernist narratives, such as the novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon or the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, frequently blur the line between fact and fiction and undermine the reader’s ability to trust the narrative voice as well as the realism of the setting. Such narratives often shift between literary styles, modes, and even genres, creating the effect of a pastiche. To some extent this is true of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which moves between various discursive modes—the discourse of natural history, theological speculation, science writing, and memoir—in the voice of a somewhat unreliable narrator.

Style and Technique

Dillard writes the way professional magicians perform: both kinds of performance rely on illusion, sudden shifts, and carefully orchestrated theatricality. Think about the book’s title, for example. A pilgrim is a religious traveler who undertakes a journey to a holy site. Christians often make pilgrimages to such holy sites as Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostella, and Canterbury; similarly, Muslims must make the Haj to Mecca at least once. The paradox of the title lies in the word “at,” for Dillard’s narrative recounts a relatively stationary pilgrimage—a voyage to a more spiritually aware experience of the here-and-now. The whole point of a pilgrimage is to travel to a holy place, yet the pilgrimage described takes place at Tinker Creek. And what is so holy about the erstwhile-unknown Tinker Creek? The narrative itself forms a spiritual pilgrimage as it moves from doubt and wonder to ecstatic affirmation. Clearly, the book’s title flirts with irony and paradox, two rhetorical strategies that make use of the intrinsic play, or wiggle room, in language itself. Dillard’s narrative persona is an unusually playful one, but she means for us as readers to take playfulness itself seriously. Indeed, her first chapter, titled “Heaven and Earth in Jest,” suggests that the natural world seems to have been created by a trickster deity.

Another of Dillard’s rhetorical techniques is the use of sudden, shocking juxtapositions. Near the opening of the narrative, for example, she writes, “I sit on the downed tree and watch the black steers slip on the creek bottom. They are all bred beef: beef heart, beef hide, beef hocks. They’re a human product like rayon.”¹⁵ This is a very disconcerting statement. The narrator has just described some bottomland near a stream where she likes to go for walks. The reader doesn’t expect to see bovine animals described as rayon. After all, this is nature writing! Labeling the large steers with which she shares the landscape “a human product like rayon” starkly reminds the reader of just how profoundly agro-industry has modified the genetic make-up of farm animals. The simile of “steers like rayon” catches us off guard and reminds us of our predicament in the modern world: even nature has been utterly transformed by human technology, so much so that one cannot even observe cattle munching their cuds without being reminded of how much the human relationship to farm animals has changed over time.

Yet Dillard is not merely a rhetorical trickster with a penchant for shocking her readers with unlikely similes. Everywhere in her writing Dillard strives to make the reader feel the spiritual energy of words and the transformative power of observing natural phenomena with a mind open to wonder and new discoveries. Consider the following passage from early in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

If you stand where the ocean breaks on a shallow beach, you see the raised water in a wave is translucent, shot with lights. One late afternoon at low tide a hundred big sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river in a feeding frenzy. As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated within itself the six- or eight-foot-long bodies of twisting sharks. The sharks disappeared as each wave rolled toward me; then a new wave would swell above the horizon, containing in it, like scorpions in amber, sharks that roiled and heaved. The sight held awesome wonders: power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with violence.¹⁶

This descriptive vignette typifies Annie Dillard’s writing in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; it might even be said to contain the author’s central themes: that nature is mysterious and awe-inspiring, and that in nature’s mysterious and often horrifying dynamics lies spiritual meaning. The world is laden with “grace tangled in a rapture with violence”—an idea to which Dillard returns again and again.

Shortly after this arresting passage Dillard pauses to reflect on the spiritual significance of the sharks in the waves, and in doing so she tips her hand, as it were, as to her theological predilections. “We don’t know what’s going on here,” she writes. “If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don’t know” (pp. 10–11). Here again the imagery suggests unusual energy and violence: “matter run amok,” “hammered out,” and metaphorical typewriters that “ignite”? Clearly, Dillard’s imagination runs toward violence, intensity, and mystery. Life, she seems to suggest, is a flame, a brief flash of ignited matter that we cannot fathom but of which we must partake.

This is precisely where Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has much to tell us about energy, innovation, and ingenuity. The awe-inspiring energy of the natural world, and its powerful connection to the spiritual energies latent in all human beings, she suggests, have never been adequately described or fully appreciated. Her task is to use her powers as a writer to reflect on the profound link between these forces.

Chapter One: “Heaven and Earth in Jest”

It is startling that a book that contains some of the most beautiful descriptive passages of nature writing begins with a scene filled with violence and gore. Dillard begins chapter one, “Heaven and Earth in Jest,” with a memory (allegedly) of her cat, not a cuddly kitten but an “old fighting tom,” who comes to her in the night “stinking of urine and blood.”¹⁷ The cat does indeed come to Dillard for comfort, but she represents the animal’s actions as anything but comfortable: the cat kneads her “powerfully… as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk.”¹⁸ The distinct contrast between the image of mother’s milk, a soothing substance, and the active power of the verb “pummeling” is picked up again in the final image the bloody paw prints left on her body, “painted with roses.”

The symbolism of these bloody paw prints is multiply symbolic. Blood evokes death (what did the cat kill?) as well as life itself (blood keeps us alive). Blood also evokes the stigmata of Christ, the bloody holes from the nails driven through Jesus’ hands as he was fastened to the cross at Golgotha. Thus, the paw prints on Dillard’s chest evoke the stigmata. But that is not the limit of the symbolism here, for red roses have traditionally stood for love and desire in European literature since (at least) the Middle Ages. Is Dillard suggesting that there is something Christ-like about the “old fighting tom”? Does she wish to suggest that love, desire, death, and spirituality are inextricably linked? She does not give answers to these questions. Instead she asks a question that reverberates like the epigraph: “What blood was this, and what roses?” The implication is that we are marked by mortality, claimed by death, a condition that creates the possibility for spiritual insight. As she ponders her (fictionalized) experience of the tomcat, Dillard cannot decide if the blood represents something good or bad, a sign of the beauty of the natural world in spite of death (the rose) or a sign of nature’s unmitigated violence (the blood). At the end of the opening scene, the narrator comes to the conclusion that we cannot know the truth of what nature means, but that we can open our spiritual eyes, as it were, to the implications of our own knowledge of mortality.

The opening passage evokes a similarly well-known passage in Walden, where Thoreau claims, “God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the laps of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend what is sublime and noble only by a perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us.”¹⁹ For Dillard reality is instilled and drenched by blood, a metonymy for our own mortal condition.

After the episode of the tomcat Dillard offers us a brief and clear picture of where she lives, situating the narrative in a place—by a creek in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Again we should note the contrast between the creek, which she thinks of as active, busy, and intricate, and the mountains, which are massive, mysterious, and simple in their passivity. This contrast contains a strange twist: the creek represents the world to Dillard; she writes, “I live there.”²⁰ Yet at the same time she writes that the “mountains are home.” How can she live by the creek while simultaneously claiming the mountains are her home? One can resolve this problem imagistically; indeed, considered visually, the problem turns out not to be a problem at all. If we remember Dillard’s description of the way Tinker Creek winds around Dillard’s house, making an ox-bow loop so that “the creek is both in back of the house, south of me, and also on the other side of the road, north of me,” then we realize that the regional topography here is interwoven.²¹ The creek is a both/and entity—in front of her and behind her. Just as the bloody rose paw prints are emblems both of beauty and of violence, so too can part of the narrator live by the creek while part of her lives in the mountains. Struggling with the complexities of these contrasts through the rest of the narrative offers a productive (if complicated) way into Dillard’s writing and thinking.

Photograph of Tinker Creek.

Photo credit: Margie Hunter.

Often the contrasts are less violent, but the narrative continually progresses through differences and divergences, as when later in the chapter Dillard watches the light on the mountains come and go intermittently as clouds come between earth and sky. The light comes on and off not gradually but like a switch (“ping,” she writes, simply), lighting up different parts of the mountains and a clump of sycamore trees nearby. This alternation makes her dizzy; she likens it to a magic show in a carnival. Significantly, she uses this description of the light show on the mountain to lead into what might be called her official “thesis” for the narrative, her declaration of intention in writing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She writes, “I propose to keep here what Thoreau called a ‘meteorological journal of the mind,’ telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead.”²²

In the first chapter we also learn that it is January, a fitting month with which to begin. Dillard is careful to tell us not only where she is, but also when events take place; the changing of the seasons fascinates her. In this chapter, January is the “now,” but this chapter—like all the others—switches back and forth between times (and sometimes places as well). The chapter opens with the scene of the tomcat, but that is a memory. The entire book alternates—often confusingly—between a time which we might call now (in this case one partly cloudy day in January) and past times which impinge upon the present. It’s a bit like a patchwork quilt: the various memories and philosophical musings are the squares of fabric which Dillard sews into one blanket out of a series of stitches which we might think of as the footprints of Dillard as she takes a series of walks in each chapter.

The “plot” of this narrative (if it can be said to have a plot—perhaps “structure” is a better term in this context) can be described as a series of walks punctuated by lengthy descriptions of memories and images which in turn initiate lengthy philosophical inquiries. Much of the book will be filled with descriptions of her walks. This is commonplace in European literature, particularly in the philosophical writings of such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, as well as the English Romantic poets.

On this particular January walk, she watches some beef cattle drink from the creek; the introduction of the cattle should bring us to a sharp realization that this natural world is heavily occupied already by human production. The cattle are not even animals to Dillard’s mind: “they’re a human product…they’re like a field of shoes,” she writes.²³ It is important to note that while Dillard is unmistakably unhappy about the use to which the cattle will be put, she does not go on a lengthy tirade but keeps the tone light, even humorous—though her disdain for meat production comes across all the more clearly because of the biting quality of her humor: “they have beef fat behind their eyes, beef stew,” she says of the cattle.

She rebels against what the cattle stand for both by her humor (as when she yells “Swedish meatballs!” at the animals to get them to move out of her path) and also by appropriating their environment for her own use. Whoever raises the cattle has erected a hanging fence on cables across the stream to keep the cattle from escaping their field by wandering down the creek bed when they come to it to drink. A fence across a stream is a strange image: impermeable as far as the cattle are concerned, but utterly useless to hold back the stream itself, which flows under and through it without a problem. Dillard clearly aligns herself with the stream and not the cattle: “Squirrels, the neighborhood children, and I use the downstream fence as a swaying bridge across the creek.”²⁴ Dillard turns a human-made structure designed to contain anthropogenically modified animals deliberately designed for food into the liberatory image of a bridge.

After crossing the bridge and arriving at a small island in the middle of Tinker Creek, Dillard sits down at a spot she says she is “drawn to.” In a pattern which will become familiar as the narrative progresses, this spot triggers a memory which Dillard first narrates and then interprets. This is the famous scene of the frog and the giant water bug, which displays the contrast between the idyllic charm of a natural setting and the gothic horror of some natural phenomena. The scene begins with playful humor—Dillard amuses herself by walking along the bank, scaring frogs into jumping off the bank into the water. One frog she approaches (allegedly) does not jump out of her way in a panic as the others do; as she watches it, the frog slowly deflates until all that is left is a “frog skin bag.”²⁵ Dillard tells us that this is because its insides have been dissolved and sucked out by a giant water bug, and then uses this experience of the frog as a jumping off point (as the frogs themselves use the bank) into a philosophical discussion of the horrors of nature—what the poet Tennyson called “nature red in tooth and claw.”

Portrait of Immanuel Kant. Dillard’s use of a series of walks punctuated by lengthy descriptions of memories and images which in turn initiate lengthy philosophical inquiries is a common feature in European literature, particularly in the philosophical writings of such thinkers as Kant.

Dillard’s central question is whether or not nature, or God, or whatever force created the universe did so “in jest” (the phrase comes from the Koran), or maliciously, or unconcernedly. It’s an age-old question: why are there evil and horror in the world? Some philosophers ask it apropos of war or other human-inflicted horrors; Dillard asks the same question based on her observations of the natural world. On the one hand there is horror and cruelty (the deflated frog), but on the other hand there is beauty (as in the elegant flight of the mockingbird which Dillard describes just after the frog episode). Which is the “truth” of nature? Dillard’s final answer appears to be “We don’t know.”²⁶

Portrait of John Keats by William Hilton. Keats described “negative capability” as the ability to hold several ideas about a topic simultaneously, without trying to find the right answer or resolution, and it is a key facet of Dillard’s approach to the natural world and her approach to the philosophical quandaries on which she muses.

© National Portrait Gallery, London.

Dillard’s willingness to eschew certainty resembles the mentality of another Romantic writer with whom Dillard has much in common, John Keats. Keats is famous for his magnificent odes. (The “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and the “Ode to a Nightingale” are two of the best known.) In a letter to his brother that has become justly famous (indeed, it is one of the greatest statements about the poet’s psychology), Keats describes something he calls “negative capability”: the ability to hold several ideas about a topic simultaneously, without trying to find the right answer or resolution. This ability to remain uncertain—even to celebrate uncertainty—has become a key criterion of evaluating a creative writer’s talent; it is also a key facet of Dillard’s approach to the natural world and her approach to the philosophical quandaries on which she muses. Her willingness to entertain ideas, rather than hammering them home, and to reflect upon them rather than arguing for a particular position or resolution, can be very refreshing. Certainly the powerful energy and distinctive voice of the first chapter of Pilgrim mark it as one of the great openings in American literature.

Chapter Two: “Seeing”

As she does with the first chapter, Dillard opens Chapter Two with a memory, this time a childhood memory of hiding a lucky penny along a stretch of sidewalk. The symbolic significance of this memory, however, is much less immediately resonant, or clear, than the meaning of the tomcat’s bloody footprints in the first chapter. When Dillard transitions from the penny memory to a discussion of seeing, are we meant to think that the penny memory is a parable about the importance of seeing? Did she hide the penny out of sight for others to find, thereby encouraging people to see things they might not ordinarily see. If we read the memory in this way, we can understand that for Dillard “seeing” is really a kind of “seeking,” a finding out of hidden things (both scientific and spiritual).

The penny memory seems more important in its emphasis on the size of the penny—a small thing, unimportant—than for any other reason. At the start of the chapter Dillard focuses not on the idea of seeing in any grand scale (which we might expect from her loving descriptions of mountains in the first chapter), but on the importance of seeing the little things, like bugs in the grass. One theme ties the images in the second chapter to the images in the first: the idea of suddenness, fleetingness. Just as the light flickered on and off the mountain cliff in chapter one, so too do the deer and the red-winged blackbirds appear and disappear in chapter two. “Nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t affair,” she writes.²⁷ Or, as she says several sentences later, “now-you-don’t-see-it, now-you-do.” That reversal of the general form of the well-known magician’s adage is in keeping with Dillard’s theme of the unpredictability of the natural world, its distance from human expectations. Whereas a human magician first lets us see something (now-you-see-it) and then—presto—hides it from us, nature’s magic is first concealing (now-you-don’t-see-it) and then revealing, but only if you train yourself to look for it.

Dillard spends much of the first part of the chapter listing animals which are hard to see in nature—deer, birds, various insects, camouflaged creatures, etc. She explains that these animals are difficult to see not because they are necessarily hidden particularly well (although some are), but rather because we don’t know how to look for them. The snake-lover can find snakes; the average person cannot.

Later in the chapter Dillard offers another example of this tendency when she tries to watch the fish in the creek at sunset. She can’t seem to get a clear view of any one fish; “it was always just happening somewhere else,” she writes.²⁸ She literally has to change the way she sees physically, to decide not to watch the fish and instead (it seems) to simply stare at the brim of her own hat until she simply gets intoxicated with blurry flashes of light which (again, it seems) are merely reflections of petals floating in the creek. The point seems to be that if you try to look, nature will elude you, but if you let yourself forget your agenda (I must see this fish) and “hush the noise of useless interior babble,” you’ll have a chance to see something—it might not be what you came to see, but it’ll be wonderful. Just before this scene she says, “there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go.”²⁹ Thus, the chapter called “Seeing” is also, perhaps ironically, a chapter about not seeing—about blindness and darkness. Again we see Dillard playing with contrasts, reversals, alternations, irony, and paradox.

The next distinct episode in chapter two describes a nighttime walk during which Dillard became frightened of both the darkness itself and something that emerges from the water near her. Because Dillard is also describing in this scene a series of reflections on the surface of the water, we are never quite sure whether this thing Dillard fears is in fact a creature in the water, or merely an airplane slicing through clouds high above her but reflected on the creek’s surface in front of her. Once again, it is important to remember what Dillard wrote in chapter one: “We don’t know.” In this chapter, Dillard fine-tunes this repeated theme into something more specific: “I don’t understand what I see.”³⁰ Seeing, as she says near the end of the chapter, may be the “pearl of great price,” but it is something that “may not be sought.”³¹

Whatever it is that terrifies her sends her home in a panic; she lies on her bed and begins to consider the enormity of the earth, the solar system, stars, meteors, and beyond. One might think that Dillard would continue in this expansive vein, thinking about phenomena on a large scale, but she returns quickly to a discussion of the small—the microscopic, in fact. She describes putting creek water in a bowl and simply staring at it until she can literally see planaria and amoebae in the water. She strives, here, to imagine life as the biotic Other. What would it be like to be an amoeba?

Dillard’s lengthy discussion of the von Senden book Space and Sight, which describes the experiences of blind people who were able to see for the first time because of advances in optical surgery, forms a large part of Pilgrim’s second chapter. What should we make of this digression? After all, we are expecting a book about the natural world, not a social or medical history of humanity. Yet human nature, like the biophysical environment, is also a great mystery for Dillard, who uses this seeming detour to introduce the idea that sight (like so many other experiences she will describe) is not a collectively shared phenomenon or experience. To say that sight is relative is perhaps too simplistic, although Dillard insists that different people (and creatures) “see” things differently depending upon who, what, and where they are. The moral she draws from the parable of the newly-sighted is more complicated. At the start of the chapter she argued, essentially, that sight is something one must learn; clearly this discussion of the struggles of the formerly blind follows a similar path. But many of the individuals whose stories she tells do not actually enjoy becoming sighted—they find it difficult, confusing, and even traumatic. They must learn to make sense of what they see—to come to terms with it emotionally and spiritually. In a sense this experience allegorizes Dillard’s own spiritual experience, for she, too, finds true insight into the workings of the natural world—the Creation—agonizingly meaningful.

Chapter Three: “Winter”

In the third chapter we move to February, and the chapter begins not with a personal memory but with a description of a historical event—an overpopulation of European starlings invading a Virginia town. The event (and the chapter more generally) allows Dillard unusual scope for humor, for she plainly sees the human approach to controlling the starling population as rather ludicrous. It is also, ultimately, unsuccessful. As with her discussion of the bred-for-beef cattle in the first chapter, this humor does not hide her disdain for the consequences of human intervention in the natural world. But she also does not sympathize with the starlings (likewise, she evinced no sentimental attachment to the beef cattle), although she does later in the chapter find their arrival at sunset to be a thing of beauty. She does not have a simple animal-rights activist agenda but seems here to bemoan the presence of the starlings (they are an invasive species) as well as the ways the people of Radford, Virginia, tried to deal with a problem other humans started in the first place.

A European starling. Chapter Three opens with a description of an overpopulation of European starlings invading a Virginia town.

After telling the starling history, Dillard moves into a lyrical description of the winter landscape, various rather gory winter tales of survival, and her own obsession with reading explorers’ travel narratives during the long winter months. What does that have to do with a plague of starlings? Her message seems oblique at best until she comes to the episode of the coot. Having played a wonderfully ridiculous game of hide-and-seek with this coot, believing it to be a skittish species and yet wanting a “good look” (any reference to sight should now make us think back to the discussions of vision in chapter two), she finally realizes that the coot is not afraid of her, that she has (as she feared) been making a fool of herself in the snow. She thinks, “I’ll kill it. I’ll hit the thing with a snowball, I really will; I’ll make a mud-hen hash.”³² Her exasperated reaction to the bird’s utter unconcern for her behavior is analogous to the way the starlings reacted to the feeble attempts of the people of Virginia to get rid of them. Neither the coot nor the starlings much care what the humans do—the birds have their own agendas.

Dillard’s point in this chapter seems to be that any effort by humans to control animals will be unsuccessful. In both the starling saga and the coot experience, the humans are trying to “trick” the birds; Dillard makes it clear that the birds are unimpressed. In her efforts to spy on the coot, Dillard is hiding behind trees and pretending to be a tree whenever the coot glances her way—but it turns out, of course, that the coot could not care less. In their efforts to eradicate the starling population, the people of Radford tried freezing them, frightening them with loud noises, and playing recordings of distressed starlings at the birds in the hopes of driving them away. The starlings were similarly unperturbed: “YIKE OUCH HELP went the recordings; snore went the birds.”³³

The details of winter survival techniques which follow the tale of the coot tell a similar story of animal resourcefulness in the face of hardship. If all these animals (and Dillard offers an impressive list) can manage to survive a cold winter without the help of central heating, how can humans possibly hope to control them? In her own house, she tells us later in the chapter, she doesn’t even try—she lets the spiders have free rein and has long since given up trying to kill insects or bring home spider egg sacs. The moral of this chapter seems to be that “Things are well in their place,” and human intervention in the natural world is ludicrous and ineffectual.³⁴

A Polyphemus Moth. Dillard’s story about the Polypemus Moth in the Mason jar is one of the scenes of humans’ unconscious cruelty to animals that is presented in Chapter Four.

Chapter Four: “The Fixed”

The opening of chapter four brings us back to the importance of learning to see. “I have just learned to see praying mantis egg cases,” Dillard writes. They were there all along, she surmises, but she needed to learn to see them—and now, of course, she sees them everywhere. The chapter also introduces several new thematic threads, mostly articulated through Dillard’s experiences with insects. Insects are associated with all manner of gothic and gruesome behavior—Dillard’s descriptions of insects’ relations to one another and her memories of human treatment of insects are repositories of powerful emotions—indeed, of trauma. We have seen her surprise us with her less-than-comforting visions of nature in earlier chapters; here she pulls out all the stops and offers a series of increasingly horrifying visions of the natural world.

Thoreau famously wrote about a battle between two species of ants in Walden, and his comparison between ant and human behavior has been justly celebrated. But whereas Thoreau sees ants as little automata resembling human soldiers, Dillard sees something completely different in the world of insects. Dillard recalls a mantis hatch that she watched in elementary school; after the eggs hatched in the Mason jar, the young mantises proceeded to devour one another until only two were left (both subsequently died of wounds in their last battle). The next major episode in the chapter is the description of Dillard watching a female mantis lay her eggs in a great pulsing explosion of foam. After witnessing the spectacle, Dillard is determined to watch the hatching. She checks on the egg sac daily; one day the sac is gone, as is the clump of wild roses to which the sac was attached: her neighbor had ridden his tractor over the site. Both stories suggest that the excitement humans feel watching the birth of insects inevitably comes to a bad end; human thoughtlessness in the face of creatures’ needs inevitably turns birth into death. The human desire to watch animals do their thing—whatever their thing is—leads to the thoughtless destruction of those animals.

These two experiences with mantises set the stage for Dillard’s powerful telling of her memory of the Polyphemus Moth. The memory is clearly traumatic, and it resonates deeply. Dillard introduces it with an apology, almost a trepidation. The tale unfolds with a kind of suspense unusual in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and with many analogies to the story of the mantises. As a child, Dillard and her classmates watched anxiously over a cocoon, waiting impatiently for it to release an adult moth as impressive as the one they’d seen drawn in a book at school. They passed the cocoon from hand to hand, and they could feel the moth moving within. The moth emerges inside the Mason jar into which the teacher has placed the cocoon, and the lacquer-like sticky substance on the wings adheres, joining the wings and destroying the moth’s ability to fly. Because the moth cannot spread his wings inside the cramped space, they harden in what Dillard describes as a “torture of random pleats and folds.”³⁵ The next time she sees the moth, it is trying to walk away from the school with his wings stuck together on his back, picking his way along the sidewalk like a zombie—or like the implacable robot at the end of The Terminator. This is perhaps the most gothic scene in the entire book, for it evokes a powerful unseen agency driving a grotesque kind of action.

In part, this is an effect of the gender pronoun Dillard gives the moth—she notes immediately upon the moth’s hatching that it is male, and proceeds to call it “he” as she describes its tortured attempts to escape. Other creatures in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek are generally simply referred to as “it.” Giving the moth a specific gender immediately personifies it (although creatures do, of course, have gender). The moth is further personified precisely because it is walking away down a driveway like a zombie or horror movie villain after committing some unspeakable act of violence, rather than (as it should rightly do) flying freely in the air. Hatching in the confines of a manmade Mason jar has turned the moth into a grotesque dwarfed human, mangled and forever mutated by human thoughtlessness from its rightful species to a monstrous figure. If Chapter Three offered scenes of human’s conscious cruelty to animals (the townspeople’s attempts to kill starlings or Dillard’s flippant desire for mud-hen hash), Chapter Four gives us scenes of humans’ unconscious cruelty. Why didn’t the first teacher simply let the cannibal mantises out? Why didn’t the other teacher remove the moth from the jar and let it hatch with room to grow? Instead, these insects become monstrous because of their control by negligent human beings.

The second half of the chapter offers stories of the apparently gratuitous violence of insects themselves. A mantis feeds on a wasp who is feeding on a bee. The moth caterpillars from Fabre’s experiments follow a circular trail blindly day in and day out until they die of starvation, even though their preferred food is just outside the circle and would take only a short detour off the beaten track. Later in the chapter Dillard ties that circular trail back to the Mason jar which indirectly caused the deaths of all those mantises and the Polyphemus Moth. The Mason jar and the circle are “fixed” spaces which imprison insects and humans alike and lead us to destruction. Even her beloved Tinker Creek, before an emblem of vibrant change and flux, in this chapter momentarily becomes a despised object, seeming to flow because it is “pushed” inexorably by mindless natural forces.

Chapter Five: “Untying the Knot”

It is Chapter Five, and we are still only in February, but the mood is much less somber than in Chapter Four. Dillard is eager to catch the precise moment when winter turns into spring, although she realizes she cannot mark that change any more than she can find the beginning or end of the knot she finds in the discarded snake skin—like the knot, the progression of the seasons is a “continuous loop” with no discernible breaks.³⁶ Although she realizes she cannot be present at the very moment when spring arrives (because there is in fact no such one moment), she is fascinated in this chapter by the idea of seasons—what they mean, how humans divide them up and experience them, and how the notion of a continuously looping progression of seasons might just be the best analogy she can imagine for the presence of a divine force which is not everywhere at once but rather rolls like a wheel or a coiled snake’s skin across the face of the earth. It is not the first time Dillard has introduced her personal view of divinity. Like the month of February itself in the calendar, the fifth chapter is the shortest of all.

Chapter Six: “The Present”

While Chapter Five stressed the continuity of time, the endless loop of the seasons and the divine force, Chapter Six focuses instead upon the now, the present moment. This is in many ways the core of the narrative. Is it any wonder that Dillard would later write a book with the title For the Time Being? What does it mean to be for a finite amount of time? This question lies behind Chapter Six, a chapter in which Dillard’s patterns and repetitions become increasingly clear. By now many tropes and ideas have become familiar, and the narrative achieves a relatively regular pattern. Once again there are animals—in this case a puppy—that incite certain human emotions. Here too we see again Dillard’s preoccupation with light as a metaphor for inspiration, revelation, a momentary insight into eternity or the infinite. Light has appeared in many places thus far, in discussions of blindness, sight, shadows, light on the mountains, and most importantly the tree with the lights in it, which appeared at the end of Chapter Two.

Chapter Six takes up this tree with the lights in it yet again. It is also a chapter about consciousness and (as the title says) the ways in which humans perceive the now.

A seemingly simple incident with a puppy Dillard meets at a rural gas station causes Dillard to explore the nature of the present; in particular she is interested in what happens when the present moment becomes a moment of radical insight into the purity of the infinite. She connects this experience of “petting the puppy” explicitly with an experience at the end of Chapter Two in which she describes seeing “the tree with lights in it,” just as a newly sighted girl reported seeing when the doctor took her bandages off. The lighted tree is as much a spiritual vision as a real tree whose needles are momentarily shining in the sunshine; the lighted tree is lit by grace, and Dillard writes that seeing it opens a door directly into eternity. Petting the puppy is a similar experience: the moment when the narrator is petting the puppy and looking at the light on a distant mountain becomes a fleeting experience we might call “out of body,” but Dillard considers it more an “out of consciousness” experience, or more specifically an “out of self-consciousness” experience. She becomes, in the moment, fully present and feels “more alive than all the world…This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present….”³⁷

Her concern in this chapter is with the problem of human self-consciousness, the ways in which the burden of our knowledge of the self keeps us from fully experiencing the present and separates us from one another and from the immanent divinity in the world. Self-consciousness—the awareness of the self as a self—is what severs the self from the experience of the present, or of eternity. Dillard chooses the word “innocence” to describe living without this damaging self-consciousness. Children (like the girl who helps Dillard find the caddis fly case) and animals, like the puppy (who does not return to self-consciousness when Dillard does), are able to remain for longer periods in this acutely aware state of the present.

Trees—in Chapter Six particularly the sycamore—represent for Dillard moments of utter unselfconsciousness.

Trees—in this chapter particularly the sycamore—also represent for Dillard moments of utter unself-consciousness. They freeze-frame us into the absolute present. But trees also allow Dillard to move from a discussion of the present moment (innocent, simple) to a celebration of the multiplicity of the now (symbolized by her discussion of all the things alive in just the top inch of soil beneath her as she sits under the sycamore). Trees branch out above and below ground; this branching suggests to Dillard the branching of thought and the importance of the ability to “make connections.”³⁸ The thought of branching triggers an enormous flood of memories; Dillard begins a kind of list of images and events from previous chapters—the giant water bug, the moth, etc. This time being caught in the web of the past is acceptable to Dillard, even something to celebrate—the tree allows her to connect with the past in a way that does not impinge upon her experience of the present.

Near the end of the chapter Dillard makes the next logical step into the future. For this she needs the creek; as she stands watching, the water in the creek comes toward her, symbolizing the ineluctable flow of time and the approach of the future. Finally, at the very end of the chapter, she returns to the memory of the puppy at the service station, and we come full circle—from the present to the past to the future and back again to the present, which is where she has striven to be all along.

Chapter Seven: “Spring”

Dillard begins the seventh chapter with a discussion of language, a theme which she already touched on briefly in the second chapter when she argued that seeing was a matter of “verbalization”—that we can only make sense of what we see if we can articulate what we are seeing and communicate that vision to our own brain or to another person.³⁹ In Chapter Seven she tackles the relativity of language, beginning first with human language and then moving on to birdsong as another kind of language, equally varied and mysterious to humans as Chinese might be to a native speaker of English (or vice-versa).

Musing on the possibility that birdsong might have “meaning” leads Dillard to a different (and, to her mind, better) question, which is a question of aesthetics. Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that centers on the inquiry into the nature of beauty, and Dillard argues that beauty is a kind of language, but a language which has no key and instead must be experienced rather than decoded. It does not make sense, she argues, to ask what birdsong means, since there is no way we can know that (and, she says, the birds themselves probably do not even know why they sing). Even if we did know such a thing, it would not necessarily do us any good. What matters is to know why we find birdsong beautiful, not to speculate about animals’ languages and their putative meaning.

It seems fitting that Dillard’s discussion of beauty modulates into a kind of Keatsian Ode to Spring, detailing all its beauties. Gone, temporarily, are the horrors of winter and of insects. It is April, and her walk in this chapter (recall the familiar pattern of memories/walk/philosophical inquiry/natural history which, in different combinations, make up the structure of each chapter) takes her into the woods. She offers poetic descriptions of the emergent new beauties she discovers on her outings—butterflies, locust blooms, and especially newts.

Portrait of the British novelist and lecturer John Cowper Powys (1872–1963), whom Dillard references in Chapter Seven: “Spring.”

At this point in a reader’s experience of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, one might feel justified in expecting her description of newts to mean something, to carry some kind of symbolic weight, at least eventually. But after three or four paragraphs, one is still waiting for the punch line, so to speak (a satisfaction her writing so often provides). The deflating frog meant something; the moth meant something; the puppy meant something. What then do these newts mean? She moves on to a description of flowers and newly leafing trees without telling us. Maybe, then, it will turn out that the trees mean something, given the previous discussions of the tree with the lights in it (Chapter Two) and the sycamores (Chapter Six). A brief reference to the writer John Cowper Powys gives us a hint as to what Dillard is up to here. She writes, “John Cowper Powys said, ‘We have no reason for denying to the world of plants a certain slow, dim, vague, large, leisurely semi-consciousness.’ He may not be right, but I like his adjectives.”⁴⁰ In this chapter Dillard is concerned less with understanding than with simply enjoying—enjoying the beauties of nature in the springtime and the beauties of a skilled writer’s descriptive prose.

The second half of the chapter moves in a different direction but with some key similarities. The incident of Jean White’s dead horse is told with light humor; Dillard relates the episode without the addition of philosophical musing or hints as to what moral her readers should take from the story. Only at the end of the chapter, when Dillard looks at microscopic rotifer from the pond under her microscope, is she willing to part with any particular moral for this chapter. Looking at such creatures under the scope is, for Dillard, “a moral exercise…a constant reminder of the facts of creation.”⁴¹ She doesn’t find them beautiful (on the contrary) but seeing them is important and part of the cycle of nature (as is finding the proper resting place for a dead horse). The flowers, the newts, the rotifer, and all the rest are equally important, and all part of trying “to look spring in the eye.”⁴²

Chapter Eight: “Intricacy”

Dillard returns to the microscopic again in Chapter Eight. It is now June, and the chapter begins with a description of the way late afternoon light falls on her goldfish. The sight elicits a consideration of the small, the minute, and the microscopic. She describes having seen individual red blood cells course through the veins in a goldfish’s tail and seeing chloroplasts travel similarly around and around the inside of a plant cell. The similarity does not end there, however. She explains that a single molecule of chlorophyll (carried within the chloroplasts) is made from atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen arranged around a central atom of magnesium and that a single molecule of hemoglobin (which is carried in red blood cells just as chlorophyll is carried in chloroplasts) is precisely identical to chlorophyll save that hemoglobin has an atom of iron at its center rather than magnesium. This profound correspondence between plant and animal life, based in scientific fact, astonishes the reader and typifies Dillard’s intellectual bridging of nature writing and science writing, a historically newer genre of essay. This chapter contains elements of both.

When Dillard traces the similarities between blood and chlorophyll, we are on familiar ground. Her carefully described scientific inquiry into the deep similarity between a goldfish and a plant (and, because humans also have red blood cells, implicitly between humans and plants) goes further than most nature writers had yet been willing to go; by zooming in at the molecular level, Dillard brings the kinship between the kingdoms of plants and animals even closer, to a microscopic baseline. If the only difference between the hemoglobin that makes up your blood and the chlorophyll coursing around a tree leaf is one atom, then the correspondence between plant and animal is both literal and profound.

In this chapter Dillard attempts once again to “see”; in this case what she sees is the interconnectedness of creation itself, the surprising similarities that exist between the most unlikely objects. These similarities are revealed only when one looks at the “intricacies” of the world, the details. The details of the world are unimaginably numerous and impossible to understand; she writes, “creation carries on with an intricacy unfathomable and apparently uncalled for.”⁴³ She gives unusual and seemingly random examples of this: there are 228 muscles in the head of a goat moth caterpillar, for example, and six million leaves on an large elm.⁴⁴ Such examples might seem trivial to some, but for Dillard this knowledge is essential to properly appreciating the majesty of the natural world (as well as the human body, as her example of the kidney shows). If in Chapter Seven the reason for closely observing the world was to appreciate its beauty, in this chapter the reason for learning about the world is similar. Paying attention to the details ensures that Dillard remains alert to the “beauty inexhaustible in its complexity.”⁴⁵ Paying attention to the details also suggests to Dillard that the creator has what she calls “a generous spirit;” she writes that “he is apt to create anything”; later she writes, “the creator loves pizzazz.”⁴⁶ The boundless variety of nature seems to be one of Dillard’s strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of some kind of divine creator. Surely an individual human couldn’t have come up with such a wild collection of extravagancies.

In Chapter Eight, Dillard points to the fact that the makeup of a molecule of chlorophyll is precisely identical to the makeup of a molecule of hemoglobin except that hemoglobin has an atom of iron at its center rather than magnesium. This profound correspondence between plant and animal life, based in scientific fact, typifies Dillard’s intellectual bridging of nature writing and science writing.

In this chapter Dillard describes a dream she had (or claims to have had) in which time appeared like a never-ending tweed scarf, with each person and every time represented in detail as dots and swirls of color. She dreams that she can go into depth in one spot (“our time” which turns out, rather ludicrously, to be France) and see various details there—cattle and trees and people and carrots. She likens this to watching time unfold on a movie screen—not time-lapse photography (which slows down an event like a rose blooming), but the opposite: a film of geologic and historical time unfolding.

Chapter Nine: “Flood”

A heavy air of menace hangs over the opening of Chapter Nine. Summer has arrived (in the space of two hours), and a summer thunderstorm has ushered in a new mood. Dillard’s images are darker at the outset (the dog is “thin as death”; the mud is “dead tan”; the blue jays are “acting generally odd”), but are dispelled by the scene with the garbage truck, whose backfires she imagines to be gunshots. Nevertheless, the somber mood continues as she recalls the previous summer, when Hurricane Agnes came through her valley, and the flood occurred. Tinker Creek overran its banks and in so doing became—in Dillard’s mind—an entirely different creek, no longer “our creek” but “the high creek,” a violent dragon which begins to rip away the bridge that spans it. The flooding creek brings down everything with it, but the variety in this chapter is different—less beautiful, more chaotic—than the “intricacy” Dillard discussed in the previous chapter.⁴⁷

This chapter is unusual in that the entire chapter tells one story, the story of the Agnes flooding, with no diverging digressions or tangential asides. Generally Dillard gives us brief powerful vignettes of only a few paragraphs, loosely connected by bits of natural history, spiritual reflection, and philosophical speculation; this comes as close to an extended story as she has yet come. Why now? I is hard to believe that Dillard could not have made an entire chapter-length tale of the Polyphemus Moth episode, or any other tale she has told thus far. Perhaps she meant to emulate the floodwaters themselves: swift moving and sweeping all in their wake. Dillard likes to keep us guessing.

Chapter Ten: “Fecundity”

Chapter Ten begins with a dream in which Dillard watches two Luna moths mating; then she watches as the eggs hatch into a bed full of fish, a sight which horrifies her so that she screams and awakens. Dillard says that she suspects the impulse or “seed” of the dream came from something she’d seen earlier in the day, a “terrible yellow plant” pushing its way up through the soil after the flood.⁴⁸ The dream—and indeed dreaming itself—makes a good metaphor for the way Dillard’s narrative progresses: she sees things out in the world, and these images implant upon her brain in such a way that they emerge elsewhere—as thoughts, questions (often without answers), or, as in this case, dreams.

What this dream brings home to Dillard is the ubiquity of death, even in birth and life. Although death has been part of her narrative from the beginning (the mantises, the moth, the dead horse, drowned animals in the flood, and so on), it is only here that Dillard decides to tackle death head on. She is aware of the irony: in a chapter taking place in high summer and titled “fecundity,” a word that refers to the bringing forth of life, it would perhaps be more appropriate to consider the topic of birth. But that, Dillard tells us, is the point, for life and death are ineluctably linked together—utterly inseparable conceptually and in the material world. When you see thousands of eggs, or watch insects mate, what you are seeing is not the beginning, but the beginning of the end. So she sets out to think about death, beginning with images of life pushing forth.

But she cannot simply face death and interrogate it—not at first. After announcing “this is what I plan to do” (namely, talk about death), she digresses for several pages to talk about the amazing vitality of plants and how their fecundity is neither frightening nor disturbing to her but rather resolutely optimistic. Plants are safe (as she writes, “acres of tulips” has a much better sound to it than “acres of rats.”) The fact that a single plant of rye grass could put out six thousand miles of root hairs does not give Dillard nightmares; rather, this fact elates her, and she has to force herself to return to the animal world and consider the fecundity there from a different, more gruesome, angle.

When considering the awfulness of fecundity, Dillard first considers barnacles, which shed a million million (one billion) larvae into the ocean from just a single half-mile stretch of coast, and then she focuses with steady horror on egg-laying creatures—mantises, wasps, termites, fish, etc. These creatures lay eggs in unthinkable profusion; the eggs hatch; out emerge innumerable creatures all of whom need to eat. Generally what they eat is one another since, after all, that is what is most readily available. Sometimes they devour other smaller species in great profusion. Mothers eat their own young; offspring devour their parents. Dillard lays out example after example, her prose becoming all the more distressed with each one.

From fecundity Dillard turns to the seeming impossibility of survival at all, using the horsehair worm as her first example. The story of the gooseneck barnacle she reserves as the height of improbable survival. Her general question seems to be, “how does anything survive long enough to die at all?” Halfway through the chapter she explains that death is a requirement of evolution; “the faster death goes, the faster evolution goes.”⁴⁹ “Evolution loves death,” she writes, and coming to terms with this takes some doing.⁵⁰ Throughout the narrative Dillard has found ways to celebrate or at least cope with the more gruesome elements in nature; this time she comes closest to throwing in the towel.

A cluster of fish eggs. In Chapter Ten: “Fecundity,” Dillard focuses with steady horror on egg-laying creatures—mantises, wasps, termites, fish, etc, creatures that lay eggs in unthinkable profusion.

She concludes, eventually, that it is not nature that is at fault for creating this system of freakish horrors, but rather human beings who persist in caring so much about it. The frog may be dissolved, the lacewing may eat her young, but (writes Dillard) “I’m the one having the nightmares.”⁵¹ But not caring is also not an option. After all, it is caring so much about the natural world that created Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in the first place. Dillard manages the emotional distress by coming to two understandings: first (a very common and traditional one, although she phrases it with supreme elegance), she realizes that death is quite simply a part of life. But she also comes to the realization that the variety of ways creatures die—however grisly they might seem—are part of the same “intricacy” she admired so much in the previous chapter. If death can also be part of the general pizzazz of creation, then perhaps it is not so horrible after all. But, to achieve this kind of reconciliation with mortality, she suggests that we must allow our perspective to be shaped by evolutionary biology as well as by a sense of the divine.

Chapter Eleven: “Stalking”

After experiencing the pessimism of Fecundity, the reader may balk upon discovering that the next chapter is titled “Stalking.” But Chapter Eleven is a lighthearted chapter, perhaps even the most cheerful of the entire book. At the end of Chapter One Dillard said briefly, “I am an explorer, then, and I am also a stalker.”⁵² Here in the eleventh chapter, she finally goes into detail about her particular kind of stalking, and what Dillard stalks is not animal prey but what she calls “eye food.”⁵³ The opening description of Eskimo hunting practices suggests a darker mood for the chapter (since those creatures the Inuit stalk will indeed become meat), but once she leaves this hunt behind, the rest of the chapter is taken up with descriptions of her close and steady observations of fish, a heron, water striders, a dragonfly, and, of course, muskrats. Dillard appears to stalk muskrats for simple amusement as well as for spiritual growth and naturalistic edification. The way she describes the experience is just plain fun; her prose is light, untroubled, and humorous for much of the chapter. Partly it may be that muskrats are in themselves cute little mammals, but partly it is the love of the hunt and the thrill of finally catching sight of one. She writes, “The great hurrah about wild animals is that they exist at all, and the greater hurrah is the actual moment of seeing them.”⁵⁴ What is it about stalking muskrats that allows Dillard to shout “hurrah,” to throw off some of the melancholy that gathered during the previous chapter?

German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg (l) and and Danish physicist Niels Bohr (r). At the end of Chapter Eleven, Dillard muses on quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which posits that at the subatomic level any attempt to know or measure certain phenomena, such as the velocity of an electron, will inevitably alter the outcome by changing the electron’s behavior.

The moral of the muskrat chapter has less to do with muskrats themselves than with the process of learning to stalk. While stalking, Dillard must willingly give up her self-consciousness and become (as she did while petting the puppy in Chapter Six) completely self-forgetful, entirely present in the here and now. If you want to see a muskrat you must be willing to crawl foolishly on your belly like a snake, or scramble in an undignified manner back and forth across a bridge on your bottom; you must not worry too much about your human dignity, or else (as Dillard writes) that is all you will end up having: your dignity (and no muskrats). The muskrats are simply the occasion for Dillard to experience again this “tremendously invigorating” feeling of unself-consciousness.⁵⁵ They are also a metaphor for living entirely in the present moment.

The narrator’s ability to give up her dignity and become unself-conscious allows her a special insight into the natural world, for in a sense she is able to live momentarily like an animal, as an animal, on the same existential level. This self-forgetting also leads her to muse at the end of Chapter Eleven on quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which posits that at the subatomic level any attempt to know or measure certain phenomena, such as the velocity of an electron, will inevitably alter the outcome by changing the electron’s behavior. It is, thus, impossible to apprehend some things with complete neutrality. The beholder is always part of the scenario, linked to what is beheld by unbreakable—if invisible—bonds.

Dillard draws a connection between the uncertainty principle and the stalking of muskrats. “The electron is a muskrat,” she writes, “it cannot be perfectly stalked.”⁵⁶ Sometimes you see one, sometimes you don’t, and you can’t predict if and when and how you might. These words harken back to the words that she used all the way back in Chapter One: when it comes to nature’s deepest meanings, “We don’t know.”

Chapter Twelve: “Nightwatch”

In Chapter Twelve, the speaker narrates a visit to the Lucas property, a secluded stretch of valley near her own house by Tinker Creek. This chapter has more landscape description than other chapters and less episodic storytelling. After a description of the chaos of a field of leaping grasshoppers, the first powerful image in the chapter is the Lucas cottage, a one-room cabin in the center of a meadow. From within that cottage appears the second image of the chapter. As the narrator stands in the cottage looking out a broken window, she sees framed by the window sill a goldfinch scattering thistle down just outside. We have seen this emphasis on framing already in the narrative. Several times already the narrator has referred (sometimes positively, sometimes negatively) to the experience of seeing the world as if captured within a camera frame.

In this chapter Dillard invokes the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic poet Saint John of the Cross, who wrote a poem titled “Dark Night of the Soul” in which he described the painful journey of the soul through the world as it tries to achieve union with God. Numerous subsequent poets, religious thinkers, and philosophers have referred to this “dark night of the soul” as a way to describe the tortured spiritual journey of any individual toward some kind of spiritual revelation, be it divine or natural. The phrase has entered the English language almost as a proverb. This chapter has Dillard’s own version of a “dark night of the soul,” but it is less a spiritual crisis (as are most of the dark nights in the Christian tradition) than a spiritual awakening. When she settles in to sleep in the cottage, the chapter becomes less descriptive and much more reflective.

Painting of St. John of the Cross. In Chapter Twelve, Dillard invokes this sixteenth-century Spanish mystic poet, who wrote a poem titled “Dark Night of the Soul” in which he described the painful journey of the soul through the world as it tries to achieve union with God.

Dillard’s dark night is filled, rather oddly, not with scripture or biblical allusion or temptation or confession, but with eels. The American Eel (Anguilla rostrata) seems a most peculiar animal to associate with a meadow in rural western Virginia, yet Dillard’s narrative persona that night imagines the force that drives the long journey of eels from all their rivers, tributaries, and ponds across America and Europe back to the Sargasso Sea to spawn. She cites a passage from the writings of Edwin Way Teale, a mid-twentieth-century American nature writer, in which he describes the ways eels will pull themselves over dry land, from one body of water to another, on their mission to spawn. Perhaps, too, Dillard had in mind Rachel Carson’s description of the eels’ voyage to the sea in the third part of her book Under the Sea Wind, which describes the spawning journey of eels. In any case, Dillard imagines what it might be like to see the spawning eels crossing the very meadow in which she finds herself. The leaping grasshoppers, the floating thistle down, and the slithering eels become similar, almost overlapping images. During her “nightwatch” she feels herself to be moving freely in a way similar to these other forms of life.

Chapter Thirteen: “The Horns of the Altar”

From eels we move to snakes. Dillard describes coming upon a young copperhead snake near her home and sits down first to admire it, and then to wait it out. Copperheads are venomous—the younger, the more dangerous. While she waits, she gives us a bit of natural history and a brief story told to her by a switchboard operator. Her concentration then fixes upon the tapered tail of the copperhead; she sees the creature as a “thickening of the air spread from a tip, a rush into being.”⁵⁷ As she watches the snake, a mosquito lands first on her and then on the copperhead. Not having hands to brush the mosquito away as Dillard had done moments before, the snake must submit to having its blood sucked by the mosquito. Dillard is riveted, and the sight triggers a question that has been haunting the narrative up to this point: “Must everything whole be nibbled?”⁵⁸ Nearly all the chapters have had some kind of consideration of eating and being eaten; here she finally puts the problem into words. It is a matter of wholeness, for the snake, which she has described as a “chunk of fullness,” is continually being “chomped.”⁵⁹

Once alert to the fact that “the world is more chomped than I’d dreamed,” Dillard sees evidence of this nibbling and chomping (which are in fact much more antonyms than synonyms, but Dillard uses them nearly interchangeably here) everywhere.⁶⁰ The late summer leaves are chomped; a snapping turtle is infested with leeches; a fox dies of mange. Dillard detours into a “whirlwind survey” of numerous insect parasites—lice, ticks, fleas, mosquitoes, etc.⁶¹ (Most readers must feel a bit itchy at this point.) From this litany of gruesome horrors Dillard concludes, first, that “the creator is no puritan”: in other words, creatures do not necessarily have to work for a living but are created to “simply steal and suck.”⁶² Second, she concludes that all this parasitism is a sign, a sign that the world is not whole but “rent,” a word she uses in two ways. First, the world is rent in the sense that it is torn, filled with holes. But Dillard also claims that parasitism is the “rent” which all created things pay for the blessing of being alive. Having our blood sucked by mosquitoes occasionally is simply the price we pay for a walk in the woods.

The title of Chapter Thirteen, “The Horns of the Altar,” comes from several places in the Old Testament (also known as the Jewish Bible), among them Amos 3:14, Kings 2:28–29, Kings 1:49–51; Exodus 29:12, and Leviticus 4:7. Biblical scholars agree that many sacrificial altars had horns attached at the corners that would be grasped by supplicants in a request for sanctuary or dabbed with the blood of sacrificed animals as an atonement for sin. Some scholars posit that sacrificial animals were tied to the horns to be sacrificed on the altar. Dillard does not explain her allusion, but it seems very likely that she has some notion of sacrifice and sanctuary in mind here. She meditates throughout this chapter on eating and being eaten, on the sacrifice of one life for the success of another, and she is aware of herself as potential food, as “a frayed and nibbled survivor” seeking some kind of solace in the natural world.

She moves from parasitism to a series of stories about seeing other creatures in less-than-pristine condition—grasshoppers without antennae, spiders missing one or more legs. The theme throughout is the same: nothing is entirely whole; everything has been pierced or torn or sliced in some way by some other living thing, and everything that lives feeds on something else to survive. It is a fitting theme for mid-September, when this chapter takes place. “The summer is old,” Dillard writes.⁶³ But at the end of the chapter she returns once again to the tree with the lights in it and insists that even if the whole world is old and tattered, the light still shines.

Chapter Fourteen: “Northing”

In Chapter Fourteen we move quickly through the end of September, all of October, and into November. Dillard’s seasonally appropriate main topic is the restless and relentless urge to migrate, an urge she shares with the animals and insects she observes around her. There are few solitary creatures or trees in this chapter; almost everything that she sees, she sees en masse: crowds of ants; flocks of goldfinches, titmice, and robins; hordes of woolly bear caterpillars; a herd of caribou. (It feels a bit like one of those grammar lessons in collective nouns: a pod of whales, a murder of crows, a gaggle of geese, etc.) The central event of the chapter is Dillard’s description of the Monarch butterfly migration, a five-day inundation which leaves her feeling as if the year itself were “molting and shedding” as leaves fall thick and fast from the trees.⁶⁴

Model of an altar used for animal sacrifices. Biblical scholars agree that many sacrificial altars had horns attached at the corners that would be grasped by supplicants in a request for sanctuary or dabbed with the blood of sacrificed animals as an atonement for sin.

The narrator shares this restlessness, certainly, but perverts it somewhat: instead of feeling the instinct to go south, she wants to go north. By this point in the book, we probably aren’t surprised by such an irony. It is unclear why the north calls her so strongly, why the same agitation that propels the creatures she sees to go south (or hunker down and hibernate) makes her want to head toward “Point Barrow, Mount McKinley, Hudson’s Bay.”⁶⁵ Eventually she tells us that what she wants is not a literal “northing” (that is, a movement toward the northern latitudes) but rather a metaphoric northing, which she defines as “a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off.” One cannot help being reminded of Thoreau’s exhortation in Walden, “Simplify, simplify!”⁶⁶ The image she uses to describe the state she wishes to achieve is that of a seashell worn supremely thin by sand and waves. To achieve that state of razor-sharp simple being, Dillard elects simply (once again) to wait. The creatures can migrate while she waits on the bridge for winter to come to her.

The end of the chapter launches us forward, toward the book’s conclusion. At this point Dillard introduces a theme which has been common enough throughout the narrative but which will take on new centrality in the final chapter: the theme of religion. She refers directly to God twice in the final paragraphs of “Northing.” First, she references a psalm in which the God of the Israelites arrives like a “consuming fire…a mighty tempest,” and she draws the analogy between that divine arrival and the arrival of winter, or simply the force of nature coming onward.⁶⁷

Second, she recalls the ancient Israelite rite of thanksgiving, in which a priest would come to the altar and wave a dead ram’s breast toward God as an offering. This “wave breast” will reappear in the final chapter, and it will be connected with another Israelite offering, the “heave shoulder,” as two ways (among many) of offering thanks for the beauties Dillard finds in the world. Once again we see Dillard’s fixation with the literal dimensions of faith and worship and with their peculiar basis in domestic animals. In her own inimitable manner Dillard makes subtle connections between natural phenomena, such as seasonal migration, and both the spirit and the letter of religious practice. It is as if she is seeking to ground her faith in the natural world—or to ground nature in religiosity. Either way, she outlines a theology of immanence.

The central event of “Chapter Fourteen: Northing” is Dillard’s description of the Monarch butterfly migration, a five-day inundation.

Chapter Fifteen: “The Waters of Separation”

The closing chapter of Pilgrim follows the penultimate one in moving sharply in the direction of religion, beginning with an epigraph from the Koran that reads, “They will question thee concerning what they should expend. Say: ‘the abundance.’” This is fittingly enigmatic, not unlike the epigraph from Heraclitus at the start of the book. The narrator then informs the reader, “Today is the winter solstice,” thereby invoking the pagan Yule holiday and Christmas—hence death and rebirth.⁶⁸ It is a fitting moment at which to end her pilgrimage and her narrative.

Shortly thereafter she exclaims, “my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it.”⁶⁹ The narrative then moves elatedly, almost ecstatically, through a walk around the area of Tinker Creek during which the narrator recounts the major episodes and vignettes of the previous fourteen chapters. There’s something of the high school English paper conclusion about this chapter, as if the author wished to summarize her experiences and insights by listing them and then deriving some form of overarching wisdom from them. This retrospective approach, however, is less nostalgic than self-reflexive; the narrator still wishes to apprehend spiritual meaning in the natural world, but now she lists her earlier attempts to do so and builds to a crescendo.

Instead of wisdom she reaps a harvest of uncertainty, passionate questioning of divine purpose, and more questions about the nature of the divine. The tone certainly seems to border on the heretical, if not the blasphemous, as the narrator asks, “How many people have prayed for their daily bread and famished? They die their daily death as utterly as did the frog, people, played with, dabbled upon, when God knows they loved their life.”⁷⁰ Surely this is a strange kind of religiosity that borders on impugning the deity and then withdraws into statements about the impossibility of knowing our purpose here on earth. Whatever spiritual or religious position we take vis-à-vis Dillard’s vehement interrogation of the divine, we cannot miss the fact that her prose is animated with a passionate energy that flows like a wellspring of words and feelings. “I stood alone,” she writes, “and the world swayed. I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.” She catalogues those signs in this final chapter—bloody paw prints, dead empty frog, creek, mountain, landscape, puppy, suffering, and religious rituals—and still concludes, “I am standing lost…”⁷¹ All she has is her own vibrant language of “praise,” the last word in the book.⁷²

SECTION III

Selected Poetry and Short Works of Literature

Introduction

In this short works of literature section, you will find eight poems and one nonfiction prose narrative following a list of keywords and brief author biographies. Each of these nine texts is accompanied by analysis and a brief contextual discussion. These selections have been chosen and arranged to represent one set of literary responses, in the English-speaking world, to the accelerating human mastery of the Earth’s resources, to the Industrial Revolution, and to human destruction of landscapes and ecosystems in modern times. Each short text gives literary shape to a writer’s insights about the role of human beings as stewards of this planet; each articulates a response to human encroachment on the natural environment; and each, either directly or indirectly, offers insights about technological innovation, new ideas, and humankind’s ability to harness nature’s energy in various forms.

Some of the writers represented in this section focus on energy captured by machines (such as steam engines, trains, and backhoes) to perform work and modify the environment. Others take as their topic the historical energies involved in global networks of trade and communication. Still others attempt to mediate the frightening effects of the rapid expansion of human civilization in modern times and the corresponding transformation of rural regions. All of the texts included in this section, thus, offer some form of literary statement about the relationship of human beings with the biophysical environment.

Immediately following this introduction you will find a number of keywords followed by definitions of about a paragraph or two each. These keywords are important conceptual categories, words that frame the way we think about poetry, history, and human behavior, that will help you interpret and understand the significance of the short literary works that follow. Just after the keywords section, you will find brief author biographies and then the short literary selections themselves. The short texts are arranged chronologically, beginning with a sonnet by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and ending with poems by the living poets Jorie Graham and Lucia Perillo. After the short texts, you will find the end notes and a selected bibliography of works cited, which will help guide you in any further reading you might choose to do.

The short texts featured here vary considerably in terms of literary form, thematic content, and tone. Some, such as the second poem by William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman’s “Passage to India,” express optimism about the potential of human ingenuity and progress; they see the achievements of the Industrial Revolution as ushering in a new age of global connectivity, communication, and prosperity. Others, in contrast, such as the poems by Edwin Muir, Sarah Teasdale, Robinson Jeffers, and Jorie Graham, comment much more skeptically about the effects of technological innovation and the course of human history. Still others, particularly the selections from John Muir and Edwin Muir (no relation), offer positive visions about the possibility of gaining distance, in time and space, from urban-industrial centers of human activity and reconnecting with the earth. As you will see, they do so in radically different ways. Edwin Muir’s “The Horses,” written in 1952, is a post-apocalyptic poem about the aftermath of an imagined nuclear catastrophe. This poem reminds us that not all new ideas about energy, and not all technological innovations, are for the best. In a sense, then, Muir’s poem engages in a sort of historical poetic dialogue with those of Wordsworth and Whitman, for while the two nineteenth-century poets celebrate aspects of the Industrial Revolution (in the poems presented here), Muir responds to industrial modernity in a decidedly negative way. Similarly, the most recent poems—one of them published less than a decade ago—employ terms and insights from science to reflect on how humankind’s material mastery of this planet alters physical reality and consciousness, not necessarily for the better. While Graham’s poem “Positive Feedback Loop” laments the potentially apocalyptic effects of anthropogenic climate change, Perillo’s brief poem “To the Field of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall” offers a verbal snapshot of a quintessentially postmodern experience, not condemning or condoning technology, but vividly capturing its dizzying effects in verse. Thus, these short works represent a diversity of literary perspectives on this year’s curricular theme.

Not only do the selections included here offer differing visions of (and commentary on) human innovation and its role in historical progress (is human progress a myth?), as well as on the human transformation of the natural environment, but they also differ markedly in form. Some are brief lyric poems, while others are longer and less technically constrained. Two of the poems are sonnets, with a strict meter and a formal rhyme scheme; several others are written in free verse, with no fixed rhyme scheme, varying line lengths, and irregular stanzas. Another is a nonfiction prose narrative—a (presumably) true story about the author’s experiences in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. There are notable synergies and overlaps between the texts, just as there are clear differences. Walt Whitman’s free verse frequently resembles John Muir’s ecstatic prose, whereas William Wordsworth’s adaptation of the sonnet to express a spiritual appreciation for nature or optimism about technological progress differs strikingly from Jorie Graham’s highly disciplined use of free verse to express pessimism about technology’s historical impact. Although we use the phrase “free verse” (useful for describing much modern poetry) for both poets’ works, Graham’s free verse differs radically, in terms of literary form, from Whitman’s. So, too, does her position vis-à-vis the technological advancement of humanity (quite starkly). Indeed, Whitman and Graham use free verse so differently that the phrase scarcely seems capable of describing both poets’ work—which raises important questions about the conceptual categories and approaches we use to analyze literature. One goal of this resource guide is to encourage you to think critically about such issues—inconsistencies, gaps, differences—for literary study has no easy answers.

What unites these selections is their authors’ masterful use of literary form and technique in the service of creating works of art that make powerful statements about the environmental and historical effects of human technological innovation. Each of the short texts offers profound insights on our attempts to harness, control, or modify natural forces. Each of these works enjoins us to question the nature of historical “progress” and raises difficult questions about human development. Do the technological advances of the last two centuries or so constitute an improvement for humankind (by raising the standard of living and diminishing the natural obstacles to travel, communication, and development)? Or, by contrast, are the innovations of the Industrial Revolution and the era of technological modernity in fact a slowly unfolding global catastrophe? We can choose to take one side or the other in our responses, but we might also decide that the best response is not an either/or but a both/and. Are we doomed or saved by technology—or both?

Keywords

Romanticism

Romanticism was a movement in literature, music, and art that emphasized emotionality, energy, experimentation with the forms of self-expression, and personal experience over tradition, control, normative values, and received opinions and forms. Romanticism is generally seen as originating in late-eighteenth-century Germany and then moving to England, the rest of Europe, and the United States in the early nineteenth century. Romanticism can refer to the historical period from approximately 1780 to 1830 (in Germany and Britain), and in France, the United States, and elsewhere circa 1800–61. Romanticism was characterized by a focus on personal experience and emotional expression (in contrast to the conventional, socially oriented writings of the so-called neoclassical period that preceded it); an interest in the sublime, the gothic, psychology, folklore, common people, nature; and new forms of artistic expression. Representative Romantic poets include William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats; prose writers include Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley.

Portrait of Queen Victoria by Alexander Bassano. English literature, especially poetry and the novel, flourished during the Victorian Period.

Image © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Victorian Period

The Victorian period, as its name implies, was defined by the reign of British Queen Victoria I (1819–1901). This period is notable for the expansion of the British Empire over approximately one-fourth of the Earth’s surface as well as for the passage of numerous reform laws by Parliament. The political era corresponded with the height of the Industrial Revolution, in which English literature flourished, especially poetry and the novel. The Victorian Period is often (perhaps mistakenly) considered a golden age for British civilization. Notable Victorian novelists include Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot (Marian Evans), and the early Joseph Conrad. Victorian poets of note include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne.

Palestinian scholar Edward W. Said argued that the “knowledge” produced by Orientalists bolstered (or created) the ideological justification for European imperialism in North Africa, Asia Minor, and the rest of Asia.

Orientalism

Orientalism refers to an ideologically charged mode of thinking about Asia and North Africa and the nineteenth-century study of Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern nations and peoples. Orientalism is marked by the belief that Asian and North African peoples—in all their diversity—share certain characteristics that contrast markedly with the inhabitants of the West, including a tendency toward political servility and despotism, unchanging cultures and outlooks, an inability to innovate, and a kind of stasis caused by the inertia of longstanding civilizations. These negative stereotypes about “the Orient” and “the Oriental Mind” produced a widespread condescension among Europeans toward people of Asiatic (and North African) origin. Palestinian scholar Edward W. Said argued, in his seminal book Orientalism, that this complex of ideas and attitudes constituted a kind of ethnocentric posturing in the guise of an objective “science” or field of scholarship, and that the “knowledge” produced by Orientalists in fact bolstered (or created) the ideological justification for European imperialism in North Africa, Asia Minor, and the rest of Asia, particularly in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.

Sonnet

A sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem, made famous by the fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarcha, known in English as Francis Petrarch, with a strict rhyme scheme and a finite set of thematic conventions. Even before Petrarch, the sonnet was associated with expressions of love and desire, and throughout the European Renaissance (c. 1400–1650) the sonnet proved an extremely popular form for poets writing love poetry in many languages. The first poets to write sonnets in English began, in the early sixteenth century, by translating Petrarch’s poems. In adapting the sonnet from Italian to English, they innovated with the sonnet form, creating a distinctly English version. Accordingly, sonnets are grouped into two categories based on rhyme scheme: Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnets and English (or Shakespearean) sonnets.

The fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarcha, known in English as Francis Petrarch. Petrarch’s sonnets were widely known and imitated.

An Italian sonnet is divided into an octave (a section of eight lines), which rhymes A-B-B-A A-B-B-A, and a sestet (six lines), which rhymes either C-D-C-D-C-D or C-D-E-C-D-E. This structure creates a strong “turn” (known as the “volta”) at the end of the octave, such that the sestet becomes a kind of riposte. The English sonnet, developed later, has a distinctly different structure, containing three quatrains (units of four lines each) and a concluding couplet (two lines), generally rhyming A-B-A-B C-D-C-D E-F-E-F G-G, although many variations exist, including admixtures of the Italian and English forms. In early modern Europe (also known as the European Renaissance), the majority of sonnets were love poems—from those written by Petrarch to those of Sir Philip Sidney in his sonnet sequence “Astrophil and Stella.” William Shakespeare addressed his celebrated sonnet sequence to two love objects, a young man and a “dark lady.” These are some of the best-known poems in English and are poetic vessels for the expression of love and desire.

Free Verse

Free verse is poetry (or, more properly, verse) that is not constrained by conventional formal restrictions of rhyme, meter, or line and stanza length. Free verse eschews traditional conventions of form. Free verse is not formless, however; shaped to its subject matter, free verse derives form from original patterns that the poet creates. Like all verse (and indeed all art), free verse relies on repetition, which is the basis of aesthetic form. Historically, free verse was pioneered by and remains associated with the nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman, although prior poets and some of his contemporaries also experimented with it. As a major verse form, free verse came of age with the modernist poets both as a means of achieving new forms of expression and as a critique of conventional forms.

Lyric

A lyric is a short poem that generally expresses a single emotion or sentiment (love, anguish, sadness) by means of literary tropes (such as metaphor and metonymy) and figures of speech (such as personification and prosopopeia). A lyric poem is a distillation of sentiment, thought, and language. The term “lyric” derives from the word for an ancient Greek instrument, the lyre, which was strummed and accompanied by song. Generally a lyric poem has a single speaker who reveals his or her thoughts and feelings about an intensely felt idea or experience. Lyric poems can take many forms, including the sonnet, villanelle, and haiku. They can be written with heroic couplets, common measure, alexandrines, or any number of metric forms.

Speaker

The speaker is the voice or persona (from the Greek word for mask) in which an author or poet chooses to deliver a narrative or poem. In poetry, the poet is not always (or usually) assumed to be the speaker of the poem; poets employ different kinds of speakers, including animals (personification), inanimate objects (prosopopeia), members of the opposite sex, or characters with whom the author or poet does not necessarily agree (or even like, on occasion). Thus, you should never assume that the speaker of a poem is identical to the author of the poem.

Narrative

Storytelling, either in prose or verse, with the recounting of a story; a form of verbal expression with a beginning, middle, and end, a plot, character development, and a narrative voice or persona is a narrative. Novels are long prose narratives; short stories are short prose narratives; epic poems are long verse narratives; and any number of poems contain short narratives in verse. Not all literature consists of narratives: lyric poems, for example, rarely contain complete narratives. In general, narrative poetry and lyric poetry are treated as quite distinct forms of poetic expression. Literary interpretation often involves the discovery of multiple narratives in a text, often hidden or implied ones (and sometimes counter-narratives).

Pastoral

The term pastoral refers to literature or art set in the countryside that celebrates rural life and either explicitly or implicitly compares it with urban life. It is a literary mode (not a genre) with a consistent set of features, including a rural or bucolic setting, animals, poetry, and conversations between characters who have retreated from the city. Leisure (Latin otium; pastoral is “otiose” art) is an important aspect of pastoral, which can be traced to the celebration of rural life, particularly that of shepherds, often associated with Arcadia (or Arkadia, a region in Greece) by the classical poet Theocritus and later Virgil. In the European Renaissance, pastoral was a popular mode for much art; for example, The Faithful Shepherd of Guarini was an extremely popular romance, as was Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, a comedy written in the pastoral mode. Later, in Romantic and Victorian literature, pastoral became associated with a bygone way of life and with rural landscapes that contrasted with the effects of the Industrial Revolution.

Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism refers to the attribution of human qualities to non-human entities. It is a rhetorical strategy often employed by poets to locate emotion (or “affect”) in an object or scene. A writer anthropomorphizes animals, vegetables, or minerals by giving them human attributes, such as speech, a name, or an individual identity. Talking animals are one example of anthropomorphism. (Children’s literature is full of talking animals and other forms of anthropomorphism.) An extreme form of anthropomorphism is personification, or treating non-human entities as humans, with human identities. However, not all anthropomorphism is personification, a kind of metaphor that treats a non-human object, animal, or idea as if it had a human identity; other forms abound, and it can be a tricky business drawing a line between anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic language.

“As You Like It,” Act IV Scene 1, by Walter Howell Deverell. Shakespeare’s play As You Like It was a very popular comedy written in the pastoral mode.

Photo Credit: Birmingham Museums Trust.

Anthropocentrism

Not to be confused with anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism is the idea that human beings are the center of the universe and the most important living things in it, above all other forms of life. Anthropocentrism is a human-centered perspective, an inability to alter one’s outlook from one that privileges all things human. Anthropocentrism is often blamed for the human destruction of the biophysical environment.

Anthropogenic

Anthropogenic is an adjective describing something that has been caused or generated by human beings or human behavior. Thus, the term must be followed by a noun, such as “anthropogenic climate change.” Anthropogenic phenomena include pollution, such as smog, acid rain, and radioactive waste, and global climate change, ocean acidification, coral reef bleaching, anoxic dead zones (such as in the Gulf of Mexico), nitrogen loading and eutrophication (overfertilization) in fresh water and salt water bodies, overextraction of resources (including mines, fisheries, and logging operations), the proliferation of non-native species in threatened ecosystems, habitat loss, and many other environmental issues.

Deep Ecology

This phrase describes a branch of the current environmental movement that posits the inherent value of all living things and opposes anthropocentrism. Adherents of Deep Ecology argue that the needs, wants, and appetites of human beings should not dictate the way we value other forms of life, and that all living things have inherent rights. As the phrase suggests, this philosophy is informed by the scientific discipline of ecology. It is “deep” in that it looks beyond a merely anthropocentric perspective and enjoins thinking that is not merely anthropomorphic. Deep Ecology is a philosophical reaction to the destruction of non-human life on this planet and a set of values that aspires to decenter humankind from the cosmos, and instead espouses an ecologically based system of values that would put human life and other forms of life on the same plain of existence.

Author Biographies

William Wordsworth

The first two short works in this section are poems by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850), who was born in Lancashire, in northwestern England. Wordsworth is closely associated with a beautiful part of that region known as the Lake District. Much of his poetry celebrates nature for its beauty and moral power; for Romantic poets, the natural world revealed profound meaning, often divine purpose or the poet’s soul. Wordsworth’s celebrated poems about the English countryside, which often recount the lessons he has learned from natural settings and enjoin the reader to become closer to nature, have inspired generations of poets, hikers, naturalists, and readers.

With the collaboration of his youthful friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who penned The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), Wordsworth published a small collection of poems in 1798 known as Lyrical Ballads. This slim volume would, in time, become one of the most important poetry collections ever published in the English language; it transformed literary expression and shaped literary tastes for generations. In it Wordsworth and Coleridge attempted, as Wordsworth put it in the preface to the second edition, to use “the real language of men” in place of time-worn conventional poetic language.

Portrait of William Wordsworth by Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1842. Much of Wordsworth’s poetry celebrates nature for its beauty and moral power.

Image © National Portrait Gallery, London.

The poems in the Lyrical Ballads are frequently cited to exemplify the Romantic celebration of nature, and Wordsworth himself is widely viewed as a kind of proto-environmentalist—a champion of nature and a critic of human industry. One of Wordsworth’s best-known lines, “we murder to dissect,” criticizes the destruction of life that science entails. In another poem, Wordsworth wrote, “One impulse from a vernal wood/ May teach you more of Man,/ Of moral evil and of good,/ Than all the sages can,” which states quite clearly that nature has more to teach us than all of human knowledge.⁷³ These are just two examples of the kind of sentiment that many pro-environmental readers have admired in Wordsworth’s writings. The poet mastered a number of poetic forms, and his poetic career spanned several periods of British history. His magnum opus is widely considered to be The Prelude, a long, unfinished narrative poem addressed to Coleridge and published posthumously. The poems included in this resource guide, both sonnets, were written at very different periods in the poet’s life and differ markedly from each other.

Walt Whitman, as photographed by Mathew Brady sometime between 1855 and 1865. Whitman is widely regarded as one of the two most important American poets of the nineteenth century.

Walt Whitman

Born in the town of Huntington, New York, to parents with Quaker sympathies, Walt Whitman (1819–92) worked as a journalist, teacher, and clerk and served as a volunteer nurse in the American Civil War (1861–65). The first edition of Leaves of Grass, which he self-published (using his own money) in 1855, was seen as scandalous by many readers because of its frankness about sexuality and desire. Whitman’s sexuality has been much discussed, and in all likelihood he was, in today’s terms, a homosexual. Whitman continued to revise his magnum opus until his death, in Camden, New Jersey, in 1892. Since then its literary reputation, along with that of its author, has grown significantly.

With his American contemporary Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman is widely regarded as one of the two most important American poets of the nineteenth century. In striking contrast to Dickinson, who is known for her short poems characterized by intense, condensed expression, Whitman appeals to readers with his grand, effusive verses, which capture the energy and enthusiasm of the young America, and for his musical celebration of the self as a corporate entity containing multitudes (as he put it). One of his best-known statements is this: “I contradict myself? So I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” Whitman’s voice strives to speak for the young republic during a period of rapid expansion and enormous tribulation: the middle decades of the nineteenth century. This collective voice rings clearly throughout the poem “Song of Myself,” which may well be Whitman’s most famous. In “Passage to India” the same grand multi-part voice can be heard.

Like Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass has found a far more sympathetic audience in the twentieth century than the nineteenth—in part because the rise of modernism made free verse more acceptable and in part because Whitman’s social outlook and attitudes have become more acceptable in recent times. In the 1950s and 60s the so-called Beat poets, such as Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, were inspired by Whitman. Ginsburg, author of the collection Howl, explicitly emulated Whitman and his work—to the point of styling himself as a latter-day Whitman.

John Muir

Born in Scotland into a family that immigrated to the United States when he was only three, John Muir (1838–1914) grew up on his family’s farm near Portage, Wisconsin, and later roamed the North American continent. His parents were strictly religious Scots Presbyterians, and the young John could recite the New Testament and most of the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) by heart at an early age. Later, however, he would express his skepticism about organized religion and conventional accounts of the creator, instead finding spiritual fulfillment in the wilderness and a theology of immanence (the presence of the deity in the present world) closely linked to Romanticism. Although he attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying botany, chemistry, and geology, Muir never earned a degree there. Like Henry David Thoreau, he was known for his perpetual wandering in the woods and fields.

During the American Civil War Muir went to Canada to avoid the draft. He later walked from Indiana to Florida, suffered a bout of malaria, and then took a ship to Cuba. After shipping from there to New York, he sailed to San Francisco. He soon departed San Francisco for the inland mountains, a region with which he would become forever associated and where he would make his name, roaming around observing the wonders of the California landscape.

John Muir, as photographed by Professor Francis M. Fritz in 1907. A great American outdoorsman, traveler, writer, and passionate advocate of wild places, Muir is remembered for his love of the California countryside.

Muir’s writings about the natural world and his travels in wild places have been popular for over a century, and deservedly so. Part of their appeal lies in the vivid juxtaposition of precise description, informed by the natural sciences, with an effusive appreciation for natural phenomena and the sublime. Muir’s energetic prose is matched by his love for the manifestations of energy in nature—snow, winds, lightning, storms, and water in its various states of matter. A great American outdoorsman, traveler, writer, and passionate advocate of wild places, Muir is remembered for his love of the California countryside, and among his other legacies he started the Sierra Club, an organization dedicated to promoting the preservation of wilderness.

Sara Teasdale was a very successful poet in her own day who died tragically and is now mostly forgotten.

Sara Teasdale

A very successful poet in her own day who died tragically and is now mostly forgotten, Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) was a native of St. Louis, Missouri. She struggled with health problems throughout her life, and, as an adult, with difficult relationships. Teasdale began publishing poems in her twenties and subsequently came out with several highly successful collections, including Rivers to the Sea (1915), her third, which was a bestseller on the eve of the American entrance into the First World War. Her next collection, Love Songs (published 1917), won the 1918 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. By this time Teasdale had married and moved to New York City. She later divorced her husband. In 1933 she committed suicide by an overdose of sleeping pills and was buried in her home town of St. Louis. The poem included in this guide, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” imagines a world after humankind has been wiped out. This poem inspired the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury to write an extremely popular short story of the same title in 1950. Bradbury’s story imagines a post-nuclear world in which humanity, as in Teasdale’s poem, has been annihilated and only its technological inventions remain—to be slowly overgrown by nature.

Edwin Muir

While John Muir was an American naturalist, Edwin Muir (1887–1959) was a Scottish man of letters. The latter man was a critic, journalist, novelist, translator, memoirist, and poet born on the Orkney Islands, a large archipelago just off the northern tip of Scotland (Caithness). His family of tenant farmers worked in different locales among the Orkneys, struggling to pay the rent. When he was fourteen, Muir’s family lost their farm in Deerness and moved to the large Scottish city of Glasgow, a manufacturing hub of the Industrial Revolution famous for steel production and shipbuilding, in hopes of better financial prospects. This transition could not have been worse: suddenly, the young Muir moved from a bucolic rural setting to a heavily industrial urban one, and Muir’s parents and two brothers died shortly thereafter.

The loss of the family farm and subsequent move from the traditional agricultural setting of the Orkneys to the urban jungle of Glasgow affected the future poet profoundly, and it is in this context that we should understand Muir’s pessimism about the fruits of modernity, industry, and technology. He would later write of himself, in his diary:

I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two day’s journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time. All my life since I have been trying to overhaul that invisible leeway. No wonder I am obsessed with Time. (Diary, 1937–39.)

These sentiments can help us make sense of Muir’s relative optimism in “The Horses” about a post-apocalyptic world.

Edwin Muir lived through two world wars and in many countries. His cosmopolitanism and awareness of the ravages of war can be seen in “The Horses,” his poem included in this guide. For Muir, a pastoral way of life that evokes the Garden of Eden is something to be wished for, and a transition from a modern, industrial, urban lifestyle to an agricultural one is not necessarily a change to be lamented, as we shall see. His poetry generally eschewed the radical experimentation with form characteristic of contemporaneous modernist poets.

Edwin Muir, photograph by Howard Coster, 1945. Muir was a Scottish critic, journalist, novelist, translator, memoirist, and poet.

Image © National Portrait Gallery, London.

After working as a clerk and later a journalist and critic, Muir married Wilhelmina Anderson and moved to London. Later they would live together for a considerable time on the European continent. The husband and wife team translated an important body of continental literature from German (a language Muir had learned on his own), most notably the fiction of Franz Kafka, into English. Muir also wrote influential works of literary scholarship, including The Structure of the Novel, which remains an influential study. Muir received many honors late in life, including a position on the faculty at Harvard University.

Robinson Jeffers

One of California’s best-known poets, Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) was a controversial figure in his own lifetime, having graced the cover of Time magazine early in his career only to become a kind of ideological outcast for his isolationism during World War II. The son of a Presbyterian minister in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Jeffers is now associated with the area around Carmel and Monterey, California, not far from the dramatic landscapes of Point Lobos and Big Sur. His reputation has waxed and waned since the early twentieth century. Because of his refusal to support the war effort, critics who celebrated his literary success before the war later wrote scathing articles about him, even accusing him of tacit support for the Nazis. In fact, his philosophical outlook resembles that of John Muir, with whom he shared a strict Scots Presbyterian heritage, a profound love of the wilderness, and a particular affinity for the landscapes of California. His poems frequently depict the stark beauty of California’s landscapes before—and at the start of—the massive mid-twentieth-century population explosion.

One of California’s best-known poets, Robinson Jeffer’s poetry influenced the thinking of many prominent figures in the environmental movement that gained momentum after his death.

Photo/Louis Fleckenstein; courtesy of Tor House Foundation.

A serious student of the classics (Greek and Latin literature) from childhood, Jeffers was deeply interested in epics and tragedy throughout his career, at one time translating the Medea by Euripides. But it is more for his lyric poetry, particularly poems that bespeak an incipient environmentalism, that Jeffers is known today. Jeffers’ poetry influenced the thinking of many prominent figures in the environmental movement that gained momentum after his death, including Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey, and other prominent nature writers and nature poets. Some have seen Jeffers as a precursor to the Deep Ecology movement, which firmly rejects anthropocentrism in favor of a revaluation of (and increased appreciation for) non-human animals and what anthropologist David Abram calls the “more-than-human world.”

Jeffers’ philosophy of “inhumanism,” derived in part from the writings of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), rejects humankind’s solipsism (utter self-involvement) and anthropocentrism and instead affirms a kind of general detachment from superficial or trivial human emotions, such as hatred, egotism, misanthropy, misogyny, and materialism, as well as from the material acquisitiveness, political partisanship, and internecine bickering that he felt afflicted the social and political realms. Other poets who admired Jeffers’ work include Charles Bukowski, and Nobel-Prize winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Jeffers remains quite popular in Japan and Eastern Europe. His longtime home in Carmel, California, has become a pilgrimage site for environmental writers and activists.

Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham (born 1950) is an American poet and is the Boylston Professor at Harvard University, where she has taught creative writing and literature courses for many years. The fact that she succeeded the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor tells us, first, that she is an enormously successful writer and teacher and, second, that her work has been produced almost entirely in an academic context. Born into a privileged family and raised overseas and in New York, Graham studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and continues to live for part of the year in France.

Graham has published numerous collections of poetry, including The Dream of a Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974–94, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1996. Among her other honors, Graham held the position of Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets from 1997 to 2003 and has been a judge for poetry prizes. Graham’s poems have been repeatedly recognized for their innovative use of literary form. Graham’s collection Sea Change (2008) consists of a series of poems about the environment, global climate change, and the increasingly dire condition of the world’s oceans. “Positive Feedback Loop” is from this collection. Sea Change engages in an overarching dialogue with William Shakespeare’s late play The Tempest, which takes place on an unmapped island and contains the memorable characters Prospero, Miranda, Caliban, and Ariel. Graham uses the characters and themes of The Tempest as the basis for her meditations on the implications of global climate change for the condition of the world’s oceans and of humanity.

Photograph of poet Jorie Graham, 2010. Graham is an enormously successful writer and teacher, and her poems have been repeatedly recognized for their innovative use of literary form.

Photo ©2008–2013 Jorie Graham.
All Rights Reserved.

Lucia Perillo

Lucia Perillo (born 1958) has published six books of poetry and won or been nominated for numerous awards and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship and a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Perillo grew up in the New York metropolitan area and attended McGill University as an undergraduate. She later earned an M.A. in English from Syracuse University and worked for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Her scientific studies as an undergraduate and her work as a field scientist resonate in her poetry, which often takes a hard look at issues that are frequently treated sentimentally. (This is clearly the case in her poem “To a Field of Scotch Broom.”) Perillo has lived and taught at several institutions of higher learning in Washington State and Illinois, settings that also show up in her poems. She has been published in numerous prominent magazines, such as The New Yorker and Orion Magazine, and she continues to produce notable poetry. Perillo currently resides in western Washington state. Perillo’s work is deeply informed by science, and her meditation on death and mortality offers a critical look at contemporary life through the scientifically informed lens of a serious lifetime student of the natural world. One would not, however, mistake her work for that of a nature writer. And, with her scientifically informed, unsentimental perspective on human life and the physical world, she often gives stark insight into the physical vicissitudes of being mortal.

Poet Lucia Perillo. Perillo’s work is deeply informed by science, and her meditation on death and mortality offers a critical look at contemporary life through the scientifically informed lens of a serious lifetime student of the natural world.

SELECTED WORK

The World Is Too Much With Us

By William Wordsworth

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!
The 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 wreathèd horn.

“The World Is Too Much With Us”—Analysis

This is one of Wordsworth’s best-known sonnets, and it is frequently anthologized and recited. In some ways it encapsulates a good deal of Wordsworth’s youthful perspective on the value of human activity—on human business as well as our perpetual busyness—in comparison to the spiritual renewal that an appreciation for nature can provide.

In this Italian sonnet (rhyming A-B-B-A A-B-B-A C-D-C-D-C-D), Wordsworth captures the powerful tension between the raw, uncalculated experience of nature and repetitive calculating social behavior. The trajectory of the poem is from the quotidian present, in which human behavior alienates us from the natural world, toward an imagined pagan past in which the sensory experience of natural phenomena compels the speaker to envision a pagan past (paganism has often been associated with the worship of nature). The speaker, who is “forlorn” (even though he stands on “this pleasant lea”), feels that humanity cheats itself by turning its back on the sea, the moon, and physical experience.

When he refers to “the world” in the first line, Wordsworth does not mean “the planet” or “the globe” but something more like the French term, le monde, which literally means “the world” but connotes humanity—the human world, or humankind. In a sense the first line says that we are too caught up in our concern for the limited and limiting ways of people. “Late and soon” implies “always,” but the diction also conveys a sense of negativity that is purely human. To be “late” is a human failing; to need something done “soon” is a human urgency. “Getting and spending,” another binary like “late and soon,” also conveys a sense of the purely human, but in ironic terms. To “get” can mean, in one context, to procreate—as in the begetting of children (a human as well as an animal characteristic). In this context, however, “getting” takes on a purely financial or material sense, given its combination with “spending”—another term which could have sexual or reproductive connotations in Wordsworth’s time, but in this case is resolutely fiscal and material.

When Wordsworth writes that these human things “lay waste our powers,” we see that he is once again drawing an oblique parallel between the positive and natural physical “powers” of the human body (which can get and spend in biological, reproductive terms) and the purely material and economic behavior of humans in the modern urban environment. In the natural (biological) sense, getting and spending is a positive, life-giving act; in the modern economic world, getting and spending become negative, life-draining actions. These actions lead, in lines five through nine, to a soul-destroying numbness in the face of natural beauty. Modern economic humans cannot appreciate the sea, the moon, or the wind—all natural phenomena and all powerfully personified here. The sea is a woman who “bares her bosom” while the winds “howl.” We are not “moved” by these powers of nature because we have laid our powers to waste by participating in modern industrial and capitalist enterprises.

The Italian sonnet offers the structural possibility of a “volta” or “turn” after the first eight lines (the octave), and indeed Wordsworth makes use of this chance to generalize: “we are out of tune.” But it is in the following line, the ninth, that the poet inserts a momentous turn—signaled by a period (after “not”), a dash, and a capital “G” in “Great God!” The double capitalization combined with the alliteration of the “G” sounds produces a minor verbal explosion. The poet seems to want to knock himself back into the pagan world of classical Greece and Rome—or at the very least out of the present moment.

Portrait of William Wordsworth, probably 1839, reproduction in 1873.

Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

In this sonnet the young Wordsworth urges a return to nature as a salvation from this life-draining modernity. He first makes a move back to a pre-Christian Pagan past, which he envisions as closer to nature than his contemporary era, although the phrases “I’d rather be” and “a creed outworn” suggest that this is not his first choice. Ironically, he prefaces his wish to be a Pagan with the cry “Great God!” which marks the tension he feels between the modern Christian era and the Pagan past, which he feels might offer him solace. What Wordsworth seems to value in Paganism (in this case a specifically Greco-Roman religious tradition) is its ability to animate the natural world with divine presence, or immanence. He does not just want to appreciate nature as he stands looking out at the sea; he wants to see Proteus and Triton in the sea; he wishes to encounter an animated nature charged with power and energy.

Proteus was an early sea god, best known for his ability to change form at will (we get the word “protean” from this source). Triton was a later Greek god, son of Poseidon and Amphitrite; he was his father’s messenger and herald, and used a sea shell to calm or agitate the waves. Both minor gods are marked by their association with the sea and nature; it is significant that Wordsworth does not call on, say, Poseidon himself in this poem. In this sonnet, the intimate connection to nature is valued more than raw power or literary/mythological allusion, which a simpler reference to Poseidon might have gained the poet.

SELECTED WORK

Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways

By William Wordsworth

Motions and Means, on land and sea at war
With old poetic feeling, not for this,
Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss!
Nor shall your presence, howsoe’er it mar
The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar
To the Mind’s gaining that prophetic sense
Of future change, that point of vision, whence
May be discovered what in soul ye are.
In spite of all that beauty may disown
In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace
Her lawful offspring in Man’s art; and Time,
Pleased with your triumphs o’er his brother Space,
Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown
Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.

“Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways”—Analysis

By the time Wordsworth wrote “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways,” in 1833, he was a literary lion with an international reputation. Within a decade he would be named Poet Laureate of Great Britain, a title he held until his death in 1850. It would be convenient if somewhat facile to claim that this poem signals a shift in Wordsworth’s mentality from the Romanticism of his younger days to a more Victorian sensibility, yet it is clear that by 1833 the poet’s youthful rebelliousness and enthusiasm for nature had modulated into a more staid perspective and more conservative opinions. This poem, composed at the advent of the Victorian period, when the Industrial Revolution was in high gear, bespeaks a shift from the young poet’s yearning for communion with unmediated nature to a more tempered faith in civilization’s progress. Yet Wordsworth was no unquestioning apologist for “progress,” and we would do well to look for continuity as well as difference between the previous sonnet and this one.

Hetton Colliery, near Sunderland, which had one of the world’s first private steam railways, opened in 1822. Steam technology lay behind the massive transformation of the landscape, travel, and material production in early nineteenth-century Britain.

The subtitle of this poem, which reads “COMPOSED OR SUGGESTED DURING A TOUR IN THE SUMMER OF 1833,” reminds the reader that Wordsworth often composed poems based on his own visual impressions and emotional experiences of the ever-changing English landscape. With his love of the English countryside, particularly the Lake District in his native northwestern England (Lancashire), with its craggy fells (large hills), glacial lakes, and stone cottages, “the Lake Poet” (as he was sometimes called) tended to prefer green spaces to urban zones. Yet “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways” shows a different side of Wordsworth, one that looks more favorably on industry than almost any other of his writings. This poem makes a surprising statement about the relationship between nature and industry, essentially equating the two.

In this particular poem Wordsworth gives us a modified Italian sonnet with the following rhyme scheme: A-B-B-A A-C-C-A D-E-F E-D-F. In a verse form as well-worn yet technically demanding as the sonnet, such an innovation suggests an effort on the part of the poet to say something new—always a challenge, indeed the challenge, for any sonneteer. For by the time Wordsworth wrote them in the nineteenth century, sonnets had been adapted over and over by generations of poets to express many emotions, thoughts, and experiences. Because for many generations sonnets were primarily written as love poems, it is something of a surprise that Wordsworth employs this form to express a response to the effects of the Industrial Revolution. This is not a matter of the poet misappropriating a genre so much as it is an adaption of a venerable genre to new uses. Between the lines, as it were, we can discern the echo of bygone sonnets.

Yet this sonnet is not about love; it is about the tension between technological innovation, which the poet calls “Motions and Means,” and “old poetic feeling,” a rather hazy notion that evokes the emotions of old poems (such as the sonnets of Petrarch or of Shakespeare) in order to set up a contrast between the venerable past and the fast-moving present. Instead of addressing a lover, then, Wordsworth adapts the sonnet form to make a statement about technology, development, and human ingenuity. By contrasting the “motions and means” that he celebrates in the poem with “old poetic feeling” in line two, Wordsworth can be said to offer a meta-poetic (or self-reflexive) allusion to the history of sonnet-writing, for a great deal of “old poetic feeling” was expressed by prior writers of sonnets. In so doing, Wordsworth suggests as well that the subject of this sonnet, the forms of human artifice, can sometimes be at odds with a poet’s aesthetic sensibility. This poem attempts to effect a reconciliation between the two.

We should begin our analysis by noting the title, which explicitly directs our attention to conspicuous emblems of the Industrial Revolution. Steam technology lay behind the massive transformation of the landscape, travel, and material production in early nineteenth-century Britain, which was in the throes of a massive transformation in production and social arrangement. As factories sprang up all over the nation and the landscape was transformed, many observers lamented the effects of industrialization and urbanization. New cities grew out of the fields like weeds in places like Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham, and the rural populace trooped to these new cities to become factory laborers. In much the same way that the automobile transformed the landscape of twentieth-century America and the lifestyle of its citizens, in the nineteenth century it was the steam engine that made possible the massive changes in landscape and lifestyle associated with the Industrial Revolution.

Steamboats and trains both relied on the compound steam engine to function; both made travel more efficient than it had ever been. In the first line of the poem the speaker addresses (the technical term is “apostrophizes”) the abstract nouns “Motions and Means,” which denote the manmade technological devices and contrivances listed in the title of the poem. These devices are “at war” with “old poetic feeling,” claims the speaker, yet nonetheless they are useful.

Wordsworth thus sets up and then breaks down the traditional binary of nature versus human artifice (“Man’s art”)—in this case, technology—by claiming that although human inventions may “mar/ The loveliness of Nature” (notice the capitalization), such inventions derive from nature and are therefore “Her lawful offspring.” This reconciliation is effected because “Time,” which is personified here, is “Pleased,” “Accepts…the proffered crown/Of hope, and smiles on you [human artifice] with cheer sublime.” Even things that appear ugly and contrary to nature, claims Wordsworth, can be seen as offering hope to human beings over time.

It is particularly important to note that this hope is obtained only over time. Wordsworth—often a dweller in the past or in the present in his other poems—is here making a claim for future generations. Not only does Time approve of these new inventions (because trains and other new transportation systems help humans triumph over space), Time is also a factor because it is only in the future, Wordsworth suggests, that these technological innovations will be understood to be beautiful (or sublime). And for this transformation to occur, the human mind (with Nature’s inspiration) must do the work of making meaning (figuring out “what in soul ye are”) out of the visible elements of modernity (steamboats, trains, etc.). This is not something Nature can do on its own, even though in Wordsworth’s eyes it clearly approves (“embrace[s]”) of the innovations, because they have their genesis in humankind.

The last word of the poem, “sublime,” is particularly significant, for it reminds us of what has been called “the nineteenth-century cult of the sublime.” The sublime is a term from the philosophical discourse of aesthetics, the study of art and beauty. Eighteenth-century philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, inspired by the essay “On the Sublime,” by the late-Classical thinker Longinus, wrote influential treatises on the sublime. The term, thus, was by Wordsworth’s day a well-established conceptual category of aesthetics. The sublime refers to any spectacle or experience that is so grand and awe-inspiring that it terrifies and, at the same time, exhilarates the beholder.

In terms of its form, this sonnet echoes its theme. The first five lines contain strong medial caesuras—pauses in the middle of the grammatical rhythm of the line noted by commas, semi-colons, other punctuation, or simply natural pauses in the structure of the poetic sentence—which reinforce the tensions Wordsworth sets up in this poem. In its musicality and condensed expression, this poem is a statement about art, time, and change. But it is notably vague as well, as if the poet were unsure of his own response to the experiences upon which he reflects. After all, without the specifics of the poem’s title we would have little awareness of what is meant by “Motions and Means,” and nowhere is the reader given a fuller understanding of what is meant by “old poetic feeling.” We are left to glean these meanings for ourselves, and we may well be left with the impression that the final image of Time smiling “with cheer sublime” is somewhat forced and unconvincing—not quite the magnificent distillation of thought, art, and feeling that Wordsworth achieves in poems about the spiritual power of nature.

SELECTED WORK

Passage to India

By Walt Whitman

1

Singing my days,

Singing the great achievements of the present,

Singing the strong, light works of engineers,

Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)

In the Old World, the east, the Suez canal,

The New by its mighty railroad spann’d,

The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires,

I sound, to commence, the cry, with thee, O soul,

The Past! the Past! the Past!

The Past! the dark, unfathom’d retrospect!

The teeming gulf! the sleepers and the shadows!

The past! the infinite greatness of the past!

For what is the present, after all, but a growth out of the past?

(As a projectile, form’d, impell’d, passing a certain line, still keeps on,

So the present, utterly form’d, impell’d by the past.)

2

Passage, O soul, to India!

Eclaircise the myths Asiatic—the primitive fables.

Not you alone, proud truths of the world!

Nor you alone, ye facts of modern science!

But myths and fables of eld—Asia’s, Africa’s fables!

The far-darting beams of the spirit!—the unloos’d dreams!

The deep diving bibles and legends;

The daring plots of the poets—the elder religions;

—O you temples fairer than lilies, pour’d over by the rising sun!

O you fables, spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known, mounting to heaven!

You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as roses, burnish’d with gold!

Towers of fables immortal, fashion’d from mortal dreams!

You too I welcome, and fully, the same as the rest;

You too with joy I sing.

3

Passage to India!

Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?

The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work,

The people to become brothers and sisters,

The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,

The lands to be welded together.

(A worship new, I sing;

You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours!

You engineers! you architects, machinists, your!

You, not for trade or transportation only,

But in God’s name, and for thy sake, O soul.)

4

Passage to India!

Lo, soul, for thee, of tableaus twain,

I see, in one, the Suez canal initiated, open’d,

I see the procession of steamships, the Empress Eugenie’s leading the van;

I mark, from on deck, the strange landscape, the pure sky, the level sand in the distance;

I pass swiftly the picturesque groups, the workmen gather’d,

The gigantic dredging machines.

In one, again, different, (yet thine, all thine, O soul, the same,)

I see over my own continent the Pacific Railroad, surmounting every barrier;

I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte, carrying freight and passengers;

I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle,

I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world;

I cross the Laramie plains—I note the rocks in grotesque shapes—the buttes;

I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions—the barren, colorless, sage-deserts;

I see in glimpses afar, or towering immediately above me, the great mountains—I see the Wind River and the Wahsatch mountains;

I see the Monument mountain and the Eagle’s Nest—I pass the Promontory—I ascend the Nevadas;

I scan the noble Elk mountain, and wind around its base;

I see the Humboldt range—I thread the valley and cross the river,

I see the clear waters of Lake Tahoe—I see forests of majestic pines,

Or, crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold enchanting mirages of waters and meadows;

Marking through these, and after all, in duplicate slender lines,

Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel,

Tying the Eastern to the Western sea,

The road between Europe and Asia.

(Ah Genoese, thy dream! thy dream!

Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave,

The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream!)

5

Passage to India!

Struggles of many a captain—tales of many a sailor dead!

Over my mood, stealing and spreading they come,

Like clouds and cloudlets in the unreach’d sky.

Along all history, down the slopes,

As a rivulet running, sinking now, and now again to the surface rising,

A ceaseless thought, a varied train—Lo, soul! to thee, thy sight, they rise,

The plans, the voyages again, the expeditions:

Again Vasco de Gama sails forth;

Again the knowledge gain’d, the mariner’s compass,

Lands found, and nations born—thou born, America, (a hemisphere unborn,)

For purpose vast, man’s long probation fill’d,

Thou, rondure of the world, at last accomplish’d.

6

O, vast Rondure, swimming in space!

Cover’d all over with visible power and beauty!

Alternate light and day, and the teeming, spiritual darkness;

Unspeakable, high processions of sun and moon, and countless stars, above;

Below, the manifold grass and waters, animals, mountains, trees;

With inscrutable purpose—some hidden, prophetic intention;

Now, first, it seems, my thought begins to span thee.

Down from the gardens of Asia, descending, radiating,

Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after them,

Wandering, yearning, curious—with restless explorations,

With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish—with never-happy hearts,

With that sad, incessant refrain, Wherefore, unsatisfied Soul? and Whither, O mocking Life?

Ah, who shall soothe these feverish children?

Who justify these restless explorations?

Who speak the secret of impassive Earth?

Who bind it to us? What is this separate Nature, so unnatural?

What is this Earth, to our affections? (unloving earth, without a throb to answer ours;

Cold earth, the place of graves.)

Yet, soul, be sure the first intent remains—and shall be carried out; (Perhaps even now the time has arrived.)

After the seas are all cross’d, (as they seem already cross’d,)

After the great captains and engineers have accomplish’d their work,

After the noble inventors—after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,

Finally shall come the Poet, worthy that name;

The true Son of God shall come, singing his songs.

Then, not your deeds only, O voyagers, O scientists and inventors, shall be justified,

All these hearts, as of fretted children, shall be sooth’d,

All affection shall be fully responded to—the secret shall be told;

All these separations and gaps shall be taken up, and hook’d and link’d together;

The whole Earth—this cold, impassive, voiceless Earth, shall be completely justified;

Trinitas divine shall be gloriously accomplish’d and compacted by the Son of God, the poet,

(He shall indeed pass the straits and conquer the mountains,

He shall double the Cape of Good Hope to some purpose;)

Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more,

The true Son of God shall absolutely fuse them.

7

Year at whose open’d, wide-flung door I sing!

Year of the purpose accomplish’d!

Year of the marriage of continents, climates and oceans!

(No mere Doge of Venice now, wedding the Adriatic;)

I see, O year, in you, the vast terraqueous globe, given, and giving all,

Europe to Asia, Africa join’d, and they to the New World;

The lands, geographies, dancing before you, holding a festival garland,

As brides and bridegrooms hand in hand.

8

Passage to India!

Cooling airs from Caucasus far, soothing cradle of man,

The river Euphrates flowing, the past lit up again.

Lo, soul, the retrospect, brought forward;

The old, most populous, wealthiest of Earth’s lands,

The streams of the Indus and the Ganges, and their many affluents;

(I, my shores of America walking to-day, behold, resuming all,)

The tale of Alexander, on his warlike marches, suddenly dying,

On one side China, and on the other side Persia and Arabia,

To the south the great seas, and the Bay of Bengal;

The flowing literatures, tremendous epics, religions, castes,

Old occult Brahma, interminably far back—the tender and junior Buddha,

Central and southern empires, and all their belongings, possessors,

The wars of Tamerlane, the reign of Aurungzebe,

The traders, rulers, explorers, Moslems, Venetians, Byzantium, the Arabs, Portuguese,

The first travelers, famous yet, Marco Polo, Batouta the Moor,

Doubts to be solv’d, the map incognita, blanks to be fill’d,

The foot of man unstay’d, the hands never at rest,

Thyself, O soul, that will not brook a challenge.

9

The medieval navigators rise before me,

The world of 1492, with its awaken’d enterprise;

Something swelling in humanity now like the sap of the earth in spring,

The sunset splendor of chivalry declining.

And who art thou, sad shade?

Gigantic, visionary, thyself a visionary,

With majestic limbs, and pious, beaming eyes,

Spreading around, with every look of thine, a golden world,

Enhuing it with gorgeous hues.

As the chief histrion,

Down to the footlights walks, in some great scena,

Dominating the rest, I see the Admiral himself,

(History’s type of courage, action, faith;)

Behold him sail from Palos, leading his little fleet;

His voyage behold—his return—his great fame,

His misfortunes, calumniators—behold him a prisoner, chain’d,

Behold his dejection, poverty, death.

(Curious, in time, I stand, noting the efforts of heroes;

Is the deferment long? bitter the slander, poverty, death?

Lies the seed unreck’d for centuries in the ground? Lo! to God’s due occasion,

Uprising in the night, it sprouts, blooms,

And fills the earth with use and beauty.)

10

Passage indeed, O soul, to primal thought!

Not lands and seas alone—thy own clear freshness,

The young maturity of brood and bloom;

To realms of budding bibles.

O soul, repressless, I with thee, and thou with me,

Thy circumnavigation of the world begin;

Of man, the voyage of his mind’s return,

To reason’s early paradise,

Back, back to wisdom’s birth, to innocent intuitions,

Again with fair Creation.

11

O we can wait no longer!

We too take ship, O soul!

Joyous, we too launch out on trackless seas!

Fearless, for unknown shores, on waves of extasy to sail,

Amid the wafting winds, (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul,)

Caroling free—singing our song of God,

Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration.

With laugh, and many a kiss,

(Let others deprecate—let others weep for sin, remorse, humiliation;)

O soul, thou pleasest me—I thee.

Ah, more than any priest, O soul, we too believe in God;

But with the mystery of God we dare not dally.

O soul, thou pleasest me—I thee;

Sailing these seas, or on the hills, or waking in the night,

Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time, and Space, and Death, like waters flowing,

Bear me, indeed, as through the regions infinite,

Whose air I breathe, whose ripples hear—lave me all over;

Bathe me, O God, in thee—mounting to thee,

I and my soul to range in range of thee.

O Thou transcendant!

Nameless—the fibre and the breath!

Light of the light—shedding forth universes—thou centre of them!

Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving!

Thou moral, spiritual fountain! affection’s source! thou reservoir!

(O pensive soul of me! O thirst unsatisfied! waitest not there?

Waitest not haply for us, somewhere there, the Comrade perfect?)

Thou pulse! thou motive of the stars, suns, systems,

That, circling, move in order, safe, harmonious,

Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space!

How should I think—how breathe a single breath—how speak—if, out of myself,

I could not launch, to those, superior universes?

Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,

At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death,

But that I, turning, call to thee, O soul, thou actual Me,

And lo! thou gently masterest the orbs,

Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,

And fillest, swellest full, the vastnesses of Space.

Greater than stars or suns,

Bounding, O soul, thou journeyest forth;

—What love, than thine and ours could wider amplify?

What aspirations, wishes, outvie thine and ours, O soul?

What dreams of the ideal? what plans of purity, perfection, strength?

What cheerful willingness, for others’ sake, to give up all?

For others’ sake to suffer all?

Reckoning ahead, O soul, when thou, the time achiev’d,

(The seas all cross’d, weather’d the capes, the voyage done,)

Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain’d,

As, fill’d with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,

The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.

12

Passage to more than India!

Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?

O Soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like these?

Disportest thou on waters such as these?

Soundest below the Sanscrit and the Vedas?

Then have thy bent unleash’d.

Passage to you, your shores, ye aged fierce enigmas!

Passage to you, to mastership of you, ye strangling problems!

You, strew’d with the wrecks of skeletons, that, living, never reach’d you.

13

Passage to more than India!

O secret of the earth and sky!

Of you, O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers!

Of you, O woods and fields! Of you, strong mountains of my land!

Of you, O prairies! Of you, gray rocks!

O morning red! O clouds! O rain and snows!

O day and night, passage to you!

O sun and moon, and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!

Passage to you!

Passage—immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins!

Away, O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!

Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail!

Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?

Have we not grovell’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes?

Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough?

Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!

Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;

For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,

And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

O my brave soul!

O farther, farther sail!

O daring joy, but safe! Are they not all the seas of God?

O farther, farther, farther sail!

“Passage to India”—Analysis

Walt Whitman was an American poet in an era when American literature was seen by Europeans and by many educated Americans as embryonic. Whitman’s life coincided with numerous momentous changes in American history, including the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the emancipation of the slaves, Lincoln’s assassination, Reconstruction, and the dramatic late-century expansion of railways, steam-powered shipping, and industry. Whitman’s life also overlapped with distinctly American religious and social movements, from Transcendentalism and abolitionism to Mormonism and the women’s movement. Many of these developments found their way into his poetry. “Passage to India” seems to surf on the surging tide of late-nineteenth-century technological and national expansion. Part of Whitman’s collection Leaves of Grass, this is a sweeping paean (poem of praise) to all that is distant and exotic, to historical technological progress and commercial expansion—indeed, to an early stage of globalization (a term often associated with our own age).

Over the course of many lines and many stanzas, the speaker develops the metaphor of India as representative of all that is distant and difficult to attain. The term “India” itself means far more than first appears: not only does it refer to the Indian subcontinent (or South Asia), a region of the globe newly accessible to the West after the completion of the Suez Canal, but it also reminds us of the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the Americas by the early modern navigators and explorers, such as Christopher Columbus, whom Whitman extols as the “Genoese.” (Columbus was from the Italian city of Genoa.) Columbus went to his grave believing he had discovered a western route to the Indies and that the islands of the Caribbean were off the coast of Asia. Columbus and Vasco da Gama are Whitman’s heroes (da Gama was a Portuguese mariner who sailed around the tip of Africa to India and back in 1497), and he sees the technological developments of his own day as the fruition of their earlier attempts to link the continents. Whitman develops the notion of India as a realm of exoticism in this free verse ode to progress.

Photograph of Walt Whitman, 1887. Whitman’s life coincided with numerous momentous changes in American history, and many of these developments found their way into his poetry.

The opening lines of “Passage to India” begin with a characteristically grand self-referential gesture by the poet, who comes out singing, using the present participle of the verb “to sing” in order to draw the reader’s attention to the contrast between “our modern wonders” and all that belongs to “antique” times.

Celebration of the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, Promontory Summit, Utah. In Whitman’s view, “modern wonders,” such as the Transcontinental Railroad, are not simply monuments but are what one might think of as connective technologies, or things which make connections between nations and individuals faster and easier.

Singing my days

Singing the great achievements of the present,

Singing the strong, light works of engineers

Our modern wonders (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)

In the Old World, the east, the Suez canal

The New by its mighty railroad spann’d.

The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires,

I sound, to commence, the cry, with thee, O soul,

The Past! the Past! the Past!

These lines follow no conventional verse form or rigid pattern. The lines and stanzas are of irregular length; the meter tends to be between iambic tetrameter and iambic pentameter. Instead of employing rhyme, the repetition of phonemes at the end of lines of verse, Whitman chooses to repeat specific words, placing great emphasis on “singing” and “the Past.” His free verse suits his majestic theme, the unification of the globe by means of technological transformation. Framing his ode to historical progress between the poles of an Old World that is being transformed and an explosive New World, Whitman celebrates the development of new technologies to bring the peoples of the earth together. The Seven Wonders of the ancient world, he claims, have been “outvied” (outshone) by “the strong, light works of engineers,” with their railroads, canals, trains, and steamships connecting the continents and nations and effectively shrinking the experiential size of the earth. Whitman mentions three of these wonders specifically: the Suez Canal, completed in 1869, which connected the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, and therefore Europe with Asia; the American Transcontinental Railroad, also completed in 1869; and the laying of trans-Atlantic telegraph cables, accomplished several times in the 1850s and 60s.

These “modern wonders,” for Whitman, exceed the great achievements of past civilizations. These three wonders, importantly, are not simply monuments (as were many of the Seven Wonders) but what one might think of as connective technologies, or things which make connections between nations and individuals faster and easier. For Whitman, these pathways become symbolic of the pathways he is attempting to forge poetically between himself and his soul, or himself and the Divine.

Whitman’s outlook on the course of history and the potential for human connection to the self or to the divine is a distinctly sunny one. The dark side of the internationalism and expansion that Whitman celebrates was imperialism, which is never mentioned by name. Throughout the poem the speaker’s tone is notably optimistic. Once upon a time, he suggests, it might have taken captains years to reach India—now, with modern technology, the passage is much quicker. This increased speed, Whitman implies, is part of the divine plan and part of the natural evolution of humanity. Consider the third section, which may remind us of Wordsworth’s “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways”:

Passage to India!

Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?

The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work,

The people to become brothers and sisters,

The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,

The lands to be welded together.

These lines articulate a wildly optimistic vision of global unity. Whitman explicitly claims that “God’s purpose from the first” has been to unite humanity across vast distances so that all will eventually be “connected by network” and “to marry and be given in marriage.” Like Wordsworth’s claim that rail and steam can conquer space, this poem similarly praises innovation for collapsing space and bridging nations and cultures. This exuberant vision of the future sounds prophetic enough: one might reasonably claim that the poet here prophesies such future developments as the World Wide Web and the United Nations (with some hyperbole), and that the poet’s predictions have in some sense come true. The poem is laden with references to technological achievements that were, in the nineteenth century, already shrinking the globe by accelerating travel. Later in the poem, Whitman writes: “All these separations and gaps shall be taken up, and hook’d and link’d together.” This is a vision of a unified, or at least a deeply interconnected, global social order.

Historically speaking, the unification that Whitman describes as “The lands to be welded together” was fast being brought to fruition in his own lifetime—in the form of Imperialism. It was a unification brought about not merely by technical and technological innovation, but also by violence, coercion, expropriation, and multiple forms of exploitation. Should we blame the poet for his cockeyed optimism? Could Whitman have known that America’s westward expansion was wrought by the massive dispossession of Native Americans and Hispanics? Perhaps not. But Whitman’s optimism runs starkly counter to the realities of American slavery and the Civil War, and anyone reading the poem today can be forgiven for detecting a discordant undertone in the verses’ optimism.

Throughout the poem Whitman omits any mention of the violent expropriation of Africans, Asians, Polynesians, Native Americans, and others in the nineteenth-century imperialist scramble that was both cause and effect of the massive expansion he celebrates. To those who would accuse Whitman of ignorance in such a blindly positive celebration of imperialism and colonialism, the takeover of less-developed nations and regions by Europeans and their descendants, we should note that he envisions a world in which the intermarriage of people of different races will become the norm. Yet nonetheless Whitman’s stridently celebratory song of progress as a unifying global force seems excessively optimistic with a theologically inflected rhetoric of total global unification, as in the following lines:

The whole Earth—this cold, impassive, voiceless Earth, shall be completely justified;

Trinitas divine shall be gloriously accomplish’d and compacted by the True Son of God, the poet,

(He shall indeed pass the straits and conquer the mountains,

He shall double the Cape of Good Hope to some purpose;)

Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more,

The true Son of God shall absolutely fuse them.

With these theological claims Whitman insists that the holy trinity of Christianity (the three-in-one of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) “shall be gloriously accomplish’d” such that “Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more.” He concludes these incantatory verses with the remarkable statement, “The True Son of God shall absolutely fuse them.” Fuse what? His answer: “Nature and Man.” The traditional Western binaries of man-versus-nature and nature-versus-culture collapse as the human and the non-human will be united in a new world order of universal sib-linghood—not just between nations but between “Nature and Man.” The sentiment of these lines closely resembles what Wordsworth wrote about Time smiling on human artifice as nature’s “offspring” in “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways.” Whitman offers his version of this statement in sweeping repetitious verses that seem designed to wash away any possibility of dissent—or at least to insist on the point for so long that the reader gives up and moves on.

This work is more a map of what could have been than a story of what actually came about historically. Whitman is a strident apologist for American expansionism and a wild optimist about the possibility of historical progress, which he sees as uniting people and places around the globe. Unlike his contemporary Herman Melville, whose Moby-Dick can be read as a prophetic warning about the course of the American ship of state, Whitman viewed the technologically-enabled expansion of the Euro-American state as an almost unmitigated force for good.

Yet if we choose to read “Passage to India” less contextually, then our response might be quite different, for Whitman’s bold poetic voice and ebullient free verse are nothing short of revolutionary. In particular, we can focus on what Whitman has to say about the self (as one might expect from the poet who wrote “Song of Myself”). For Whitman, technology, nature, innovation, other cultures, the American landscape, and the Suez Canal are but elements contained within his own being. The literal passages to India can be read as allegories for passages Whitman is eager to forge between his poetic “I.” Read in this metaphoric light, Whitman celebrates any technological innovation which would speed this connection. India itself becomes a complex symbol rather than a real geographical cultural-political entity. For many nineteenth-century Westerners, Whitman among them, India represented the East, the Antique, the Orient. The rich and ancient Hindu traditions, as well as associations with the Buddha, made India a prime symbol of all that was spiritually deep and complex. Whitman is clearly drawing on these associations as well as others when he aligns making “passages” to India with forging connections to his own soul.

In addition to his effusiveness and refusal to employ traditional verse forms, several features of Whitman’s style stand out. First, his diction tends to be inventive, and he frequently creates compounds and uses slightly Anglicized French words such as “eclaircise” (meaning “clarify” or “shed light on”) and rondure (for “roundness”). The poet’s inventiveness in this respect cannot be missed. Whitman is shaping not only syntax, line length, and stanza to his purposes, but also words and phrases. It is as if conventional, everyday language and traditional poetic forms were simply insufficient to bear the weight of his message about progress. One cannot help feeling his energy and enthusiasm in “Passage to India.”

SELECTED WORK

A Wind-storm in the Forests

By John Muir

The mountain winds, like the dew and rain, sunshine and snow, are measured and bestowed with love on the forests to develop their strength and beauty. However restricted the scope of other forest influences, that of the winds is universal. The snow bends and trims the upper forests every winter, the lightning strikes a single tree here and there, while avalanches mow down thousands at a swoop as a gardener trims out a bed of flowers. But the winds go to every tree, fingering every leaf and branch and furrowed bole; not one is forgotten; the Mountain Pine towering with outstretched arms on the rugged buttresses of the icy peaks, the lowliest and most retiring tenant of the dells; they seek and find them all, caressing them tenderly, bending them in lusty exercise, stimulating their growth, plucking off a leaf or limb as required, or removing an entire tree or grove, now whispering and cooing through the branches like a sleepy child, now roaring like the ocean; the winds blessing the forests, the forests the winds, with ineffable beauty and harmony as the sure result.

After one has seen pines six feet in diameter bending like grasses before a mountain gale, and ever and anon some giant falling with a crash that shakes the hills, it seems astonishing that any, save the lowest thickset trees, could ever have found a period sufficiently stormless to establish themselves; or, once established, that they should not, sooner or later, have been blown down. But when the storm is over, and we behold the same forests tranquil again, towering fresh and unscathed in erect majesty, and consider what centuries of storms have fallen upon them since they were first planted,—hail, to break the tender seedlings; lightning, to scorch and shatter; snow, winds, and avalanches, to crush and overwhelm,—while the manifest result of all this wild storm-culture is the glorious perfection we behold; then faith in Nature’s forestry is established, and we cease to deplore the violence of her most destructive gales, or of any other storm-implement whatsoever.

There are two trees in the Sierra forests that are never blown down, so long as they continue in sound health. These are the Juniper and the Dwarf Pine of the summit peaks. Their stiff, crooked roots grip the storm-beaten ledges like eagles’ claws, while their lithe, cord-like branches bend round compliantly, offering but slight holds for winds, however violent. The other alpine conifers—the Needle Pine, Mountain Pine, Two-leaved Pine, and Hemlock Spruce—are never thinned out by this agent to any destructive extent, on account of their admirable toughness and the closeness of their growth. In general the same is true of the giants of the lower zones. The kingly Sugar Pine, towering aloft to a height of more than 200 feet, offers a fine mark to storm-winds; but it is not densely foliaged, and its long, horizontal arms swing round compliantly in the blast, like tresses of green, fluent algæ in a brook; while the Silver Firs in most places keep their ranks well together in united strength. The Yellow or Silver Pine is more frequently overturned than any other tree on the Sierra, because its leaves and branches form a larger mass in proportion to its height, while in many places it is planted sparsely, leaving open lanes through which storms may enter with full force. Furthermore, because it is distributed along the lower portion of the range, which was the first to be left bare on the breaking up of the ice-sheet at the close of the glacial winter, the soil it is growing upon has been longer exposed to post-glacial weathering, and consequently is in a more crumbling, decayed condition than the fresher soils farther up the range, and therefore offers a less secure anchorage for the roots.

While exploring the forest zones of Mount Shasta, I discovered the path of a hurricane strewn with thousands of pines of this species. Great and small had been uprooted or wrenched off by sheer force, making a clean gap, like that made by a snow avalanche. But hurricanes capable of doing this class of work are rare in the Sierra, and when we have explored the forests from one extremity of the range to the other, we are compelled to believe that they are the most beautiful on the face of the earth, however we may regard the agents that have made them so.

There is always something deeply exciting, not only in the sounds of winds in the woods, which exert more or less influence over every mind, but in their varied waterlike flow as manifested by the movements of the trees, especially those of the conifers. By no other trees are they rendered so extensively and impressively visible, not even by the lordly tropic palms or tree-ferns responsive to the gentlest breeze. The waving of a forest of the giant Sequoias is indescribably impressive and sublime, but the pines seem to me the best interpreters of winds. They are mighty waving goldenrods, ever in tune, singing and writing wind-music all their long century lives. Little, however, of this noble tree-waving and tree-music will you see or hear in the strictly alpine portion of the forests. The burly Juniper, whose girth sometimes more than equals its height, is about as rigid as the rocks on which it grows. The slender lash-like sprays of the Dwarf Pine stream out in wavering ripples, but the tallest and slenderest are far too unyielding to wave even in the heaviest gales. They only shake in quick, short vibrations. The Hemlock Spruce, however, and the Mountain Pine, and some of the tallest thickets of the Two-leaved species bow in storms with considerable scope and gracefulness. But it is only in the lower and middle zones that the meeting of winds and woods is to be seen in all its grandeur.

One of the most beautiful and exhilarating storms I ever enjoyed in the Sierra occurred in December, 1874, when I happened to be exploring one of the tributary valleys of the Yuba River. The sky and the ground and the trees had been thoroughly rain-washed and were dry again. The day was intensely pure, one of those incomparable bits of California winter, warm and balmy and full of white sparkling sunshine, redolent of all the purest influences of the spring, and at the same time enlivened with one of the most bracing wind-storms conceivable. Instead of camping out, as I usually do, I then chanced to be stopping at the house of a friend. But when the storm began to sound, I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to enjoy it. For on such occasions Nature has always something rare to show us, and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof.

It was still early morning when I found myself fairly adrift. Delicious sunshine came pouring over the hills, lighting the tops of the pines, and setting free a steam of summery fragrance that contrasted strangely with the wild tones of the storm. The air was mottled with pine-tassels and bright green plumes, that went flashing past in the sunlight like birds pursued. But there was not the slightest dustiness, nothing less pure than leaves, and ripe pollen, and flecks of withered bracken and moss. I heard trees falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three minutes; some uprooted, partly on account of the loose, water-soaked condition of the ground; others broken straight across, where some weakness caused by fire had determined the spot. The gestures of the various trees made a delightful study. Young Sugar Pines, light and feathery as squirrel-tails, were bowing almost to the ground; while the grand old patriarchs, whose massive boles had been tried in a hundred storms, waved solemnly above them, their long, arching branches streaming fluently on the gale, and every needle thrilling and ringing and shedding off keen lances of light like a diamond. The Douglas Spruces, with long sprays drawn out in level tresses, and needles massed in a gray, shimmering glow, presented a most striking appearance as they stood in bold relief along the hilltops. The madronños in the dells, with their red bark and large glossy leaves tilted every way, reflected the sunshine in throbbing spangles like those one so often sees on the rippled surface of a glacier lake. But the Silver Pines were now the most impressively beautiful of all. Colossal spires 200 feet in height waved like supple goldenrods chanting and bowing low as if in worship, while the whole mass of their long, tremulous foliage was kindled into one continuous blaze of white sun-fire. The force of the gale was such that the most steadfast monarch of them all rocked down to its roots with a motion plainly perceptible when one leaned against it. Nature was holding high festival, and every fiber of the most rigid giants thrilled with glad excitement.

I drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and motion, across many a glen, from ridge to ridge; often halting in the lee of a rock for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees,—Spruce, and Fir, and Pine, and leafless Oak,—and even the infinitely gentle rustle of the withered grasses at my feet. Each was expressing itself in its own way,—singing its own song, and making its own peculiar gestures,—manifesting a richness of variety to be found in no other forest I have yet seen. The coniferous woods of Canada, and the Carolinas, and Florida, are made up of trees that resemble one another about as nearly as blades of grass, and grow close together in much the same way. Coniferous trees, in general, seldom possess individual character, such as is manifest among Oaks and Elms. But the California forests are made up of a greater number of distinct species than any other in the world. And in them we find, not only a marked differentiation into special groups, but also a marked individuality in almost every tree, giving rise to storm effects indescribably glorious.

Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge in the neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my ear close to the Æolian music of its topmost needles. But under the circumstances the choice of a tree was a serious matter. One whose instep was not very strong seemed in danger of being blown down, or of being struck by others in case they should fall; another was branchless to a considerable height above the ground, and at the same time too large to be grasped with arms and legs in climbing; while others were not favorably situated for clear views. After cautiously casting about, I made choice of the tallest of a group of Douglas Spruces that were growing close together like a tuft of grass, no one of which seemed likely to fall unless all the rest fell with it. Though comparatively young, they were about 100 feet high, and their lithe, brushy tops were rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy. Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobo-link on a reed.

In its widest sweeps my tree-top described an arc of from twenty to thirty degrees, but I felt sure of its elastic temper, having seen others of the same species still more severely tried—bent almost to the ground indeed, in heavy snows—without breaking a fiber. I was therefore safe, and free to take the wind into my pulses and enjoy the excited forest from my superb outlook. The view from here must be extremely beautiful in any weather. Now my eye roved over the piny hills and dales as over fields of waving grain, and felt the light running in ripples and broad swelling undulations across the valleys from ridge to ridge, as the shining foliage was stirred by corresponding waves of air. Oftentimes these waves of reflected light would break up suddenly into a kind of beaten foam, and again, after chasing one another in regular order, they would seem to bend forward in concentric curves, and disappear on some hillside, like sea-waves on a shelving shore. The quantity of light reflected from the bent needles was so great as to make whole groves appear as if covered with snow, while the black shadows beneath the trees greatly enhanced the effect of the silvery splendor.

Excepting only the shadows there was nothing somber in all this wild sea of pines. On the contrary, notwithstanding this was the winter season, the colors were remarkably beautiful. The shafts of the pine and libocedrus were brown and purple, and most of the foliage was well tinged with yellow; the laurel groves, with the pale undersides of their leaves turned upward, made masses of gray; and then there was many a dash of chocolate color from clumps of manzanita, and jet of vivid crimson from the bark of the madroños, while the ground on the hillsides, appearing here and there through openings between the groves, displayed masses of pale purple and brown.

The sounds of the storm corresponded gloriously with this wild exuberance of light and motion. The profound bass of the naked branches and boles booming like waterfalls; the quick, tense vibrations of the pine-needles, now rising to a shrill, whistling hiss, now falling to a silky murmur; the rustling of laurel groves in the dells, and the keen metallic click of leaf on leaf—all this was heard in easy analysis when the attention was calmly bent.

The varied gestures of the multitude were seen to fine advantage, so that one could recognize the different species at a distance of several miles by this means alone, as well as by their forms and colors, and the way they reflected the light. All seemed strong and comfortable, as if really enjoying the storm, while responding to its most enthusiastic greetings. We hear much nowadays concerning the universal struggle for existence, but no struggle in the common meaning of the word was manifest here; no recognition of danger by any tree; no deprecation; but rather an invincible gladness as remote from exultation as from fear.

I kept my lofty perch for hours, frequently closing my eyes to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past. The fragrance of the woods was less marked than that produced during warm rain, when so many balsamic buds and leaves are steeped like tea; but, from the chafing of resiny branches against each other, and the incessant attrition of myriads of needles, the gale was spiced to a very tonic degree. And besides the fragrance from these local sources there were traces of scents brought from afar. For this wind came first from the sea, rubbing against its fresh, briny waves, then distilled through the redwoods, threading rich ferny gulches, and spreading itself in broad undulating currents over many a flower-enameled ridge of the coast mountains, then across the golden plains, up the purple foot-hills, and into these piny woods with the varied incense gathered by the way.

Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or little we may be able to read them; telling their wanderings even by their scents alone. Mariners detect the flowery perfume of land-winds far at sea, and sea-winds carry the fragrance of dulse and tangle far inland, where it is quickly recognized, though mingled with the scents of a thousand land-flowers. As an illustration of this, I may tell here that I breathed sea-air on the Firth of Forth, in Scotland, while a boy; then was taken to Wisconsin, where I remained nineteen years; then, without in all this time having breathed one breath of the sea, I walked quietly, alone, from the middle of the Mississippi Valley to the Gulf of Mexico, on a botanical excursion, and while in Florida, far from the coast, my attention wholly bent on the splendid tropical vegetation about me, I suddenly recognized a sea-breeze, as it came sifting through the palmettos and blooming vine-tangles, which at once awakened and set free a thousand dormant associations, and made me a boy again in Scotland, as if all the intervening years had been annihilated.

Most people like to look at mountain rivers, and bear them in mind; but few care to look at the winds, though far more beautiful and sublime, and though they become at times about as visible as flowing water. When the north winds in winter are making upward sweeps over the curving summits of the High Sierra, the fact is sometimes published with flying snow-banners a mile long. Those portions of the winds thus embodied can scarce be wholly invisible, even to the darkest imagination. And when we look around over an agitated forest, we may see something of the wind that stirs it, by its effects upon the trees. Yonder it descends in a rush of water-like ripples, and sweeps over the bending pines from hill to hill. Nearer, we see detached plumes and leaves, now speeding by on level currents, now whirling in eddies, or, escaping over the edges of the whirls, soaring aloft on grand, upswelling domes of air, or tossing on flame-like crests. Smooth, deep currents, cascades, falls, and swirling eddies, sing around every tree and leaf, and over all the varied topography of the region with telling changes of form, like mountain rivers conforming to the features of their channels.

After tracing the Sierra streams from their fountains to the plains, marking where they bloom white in falls, glide in crystal plumes, surge gray and foam-filled in boulder-choked gorges, and slip through the woods in long, tranquil reaches—after thus learning their language and forms in detail, we may at length hear them chanting all together in one grand anthem, and comprehend them all in clear inner vision, covering the range like lace. But even this spectacle is far less sublime and not a whit more substantial than what we may behold of these storm-streams of air in the mountain woods.

We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not extensive ones, it is true; but our own little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings—many of them not so much.

When the storm began to abate, I dismounted and sauntered down through the calming woods. The storm-tones died away, and, turning toward the east, I beheld the countless hosts of the forests hushed and tranquil, towering above one another on the slopes of the hills like a devout audience. The setting sun filled them with amber light, and seemed to say, while they listened, “My peace I give unto you.”

As I gazed on the impressive scene, all the so called ruin of the storm was forgotten, and never before did these noble woods appear so fresh, so joyous, so immortal.

John Muir, c. 1912.

Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

“A Wind-storm in the Forests”—Analysis

Originally the tenth chapter of his book The Mountains of California, published in 1894, “A Wind-storm in the Forests” describes Muir’s experiences with wild weather in the woods of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. This is the only text in this section that is not in verse; it is a prose narrative recounting an episode in the writer’s life. Yet it is poetic prose, highly descriptive and laden with adjective phrases and vivid descriptions. Muir’s writing at its best is characterized by meticulously detailed observations of natural phenomena growing out of an exhilarated first-person narrative. An enthusiastic field naturalist, Muir not only evinces great familiarity with the flora and fauna of the regions he describes, but he also demonstrates an ecological mindset. Ecology is the study of living things and their interactions with each other and their physical environment; it is a systemic and holistic science. Muir’s ecological mindset can be seen in the connections he makes between living things and material forces—between the wind and the forest, water in its various states and all living things—and in the distinctions he makes between species and phenomena. A quick glance at this selection, for example, reveals his knowledge of the coniferous trees of the Sierra Nevadas: he mentions “Needle Pine, Mountain Pine, Two-leaved Pine, and Hemlock Spruce,” as well as “the kingly Sugar Pine, towering aloft to a height of more than 200 feet.”

In this descriptive prose piece Muir gives the reader a taste of the sublime in a very different guise than Wordsworth does in “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways.” After a brief general discussion of the creative force of “the mountain winds,” which is the central topic of the narrative, in which he illustrates the power of wind to shape mountain landscapes, Muir then recounts an episode from his own life in which he personally experienced the wind’s power firsthand. He begins the narrative proper by informing the reader, “One of the most beautiful and exhilarating storms I ever enjoyed in the Sierra occurred in December, 1874, when I happened to be exploring one of the tributary valleys of the Yuba River.” He later ascends a tree in order to witness the power of the wind. Why does he climb a tree at the start of a squall? The answer, as Muir puts it, is simple: to “get my ear close to the Æolian music of its topmost needles.” He wishes to hear the divine sound of the wind rushing through the pine needles. For Muir, this is a sound that evokes classical poetry. (The Aeolian Harp is an important part of Homer’s Odyssey.)

John Muir hiking in his beloved Sierra Nevada Mountains. Muir’s writing reveals his unflagging commitment to getting as close to the raw forces of nature as he possibly can.

Ultimately, Muir wishes to get closer to the Creator of the forests and mountains he loves. What the reader finds arresting about this account of his travels is his unflagging commitment to getting as close to the raw forces of nature as he possibly can. His description of what follows details the effects of nature’s raw energy:

The air was mottled with pine-tassels and bright green plumes, that went flashing past in the sunlight like birds pursued. But there was not the slightest dustiness, nothing less pure than leaves, and ripe pollen, and flecks of withered bracken and moss. I heard trees falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three minutes; some uprooted, partly on account of the loose, water-soaked condition of the ground; others broken straight across, where some weakness caused by fire had determined the spot. The gestures of the various trees made a delightful study. Young Sugar Pines, light and feathery as squirrel-tails, were bowing almost to the ground; while the grand old patriarchs, whose massive boles had been tried in a hundred storms, waved solemnly above them, their long, arching branches streaming fluently on the gale, and every needle thrilling and ringing and shedding off keen lances of light like a diamond. The Douglas Spruces, with long sprays drawn out in level tresses, and needles massed in a gray, shimmering glow, presented a most striking appearance as they stood in bold relief along the hilltops. The madronños in the dells, with their red bark and large glossy leaves tilted every way, reflected the sunshine in throbbing spangles like those one so often sees on the rippled surface of a glacier lake. But the Silver Pines were now the most impressively beautiful of all. Colossal spires 200 feet in height waved like supple goldenrods chanting and bowing low as if in worship, while the whole mass of their long, tremulous foliage was kindled into one continuous blaze of white sun-fire. The force of the gale was such that the most steadfast monarch of them all rocked down to its roots with a motion plainly perceptible when one leaned against it. Nature was holding high festival, and every fiber of the most rigid giants thrilled with glad excitement.

This passage can be described as anthropomorphic yet not anthropocentric. Anthropomorphism animates this passage and can be found in nearly every sentence. As we know, in reality nature does not actually hold “high festival,” and calling trees “giants” that “thrilled with excitement” is a near-personification (like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ents in The Lord of the Rings). Nevertheless, Muir’s anthropomorphic description of the landscape seems entirely appropriate here; indeed, as a rhetorical strategy it works exceptionally well. For Muir captures the excitement and spiritual exultation that he felt when experiencing the powerful energy of a storm in the Sierras. He also keeps his attention directed at natural phenomena and projects his own emotions onto the forested landscape. Can the trees genuinely be said to be “thrilled with glad excitement”? No. But the speaker is: he describes himself, his own emotional response to the situation. But the speaker is far less interested in himself—or in anything else human—than he is in the nature that surrounds him. He risks his own health and safety to witness the “high festival” that he feels “Nature” holds during the wind storm.

Part of Muir’s appeal as a writer lies in the way his writing style captures the energy of natural forces—a meteorological disturbance and the trees’ response to it. This text, then, seems an excellent example of this year’s curricular theme, for the innovative theme that Muir offers is how the energy of natural forces can invigorate and renew our own lives. In a storm in the Sierras, Muir hears “the passionate music” of nature and learns how each tree “express[es] itself in its own way.” For John Muir, the citizens of the vegetable kingdom have individuality, character, and something very special to say—if only we will listen, as he does in passages such as the following.

I drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and motion, across many a glen, from ridge to ridge; often halting in the lee of a rock for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees,—Spruce, and Fir, and Pine, and leafless Oak,—and even the infinitely gentle rustle of the withered grasses at my feet. Each was expressing itself in its own way,—singing its own song, and making its own peculiar gestures,—manifesting a richness of variety to be found in no other forest I have yet seen. The coniferous woods of Canada, and the Carolinas, and Florida, are made up of trees that resemble one another about as nearly as blades of grass, and grow close together in much the same way. Coniferous trees, in general, seldom possess individual character, such as is manifest among Oaks and Elms. But the California forests are made up of a greater number of distinct species than any other in the world. And in them we find, not only a marked differentiation into special groups, but also a marked individuality in almost every tree, giving rise to storm effects indescribably glorious.

Here again we see Muir taking pains to distinguish between tree species, between coniferous trees (softwoods) and deciduous trees (hardwoods), and we witness his deep understanding of the vegetable life and ecosystems of North America, from “Canada, and the Carolinas, and Florida” to California. Muir eschews anthropocentrism throughout this prose narrative, choosing instead to celebrate the energy that he finds outside of human civilization and outside of himself. In so doing, he becomes like a tiny figure in a vast landscape painting, like those of Albert Bierstadt, another artist and traveler who loved the landscapes of the American West. Or, to make a similar comparison, we might think of the photographs of Ansel Adams, whose exquisite shots capture the stark beauty of the California landscape, drawing the viewer outside the realm of the human-created.

Thus, anthropomorphism paradoxically serves to resist anthropocentrism, and the reader finds herself or himself pulled into vivid verbal landscapes painted with sweeping brushstrokes as well as minute attention to detail, as in the following passage:

In its widest sweeps my tree-top described an arc of from twenty to thirty degrees, but I felt sure of its elastic temper, having seen others of the same species still more severely tried—bent almost to the ground indeed, in heavy snows—without breaking a fiber. I was therefore safe, and free to take the wind into my pulses and enjoy the excited forest from my superb outlook. The view from here must be extremely beautiful in any weather. Now my eye roved over the piny hills and dales as over fields of waving grain, and felt the light running in ripples and broad swelling undulations across the valleys from ridge to ridge, as the shining foliage was stirred by corresponding waves of air. Oftentimes these waves of reflected light would break up suddenly into a kind of beaten foam, and again, after chasing one another in regular order, they would seem to bend forward in concentric curves, and disappear on some hillside, like sea-waves on a shelving shore. The quantity of light reflected from the bent needles was so great as to make whole groves appear as if covered with snow, while the black shadows beneath the trees greatly enhanced the effect of the silvery splendor.

Here again the trajectory of Muir’s writing pulls the reader outside of human preoccupations and invites her (or him) to witness a spectacle of transcendent beauty—the spectacle itself, of course, depicted in Muir’s prose. Muir’s attention to details of light, movement, color, and other aesthetic effects begins, after a time, to seem somewhat obsessive, and we might find ourselves suspecting that there is more to his description than meets the eye. And indeed there is. For at the end of the storm and of Muir’s description of it, the tone of the prose becomes distinctly religious—or at least spiritually tinged. The storm ends in tranquility, and the now-quiet trees are likened to “a devout audience.” Suddenly, we are in church, or in Nature’s chapel, and “the setting sun,” in Muir’s words, “seemed to say, while they [the trees] listened, “My peace I give unto you.” The Judeo-Christian God is, of course, associated with light (from the first book of Genesis). Muir points us to this association, yet he alters the traditional religious scenario of a congregation worshipping in a human-made church or temple, instead locating the holy in the wild outdoors. The trees become congregants and the sun a beneficent deity, exemplifying the Romantic movement’s “natural supernaturalism,” its nature worship. In the end, Muir’s voice, the speaker of what in the end looks very much like a prose poem, becomes a witness to immanence (the presence of the divine in the material world): “never before did these noble woods appear so fresh, so joyous, so immortal.”

There is more than a hint of pastoral in this piece, especially in its closing paragraphs, where the narrative voice modulates into a more-than-usually reverential tone. The suggestion of pastoral emerges when, at the end of the narrative, we realize that the narrator (who we can identify with Muir himself), having left the urban world of civilization, finds in the green zone of the woods and mountains a kind of alternative community: the trees themselves become his fellows. In so doing, he finds companionship (that of his beloved woods), pleasure (a high-energy experience), much to think and write about, leisure (or at least recreation), and peace. These are some of the hallmarks of pastoral.

SELECTED WORK

There Will Come Soft Rains

By Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools, singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

“There Will Come Soft Rains”—Analysis

This poem’s renown owes largely to its use in the title of a short story by Ray Bradbury, a mid-twentieth-century author known for his science fiction. It is a compact poem about the ending of human life and the continuation of the rest of the natural world, a polished yet bitter judgment of a world (in Wordsworth’s sense of the term) engaged in the zero-sum game of world war.

The technical features of the poem, rhyme, meter, alliteration, and assonance, all seem at odds with the fact that this poem imagines a future in which “mankind perished utterly.”

Only twelve lines long, this poem puts the reader in a setting marked by familiar emblems of nature—rain, “the smell of the ground,” frogs, plum trees, and robins. We are very much at home in the first six lines; then, suddenly, everything changes with the mention of “the war.” Then, in the next six lines, Teasdale entertains the idea of a world without human beings—a post-apocalyptic world that retains a trace of human civilization in the form of “a low fence-wire” without any people left. Teasdale uses a series of emblematic natural beings, from swallows to “Spring herself,” as utterly apathetic witnesses to a future where “mankind perished utterly.”

Notice the soothing sounds of the first line, and notice that human agency has been removed. The “soft rains” are captured by the soft vowel sounds and liquid consonants: “will” and “smell” gently balance each other on either side of the middle of the first line, and “come,” “soft,” and “ground” all suggest a gentle natural setting. By line two we detect a pattern of consonance (repetition of consonant sounds, but not quite alliteration) in “will,” “smell,” “swallows,” and “circling,” all of which contain notable liquids (“l” sounds). Lines three through five continue this pattern of liquids, with “pools,” “wild plum,” tremulous,” “will,” “whistling,” and “low,” right up to the “will” near the middle of the fifth line. Moreover, the adjectives, from “soft” and “shimmering” to “wild” and “tremulous,” all evoke a lovely natural setting.

Poetic devices abound. The first line contains a synesthesia, the description of one form of sense perception by reference to another. In this instance the poet describes “swallows circling with their shimmering sound.” Sound does not shimmer; visual objects do (or can). In the eleventh line we encounter an easily recognized metaphor, a personification: “Spring herself, when she woke at dawn.” Seasons do not, strictly speaking, sleep. Yet this personification seems particularly vivid because it appears directly following the thought of what might happen “If mankind perished utterly.” Thus, we have the very presence of humanity being replaced by a personified season, Spring, that has been anthropomorphized.

Poet Sara Teasdale. In her poem “There Will Come Soft Rains,” Teasdale uses poetry to cast a skeptical look at the destruction of which human beings are capable.

Photo courtesy of the Macmillian Co.

There is a hint of anthropomorphism in line five: “Robins will wear their feathery fire,” along with an elegant metaphor (the robins in question are not, of course, on fire, but the description is apt). The peaceful mood of rural retreat that emerges is reinforced by the use of alliteration (repetition of initial consonant sounds). Lines one, two, four, five, and six all contain alliteration. See if you can pick them out. Of these, “Swallows circling/ sound,” Feathery/ fire,” and “Whistling/ whims” stand out as particularly evocative combinations.

Strong medial caesuras make us pause in lines three, seven, and nine. A caesura is a pause in the middle of a line of poetry, and as such it gives the poet a chance to change directions or shift ideas, tone, or even meter. A caesura creates a kind of pivot-point or “reset” button for the poet and the reader. When a poem contains many caesuras, it is often a sign of some thematic conflict within the poem or within the speaker’s psyche. This poem contains three strong caesuras (those mentioned), marked by commas, but weaker caesuras can be found in the first two lines, where just a hint of a pause appears mid-line. When we reach the end of the poem and realize that we’ve just read a post-apocalyptic vision, we might be astonished at how the end of humanity crept up on us. At this point it behooves us to read the poem again; if we do, we might begin to suspect that Teasdale has sort of tiptoed up on us in the first few lines, with just a hint of tension in those barely present medial caesuras in the first two lines, only to whack us with the disclosures of lines six through twelve.

Teasdale’s poem subtly uses poetic technique to amplify its thematic content, inviting us to imagine humanity’s demise in the deftest and most compact of verses. In the end, we are left gaping at the trick, for we realize the momentousness of the topic while very likely not having seen it coming. The theme, apocalypse, hardly fits the form, and the poem’s opening nowhere indicates that it will serve up such a powerful and terrifying image. The poem’s success lies in this deft trickery: to portray calamity as a matter of little consequence to nature in verses that barely register the calamity either. The natural world, here represented by flora, fauna, weather, seasons, and diurnal rhythms, simply ignores the end of human civilization; so, too, in its musical imperturbability, does the language of the poem. No trumpets blare, and cymbals don’t crash. There are no explosions. The end has simply happened without fanfare.

Wars often begin with great fanfare, and the entry of the United States into the First World War was a momentous event (it took this country nearly three years to enter the war after it had begun in Europe in 1914). The war was given such grandiose titles as “The War to End All Wars” and “The Great War”; for many, it was an event of such magnitude that nothing else—certainly no prior military conflict—could compare. Significant parts of Europe were completely destroyed as many nations were pulled into the conflict. The global balance of power shifted; empires and nation-states were transformed. Moreover, World War One produced a variety of excellent poetry, much of which reflects the physical and psychological realities of soldiers. One might therefore expect a poem about “the war” to emphasize the magnitude and scope of the conflict, yet Teasdale’s tiny lyric poem is profoundly deflationary. By ignoring the vast investment of human effort and ingenuity in the Great War (tanks, chemical weapons, flame throwers, and airplanes were all used, and the loss of life was enormous), the poet suggests that nature’s failure to notice “the war” might mean that, for all its sound and fury, the conflict means nothing to the denizens of nature. Teasdale uses poetry to cast a skeptical look at the destruction of which human beings are capable.

SELECTED WORK

The Horses

By Edwin Muir

Barely a twelvemonth after

The seven days war that put the world to sleep,

Late in the evening the strange horses came.

By then we had made our covenant with silence,

But in the first few days it was so still

We listened to our breathing and were afraid.

On the second day

The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.

On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,

Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day

A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter

Nothing. The radios dumb;

And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,

And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms

All over the world. But now if they should speak,

If on a sudden they should speak again,

If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,

We would not listen, we would not let it bring

That old bad world that swallowed its children quick

At one great gulp. We would not have it again.

Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,

Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,

And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.

The tractors lie about our fields; at evening

They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.

We leave them where they are and let them rust:

‘They’ll molder away and be like other loam.’

We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,

Long laid aside. We have gone back

Far past our fathers’ land.

And then, that evening

Late in the summer the strange horses came.

We heard a distant tapping on the road,

A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again

And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.

We saw the heads

Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.

We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time

To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us

As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.

Or illustrations in a book of knights.

We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,

Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent

By an old command to find our whereabouts

And that long-lost archaic companionship.

In the first moment we had never a thought

That they were creatures to be owned and used.

Among them were some half a dozen colts

Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,

Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.

Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads

But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.

Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

“The Horses”—Analysis

Among the admirers of Edwin Muir’s “The Horses” is former Poet Laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky. In Pinsky’s words:

Edwin Muir (1887–1959) is a mysteriously neglected, gorgeous, and emotionally penetrating poet. Of all the many pieces of writing spurred by the Cold War and the threat of nuclear apocalypse, and of the other kinds of 20th century apocalyptic writing, his poem “The Horses” may be the most effective, perhaps because it is the most calm and gentle. The plainness of the writing, the persuasive speech rhythms under the almost hidden iambic pulse, manifest immense art, culminating in a last line that could be incised in stone.⁷⁴

In Pinsky’s summation “The Horses” is a poem that subtly questions some of our deepest assumptions about progress in lines that quietly resonate long after they have been read.

“The Horses” begins with imagery evocative of a final, catastrophic military conflict and ends with a vision of a post-industrial future in which humans and animals are reconciled. In the opening lines the emblems of modernity, from a warship to radios, feature prominently, all of them associated with destruction and devastation—an alienation built into the very fabric of urban-industrial civilization. The closing lines imagine the end of that alienation, which has been clearly associated with technology and artifice.

Thus, “The Horses” can be read as antithetical in tone and outlook to Wordsworth’s “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways” and to Whitman’s “Passage to India,” for the “motions and means” of progress effect not a celebratory passage to India, but the end of the world. Oddly enough, however, even though its dark tone could hardly contrast more with Whitman’s effusive one, “The Horses” shares with “Passage to India” a prophetic vision of a future world in which alienation and difference are reconciled. But whereas for Whitman it is technological progress that shall unite the world, for Muir it is an apocalypse that smashes “the old bad world” and reconciles humanity with the animal kingdom—and with itself. The historical gap between the developing nineteenth-century world of Wordsworth and Whitman and Edwin Muir’s twentieth-century experience is enormous, as is the gap in sensibility between these poets.

It is clear from the start that this is a meditation on the end of the world, more specifically on the Apocalypse, an event predicted in the Revelation of John, the last book of the New Testament. Derived from a word meaning “revelation,” apocalypse has several meanings in the Bible. In the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible), it refers to a moment of intense spiritual insight; following John, however, the term has come to mean, for devout Christians, the final and complete victory of good over evil. For others, however, the term has a distinctly negative overtone, and its widespread use to describe a possible nuclear holocaust during the Cold War has imbued the term with a distinctly negative aura. For an apocalypse refers to the end of the world, or, to use a religious phrase, the end of days.

Edwin Muir’s use of horses evokes a common feature of environmental writing—the dream of a more authentic connection with animals.

The speaker of “The Horses” retrospectively describes the events of an apocalypse; it is, thus, an explicitly post-apocalyptic poem. But the apocalypse in question is not the end of all things; it turns out, we learn, that this particular ending is merely the conclusion of a certain world order—one that is clearly evocative of urban-industrial modernity, with its war machine, internal-combustion-engine powered vehicles (tractors, airplanes, a warship), and attitude of dread. Herein lies the redemptive aspect of this poem, for it ultimately offers an optimistic vision of a potential post-industrial, radically postmodern recovery by returning to a pastoral mode of life in which humans and animals collaborate. The term “pastoral” is a tricky one, as the scholar Paul Alpers has argued in a book on the subject, but in general it refers to a way of life based on herding animals.⁷⁵ Pastoral art and literature derives from the idealization of a rural way of life—the lives of shepherds and shepherdesses in rural Greece and Rome. “The Horses” departs from pastoral conventions, but it emphatically ends with a vision of human-animal pastoral collaboration.

In the opening line the speaker uses somewhat archaic diction: a year is a “twelvemonth.” The apocalyptic war is called “the seven days war,” lasting the same amount of time as the Biblical creation of the world (counting the sabbath, or seventh day, a rest day). But the diction is not archaic throughout the poem; indeed, it is powerfully descriptive in an understated way: “no answer” and “the radios dumb.” The post-war world seems at once futuristic and archaic, as if the apocalypse had indeed collapsed time without ending absolutely everything. The arrival of the horses occurs in a reverential description evocative of classical literature: the horses arrive “As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield,” evoking symbolic shields in classical literature, such as the shield of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad or of Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid.

We should pay particular attention to the figurative work being done by horses; after all, the title itself insists we do so. What do the horses stand for? What do they mean? What do they suggest or evoke? Traditionally, in Christian culture, the symbology of the apocalypse has included four horsemen who signal the end of days with their arrival. Thus, they remind us of the Biblical end of days, an ominous and awful (as well as awesome) thing. But it would be a mistake to end here, for that is not all that Muir’s horses represent. They are also associated with new life, “half a dozen colts/ Dropped in some wilderness,” and, clearly, with wilderness, which reappears in the “broken world” that follows the catastrophic war. Thus, after the end of “That old bad world that swallowed its children quick” (line 19) a new set of horses arrives on the scene, not the harbingers of the end of the world this time, but just the opposite—emissaries of a future in which humans and animals reunite, but a future which is like the distant past (before the war that destroys civilization), having reestablished “that long lost archaic companionship” of tilth and pastoralism—of working together in the fields.

The term the speaker uses to describe the new human-horse symbiosis is “companionship,” a word that derives from a Latin compound for sharing bread (cum-panis: “with bread”); thus, the relationship between horses and humans that Muir imagines is an intimate one in which humans and animals live together and share their sustenance—literally, but also metaphorically. Muir thus suggests that a radically changed world order might lead to a reemergence of a more pastoral way of life, and this possibility emerges like a dream emerging from a nightmare in the poem’s closing lines.

Muir’s use of horses evokes a common feature of environmental writing, which is the dream of a more authentic connection with animals, or, as is the more common term in contemporary Animal Studies writings, “non-human animals,” a phrase which emphasizes the fact that humans too are animals. The horses’ return indicates that humans are saved. This is not, of course, a Christian version of the apocalypse, for Christianity stipulates that it is Christ who will return and redeem humanity at the end of days. Here it is not Christ but horses that provide redemption and salvation for humankind. The horses will help these post-apocalyptic humans plow their fields and share their struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world and will help provide humans with the bread they will break with their animal companions. This is a rather literal, and quite animal, vision of a post-Christian communion.

The apocalypse Muir imagines is therefore not all bad, as the poem’s last line suggests, for the conclusion of urban-industrial modernity allows for the birth of a new world order that harkens back to a greener world. The horses that replace the emblematic tractors (which represent industrial modernity) do not merely symbolize the end of the world. They also stand for a return to an older, rural way of life. As the poem makes this point, “We have gone back Far past our fathers’ land.” In doing so, the speaker suggests, the post-apocalyptic civilization that emerges leaves behind material acquisitiveness and private property: “we had never a thought That they were creatures to be owned and used.” Rather, the new companionship with horses incorporates something long missing from civilization, a trace of “wilderness” that remains in a relationship of “free servitude [that] still can pierce our hearts.”

Here again the poet alludes to Christ, and again the allusion is heterodox. Christ was wounded as he carried the cross to Golgotha, stabbed in the side by a Roman soldier. In “The Horses,” Muir’s redeemers, the horses themselves, become so close to their human companions that a new kind of passion emerges, a closeness that goes to the heart. Perhaps, in the end, this poem offers a radical counter-version of progress in which the destruction of warfaring urban-industrial modern civilization contains the seeds of an edenic redemption of human and animal labor and companionship.

SELECTED WORK

Carmel Point

By Robinson Jeffers

The extraordinary patience of things!

This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—

How beautiful when we first beheld it,

Unbroken field of poppy and lupine walled with clean cliffs;

No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,

Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rock-heads—

Now the spoiler has come: does it care?

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty

Lives in the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

From the Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Volume 3, Edited by Tim Hunt. © 1987 by the Jeffers Literary Properties. Reprinted with the permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org.

“Carmel Point”—Analysis

From his hand-built stone tower on the Central Coast of California, where he lived with his wife and soul mate, Robinson Jeffers did not look positively at the development of the land to support the burgeoning mid-twentieth-century population. In “Carmel Point” he develops a tension between “this beautiful place” and a newly constructed “crop of suburban houses.” This poem expresses a sentiment that may be familiar to all of us: dismay at the transformation of a beloved landscape by the forces of progress, here depicted as the literal advance of human civilization. Jeffers sees human progress, the growth of civilization, as an incursion into the coastal landscape that he loved.

This brief lyric poem, just one line longer than a sonnet (fifteen lines; sonnets have fourteen) bespeaks an elegiac and stoical response to the encroachment of humanity upon a spectacularly beautiful landscape. Human development, in the form of “a crop of suburban houses” has “defaced” a “beautiful place,” transforming it from a pastoral region (“two or three horses pasturing,/ Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rock-heads”) to something more unsightly, a place in which the human “tide” has encroached on the region.

The word “crop” stands out in the second line of the poem because the suggestion that the land might have grown the houses as the nearby Salinas Valley grows fruit only heightens the sense of encroachment. These structures are clearly at odds with the appeal of “this beautiful place,” which has changed for the worse over time. For the speaker, the beauty of the place belongs to the past—“How beautiful when we first beheld it”—in contrast to which the unsightly present seems unnatural. The stark binary that divides the new houses from the beauty of the place also separates the “tide” of “people” who intrude from “the pristine beauty” that “Lives in the very grain of the granite.” For Jeffers the elements of the natural world are permanent and immutable: the pristine beauty preserved in the granite, as well as “the endless ocean that climbs our cliff,” are safe because they are allegedly timeless.

Robinson Jeffers at Hawk Tower on the Carmel coast.

Photo/John Stanton, courtesy of Tor House Foundation.

As in Edwin Muir’s “The Horses,” here too the presence of farm animals symbolizes a bucolic world, one that is unencumbered by the trappings of human civilization—and one that is being crowded out by human settlement. The horses and “milch cows” (dairy cows) seem to be part of the landscape, even if they, too, are signs of human encroachment (cows and horses having been imported by Euro-American settlers). Clearly, the “spoiler” that “has come” (line 7) refers to the intruding houses, yet we can discern in the landscape description that the signs of human presence have been a feature of the place for a lot longer.

The speaker self-reflexively uses the first-person plural pronoun “we” instead of the more typical singular pronoun “I”. This lexical decision stands out and is somewhat disconcerting. Is the reader meant to understand it as the Royal We, or a plural we? Monarchs use the Royal We (consider the first scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear, for example). Is the speaker a king? Or does he (it?) speak for some kind of group? If so, who or what? The answer seems to be a little bit of both: the speaker in “Carmel Point” has the tone of a self-appointed monarch of the landscape who speaks for the features of the landscape itself—the “poppy and lupine walled with clean cliffs,” “the outcrop rock-heads,” the “grain of the granite.” This interpretation appears confirmed in the closing lines of the poem, where the pronoun “we” becomes insistent even as the speaker announces an affiliation with the landscape over humanity.

The poem ends with a statement of resolution that seems almost militant in its resistance to the encroaching tide of human development: “We must uncenter our minds from ourselves,” the speaker resolves, and “We must unhumanize our views a little,” as if an inward counter-effort were the best response to the “crop of suburban houses”—a rejection of his own ties to humanity. What is curious about this poem is the adjective “confident” in the penultimate line. The word (like its relatives “confidant” and “confide”), as the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, comes from the Latin “confidere,” which itself is made up of the prefix “con,” together, and the root verb “fidere,” to trust. The word “faith” ultimately comes from the same Latin root (after a detour through French).

Jeffers asks his audience to have “trust together” in ourselves the same way that rock and ocean have confidence—and unusual expectation. “Confidence” is more often thought of as a quintessentially human trait, rather than something which characterizes the natural world. Flattening the landscape and putting in a suburban housing development could certainly be described by many nature writers as an instance of human over-confidence. Here, instead, Jeffers insinuates that humans build such things because of our lack of confidence, our insecurity. Like the tide to which he likens humanity, we are unstable; we build houses in an attempt to shore up our insecure human identity.

SELECTED WORK

Positive Feedback Loop

(June 2007)

By Jorie Graham

I am listening in this silence that precedes. Forget

everything, start listening. Tipping point, flash point,

convective chimneys in the seas bounded by Greenland. Once there was thunder and also

salvos at the four corners of the horizon, that was war.

In Hell they empty your hands of sand, they tell you to refill them with dust and try

to hold in mind the North Atlantic Deep Water which also contains

contributions from the Labrador Sea and entrainment of other water masses, try to hold a

complete collapse, in the North Atlantic Drift, in the thermohaline circulation, this will happen,

fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef, the new Age of Extinctions is

now
says the silence-that-precedes—you know not what
you

are entering, a time

beyond belief. Who is one when one calls oneself one? An orchestra dies down. We have other plans for your summer is the tune. Also your

winter. Maybe the locks at Isigny

will hold, I will go look at them

tomorrow. I will learn everything there is of this my spouse the future, here in my

earth my parents’ house, the garden of the continuing to think

about them, there is nothing else in fact but the

past, count the days count the cities you have

visited, also what comes to keep you awake, also dew while you finally sleep—can you ever

enter the strange thing, the name that is yours, that “is” you—

the place where the dead put their arms around you, & you can just taste it the

bitterness, & you would speak for your kind but

they will laugh at you—both the naming and the kind—also thin air will laugh that’s what

it’s doing look—
feather, invisible bog,

positive feedback loops—& the chimneys again, & how it is the ray of sun is taken in

in freedom, & was there another way for this host
our guest,

we who began as hands, magic of fingers, laying our thresholds stone upon stone,

stretched skins between life and death,

always smoke rising to propitiate the star that might turn black, quick give back to it

before it kills you, speed your thought to it,
till your feet themselves are
weary not just your
heart—the

skins, the flesh, the heat, the soil, the grain, the sound of each birdcall heard over the millennia, autumn’s maneuverings into winter, splinters of dream-filled times, beauty

that pierces, yes, always we were
vulnerable to
beauty, why should it be

otherwise—time and its wonders as it passes and things grow, & the rippings of death

heal, & the blossoms come which one can
just for a
minute longer
look at, take in, & the mind

finds itself uncertain again, it calls, something hangs up on it,just like that, you hear

the receiver go down, power and its end,
something else smiling elsewhere on another world,

us in The Great Dying again, the time in which life on earth is all but wiped out

again—we must be patient—we must wait—it is a
lovely evening, a bit of food a bit of drink—we
shall walk

out onto the porch and the evening shall come on around us, unconcealed,

blinking, abundant, as if catching sight of us,

everything in and out under the eaves, even the grass seeming to push up into this our

world as if out of

homesickness for it,

gleaming.

From SEA CHANGE by JORIE GRAHAM. Copyright © 2008 by Jorie Graham. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

“Positive Feedback Loop”—Analysis

One does not typically expect a scientific phrase to be used for the title of a poem, yet Jorie Graham does exactly that in “Positive Feedback Loop,” a poem from her 2008 poetry collection Sea Change. A positive feedback loop is a disturbance to a system (often natural, such as an ecosystem), the immediate effects of which exacerbate and ramify the disturbance, causing it to grow. The ultimate result of the initial disturbance is therefore amplified by the immediate effects, which might at first seem small; this result, be it a population crash or an ecosystemic regime shift, is ultimately far greater (often exponentially so) than would seem warranted by the size or degree of the initial disturbance.

Poet Jorie Graham, Iowa City, Iowa, 1997.

Photo ©2008–2013 Jorie Graham.
All Rights Reserved.

Positive feedback loops occur frequently in nature, most often (but not always) when human behavior disturbs natural processes. For example, global climate change is right now causing many regions of Arctic tundra to release methane gas from thawing ground that used to be permafrost, where methane had been sequestered and kept inert by the cold. Just a few degrees of warming causes an enormous amount of methane to be released, and recent warming trends are putting natural methane into the atmosphere in high concentrations. Since methane is a particularly effective (or destructive) greenhouse gas (even more so than carbon dioxide), the effects of the initial temperature increase ultimately cause further warming by intensifying the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere. Thus, the widespread release of methane in the Arctic accelerates the rate of global climate change. This is just one example of a positive feedback loop; others can be found throughout the sciences, including the marine sciences.

Graham’s formally innovative poems can be challenging to read, often appealing (in this collection) to the eye more than the ear. The poet employs varying line lengths, white space, broken narratives, and stream-of-consciousness to develop a theme, often with the effect of disorienting the reader. Such is the case in “Positive Feedback Loop,” which begins with a sub-title in the form of a date: June 2007. Immediately, then, we realize we are thrust into the present (or nearly the present), and in very few lines we realize that we are reading about the marine environmental crisis that is slowly unfolding as a result of global climate change. In Sea Change, Graham draws on recent research in the marine sciences in order to imagine an anthropogenic marine disaster—something of a watery apocalypse.

One quickly gathers that the poet wishes to perform, in verse, a version of the poem’s title; she uses the craft of poetry to create a kind of positive feedback loop. Of course, this is a metaphor, inevitably, for the poem itself is not a physical system, nor can its opening be defined as a disturbance. But one implication of Graham’s opening line is that a poem itself acts like a positive feedback loop—a disturbance to the quotidian flow of experience that will resonate far beyond the reading of the poem.

The first two lines of the poem are visually arresting:

“I am listening in this silence that precedes. Forget

everything, start listening. Tipping point, flash”

Enjambment—the technique of ending a line of poetry without end punctuation (often, as in this case, in the middle of a sentence)—creates tension for the reader, who inevitably feels rushed to see what will appear at the start of the next line. In this case, Graham’s decision to end the first line with the command “forget” creates even greater tension. Forget what? The reader must ask, and in line two, the left margin of which is aligned with the center of the page (beginning almost where the first line ends) we find an answer: “everything, start listening.” The reader thus becomes situated much like the speaker: in an attitude of listening in silence for a sound that will presumably arrive. Line two continues: “Tipping point, flash/” and again the reader is left hanging by the conspicuous enjambment, at least until line three, “point, /” which finishes the phrase “flash point.” The speaker asserts, “I am listening in this silence that precedes.” Precedes what? The answer is suggested in the next line: “Tipping point, flash/ point (lines 2–3). So we are instructed by the speaker, as if by a teacher or an autocrat, to listen for the signals of a tipping point or flash point.

Again we encounter scientific language. A tipping point is a moment when the build-up of some force or set of forces suddenly exceeds the strength of the resisting object or force, as when two children of equal weight on a see-saw are joined by third, who sits on one side and causes it to tip. Scientists often speak of tipping points, as do policymakers. For example, if a particular fish stock, such as Atlantic Cod on Georges Bank off Massachusetts, is overharvested, continuing to fish at unsustainable levels will reach a tipping point when the cod population will crash (as has happened) and the entire ecosystem can follow suit (which also has happened). These are not common poetic phrases, and Graham deploys them in this poem to startling effect.

The poem continues to develop the idea of past, existing, and impending catastrophes by suggesting the ongoing presence of general global catastrophes. In line four we learn of “convective chimneys in the seas bounded by Greenland,” and in line five we hear of “salvos at the four corners of the horizon, that was/ war.” Are we to imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario, or do these lines refer to current conflicts as well as environmental crises? We never learn. But the poem’s setting seems futuristic, the brewing problems associated with climate change and with global political strife apparently having already reached a point of no return—a tipping point for one (climate change) and a flash point for the other (warfare).

What Graham examines in this poem is the imminent possibility of “complete collapse,” of a world in which human behavior has altered a part of the natural world as fundamental as “thermohaline circulation” in the world’s oceans (line twelve). “This/ will happen,” the speaker informs us; moreover, the crisis is already upon us: “fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef, the new Age of Extinctions is/ now” (lines 14–15). All this the speaker learns from listening to “the silence-that-precedes”; and, to make matters worse, that is only the beginning of calamity, for “you know not what/ you/ are entering, a time/ beyond belief.” The tab—a white space jump—to “beyond belief” creates a vertiginous reading experience, the reader is suddenly plunged headlong across the page into…(s)he knows not what. And then instead of foretelling an even more gruesome doom, the speaker poses the rhetorical question, “Who is one when one calls oneself/ one?” We surely cannot know. The implication here, of course, is that a world erased of its familiar features—marine life, the great oceanic gyres—also must erase the self and any notion of identity.

What the speaker hears in “the-silence-that-precedes,” then, is the prophecy of impending environmental calamity at a global level. After this calamitous vision, the speaker is brought, almost humorously, back to herself: “An orchestra dies down. We have other plans/ for your summer is the tune.” Other plans indeed.

The poem then moves away from imagining a future disaster that has already begun and into an internal monologue, a stream-of-consciousness flow of thoughts and words, concerning identity as a function of being grounded in experience, relationships, and the body. The metaphysical speculations in lines twenty-five and following seem to devolve into an inward spiral of self-reflexivity; what holds this section together is the overarching sense of the speaker’s crisis of identity, having been catalyzed by anxiety about a world on the verge of environmental collapse. “Was there another way for/ this host/our guest, / we who began as hands, magic of fingers, laying our thresholds stone upon stone, stretched skins between life and death,/ always smoke rising to propitiate the star that might turn black.”

In this poet’s dark night of the soul, the deepest anxiety lives in the notion that beauty can cease, “the mind/ finds itself uncertain again, it calls, something hangs up on it, just like that, you hear/ the receiver go down, power and its end.…” The logic, here, of the speaker’s interior monologue is panic about the end of life on earth as well as the negative theology that it entails. The speaker imagines “something else smiling elsewhere on another world,” as if the deity had moved on from this experiment, on this planet, to another one more fortunate.

In the end, the speaker resolves that the only possible response to the consciousness of living on the brink of “The Great Dying again, the time in which life on earth is all but wiped out/ again” is to “be patient—we must wait—it is a/ lovely evening, a bit of food and drink—we/ shall walk/ out onto the porch and the evening shall come on around us, unconcealed,/ blinking, abundant, as if catching sight of us.…” These lines articulate an experience of negative theology, a condition of being abandoned by whatever higher power and meaning might have preceded the present. Having outlasted the happy era of a world not manifestly on the brink of environmental collapse, the speaker turns to small things, seeking to appreciate the present in all its rich detail, “even the grass,” which the speaker perceives at the poem’s end to be “gleaming.”

SELECTED WORK

To the Field of Scotch Broom that Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall

By Lucia Perillo

Half costume jewel, half parasite, you stood

swaying to the music of cash registers in the distance

while a helicopter chewed the linings

of the clouds above the clear-cuts.

and I forgave the pollen count

while cabbage moths teased up my hair

before your flowers fell apart when they

turned into seeds. How resigned you were

to your oblivion, unlistening to the cumuli

as they swept past. And soon those gusts

will mill you, when the backhoe comes to dredge your roots, but that is not

what most impends, as the chopper descends

to the hospital roof so that somebody’s heart

can be massaged back into its old habits.

Mine went a little haywire

at the crest of the road, on whose other side

you lay in blossom.

As if your purpose were to defibrillate me

with a thousand electrodes,

one volt each.

Lucia Perillo, “To the Field of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall” from On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths. Copyright © 2012 by Lucia Perillo. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

“To the Field of Scotch Broom that Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall”—Analysis

The title of Perillo’s brief lyric poem tells us a good deal about what to expect, but not everything. Poets of many eras have given their works titles that signal their intention of addressing someone or something in particular. Odes, for example, frequently address military and political heroes. This poem addresses a weed. Scotch Broom is a woody shrub that grows quickly in spaces that have been clear cut (timbered off), and in the Pacific Northwest it is considered an especially noxious weed because it prevents new trees from growing. It also produces a good deal of pollen—no fun for those with allergies (including the speaker of the poem).

Laden with anthropomorphism (and indeed with its extreme form, personification), this poem expresses a complex response to the converging forces of land development and medical technology in contemporary America—in this case, presumably in a suburban area in the Pacific Northwest. The speaker addresses a field of weeds that is slated to be developed, or destroyed (depending on your perspective), in order to make room for a shopping mall expansion, suggesting that nature and human “motions and means,” to use Wordsworth’s phrase, are not very far removed from each other. The field of blooming brush sways “to the music of cash registers,” fated already to be buried “when the backhoe comes/ to dredge your roots.” Moving between images of what will happen to the field once the builders come and impressions of a medevac helicopter landing on a nearby hospital roof, the speaker develops an analogy between technology as a tool of land development and as a means of saving lives.

Whereas prior generations of poets, such as Wordsworth and Whitman, were famous for writing about daffodils, sunflowers, lilacs, or other attractive plant life, this poem chooses to address—or apostrophize—a field of undesirable plants which are likely thriving because of the human impact of logging on the landscape. Clearly, nature in this instance is not simply a happy green space; rather, it is a transient, ecologically complex zone caught in a complex fabric of human involvement. Even as the speaker seems to lament the loss of a bright field of blossoming plants, she suggests that the good goes with the bad—human inventiveness, while it can be destructive, can also save lives. But the poem goes even further, suggesting that nature, too, can redeem and revitalize human consciousness.

In terms of poetic form, “To the Field of Scotch Broom” is initially marked by the playful anthropomorphism suggested, in the first place, by “Scotch” (an archaic form of “Scottish”), and then by the apostrophization of “you,” as if the weeds were a person, by the suggestion of dancing, “swaying to the music,” and then by the development of the personification through the rest of the first stanza. As the first stanza develops, we also see its intensive use of the medial caesura, a pause in the middle of a line that may or may not be signaled by punctuation. In line eight, for example, the period after “seeds” occurs in the middle of the line, and then a new sentence begins: “How resigned you were.…” Line nine, too, has a medial caesura, this one marked by a comma. This division of some lines into two parts creates a kind of see-saw dynamic, recapitulating the thematic back-and-forth between nature and technology and between the material present and a half-prophesied future (“your oblivion,” “what most impends”).

There is no formal rhyme scheme in this poem, but rhyme is nonetheless present and highly effective. For Perillo uses internal rhyme—rhyming words within a single line—in line 12: “what most impends, as the chopper descends.” The rhyme of impends and descends, placed on either side of a medial caesura, creates a musical effect at the moment when uncertainty materializes in the form of a flying steel machine containing a heart attack victim. A little earlier, in line ten, there is just enough similarity between the two words “past” and “gusts” to create a partial rhyme (or off rhyme), here too placed on either side of the caesura.

Poet Lucia Perillo.

Photo Credit: James Rudy.

Perrillo employs traditional poetic techniques subtly throughout the poem. In line four, for example, “clouds” and “clear-cuts” form a clear alliteration (repetition of initial consonants), and in line seven we find “flowers fell” in the middle of the line, which is not only alliterative but contains consonance (repetition of non-initial consonants—here, the “l” sound in flowers and fell). These deft moves on the part of the poet make the poem seem like a flirtation with some more traditional form, such as the sonnet, an effect that reinforces the suggestion of what Wordsworth calls “old poetic feeling” haunting Perillo’s poem.

But this poem is resolutely postmodern, describing an experience that blurs the line between nature and culture, its vision of nature linking technological devices with flowering plants even as it sets them in opposition. In the end, Perillo reverses the direction of the forces she describes—until the last several lines, the poem’s forces all go in one direction, with human technology intervening in natural processes (the helicopter in the clouds, the massaging of a dying heart back to normal, and the impending arrival of the backhoes to expand the mall), not the other way around. But in the second, short stanza this dynamic is reversed: the speaker’s heart goes “a little haywire/ at the crest of the road, on whose other side/ you lay in blossom.” Notice the diction: “haywire” simultaneously evokes images of hayfields and defibrillation wires. With this reversal of the nature-technology dynamic present in the preceding fifteen lines, the poem turns the tables on the speaker’s initial anthropocentrism, suggesting that nature, too, contains energy of a potentially transformative kind, like the human heart.

Notes

1.   See Hiltner, 2001.

2.   Scheese, p. 214.

3.   Quoted in Scheese, p. 227.

4.   Further discussion of literary keywords can be found in a variety of guides, glossaries, and handbooks of literary terms, including those by Abrams, Harmon and Holman, and Barton and Hudson (see bibliography).

5.   “A Pilgrim’s Progress.” New York Times April 26, 1992.

6.   Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, front matter.

7.   Smith, pp. 3–6.

8.   Smith, pp. 3–13.

9.   Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

10. See Parrish, pp. 123–163.

11. See Donald M. Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne.

12. Smith, p. 14.

13. Thoreau, in Finch and Elder, eds. p. 180.

14. Robert Finch and John Elder, eds., p. 867.

15. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper Collins, 2007) 6.

16. Pilgrim, p. 10

17. Pilgrim, p. 3.

18. Pilgrim, p. 3.

19. Walden (Princeton edition), p. 97.

20. Pilgrim, p. 5.

21. Pilgrim, p. 6.

22. Pilgrim, p. 13.

23. Pilgrim, p. 6.

24. Pilgrim, p. 6.

25. Pilgrim, p. 8.

26. Pilgrim, p. 10.

27. Pilgrim, p. 18.

28. Pilgrim, p. 34.

29. Pilgrim, p. 33.

30. Pilgrim, p. 26.

31. Pilgrim, p. 35.

32. Pilgrim, p. 47.

33. Pilgrim, p. 39.

34. Pilgrim, p. 53.

35. Pilgrim, p. 62.

36. Pilgrim, p. 75.

37. Pilgrim, pp. 79–80.

38. Pilgrim, p. 97.

39. Pilgrim, p. 33.

40. Pilgrim, p. 113.

41. Pilgrim, p. 122.

42. Pilgrim, p. 123.

43. Pilgrim, p. 133.

44. Pilgrim, p. 133.

45. Pilgrim, p. 141.

46. Pilgrim, p. 139.

47. Pilgrim, pp. 151–53.

48. Pilgrim, p. 161.

49. Pilgrim, p. 177.

50. Pilgrim, p. 178.

51. Pilgrim, p. 181.

52. Pilgrim, p. 14.

53. Pilgrim, p. 189.

54. Pilgrim, p. 195.

55. Pilgrim, p. 200.

56. Pilgrim, p. 205.

57. Pilgrim, p. 228.

58. Pilgrim, p. 230.

59. Pilgrim, p. 229.

60. Pilgrim, p. 230.

61. Pilgrim, p. 236.

62. Pilgrim, p. 236.

63. Pilgrim, p. 241.

64. Pilgrim, p. 256.

65. Pilgrim, p. 248.

66. Pilgrim, p. 255; Walden, p. 91.

67. Pilgrim, p. 263.

68. Pilgrim, p. 265.

69. Pilgrim, p. 267.

70. Pilgrim, p. 270.

71. Pilgrim, p. 273.

72. Pilgrim, p. 277.

73. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads.

74. Slate.com: www.slate.com/articles/arts/poem/1999/01/the_horses.html (Posted Jan. 14, 1999). Last accessed September 2, 2013.

75. See Alpers, 1997, especially the Introduction.

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