N is for Nature

By Rena J. Traxel

N is for nature.  Nature poetry has been around for centuries.  The Greeks wrote about it in their poems (think of Idylls written by The Greek poet Theocritus).  Nature poetry really started to take hold during the Romantic period when famous poets such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats took to looking around them. They believed in going into nature, observing the world around them and writing about it. If you ever read poetry from the Romantic period you will know that many of those poems commented on the horrible things happening around them.  

Many contemporary nature poets according to Poets.org are “inspired by the Japanese traditions of Haiku and Renga. (Originally conceived as a short associative meditation on the natural world).” 

What is a nature poem?

According to The Art and Craft of Poetry a nature poem is "a poem in which nature plays an integral role, emphasizing terrain and life (including humans) in a natural setting, season, metaphor, symbol, situation or theme."

As some of you know I live in the country. Now that spring is in the air, I wake up to the birds singing in the trees outside my window.  So when I write nature poems, I tend to write about birds.  Here is a poem I wrote one cold afternoon after spending the morning snapping photos.  I wanted to write a poem about this precious nest I had found that I was sure wasn’t there a year ago. I ended up writing a poem about my own frustrations that came from building a house from scratch.

Abandoned nest in the trees

Covered in snow and frost

Not an ideal place to live

Better than being homeless

Challenge

--Go into nature and write a poem.

--Look out your window and write a poem about the nature you see around you (even if you live in the city). 

--Using the picture above as a prompt write a poem.

--Write a poem that uses nature as metaphor for the social injustices that you have observed.

Feel free to share your poems in comments below, on your own blog, or in the A to Z poetry Facebook group. 

Resources

--To learn more about the different types of poetry click here.

--To read some nature poems click here.

If you liked this post please let others know. Tomorrow, author Kari-Lynn Winters will be joining us. I hope you come back for that.