O Gaia:  Nature and the Poetic Intuition by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

Do you know who your closest friend’s favorite poet is?

[Cont. from page 2 ] ...

Did I hear a voice there in the corner, meekly asking, “but how?”  Well, let us formulate a check list of questions to help us translate these reflections into action.  (Please note that these questions apply regardless where you live, even in the city.  Answering them should not be work, but play, and you can turn it into a game, if you and a friend do it together.)

What place can you call home in the full sense of the word?

How much time do you spend there?  How much of it outdoors?

How many flowers, grasses, trees that grow there do you know by name?

What do you know about the mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, insects of your neighborhood?  Their names?  Their living habits?

How many of your neighbors do you know by name?  First name?  Last name?  The names of their children?  Of their pets?

How would you rate your relationship to your neighbors?  Distant?  Cordial?  Cooperative?

Do you ever discuss with your neighbors questions concerning the environment you share and its protection?

When did you last sit or walk outdoors without a specific purpose, just looking, listening, doing nothing?

Do you grow anything?  In a garden?  In flower pots or planters?

Name the three most pressing environmental problems of your neighborhood, your country, your state or region.

Who are your political representatives: What are their positions on environmental issues?

What is your opinion of the significance of poetry in human life?  In education?

What place does poetry occupy in your own life?

Name two books of the Bible whose literary form is poetry.  Do you think one can get the gist of the teachings of Jesus (especially the parables in the gospels) without a sense for poetry?

Name three poets whose work you personally enjoy (not just think you ought to enjoy). 

Name one poet whose work you enjoy less, or not at all.  Give reason why.

Who is your favorite poet?

Do you know who your closest friend’s favorite poet is?

Do you ever read poems with your friends?  Your children?

Which poet or poem had a significant influence on your inner development? 

When did you last sit down to read a poem for enjoyment?

Roughly, how many poems do you know by heart?  Recite one.

And now, to reward you for your patience, I will share with you a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.  It may not be an easy one, at first sight, but it is worth reading more than once.  In re-reading, and especially when one reads it aloud, suddenly some dense passages become clear.  This is true of all the poems that Hopkins wrote.  He wanted them to be read aloud.  The repetitions in lines 3 and 5, and in the last five lines suggest to me a sobbing which the poet cannot suppress as he laments the felling of these poplars, so dear to him.  I remember a row of poplar trees behind my own home on the outskirts of Vienna.  Local legend had it that Napoleon had given orders to plant that avenue of trees.  The owner of an adjacent plot of land resented these trees for stealing the sun from his vineyard.  During the last weeks of the war, he took advantage of the prevailing chaos and in one day he had them all felled.  Those ax strokes of havoc still echo for me in the “all felled, felled” of this poem.    

Hopkins knew about nature what we are barely beginning to realize a century later: “even where we mean to mend her, we end her, when we hew or delve.”  And he finds the poignant comparison with that “sleek and seeing ball/but a prick will make no eye at all.”  There is more here than an image of extreme vulnerability.  These lines have overtones that make me flinch.  There is allusion here to an equally vulnerable poetic vision, a fragile inner eye, a sense to see the sacredness of nature.  Every child is born gifted with that sense.  If only we allow our children to take roots on some soil that is home for them, to take roots also in that depth where the heart sees visions, Adam, the poet and gardener, may still survive on “God’s green earth.” +

Read "Binsey Poplars" by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Reprinted from Epiphany, Spring 1983.