At the start of the new year we wanted to think about encounters with nature which make us stop and think, feel and reflect, as humans living in a world much bigger and more complex than us.
We began with an extract from D.H Lawrence’s poem ‘The Snake’.
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough
before me.
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over
the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused
a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels
of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold
are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink
at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
We then moved on to Alice Oswald’s poem ‘Eel Tail’, which begins,
Sometimes you see mudfish,
those short lead lengths of eels
that hide at low tide
those roping and wagging,
preliminary, pre-world creatures,
cousins of the moon,
who love blackness, aloofness,
always move under cover of the unmoon
and then as soon as you see them
gone
We really encourage you to explore her poetry further if you are interested in writing that draws on meticulous observations of the natural world, combined with a rich hinterland of learning, both of the classical world and of local history, customs, language and identity.
Our final poem was by Ted Hughes, ‘The Bullfrog’.
It was wonderful to hear from participants who knew a great deal about these fascinating creatures and we learnt a lot.
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