Nature Poem Quotes & Sayings

Every known thing used to be unknown
And every rock could become a stone
Someday nature will have to atone
When soul sees dead flesh leaving the bone — Munia Khan

I have always thought of poetry as an act of celebration. Just by nature of writing a poem you are taking the time to dwell on whatever it is that you're writing about ... you can be celebrating anger, you can be celebrating sorrow ... you are spending the time to focus and observe and try to understand the various parts of being human. — Sarah Kay

Where there are many beauties in a poem I shall not cavil at a few faults proceeding either from negligence or from the imperfection of our nature. — Horace

There in the mountains, close to the delights of Nature, everything you see and hear is a joy. It is a joy unspoiled by any real discomfort. Your legs may possibly ache, or you may feel the lack of something really good to eat, but that is all. I wonder why this should be? I suppose the reason is that, looking at the landscape, it is as though you were looking at a picture unrolled before you, or reading a poem on a scroll. The whole area is yours [...]. You are free from any care or worry because you accept the fact that this scenery will help neither to fill your belly, nor add a penny to your salary, and are content to enjoy it just as scenery. This is the great charm of Nature, that it can in an instant discipline men's hearts and minds, and removing all that is base, lead them into the pure unsullied world of poetry. — Soseki Natsume

Do Stones Feel?
Do stones feel?
Do they love their life?
Or does their patience drown out everything else?
When I walk on the beach I gather a few
white ones, dark ones, the multiple colors.
Don't worry, I say, I'll bring you back, and I do.
Is the tree as it rises delighted with its many
branches,
each one like a poem?
Are the clouds glad to unburden their bundles of rain?
Most of the world says no, no, it's not possible.
I refuse to think to such a conclusion.
Too terrible it would be, to be wrong. — Mary Oliver

It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

...feel the fierce way desire
tourniquets itself around you and
clings

Clubland South of Market tweak-
chic trannies powder their noses from
bullet-shaped compacts and flick their forked
tongues like switchblades as they burn the night
down bleed day to night to day to

Mission sidewalks where pythons hide
twenty dollar balloons beneath their tongues which
get bartered in smiles quicker than a coke buzz and
tossed out through the cracks

Cottonmouth kisses
camouflage emotions and
strike with a vengeance
when he
wants and she
wants and they
want and I
won't

Genet was right, I suppose
when he wrote "The only way
to avoid the horror of horror is
to give in to it"
it's
the nature of
the economy of the
business it's the
nature of
things... — Clint Catalyst

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words. — Northrop Frye

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have. — Wallace Stevens

Your printers have made but one blunder,
Correct it instanter, and then for the thunder!
We'll see in a jiffy if this Mr S[pencer]
Has the ghost of a claim to be thought a good fencer.
To my vision his merits have still seemed to dwindle,
Since I have found him allied with the great Dr T[yndall]
While I have, for my part, grown cockier and cockier,
Since I found an ally in yourself, Mr L[ockyer]
And am always, in consequence, thoroughly willin',
To perform in the pages of Nature's M[acmillan]. — Peter Guthrie Tait

To grow up, a man must stand apart not only from his mother but from his fellows. Human achievement, according to this perspective, is always to be measured in difference, who is the fastest, the most handsome, the richest. The quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon highlights this way of looking at human achievement. Not only do the two men compete for the most honor, symbolized by possessions, but they see their contest as a zero-sum game. That is, they - and all the other warriors - assume that there is a finite amount of honor available, so that if one man gets more, then someone else gets less.

Achilles, with his semidivine nature and abundant physical gifts, would seem to be an example of a man fully equipped for success in this system. And yet, Achilles does not prosper in the world of the poem. As he pursues honor and status among his fellows, he becomes more and more isolated, the price of distinction in a competitive society. — Thomas Van Nortwick

It may also be that, quite apart from any specific references one food makes to another, it is the very allusiveness of cooked food that appeals to us, as indeed that same quality does in poetry or music or art. We gravitate towards complexity and metaphor, it seems, and putting fire to meat or fermenting fruit and grain, gives us both: more sheer sensory information and, specifically, sensory information that, like metaphor, points away from the here and now. This sensory metaphor - this stands for that - is one of the most important transformations of nature wrought by cooking. And so a piece of crisped pig skin becomes a densely allusive poem of flavors: coffee and chocolate, smoke and Scotch and overripe fruit and, too, the sweet-salty-woodsy taste of maple syrup on bacon I loved as a child. As with so many other things, we humans seem to like our food overdetermined. — Michael Pollan

The River Swish

Deftly maneuvered through
the dark green abyss ~
The wooden raft seemed
in tune with this ~
Canorous rush of the
river swish.... — Muse

Dance,' they told me, and I stood still,
and while I stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.
'Pray,' they said, and I laughed,
covering myself in the earth's brightnesses,
and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel,
and prayed like an orphan. — Wendell Berry

New clothes left Sylvia reeling with happiness. For Sylvia, a shopping list was a poem. She always shopped alone - it suited her deliberate nature and the artistic joy with which she approached all things aesthetic. — Elizabeth Winder

Unfortunately, upsetting the balance of nature just happens to be what our species has been selected to do well- although we hate admit it. Like the Walrus in Lewis Carroll's poem, we shed hypocritical tears over the diminishing supply of oysters, while gulping them down as quickly as ever. — Christopher Wills

There are two irreconcilable ideas of God. There's the Unknowable Creative Principle---one believes in That. And there's the Sum of altruism in man---naturally one believes in That...The sublime poem of the Christ life was man's attempt to join those two irreconcilable conceptions of God. And since the Sum of human altruism was as much a part of the Unknowable Creative Principle as anything else in Nature and the Universe, a worse link might have been chosen after all! Funny---how one went through life without seeing it in that sort of way! — John Galsworthy

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress. — Wallace Stevens

This creative tension between wonderful and terrible is named so well by Gerard Manley Hopkins, as only poets can. Even the long title of his poem reveals his acceptance of the ever-changing flow of Heraclites and also his trust in the final outcome: "That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection." Flesh fade, and mortal trash fall to the residuary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, — Richard Rohr

April is the cruelest month.' So begins T.S. Eliot's 1922 masterpiece, a 434-line poem titled 'The Waste Land.' Until my employment as a trail maintenance worker, this had simply been a line on a page, albeit a line fraught with metaphorical import and potential. Now I saw it for what it was - a big fat lie - because Eliot grew up in St. Louis and no one forgets what a Missouri summer is like. If the Nobel laureate had been truthful with himself, the opening verse would start out, 'June's a bitch. — Michael Gurnow

There can be no law of nature, no science,
No aberrant infliction of human will
That unchained the soul cannot conquer,
Simply sweep away, should it chose to. — Scott Hastie

These aren't still shots; the camera is always moving. And the scene is always just slipping out of sight, as if in spite of myself I were always descending a hill, rounding a corner, stepping into the street with a companion who urges me on, while I look back over my shoulder at the sight which recedes, vanishes. The present of my consciousness is itself a mystery which is also always just rounding a bend like a floating branch borne by a flood. Where am I? But I'm not. I will overturn, overturn, overturn, it: and it shall be no more ... — Annie Dillard

Another day without no rain, is another day of sorrow.
And if it doesn't rain today, I hope it rains tomorrow. — J.M. Carydice

What I love about drafts is the experimental nature of them. The draft is what you know about writing a poem running up against what you don't know about the subject. If you're lucky, you get to surprise yourself. — Cornelius Eady

Line in nature is not found;
Unit and universe are round;
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is this admirable, this immortal, instinctive sense of beauty that leads us to look upon the spectacle of this world as a glimpse, a correspondence with heaven. Our unquenchable thirst for all that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the liveliest proof of our immortality. It is both by poetry and through poetry, by music and through music, that the soul dimly descries the splendours beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, those tears are not a proof of overabundant joy: they bear witness rather to an impatient melancholy, a clamant demand by our nerves, our nature, exiled in imperfection, which would fain enter into immediate possession, while still on this earth, of a revealed paradise. — Charles Baudelaire

It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story. — Don DeLillo

After hours of wearing stifling suits while seated on rigid pews and high-backed dining chairs, to enter water and splay our limbs was freeing. The midday sun fell full on the pool, so when we waded in up to our waists, heat and cold balanced as if by a carpenter's level. That was the best sensation, knowing in a moment, but not quite yet, I'd dive into cold but emerge into warmth. Years later at Wake Forest, when I still believed I might create literature, I'd write a mediocre poem about those mornings in church and afterward the 'baptism of nature. — Ron Rash

Our nature as sensitive beings is far too complex to break apart, re-examine and reshape in a poem. — Masiela Lusha

Feel the kiss of ocean breeze,
Hear the song of dancing wave
Let your soul fly away with seagulls
To fill the heart with the joy of life. — Debasish Mridha

The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?' — M.H. Abrams

Just as a child is really a thing that wants to become a man, so is the poem an object of nature that wants to become an object ofart. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

There is a tender breeze
Wafting around here
Feel it from your Soul
You will see Magic over here

Did I just now hear a beautiful symphony over here ?
Or is it just your soothing words murmuring in my ear?

Is it the cute mynah bird on my shoulder?
Or is it your soft head nestling that I feel so tender?

There is a tender breeze
Wafting around here
Feel it from your Soul
You will see Magic over here...

Did I just now hear the nightingale sing around here?
Or is it the breeze whispering softly to the trees near?

Is that you giggling away to glory?
Or is that just the flowers mingling with the bees and telling their story?

There is a tender breeze
Wafting around here
Feel it from your Soul
You will see Magic over here.. — Avijeet Das

A panther poised in the cypress tree about to jump is a
panther poised in a cypress tree about to jump.
The panther is a poem of fire green eyes and a heart charged
by four winds of four directions.
The panther hears everything in the dark: the unspoken
tears of a few hundred human years, storms that will break
what has broken his world, a bluebird swaying on a branch a
few miles away.
He hears the death song of his approaching prey:
I will always love you, sunrise.
I belong to the black cat with fire green eyes.
There, in the cypress tree near the morning star. — Joy Harjo

When I consider that the nobler animal have been exterminated here - the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, dear, the beaver, the turkey and so forth and so forth, I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country ... Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature I am conversing with? As if I were to study a tribe of Indians that had lost all it's warriors ... I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth. — Henry David Thoreau

My surname for a mask to pretend!
I have no stand to protest,
but I will find it (in the poem 'Tatiana Naturova at Time's End' in the collection 'The Green Divorce') — Christos Rodoulla Tsiailis

Why do most people write poems about nature? For the same reason that every community center is propped up with industrious, self painted landscapes: you have no need of any imagination to simply describe what is around you, and the amateur naturally thinks an idyllic picture is best, not the dirty city around him. What makes van de Waarsenburg special is that he crams a hundred idyllic scenes into a single poem, as if he does not trust a single boathouse would be poetic enough for the reader. — Martijn Benders

A haiku is not a poem, it is not literature; it is a hand beckoning, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean. It is a way of returning to nature, to our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short, to our Buddha nature. — R.H. Blyth

Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself. — Stephen Spender

A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it. — Keegan-Michael Key

Art, she said, is more nuanced than life. If a teacher is lecturing and looking out of smudged windows, smeared with obscenities (sure enough, ours were) it doesn't mean anything, in life, except that the cleaning crews are lazy. But in a story, if a professor is lecturing and the windows are smudged, we are obliged to think that his words are similarly untrandescent, right? ...
One of the great problems with artists, she said, is that they don't keep nuance and nature distinct. Import raw nature into a story or a poem and you've only ruined a story. Import nuance into life and you'll go mad. There'll suddenly be too much significance everywhere, a message in everything. — Clark Blaise

Some say; "Poetry is what gets lost in translation!"
In this sense, my life is a bitter poem. But that is the force of nature.
I already changed it to my alternative order: "Poetry must find ways of breaking distance. — Fereidoon Yazdi

The world is better without
them.
only the plants and the animals are
true comrades.
I drink to them and with
them. — Charles Bukowski

Oh the beauty of nature!
Oh the magical heart touching flower.
My heart wants to bloom like you
with love, joy, and laughter. — Debasish Mridha

When a poem might become a song, then certain parts are repeated and might become a refrain or a chorus, so they change in that way. But it's more the nature of the words and what they're saying that determines whether it's a poem or a song. — PJ Harvey

There'll be the lightning bugs with their Morse code display,
And shooting stars and constellations to befriend;
The dragonflies will keep us from going astray,
As we search for new adventures 'round every bend.
-excerpted from the poem 'The Huge Playroom that is Nature' in the book FROM GUAM TO CROWN CITY CORONADO (THANKS TO HERMANN, MISSOURI): A JOURNEY IN POESY — Mariecor Ruediger

It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth. — Charles Baudelaire

A poem is a 'line' between any two points in creation. — Charles Olson

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in her breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from his nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be. — Robert Frost

It didn't help when he told David that his mother would always be with him, even if he couldn't see her. An unseen mother couldn't go for long walks with you on summer evenings, drawing the names of trees and flowers from her seemingly infinite knowledge of nature; or help you with your homework, the familiar scent of her in your nostrils as she leaned in to correct a misspelling or puzzle over the meaning of an unfamiliar poem; or read with you on cold Sunday afternoons when the fire — David Nicholls

Nature is a book of many pages and each page tells a fascinating story to him who learns her language. Our fertile valleys and craggy mountains recite an epic poem of geologic conflicts. The starry sky reveal gigantic suns and space and time without end. — A. E. Douglass

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road - the one less traveled by - offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth. — Rachel Carson

Men propound mathematical theorems in besieged cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on the scaffold, discuss a new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature. — C.S. Lewis

Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like "I wander through each charter'd street" than in three-quarters of Socialist literature. — George Orwell

In January 1821, Thomas Jefferson wrote John Adams to "encourage a hope that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago." This wish for a return to the era of philosophy would put Jefferson in the same period as Titus Lucretius Carus, thanks to whose six-volume poem De Rerum Naturum (On the Nature of Things) we have a distillation of the work of the first true materialists: Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus. These men concluded that the world was composed of atoms in perpetual motion, and Epicurus, in particular, went on to argue that the gods, if they existed, played no part in human affairs. It followed that events like thunderstorms were natural and not supernatural, that ceremonies of worship and propitiation were a waste of time, and that there was nothing to be feared in death. — Christopher Hitchens

MASTERED, the Poem Weary of secrets, Of shame and denying, A lifetime of stories, Excuses, and lying, Dark nights lying awake, Frightened and crying, With society's eyes Judgmental and prying. Existing in limbo, No peace in her soul Just shadow and smoke, And a vast gaping hole. Submissive by nature, Now taking its toll, Shan't ever confess, Yearns a Master's control — K.L. Silver

Schelling's God is the totality of Nature struggling towards consciousness, and Man is as far as the struggle has got, with the animals not too far behind, vegetables somewhat lagging, and rocks nowhere as yet. Do we believe this? Does it matter? Think of it as a poem or a painting. Art doesn't have to be true like a theorem. It can be true in other ways. This truth says there is a meaning to it all, and Man is where the meaning begins to show. — Tom Stoppard

Up past the old lime kiln
built into the side of a hill
we take a hard right at a clearing
lined by brittle apple trees
still willing to bear fruit.

I snap sticks beneath my feet
and steal pictures of the view
while you reach for something
sweet, as much as it bows
to you. — Kristen Henderson

In the Augustan age ... poetry was ... the sister of architecture; with the romantics, and their heightened vowel-sense, resulting in different melodic lines, she became the sister of music; in the present day, she appears like the sister of horticulture, each poem growing according to the law of its own nature ... — Edith Sitwell

It was the poem that explained the nature of courage and turned the mystery of death into a heroic couplet. Ultimately, it was the poem that banished fear from the heart and transformed us from actors into participants. — James Lee Burke

This constant basso on the horizon
is it the waterfall
or the cannon
("Poem") — Paul Dermee

Some mysterious revenge of nature has seen to it that no poem in praise of drink or tobacco (or snuff, if any) can succeed. — Kingsley Amis

As we know, Rilke, under the influence of Auguste Rodin, whom he had assisted between 1905 and 1906 in Meudon as a private secretary, turned away from the art nouveau-like, sensitized-atmospheric poetic approach of his early years to pursue a view of art determined more strongly by the priority of the object. The proto-modern pathos of making way for the object without depicting it in a manner 'true to nature', like that of the old masters, led in Rilke's case to the concept of the thing-poem - and thus to a temporarily convincing new answer to the question of the source of aesthetic and ethical authority. From that point, it would be the things themselves from which all authority would come - or rather: from this respectively current singular thing that turns to me by demanding my full gaze. This is only possible because thing-being would now no longer mean anything but this: having something to say. — Peter Sloterdijk

He is deaf, and keen to accept,
any economical operation,
that will correct his situation.
He visited the doctor best,
and started talking on subject,
like the after-effects, and if any threats.

The doctor medically checked,
and asked him what he expects?
He expressed, he wants to be addressed-
in words, and not in signs.
And how keen he is, to have his ears listening.

He wants to listen the echo of,
sun-set over that crimson dawn.

He is keen to know, the sound of,
a blooming rose.

He wants to know what it sounds like,
when a seedling grows.

But Doctor- if you say: You are incapable,
then I better get away,
for then there is- nothing worth to be heard,
in your seemingly wordy world. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

It is raining! In other words little poems are coming down from the sky! Nature is literature! Sun is a fable; forest is a story; birds are a theatre; mountains are a myth; rain is a poem! Nature is literature! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

You have the greatest soul, the noblest nature, the sweetest, most loving heart I have ever known, and my love, my reverence, my admiration for you, you have increased in one evening as I should have thought only a lifetime of intimate, loving association could have increased them. You are more wonderful and lovely in my eyes than you ever were before; and my pride and joy and gratitude that you should love me with such a perfect love are beyond all expression, except in some great poem which I cannot write. — Woodrow Wilson

THE THREE LAWS OF ALL

You are never to worship a living soul,
Except for three entities:
Three - YOUR FATHER
Two - YOUR MOTHER
And one - HE WHO IS ALL.


To begin to study All Things,
You must start with only three things:
Man,
Nature,
And the universe.
All three are a reflection of each other.
So simply study one,
To understand the other.

All of creation started with JUST three things,
And no living thing was created without them:
Water,
Light,
And dust.

Know these three basic laws.
And you will come to know
He Who Is All.
Forever big, yet sometimes small,
He is found in the heart
Of everything.


Suzy Kassem Poetry, Truth is Crying — Suzy Kassem