I wouldn’t classify Howard Nemerov as a nature poet because only a small percentage of his poems are about nature, but I bought his Collected Poems because I liked the poems I read in The Blue Swallows (1967), and my favorite poem in that collection is the title poem, which may very well turn out to be my favorite poem in the entire book, though I have another hundred pages to read:
THE BLUE SWALLOWS
Across the millstream below the bridge
Seven blue swallows divide the air
In shapes invisible and evanescent,
Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s
Or memory’s power to keep them there.
“History is where tensions were,”
“Form is the diagram of forces.”
Thus, helplessly, there on the bridge,
While gazing down upon those birds—
How strange, to be above the birds!—
Thus helplessly the mind in its brain
Weaves up relation’s spindrift web,
Seeing the swallows’ tails as nibs
Dipped in invisible ink, writing…
Poor mind, what would you have them write?
Some cabalistic history
Whose authorship you might ascribe
To God? to Nature? Ah, poor ghost,
You’ve capitalized your Self enough.
That villainous William of Occam
Cut out the feet from under that dream
Some seven centuries ago.
It’s taken that long for the mind
To waken, yawn and stretch, to see
With opened eyes emptied of speech
The real world where the spelling mind
Imposes with its grammar book
Unreal relations on the blue
Swallows. Perhaps when you will have
Fully awakened, I shall show you
A new thing: even the water
Flowing away beneath those birds
Will fail to reflect their flying forms,
And the eyes that see become as stones
Whence never tears shall fall again.
O swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.
Animal metaphors are so deeply ingrained in not only our literature but our very language that it is far too easy to think of them metaphorically, “Seeing the swallows’ tails as nibs/ Dipped in invisible ink, writing.”
There’s also a natural tendency to see ourselves reflected in nature, or at the very least, like the Puritans, to think that God reveals himself to us through nature, “Poor mind, what would you have them write?/ Some cabalistic history/
Whose authorship you might ascribe/ To God?”
You’d be forgiven if you thought that this was my favorite poem simply because blue-colored tree swallows are one of my favorite photographic subjects:
but, like Nemerov, I’d argue that photographs are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.