Longfellow reenacts the Pentecost in this reflection up his changing relationship to nature.
Mary Oliver finds hope even for those weighed down by the thorn of depression.
Emily Dickinson captures magical light of spring–and its transience.
Zora Neale Hurston has one of the most erotic descriptions of a blossoming tree that you will find anywhere.
For Mary Oliver, the season’s first snow fall raises existential questions and then answers them in its own way.
A rainbow sighting led to a discussion about how humans often turn to nature for guiding metaphors.
Oliver’s “Fall Song” captures the “rich spiced residues” of autumn.
As Scott Bates sees it, trees in autumn are involved in a joyous striptease.
In his haunting “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats imagines himself as a homesick Ruth standing “amid the alien corn.”
“Sandy” conjures up for me a traumatic childhood reading experience along with a passage from “The Tempest.”
The onslaught of Hurricane Sandy reminds us of King Lear’s storm experience.
Describing the slaughter of the buffalo herds by whites, Mary Oliver draws on Sioux religion to imagine them as not altogether gone.
Scott Bates’s ABC of Radical Ecology calls for us to keep fighting to save the environment.
“Beasts of the Southern Wild” points to the devastation coastal communities can expect from climate change.
An afternoon spent in a friend’s boat brought to mind Huck and Jim watching the Mississippi River.
Li Po’s poem captures the joys of a summer hike in the mountains.
French poet Frédéric Mistral dreams of wild horses breaking free of civilization’s fetters.
This Scott Bates looks at Pentecostal snake handlers from the snake’s point of view.
To find a sense of deep connectedness, Emerson tell us we can’t cling to fragments.
In honor of upcoming Earth Day, I share a poem based on an actual incidents where hundred of rabbits released to be hunted by Napoleon turned on the emperor’s party and routed them.
Encountering a dead bird outside my window, I recalled a Lucille Clifton poem on the subject that draws a powerful social message.
Mary Oliver finds Easter holiness in a new born fawn.
On a beautiful spring morning when she is startled by birdsong, Mary Oliver describes a merging with nature where she “began to understand what the bird was saying.”
The magnificent poet attributed to St. Patrick looks to nature to provide images for God’s strength and support.
Here’s a non-Christmas tree poem by Scott Bates for friends of the environment.
Our College has closed down two dorms after a mold attack. Among the many remedies has been an Emily Dickinson poem.
Sometimes art holds a mirror up to life, sometimes life imitates art. Wednesday’s story of exotic animals on the rampage in Zanesville, Ohio had me thinking we were in the middle of the John Irving novel Letting the Bears Loose. The story, in case you missed it, involved the owner of an exotic animal preserve [...]
May Justus, an Appalachian author who wrote children’s books and poetry, has a great poem about windy weather. Recalling it recently brought back other memories of this remarkable woman.
Wendell Barry’s “Peace of Wild Things” provides a vision that can help counteract what Thomas Merton identifies as the most common form of innate violence: the rush and pressure of modern life.
Autumn kicks off this week–Friday by some calculations–so here’s a poem by Scott Bates to celebrate her coming.
Philip Larkin has written a fine poem about harvest moons, one of which we experienced last night.
