Animals and Nature

It was the nightingale, and not the lark,

 

Orpheus with his lute made trees,

 

His nose was as sharp as a pen, and a’ babbled of green fields.

 

I never saw a wild thing

 

Be a good animal, true to your instincts.

 

Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

 

Praised be You, my Lord, with all your creatures,

 

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

 

I am the son of the first fish who climbed ashore but the news has not yet reached my bowels.

 

great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies. And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.

 

A snake came to my water trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat, To drink there.

 

Dosn’t thou ’ear my ’erse’s legs, as they canters awaäy? Proputty, proputty, proputty—that’s what I ’ears ’em saäy.

 

I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley.

 

He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring’d with the azure world he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

 

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky!

 

Nature, red in tooth and claw.

 

So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life.

 

Sweet is every sound, Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet; Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.

 

O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South, Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves, And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee.

 

The splendor falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story: The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

 

Sweet and low, sweet and low, Wind of the western sea, Low, low, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea! Over the rolling waters go, Come from the dying moon, and blow, Blow him again to me; While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.

 

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapp’d in universal law.

 

Like a dog, he hunts in dreams.

 

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.