The Environment and Human Experience as Explored in Three Poems - Book Report/Review Example

 The Environment and Human Experience as Explored in Three Poems Poetry allows for a writer to examine themes through their emotional context in regard to topics that can be explored through the imagery that is evoked. In three poems that discuss the nature of human impact on the environment and within the environment, the negative role that humanity plays is revealed through imagery of corruption, destruction and decay. The poets Robinson Jeffers, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Oliver Goldsmith all contribute to the discourse about the destructive and corruptive force that is the human animal. The poem “Live from the Lifeless was written by Robinson Jeffers, a poet who was born in 1887 and died in 1962. Jeffers had his first book of poetry published in 1938 although he was primarily neglected by the academic world during his time. His skill in the narrative poem has set him along side poets such as Frost and E. A. Robinson and as an alternative to the High Modernism that can be seen in Pound, Stevens, and Elliot. Tim Hunt, in his introduction to The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers states that “Jeffers stands as a crucial precursor to contemporary attempts to rethink our practical, ethical, and spiritual obligations to the natural world and the environment” (Robinson and Hunt 1). The poem looks at the nature of life in comparison to that which is not in need of sustainability. The discussion centers on the concept of need and how in the prospect of need, man has become corrupt. He says “Men suffer want and become/Curiously ignoble; as prosperity/Made them curiously vile” (Robinson). Through framing this stanza, the idea behind the poem is revealed, that in the needs that are necessary for life is a corruption. Life is about need and through those needs is seen the lack of nobility that the aspects of the world that do not have needs to survive display. In reading the poem a distinct contempt for life, not as a suicidal concept, but for the consumption that life needs to survive, can be felt. In reading the poem one can see the rolling of the ocean and the movement of the sky, but in contrast the word decay emerges as it seems to pollute the ocean, the rock, and the sky. Life is framed for its messy nature, for the needs that must be filled and when they are not, create a wasting. The solitude and stillness of inanimate life is the center of this poem, the cyclical forms of life spinning around this still center which stands noble while all else is subject to the corruption of need. The stanzas of the poem are arranged in three lines, five of them creating the length of the poem. There is a sense of fragmentation as the pictorial nature of the descriptions within the work come in visual symbols of the theme. The poem has a variety of speeds, quickening through a flurry of visuals about the living world, but slowing when it speaks of the inanimate world. The poem uses a rhetoric of visual imagery that is intended to convince the reader of his point of view. The poem creates the sense of his vision, the living world an abomination against the clean, pristine solitude of the inanimate world. In contrast to the comparison that Jeffers makes in his poem between the animate and the inanimate is the poem “The Eighth Duino Elegy” by Rainer Maria Rilke who compares the nature of man against the nature of the rest of the animal world. Rilke was born in 1875 and died in 1926. He wrote in both French and in English, creating his works with a heavy use of metaphor and was intent upon “his resolution to accept nothing at face value, but to transform whatever he took up” (Durr 2). In studying death from the perspective of human thought in comparison to that of the animal world, Rilke shows how freedom is outside of the human grasp because of the keen and constant awareness of death, through which the human is never free from waiting for his or her end. In the end, it is stated “we spend our lives saying/goodbye“ (Rilke). The nature of the poem is created from the concept that knowledge takes certain freedoms from human beings because in that knowledge is the anticipation of the event of death. The poem is a relatively long poem with four uneven stanzas, grammatically structured with sentences and without the use of capitalization at the beginning of each line. The phrasing creates a rhythm that mimics prose more than verse. However, in the visual creations of the work the emotional context is brought forward, creating a sense of how this poet sees sentience. Rilke writes “we who up-end the infant and/force its sight to fix upon/things and shapes, not the/freedom that they occupy,/that openness that lies so deep/within the faces of the animals,/free from death!” (Rilke). In these lines the main point of the poem is clear. Humans do not see their life, but live it within a framework of the past and the future, the space in which existence is framed devoid of the truth of its freedom. There is a contradiction in this framing, however, as Rilke discusses the moment as having importance for the animals, where the human is tied up in abstracts. However, in the quoted phrase, the abstract of freedom is given over to the animals with the mundane nature of existence taking primary importance. Still the message is clearly stated and the reader becomes aware of the freedom that is available through the ignorance of the end in death in comparison to living life with the anticipation of its finality. Oliver Goldsmith, who lived from about 1730 to 1774, was a physician as well as a poet. While much of his work was for publications of the time period and had little meaning to literary history, he produced a few works that were noteworthy and contributed to the evolution of writing. “The Deserted Village, A Poem” laments the loss of the past and the intrusion of progress as it destroys the beauty of a content village. The corruption of vanity and greed destroy the naturalistic beauty of a quaint village, the memories of this place being given as if in eulogy of its loss. The writer associates the village with innocence through lines like “The bashful virgin’s sidelong look of love,/The matron’s glance that would those looks reprove:/These were thy charms, sweet village! sports like these/With sweet succession taught e’en toil to please:” (Goldsmith). Through imagery that suggests a clean and wholesome time for the village, the writer creates a discourse on the nature of the past, its seeming purity and the nature of progress as it destroys the innocence that once seemed to reside in a place. It is through greed, the writer suggests, that these concepts no longer reside within the village. The vanity and wealth of those with the power to change for the purpose of exploiting resources has changed the contentment that was once within the village. The imagery that is created through the words is emphasized through the traditional nature of the structure of the poem. The stanzas are comprised of rhyming couplets, although the stanza length varies depending on the intent of the passage. As the lament continues, the rhyming creates a rhythm that drives the emotions of the piece. While its length seems long to present the message of the work, the redundancy of couplets creates a forward motion from which the intent and meaning can be experienced. The three poems somewhat demonize the human existence as a parasite to the environment. Even though Rilke’s work is a bit different in this aspect, it still suggests that despite the dominion of man, man does not have the grace that the animal kingdom has due to the hubris that comes from too much knowledge. In the prideful way in which knowledge is approached, freedom is lost. The three works elevate the natural world and show the human world to be corrupt, decaying all that is pure and good for the sake of greed and vanity. The three works create commentaries on the way in which man has abused and used resources within the world. Works Cited Dobson, Austin. Oliver Goldsmith: A Memoir. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1899. Print. Durr, Volker. Rainer Maria Rilke: The Poet's Trajectory. New York: Lang, 2006. Print. Goldsmith, Oliver. “The Deserted Village, A Poem”. Representative Poetry Online. 14 February 2002. Web. 24 April 2011. Jeffers, Robinson, and Tim Hunt. The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2001. Print. Jeffers, Robinson. “Life from the Lifeless”. Poemhunter.com. 12 April 2010. Web. 24 April 2011. Rilke, Ranier Marie. “The Eighth Duino Elegy”. transl Robert Hunter. Hunter Archive. 2011. Web. 24 April 2011. Read More