MYSTERIES OF NATURE
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This poem explores the mystery and fear of nature through imagery of wells and the sea. The speaker recalls being drawn to wells as a child but also feeling awe and fear of their depth and unknown contents. Nature is portrayed as a "stranger" with an ominous, haunted quality that cannot be fully known or understood, even by those closest to it. The more one observes nature, the less it can be simplified or comprehended.
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MYSTERIES OF NATURE
- 3. Personal Helicon By Seamus Heaney for Michael Longley As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top. I savoured the rich crash when a bucket Plummeted down at the end of a rope. So deep you saw no reflection in it. A shallow one under a dry stone ditch Fructified like any aquarium. When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch A white face hovered over the bottom. Others had echoes, gave back your own call With a clean new music in it. And one Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection. Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
- 4. What mystery pervades a well! That water lives so far -- A neighbor from another world Residing in a jar Whose limit none have ever seen, But just his lid of glass -- Like looking every time you please In an abyss's face! The grass does not appear afraid, I often wonder he Can stand so close and look so bold At what is awe to me. Related somehow they may be, The sedge stands next the sea -- Where he is floorless And does no timidity betray But nature is a stranger yet; The ones that cite her most Have never passed her haunted house, Nor simplified her ghost. To pity those that know her not Is helped by the regret That those who know her, know her less The nearer her they get.
- 5. Departure Points Compare Wordsworth: It is a beauteous evening calm and free. Consider Heaneys Personal Helicon. Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 19 April 1882) Origin of the Species (1859) Darwins theory of evolution: shattering and disturbing.The world as our home, no other place to be. Attempt to find beauty in transience.
- 6. William Wordsworth : It is a Beauteous Evening IT is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
- 7. What mystery pervades a well! That water lives so far -- A neighbor from another world Residing in a jar Four iambic feet per line (tetrameter ) Three iambic feet per line (tetrimeter) Neighbouring relation to an unknown entity. A reflection on the strangeness of nature. Juxtaposition between abstract mystery and the physical well Child-like sense of distance and fear. Full rhyme in lines 2 and 4. Imagery of contained and uncontained spaces. Use of enjambment breaks the stanza form
- 8. Whose limit none have ever seen, But just his lid of glass -- Like looking every time you please In an abyss's face! Beyond the surface lid the limits are unknowable . The well is an emblem of the unfathomable: Whose limit none have ever seen and an abysss face-unknown, frightening. Abyss-deep chasm, immeasurable depth. Use of metaphor and simile in an attempt to tackle the mystery of the well. Use of slant rhyme.
- 9. The grass does not appear afraid, I often wonder he Can stand so close and look so bold At what is awe to me. Dickinson personifies the calm grass, the sedge, with her own acute sense of awe. Contained stanza and full rhyme.
- 10. Related somehow they may be, The sedge stands next the sea -- Where he is floorless And does no timidity betray Movement away from the well to a consideration of the sea-concentric cirlces on the surface of the water. Sedge-waterside marsh plant, coarse grass. Imagery of depth floorless transfers easily from the well to the sea. Uncontainable nature suggested by the enjambment and the way that Dickinson breaks full rhyme (sea, timidity)
- 11. But nature is a stranger yet; The ones that cite her most Have never passed her haunted house, Nor simplified her ghost. Far from being a Romantic assertion of wonder and redemptive agency of nature, here Dickinson talks about nature as a stranger, with a haunted house. Blakes The Tyger Did he who made the lamb make thee? Sense of the enormity of nature and the fear (of the unknown) and wonder that it can inspire.
- 12. To pity those that know her not Is helped by the regret That those who know her, know her less The nearer her they get. The poem has a sense of never quite fully belonging to nature. We are left with no sense of the possibility of knowledge or connection. The nearer one gets to nature (something that is always fraught with danger and fear), the less one knows.