This poem as I see it, is a warning to humans that mother nature can give and she can take. Mother nature, in our imagination, shows us the power of wind, earth, water, sunshine and storm. She feeds us and we continually take what she has provided. " A peopled world it is; in size a tiny room". The world used to be a place where one could lose yourself in, but in modern times there is hardly any room to move where there are no people. "Burried beneath the glittering lake! Its place no longer to found, Yet the lost fragments shall remain, To fertilize some other ground". How much ground has been lost? The Glaciers melt, the polar ice caps are melting and in the process the ground that is being lost is fertilizing some other ground, mostly under water. The lakes, rivers and oceans are rising, and most people who have beach front property are losing their ground at an alarming rate. The emotions that people have is that of losing the home that they have built. Fear of the rising tide and finding their house in the middle of the ocean. Mother nature, in the future will try to reclaim the land from man/woman because we have not tried to work with nature to live in harmoney with it. We have taken for granted what she has given and we expect more, how much more can she give? If we could just sit back and enjoy what has been given we then can move more in harmoney with nature. Along with the warning I can see (from my memories) the flowers on the tundra in bloom, the clouds dancing in the blue sky, the sound of the water in the river moving on an endless journey toward the sea, those were the days in Alaska that I remember the most. No sound of people, no airplanes overhead, just the still and quiet of nature. People just need to stop and smell the roses and contemplate nature and the gifts that she can bring.
The "floating island" is that we are going away from nature and nature is going to reclaim what isn't ours by right, we are just custodians of the earth and if don't take care of it we are going to lose it out of our own carelessness.
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There are definitely critics who read this poem and use it to support what they refer to as Dorothy's ecocritical poetics (ecocriticism being a specific way of reading literature).
ReplyDeleteInteresting that would analyze this poem as if it were written in the 21st century. I think the poem was definetly about the cycle of life. Yet the tiny room is the confines of mankinds mind. I think she was really talking about peoples frivilous pursuits for vein things.
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