#42: Landscape Poetry

Exploring poems that weave geographical features into verse.

Dear Reader,

I’ve long considered compiling old poems that paint vivid pictures of landscapes, yet I didn’t quite know where to start. I needn’t have looked too far. During my early teenage years, I’d faithfully copy poems that resonated with me into a dusty, handmade paper book. Here’s one that glorifies the poet’s role in celebrating Nature:

Call it not vain—they do not err,
  Who say, that, when the poet dies,
 Mute Nature mourns her worshipper,
  And celebrates his obsequies;
Who say, tall cliff and cavern lone
For the departed Bard make moan;
That mountains weep in crystal rill;
That flowers in tears of balm distill;
Through his lov’d groves that breezes sigh,
And oaks, in deeper groan, reply;
And rivers teach their rushing wave
To murmur dirges round his grave.

~ Sir Walter Scott. Canto Fifth, The Lay of the Last Minstrel.

This excerpt from a ballad was written by Sir Walter Scott, better known for his historical novels, such as Ivanhoe and Rob Roy. To me, this verse harkens back to the late 18th to mid-19th-century Romantic Era — with wild countrysides disappearing, and bleak industrial infrastructure swallowing our horizons — when writers and artists tried to immortalise Nature through their works. I’d written before about how the Romantic era highlighted the fleeting, fragile nature of the wilderness [Read: Reimaging Wilderness]

This historical landscape painting, ‘The Bard’, by John Martin (1817) was inspired by Thomas Gray’s poem with the same name, and depicts a Welsh bard shouting in defiance at the army of Edward I before throwing himself to his death into the river Conwy below. Public Domain.

This edition draws inspiration from Robert Frost’s words, “all poetry starts with geography.” Keeping Geosophy’s scope in mind, I have chosen a few poems from different places that deftly weave geographical features or topographies into verse.

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OF RIVERS

Rivers are, perhaps, the most popular geographical muse for poets. If one traces their path, rivers lend themselves beautifully to linear narratives, as well as to metaphysical musings on cyclical processes of renewal and rebirth. They are unchanging, and yet, ever-changing. In ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, James Joyce has written about the alluvial recycling of rivers; in ‘My River Runs to Thee’, Emily Dickinson may have written about love or surrender; in ‘On the Pulse of Morning’, Maya Angelou weaves the history of deep time and human tribes. For now, I’ve chosen just one short, haunting poem on rivers:

📍The Mississippi river, United States of America.

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

~ The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes.

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OF MOUNTAINS

There are so many ways in which poems speak of mountains; as eternal, majestic, imposing, silent, sometimes attributed with wisdom and endurance. Grand epithets aside, I best remember Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem, where a mountain is humbled by a squirrel (The Mountain and the Squirrel).

In these three verses, each with a different poetic style, mountains assume different roles:

📍Murrumbidgee River, New South Wales, Australia.

I bought a run a while ago,
On country rough and ridgy,
Where wallaroos and wombats grow —
The Upper Murrumbidgee.
The grass is rather scant, it’s true,
But this a fair exchange is,
The sheep can see a lovely view
By climbing up the ranges.

~ A Mountain Station by Andrew ‘Banjo’ Paterson.

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The sunrise over Kussowlie is a lithograph by Mrs Anna Scott, featured in ‘Views of the Himalayas’. As you ascend from the Himalayan foothills toward Shimla, at about 6,000 feet, lies the hill station of Kasauli. Public Domain.

📍Kasauli village, Himachal Pradesh, India.

High in the azure heavens, ye ancient mountains,
Do ye uplift your old ancestral snows,
Gathering amid the clouds those icy fountains,
Whence many a sunny stream through India flows.

Flows with a lovely and unceasing motion,
That only rocks the lotus on its wave;
Unknown the various storms that rend the ocean—
Ocean, each river's mighty home and grave.

~ The Village of Kursalee by Letitia Elizabeth Landon.

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📍The Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina, United States of America.

STILL and calm,
In purple robes of kings,
The low-lying mountains sleep at the edge of the world.
The forests cover them like mantles;
Day and night
Rise and fall over them like the wash of waves.

Asleep, they reign.
Silent, they say all.
Hush me, O slumbering mountains --
Send me dreams.

~ The Blue Ridge by Harriet Munroe.

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OF DESERTS

As most English poetry has come to us from temperate places, we don’t often find deserts in poems (though there are enough oases in verses about love). The first poem speaks of the desert sands and winds, while the second poem speaks of war, both conjuring up a dry, desolate landscape:

📍The Sahara Desert, north Africa.

Not a breath
Stirs the death
Of the desert, nor a wreath
Curls upward from the sand,
From the waves of loose, fine sand,—
And I doze, half asleep,—
Of the wild Sirocs that sweep
O’er the caravans, and heap
With a cloud of powdery, dusty death, the terror-stricken band.

~ On the Desert by William Wetmore Story.

This tinted lithograph by David Roberts titled ‘Fragments of the Great Colossi at the Memnonium’, shows the ruined mortuary temple of Amenhotep III dated to 1350 BC that lies in present-day Egypt and Nubia. Public Domain.

📍El Alamein, Egypt, north Africa.

This land was made for war.
As glass resists the bite of vitriol,
so this hard and calcined earth
Rejects the battle’s hot, corrosive impact.
Here is no nubile, girlish land;
No green and virginal countryside for war to violate.
This land is hard.
Inviolable.

~ The Desert by Peter Batty.

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OF OCEANS

I love how these two poems speak of different aspects of the ocean. The first poem describes the unknown depths that may harbour fantastical creatures like the kraken, or hidden treasures, while the second features a volcanic archipelago connected by trade. It is interesting to think that historically, we quelled our fears of the vast oceans and crossed them in search of trade and treasure, in a very short span of time.

📍The Atlantic Ocean.

Thou dark, unfathomed Ocean! in thy halls
No searching glance of kindly sunlight falls--
Far through thy azure depths the sea-snakes sweep,
And the huge Krakens haunt thee--stormy deep!
Yet hast thou wealth of glorious things, far down
Thy hidden palaces--jewels and crown,
And the reich spoils of many a shattered bark,
Lie with thy Sea-Stars and the ocean shark;
And from thy many-twinkling sands, bright gems
Shine like the pearls in kingly diadems.

~ The Ocean by Isaac McLellan.

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📍Society Islands, Pacific Ocean

Now the blue
meridians free
islets and islands
from the sea,

Huahine
Raieta
are stepping from
one green idea,

Bora Bora,
Otaha,
move past the ship
somnambular,

volcanoes in
lush periwigs
and hubbub trade
in nails and pigs,

Motu-iti
Rurutu,
fantastic profiles
on the blue

accept what cannot
be eschewed
your fateful gifts
of longitude.

~ Society Islands 1769 by Alan Gould.

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Years ago, I had dreamed of creating a map of poetry, with pins for real-world locations that inspired poems. As is often the case with grand ideas, someone had already created the Poetry Atlas. It was incredible to revisit the site after all these years, and revisit some poems and discover new ones. If any of these poems resonated with you, I hope you will look for the complete versions and tumble as far down the rabbit hole as you’d like. Or look for poetry inspired by places around you!

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