Nature’s Nature

I woke, shaken from the dream. It was not quite dawn but that filtered darkness just as the first light shadows the curtains. It had been a dream of words, of many people, their voices, and my sense of a great conversation woven with musical phrases. But all I could remember, even just waking, was one phrase. It was clear. Thus runs the world away. It was uttered in closure with a shake of the head, a sorrow in the speaker’s voice, conclusive.

Later that morning I remembered it again, though I misremembered the source. Macbeth, I thought, but a quick search took me instead to Hamlet. Of course it was Hamlet, in one of his rhymed quatrains; in fact, Hamlet may be recycling part of an older folksong, a bit of lore in hymnal meter, as he speaks to Horatio, in the middle of Act III, which is in the middle of the play.

Why, let the stricken deer go weep,   The hart ungallèd play;For some must watch, while some must sleep:   Thus runs the world away.

Alas, poor Hamlet. The world is not running away from us. The tragedy is that we are running away from the world. Our ruination — our ruining nations — is vast and in many ways unfixable. Perhaps it’s hard to see the profound effects of our running away, our environmental neglect. But changes that might naturally occur over geological time, those vast expanses, are happening instead up close, in human time.

Here’s an example. The massive ice sheet of Greenland measures over a mile deep and covers eighty percent of the world’s largest island. That’s a staggering lot of ice. The Guardian reported that, in 2019, this same sheet was melting at the rate of about one million tons a minute. In a related item, the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity recently estimated that “[e]very day, up to 150 species are lost.” Our own species, Homo sapiens, is roughly 250,000 years old, while the average mammal species is about one million years; some persist for as long as ten million years. Yet at the current accelerated rate — in the new epoch of the human-driven sixth extinction — as many as a third of species may be extinct by 2050, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

I won’t continue with this catalog — the demise of species, shelf ice turning to slush and runoff, the trillions of minute nodules of plastiglomerate wavering in the salt oceans. But I will say this, the world will not quickly expire or vanish or run away. We will. Though we treat nature like a hardware store or a bank, like a grocery store or a battlefield, it will nonetheless go on and on — though it will be altered radically by our species’ mistreatment, and our species is likely to expire well before our allotted million years is up.

In such circumstances, how does a poet — or any artist — find the heart, the motivation, and the words to continue? Sometimes I don’t know. Sometimes, as Bertolt Brecht shows, I see the way it must be: “In the dark times / Will there also be singing? // Yes, there will be singing. / About the dark times.”

Here is some of that singing, dark and even, at times, with a clear-eyed brightness. In this eighth annual iteration of the Kenyon Review’s environmental feature, “Nature’s Nature,” in these twenty-four poems by fifteen poets, we see a natural diversity of poetic forms and styles, and a varied landscape of concerns, tones, and treatments. In “Pestilence,” Maya C. Popa voices some of the same critical disquiet:

It will take longer to shed this panicthan the trees their memories of sleep

or winter’s interrogation, snapping backeach branch, asking, You, will you endure this strife?

And yet, in the midst of her own “Elegy,” Elizabeth Arnold shows us the persistent adaptation of living things and the wonder of their particularity, as they exist inside the massive movements of time and the world:

Sea cows float like balloons all winter in the...