the substantial words are in the ground and sea,
they are in the air, they are in you.

Walt Whitman

Ever since Emerson announced to a burgeoning Democracy that “in the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows,” nature poetry in America has been permeated with an overriding optimism difficult to discard. According to the New World poet/priest, nature calmed, healed, and inspired with a God-like generosity. Not surprisingly, much of the poetry of the American Renaissance and beyond often muddied the distinction between God and nature, as the poets sought to record their magical encounters with a two-headed deity. One of the most famous instances of this convergence, Emerson's address to the Rhodora, concludes with a naive rhetorical question no modern poet could legitimately ask:

Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew;
But, in my simple ignorance, suppose,
The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

That trusting connection to some beneficent Power which allows one, selflessly, to partake of the surrounding wilderness is the central experience of American nature poetry. In principle that mysterious intimacy was available to anyone. But as Emerson came to see, only the poet was receptive enough to absorb this bounty of natural imagery and recreate the vision in verse. A poetic sensitivity which in overtly Puritan times would have produced religious hymns of fervent subservience to God now produced, as it reacted to the growing pre-Darwinian skepticism and the glaring and unabated natural despoliation, a poetry of spiritual equality among the individual, divinity, and nature. In leaves of grass or summer rain, both Whitman and Thoreau were caught up in celebrating the union. Even Dickinson, whose consciousness was too beseiged and whose beliefs too edged with doubt to worship a benevolent deity, could find release from her self-scrutinies as she pondered the seasons from her Amherst windows: “The grass so little has to do / I wish I were a Hay.”

By the time Frost appears, nature and God, both rather battered, have gone their separate ways. Frost's poetry is, implicitly, an acknowledgment that the curious balance that characterized pantheistic euphoria is gone, replaced by an almost wryly stoical contemplation of the isolated self, which speaks of “contraries.” And while this change contributes significantly to the iciness of the star-gazing Frost, there is another reason for the New Englander's detached quality: he lived just before the first stirring of the environmental movement brought nature as a guiding and consoling force back to public consciousness.

While this renaissance of respect for nature is a windfall for the planet, for many poets this rekindling has proved a pathway back to the Promised Land. Not surprisingly, a number of contemporary, nature-focused poets—A. R. Ammons and David Wagoner, for instance—often paddle in this new-found current of optimistic enchantment, where an image from unsullied nature reverberates with a hospitable spirituality. Unfortunately, though the spirit of the woods is now as compelling as ever, poetry's ability to preach this gospel has, for the most part, grown wheezy.

Wagoner realizes the problem, that the archetypal images worked over for 150 years are increasingly ineffective, when he writes:

But all this broken beauty of cloud-shapes, the endless
Promises and the unrepeatable gestures
Of light, omens, high masses,
Each shred, each smattering of each flamboyant
          sky-scape
Have numbed our language into a mawkish grandeur.

(“Reading the Sky”)

It is as if Wagoner and others are forced to create fire out of sodden and crumbling words, “the old words” as he calls them in an early poem. It is every nature poet's problem, for nature, unlike society, never changes. Cyclical though it is, the untouched natural world has a permanency that is, for all intents and purposes, eternally stable. The rainforest one poet sees this year, barring an unusual disaster (a blowdown) or man's intervention (clear-cutting), the next poet will also find. Thus the poet of the woods is forced to explore a world where the tracks of others, and his own, are readily apparent. Add to this poetic clutter, the diffusiveness inherent in free verse, and it is not hard to see why most contemporary nature poets seem to be stumbling along, predictably irregular as drunken pack animals.

Faced with hundreds of years of metrical heritage, Whitman found free verse perfectly suited for capturing the boundless sublimity of a wild sprawling America, a country which he himself claimed was “essentially the greatest poem.” Dickinson, though her rhythms are based on traditional Protestant hymns, was able to create an inward country as vast as Whitman's. Emerson and Thoreau, because they were not able to move beyond conventional prosody and because they did not possess a genius for introspective dialogue, remained minor poets writing major prose, never gaining the oracular quality of Whitman or the internal velocity which distinguishes Dickinson. But no contemporary poet can have the limitless enthusiasm for America that Whitman conveyed, and few are willing—or able—to isolate and intensify their psychological existence the way Dickinson did.

David Wagoner understands this and dealt with the problem of meter early on. Like Frost, he realizes that free verse can be an enticing distraction, and his early formal meters, such as this stanza from a 1958 poem “The Feast,” tacitly concede that a rhythmic free-for-all can be enervating:

Maimed and enormous in the air,
The bird fell down to us and died.
Its eyelids were like cleats of fire,
And fire was pouring from its side.

Despite the pat rhymes, Wagoner strengthens the disturbing descriptions—“maimed and enormous,” “eyelids … like cleats of fire”—by embedding them in a grid of iambic tetrameter. And the abrupt verbal activity of the spondee “fell down” leads to the mystical figure of “was pouring,” the past progressive movement aptly contained within the intact meter.

Wagoner also realizes that the natural world, so full of wonder to Thoreau and Melville and Darwin, has lost its most stirring attribute, its fresh and vast primordiality, through man's continued encroachment. Melville and Darwin, wandering where few had been before, were both immensely struck by the primeval desolation of the Galapagos islands; now tour packages replete with Nouvelle Cuisine specialize in visiting them.

What to do? Several possibilities exist, the main ones involving a variation on the traditional tramp deep into the woods, a pilgrimage which can expose hidden insecurities, or on the direct contrast of nature with civilization. Both ways generate a keen awareness of the subtle orderings of natural elements, the club moss maintaining itself in the darkness of a hemlock stand, say, but the shedding of worldly pressures and self-concerns is more easily available through the first approach. For Wagoner, the poet reawakens “the old words” by portraying the natural world as experienced by psychically uneasy characters, wanderers who are lost either through inexperience or daydream. This very apprehensiveness increases the chances of noticing, for example, that the peculiar dipping flight of the phoebe differs from the waxwing's spurting acrobatics. This knowledge is therapeutic because it reassures one that there are stable natural rhythms which are not subject to the assaults of civilized life. Though occasionally sententious, the best poems in Landfall and First Light, his two latest books, abound with the observant and intimate attachment to the loons and ospreys, the marshes and ponds, that marks Walden.

The compass for understanding Wagoner is the remarkable title poem of his 1966 book Staying Alive in which Wagoner explores the dangers of being lost in the wilderness. If you get lost, he says, in this manual fit for any camper's knapsack, you must not panic, and if you follow a few simple rules you will survive. As a sort of metaphysical forest ranger, Wagoner first offers practical advice on how to cope with emergencies—what to eat and how to build a shelter, how to travel and what carelessness to avoid—then moves on to counsel about the deeper fears of “bears and packs of wolves” which can be quelled by a patient alertness to the quiet signs and pathways of the wilderness (“the bottom of your mind knows all about zero”). When man acts like an intruder into nature, his safety cannot be guaranteed. But if these rules are followed, he observes wryly,

          There may even come, on some uncanny evening,
A time when you’re warm and dry, well fed, not thirsty,
Uninjured, without fear,
When nothing, either good or bad, is happening.
This is called staying alive. It’s temporary.
What occurs after
Is doubtful.

This psychic equilibrium is certainly not wild delight, but for the skeptical modern such balance is almost comparable to the rapt calm the Transcendentalists valued in their encounters with nature. Interestingly, however, “Staying Alive” goes on to tackle the problem of being found, a worry that Thoreau sensed in his chapter on visitors in Walden but, with his ready access to virgin forests, never bothered probing. Once a person grows self-reliant and competent, the necessity of being found loses much of its urgency. Because of its passive and dependent character, being found can in fact be crippling; the hard-earned self-mastery often comes apart after one stumbles into society's traps.

In both Landfall and First Light, that feeling of being lost, of disorientation, is Wagoner's preferred way of dissolving the self's encrusted habits. This discomfort evident in a number of poems dominates the sequences which center each volume, “The Land Behind the Wind” and “Sea Change.” Both dramatize journeys that unlayer the confining folds of self-consciousness through exposure to nature: the lovers move from isolation to a solitude which replenishes the nineteenth-century poets' spiritual bond (God/nature/individual), with the lover replacing God in the equation.

“The Land Behind the Wind” (First Light) is a narrative sequence which opens with the couple enacting a series of ritualistic preparations in order to establish a groundwork for further travel. “Making, Camp,” “Their Camp,” and “Their Shelter” are preliminaries for “Backtracking,” a poem in which the couple moves from a decisive retracing of steps to a necessary but disconcerting loss of bearings: and when nature obliterates all traces of their presence, it is a chastening augury of their struggle to break away from familiar landmarks:

But gradually by day and gradual evening
The footprints grew fainter.
The leaves had recovered from their careless passage.
The grass had turned
Upright and smooth, no longer bending toward them
In their old direction,
And the bare ground had levelled away their traces
Like snow melting.

Having lost their physical and psychic ways, both are ready for further trekking, their shared transport being the “dreaming consciousness” that Gaston Bachelard speaks of (in The Poetics of Space) as so crucial to poetic exploration and spiritual growth: “They kept on walking, / Dreaming they were there.”

“His Dream” now takes place, where the male encounters and decidedly rejects the suffocations of an entrapping house:

                                                            Why are so many walls
Standing unchangeably upright around him?
Why do the floors and ceilings end in corners?
What is there here for him? Nothing remains,
Nothing he wants as deeply as what he’s found
Outside of houses, no feeling as full of wonder
As being tired and restless, eager and lost.

The initial poetic questioning is uninspired, but the verbal play with “found / Out[side]” is a fine touch, and the word “lost” yoked with “eager” is unexpected. “Eager” normally bespeaks unmistakable, goal-oriented direction, but Wagoner's pairing it with “lost” virtually redefines it. Being lost is desirable because it leads away from rutted mind and grooved paths to complete selflessness:

And now he dreams he has finished dreaming. His body
Is lying under the pale rooftree of morning,
Under a movable and changeable sky,
And for a moment, only a moment,
He reaches the right true end of travelling,
A place to be still, a place to belong in,
Where forgetting to be himself is the final
Incredible comfort he had always forgotten
Even to wish for.

Having struggled this far in their pilgrims' progress, they continue on to “The Source.” This poem shows Wagoner at his best. Anyone who has walked to the birthplace of a mountain stream can appreciate Wagoner's acute observation (“wading through ferns and leaves / as if through a living and dying current”), his invigorating knowledge of fountain moss and winter wrens, and of all the sharp subtle distinctions, nuances of light, for example, that excite the poet in nature. The whole journey is carefully paced through the changing lively rhythms, but nowhere is image more aligned with rhythm than midway through the climb when the reader finds the movements of the tiny stream: “the creek seemed younger, / Hurrying, its surface quick, more hectic.” The couple clamber up to the pond from which “the foot-wide creek / Was now being born / Again and again under their eyes.” Then the journey ends in a joyful ceremony of union:

                                                            They drank
From the source, their blue lips going numb
At that strange kiss.
They kissed like strangers. They watched the creek
                    spill over
Stones like the first words: Only
Begin, and the rest will follow.

The parallel kissing of the water and one another echoes the Transcendentalist union of God and nature and the individual mind, with God as mentioned earlier replaced by the lover. With this merging of element and themselves, the couple are able to see each other and the rest of the physical world anew. For Wagoner, this movement back to the source is what allows “the old words” to reemerge as substantial “first words.” Unfortunately, though the purpose of the image is admirable, the poetry on the page is not particularly compelling, especially after the vivid accuracy of the hike up.

The sequence could have stopped here, but Wagoner wants to work past the beginning, past the simple delusion that being born again is the culmination of their quest. Wagoner is not interested in a casual relationship with nature. Just as Emerson was unable to accept the smug Unitarianism around him, Wagoner doesn’t accept an only-on-Sundays attitude toward nature. They both sense the truth that nature can provide, and they both like to lecture about it. But there is a key difference: Emerson's expansive sensitivity, in a pre-Civil War country intoxicated with possibility, seemed justified; in a changed and cynical world, when Wagoner speaks to a country which no longer cares to be “Nature's Nation,” his advice, except to those who have already found “the source,” must seem naive and unimportant.

“Seeing the Wind” and “Walking into the Wind,” the last two poems in the sequence, bring the couple into contact with the wind, the spirit of nature whose energy they must absorb if they are to continue beyond the communion at the source. Wagoner's biological metaphor is a kind of displaced religiosity:

                                                            They held their eyes
Open to know it, arms open to take it in
Where it belonged, in their bones, not only blowing
Among them as it might through their skeletons
If they lay down, but inside their hollows, a marrow
Like the music of their blood being reborn
Over and over.

How much this selfless acceptance chimes with the most famous passage in “Nature”!

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.

Take away the name of God and substitute the phrase “the music of their blood being reborn,”; for Wagoner in “Seeing the Wind,” the experience is the same. In our most profound moments in the woods, this spirit, “the currents of the Universal Being,” does indeed “circulate” through us.

“Walking into the Wind” is Wagoner's final comment in the sequence about the necessity for sustained contact with the quite literal windfall of nature:

Though they knew where they might shelter, warming
their                     hearts
Among trees and houses, no longer listening
To anything at all in the darkness,
They slept instead where it could touch them
And touch them with its fingers till morning.

This rejection of the safety and comfort of the house and tree which earlier had confined them now leads to the final recognition (and didactic lesson) that imposed or preconceived direction is stultifying—the only real direction, as difficult and impractical as it may be, is to live as much as possible in the surging pulse of nature: “There lay the wind at their feet like a pathway.”

The best poems in First Light and Landfall insist that the natural world is the only place to exist fully. For the poet whose life is grounded in a confusing array of mundane concerns such as paying bills or correcting an endless pile of student papers—Wagoner still writes about the humdrum of life with a certain caustic humor, as a poem like “My Physics Teacher” testifies—nature serves as a potent spiritual instructor. Having to deal with many of the mindless contingencies and appalling abuses of the environment that Thoreau so convincingly denounced in his prose, Wagoner undoubtedly goes into the woods as uneasy, at points, as the fictive participants in his poetry. All nature poets do. For without this experience of confusion, or something akin to it, there would be no reason to celebrate the comfort nature offers for “real sorrows.” Without this need for spiritual coherence, the wandering through nature would be senseless, simply a tourist's snapshot session.

Wagoner's most penetrating poetry in Landfall and First Light—the two sequences, “Sleeping on Stones,” “Wading in a Marsh”—sticks to the simple principle outlined above, a sequence of events which, not surprisingly considering the poet's familiarity with Indian lore, recalls tribal initiation rites. This movement from psychic disarray to psychic maturity, where the confusions of self-centeredness are cleared away through a glimpse into the hidden ordering of nature, where man is part and not paragon, is Wagoner's innermost vision. It is also at the core of all authentic nature poetry.

“Sleeping Stones” illustrates this crucial process. Here another restless couple, after watching a dog salmon prepare for spawning by hollowing out a place in the gravel, fall asleep on an improvised bed over the smooth but slightly uneven stones. They share a dream as the currents lull them to sleep:

                                                            The water under our minds
Began to rise, began to come together.
It flowed over the gray stones in our skulls
That had been waiting, it rushed blue
And green and white, it smoothed them, it turned them
Speckled like constellations, it turned them over
And bedded them down, kept edging them stone-fast,
Shifted them, one by one, into one streambed.
And into that stream the salmon came, she swam,
Half turned, surged again, came closer,
Swivelled, and held against the flow, the color
Of sun on melting snowfields high among stones
Still in their mountain, she drank that snow,
She turned her shimmering side and began nesting.

There is intricate and satisfying beauty in the final stanza, an inexorable movement toward completion, mirrored in the syntax, that brings profound unity to the dreamers. Pardoning the slightly excessive sibilance, the lines also show Wagoner's increasing rhythmic grace, perhaps an influence from his early mentor Theodore Roethke. Anyone who has slept beside a rushing stream knows it has an almost miraculous calming power, and Wagoner catches this with the wonderful image of water smoothing and organizing the rough, disjointed parts of the couple's minds, thus preparing for the coming of the surging salmon. There is a tenacity in that salmon which is central to all nature writing, a clinging to life which even the most delicate alpine wildflower must possess. Wagoner here displays it convincingly.

Unfortunately, in a number of other poems, the reader must often wade through sections of marshy softness in order to get to the solid ground of sprightly invention, where the “beautiful sane laughter” of “Loons Mating” opens up the neglected trail to the spot where loon and kingfisher, Douglas fir and lodgepole pine, and man have equal significance and equal beauty. When the pulse falters and the imagery clots, a kind of self-indulgent padding leaves the reader sleepily entertained, as in the opening to “By a Lost Riverside” in Landfall:

The bedding stones, where we lay
All summer at low water,
Where we made our fires,
And our love through fall and winter
And dreamed while gray-green
Rainbow-making salmon
Spawned as close as our arms,
Are gone now, carried downstream
By the changed course of the river.

This lazy and sentimental reportage is stagnant as a silted pond. It is as if the priggish Miles Coverdale, the narrator of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, were leading a nature walk. We sense that Wagoner's characters feel delight and wonder, but they rest in a privacy between poet and protagonist which the reader cannot often share.

While pedantry and sluggish tone are occasional defects, what one most misses in Landfall and First Light are lines that lodge in the mind long after the reader shuts his book, like Yeats', Stevens', and Lowell's: “the salmonfalls, the mackerel-crowded seas”; “Downward to darkness, on extended wings”; “And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill.” None of the poems in these latest volumes shimmers and dances with the charming lilt of “Water Music for the Progress of Love in a Life-Raft down the Sammamish Slough,” a love poem that glides along at different speeds, gracefully noting mallards and water spiders, bullocks and goats “in the dying reeds,” but also spoofing and paying homage to the trips of George I and Cleopatra in their royal barges with a Handelian music of its own. Still, Wagoner knows his terrain well, and the earnest imagination of Landfall and First Light offers more than a sprinkling of mild delights.