Things I Think I've Done Outside Because of Books
Each year, at the start of March, a snatch of poetry runs through my head:
March, black ram,
Comes in like a lion,
Goes out like a lamb.
It appeared in a book which gathered stories, rhymes and snippets of seasonal lore about winter that I pored over annually as a child. I can’t find any reference to this version of the proverb now, so I suppose the ram of Aries was added purely to give the sentiment a rhyme and rhythm. It demonstrates the sticking power of poetry, though: the music of those lines caught in my mind forever.
I had a bookish, indoors childhood, despite my parents’ best efforts to exhort me out into the fresh air. I admit that the majority of the feelings I amassed about the natural world came from books and poems. It’s no substitute for the real thing, which utterly delights me now - sorry Mum and Dad! - as I chivvy my own reluctant children – sorry, kids! – into the cold to exclaim over catkins, but it did help me build a store of natural knowledge.
It turns out I (and now, my daughters) can identify a dog violet, thanks to Flower Fairies of the Spring. My sense of seasonal aesthetics is embarrassingly obviously influenced by Brambly Hedge. April cannot dawn without Browning’s ‘Home-Thoughts from Abroad’ coming to mind. I will always be unsettled by frog spawn, thanks to Heaney’s ‘Death of a Naturalist’. And every year, when my children complain about bright summer bedtimes, I find myself quoting Robert Louis Stevenson:
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
Again: sorry, kids.
Later in the year, Rachel Field’s autumnal ‘sagging orchards’ in ‘Something Told the Wild Geese’ come to mind.
Something told the wild geese
It was time to go.
Though the fields lay golden
Something whispered,—‘Snow.’
Leaves were green and stirring,
Berries, luster-glossed,
But beneath warm feathers
Something cautioned,—‘Frost.’
All the sagging orchards
Steamed with amber spice,
But each wild breast stiffened
At remembered ice.
Something told the wild geese
It was time to fly,—
Summer sun was on their wings,
Winter in their cry.
The geese will be chased by Nikki Giovanni’s ‘Winter’: ‘once a snowflake fell / on my brow’ and Robert Frost’s traveller, stopped among in snowy trees with ‘miles to go before I sleep’. Have I really not been in that snow-smothered wood? I see it so clearly.
Wordsworth, in ‘The Prelude’, captured the exhilaration of whirling about on ice-skates. It feels convincing even to me as a clumsy person, whose few attempts at skating (on suburban rinks resounding with Radio 1) resulted in falls eliciting audible gasps from onlookers.
It rarely snowed where I grew up. I was never ambushed by a rabble of farting frogs. I couldn’t see pedestrian’s feet from my bedroom. But reading has helped me make imaginative leaps: in the treasure house of my mind, I’ve thrilled to a chaffinch in the April orchard, even though I wouldn’t recognise one in real life if it pecked me on the head wearing a tiny ‘CHAFFINCH’ t-shirt. In my imagination, I’ve sailed across frozen lakes under a wintry sky and not just done the world’s sweariest Bambi impression, resulting in spectacular bruising. These experiences were not ‘real’, but they live in me nonetheless, and I’d be so much the poorer without them.
The success of Allie Esiri’s seasonal anthologies – A Poem for Every Spring Day, and so on, and the beautiful anthologies edited by Fiona Walters – I Am the Seed That Grew the Tree and Tiger Tiger Burning Bright – show that I’m not alone in valuing poetry as a way in to nature for young readers. Gathering material for Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book, I hoped the poems could inspire young champions for our planet and its wildlife, just as the museum’s collections aim to do.
In a world where we’re ever more disconnected from natural rhythms, I do believe books and poetry can help to plug us back in. And so what if most of my memories of the natural world are stitched together from things I’ve read? I can head out into the world now (dragging my complaining children… sorry, kids!) and look for all that magic this spring. I can gather it and file it with the rest, the real illuminating the imaginary and, together, building into a view of nature that weaves the experiences of so many different writers together… but is ultimately mine and mine alone, built of spring buds and birdsong — and books.
A version of this blog appeared on the Children’s Poetry Summit in March 2022.
