David Comeau: wendell berry- secular pilgrimage

The very beginning of Wendell Berry’s essay “a secular pilgrimage” in A Continuous harmony grabbed my attention immediately. He writes “ ‘Nature poetry’ is a clumsy term and it presents immediate difficulties, for there is a sense in which most poetry is nature poetry; most poets, even those least interested in nature, have found in the natural world an abundant stock of symbols and metaphors.” Berry here makes an interesting point, in that even those who aren’t in love and completely absorbed by nature such as Thoreau and others he mentions later, still use nature in their poems. It truly shows the importance of nature in art and how easily nature can be used to describe different feelings and emotions. It seems as though when talking about beauty or love, nature metaphors are unavoidable. I believe that this shows how deeply nature is written in our hearts and in a very spiritual sense. Although I enjoy nature, I do not consider myself a true lover of nature. However, I guarantee that if I were to sit down with my guitar and write a song or write a poem describing how I feel, I would most likely use nature. It is interesting to see how quick our minds are to recall sunsets or starry nights or bright colored leaves even when we do not think of ourselves as passionate nature lovers. I guess one explanation for this in my own life could be that if God desires to be glorified he could put thoughts of nature in my head because he knows that I can’t attribute nature to anything other than himself.