Made of Flower and Flame: Poetry and Climate Change

The natural world, long a source of delight and repose and so often celebrated in poetry, is changing. As the impact of human activity harmful to the earth ’s climate and global health continues to be documented, so too has contemporary poetry responded in its own terms in the work of poets like Gary Snyder and Terry Tempest Williams, and in this issue’s “Persephone Explains Global Warming.” Florid, overheated language evokes the globe’s asto nishing variety of biota and the threat posed by rising temperatures. “Unphas[ed] tides” and “blister[ed] trees” are metaphors for nature gone awry. The poem’s version of the mythic Persephone, who joins Hades in the underworld in fall (precipitating winter) and returns to the earth’s su rface in the spring (precipitating summer), returns to earth off-cycle, vengefully bringing not just warmth, but heat and flame to creation, and unleashing the meteorologic consequences described in a line as punishing to enunciate as it is to imagine: “hurricanes, volcanoes, tornadoes, wildfires, tsunamis.” Yet for all the tangle of unnatural cycles and extreme weather the poem’s language suggests, it is Persephone’s aspect as Queen of the Dead whom the last lines insist we remember. In the excesses wrought upon a damaged, despairing world, spring is no longer a healing balm after a l ong winter, but instead another reminder that we are doomed to lose everything unless we act urgently to repair our besieged paradise, “res...
Source: JAMA - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research