You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain
The poem’s syntax becomes confused to the point that the reader is unsure where the mountain ends and the lover’s body begins. In this poem of erotic yearning, the Unitah mountains are conflated with the body of the poet’s lover. Nature and mountains are the fuel that drives his poetry. Born and raised in Oregon, he climbed with the Mazamas, the local mountaineering group, and later spent two seasons as a fire lookout in the North Cascades. Snyder, one of the great modern American poets, grew up around mountains. They are connected in infinitely complex ways to the animals who call it home, the trees growing its hills and the people who attempt to climb it.īeneath my Hand and Eye the Distant Hills, Your BodyĪs when vision idly dallies on the hills By the middle of the poem, Rainier turns into the home of the ancient Greek gods, Mount Olympus.Īn important point that Moore’s poem observes is that mountains are not discrete objects that can be separated from their landscapes. The metaphor isn’t stable, however: the eponymous octopus changes into a python, then a spider. Like Dickinson, personifies the mountain - in this case, the glacier on top of Mount Rainier, around which she once hiked.
So begins Moore’s 193 line poem An Octopus, the longest of her career. To the green metallic tinge of an anemone-starred pool.’ Or killing prey with the concentric crushing rigor of the python, Made of glass that will bend–a much needed invention–Ĭomprising twenty-eight ice-fields from fifty to five hundred All the poet can do is bow in the mountain’s presence.ĭots of cyclamen-red and maroon on its clearly defined The mountain is transfigured into a fearsome warrior clad in icy armor to whom the royalty of this world - the “Purples of Ages” - defers. Thigh of Granite - and thew - of Steel –įour of Dickinson’s poems concern mountains, the best of which, “Ah Teneriffe”, takes its inspiration from a mountain in the Canary Islands. Sunset - reviews her Sapphire Regiment – In these poems, the poets are metaphorical mountaineers, grappling with the inconceivable power of mountains, attempting to achieve the summit of understanding. How could there not be? The sublime majesty of mountains has inspired history’s best minds, proving William Blake’s dictum “Great things are done when men and mountains meet.” There are many great poems about mountains as well. They rise up and erupt in our minds as much as they do on our landscapes. Mountains loom large in the cultural imagination.
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