Emily Dickinson

The poem I selected and chose to read was call Nature, The Gentlest Mother, of course by Emily Dickinson.  After seeing a long line of poems to chose from, I immediately went under the "n's" to see if there was anything about nature, because of Thoreau's and Emerson's views on those two topics.  Anyways Emily Dickinson compares nature to a mother, hints the title.  She expresses positive attitudes towards nature inferring that nature is like a mother (Dickinson).  Dickinson also gives out a positive vibe towards by writing nature as a soothing and relaxing topic.  She does this by saying things like "summer afternoon" (Dickinson).  When one thinks about a summer afternoon, you think of a sunny day, not too hot, but with a perfect breeze, and being outside for this is like nothing other in the world.  Dickinson.  It compares to Thoreau's love for nature when he said that nature was like an artistic model (Grant).  I think than Dickinson is trying to prove the same thing when she talks about a summer afternoon because she is giving the reader a visual image of what a summer afternoon may look like.

Emily Dickinson also gives the reader a clear image of how she thinks nature is like a mother.  When she says this:

"all the children sleep
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light her lamps;
Then, bending from the sky

With infinite affection
And infiniter care,
Her golden finger on her lip,
Wills silence everywhere" (Dickinson)

You think of a mother and a child and you immediately think of the bond that they share.  They have such a great bond and when Dickinson says this it says that nature is like a mother.  I guess that if you think about it like saying when the sun comes up, your mother gets you up and when the sun goes down, she puts you to bed.  The little things in the middle of this poem may be the things that she does for you to reward you.  Nature is doing the same things for us that a mother does.  She treats us with love and care just like the warm summer day that the poem refers to, and when it is dark nature puts us in our beds and cools us down.

Grant, P. B. "Nature in

Walden." McClinton-Temple, Jennifer ed. Encyclopedia of Themes in

Literature

. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2011. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.

http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=&iPin=ETL1134&SingleRecord=True (accessed January

30, 2012).

Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson." Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. University of Maryland. Web. 12 Mar. 2012. <http://mith.umd.edu//WomensStudies/ReadingRoom/Poetry/Dickinson/nature-the-gentlest-mother>.