The Poetry of the Earth is Never Dead

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

-- Lord Byron

Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

-- Robinson Jeffers

All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks
Are life eternal: and in silence they
Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;
There's nothing mortal in them; their decay
Is the green life of change; to pass away
And come again in blooms revivified.
Its birth was heaven, eternal is its stay,
And with the sun and moon shall still abide
Beneath their day and night and heaven wide.

-- John Clare

I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

– Mary Oliver

IN vain I see the morning rise,
            In vain observe the western blaze,
            Who idly look to other skies,
            Expecting life by other ways.
           
            Amidst such boundless wealth without,
            I only still am poor within,
            The birds have sung their summer out,
            But still my spring does not begin.
           
            Shall I then wait the autumn wind,
            Compelled to seek a milder day,
            And leave no curious nest behind,
            No woods still echoing to my lay?

-- Henry David Thoreau

If the sight of the blue skies 
fills you with joy, if a blade 
of grass springing up 
in the fields has power 
to move you, 
if the simple things 
of nature have a message 
that you understand, rejoice, 
for your soul is alive.

 - George Santayana