FLORENCE, ITALY – Earth Day (in italian la Giornata della Terra, in French Jour de la Terre), is the name used to indicate the day in which the environment and the protection of planet Earth are celebrated. The ecological movements in 1970 the UN established the first World Earth Day. Since then, the United Nations has celebrated this holiday every year, one month and two days after the vernal equinox, on April 22. The celebration, which wants to involve as many nations as possible, currently involves precisely 175 countries.
We decided to honor this day with 6 poems about earth planet.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Move Eastward, Happy Earth’
Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
Your orange sunset waning slow;
From fringes of the faded eve,
O, happy planet, eastward go;
Till over thy dark shoulder glow
Thy silver sister-world, and rise
To glass herself in dewy eyes
That watch me from the glen below.
Ah, bear me with thee, smoothly born,
Dip forward under starry light,
And move me to my marriage-morn,
And round again to happy night.
Walt Whitman, ‘Earth! My Likeness!’
Earth! my likeness!
Though you look so impassive, ample and spheric there,
I now suspect that is not all;
I now suspect there is something fierce in you, eligible to burst forth …
So begins this poem from the nineteenth-century pioneer of free verse, the American poet Walt Whitman (1819-92), who identifies himself with the Earth in that they are both outwardly ‘impassive’ but inwardly burning with a ‘fierce’ fire…
Henry Van Dyke, ‘Mother Earth’.
Mother of all the high-strung poets and singers departed,
Mother of all the grass that weaves over their graves the glory of the field,
Mother of all the manifold forms of life, deep-bosomed, patient, impassive,
Silent brooder and nurse of lyrical joys and sorrows!
Emily Dickinson, the wind
Of all the sounds despatched abroad,
There’s not a charge to me
Like that old measure in the boughs,
That phraseless melody
The wind does, working like a hand
Whose fingers brush the sky,
Then quiver down, with tufts of tune
Permitted gods and me.
When winds go round and round in bands,
And thrum upon the door,
And birds take places overhead,
To bear them orchestra,
I crave him grace, of summer boughs,
If such an outcast be,
He never heard that fleshless chant
Rise solemn in the tree,
As if some caravan of sound
On deserts, in the sky,
Had broken rank,
Then knit, and passed
In seamless company.
Rudyard Kipling, The Way Through The Woods
They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again,And now you would never know There was once a path through the woods Before they planted the trees: It is underneath the coppice and heath,And the thin anemones.Only the keeper sees That, where the ring-dove broods And the badgers roll at ease, There was once a road through the woods. Yet, if you enter the woods Of a summer evening late, When the night-air cools on the trout-ring’d pools Where the otter whistles his mate (They fear not men in the woods Because they see so few), You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet And the swish of a skirt in the dew,Steadily cantering through The misty solitudes, As though they perfectly knew The old lost road through the woods … But there is no road through the woods.
Pablo Neruda, Keeping Quiet
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.Life is what it is about…
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
Discover more from Florence Daily News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
6 comments