On Thinking about Gilbert White in Our Nuclear Age

Just behind the house
on a path which follows
the stone wall, the line
of oaks, I walk each evening
towards the river. Again,
as every year. I take notes,
look for nests, check
fledgling leaves for progress.
Three weeks from now, warblers
will be back. Already phoebes
have built their nest.
In the meadow, robins lean
their heads and listen
as though providing
a demonstration of the way
to seek and find. Last year
I saw a woodcock fly up,
spiral unimaginably high,
then fall in loops
like a plane going down
in a tailspin. On this day
in 1777, he noted
gooseberries and honeysuckle
had begun to bloom.
The meadows were yellow
with dandelions. He planted
three Provence roses
and a Newington-nectarine
against the fruit wall.
And some columbines, Sweet
Williams and hollyhocks.
(Each year my hollyhocks
come up strong, then
are attacked by beetles.)
His turtle, Timothy,
“came forth from his winter
retreat.” A cuckoo worked
its natural rhyme. Here,
peepers trill—those toads
that have learned to sing—
and a sycamore provides
another metaphor: dark
at the bottom, light on top.
A week ago, I read
how this age I live in
is distinctly different,
a world no longer certain
“to abideth.” Emerson is dead.
Likewise the myth of renewal
and rebirth. And, of course,
the nature poem. This walk
by the river is what I have
grown accustomed to. I like
to sit on the railroad bridge and
look down into the water: it’s dark
and greasy, fishless since
the woolen mills. It’s my place,
a world small enough to know.
Or think I know, since yesterday
the paper warned of nuclear
infrastructures, unknown to most,
here in our own backyards.

It could have been a diorama—
18th-century English village
of thatched roofs, white cottages,
narrow streets with names
like Gracious—except people
were actually living there,
going about the daily business
of keeping up hedges and gardens
or driving off to work
at the industrial park and
the military complex just
the other side of Wolmer Forest.
In his house, now a museum,
everything had a place:
a room for writing, for reading,
for tea, for dancing.
You can still see his calendars,
their careful leisurely script—
the first martin and nightingale,
the new blooms on the elms
and box elders, the first snake,
a spring spider webbing
the grass. Dates, dates, and
the weather. Always the vacillation
of sun and rain, the days
adding up for better or worse.
After his visits to the sick or
dying, to the local poor,
after his afternoon tea
with the more well-off parishioners,
he’d sit down with his collections—
some plant or bird, maybe an egg,
a map of intersecting lines
he’d travel and record.
Always the same approach—
measurements, then general aspect,
in one letter a fish, pellucid,
with black dots mottling
the back, a black line from eye
to nose, a silvery white belly.
Finally hypothesis: the life
of the fish seen in
its powerful tail muscles.
Just to write down
what could be seen, as if life
were simply a matter of looking,
was perhaps what he loved best.
Of course, he made mistakes:
he thought he saw swallows
hibernate and he couldn’t help
but see a sociable Nature.
He limited his world enough
to organize it; no one is
better off because of his
observations. At most he added
to the slow accumulation of fact
and the shifting matter of truth.
And, there’s the larger charge:
What did he have to say
about the soldiers tramping
the neighborhood roads to Portsmouth,
and then America? Or the children
wearing themselves out
in factories. His Natural History
of Selbourne was published
the same year history gives
to the French Revolution.