Friendship with Nature
“Nature and you must be greater friends than ever.”
Letter from Maria Bicknell to her fiance,
John Constable
September 9, 1815
I wouldn’t leave till every single tree
In Suffolk is stripped bare: an autumn whim
(She made it sound like that), her sincere decree.
But naturally she was thinking of him,
His landscape passion, wider than the height
Of portraits once distracting her man’s brush.
This fuzzy, early, nineteenth-century flight
Of thought seems silly now the great onrush
Of Darwin’s later doctrine having made
The sentiment that nature is a friend
A virgin myth. This notion, slow to fade,
Drives pressure groups like Greenpeace to pretend
That well-intentioned gentle folk can hold
Back winter’s storms by sketching in the cold.