The Importance Of Nature In Poetry

Nature has always played an important role in literature, especially in poetry. Writers and poets have often used nature to describe their emotions and their thoughts about life, death, love and war. This is how numerous great poets dealt with the terror of the First World War, including Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. In Owen’s poems “the sympathetic connection between man and Nature is broken by the war, and the natural world is seen as complicit in the killing”. (Featherstone, 80)
In his poem, 1915, Robert Graves expresses the passing of time on the French front by the passing of the months and the seasons. He mentions spring by the blooming of primroses, which belongs to one of the first flowers of spring. In the spring of 1915, the British army started to occupation of the railway station close to La Bassée where the writer of the poem fought too. In the poem, the poppies, which usually bloom from May to August, stand for the summer. Poppies also represent the blood of the wounded or dead soldiers in this poem. Autumn is described by the color of yellow, the “winter nights” appear with “knee-deep mud and snow”. Here Graves writes about the beggary and misery of the fighting crowd.

There is no point of “the ‘kind old Sun’ ” because it “does not fulfil its pastoral duty to wake the dead soldier in Futility; the balance of civic, sexual, and generational relationships breaks down constantly”. (Featherstone, 59) So if everything ends once, then what is the point of fighting? The poet is tired of losing his fellow soldiers, seeing them dying. He is disappointed and convicts the war. The fields are not sown since that is where the battles take place and the soldiers who are fighting are the agricultural workers. This is one of the reasons why the soldiers are starving: as there is no one to grow and harvest crops, people will have nothing to