Ecocritical Readings of Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Dylan Thomas

Abstract

Ecocriticism is a lately developed theoretical branch of literary criticism which

explores the relationship between literature and environment. It reads literature

from ecocentric perspective. Here in the Project three mid-twentieth poets,

namely Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Dylan Thomas, are taken and their

poetry is explored through the parameters of ecocriticism. Ted Hughes’ poetry

depicts the violence and struggle for survival of the animal world which becomes

invaluable lessons for man in the contemporary world teaching him that ways

about how to cohabit with nature. Heaney’s poetry imbues literature with the

spirit of the place. He explores place-consciousness of man in order to resituate

him into the ecosystem. Thomas’ poetry betrays concern for aquatic ecology and

for the native flora and fauna; his pantheism often borders on deep ecological

concerns. Their poetry explicates that man has done enough damage to the world

and attempts to bring man back to their senses. Their poetry also stays witness

to the fact that poetry can incite genuine ecological consciousness and love for

nature. Ecocritical study also throws new light on their poetry.

Key Words: Ecocriticism, nature, eco-poetry, violence, place, deep ecology,

paganism, ecosystem
CHAPTER ONE : AN OVERVIEW OF ECOCRITICISM

Ecocriticism is a Twentieth Century approach. It is now studied comprehensively

in the context of various literary theories. Though earlier writers across the globe

had sensitized the masses towards the love and sanctity of the landscape of

nature, their words consistently focussed on ecopreservation.

Ecocriticism is one of the latest critical approaches which is concerned with the

necessity to rethink and reconfigure human interaction with the environment.

Ecocriticism searches literary works to examine how they interact with the

environment: landscapes, plants, animals, and natural resources. It analyzes

literary works which raise a moral question about human behaviour towards

nature. That is to say the principal core of this new critical approach is to

examine how human interaction with the environment reflects the cultural,

political and spiritual ethics.

With the publication of Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination (1995)

and Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm’s joint collection, The Ecocriticism

Reader (1996), Ecocriticism emerged in the 1990s and the critics changed their

perspective and examined the works of art by focusing on the relationship

between man and Nature.

Some alternative suggestions to the term ‘ecocriticism’ have included

‘environmental criticism’, ‘literary ecology’ and ‘literary environmentalism’, but the

most useful alternative has been Laurence Coupe’s suggestion of the term ‘green

studies’. The main benefit of ‘green studies’ is that it is not specific to literature,

but examines the role of nature across cultural studies. This allows for a more

comprehensive understanding of the meaning and representation of nature

across the arts and beyond to politics and philosophy. Although the terms ‘Green

studies’ and ‘Ecocriticism’ are often used interchangeably, green studies has

become particularly associated with the interdisciplinary, inclusive and forward-

looking character of British environmental criticism and will be used in this thesis,

in combination with ‘ecocriticism’. In recognition of this as well as difficulties in

adequately naming and defining the theory, ecocriticism’s central subject matter,

‘nature’, is also a highly complex subject which is difficult to define precisely.

Raymond Williams describes ‘nature’ as ‘perhaps the most complex word in the

language’, encompassing as it does:

(i) the essential quality and character of something; (ii) the inherent force

which directs either the world or human beings or both; (iii) the material
 world itself, taken as including or not including human beings.30(Williams,

219)

The degree to which humans can be considered part of nature is an important

question for ecocritics. Terminology is also an issue in speaking about nature.

‘Nature’ is an evocative term which lacks neutrality and is laden with personal

and cultural associations. The emotional response ‘nature’ elicits can be a

useful tool for a theory wanting to encourage a sense of environmental

responsibility; however it is also vulnerable to distortion or romanticization.

Raymond Williams recognises this danger, noting that ‘the cultural

associations of the term “nature” in Britain since the eighteenth century have

been inseparable from ideals of goodness and innocence. (Williams, 219)

This is relevant because within this context ‘nature has meant the “countryside”,

the “unspoiled place”, plants and creatures other than man’ and as a result has

strengthened the dualism between country and city and humans and nature.

In ‘Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics’, Timothy

Morton argues that these aesthetic associations of ‘nature’, rooted in Romantic

poetry, are so dominant that a radical revision of ways of thinking about humans

and nature is required. Morton believes that:

the very idea of nature which so many hold dear will have to wither away in

an ecological state of human society because ‘the idea of nature is getting

in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and

art.32 (Morton,11)
Sven Birkerts suggests this can be made possible through a change in

terminology:

Nature and its preservation is what occupies most ecocritics. And this

imposes a kind of programmatic simplicity upon the whole movement [...].

How much more interesting and controversial would be an ecocriticism

pledging itself to the more inclusive idea of environment. (Birkerts,7)

However, although ‘environment’ does not discriminate between city and country,

or all places in between, it is not wholly neutral because it still refers to what

surrounds humans and so continues to put humanity at the centre. It is also

problematic because of the strength of its association with crisis.

The nature writings had long been studied keeping man at the centre.

Romanticism reacted against industrial rationality and celebrated unestranged

(that is, still belonging to nature) conditions: childhood memories, rural setting,

passive contemplation in nature and the moment of self absorption. While the

ecocritics assert that the romantic joy in the contemplation of nature must be

combined with ecologically informed practices. And the momentary epiphany

upon which romantic nature writing visibly depends must be kept in balance with

experience, skill and expertise. The romantics had seen nature as „a space of

leisure‟ where we entertain our subjective feelings; the ecocritics try to unmask

objectively the dependence between different spaces (Ecological Niche) in the

physical ecosystem. They thoroughly examine the ecosphere that surrounds the
romantic text. Although Wordsworth and Thoreau and others thought about the

moral widening in the liberty of nature, the ecocritics more systematically leads to

moral expansion by helping us to achieve an integrated sense of the natural world

that includes humanity.

In an age of high theory the idea of Nature is marginalized. Literature and criticism

in general romanticizes and often humanizes nature and reduces it to a

background, a mere setting. In the present world everywhere there is a sense of

commercial value, utilitarianism and post-industrial apathy to the environment.

This in turn affects literature and its criticism as well. Although the romantics

appealed for a return to nature and an escape from the daily drudgery of the urban

life to a rural surrounding, it was only in relation to man that nature was valued,

such as in The Prelude we find the formative influence of nature on the growth

and development of a poet. The environmental challenges facing humanity in the

twenty-first century are not only acute and grave, they are also unprecedented in

kind, complexity and scope. Nonetheless, or therefore, the political response to

problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss and widespread pollution

continues to fall short. To address these challenges it seems clear that we need

new ways of thinking about the relationship between humans and nature, local

and global, and past, present and future. One place to look for such new ideas is

in poetry, designed to contain multiple levels of meaning at once, challenge the

imagination, and evoke responses that are based on something more than

scientific consensus and rationale. In other words in their works nature appears to

have validity only when it is useful to man. As a result, writers like Ted Hughes,
Seamus Heaney and Dylan Thomas are often projected from psychoanalytical and

mythological angle where nature is not just the external nature of sun, moon, and

mountain and of birds. But nature and its agents are made to perform symbolic

functions. Thus the crow is an emblem, a demigod – a symbol of a writer

struggling for existential questions; the „North‟ is a mythic voice establishing the

poet’s relationship with the Irish soil and the Mythic Irish past; Fern Hill only

complex studies of psychology and synaesthesia. Ecocriticism opens up new

possibilities while reading those writers from ecocentric perspective. We have

seen that on the ecological level Hardy’s poems are environmental protests

against the mechanization of the rural life; in the poems we find an ideal fusion

between the vegetable world of the plants and landscapes and that of the human,

between the patient process of growth and cultivation and that of the destructive

human activities that have led to the present global ecological crisis.4 Hughes‟s

is a predatory, elemental and nihilistic world where violence and vitality merge;

this also embodies an awe at natural processes, recognition of a creative

destructive world, the marriage of the inner to the outer world, of the self to

nature. He addresses the problems of human cohabitation with nature. Heaney

following the line of Wordsworth craves for a closer relationship of the individual

with earth and soil, and his writing is deep rooted in tribal passion. Even in the

face of political imbalance he focuses on the rural, the rich and the hopeful

anticipation of a rich crop, although somewhere there is a sense of betrayal and

abandonment. And Dylan Thomas opposes intellectualism in verse; draws on a

range of subject matters like human body, sex, religious associations along with
the appreciations of landscapes and childhood memories. He often pursues the

Eden-motif, that is, a simple, natural and instinctive mode of life which has often

been the dreams of escape. The Ecocritics frequently explore this area for a

systematic resolution of the Nature/Culture, Reason/Nature dualisms.

CHAPTER 2

Ted Hughes’s (1930-98) poems written from the point of view of nature share the

basic concerns with the environmentalists and ecologists. His myths heighten the

ironic human tendency to control and exploit the wild forces of nature. Here

Ecocriticism tries to switch the critical attention from the internal human desire to

the external nature so that Hughes’s birds and beasts are simply birds and beasts

sometimes; thereby it offers to heighten natural interdependences, which is the

key word in ecology. Earlier Hardy saw rustic life threatened, overrun by the

invasion from modern mechanization and Hughes writing in a more industrialized,

sophisticated setting considered as his theme the conflict between elemental life

force and death. Environmental changes have vehemently affected literature and

Hughes likens some of the darker episode of human history with the dark

unsentimental reality of the animal world, presented in his poetry in a more

elemental way: deromanticized and deconstructed. The fact is that we have

become over-sophisticated, almost cyborgs. And Hughes contention is that the

violence, the vitality and the sheer power of the animal world might inspire us to

resist the all sweeping grip of urban cosmopolitanism. Hughes’s folks of the

animal world, such as, jaguar, pike, hawk, skylark, owl, horse, the manner less

monster do not present any transcendent reality. In Hughes alternative cosmology

they are the reality. Hughes even challenges Darwinism by endowing the hawk

with the control over creation.

To call Ted Hughes (1930-1998) a nature poet, should not be considered

pejorative. It simply means that nature is a frequent subject in his poetry.

However, while a great many of his predecessors expressed nature as the idyllic,

romantic, and peaceful opposite of a denatured and technological world, Hughes

highlighted the darker and more realistic aspects of nature by putting its

murderousness in the foreground. Thus, the recognition of violence and

aggression in nature became one of Hughes’ dominant themes in numerous of his

poems. Yet, looking at his work, we can state a significant change when it comes

to describing nature.

Nature is the principal theme of Hughes's poetry and his approach to it is

refreshingly original. He views it as comprising white as well as black powers, and

accepts it with its paradoxical qualities of benevolence and malevolence. The

natural world depicted in his poems comprehends the concrete and palpable

perceived through the senses. It is peopled by animals, birds, fishes, landscape

and the elements, all palpitating with life. Hughes is strikingly different from both

Wordsworth and Tennyson in that we do not find in them any acceptance of the

violent forces of nature. The present chapter accordingly attempts to bring out

what distinguishes Hughes as a poet of nature through an analysis of the salient

features of his nature poetry.

Hughes attained reputation as a nature poet with his animal poems. His interest in

animals is traceable to his childhood days when he would collect mice at the time

of threshing . . . snatching them from under the sheaves as the sheaves were

lifted away out of the stack and popping them into my pocket till I had thirty or

forty crawling around in the lining of my coat. He would collect toy animals:,

model them in plasticine and copy photographs of animals from "a thick green-

backed animal book" that his aunt had presented to him on his fourth birthday.

Hughes has shown his consciousness for nature preservation while commenting

on Max Nicholson’s The Environmental Revolution. Ecocriticism tells us that the

poet must use his pastoral vision as a form of social therapy and in this respect

Hughes is always believed to be a healer – an environmentalist for our

endangered earth. He sees the operation of violent primary forces everywhere in

the universe, which he believes can bring about man’s relocation into the

ecosystem by erasing cultural consciousness. Hughes’ remedy for healing the

split between man and nature, is through romantic primitivism which with its

biocentric principles allows man to develop correspondence with nature. Hughes’

fascination for tribal societies, oriental philosophies, and pagan religious

principles is also inspired by their nature centric ways. He performs empathy with

the natural world so that he can connect the internal human nature with external

nature. He imbibes his poetry with the dynamism of the ecosystem and aims to

bring about psychological renewal in man. His animal poems realistically depict

their survival strategies in order to promote conservation of species, and to teach

lessons to man regarding survival on this planet. The environmental sensibility of

Hughes’ poetry also emanates from their awareness about the contemporary

threats to the environment ranging from deforestation, pollution, chemical

contamination, dumping of toxic atomic waste, and so on His earlier volumes, like

The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal view natural forces with a harsher eye and

focus on the prehistory of natural forces, stressing its indifference to man; nature

in these poems is a self-possessing, predatory power. But he believed in our

potential to live in harmony with nature. A kinship with nature is developed in

Wodwo with a questioning of anthropocentrism. Accordingly in his later volumes,

like River and Gaudete he tried to restore the fractured bonding between man and

nature with the aid of a biocentric vision. In Wodwo we find the agony, suffering

and victimhood as a necessary precondition for redemption and enlightenment. In

Winter Pollen Hughes asserted that Christianity had taught man that nature is the

resource given by God to him, for serving all his needs. In Hughes, pastoralism

works as a self protective instrument (his Defense Mechanism). The poem

Egghead metaphorically linked an intellectual’s skull to a fragile egg shell through

which he filters the world and is able to perceive wonders what others cannot. In

this poem the poet shows that excluding or ignoring natural forces is ultimately

self-annihilatory; these forces may turn harmful but have cleansing purposes. In

Revenge Fable from the collection of poems Crow: from the Life and Songs of the

Crow, the crow tells the story of a person who compares himself with the highest

branch of a tree and his mother with the tree itself. In order to get independent of

his mother he kills her using various technological devices and weapons.

Ecocritical consideration shows us that the tree becomes the emblem of Mother
Nature which comes under the threats of global warming and atomic explosion. In

his earlier collections Hughes wrote poems which celebrated natural forces

together with anti-pastoral poems that exposed the deceptive social construction

of nature (such as, Thrushes, The Jaguar). His mythic sequence of poems Cave

Birds begin and end with a critique of the pastoral (that is why Terry Gifford

termed Hughes’s poems as Anti-pastoral).6 The cockerel protagonist faces a trial

for his neglect of his inner self and his alienation from natural forces. His

accepting of his own death in the poem The Knight marks the recognition of a

creative-destructive world of which he is a part. The fact that the process of outer

nature is also happening in the inner nature is subtly hinted in A Green Mother. In

Cave Birds he is using myth to bring out the essence of the physical universe and

thus reconnects us with the environment and tells us that nature is generally

mediated by culture. Earlier Hardy mourns the death of an era and anticipates the

coming of another with all the threats of such issues as pollution, industrialization

and mechanization etc; this includes the withdrawal of nature’s consolatory

power. Actually, ruthless treatment had made nature indifferent andcallous to

men’s good. A distance has been created; this alienation upsets ecological

balance. And poets like Hughes and others try to bring men back to their senses.

Instead of shutting his eyes to the metaphysical and spiritual questions about life,

Hughes tries to go to their bottom. He brings round that blood can be spilled as

mercilessly as milk and water. The reality is depicted in the ‘boulders’ troubles of

life. Like Blake he shows a fourfold vision which progresses from knowledge of

the surfaces seen from a singular and therefore one-sided perspectives to the
mature philosophic perspective which goes to the heart of the matter. He finds a

close kinship between the ambivalent but powerful forces within man and the

inscrutable and terrible working of the world of Nature. Equally remarkable is the

fact that Hughes has treated of many modern concerns, like war and violence,

with an awareness which is lacking in many of his contemporary poets. His

poetry evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in a specific

emotional response through language that he chooses and arranges for its

meaning, sound, rhythm and a purpose.

CHAPTER 3

Seamus Heaney (1939 - ) revisits the pastoral, ignores socially preconceived

notions about man and nature; and seeks, rather finds consolation in the

supposed perfection of the past. Hardy’s poems in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth century are largely traditional and show continuity with the

Wordsworthian art of recording ordinary daily events, but a sudden sense of

death and impermanence pervades the pastoral moments of domestic happiness:

hope and pessimism exist with equal intensity against a vivid background that is

often more lively and sentient than the people who dwell upon it. Ecocritically this

is no negative view of humanity, but a confirmation that nature itself is a

presence, an entity and has intrinsic value.

Heaney’s poetry is often a continuation of and an addition to the poetic tradition

of Hardy. Heaney cautiously celebrates and glorifies nature, evoking landscapes

and immemorial culture of the Northern English countryside along with an

awareness of nature as culture and culture as nature. Heaney wrote about

Hughes’s England which is a savage, primeval realm of nature, holding a close yet

detached relationship with human beings; and called Hughes a pagan, a heath-

dweller. These observations might intuit us about a possibility of exemption from

anthropocentric attitudes. The Gaia Hypothesis considers earth as a sentient, self-

regulating organic whole; and Heaney shares these concerns in his longing to

fuse with nature’s vital energies in order to be consumed into the biocentric

organism. He thought of tuning one’s personal self with nature that would lead us

to cope with the strife of daily life, yet he differed from the Romantics who had

shown certain tendencies of escapism.

Heaney’s earlier bucolic mode was much inspired by his childhood experiences at

Country Derry. Latter he, being influenced by Hughes, presented an unsentimental

natural world bent on destroying existence, which became the objective

correlative for contemporary violence in Ireland. Heaney combined romantic

enthusiasm for nature with contemporary green politics. Like Hughes, he did

practical advocacy for nature: his fascination for the bogs is actually a protest

against climate change and deforestation; it has conservational motives since

only 18% of the original bog lands remained in Ireland. He mourns for the

extermination of the Irish wolves, finding economic progress and mechanization

as responsible for this. He protested against the victimization of native flora and

fauna and birds species due to the chemical tampering of Ulster landscape, and

also because of the mechanization of agricultural techniques. The environmental

agenda of Heaney’s poetry challenges the pastoral idealization of nature in order

to make us aware of the real situation of the biosphere we are living in. His poetry

sets out to rectify man-nature relationship by developing an intuitive, unalienated

bonding with nature by exploring the pre-social part of man. Heaney’s poetry

takes a pluralistic approach to the environment. Being aware of the threats faced

by indigenous species Heaney’s poetry searched methods for their biocentric

rehabilitation. He attempted to heal the troubled psyche of the people of his land

by initiating them to the fertility and creativity principles in nature. Language in

his hand becomes a potent medium for connecting human culture with the

pristine forces of nature. His most biocentric effort is in the conception of

poetrymaking as workings in the field. However, what makes Heaney’s

contribution as an ecological poet unique, is his prioritization of the ugly and

more ecologically threatened zones, such as, bogs, fens and marshes etc.

The poems of Heaney’s first poetic volume Death of a Naturalist are full of

beautiful images taken from nature and related agricultural activities. The images

of ground, digging, ploughing, landscapes, tilling, lea, shovel working all

emphasize the topography of a particular region. This regional space coupled with

the reminiscences of childhood memories of the pastoral calm make them liable

to Ecocritical reading. In his sonnets growth and fertility are allusively used for art

and creative process. From ordinary images of the pastoral world to the grand

geographical scenes of land, ocean and mountains are abound in Heaney’s poetry

and this is an attempt at finding a coherence between the subjective inner

emotions and the objective outer world. But he differed from the Romantics in that

the Romantics in order to valorize the vastness, beauty, sublimity and endurance
of the natural landscapes, had overlooked the sense of biodiversity. They have

diverted our attention from such places, like bog, fens, and marshes which are

ecologically under more pressure. It is Heaney, who has interwoven these less

enlightened spots within the body of his poetic imagery. Heaney hoped to explore

love, politics and his role as a writer through images of nature in his poetry and

these further affirmed the typical Irish identity. For instance, the activity of

handling spade (Digging), the pastoral image of butter making (Churning Day), the

potato heaps (At a Potato Digging) essentially highlight the simple rural touch of

the unaffected country life of Northern Ireland. However, the danger of idealizing

nature is one of the themes in Heaney’s poetry as we find in Glanmore Sonnets in

the volume Field Work; in Sonnet-III the cuckoo and the corncrake consorts but

that is biologically impossible. Yet he discovers the organic continuum (Iambic)

between the poet’s art and the natural rhythms. Connections between land and

language are Heaney’s mode of response to the tensions in the contemporary

Ireland (North). Sonnet-I of the Glanmore Sonnets works at sensory perceptions of

the land to find a dream grain of poetry and likens it to the rhythmic way of

working in the field. Heaney believed that natural processes are at work within us

and they have purgatorial purposes. He refers to the poet’s voice as plough

producing rich ideas and entering the fertile mind of his countrymen; and uses

nature imageries as life-sustaining energies of earth and sky for the entire nature

is actually embedded in a process of growth and rebirth. He uses familiar natural

images (alders, mushrooms, dung, that is, they consume garbage and dead and

rotten materials and keep environment clean) as a demand to confront social

corruption through images that represent organic process of dissolution. In the

poem Gifts of Rain Heaney uses the images of water and river; its flow can

produce and circulate positive energies that in turn connects the human, the

natural and the elemental worlds. In Blackberry Picking the poet recalls his

childhood experiences of blackberry picking; in the poem the rotten, crushed and

fermented fruits are realistically equated with the loss of peace, innocence and

freshness of childhood. For Heaney Evasion into childhood fancies are no

permanent solution to the contemporary social and ecological problems; it only

produces nostalgic pastoral – mysterious and idealized. He tried to maintain a

balance between the pastoral’s impulses to return into a rural setting and

culture’s corruption and uncertainty.

Heaney seemed to be fascinated with specific points in the historical landscape of

Ireland. The Tollund Man is essentially a poem that Heaney wrote after seeing

photographs of ‘bog people’. These bog people were pulled out from the bogs in

the Irish farm lands and usually found to be in some sort of ritualistic way (this fits

in later with the theme of violence). Anyway he goes on to explore the historical

background that these bog people might have had within many other poems he

goes on to write. Another part of history is talked about in Punishment. This poem

is essentially about the bombings that were happening in Ireland in the mid 70s

due to the IRA and British fighting. By making these concrete references to

historical moments and artifacts Heaney pulls the reader into a realistic and

believable world.

CHAPTER 4
Dylan Thomas’s (1914-53) poetry moves away from the politically committed

poems of the Auden Group of the 1930s. We find in his poetry a more sustained

focus on the themes of childhood and nature, both depicted as sublime and

magical, suffused with a rare spirituality. Amid the interplay of dark and light,

death and decay, love of nature persists. His works are much praised for their so

called pantheism or deep ecological concerns: a world view in which divine,

human or natural are fused together. Disgusting images of heron, black rooks, the

roaming fox barking clear and cold, the hawk on fire are present along with the

images of sweet berries, sunshine, feathers, seeds, song birds, fish and bird’s

nest. These at the same time remind us of an idyllic rural setting and of a

merciless, violent nature ready to devour us. In case of Hardy we have seen that

despite his preoccupation with destiny, fate, cosmic forces there is a constant

search for immutability and permanence even in trivial on field agricultural

practices (In Time of The Breaking of Nations).

It was a childhood experience that eventually evolved into Thomas’s most often

repeated theory on the composition of his poems: the concept of his writing

“from” words, not “towards” them. It would be a mistake, however, to equate this

primacy of the texture and colour of words with a purely instinctive mind creating

in isolation. Thomas was an instinctive poet, gifted with a natural composer’s ear

for the emotional penumbra of words and phrases. But he was, too, a scholar of

his art, who read widely and thought deeply on his poetry and the poetry of

others. Once he was old enough, it would be his father’s study, packed with

books, that provided the literary fuel for his poetic aspirations. If Thomas was
being fed by the writers of the past within Cwmdonkin Drive, then he was being

equally provoked and challenged by the intellectual environment beyond its walls.

The composer Daniel Jones, the poet Vernon Watkins and the artist Alfred Janes

were all regulars, along with Thomas, of the Kardomah café opposite the Daily

Post, where Thomas worked. It was Watkins, though, who of all of them would

become an especially vital sounding board and poetic sparring partner. In this

1938 letter, commenting on Watkins’ work, Thomas once again returns to his

insistence upon the “inevitable” rather than the “chosen” word: “All the words are

lovely, but they seem so chosen, not struck out. I can see the sensitive picking of

words, but none of the strong, inevitable pulling that makes a poem an event, a

happening, an action . . . ” Perhaps of greater importance to Thomas’s poetry,

however, was the wider cultural landscape of 1930s Wales, and Thomas’s

geographical and familial location within it. Thomas’s parents were the

personification of the intellectual and industrial movement from rural to urban that

characterised Wales in the early 20th century. Both originated from Welsh-

speaking families of agricultural and religious occupation. The young Thomas, a

listener “in love with words”, found himself at the centre of a linguistic and

cultural maelstrom. The languages of both Welsh and English informed his ear,

just as both the streets of Swansea and the fertile fields of the Llanstephan

peninsula informed his eye.

Dylan Thomas’s unequivocal love for nature cannot be circumscribed in words.

Though he did not provide any philosophy of nature but the readers can view

some flamboyant and exhilarating depiction of nature in his poetry. Thomas’

frequent observation of immaculate beauty in nature reflects the impact of the

Romantic poets on him. Thomas was truly a nature poet as he drives his

motivation from the beauty of nature which was dispersed in Wales and he found

himself immersed in it and his expression of nature comes from his subconscious

mind. The best example is his poem “Poem in October” where Thomas

demonstrates nature delightfully vibrant through day-to-day sounds and sights.

When he comes out of the town on his thirtieth birthday, he realises that he is

welcomed by the entire nature. The complete view appears holy to him and he

perceives himself on his way to heaven. He is in absolute accord with nature. In

order to revere their creator the waves of the ocean rises high, the forest appears

to him as his neighbour and the herons to be the priests. The gardens are

blossoming and the birds are singing. The poem portrays the vibrant natural

pictures with the normal atmosphere of delight. Many of Thomas’s poems are

about nature and only some are not having a direct reflection of nature. Some give

equivalent or unequivalent significance to art and nature. Seldom are some about

nature and love. The manner in which Thomas used to load his poems with

greenness and regarded former poets, like Traherne and Blake, who had the same

re-creative and commemorative logic of aesthetic and symbolic importance of

green as Thomas. “The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” is a

poem of four verses of five lines each and a coda of two lines; it’s a short poem

with a strong structure. As the title resounding the first line suggests is an

ambiguous force, which the poet advances to describe, endow and study in a

variety of ways. Apparently, the force behind all creation and presence – maybe
even a supernatural force – eventually connects life and death and associates the

poet – the “I” of the poem – to the cosmos. The force is described in a little

different way in each verse, illustrating a distinct facet of its process. The effect of

the stanzas is collective and uniform; each definition augments the last. Each

stanza ends by ascertaining the poet’s relationship with the forceThe central

motive of this poem is the inexplicable paradoxical “force,” stringing in its unity of

nature, life and individuals. It is a link between individuals and nature, between the

poet and all other mankind. It is an agreement that links together each thing, living

and dead and ends up in love. The agreement is also that of production and

extinction, nevertheless, it is grave and saddening and the unity is also

inexpressible. Growth and mortality, genesis and demolition, the blossoming of

the smallest flower, the falling of big trees, the citizen abiding-law, the hanging

man, and the person who hangs himself – all are impelled into one by the poet

with its intricate arrangement of interlinking oxymoron, puns and paradoxes. The

opening line of “The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” is a

strong statement that instantly unites nature with human race: The force that

through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the

roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is

bent by the same wintry fever. (1-5) The energy that the poet speaks of is the same

energy that is present in a flower and also in human beings and this is the force,

which brings both life and destruction. The force or energy is so overwhelming

that when realised by human consciousness merges the entity of the self. 'And I

am dumb' indicates that the speaker is so overpowered by the revelation of this

force. The fate of the rose and every person is same. The rose is a symbol of love

and the tree could be the tree of life. In the first line the words: force, through,

fuse and flower, there are musical tones running through a drive of power; as if

the season of spring has all of a sudden blasted into action. Again the stanza two

of “The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” has the opening

“the force” and the speaker brings in the element of water and compares it to the

red blood flowing through his veins: The force that drives the water through the

rocks Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams Turns mine to wax.

And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins How at the mountain spring the same

mouth sucks. (6-10) The natural world and the human body appear to be the

reflections of one another. The force acts in the same way on both and the

movement and imagery of nature is same as the movement and imagery of human

body. Here Thomas comes very close to the Indian philosophy of ‘Yat Pinde Tat

Brahmande,’ means that whatever exists in universe exists in human body too.

Indian philosophy speaks of the five elements earth, air, water, fire and space.

Thomas poetry is abundant with the references of these natural elements too.

However his images are so sensuous that they have an immediate appeal to our

senses. By using personification Thomas highlights the connection between the

natural imagery and the imagery of human body.The natural imagery used is

vibrant, as in, water, rocks, mouthing streams, spring, blood, wax, veins and

mouth etc.

In Dylan Thomas’s poetry the consolation and security of childhood is frequently

interrupted by the images of death and decay: Fern Hill is no paradise regained;
for the young boy is both green and dying. This is highly important in the context

of the Second World War and in the actual precariousness of the ecological

balance in a world culturally mobile and environmentally endangered. The impulse

towards neo-romantic poetry in the post-war period is not only a matter of looking

back and nostalgia but an environmental resistance whose cultural function was

to reconnect the urbanized and war-trampled readership with the consolation of

the pastoral and the infancy. Thomas’ process view of the universe preaches

biocentrism, and might be helpful in resolving nature/ culture, reason/ nature,

instinct/ emotion dualisms. Through this he attempted to interpret human life in

terms of the intertwining seasonal cycles of nature. His poetry initiates a

posthumanistic, holistic world view in which the stereotypical anthropocentric

man-nature relationship is reversed based on the principle of the organic

universe. Thomas’ fascination for surrealism enabled him to perceive things

outside their conventional referential context, so that the relationship between the

self and the world, the human and the non-human, is renewed. Moreover, his

ability to envision the unitive, dialogic relationship between man and nature can

promote psychic ecology that aims to resolve the split between man and nature.

18 Poems concerns itself with the biological processes of birth, death and decay.

It also introduces his process-view of the universe. Twenty five Poems captures

Thomas’ primitivistic and pantheistic apprehension which in its way

ofworshipping nature intuitively realizes the sacramental nature and sanctity of all

the elements and agencies of nature. The Map of Love takes celebratory approach

to nature, and shows that despite the brooding presence of death, the power of
nature can heal, and is redemptive. Deaths and Entrances gives primacy to death,

but death appears in the optimistic sense of return of the body into the elements

for the purpose of regeneration.

The prevalence of darker images in his poetry shows that life for Thomas is

essentially tragic; yet he balances this with a sentimental yearning for the bliss of

childhood, sublimated into an enduring sanctification of the creatures, wild fields,

lanes, woods. In the Poem in October the poet speaks of the tragic loss that he

feels for an adulthood that had somehow betrayed the child: the wonder of

summer, the parables of sunlight, the twice told fields of infancy and the true joy

of the long dead child. And this is the feeling that most of Thomas’s mature

poems, like Fern Hill, Over Sir John’s Hill, In the White Giant’s Thigh and A

Winter’s Tale produces. Ecocriticism equates this separation and doubt with

modernism’s skepticism and treats this syndrome in the context of cultural

progress by reassessing the history of nature. In the poem ‘The Force that

through the Green Fuse’ the poet even when he is acknowledging oneness with

nature, reminds us that he is unable to talk to nature, that is, he fails to identify

himself purely with nature. The poem thus refuses to sentimentalize in the manner

of conventional nature poetry; therefore natural images do not provide any untrue

solution to the contemporary existential problems. Thomas’s late poems convey

the poet’s complex and troubled relationship with nature; nature in these poems

resists the idea of nature as being culturally constructed.9 In the poem In Country

Sleep an unusual emphasis is given to the word pastoral. Man has already ruined

the beauty of nature; nothing is left to mourn at. Thomas’s intention here is that
pastoral’s assimilating power may act for redeeming a world under the threat of

atomic war. The thought is carried over in the collection of poems, entitled In

Country Heaven. Thomas argues contemporary poetry cannot be a celebration of

nature but an elegy for the loss of a presence that used to be. But he is not that

pessimistic; the fact that the process of life and nature never fails, that the

seasonal changes with time are themselves beneficent are beautifully expressed

in ‘Especially When the October Wind’. This idea is anticipated in ‘Poem in

October’; various aspects of nature such as birds, trees, weather, sun and sea

have been engaged to explore the poet’s inner life and language here becomes

the vital mode for conveying that experience. Thomas’s awareness about the

relationship between his own physical body and the process of nature is explored

vividly in 18 Poems. This is an identification of man and the universe where nature

becomes his elemental origin and his destiny too: when alive blood moves like the

ocean in him; at death flesh becomes the earth.10 His poetry thus brings the

British landscape vividly to life but is also enhanced by his humane concerns. He

therefore goes beyond the simple pastoral because he is able to project onto

nature some innately human fears and concerns and intertwines the flow of

nature’s year with these pressing problems of human life – such as change,

decay, reproduction and death. While elaborating the aesthetic of Thomas’s art

Barbara Hardy remarks in her book Dylan Thomas An Original Language: The

poem’s images are particular and complex, and sometimes synaesthetic, joining

the mineral and animal in that wonderful spitting image, which is sandily dry, wet,

and stinging. In that personal and radical revision of Yeats’s singing school, the
green singing house, there is a fusion of what is literally animal and vegetable and

metaphorically human. As the sand grains spit life into each other, as I’ve

mentioned, they sting sharply and grittily like actual sand, and they are also given

an imaginary method of reproduction animistic but also physically apt, thoroughly

felt. The vividness of images in Thomas poetry is a result of the skilful

metaphorical representation of ineffable mysterious natural phenomenon.

Thomas’s perception rises above the sensuousness and employs his sensibility

in animating human expressions - “spat life into its fellow” – so metaphors aptly

convey the mood of the poet and by using metaphors “Where once the waters of

your face,” he seamlessly transforms a love poem into nature poem.

In conclusion we can say that ecocentric readings of their poems compel us to

believe that poetry can develop environmental consciousness in man.

Environmental changes can be achieved through changing our perception of the

natural world, and poetry can play an important role in transforming our attitude

towards it. An optimistic apprehension of the natural world in poetry can counter

the post-industrial mental disintegration which distanced man from nature. Poetry

can lead to radical restructuring of human psyche so that man becomes aware of

his interconnections within the biotic community. In this way poetry can lead to

ecological activism. Some of the volumes of Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and

Dylan Thomas can incite ecological activism by converting poetry into potential

ecological tool. Their poems promote animistic vision, and do practical advocacy

of nature motivating man to engage into active participation with the natural

world.
Apart from these above three poets I have gone through some of the poetical

works of Gary Snyder, Wendell Barry, D.H. Lawrence and Walt Whitman. There are

immense possibilities in their works which can valuably contribute to the field of

Ecocriticism. The first two are themselves directly related to the Ecocritical

movement; and the last two foregrounded nature in their poetry and have shown a

tendency to write form nature’s point of view. In these days our thinking and

perceptions are modified by the technological environment rather than the

natural. In this context reading Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Dylan Thomas

might help us to understand their poetry in a new light and we may observe that

ecological problems which are mainly scientific issues can be understood and

addressed through critical reading of texts. Any full length research, taking the

above poets together in the field of Ecocriticism have not so far come to my

notice and that is why I attempt this reading. Moreover, if environmental change

depends upon transforming individual perception, then poetry can both survey

and modify the perception of its readers by directly affecting their intellect; and

thereby bringing about environmental revolution. The vivid, pessimistic, almost

hopeless worldview, violent and forceful imagery, presentation of an

uncontrollable natural world, the mythical cycle of earth- fertility and the painful

threats of death, mixed with beautiful landscapes and birds and beasts cite a

different dimension in the relationship between man and nature.

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