Man’s Power Related to Nature

As we discussed in class on Monday, the definition of nature is diverse and spans different eras throughout history. We discussed how man is often separated from nature and I think this concept appears in a slightly different way in Burns’ “To a Mountain Daisy”. In the first stanza, the poem mentions how the speaker has crushed the daisy, and to spare it now is beyond the speaker’s power. This is tied into the concept of fate throughout the poem. I think it is interesting that this is how the poem starts—with man, nature, and an act of destruction. There is no way for the speaker to save the daisy in this instance; the speaker has committed an irreversible act that has ruined something natural. I think this ties into the “wilderness” view of nature we discussed on Monday—that nature is made up of the lonely places. Taking it a step further, one could say that Burns’ first stanza shows that the effect of man on nature is destructive, and the definition of nature as what man has not touched holds—because man only has the potential to destroy nature, rather than construct or add to it.