Robert Burns’ poem, “To a Mountain Daisy,” initially conveys a sense of human destruction towards a persevering nature. In the opening context of the poem, nature is perceived as a separate entity than man and quaintly represented by a daisy. Unfortunately, Robert clumsily crushes “Thy slender stem,” highlighting man’s destruction of nature. However, Burns introduces much deeper complexities to his poem when he intertwines mankind’s fate with that of the Daisy: “That fate is thine-no distant date”. The distinction between man and nature is suddenly not so simple. A clear delineation between his description of the daisy (nature) and men dominates the poem. This separation helps to highlight the parallels between his description of nature and the people in the poem. Nature springs up and perseveres through storm and isolation until “the share uptears thy bed, / And low thou lies”! This strongly parallels the fate of the artless maid whom love betrays and leaves “Low i’ the dust”. In accordance with the fate of the maid, Burns emphasizes how pride and cunning ultimately drives man “To mis’ry’s brink”. If man crushes daisy and man shares fate with daisy, we are led to the idea that human pride and cunning are essentially self-destructive. However, there is irony in the fact that nature perseveres, and the bard does not: “Till billows rage, and gales blow hard, / And whelm him o’er”! Burns seems ahead of his time in his understanding of the fact that nature will always exist and that we, and certainly the individual, may not. He cries “doom!” to a society that blatantly and fatally harms itself through vices such as pride and self-interest.
"All this hullabaloo over a silly little flower." -Dr. Seuss
I think the poem is about civilization's destructive influence over nature. The poem's speaker inadvertently kills the daisy growing wild in the field, evidently while he is plowing the field, even after the daisy has survived storms: “But now the share uptears thy bed/ And low thou lies!” The flowers in his garden, in contrast, are protected, civilized: “the flaunting flow’rs our gardens yield,/ High shelt’ring woods and wa’s maun shield.” The daisy is vulnerable to the destruction by man and civilization, much like the “artless maid,/ Sweet flow’ret of the rural shade!/ By loves simplicity betray’d,/ And guileless trust;/ Till she, like thee, all soil’d is laid/ Low i’ the dust.” Both the innocent maid and the wild daisy are compared to the poet, the Bard, and the poet’s inability to navigate the rough waters of life: “Such is the fate of simple Bard,/ On Life’s rough ocean luckless starr’d.” Life overwhelms him, as it does the daisy and the maid. He concludes by saying, even for those who mourn the fate of the daisy, that same fate is yours. When humans intervene in nature or in life, “ruin’s plough-share” will crush you “beneath the furrow’s weight.”
ReplyDeleteWhile in agreement with the above comment, I, moreover, drew a connection between Burns’ and Clare’s poems. As Burns cites the entangled fate of nature and man, Clare too details his “fate [that] shall stand the storm with thine.” The tones they respectively convey, however, in drawing such a conclusion, seem to be different. Whereas I get the sense that Burns is more pessimistic – “Till crush’d beneath the furrow’s weight, / Shall be thy doom!” – Clare is ostensibly respectful and humbled by the connection – “My heart did melt at its decline.” The melting of the heart denotes a compassion for nature that is not evident in Burns’ poem and, as a result, I believe Clare nicely compliments Burns’ ‘guess what, where the same’ conclusion. In combination, the reader is introduced to the surprisingly novel concept of convergence between the fates of man and nature.
ReplyDeleteI strongly agree that between Burns and Clare there is a powerful message of man/civilization's destruction of nature. While Burns and Clare acknowledge and even stress man and nature’s tangled fates, Clare’s poem “To an insignificant flower, obscure blooming in a lonely wild,” expresses a unique opinion concerning this relationship. Unlike Burns who waits until the end of his poem to fully associate man and the daisy, Clare begins with the association: “And though thou seem’st a weedling wild, / wild and neglected like me”. Clare emphasizes how the flower, despite its beauty and much like him, is consistently neglected. To Clare it seems that a fundamental issue in the relationship between man and nature is simple negligence. In Clare’s feelings of neglect one can see how man struggles to even acknowledge his own neighbor, let alone nature.
ReplyDeleteBurn's misanthropic vision of nature stems from his view that man destroys the wonders of nature simply by acting as humans do. The plough, symbolic of all technological achievements man uses to subdue the earth for man's own ends (just as in "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough"), upturns the earth so that the land may be sown with crops to feed mankind. The Plough's blind destruction stands in stark contrast with John Clare's "Patty of the Vale" poem in which a flower, left to its own devices (i.e. not encumbered by mankind) is "Exposed to wind and heavy rain,/ It's head bow'd lowly on the plain;/ Hand silently it seem'd in pain/ Of life's endanger'd hour." Rather than let the flower wither and die and thereby have "My heart melt at its decline;" Clare chooses to protect the flower so that "My fate shall stand the storm with thine" even if that means taking "the root and all."
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