Comparing Showing The Birds By Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver, And Wallace Stevens

In the era of the Anthropocene—an age defined by the profound human impact on the environment—a significant portion of the natural environment, whether it be natural landscapes or wild species, has been lost to human endeavors. In response to the seemingly unending and growing human impact, environmentalists have resorted to various outlets to communicate the importance and urgency of preserving Earth’s wilderness. Nature poetry is one of these mediums capable of exploring human impact and responsibility in relation to the natural world. Poets like Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver, and Wallace Stevens prompt an evaluation of the state of the natural environment and raise awareness of ever-expanding bounds of human impact through their literary

While she laments the loss of the site’s magical nature, she does not directly critique what caused it. Instead, she directly confronts the permanence of the consequences that are born from these actions, and how it can be applied to the irreversible effects of the human impact on the Earth’s environment. Like Clifton, Mary Oliver reveals the losses the natural world has suffered as a consequence of the Anthropocene in her poem “Showing the Birds”, a piece from a collection of poems called Red Bird. The poem takes place in a museum, which most commonly acts as an archive aiming to preserve things of historical significance. The speaker, who acts as a motherly figure, guides the children through the museum as they unearth various artifacts of the past. They instruct the children to study the birds, highlighting ones such as the “shy, flightless dodo”, “the many-colored pigeon called the passenger”, “the great auk”, “the Eskimo curlew”, and “the woodpecker called the Lord God Bird.”. Oliver stylistically adds an ellipsis to this list in the poem, signifying that there are other birds that have been preserved by the

In “Anecdote of the Jar”, Stevens demonstrates how human encroachment can alter the natural environment. The poem consists of three stanzas, each one representing a stage in this process. The first stanza establishes the setting in the wilderness of Tennessee, which is known for its diversity of natural wonders, beginning with “I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill.” The poem continues as the speaker notes the “slovenly wilderness” that begins to converge towards the hill the jar is placed on. Stevens makes note of the change in the environment, as its slovenly nature is now reflected around the jar. The speaker corroborates this observation in the second stanza as they observe how the “wilderness rose up to it [the jar], And sprawled around, no longer wild.” At this point in the poem, the natural environment has lost the wilderness that is inherent to it, but the consequences of this transformation are not fully realized. In the third and last stanza, the speaker announces that “It took dominion