Poetry has a big debt to nature, its muse and source of metaphor for centuries. As the UN climate conference begins, it is time to pay it back. Poetry must give nature a voice to express its dire predicament. “I will rise,” declares the furious river in the Scottish makar Kathleen Jamie’s poem What the Clyde Said, After Cop26 – just as the River Xanthus in Homer’s Iliad rose in revenge against Achilles for filling it with so many bodies.
Ms Jamie’s poem appears in a new anthology, Earth Prayers, edited by the former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. “We are in the age of anthropogenic climate breakdown, possibly the Age of Grief,” Ms Duffy writes in the foreword. The 100 poems, ranging from classics such as Matthew Arnold’s 1867 Dover Beach to #ExtinctionRebellion by Pascale Petit, remind us not just of the beauty of the natural world, but its fragility.
