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Cyber Monday deal on books and merchandise! Word Branch Publishing http: Happy Thanksgivukkah from Word Branch Pu. Happy Thanksgivukkah from Word Branch Publishing! Get great deals on. Popularity Popularity Featured Price: Low to High Price: High to Low Avg. The Field Guide to Telecommuting: Available for download now. Available to ship in days. During the centuries of captivity in Egypt, the children of Israel kept this ancient memory of the Promised Land in their hearts.

When free by God, under the leadership of Moses, they escaped the Pharaoh and began the long journey back to their long-hoped-for home. For 40 long years, they wandered in the wilderness, dwelling in tents as the Lord prepared them to take the land, giving them the Law, transforming them into a united people. Under Joshua, they finally crossed the Jordan and move from city to city, claiming the land that God had promised them. This bloody conquest, taking many years, was never quite complete. The terms of the covenant under Joshua were clear: They were warned not to bow down before the pagan gods or marry the women of the so-called nations that were around them.

Even their anointed rulers found wives among the pagans. Solomon and his descendants were infamous for their hospitality to the worship of foreign gods. Enemies attacked them from all sides, challenging their right to the land. It was therefore no surprise that the Israelites, like Adam and Eve, were once again cast out of their home.

The story of the many invasions, the captivity, the violence, the cities under siege, and the kings killed are part of this long saga of the loss of their earthly dream. The remnant of the tribe did return from captivity, trying once again to establish Jerusalem as the Holy City, but even that effort was often thwarted. As the dream of the Promised Land with its Temple grew dimmer, another hope rose among the Jews. Believing still that they were the children of the promise, they began to realize that the real kingdom would not be in this world.

The prophets began to speak of an eternal kingdom, the Kingdom of God, and of a Heavenly Jerusalem. Isaiah prophesies eloquently of the New Creation, a time when the Lord will return in all his glory, and the lion and the lamb will lie down together. In these 16 Thematic Guide to Biblical Literature powerful verses, the prophet revives in the Jews the ancient memory of Eden.

The primal harmony between man and nature, between man and man, and between man and God will return in the Day of the Lord. Unlike Eden, however, this is not to be a simple garden or even a fertile and peaceable country, but it is to be the Kingdom of God, a world reigned over by the Prince of Peace. As the reality of their own earthly kingdom diminishes, the Jews dream of citizenship in an eternal kingdom. Christ emphasizes the kingdom that is to come, and outlines in the Beatitudes those astonishing attributes of the citizens of that kingdom: Like Joshua, Jesus invites his followers, the true citizens, to cross over and enter, and finally to possess the Promised Land, which has been made ready for them since the world was made Matt.

This vision, which St. Augustine traces in more detail, has some of the components of Eden, but belongs to a far more sophisticated and complex time. It is a new creation, not a re-creation of Eden. Humans cannot return to primal innocence or to this magical land, still guarded by the fiery Cherubim.

Augustine also argues for the symbolic significance: The life of the blessed; in its four rivers, the four virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice; in its trees, all useful knowledge; in the fruits of the trees, the holy lives of the faithful; in the tree of life, that wisdom which is the mother of all good; and in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the experience that results from disobedience to the command of God.

Augustine, The City of God, Augustine read the Genesis narrative as an allegory of the Church, prophetic of what was to be in the future. His interpretation opened the door to a general understanding of the Garden of Eden as the state of innocence that all individuals and groups know at the beginning, before they exercise their free will and fall into sin and damnation.

Among the most famous is the one Hesiod includes in his Theogony. It speaks of the five ages of man: The gods, who live on Mount Olympus, first Fashioned a golden race of mortal men; These lived in the reign of Kronos, king of heaven, And like the gods they lived with happy hearts Untouched by work or sorrow. Vile old age Never appeared, but always lively-limbed, Far from all ills, they feasted happily. Death came to them as sleep, and all good things Were theirs; ungrudgingly, the fertile land Gave up her fruits unasked.

Happy to be At peace, they lived with every want supplied. Hesiod, Theogony, in Sproul, Hesiod then describes the subsequent ages: This decline from the Golden Age contrasts with the biblical view that Eden innocence lasted only briefly. The Fall of mankind was quick and final, not a gradual decline. The people thousands of years later bear the same scars of sin that Adam and Even recognized as they were driven from the Garden.

Hesiod records the Greek belief that each succeeding race is shaped afresh by the gods. For the Hebrews, creation was a single dramatic occurrence by one God. Like Augustine, Dante assumes that the Earthly Paradise is both a reality and a symbol. This wise and prescient pagan writer is not allowed to linger in the Earthly Paradise or ascend into Heaven. Having passed the flaming swords of the Cherubim who guard the gate, he enters the sacred wood, enjoying the delicate air and gentle breezes.

Those men of yore who sang the golden time And all its happy state—maybe indeed They on Parnassus dreamed of this fair clime. Alighieri, Purgatorio, In the Earthly Paradise the poet his persona in the poem is purified from all earthly corruption before entering into Heaven. These honored saints and scholars, like St.

Augustine, had explored the potential meanings of Eden. It is in Heaven, where they will dwell in eternal bliss in the presence of God. This joy transcends the perfect physical comforts of Eden. Now the believer is thrilled that God allows him or her to choose good over evil, obedience over selfishness, service over pride. Some cynical writers of the seventeenth century came to propose, jokingly, that Eden was lost with the advent of Eve.

Such was the happy garden-state, While man there walked without a mate; After a place so pure and sweet, What other help could yet be meet! In Paradise Lost, he describes her charm and sweetness as she gathers a perfect medley of foods for the meal the first couple to share. In their bower of bliss, their nuptial grove, they are in perfect harmony—largely because of her gentle subservience. For Milton, this golden-haired beauty is the ideal companion, considerate, coy, submissive, modest, and chaste.

She is everything that Milton dreamed of before his own troubled marriage. Only when Eve steps out of her role, seeks more knowledge and independence, does she ruin Eden for them both. He includes a catalogue of trees and flowers that sounds like the idyllic English countryside: This description echoes many of the Elizabethan pastoral poems in which the shepherd and his nymph cavort over the green hills among the woolly lambs, enjoying the delights of the springtime.

The form derived from the classics, where authors from both Greek and Roman cultures used the supposed innocence of the simple life as a reminder of their legendary Golden Age. The pre-Romantic poet William Blake, a great fan of both Dante and Milton, recognized in their poetry the divine inspiration that he felt deep within himself. In his work as a printer and an engraver, he illustrated many of their works, including Earthly Paradise 19 the Divine Comedy.

He drew heavily on their ideas for his far simpler poems, which have their own charm and power. The Songs of Innocence capture the child-like innocence of Eden, with the pastoral tone of shepherds and sheep. Little lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Blake envisions Eden as the essence of primal unity, a condition natural to young children, whom he sees as not yet fallen.

Eden becomes, for him, a state of mind that innocent children reflect briefly. It is lost forever as humans mature, know evil, choose sin, and become alienated from one another and from nature. This is a clear change from the Calvinistic emphasis on total depravity, which involves the child as well as the adult. Jean Jacques Rousseau had preached this at about the same time that Blake was writing his poetry and may have influenced his thought.

William Wordsworth, a Romantic poet who inherited many of the same ideas as Blake, also saw the child as innocent. As he opens the ode, he quotes an earlier poem that hints at this philosophy of pre-existence and natural goodness: There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. For the Romantics, the lively imagination of youth, which declines with age, is evidence of the divine image that resides in the child. This Platonic faith in a perfect world from which we descend, which we recollect from time to time in visions, and to which we will ultimately return is hardly biblical.

As opposed to this cyclical view of life, the Hebrews understood history and individual experience to be linear. Humans had once lived in the garden of perfect innocence. The fall of human kind was once and for all, not a delightful metaphor for the state of mind shared by all children, lost once again in each lifetime. Like their British contemporaries, Americans of the nineteenth century were also tempted by this vision of idyllic youth. Turning away from the stern Calvinistic doctrine of total depravity, they came to believe in the basic goodness of humans.

It is very difficult to look at the sweet face of a child and perceive behind that apparent innocence an ingrained human depravity. In fiction and in popular thought, a new veneration for motherhood, children, and domestic tranquility developed the theme of the home as a kind of man-made Eden. This sentimental cult of domesticity replaced the tough old Hebrew Eden.

The child in the garden became an image of primal innocence. The children in her novel instinctively know that slaves are people, not just possessions, and are far more likely to feel the pain of those who are abused. James Fenimore Cooper portrays the primitive American forests with the Indians and the wild animals as a lost paradise in books like The Deerslayer or The Last of the Mohicans By contrast, the more orthodox Christian writer Nathaniel Hawthorne sees the forest as a place of danger and temptation.

In The Scarlet Letter , it is in the woods, in an Edenic setting, that Hetty and her lover commit adultery. In books such as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain loves to portray the boys of his remembered youth, playing innocent pranks, running wild in nature, enjoying a carefree world as young noble savages.

But he does show that Huck Finn and Nigger Jim each has his own problems. Even youth is not simple or without its briars and nettles.

The automatic cruelty that the white boys show to their black friend, who is a slave, reveals that no world is without the shadow of sin. He like Andrew Marvell presumes that the harmony is broken by the introduction of woman into the garden. Even Emily Dickinson saw Eden as childhood innocence, though with enriched insights. The doorway is Earthly Paradise 21 locked, the house demolished. This perennial dream of a place where humans live in perfect harmony with one another and with nature and sometimes with God has haunted the literary imagination. Refusing to believe that Eden is lost, dreamers repeatedly design their own earthly paradises according to principles of their own devising.

Moderns, drawing on the nineteenthcentury dream of the innocent natural man, assume that they can eliminate sin from their new creation. In the twentieth century, we have come to see that no socialist republic or planned community can address the enormously complex world set in motion in the original Eden. The modern Southern novelist Walker Percy laughs at this humanistic arrogance in his spoof on planned communities of modern America, Love in the Ruins The central character, a mad doctor who is a lineal descendant of Thomas More, is a rare breed, a Roman Catholic in the South.

He and his wife and child live in Paradise Estates, in a perfect home. More finds himself in an abandoned Holiday Inn, in the middle of an asphalt jungle, with a cluster of displaced persons. He knows deep in his heart that all this is foreordained, a result of the fall and of his own daily lapses. He begins the book with an airplane wreck that strands a group of school children on a paradisiacal deserted island. The children, of various ages and physiques, have been evacuated from British schools one a choir school.

Unlike the character Robinson Crusoe, with his strong sense of concern for survival and his need to build a civilization in the wilderness, these young boys see little reason for order or thought for the future. The warm climate and plentiful supply of fruit make their days a delight. Soon, however, they go their own thoughtless, egocentric ways, eating green fruit, using the whole island as their toilet, accidentally setting the woods on fire. They become enamored by the hunting and killing of wild pigs, which prompts a series of primitive rituals: The island itself is idyllic, but the boys eventually burn the whole surface, destroying their own food supply.

They are finally rescued from their Eden paradise, just as they have rendered it unlivable. Golding is unwilling to allow even their rescue to represent any form of redemption, pointing out in his notes that the rescuer is himself a member of the Navy, part of a destructive force that is also intent on hunting and killing in a far larger way. As is noted in the comments at the end of the book, Golding describes the theme of Lord of the Flies as: An attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature.

The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable. The whole book is symbolic in nature except the rescue in the end where adult life appears, dignified and 22 Thematic Guide to Biblical Literature capable, but in reality enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island. The officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way.

And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser? Golding, Lord of the Flies, These gloomy words point to a common modern horror scenario—a fallen world, a lost Eden, but no story of redemption. Based on the patterns Huxley saw developing in his world, the advances of science, the fixation on comfort and security, the willingness to forego freedom for a benevolent totalitarian regime, the vulgarization of popular culture, and the obsession with perpetual youth, he envisions where it is all leading.

Setting his sterile, urban Eden well into the future, Huxley projects a precisely managed paradise, with all activities from birth to death carefully monitored. By fitting people for the essential tasks of the society, he sweeps away all unhappiness and frustration. By providing a pill for every pain, a solution for every problem, he frees his happy little world from disease, sorrow, loneliness, confusion, and all forms of discontent.

Even death is efficiently and pleasantly managed with the chemical components of the body retrieved for re-use. Here, people are born, not decanted. Rather than retaining their youth until the very moment of their death, they grow fat, old, and ugly. They have families that they love and hate, feel jealous when others steal their husbands. They get drunk and suffer painful hangovers. And they have their wild worship services that mingle Christian and Indian elements in a kind of grotesque and bloody mysticism.

They never need to think for themselves or work on the tough issues of life. Imagining the ideal paradise often transforms the product into a dystopia—a nightmare. They dreamed of universal prosperity, perfect peace, and found instead massive slaughter and brutal deprivation. While projecting human desires into a universal system produces delight for some principally the planners , it becomes a straight jacket or a concentration camp for others.

This makes the story of Eden all the more impressive. Here were all the flora and fauna living with the first humans in perfect harmony. Scripture teaches that perfection on earth is shattered by the sinful human heart, that we should expect such perfect bliss, not on earth, not even in Jerusalem, but in Heaven, when we finally come to dwell with God.

A Search for the Earthly Paradise. Zema, Grace Monahan, and Daniel J. University Press of America, Lord of the Flies. Simon and Schuster, Creating the World, ed. Stories from the Earthly Paradise Told through the Ages. Love in the Ruins. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, To have created the enormously complex and diverse range of plants and animals, to have structured the world so that 26 Thematic Guide to Biblical Literature these creations might be self-sustaining, self-propagating, and balanced in the whole network of other creatures, was a dazzling tour de force.

Genesis 1 describes the pattern of creation and details a few of the creatures, climaxing with the creation of man male and female in the image of God. Genesis 2 tells how God gave humans the role of caretakers, with dominion over the animals and the task of assigning them names. The Garden of Eden is simply the setting for the drama of the Fall, not aparticipant in the disastrous human actions—except for providing the fruit of the forbidden tree.

Some, however, believe that all of nature fell from its original ideal state when Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden. A part of the result of the Fall was that humans would face nature as an adversary—full of thorns and thistles, hard ground, and snakes. This is not the harmonious, happy garden in which the first couple made their first home. When tutored in the concepts of Christianity, Friday proves to be an eager learner. Defoe makes it clear that the Christian faith is not innate. The religion must be taught to the heathen by a person who has received the basic tenants of the faith from some teacher at home and at church.

Friday can make no theological sense of the Book of Nature that stands before him until he has been instructed in the faith of his new master. Nature, after all, includes both the abundance of food and water on the one hand, and savage men eager to eat their enemies on the other. What is our relationship with nature? Are we the guardians, the opponents, or the beneficiaries of the fruits of nature?

Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community (Contemp North American Poetry)

Does nature have any moral component or any lessons that may be learned by humans? What are our obligations to our environment? Scripture For the most part, scripture uses nature as a background for the events of the human actors. On occasion, a violent eruption of some sort—a drought or a flood— may bring nature into the foreground. For instance, in the story of Noah and his ark Gen. We also see his concern for the animals and his promise of protection of Noah and his descendants. The plants that are swept away by the flood replenish themselves afterwards, as we see as the olive leaf is growing again on the olive tree.

Although scripture deals with the violence of nature, the extremes seen as catastrophes by humans do not define nature. God is the master of the storms and the lightening, the floods, the droughts, and the earthquakes. Jesus demonstrates his own divinity when he quiets the storm on the Sea of Galilee.

In the Bible, neither Hebrews nor Christians worship nature itself or confuse nature with God. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even forevermore. Although God set his order into the very fabric of nature, he interrupts or manipulates these regular rhythms from time to time for purposes of his own divine providence, producing miracles.

Although an earthquake or a tidal wave might well explain the parting of the Red Sea, it is God who chooses the perfect moment for this to occur. Sometimes he interrupts the natural movement of the sun and stars, making the sun stand still for Joshua, or using a star over the stable in Bethlehem to guide the wise men to the Christ child. The miraculous healings by the prophets, the saints, Christ, and his apostles appear to combine natural and supernatural events. Some healing may be purely psychological, some cannot be explained by anything but supernatural intervention—such as bringing Lazarus back to life.

For Jews and Christians, God is an active participant in human history, not simply a great watchmaker who created the world, set it in motion, and then closed the door on events, locking up his shop and leaving nature to run automatically to the end of time. In some primitive faiths, God is to be found in nature: Animists often take this a step further by creating an image or selecting a special mountain or a tree or a rock that becomes the object of veneration.

The Egyptians found evidence of the sacred in cats, beetles, snakes, flies, fish, and so forth. Many of the ancients venerated bulls as symbols of fertility.

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This may well explain the worship of the Golden Calf. While animists turn nature into god, pantheists find God everywhere in nature. Pantheists and some Transcendentalists are inclined to see God in the hills and clouds and trees. Wordsworth, The Jews, even in their most nature-soaked imagery, never confused God with his creation.

In Hebrew scripture, God is clearly separate from nature. This is not to say that the writers of scripture were blind to the beauties and liveliness of nature. The book of Job is a virtual catalogue of nature imagery, as is the Song of Solomon. Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from washing, whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.

Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense. And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? He speaks of the foxes and the birds, lamenting even the fall of a sparrow. The natural world, the fields and flowers, the Sea of Galilee with its winds and waves, the hills and the wilderness are all part of his story.

He walks everywhere, from one end of Israel to the other, stays in the desert for over a month, is baptized in the Jordan River, and frequently climbs the long path to Jerusalem. Even after the Crucifixion, the resurrected Christ walks along the road of Emmaus with his disciples and cooks fish for friends on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Though nature provides the background for the New Testament narratives, it affords no guidance for the way a person should live his or her life. The natural man is the person who lacks the spiritual discernment that comes with the Holy Spirit: Literature The Greeks, like the Hebrews, loved nature without losing their focus on the humans in the foreground.

They become monsters like Scylla and Charybdis, or the Sirens, or simply minor gods. The sea itself is controlled by the god of the sea, Poseidon called Neptune by the Romans , just as the sky is controlled by Zeus and the underworld by Hades. These gods are limited to their own sphere of activity. They can neither create nor destroy the sea. By petitioning the winds, they might whip up waves to punish or reward humans.

As he thunders out his majestic response to Job, he reveals his power to raise up the waters and tear down Nature 29 mountains, set rocks in their place, appear in the midst of a whirlwind, or speak from a burning bush. At no point do the Hebrews turn nature into a god to be adored.

Early English poetry is full of references to nature, but usually as an adversary. Instead, he dives into the icy waters and challenges this grotesque monster in her native habitat. These are poems written by people who have seen the ferocity of wind and wave. The poems that have survived from this era were transcribed and transformed by monks, who provided an overlay of Christian piety not fully intrinsic to the poetry itself. But fairer indeed are the joys God has fashioned Than the mortal and mutable life of the world.

Firmer is fate, greater is God, Than the thoughts of man can ever imagine. The Seafarer, by contrast, hears in the song of the birds a call to return to the sea and to the rugged life. Shakespeare uses nature in much the same manner as Chaucer. In his plays, the natural setting often establishes background for actions and the mood for human activity. The old king shouts at the wind as he vents his rage and sorrow at the perfidy of his daughters and his despair for his own life. The storm is a perfect reflection of his own wild state of mind.

Comedies are more usually in mid-summer or springtime, when all of nature is coming to life and love is in full bloom. Later, many Gothic writers repeat this strategy. They seem to assume that most evil deeds are plotted by candlelight on dark wintry nights; Arthur Conan Doyle fills his stories with fog and gloom, a suitable background for the crimes to be solved by Sherlock Holmes.

The writers of romances know that love stories blossom with the springtime. As life in England grew more urbane and comfortable, writers like Thomas Gray became increasingly sentimental about nature. Living in London during the Industrial Revolution, this gentle scholar much preferred to retreat to smaller towns and cherished untrammeled nature.

Nature is frequently described, during this period, to be the teacher to humans. As people grew more civilized, they lamented the loss of their close ties with nature, though they enjoyed all of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution.

Lew Parker "THE AMOROUS FLEA" Imelda De Martin 1966 Hollywood Playbill

The English Romantic poets love Nature now personified and capitalized as a transcendent power, capable of healing and teaching humans. William Wordsworth writes about his beloved Lake District when on a walking trip with his sister, Dorothy, in the summer of He describes the actual landscape before him in moving terms, almost as if he were painting it: These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur.

He also remembers a second phase of his life, when he was thrilled with the colors and forms of nature—a kind of aesthetic appetite and delight. But in his later years, he has come To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity. This would appear to imply a pantheistic concept of a God-spirit found throughout nature. He pronounces a very beautiful benediction on her: Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain winds be free To blow against thee.

It also provides clear evidence that he is more Greek than Hebrew in his response to the natural world. In stark contrast, Gerard Manley Hopkins, another English writer who delighted in the natural world, was much more clearly a Christian. He was a Jesuit, a learned and complicated man, who sang his songs of praise to God the Creator, not to Nature.

All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled who knows how! With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: He creates this prayer of praise in a verse form akin to Old English, full of alliteration and accented syllables, not relying on rhythm and rhyme. It is much more personal and modern. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.

Why do men then now not reck his rod? In deliberately antique words, Hopkins notes that humans fail to pay attention to the message richly expressed in nature, flashing out here and there. Rather, humans have trod through one generation after another over paths, losing through the repetition their amazement at this incredible splendor. Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! In these last lines, he recalls the biblical Nature 33 description of the creation, where the spirit of God broods over the waters.

Hopkins, who knows both scripture and nature, can capture the wonder of a moment, the silver flash of a fish or the sudden glimpse of a scarlet wing on a bird; he can make us feel anew the delight of individual natural splendors, using this thrill to give thanks to the God who created it. America, like England, has produced many lovers and worshippers of nature. Her description of her own experiences in the natural world, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek can make the reader gasp in amazement. She loves, as did Hopkins, the idiosyncratic and startling moments that have touched her, the sudden disappearance of a frog or the pitiful crippling of a butterfly.

In her work, she draws on a long heritage of nature writers, including such essayists as Henry David Thoreau, who also chronicled his own close observations at Walden Pond. A better known and more prolific writer in the nature tradition is Walt Whitman, who wrote at the time of the Civil War.

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He rambles on loquaciously, letting his thoughts wander far and wide. Among the multitude of answers he proposes are these: I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.

He accepts both answers. The Naturalists, on the other hand, have a far darker and flatter view of the natural world. They personify nature, seeing it as a malevolent god, or at least a disinterested one. Stephen Crane, one of the most articulate of this group of writers, published only two slender volumes of verse. In one, he included this brief, cruel poem: A man said to the universe: This nineteenth-century American writer wrote a report in very realistic detail about the experience of four men who survived the sinking of the steamer Commodore, only to be tossed on the sea for some time in an open boat.

The captain is hurt and unable to help row; the oiler, the cook, and the correspondent are the main crew. They have a little water but no food when they find themselves within view of land off the coast of Florida. Gradually, they discover that one hope after another is dashed: They think the seamen are just waving a friendly greeting.

The refrain finally becomes, in the words of an un-named narrator: Crane sums up the vision of the story clearly: Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation. The ones saved and the one lost have not been foreshadowed. Their fates are not determined by their wisdom, strength, or hard work. Or, as the world-weary writer of Ecclesiastes said centuries earlier, the Lord makes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. This turn-of-the-century American writer describes vividly the western plains with their fierce winters and thrilling springs, the battle of men and women to bring a living out of the soil.

She also describes the toll the land takes on the people who dare to farm this great and fertile land. Her immigrants, from Bohemia and other eastern-European regions, are realists who love their farms and realize that the work of the farmer is full of Nature 35 day-to-day challenges. The rewards for their hard labor are potentially enormous, but these rewards do not typically include the arts or the other niceties of life. Cather shows that human planning and persistence are essential in this long and loving battle to make a living out of nature.

Some Americans have found that they are doomed to lose this perennial battle with nature. The opening chapter of The Grapes of Wrath is one of the most powerful descriptions of dust storms ever written. The Joads are driven from their farm in Oklahoma by the winds and the dust, joining the Oakies and Arkies and others who seek the green pastures of California. Like the ancient Hebrews headed for Egypt, these immigrants find themselves virtual slaves in the new territory.

As migratory workers, following harvest, they too seek primarily to survive as a family. For Steinbeck, the hope lies in the solidarity of the people—in farm labor unions and in human sympathy. He expects and finds no divine intervention. At the end of the day, California is not a promised land for these poor wanderers. Like the Joads, Wang Lung is also forced from the land by drought. Faced by desperate times, he takes his aged father, his wife, O-Lan, and his children to the nearest city, hoping to find work, food, and prosperity.

This family soon discovers that they are strangers in this new terrain, marked by their poverty and their speech. They survive by hard labor and begging, seeking always to return to their land, which they consider the ultimate hope for themselves and their prosperity. For this family, Christianity is the alien idea of a naked man suffering on a cross, incompatible with their culture and understanding. Wang Lung believes in the land itself, which is the very real source of his hope. In his love of material prosperity, he gradually loses sight of the richness of his life—especially the blessing of his hardworking and devoted wife.

Only after he has taken a second wife and O-Lan is dying does he come to understand that she, like the land, has been the key to his happiness. The sad ending of the narrative comes as Wang Lung himself faces death, knowing that his educated sons will leave the land, sell it, and forget their roots. Pearl Buck, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, born and raised in China, was American by heritage and education. They need something beyond themselves to account for the catastrophes of nature, but find their many idols as helpless as the petitioners who kneel before them.

In novels such as Absalom, Absalom! The land will remain long after the man dies and is buried. The Bear is an excellent study in human interaction with nature, with the white man stealing it from the Indians, shedding the blood and sweat of slaves on it, stripping the land of its forests, and trying to claim it for his posterity. Another of his tales, the novella Old Man in the book Wild Palms , tells of an actual flood of the Mississippi River, the lives it swept away, the human stories it uncovered.

For a short time, the Tall Convict sees the world outside of the penitentiary, the patterns of life and death, the struggle for survival. He understood obsession with the land—people loving it too much, being to greedy to own it, or fighting too hard to subdue it. To the very end, Faulkner found nature a source of affection, comedy, power, and wonder.

Unlike Thomas Gray, she has no faith that working on the land can make a person more honest or happy. Her farm people are realistically portrayed: They have dominion only so long as they have life and strength. Jane Smiley, a contemporary American author, pushes harder on the idea that humans are assigned the role of caretakers of nature—not just dominators. Adam and Eve were told to care for the Garden of Eden. The violation of the one produces illness and death in the other. For many people who are concerned with the fragile ecosystem of the earth and the need for harmony between civilization and the environment, Smiley is a lively and convincing spokesperson.

She is, however, more in love with the created world than she is concerned with its Creator. This long free-verse poem draws liberally on scripture for its inspiration, especially on the world-weary tone of the book of Ecclesiastes and the alienated imagery of Ezekiel. He opens the poem with a satirical contrast to the opening of The Canterbury Tales.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.

Only There is a shadow under this red rock, Come in under the shadow of this red rock , And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out, in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, And caused me to pass by them round about: And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord, Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity. We live in a sterile world waiting for rain, a wasteland.

In the Bible, the desert is usually a place for meditation, prayer, fasting, and mortification of the flesh. The image of the wasteland, though terrifying for the reader who sees only the sterility and dreariness of the scene, is rich with resonance for the Bible reader, who knows that the sojourn in the desert is the prelude to the prophetic ministry that follows. And so the long, rich story of humans and nature continues. In our concrete jungles, we sense our alienation from the natural world; we hunger for closer communion with it; we fear damaging it; and we are overwhelmed by our gratitude for the changing seasons, the flowers, the plenitude of creatures that surround our lives and enrich them.

The writers who are able to revive this spirit of wonder in us deserve our gratitude. Animals and Humans; Creation. Washington Square Press, Norman Foerster and Robert Falk. In American Poetry and Prose, ed. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Religious Trends in English Poetry 6 volumes.

Columbia University Press, Library of America, The Old Man and the Sea. Literary Classics of United States, The Grapes of Wrath. Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility. Harcourt, Brace and Company, Barnes and Noble Books, Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eatheth grass as an ox. Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar: His bones are as strong as pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.

He is chief of the ways of God: Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? Will he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee? Wilt thou take him for a servant for ever? Wilt thou play with him, as with a bird? Or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens? None is so fierce that dare stir him up: Sometimes, humans have seen animals as enemies, sometimes as pets, sometimes as ancestors, and sometimes as co-inhabitants of planet earth. The question of the relationship between humans and the animals was raised in the earliest biblical traditions: Later, east of Eden, animals were used for sacrifice, for food, for clothing, and for help in labor.

In literature, animals have often taken on personalities of their own. Sometimes they become the actors in fables. Aesop, like the author of Proverbs, saw moral lessons to be taught by animals.

Scripture One of the first issues raised in Genesis is what relationship God ordained between humans and animals. As God tells Job centuries later, humans cannot dominate the monstrous animals of the world—the crocodile and the rhinoceros, the whale and the elephant. What is man, that thou art mindful of him? For thou has made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. Animals and Humans 41 Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou has put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.

O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! In the eighteenth century, when this concept became powerful among the writers, Alexander Pope considered the Great Chain of Being foundational to his world view. He saw a chain stretching from earth to heaven, with the instinctive creatures at the bottom, the reasoning ones in the higher regions. He was delighted at the idea of the plenitude of this great panoply of life: Above, how high progressive life may go! Natures ethereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see, No glass can reach, from infinite to thee; From thee to nothing.

In this famous poem, Pope explains that the role of humans is to submit to their position. To seek more than God ordains is to violate the order of the universe. As Pope admonishes his impatient audience: The bliss of man… Is not to act or think beyond mankind; No powers of body or of soul to share, But what his nature and his state can bear. Why has not man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, man is not a fly Pope, An Essay on Man, Animals, which fall below humans in this chain, should remain subjected to their superiors.

This theme of the great chain of being was to linger in the human imagination over the centuries, shaping not only the view of kings as divinely ordained for their role, but also the relationship between man and beast as established from the beginning by God. It is clear from the book of Genesis that humans were designed to be both masters and stewards of the earth, responsible for its replenishment as well as its fruitfulness.

Another segment of the Creation narrative indicates that animals, like humans, fell from primal innocence with the transgression of Adam and Eve. The Lord turned on the serpent at that point, saying to it: From this time forth, humans and beasts are set at enmity with one another, with mankind wearing animal skins and eating animal flesh. This authority reveals the lordship of Adam.

He doubts that Eve would have allowed her husband to choose all the names, and would have snatched the role from her spouse. In his impressive study of Western views of nature, Man and the Natural World, Keith Thomas devotes considerable space to the concern for nomenclature. Eventually, the scientists took control over this naming task, replacing the popular names for the animals developed over thousands of years with Latin ones, fixing them so that people might study animals more carefully and with more universal understanding. People gave species and individual animals names that marked their role and their relationships.

Unfortunately, older literature, including scripture, often includes names that have long since disappeared from usage, making it difficult to picture what a leviathan or a behemoth is in modern terms. Scripture most often pictures animals helping humans, carrying their burdens, supplying their food, clothing, and shelter, serving humankind with their skins, their milk, their meat, and their labor.

Humans have domesticated many types of animals, feeding and caring for them in return for their labor. A wide variety of animals are mentioned in scripture, both domestic and wild. In early times, the domestic beasts lived under the same roofs as their masters. The very closeness between men and animals encouraged affection and consideration that carried over into customs. The law of Moses is quite detailed on the protection of the animals that live in the midst of the people. The ox threshing the grain is not to be muzzled. Domestic animals are not to be mistreated or stolen or maimed or sexually abused.

They are to share the Sabbath rest with their masters. Wild animals are a different matter. Shepherds must protect their flocks from lions, which lurk by the side of the road and threaten humans and beasts. Samson does not hesitate to kill a lion that he meets along the path. Nor does he hesitate to abuse foxes, which often damage the crops. Actually, Samson proves more destructive than the little foxes.

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Animals are loved or feared according to their role in human activities. Scripture is not sentimental about animals, nor does it confuse animals with humans by attributing proper names and individualized personalities to them. Animals and Humans 43 Farmers, who know they must kill their cattle or sheep, are reluctant to become too affectionate with them.

The massive sacrifices recorded in scripture, with hundreds of animals slaughtered in a day, point to the unsentimental stance of both clergy and laymen. Although it is important the sacrificial animals be without blemish, it is not important that they be loved. The scriptural tradition uses animal imagery for humans, but keeps the two levels of creation quite separate, with animals invariably in the background.

Animals may be companions and helpers and sources of sustenance, but not on the level with humans. Literature Only twice in scripture do animals speak the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and the donkey in the story of Balaam. By contrast, the fables of Greek writer Aesop use numerous loquacious animal characters to portray human foibles. This fable tradition continued among the Romans and into medieval literature.

In related poems included in this charming collection, the other animals who traveled on the ark with Noah are also characterized by human traits, the will-o-the wisp quality of the butterfly, the plodding faithfulness of the ox. One of the most delightful modern versions of these stories that build on the fairy tale tradition is E. Notably, the much more serious and satiric novel by George Orwell, Animal Farm , uses pigs, horses, sheep and other creatures to explain the underlying history of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism.

In this book, the animals, having overthrown the farmer, quickly assume dominant or subordinate roles according to their nature, their wits, and their malevolence. The pigs, being the smartest of the animals, grab the authority while the sheep, the dumbest, bleat helplessly and follow mindlessly. The hard-working horses do their unthinking duty, plodding along, puzzled but faithful. Scripture does draw on the traits of certain creatures to demonstrate traits and activities that appear parallels to those of human.

Thus, we see the busy and productive ants and bees of Proverbs. The bestiaries of the Medieval period, drawn from both the Bible and later Church literature, present animals as more flatly symbolic of human qualities, often turning them into icons that can be read as precise equivalents. Statuary and paintings frequently employed animals to identify biblical characters or saints. The most famous of the animal-loving saints was the gentle twelfth-century Italian St. He is usually portrayed with an animal by his side or in his arms, typically a wolf and a lamb Ferguson, Jonathan Swift, an eighteenth-century writer and the Dean of St.

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The animals in Lilliput are so tiny and Gulliver so enormous that all of his physical needs became disgusting and animalistic. By comparison, the animals are dainty and genteel. His decision to put out a fire by urinating on it, for instance, outrages the whole community. By contrast, when he is among the Brobdingnabs, even cats and mice can tyrannize him. He is frightened of all the animals in this monstrous land and has to be treated as a pet by his mistress, who puts him on her bosom to protect him.

This leads to vivid descriptions of his revulsion at the animal qualities of the human body—the oil pouring out of her pores, the smells that overwhelm tiny Gulliver. A giant bird eventually carries him out of the country, thereby concluding this chapter of the book. The most fascinating of his travels for its revelation of the animalistic quality of humans is the trip to the Houyhnhnms, where rational and honorable horses are the rulers and Yahoos ape-like creatures are the despised lower beings.

Here the Great Chain of Being is reversed, with the human gazing with adoration at the superior horses. Gulliver becomes enamored of the decency of these animals and is hideously embarrassed to be viewed as a Yahoo. When he returns home, Gulliver is shocked to find that his family and friends look very much like Yahoos. He ends his days disgusted with his own family, spending most of his time in the stables, talking to his horses. William Blake, a mystic and a pre-Romantic, who was also born in the eighteenth century, takes a simpler and more direct approach to nature.

Like many of the Romantic writers, he loves animals. Animals and Humans 45 In the second stanza, he answers for the lamb: Then, in a later poem, he poses the same question of the tiger with all his sinister and beautiful power. When the stars threw down their spears, And watered heaven with their tears, Did He smile his work to see? Did He who made the Lamb make thee?

These rhetorical questions, posed in simple and forthright lines, make these twin poems a powerful expression of one of our most basic puzzles: The combination of this brutality with great beauty is even more puzzling. Other Romantic writers, such as Wordsworth and Shelley, tend to idealize nature, often personifying it or turning it into a mystical experience.

Shelley, for example, addresses the skylark, transforming the bird into the very image of the poet. As it sings on its flight toward heaven, it becomes more a disembodied voice than a real bird. The speaker of the poem begins: He is less interested in the actual bird than in his own emotional and philosophic response to it. Thou was not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home, She stood in tears amid alien corn.

More of a realist than some of his fellow Romantics, Keats tends to return to reality after his flights of fantasy. The Romantics, who often returned to classical and medieval literature for their inspiration, loved Gothic monsters. Both Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge a somewhat earlier Romantic poet wrote of blended human-animal creations. Both developed poems about a lamia, a mythic figure that was part snake, part woman.

Classical literature is full of such half-human monsters, some half bulls, some half goats, some half horses. Such legendary creatures as the basilisk half cock and half snake , which could kill at a glance; the phoenix, a mythical bird which lived between three hundred and five hundred years, burning itself on a funeral pyre and then rising from its own ashes; or the unicorn, a small animal the size of a kid, with a single horn in the center of its forehead, which could be caught only by being trapped by a virgin—these were the delight of medieval and later writers.

Such fabulous monsters are not like those that populate Revelation. There is nothing seductive about Grendel or his mother. For the medieval world, most of the monsters were symbols of evil, the spawn of Cain, most often portrayed as denizens the infernal regions. They appear as gargoyles on the cathedrals and in the hideous portrayals of the gaping mouth of hell in medieval art. Modern myth writers, such as C. Lewis and Tolkien, use their animal figures as both diabolic monsters and as blessed saviors. The lion has a long and impressive history as a symbol.

In scripture, it is often the fearful wild animal, but also a symbol of strength and beauty. Generally, the lion stands for power, majesty, courage, and fortitude.