The worship of nature

Poem by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)

The harp at Nature’s advent strung
    Has never ceased to play;
The song the stars of morning sung
    Has never died away.

And prayer is made, and praise is given,
    By all things near and far;
The ocean looketh up to heaven,
    And mirrors every star.

Its waves are kneeling on the strand,
    As kneels the human knee,
Their white locks bowing to the sand,
    The priesthood of the sea!

They pour their glittering treasures forth,
    Their gifts of pearl they bring,
And all the listening hills of earth
    Take up the song they sing.

The green earth sends its incense up
    From many a mountain shrine;
From folded leaf and dewy cup
    She pours her sacred wine.

The mists above the morning rills
    Rise white as wings of prayer;
The altar-curtains of the hills
    Are sunset’s purple air.

The winds with hymns of praise are loud,
    Or low with sobs of pain, –
The thunder-organ of the cloud,
    The dropping tears of rain.

With drooping head and branches crossed
    The twilight forest grieves,
Or speaks with tongues of Pentecost
    From all its sunlit leaves.

The blue sky is the temple’s arch,
    Its transept earth and air,
The music of its starry march
    The chorus of a prayer.

So Nature keeps the reverent frame
    With which her years began,
And all her signs and voices shame
    The prayerless heart of man.

John was from Amesbury Meeting in Massuchusets. He is perhaps best remembered for his work for the abolitionist movement, but Whittier himself felt that those poems had been too quickly composed, and for political ends over poetic ones. His true legacy, according to his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, was his ‘humanizing’ of the hard theology of Calvinism.

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