Notes for Hughes, Muir, Stevens, Ortiz, and Ríos readings


We began by discussing the Langston Hughes poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” We had discussed rivers before, in our previous class, in discussing Hart Crane’s “The Tunnel” (written not long after Hughes’s poem). In “The Tunnel,” Crane uses “river” as a verb: “to river” (“rivered under streets and rivers . . .”). Similarly, in regard to Hughes’s poem, we looked at the multi-dimensionality of river references in his poem. Is the “river” the central focus of the poem? Is it an active agent, an agent of change? Or is it the human (“the Negro,” as in the poem’s title) who is the agent and the river is only an observer? If it is “the Negro” who speaks, as the title suggests, what then does the river do; what is its purpose?

To get at the questions revealed above, we thought of rivers as a symbol or phenomenon also of the body. Like blood running through veins, water coursing down a riverbed (know as “a river”) can be peaceful and productive or violent and destructive. In regard to blood in one's veins, we considered how in American history, blood in one's veins has been a determinant of inclusion or exclusion, slavery or freedom. So, a river as a symbol – a poetic symbol of freedom – is powerful and evocative.

We stopped to wonder, though, whether in this poem “nature” takes on only a metaphorical role, as if it is suggestive of human or bodily things and that those things are really what is important. If so, then, this poem might not be justifiably a piece of “environmental literature.” But perhaps in such as assessment, if we came to that conclusion, we would be demonstrating a kind of narrowness in our understanding of “environment.” Certainly bodies, environmental human history, exist parallel to natural history (life happens, to further the river metaphor, on the banks of rivers; rivers and humans exist side by side, but humans depend on rivers).

One more item we discussed was the dramatic force of rivers; they do carve landscapes. They are difficult to control, though they can be through modern technology. As Hughes expressed in the central stanza of his poem, a river witnesses human history; humans have, literally, grown up alongside rivers. Rivers, collections of them, form networks (as do human veins). Rivers have been employed in the service of commerce; rivers have been a significant part of the story of America’s growth. So too have railroads and this was a final point of ours in respect to this poem. Rivers form natural paths in landscape. Railroads, as a contrast, some have read as “scars” on a landscape – again, employing a bodily image. Rivers are in a landscape. Railroad lines are forced upon it. By using the river metaphor, Hughes conveys the intricate relationship between people and aspects of their natural place, aspects that are natural and are hard to blind, stop, or control, despite the contrivances or processes of ownership that other humans might try to impose (process by which humans have attempted to own other humans and have attempted to partition the very landscape).

In our discussion of “A Wind-Storm in the Forests,” we considered Muir’s employment on certain “Garden of Eden” images to describe the forest community into which he throws himself. If America was, in the minds of many Americans in the nineteenth and eighteen centuries, the last hope on earth for the retrieval of the purity of the Garden of Eden, then one might conclude that the preservation of the natural “paradise” was paramount. This ideal conflicted with the ideals of progress, advancement, and capital – as we have seen. Reliant on the notion of the preservation and protection of the Edenic nation was the idea that the “American” was a kind of prelapsarian Adam, a figure who retained all of the initial promise and future potential of Adam before the Fall. In this line of thinking, America needed to be protected from “contamination” of/in this garden. This contamination, for Adamists, came in the form of people (specifically, “undesirable immigrants” and others) nearly always rather than in the form of environmental destroyers or contaminants.

Muir’s essay relies on some ideas that also might have resonated with Adamists; Muir believed that natural, uncontaminated spaces in America needed to be protected. It was only in these places that we see true equality and democracy demonstrated. His purpose (and thus his satisfaction of one of Buell’s criteria) was decidedly activist but it was also celebratory and, as we discussed, ecstatic. The trees, creatures, leaves, needles, dirt, pebbles, and branches are all – he suggests equally – affected by the powerful windstorm in the forest. As the forest functions as a system truly affected, throughout it, by a force (be that force “natural” like the wind or manmade like a river dam, such as that which flooded the Hetch Hetchy valley), a human system too can be entirely affected by a force. Muir believed that a human network, all American people whether they knew it or not, could be uplifted through a more spiritual and nuanced appreciation and enmeshment in nature or could be destroyed by overt incursions into and violations of this environment.

Some students complained about Muir’s amplified “ecstatic” tone in his essay – his wordiness. We cannot accuse Ortiz or Stevens of similar amplification or wordiness. These poets’ works, which we were not able to consider at length in class, communicate two powerful ideas: the timelessness of places (a snow-covered slope, for Ortiz) in human memory and the necessary disappearance of the boundary between human and nonhuman for one who hopes to truly “regard” nature, to develop an ability to sense nature (snow, wind, sun, “junipers shagged with ice,” for Stevens) without sensing the self at all.